COLUMN ONE : Love and Those Little Town Blues : Rural California offers residents a chance at the good life--with one hitch. In places like Weaverville and Bodfish, singles say, it can be hard to find a date, let alone a mate.

Wendy Davis and Patty Carlson, one divorced, one never married, room together in Paradise with a capital P--the picturesque Northern California mountain village, not the perpetual state of romantic bliss.

It’s far from the evils of the big city. In fact, it’s far from the evils of most little cities. The air is clean, the children are healthy, but the right men are distressingly hard to find.

“Thank you for calling the Davis and Carlson residence,” their answering machine intones. “If you are calling regarding a Bible study, press 2 and leave a message. If you are calling regarding a tall, dark and handsome man you’d like to introduce one of them to, press 3.

“If you are the tall, dark and handsome man or would just like to say hello, please leave your name and number, and they will return your call.”

If you think there’s trouble in Paradise, population 25,000, try Weaverville, population 3,500, in Trinity County. The last time Melissa Lovitt, a 20-year resident, had “a real boyfriend” was when her son, Atticus, was 3. He’ll be shaving soon.

“As far as meeting anyone, the only people you would meet through here would be tourists,” Lovitt says, pausing a moment to recall the other sorts of single men to come her way in recent years: “Loggers and alcoholics, no one of my choice.”

California’s rural singles--perhaps the state’s loneliest adults--give new meaning to the term “geographically undesirable.” They live in isolated outposts where life can mean deferring certain dreams--like finding companionship--in favor of others: No crime, no crowds, no fear except the fear of loneliness.

The only Americans lonelier than rural adults, according to one recent study, are high school girls in urban areas. Rural women are lonelier than rural men. The most isolated adults, according to sociologists, are single mothers in out of the way places--out of the way of decent jobs, emotional support or potential partners.

Of course, plenty of rural youth do grow up to find partners--reducing the pool of available mates. In addition, an exodus of the young from California’s economically hard-pressed hamlets has been balanced--if it can be called that--by an influx of couples and nuclear families fleeing cities for the serenity of small-town life. A result is that 75% of rural adults ages 25 to 60 are married, compared to only 62% of their urban counterparts.

For those still seeking love, dating is hell all over. It’s just as possible to be lonely in Los Angeles as it is in Likely, Lovelock, Weed, or Rough and Ready. But the difference, rural sociologists and California’s outlanders say, is not in the malady but the remedy.

Feeling at loose ends in Los Angeles or Newport Beach? There are so many movies that it’s hard to choose. Want to be somewhere with lots of people? Try the restaurant down the street, or the next street, or the one after that. Want support? There’s a group for every need, from Parents Without Partners to Women Helping Women.

Weaverville, in contrast, is separated from Redding to the east by a gut-wrenching hour on California 299, a narrow road traversed by logging trucks and fraught with enough hairpin turns to stop a driver drunk on love or anything else. Going west, it’s 100 miles or so to Arcata. As the pines whiz by, the radio plays only Garth, God or G. Gordon Liddy--country music, Christian stations or conservative talk shows.

For those without the intestinal fortitude to travel such distances, Weaverville offers a movie theater. A bowling alley. A few bars. And a population that knows you, knows what you did last night, who you did it with, who you should have been doing it with.

Weaverville, Paradise and their sister towns in the outback are not only places with no dates, they are places with no venues for having dates. If there’s a bar, the women often say it’s too rough even for most committed drinkers. If there’s a dance, it’s probably at the senior center. If there’s a restaurant, it’s more likely a Perko’s than a Patina.

Looking for love in all the small places--where pickup trucks outnumber cars, the markets are mini not super, and cowboy boots have a function beyond fashion--may be difficult, but it’s not impossible. What it takes is grit, innovation and a lot of persistence:

* In Greenfield, the self-proclaimed broccoli capital of the United States, the greatest influx of singles comes to town once a year, when school opens and new teachers are hired. Each September, the Greenfield News, in a sort of scholastic swimsuit issue, publishes the pictures of incoming educators along with short biographies. The teachers in this Salinas Valley town are nearly all single women; the most avid fall readers, single men.

* Carlson and Davis, who sing in a church-sponsored ensemble in Paradise, use their vantage point onstage during performances to scan the congregation for new men sitting alone. Early this year, Carlson found one, the unsuspecting Bert Maxwell, manager of a fast-food restaurant, divorced father of two, the kind of man who “has a hard time admitting he’s lonely,” she says.

But in the socially complex dance of small-town life, even the eagle-eyed Carlson needed assistance to actually meet her man. “A couple months later,” Maxwell recalls, “an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Little, introduced us. Patty had asked about me, and Mrs. Little knew she was interested in me. They set us up. It was so cool.” They are still dating.

* In Taft, a rough-and-tumble oil town outside of Bakersfield, twice-divorced John ran an ad in Singles Touch, one of the few dating services that serves rural areas. “I’m looking for ‘that feeling,’ ” he says. “It’s the feeling that you can’t wait to get home from work. You wake up on Saturday and she’s lying there. I’m looking for someone to give (my) heart to.”

John thinks he may have found just such a repository for his softer side, but she lives nearly two hours away--through a national forest and up the side of a mountain. He has yet to drive to her trailer home in Bodfish, but it could happen. It would be better, after all, than meeting in a bar, which John says he dislikes.

On their solitary rides through rural life, many women and men tend to steer clear of the honky-tonks and dingy watering holes that dot the blue highways, places like Shenanigans in Paradise--described by one resident as a saloon where a woman alone might feel comfortable because “at least it’s better than the biker bar.”

The live blues was loud and the seats were empty one recent Thursday night at Shenanigans, where a vodka tonic runs $1.50 and is worth just about that much. John, a none-too-sober, forty-something cowboy, slouched at the bar, bumming cigarettes, sipping atother people’s drinks and burnishing his charm.

His second-best line of the night, shouted with a proud pat of his sweats-clad thighs: “I bet you don’t know what you got here.” After a polite rebuff, he growled the winner: “Ya know, I could really twist you up.”

So what’s a single person to do in Paradise, this logging town turned retirement community turned family haven? There is a bowling alley--just reopened after several dark years caused by a snow-crushed roof. Two movie theaters. And lots of churches.

The biggest in town is Paradise Alliance Church, second home to Chris Hallett, 43, once-divorced, a former Navy dental technician and recently converted Christian who has dated only three men--two or three times each--in the five years she has lived here.

It’s not that they aren’t basically nice, but they’re just not right, Hallett says. With two years of college under her belt, she feels “on a different intellectual level” than most of the men she knows--an observation echoed by the few academics who study rural life.

Rural men, says sociologist Barbara Childers, are more apt to be loggers, carpenters, farmers, mechanics, and physical laborers, but the women who come to rural areas do so for family reasons, to teach or for other professional jobs.

“Even when statistically it might look like there is a reasonably equivalent number of single men and women,” Childers of Humboldt State University says, “they are not matchable.”

“I had a real loneliness until about a year ago, when I became a Christian, a real empty hole until I accepted Jesus,” Hallett says. Now, says the church deaconess who no longer dates, “I don’t have a lot of need to be with people all the time.”

Carlson and Davis--of the tall, dark and handsome phone message and the eagle eyes--belong to the same church but see it in a different light. To them Paradise Alliance, like Paradise itself, is a human Noah’s ark, where everything from festivals to Sunday school classes are tailored to twosomes or nuclear families.

They boycotted the recent Family Festival, a daylong church-sponsored barbecue, because they didn’t feel welcome. “One person, or one person with kids going, not only is it uncomfortable, but it hurts,” Carlson says. “It’s easier just to stay away.”

Not long ago, she and a friend, who is a single mother, crashed the church’s marriage and family class--implicitly a couples-only affair. After all, they thought, a single mother and her children make a family, right? And a never-been-married 31-year-old might just learn something valuable for the day she finally ties the knot--if she ever does. It was not a success.

“The people in the group were forced to deal with us being single,” says Carlson, who with Davis has since formed a single women’s Bible study group. “There was a lot of discussion over that one. They looked at us and said, ‘Don’t you know this is a marriage class?’ ”

Experts in rural affairs tend to study the economics of small-town life and the vagaries of production agriculture, rather than the people who inhabit the nation’s far-flung hamlets. What little is known about rural life verges on the grim.

The suicide rate in rural California is 21 per 100,000, says Doug Heckman, a marriage and family counselor in Chico and past director of the now-defunct North Valley Suicide Prevention Center. In urban California, it’s 15 per 100,000. Alcoholism and domestic violence are common. Isolation and loneliness are often key to these maladies, and help is hard to find, he says.

John C. Woodward, professor of human development and the family at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, has studied loneliness for 20 years. He found that urban high school girls were the worst off, rural adults No. 2.

The elderly ranked lowest for loneliness, meaning they are lonely but not as lonely as other groups. “They don’t expect a whole lot,” he says. “If you don’t expect a lot and don’t get a lot, it’s OK.”

Younger rural adults, however, expect much more. In North Dakota, a group of bachelor farmers got together a few years back to put out two years of pinup calendars called “Dakota Men,” complete with an 800 number and a promise that, if a woman called, she’d get a man to talk to.

“Seven or eight of the guys ended up getting married within 18 months,” says one Mr. February, Roger Jaeger, a grain farmer who has left the farm for city life in Fargo. He was not among them.

Bill Martin, a Paradise resident and sociologist at CSU Chico, calls the rural scene “a familistic world, a marital world, where routine participation in the community is for couples . . . and there is an assumption of marital status.”

If young people stay, they tend to marry young, soon after high school, join a family business, work on a family farm or at a job with little future or room to grow, he says. Those who break with that pattern tend to leave entirely.

“The person who struggles the most is the single mother with children who doesn’t work,” Martin says. “There is no systematic connection with others. The wolf of poverty is at the door. There is more of a stigma of being on welfare. . . . Even though we get all the cable channels like everyone else, a failed marriage has greater significance in rural than urban areas.”

Not to mention no marriage at all. Melissa Lovitt never married her son’s father, whom she met in Redding and never brought home to Weaverville. He is now serving time at Vacaville. Still, she runs into folks who insist that Atticus, nearly 15, has a father in town and they try to guess the mystery man’s identity.

Still, Weaverville gave her the 15 friends who gathered with sleeping bags and spent 48 hours with her while she was in labor, leading up to Atticus’ home birth. It has also given her a growing sense that everyone is watching and doesn’t necessarily like what they see--especially since she lost her job with the county welfare department.

“People get very annoyed if you pay with food stamps,” she says of her town, which balances only four places to buy groceries with 3,500 pairs of eyes to watch you do it. “Weaverville is so tiny it’s like it’s their money you’re using.”

Every day that Lovitt spends still happy to be single, Gloria Baldwin of Willows spends hoping to find Mr. Right. She moved to this fallen-on-hard-times Sacramento Valley rice town in 1986, after fleeing an abusive husband in Medford, Ore.

Compared to Willows--population pushing 6,000, with a just-closed Safeway and a Hallmark store on the ropes--Medford was swinging. It had a co-ed Christian singles group and nearly 47,000 residents, plus a population that actually changed once in a while.

“The only reason I came here is because I have family,” Baldwin says. “I knew in a remote area like this I wasn’t going to find anyone next door, down the street or across town. I knew I was going to have to take a drastic measure.”

Her drastic measure was to hunt down the Van Nuys-based Church of Many Mansions Christian Singles Outreach Division, a nationwide listing service that operates largely in rural areas. Her estranged husband, in a tangled act of goodwill and bad faith, told her that it existed but not where it was.

Pastor L.W. Fusselman, who runs the outreach program, advertises his donation-only services in farmers’ almanacs and agriculture publications. It has ads arranged by ZIP code, the slogan “Loneliness really doesn’t have to be” and a success-story column called “Testimonials of Single Christian No More” (“Please remove my name and ad from the listing . . . I am dating one of your singles. And my loneliness has ended.”)

“There is no circulation of singles in the small town,” Fusselman says. “The rural people tell me stories like, ‘There are two single people in my church. I’m 18 and he’s 85. What do we do?’ ”

Baldwin has flown as far as Los Angeles for dates with men she’s met through the Church of Many Mansions. So far, no good.

“I’m thankful I have a little boy who’s very interesting and lively to keep me from going crazy bananas from loneliness,” she says. “I do go to shows. . . . I have a dog, cat, rabbit, fish, birds. They take up your time, are almost as good as human beings. Well, somewhat.”

There is a glimmer of hope for Baldwin. She has exchanged letters, phone calls and confidences with a man whose picture she has tucked into a frame above her living room sofa. He could be the one for her, she thinks.

There’s just one small hitch, a distance thing that even the geographically undesirable woman from Willows could not have imagined. This man? He lives in Yorkshire, England.

“Isn’t this a crime?” she sighs.