Concerns over crowding go back centuries

When people read the story on projected population numbers in the Flathead Facts insert of the April 3 Daily Inter Lake, there will most likely be any number of reactions including grumbling, joy, denial and anticipation.

Using U.S. Census Bureau estimates, NPA Data Services predicts there will be 90,000 people in the Flathead Valley by 2010 and the population should reach 100,000 around 2017.

In 2000, the Flathead census was at 74,471.

Whatever the reaction to a 34 percent population increase in less than two decades, those feelings are at least four centuries old.

I've often wished I knew more about the work of Shakespeare, but because I am too lazy to actually forge through the plays themselves, I will occasionally pick up a book about him and hope to glean some bits of trivia from that. So I'm currently reading Stephen Greenblatt's "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare."

One chapter describes what was probably the country-bred Shakespeare's first introduction to the big city of London in the 1580s. Except for the use of words generally avoided by people in the Flathead Valley - one rarely hears "looketh" and "commodious" these days while in line at the grocery store - Greenblatt's research could have been culled from a number of the Inter Lake's letters to the editor on the subject of growth.

Greenblatt speculates that Shakespeare, after moving to London, must have wished for the open country in which he was raised. Earlier in the 16th century, Greenblatt wrote, people dwelling in the heart of London with an "ordinary craving for a stroll in the fields" could be stretching their legs over pastureland without venturing too far from home. By Shakespeare's time, Greenblatt says, access to open spaces for the 200,000 or so people living in the city was beginning to disappear.

John Stow, a late 16th-century historian quoted by Greenblatt, pined for the days when he was young in London, when "there were pleasant fields, very commodious for citizens therein to walk, shoot, and otherwise to recreate and refresh their dull spirits in the sweet and wholesome air."

Stow also had fond memories of a farm run by an order of nuns where he used to fetch "many a halfpenny of milk" as a boy. When the abbey was destroyed at a time when the Catholic church was, to say the least, out of favor, the new owner subdivided the farm.

Stow also complained that the area had been turned into "continual building throughout," and that the traffic had become lamentable: "The coachman rides behind the horse tails, lasheth them, and looketh not behind him; the drayman sitteth and sleepeth on his dray, and letteth his horse lead him home."

He even derides the youth of the time for their lazy, slacker ways. "The world runs on wheels with many whose parents were glad to go on foot," Stow wrote.

So if today's Flathead Valley citizens share an appreciation for the same open spaces and opportunities for outdoor recreation of people in Elizabethan England, thankfully not all those old sensibilities toward the natural world endured.

While we have done so much to ensure the survival of bears in Northwest Montana, a popular spectator event of the time was to watch what happened when a chained bear was placed in a ring with a pack of fierce dogs.

"Elizabethans perceived bears as supremely ugly, embodiments of everything coarse and violent," Greenblatt wrote.

Though many today say that access to open space is crucial to their mental health, for Londoners, it was sometimes a matter of physical survival. The bubonic plague was spread many times through the heart of the city, and, as Greenblatt writes, "the sweet country air was regarded as literally lifesaving."

And all can be thankful that, upon entering the valley's metropolitan areas, we aren't greeted by the renowned tourist attraction that Shakespeare must have seen on his first visit to London - the Great Stone Gate bearing a row of more than 30 severed heads on poles.

Reporter Heidi Gaiser may be reached at 758-4431 or by e-mail at hgaiser@dailyinterlake.com