At Least in the City Someone Would
Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in
Search of the Simple Life by Wade
Rouse
A Memorable Story About Living Your Dreams
We all dream it.
Wade Rouse actually did it.
Finally fed up with the frenzy of city life and a job he hates, Wade Rouse
decided to make either the bravest decision of his life or the worst mistake
since his botched Ogilvie home perm: to uproot his life and try, as Thoreau
did some 160 years earlier, to live a plain, simple life in radically reduced
conditions.

In this rollicking and hilarious memoir, Wade and his partner, Gary, leave
culture, cable, and consumerism behind and strike out for rural Michigan–
a place with fewer people than in their former spinning class. There, Wade
discovers the simple life isn’t so simple. Battling blizzards, bloodthirsty
critters, and nosy neighbors equipped with night-vision goggles, Wade and
his spirit, sanity, relationship, and Kenneth Cole pointy-toed boots are
sorely tested with humorous and humiliating frequency. And though he
never does learn where his well water actually comes from or how to
survive without Kashi cereal, he does discover some things in the woods
outside his knotty-pine cottage in Saugatuck, Michigan, that he always
dreamed of but never imagined he’d find–happiness and a home.
At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream is a sidesplitting and
heartwarming look at taking a risk, fulfilling a dream, and finding a home–
with very thick and very dark curtains.
Personal Review: At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me
Scream: Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life by Wade
Rouse
When was the last time you read a memoir that begins with an angry
raccoon perched on the author's head? That's the opening scene of Wade
Rouse's new book and one of many, both hilarious and wise, that make
this a memorable story about living your dreams and in the process
discovering a new life.
Despite the inspiration supplied by his grandmother's passion for Henry
David Thoreau's WALDEN, Wade Rouse is an unlikely heir to the mantle
of that nature-loving philosopher. Although he grew up in the Ozarks, the
flamboyantly gay Rouse confesses that he had transformed himself "from
a country rube into a sophisticated city boy, a Starbucks-swilling,
pashmina-wearing, catch-a-Parker-Posey-independent-movie kind of guy."
Frustrated in his day job as a public relations director at a St. Louis prep
school, he yearns to become a full-time writer. So in 2005, he persuades
his salesman partner Gary to abandon urban life for a small house they
christen "Turkey Run" on three and one-half acres of land just outside the
small town of Saugatuck, Michigan, a resort town and burgeoning artist
community about a mile from Lake Michigan. Wade and Gary soon
discover the chasm that separates life in the tourist season and the reality
of a Michigan winter, and the fun begins.
Before embarking on his adventure, Rouse grabs a pile of coffeehouse
napkins and compiles a list of "new life goals, one per napkin, that would

match the tenets and principles that Thoreau set forth in WALDEN." The
book's succeeding chapters end with a scorecard in which he judges his
success by assigning a point to "Wade's Walden" or "Modern Society."
Rouse's goals range from the mundane ("learn to love the snow") to the
practical ("live off the land" and "nurture our country critters") to the
profound ("rediscover religion" and "redefine the meaning of life and my
relationship with Gary"). What gives his memoir its real zest are the sparks
that fly when his wish to "eschew the latest entertainment and fashion for
simpler pursuits" meets stiff resistance as he tries to "let go of my city
cynicism."
For someone who is used to hanging out at Kenneth Cole and Banana
Republic and is a devoted fan of "I Love Lucy" ("What would Lucy do?" is
a frequent mantra) and Erma Bombeck, it's an understatement to describe
Rouse's immersion into rural life as a culture shock. It isn't long before he
has had to shed his normal haunts to frequent the local feed store on
Saturday morning ("This is like replacing meth with Bubble Yum") or attend
a potluck church supper that inspires a poignant recollection of the painful
week he spent at church camp as a teenager. In one unsparing, often
riotously funny self-portrait after another, Rouse tells of his grim battle with
the relentless Michigan snow, his encounters with the local wildlife (the
aforementioned raccoon gets a curtain call later in the book), his stab at
ice fishing, and his attempt with Gary to plant a vegetable garden, among
other adventures.
Like his predecessor Thoreau, Rouse is a keen, if initially reluctant,
observer of natural life. He is able to write about it both lyrically
("Sometimes the fog rolls off the lake, heavy and thick, like a moving
curtain, and the morning simply becomes stalled, the sunlight choked in
darkness.") and with humor ("Spring arrives one day in Michigan like a
forgotten castaway who manages to row his way onto the beach using two
coconuts."). He is equally perceptive in the stories he tells of his neighbors,
from the artists on whose farm he and Gary pick blueberries to the migrant
workers who live, and eventually abandon, the decrepit single-wide trailer
next door.
It's evident early in Wade Rouse's memoir that he's able to play a scene
for laughs every bit as skillfully as David Sedaris, with whose work this
book inevitably will be compared. Rouse's journey isn't an easy one, and
for every step forward it seems he suffers a corresponding pratfall along
the way. And yet, for all its biting wit, there's a rich, life-affirming message
worthy of Thoreau at this story's core: "I have now learned that there is
never a wrong time to do something meaningful and courageous in life,"
Rouse writes, "something that makes you deeply and achingly happy.
There is only a right time: a moment to hold your breath, close your eyes
and jump."
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

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