I Think: The difficulty of staying home

Montana Population Shifts (U.S. Census Bureau)

This semester I'm taking Regional Literature, which means a lot of reading about the west. We haven't gotten into any fiction yet, but I have enjoyed the essays we've read so far. Most deal about water. Water creates a problem for the West, in that there is not very much of it.

However, I don't want to talk about water here. Mostly because I took part in an hour-long discussion about it earlier today. Instead, I want to talk about something that has been a minor theme so far, but one that I feel resonates with a lot of Westerners today. It may even apply to you folks on the East Coast too.

Sometimes when you read an essay or story, a passage just jumps out at you. It resonates so strongly with the experiences that shape your world that the words stick with you. This happened to me while reading "The American West as Living Space" by Wallace Stenger. Mixed in between the talk about water rights and how public lands are good, there's one passage in particular that stuck with me. In his essay, Living Dry, Stegner writes:

Whether they are winter wheat towns on the subhumid edge, whose elevators and bulbous silver water towers announce them miles away, or country towns in ranch country, or intensely green towns in irrigated desert valleys, they have a sort of forlorn, proud rightness. They look at once lost and self-sufficient, scruffy, and indispensable. A road leads in out of wide emptiness, threads a fringe of service stations, taverns, a motel or two, widens to a couple of blocks of commercial buildings, some still false-fronted, with glimpses of side streets and green lawns, narrows to another strip of automotive roadside, and disappears into more wide emptiness.

 The loneliness and vulnerability of those towns always moves me, for I have lived in them. I know how the world of a child in one of them is bounded by weedy prairie, or the spine of the nearest dry range, or by flats where plugged tin cans lie rusting and the wind has pasted paper and plastic against the sagebrush. I know how precious is the safety of a few known streets and vacant lots and familiar houses. I know how the road in both directions both threatens and beckons. I know that most of the children in such a town will sooner or later take that road, and that only a few will take it back. (Stegner, 25)

I grew up, until high school anyway, in a town much like the one Stegner describes. Technically, Highway 95 goes around Cottonwood, but it still works. If anything, living on Montana's Hi-Line gives  this impression. Chinook, a town I passed through many a time on my way to and from Malta, comes to mind.

It is the last part of the passage that really stands out to me. Stegner knows that the children will leave and most will stay away. Part of that is reality: there are only so many jobs in a small town. To a certain extent, I think people with big plans and ideas can only do so much in a small town as well.

But still, people are leaving small towns and rural America rapidly. The picture at the top of this post shows the population shifts, county by county, in Montana. I live in Gallatin County, which is the fastest growing county by far in the state. However, looking east, and particularly northeast, we see a different picture. Sheridan County has lost 21% of its population in the past decade. Its current population sits at 3,384. It was not a populous place to begin with, and now one-fifth of its population has left.

I think it would make a great journal exercise to ask students if they plan or want to stay in their hometown and why or why not. Taking it one step further, it would be interesting to follow a class and every other year or so have them write about it. Do perceptions change throughout development? How so? For older classes, why do they think this exodus from rural America is happening, does it concern them, and if so, how do you fix it?