I grew up in a rural town of roughly 2,500 people among the orchards of eastern Washington state, where driving more than 30 minutes for errands or appointments was ordinary life. A full tank of gas wasn’t a convenience; it was an everyday necessity. You couldn’t opt out of fuel costs the way you might in a city with a subway. The road and the pump beside it were our infrastructure.
That upbringing shapes how I read the world right now.
Since late February, when the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran and Iran responded by sharply restricting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, gas prices have risen more than fifty percent. The International Energy Agency has described the crisis as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil shipments normally pass through the Strait. The national average now sits above $4.53 a gallon. In New Hampshire, it’s $4.49, up 55% from a year ago.
On many college campuses, those increases are background noise. At Dartmouth, tucked away in rural New Hampshire, they feel harder to ignore; for anyone who came up in a place like eastern Washington, they feel harder to dismiss.
Life across the Upper Valley depends heavily on driving and distance. Even with Advance Transit serving the region, most employees commute by car, and daily life often requires traveling from one town to another for groceries, appointments, family visits and ordinary errands. Dartmouth students regularly travel long distances for athletics, club activities, internships and breaks. When fuel costs rise, the effects do not stay at the pump. In early April, The Dartmouth reported that Hanover officials and local school administrators were already warning that prolonged fuel price increases could raise future transportation, heating and shipping costs across the Upper Valley.
People notice the fluorescent numbers at the pump because they have to. For many families, those numbers now shape daily decisions.
In rural communities, fuel costs are not an abstraction or a partisan talking point. They determine whether long commutes remain manageable, the feasibility of weekend travel, the cost of ordinary errands and even whether a sweater is required to wear indoors in the winter. And because gas prices are displayed on bright signs at nearly every highway exit and intersection, people experience this inflation directly, not through quarterly reports or economic indicators, but through the routines of everyday life.
Dartmouth sits at the crossroads of rural life and global conversation. Students discuss geopolitics, climate policy and international conflict in classrooms every day. Yet they also live in a place where a war thousands of miles away has already altered the cost of getting to campus, traveling home, commuting across the Upper Valley or heating an apartment. The price on the sign is both things at once: a local hardship and a global signal.
None of this means concerns about climate change or international security should disappear when gas prices rise. But the Strait of Hormuz crisis is a reminder that global events are rarely as distant as they first appear.
In places like Hanover, the greater Upper Valley and towns like the one I grew up in, conflicts thousands of miles away can quickly become visible in everyday life through the numbers on a gas station sign.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
