At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream

We all dream about it, but Wade Rouse actually did it. Discover his journey to live the simple life in this hilarious memoir. 

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.
“This is David Sedaris meets Dave Barry….every page is good for a laugh.”
–Library Journal

"Rouse chronicles the hilarious escapades of these 'two neurotic urbanites' as they ensconce themselves in the woods without magazine subscriptions, malls, Trader Joe's, HGTV, or lattes. Rouse feels like a Martian confronting the locals at the general store, and suffers extreme anxiety when attempting ice fishing or karaoke. Gay or straight, any reader who has tried to 'fit in' somewhere outside his or her comfort zone will readily empathize with Rouse's rousing and ultimately successful lifestyle change."
–Booklist

"Wade Rouse is a true oddball: half Henry David Thoreau, half Oliver Wendell Douglas. AT LEAST IN THE CITY SOMEONE WOULD HEAR ME SCREAM is a funny, good-natured chronicle of a fish out of water, slowly learning to breathe."
–Tom Perrotta, bestselling author of Election, Little Children, and The Abstinence Teacher

“In AT LEAST IN THE CITY SOMEONE WOULD HEAR ME SCREAM, Wade Rouse’s inner Eddie Albert does battle with his inner Eva Gabor. I won’t tell you who wins, but the fight is immensely entertaining.”
–A.J. Jacobs, bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically

“Somewhere between Thoreau’s Walden Pond and Oliver Douglas’s Green Acres lies Wade Rouse. In AT LEAST IN THE CITY SOMEONE WOULD HEAR ME SCREAM, Rouse details his quest to shed the trappings of his fabulous life to live more simply… except no one told him how hard the simple life would be. Rouse is a master raconteur and his transition from city slicker to country mouse is filled with side-spitting humor, heart, and, of course, bands of marauding raccoons. This book has now taken its place at the top of my favorites list!”
—Jen Lancaster, bestselling author of Such a Pretty Fat and Pretty in Plaid




WADE ROUSE is the critically acclaimed author ofthe memoirs America’s Boy, Confessions of a Prep School Mommy Handler, and At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream and editor of the upcoming humorous dog anthology I’m Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship!He is a humor columnist for Metrosource magazine. Rouse lives outside Saugatuck, Michigan, with his partner, Gary, and their mutts, Marge and Mabel.Coonskin Cap

There’s a raccoon on my head.

And I don’t particularly look good in hats.

Especially when they’re still moving.I certainly wish this were one of those “Hey, look at me standing here on vacation in Wall Drug wearing a fifteen-dollar coonskin cap pretending to be Daniel Boone, so hurry up and take the goddamn picture!” moments, but it’s not.

No, my cap is very much alive, very much pissed off, and very much sporting a bad stink, a head filled with razor fangs, and a lot of painfully sharp claws.

But I guess I’d be pissed off, too, if someone interrupted my late-night dinner reservation.

Who knew that in the woods you simply can’t shove a forgotten bag of trash into your garbage can?

I didn’t.

That’s because I’m a city boy, a self-obsessed gay man who intentionally bedazzled himself in roughly $1,000 worth of trendy clothing just to walk the trash out in the middle of f***ing nowhere!

I honestly believe, deep down, that I am like K-Fed in Vegas, or some pseudocelebrity on vacation who just might be ambushed by the paparazzi at any moment.

But I’m really just a lost soul, in every possible way.

Not long ago, I moved to the woods of Michigan from the city, because I wanted to be a modern-day Henry David Thoreau.

My goal? To find myself, to find my modern-day Walden Pond, by stripping away superfluous luxuries and living a plainer, simpler life.

Thoreau famously wrote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

And he is right. The woods have already taught me something of great value: I am going to die. Specifically, I am going to die after being disfigured by a raccoon.

But at least I have had a life-changing epiphany, albeit a bit too late. The epiphany “Never go to a place that doesn’t have a Starbucks within arm’s reach or you might find a wild animal clinging to your scalp” has already edged out my all-time favorite epiphany, the one I had in eighth grade: “My God, my thingy doesn’t seem to work when I kiss girls!”

The raccoon digs its claws into the side of my head and begins to burrow, like it’s trying to bury the apple core it still has in its mouth into the middle of my brain.

My hair! I think. You’re jacking up my hair!

Which is another reason why I shouldn’t be living in the woods. I care more about how my profile will look when I’m found dead than about actually trying to stay alive.

The raccoon locates an artery, and I begin screaming, like any man who is truly scared for his life.

And then I pee on myself.

I admit it. There is no shame.

I scream again, yelling, “Help! Help! There’s a raccoon on my head! Can somebody, anybody, help me?”

But I sadly realize this is a rhetorical question, that it doesn’t matter what I yell, because no one can hear me in the woods. My closest neighbor is a “holler” away, or what ever the hell they say out here in the country.

In fact, my yells simply echo off the surrounding pines, the voice coming back to me sounding a whole lot like Drew Barrymore right before she gets offed at the beginning of Scream.

I do have enough wherewithal, however, to scrunch my eyes shut, in order to protect my vision, and to begin spinning like a top, twirling like a drunken, crazed ballerina, to jostle the beast free. Unfortunately, the coon is along for the ride.

I can feel blood beginning to trickle down my face.

I will later read on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia: “Raccoons are unusual for their thumbs, which (though not opposable) enable them to open many closed containers (such as garbage cans) and doors. The raccoon is most distinguishable by the black ‘mask’ of fur around its eyes and the long, bushy tail. They are intelligent omnivores with a reputation for being clever, sly, and mischievous. Raccoons range from 20 to 40 inches in length (including the tail) and weigh between 10 and 35 pounds. As city dwellers in the United States and Canada increasingly move into primary or second homes in former rural areas, raccoons are often considered pests because they forage in trash receptacles.”

I, of course, read this too late, like I do everything in my life: the nutrition chart on Little Debbie boxes, the prescription for my Xanax, the size 4 tag in the back of my “men’s” jeans.

However, I am a child of the ’70s, which means I didn’t really have to read to learn anything; I just had to watch TV. And that I did.

That’s when it hits me. The solution to my problems.

What would Lucy do? I ask myself.

Lucy would fight back, in some wacky-chocolate-factory, grape-stompin’, Vitameatavegamin way!”

So I grab the garbage can lid, and the flashlight I am holding, and begin to wield them like shields, like Brad Pitt in Troy, and whack the raccoon, taking part of my temple along with it. But the coon doesn’t budge. It screeches and digs its claws more deeply into my skull.

It’s those damn thumbs. They may not be opposable, but I swear this thing could hitchhike.