I grew up in South Dakota, but spent my
summers in Portland, Ore., with my mom. As an adolescent, I enjoyed
how my city experience pushed me ahead of the curve when I got back
home for school.
I had my classmates beat by at least a
year on the overalls-with-one-strap thing. It wasn’t all that
hard to stay ahead of a state whose curve, many observers say,
slopes downward.
In later years, addicted to being a
pioneer, I followed the logic of the curve to its extreme. My
philosophy: The instant someone declares a trend a trend,
it’s done. So when the fashion arbiters say “white is the new
black,” it’s red all over.
That’s why a
recent series in the New York Times caught my eye. Three articles
pondered population trends out in my neck of the weeds, lamenting
losses on the rural Great Plains. Just about everybody has been
playing this dirge in one minor key or another for a decade and a
half — at least since Rand McNally omitted Oklahoma and both
Dakotas from its travel guide in the late 1980s.
The
first article described for the hundredth time the “slow
demographic collapse” and “quiet crisis in confidence” in the
region. Yawn. The dying Plains are so passe.
Frank and
Deborah Popper — the New Jersey professors who forecast this
decline and prescribed returning the prairie to a “buffalo commons”
— were the Dying Plains trendsetters back in 1987.
When the 1990 census came out, Americans were startled to learn
that the Poppers were right; the population of many Plains counties
had plummeted to frontier levels. Perhaps Frederick Jackson
Turner’s 1893 elegy for the ending of the frontier —
inspired by the 1890 census — was null and void.
Open space again existed in America, but without the possibility
the word “frontier” suggested a century ago. Now, the frontier is a
vast, unpeopled factory for agribusiness giants like ConAgra and
Tyson Fresh Meats, Inc. Another decade and another census inspired
another suite of Dying Plains dirges. But the Times has now added a
twist: Some of Superior, Nebraska’s departed youth (kindred
spirits: I split five years ago to attend college seven states east
of home) had returned, giving the town a fighting chance.
There were also whispers of hope in Kansas and Oklahoma. Some small
towns survive by resurrecting an informal, “make-do” economy, where
neighbors share extra garden produce, maternity clothes and even
houses with those in need. Some towns have zoned industrial
parks-to-be and conceived new festivals with a sort of Field of
Dreams logic. The last residents of the Plains hang on with a
determination to preserve the communities they grew up in.
Tenacity, the paper suggested, might just turn the curve around.
I’m not sure what’s unsettling about these
articles. Maybe I’m afraid that with its Midas touch, the New
York Times will jinx the good news by printing it. Or maybe
it’s that when the Times says “white is the new black,” it
isn’t long before the Gap and then Wal-Mart (the only
clothier left on the Plains) start bleaching their racks and bring
supercenter prosperity to the region.
I just left a
Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood where young hipsters have converted
empty warehouses into expensive loft apartments. After a year of
gagging on the new residents’ stylish mullet and mohawk
hairstyles, I fled — only to move to a small Colorado town
that’s gentrifying in its own way. I couldn’t bear to
watch the Plains re-fill with classy Californians, either.
I may be loyal to the charm of a dying place. “As memory,
as experience, those Plains are unforgettable,” wrote Wallace
Stegner in 1963, long before anyone cared to notice; “as history,
they have the lurid explosiveness of a prairie fire, quickly
dangerous, swiftly over.” The Plains, with their droughts and their
hard seasons, with their long drives to the multiplex, may be
destined to lose their people. There’s something comforting
about that; if my home would simply disappear like a landlocked
Atlantis, nobody could steal it — not even the people who
still live there.
But maybe I’m just jealous,
because the Plains have sparked a trend for once and done it
without me. Caught up in my own momentum, like so many of my peers,
away from the broad flats, I may have missed a turn for the better.
Maybe, I’m behind the curve.
Josh
Garrett-Davis is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service
of High Country News (hcn.org) in Paonia, Colorado, where he was
most recently an intern for the paper.
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