Every Town on the Map
Posted by: Scott W. Graves | 03/03/2008 3:14 AM
By James Lileks
When you read that North Dakotans are angry about a National Geographic profile on their state, you might think: ya sure you betcha, rent them a phone booth, they can have a convention, doncha know. This is typical of the abuse the state regularly endures, and it's up to faithful loyalists to defend it. They're often like me: people who left at the earliest possible opportunity.
The National Geographic story concerned the great vast vacant ache of North Dakota--the empty back roads, abandoned towns, depopulated plains. Ramshackle sun-blasted barns, haunted farmhouses with busted windows. No one's home. This has peeved the NoDakians. They have a point; you can aim your camera anywhere in America and find a vacancy, then swing it around 180 degrees and find something prosperous and optimistic.
Says one defender: "We've heard this story 1,000 times, and furthermore we know it's true," he said. "The notion that all the intelligent people have left and the rest are slowly committing suicide really ticked people off."
He's right. The article, it seems, examines parts of North Dakota that haven't been populated for decades. I own a copy of "North Dakota: Every Town on the Map," and it's full of towns that hit their peak in the teens and the twenties; the architecture makes it plain that prosperity hadn't stopped by for a long chat since the Depression. But assume the story's accurate, and the NoDak small-towns are heading into history. So?
We're told that the decline of rural America has changed the nation's character--not because we're no longer ruled by the idea of sturdy plowmen who pause once a year, unyoke their beasts, walk six miles to the voting booth and ask themselves "what would Abe do?" while kneading their caps in their honest, callused hands. No, it's the declining population of young people who flee the small towns. That's what changed us, if you believe some social historians. The nation had relied on people raised with corn-fed virtues and simple flinty values, leaving home, heading to the big city, and getting rolled the moment they stepped off the train--er, bringing up the moral level of the turpitudinous city.
Maybe. Could be that the small-town escapees were thrill-seeking misfits who couldn't blend into the simple normal life of Mayberry RFD, and these messed-up neurotic émigrés made us the place were are today.
I grew up in Fargo. It hugs the border of Minnesota, looking east; real North Dakota was out west, beyond the edge of town, an endless oration of sky and fields unsullied by hills or dales. Fargo held 50,000 souls when I was growing up, but you were never far from the edge of town. And you never felt like you lived by a silent empty ocean whose implacable expanse could swallow you whole--that was just the world beyond the streets and houses, and you entered and left it as easily as an amphibian traversing the sea and the beach.
My parents, for example, grew up around Harwood, a frontier town ten miles north. Thanks to its proximity to thriving Fargo, Harwood now has a second life as a bedroom community for those who can't take the congestion and annoyances of city life. There's a new store, two bars, a firehouse, an elementary school. The grain elevators still stand. The Harwood Bank is still open. Harwood was spared the fate of the outlying hamlets, so National Geographic will pay it no mind.
But drive ten miles west, and you could be in the middle of the state--not a soul to see, two-lane roads, silent farm houses huddled in a windbreak, the occasional church. On a day after Christmas I went down one of these roads to a funeral; the church dated from the 19th century, and was founded by my immigrant ancestors. One of their descendants had died on a road heading home to Harwood and would be buried in the yard with his forebears.
You think there's no one alive out here until you come across a funeral; then the shoulders of the road are packed with parked cars for half a mile. You can visit the heartland and take pictures and draw your conclusions, but you have to live there to know it. People are still here. People have always been here.
When you read that North Dakotans are angry about a National Geographic profile on their state, you might think: ya sure you betcha, rent them a phone booth, they can have a convention, doncha know. This is typical of the abuse the state regularly endures, and it's up to faithful loyalists to defend it. They're often like me: people who left at the earliest possible opportunity.
The National Geographic story concerned the great vast vacant ache of North Dakota--the empty back roads, abandoned towns, depopulated plains. Ramshackle sun-blasted barns, haunted farmhouses with busted windows. No one's home. This has peeved the NoDakians. They have a point; you can aim your camera anywhere in America and find a vacancy, then swing it around 180 degrees and find something prosperous and optimistic.
Says one defender: "We've heard this story 1,000 times, and furthermore we know it's true," he said. "The notion that all the intelligent people have left and the rest are slowly committing suicide really ticked people off."
He's right. The article, it seems, examines parts of North Dakota that haven't been populated for decades. I own a copy of "North Dakota: Every Town on the Map," and it's full of towns that hit their peak in the teens and the twenties; the architecture makes it plain that prosperity hadn't stopped by for a long chat since the Depression. But assume the story's accurate, and the NoDak small-towns are heading into history. So?
We're told that the decline of rural America has changed the nation's character--not because we're no longer ruled by the idea of sturdy plowmen who pause once a year, unyoke their beasts, walk six miles to the voting booth and ask themselves "what would Abe do?" while kneading their caps in their honest, callused hands. No, it's the declining population of young people who flee the small towns. That's what changed us, if you believe some social historians. The nation had relied on people raised with corn-fed virtues and simple flinty values, leaving home, heading to the big city, and getting rolled the moment they stepped off the train--er, bringing up the moral level of the turpitudinous city.
Maybe. Could be that the small-town escapees were thrill-seeking misfits who couldn't blend into the simple normal life of Mayberry RFD, and these messed-up neurotic émigrés made us the place were are today.
I grew up in Fargo. It hugs the border of Minnesota, looking east; real North Dakota was out west, beyond the edge of town, an endless oration of sky and fields unsullied by hills or dales. Fargo held 50,000 souls when I was growing up, but you were never far from the edge of town. And you never felt like you lived by a silent empty ocean whose implacable expanse could swallow you whole--that was just the world beyond the streets and houses, and you entered and left it as easily as an amphibian traversing the sea and the beach.
My parents, for example, grew up around Harwood, a frontier town ten miles north. Thanks to its proximity to thriving Fargo, Harwood now has a second life as a bedroom community for those who can't take the congestion and annoyances of city life. There's a new store, two bars, a firehouse, an elementary school. The grain elevators still stand. The Harwood Bank is still open. Harwood was spared the fate of the outlying hamlets, so National Geographic will pay it no mind.
But drive ten miles west, and you could be in the middle of the state--not a soul to see, two-lane roads, silent farm houses huddled in a windbreak, the occasional church. On a day after Christmas I went down one of these roads to a funeral; the church dated from the 19th century, and was founded by my immigrant ancestors. One of their descendants had died on a road heading home to Harwood and would be buried in the yard with his forebears.
You think there's no one alive out here until you come across a funeral; then the shoulders of the road are packed with parked cars for half a mile. You can visit the heartland and take pictures and draw your conclusions, but you have to live there to know it. People are still here. People have always been here.
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