On cultures

Walking around remote native villages in the Alaskan bush always creeped me out: you're as likely to have a member of the tribal council cruise by to evaluate your disruption quotient as have a scraggletoothed punk kid try to splash you with his quad as have a scraggletoothed old wire-bearded lady offer you a ride, and if there's a pack of sled dogs loose, it's a given that you'll pull out your heat and shoot until either they're dead or you run out of ammo and scream until someone pulls the dogs off or you die. As long as you're not an active disruption or threat, you're okay; prove yourself congenial, and you can walk in any door.

I was surprised by small towns in the Palouse: same impoverished desperation kept alive by subsistence harvests, welfare, and poaching, but the bar was out of burgers and beer when I walked in, and the store sold me a pop without a monosyllable.
Okay, yes, I'm a guy with a ponytail and screaming yellow car, and the only friendly looks I received were from men too old to decipher that they were not waving at a sweet young girl. Be that as it may, I pay in cash, and not many of the places in Dayton, Pomeroy, or Lacrosse--living ghost towns without blips on any map drawn within the past four-score and seven years--seemed to be in good stead to turn down clients.

Not to mention Albion, Endicott, Hay, or Starbuck. Each offered one or six engagingly dilapidated buildings with "FOR SALE BY OWNER" spray painted on boarded-over windows, but as I slowed down and reached for my camera, I heard twelve gauges chambering shells and could imagine the "what'chew fixin' to do?" rasped around a wad of chaw and cheek full of shotgun stock.

Question: when held at gunpoint for representing a stereotype, is it good bad or neutral to rev up the turbo and leave town in a sideways spray of gravel?

In my experience, only one place on earth is more inhospitable to life: Virgil's resting place, the great city of Napoli.
I kept driving through Starbuck because I didn't want to push the people into feeling more uncomfortable and waving guns more threateningly (didn't expect substantive damage with both me and my car together; hiking is a different story, especially during hunting season, when outsiders can very easily be made to disappear). Neapolitans have no such compunctions. Within an evening, I was ready to shoulder-check a kamikaze scooter for the same reasons I shake my fist at the sky, although diving into a tour bus was tempting because the bus drivers might be under non-mob and conscientiously-oriented unions. Or so I told myself.

I'm tempted to draw inverse relationships been the age and cultivation of a development, but then I consider that native villages are generation-old constructs enforced upon nomadic tribes, wherein traditional cultures still thrive as much as possible in the communal centers. Which is to say: Virgil may be entombed in Naples, but the elders in Togiak can tell me where the world came from; Naples may have millenia of art history, but Starbuck has the self-respect not to actively spite me for evolving past its cultural epoch; and what the hell am I thinking to mistake town square for a dirt lot just perfect for high-speed maneuverings?