Glasgow, Mont., is a far cry
and a long drive from the mountainous western portion of a state
that draws its name from the Spanish word
montana. I know that because I recently drove to
Glasgow, a town of 3,253 that rests in a flat region of
northeastern Montana and serves as the county seat of the aptly
named Valley County.
My wife and I visited Glasgow
shortly after our 23-year-old daughter moved there to spend a year
working as an Americorps volunteer at the Women’s Resource
Center. Since no interstates go north there, we drove on two-lane
highways for all but 55 miles of the 440-mile trip from our home in
Rapid City, S.D. For the last 400 miles of the journey, no vehicle
showed up in the rearview mirror — not even one — even
on the 25 miles of interstate in Montana.
Our daughter
had called us a couple of days after arriving in town to prepare us
for where she’d landed. “They have a McDonald’s, a
Dairy Queen and an Albertsons grocery store,” she explained, “but
no Wal-Mart. It’s 200 miles to the nearest K-Mart. But they
do have a Pamida.”
That’s how many of us who live
in rural areas characterize a town and maybe even judge its worth.
We tote up the chains that have located there. I now think this
tells us next to nothing, because it merely tells how a place is
just like any other place scattered around the country. It
doesn’t tell us what makes a town unique or odd or beautiful.
Before we visited Glasgow, my folks called from their
home in suburban Chicago, where I grew up. (My hometown happens to
be home of the first McDonald’s drive-in.) They asked for
news of their granddaughter’s move and new location.
I tried not to say it, but I ended up repeating, “They
even have a McDonald’s.” Then I went on to list the other
chains that were there. I felt terrible, but I really didn’t
know what else to say. The statements served as a kind of cultural
shorthand.
Even in the rural reaches of our country, the
world of advertising and the corporations have so saturated our
minds with their products and logos that we find it difficult to
define our existence apart from them. It takes effort to see a
place and the people who have settled there for who they are in
their own frame of reference. But to do otherwise is to show a form
of bias that writer Wendell Berry calls a “prejudice against
country people.”
Now that I’ve visited Glasgow
myself, I’ve discovered several ways to describe where my
daughter lives. I talk about the town’s remoteness and its
broad valley, and I sometimes say that St. Matthew’s, the
Episcopal Church which my daughter attends, is full of “Markles.”
That’s the name of a family that’s been in the area for
generations and which owns, among other things, a furniture store
called Markles. It is celebrating its 100th year of business.
I make sure they know that the priest at St.
Matthew’s is also an orthopedic surgeon at the local
hospital. He decided he wanted to go into the ministry and now does
both jobs — not an unusual phenomenon in small towns.
They might also want to know that the chief of police
called the Women’s Resource Center where my daughter works to
say someone had reported a vehicle with South Dakota plates
regularly parked there, and to inform that owner that state law
requires new residents to get Montana plates within 30 days of
moving to the state. And I pass on the tip my daughter received
from a member of St. Matthew’s to check out the huge portions
of the walleye special served on Fridays at Sam’s Supper
Club.
As corporate America spreads like creeping jenny to
choke out the character of rural America, it is up to us to remain
alert to what lies beneath the chain-store veneer of the places we
live. We need to resist the siren’s call, amplified by
advertising and designed to lure us to the chains that promise us
rock-bottom prices, in place of personal concern and lasting
relationships. We can seek out and support the things that make a
place distinctively local. I did, and I can tell you, the walleye
was phenomenal.
Ken Steinken is a contributor
to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He teaches journalism and English at
Stevens High School in Rapid City, South
Dakota.
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