How do you maintain a village so it remains a village?

Had a good talk Saturday morning with Evan Blythin, who recently published “Vanishing Village: The Struggle for Community in the New West” CityLife Books, Las Vegas .

He was in town at the community library Saturday morning, chatting with interested residents and signing and selling his book.

Evan is a sculptor and musician who holds a doctorate from University of Colorado and retired after 30 years as a communications studies professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

His book considers the plight of the small town that faces growing stress due to the anonymous urban life that looms over the horizon. In brief, where people in a small rural community know each other’s names and recognize the faces of their neighbors, the same cannot be said for those who live in, say, Summerlin or Centennial or Sunrise Manor.

Blythin lives in Blue Diamond, and we had some things in common. Back east I lived in a town with perhaps 600 souls; Blue Diamond has fewer than 400. I also covered other towns which were seeing themselves change, and not always for the better.

What strikes me about Blue Diamond is its racial makeup perhaps 90 percent white and its median income about $55,000 per family . That’s probably not too different from Brookfield, N.H. It is also nearly lily white and well off.

I asked Evan whether that might have something to do with Blue Diamond’s sense of community. Would a town with, say 30 percent blacks and 20 percent Hispanics have a different dynamic and perhaps not seem so tranquil and homogeneous?

That’s a good point, he allowed, but he added that a friend of his in New Mexico, in a small town with much more racial balance, has witnessed a considerable, conscious effort to bridge the gaps among those different communities for the good of the village as a whole.

In an early segment of the book, Blythin recalls, as part of his initiation to the village, the theft of one of his sculptures. Without suggesting the village as a whole accepted such things, he said it seemed more a cultural matter than anything else. The family saw such events as part of its background. And he had the evidence, in tribal terms, to back up his contention.

Nevertheless, he cautiously agreed with me when I suggested that, after all the analysis and consideration, Freud might have said, “Sometimes a theft is just a theft.”

What I think we both agreed on is the dilution of the village atmosphere due to the pressures from “outside.”

In Gilford, N.H., as an example, there are fewer and fewer call firefighters available, and the town depends more and more on professionals for emergency services.

Why?

On the one hand, because fewer and fewer local businessmen are willing to allow volunteer firefighters to rush off to fight a fire or work at a wreck.

On the other, because in many communities there is little or no local business to begin with, and the volunteers go to work 10 or 20 or more miles away — too distant to save a house when a tone goes out. Back east, one local fire department allegedly had as its slogan: “Never a foundation lost!”

In addition, mutual aid networks force the community to depend on outsiders for its fire safety. In Brookfield, the town actually contracted out its fire, police, rescue and waste disposal services to a neighboring town. The community’s sense of its own independence was accordingly weakened.

That was how a sense of anonymity began to grow.

Added to that is the fact that the so-called bedroom community tends not to care as much for itself as did the old-timers who created it. When most of the people travel elsewhere to work, there is more of a tendency for them to get home and want to relax and not get out and hobnob with the neighbors. On weekends, I think they are as likely to go somewhere else as they are to spend a few hours at the local athletic field or the local bar.

Why? Because all week they have traveled to and from work, and travel has become the norm.

Blythin has given considerable thought to the pressures and strains communities like Blue Diamond — and for that matter Shoshone, Amargosa Valley, Beatty and Tecopa — face every day, and his book out to be read and thought about.

I started off feeling very critical of his perceptions and conclusions, but I ended up seeing the point … and feeling that much more depressed about the future of the little towns that dot America.