Next to Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, I would rate Merle Haggard as one of the most gifted country/western singers of our generation. He sang from the heart. I was saddened when he died a few years back, but his music lives on.

In his song “Big City,” he spins a tale of getting “tired of these dirty old sidewalks” and wanting to get back to country living. In words that resonate to the bottom of your boots, he implores the big city to “turn me loose, set me free, somewhere in the middle of Montana!”

I feel he is speaking for me though I am living on a lake in rural, upstate New York. When I sing along with him while driving my car with the country music turned up, I say “Chautauqua” and not “Montana” when it comes to that part of the song. It fits.

I was thinking of this song these past days as we have been locked up in dealing with the coronavirus. I’m glad that I am up here in “Montana” and not down in the City. In a way, I feel that “country living” may have saved us from the worst of the virus. We are spread out and are now spacing ourselves even further apart. We aren’t constrained by subways, skyscrapers and wall-to-wall people. We are not immune from the disease but, it would appear, may be better positioned in fighting it.

Since I came back to the county in 1970 after college, graduate school and a stint in the Navy, we have become even less dense — our population has slipped from 147,000 people to 127,000. Some of that is due to the poor business and high tax climate in New York, but a lot of it is just basic demographic change — people, especially our young people, have been moving south, west and into the cities. After this coronavirus epidemic is over, I think that a few of them may consider moving back home — to the country.

This is not to say that country living is a panacea for all health problems. We have had fewer tests available than in urban areas. We have had shortages of protective gear and a limited capacity with ventilators. However, we have also had a “hands on” public health effort going on that has helped isolate and identify those with the coronavirus, and a county task force communicating daily with the public.

Merle Haggard wasn’t always right, and it makes you chuckle when he tells the big city “keep your retirement and your so-called social security.” Yet, even here, he was pointing at a truth … that country living provides more than that.

I have lived in the big city of Chicago, been to New York many times and saw many of the major urban centers of the Far East when I was in the Navy. Nevertheless, when Haggard sings this song — it connects with me. The “big city has turned me loose and set me free” and plopped me right down here “in the middle of Chautauqua!” It is a good place to be.

Rolland Kidder is a Stow resident.