Full disclosure: Like many things, this essay didn’t turn out as planned.

The goal was simple; the task should have been easy. I wanted to make an argument, quantifiable and data-driven, for the value and worth of our state’s rural people and places. I wanted to show that rural is not something to be “fixed,” or, as a colleague once framed it, not a “problem to be solved but a place to be celebrated.”

I wanted to paint a picture — based in numbers and facts — of opportunity and assets, not one of lack, scarcity, or deficit, the color palette too often used to paint the portrait of rural life.

From Cherokee, Burke, and Surry to Anson, Bertie, and Dare, 78 of the state’s 100 counties are deemed rural (shaded green) due to their population density. illustration by Our State Staff

The words should have come easily. I have spent the better part of my professional career working in rural North Carolina’s many small towns and communities. My career in nonprofits has supported rural and under-resourced areas across the state, giving me the privilege to learn from folks like the academic researcher, the community-development practitioner, the local small-business owner, and the classroom teacher.

It’s an argument that must be made. As cities and suburbs continue to sprawl, and more and more farmland and woodland turn into subdivisions or vacation homes, “rural” might be one of the most misunderstood words in the modern American vernacular.

I hear it in the conversations that I have with friends and family, strangers and acquaintances: Rural is either pictured as an idyllic, bucolic, and pastoral escape from the harried pace of our modern lives, or it is viewed as a backward, frozen-in-time mindset that needs to be pulled, kicking and screaming, into modernity.

Neither narrative is fully accurate, of course, and seldom is it based in any lived experience.

“Rural” might be one of the most misunderstood words in the modern American vernacular.

Because we lack the huge swaths of desolate land that some other states have, North Carolina is one of the most densely rural states in the nation. Rural in North Carolina is different from rural in North Dakota. Instead, we are a state of crossroad communities and small towns. Yes, there are places where you can get lost walking on a mountain trail or paddling in a coastal swamp, but mostly North Carolina is a more populous kind of rural.

The NC Rural Center categorizes a rural county as having fewer than 250 people per square mile. By that measure, 78 of our 100 counties are rural, accounting for more than 3.7 million of our 10.8 million residents. That’s a lot of rural folk.

But as I wrote line after line, draft after draft of this essay, the numbers felt inadequate. Rather, I kept drifting back to my childhood to explain what it is about rural places that called me to return as an adult.

• • •

One of my most vivid memories growing up happened at the end of a long summer day in the woods of Randolph County. My mother had put me out with the sun that morning and expected my return at dusk. On this day, the hours were particularly active, passed building forts, riding bikes, and shooting BB guns.

My mother — aghast when I came back home covered in mud, dust, and possibly insects — sent me straight to the bath. I remember that after a good, long scrubbing, as the water drained from the porcelain-white tub, a ring of North Carolina red clay circled the basin, darker at the top where it had settled in the bath water.

Years later, like countless others, I was ready and willing to leave home when the time came. I went off to college in Chapel Hill, and the larger world opened to me. In my mind at the time, there was no going back.

While the move to Wayne County was a return for Amy Brantley (right), Todd and their children — (from left) Nora, Atha, and Everett — have made it home as well. photograph by Joshua Steadman

I spent the next 20 years building a life in the Triangle, navigating my way through undergrad, graduate school, and into adulthood. I somehow convinced a farm girl from eastern North Carolina to marry me, and we made a home in Raleigh, first in an attic apartment in the Five Points neighborhood and then, later, on a quarter-acre lot in one of the city’s suburban rings. We formed many lifelong friendships along the way, and it was there where we started our family.

As the years passed, though, we began to feel disconnected from where we lived. We started to feel the call of “home” as we realized that the places we were both so ready to leave as teens looked different once we had our own children.

So we returned — with our kids and experiences of the wider world in tow — to my wife’s family farm on Big Daddy’s Road in Wayne County. Today, we live here and farm the land with her family, overseeing about 500 blueberry bushes and a small community-supported agriculture operation. The farm is modest by local standards, but we are growing slowly and sustainably on our 50 acres. This is my home now. This is where I hope I will die and where I certainly expect to be buried.

It was good for my soul to be back in nature, and to enjoy the quiet solitude that I had experienced as a child exploring those Randolph County woods. But what ultimately pulled me back to a rural life was a different longing: to be more fully and authentically connected to others. Life in the city felt transitory to me. Neighbors would come and go. Homes would be sold, jobs would be taken, adventures pursued. Though the connections were strong, the anchoring felt temporary, like an airport layover before the next leg of a trip.

Todd Brantley picks (and most certainly samples!) plump blueberries for Sister Oaks Farm, their family-run farm stand, U-pick, and produce box business. photograph by Joshua Steadman

Relationships feel more intentional in rural communities and small towns. While you might never deliberately seek them out in a larger, more populous setting, for better or worse, you cannot escape your neighbors here, and they cannot escape you. They are just as much a part of this place as you are. You will see them in the grocery store, you will sit next to them at high school football games, you will pray with them at church, you will work with them at the barbecue fundraiser for the volunteer fire department.

I’m more engaged with these folks because they’re more present to me as individuals — not just faces on the highway during rush hour. They have come out in a hurricane to help me fix a broken generator. They have, without hesitation or second thought, loaned me farm equipment like a disc harrow, a seed drill, and even a tractor.

• • •

I went to elementary school in a community aptly named Farmer, where our schoolhouse shared a crossroads with a small general store. That shop was where I had my first taste of a MoonPie and discovered the delights of dumping salted peanuts into my cold bottle of Coke. Connected to the general store was a combined post office and barbershop. I remember going in there with my mother and walking past the leather barber’s chair on our way to pick up or drop off mail.

Rural people are entrepreneurial at their core. It comes from a long history of self-sufficiency and resilience, born of necessity. Where else is your post office also your barbershop?

Rural places have problems and challenges, too, and we should be honest about them and their root causes: substance misuse, health care workforce shortages, discrepancies in educational opportunities, broadband access and affordability, employment prospects, and small business support and resources.

But we also should be honest about the many stereotypes of rural people and places and their root causes. No two rural places are the same, and lumping their residents into a single racial, ethnic, political, or socio-economic identity is wrong and lazy.

Over the past 30 years, the state’s population has exploded. I welcome these fellow North Carolinians and am grateful that the newcomers are here — they make us better. But I ask metro residents one thing: Take the time to visit a rural community, to stop in a small town. Turn off the GPS and avoid the highways. The places you will discover are not vestiges of a bygone North Carolina. They still have a rich life and colorful stories to tell. For the people who call them home, these are places where children are born, parents are buried, and weddings are celebrated. They are where lives are layered deeply, literally and figuratively, into the soil.

Lou Hammond’s painting captures a nostalgic image of a front porch picker. Its frame is quite literally plucked from the scene. photograph by Joshua Steadman

In Farmer, there was a local artist named Lou Hammond, but my mother always called her “Mama Lou.” One of her paintings, which hangs in the hallway in my house, is of an old man dressed in overalls and playing his banjo on a porch swing. I mentioned to my brother once that I was considering having the piece’s wooden frame redone with something newer and not so beaten up.

He protested: The wood of the frame, he told me, was taken from the old man’s home in Randolph County, from the very place where he is sitting in the picture, strumming his instrument.

That frame will never be touched.

My daughters are about to leave home to head to school in the city. I am excited for them. I want them to get out and see the world. I want them to have life experiences they cannot get here on Big Daddy’s Road.

At the Brantley home, front porch rockers await neighbors and kin. photograph by Joshua Steadman

However, if they should ever feel the same call to return to a rural life, I hope that they will have the courage to make that decision: to live, to work, to worship side by side with their neighbors through the good, the bad, and the ugly of human existence. To feel beholden to those you cannot hide from, to be unable to settle into the background, to know your community and neighbors in a way that’s immediate and intentional.

It is now clear to me how much Randolph County’s red clay is a part of who I am. I carry it with me when walking the sandy loam of eastern North Carolina. The value of rural is not in its numbers or data alone. Rather, it’s in the lived experiences of its people — those who are caretakers today for the places that others will call home tomorrow.

Much like my own life, this essay didn’t take the path that I expected or had planned. But in the end, both it and I arrived exactly where we needed to be.