The prairie is filled with skeletons.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger      12 comments      link this post     


::UPDATE: Read a follow-up post here.::

There are many things to take photos of in North Dakota, things that are alive and beautiful, like wildlife and lush green prairie and rich yellow and blue fields of canola and flax. However, if you're a journalist or photographer from a big-name publication, you need to wait until early autumn and find not only the skeletal remains of a large animal, but an abandoned house for the background, and then take the winning shot. This will frame out your story nicely, no matter how objective you claim to be, since the ONLY STORY PEOPLE CAN SEEM TO WRITE ABOUT NORTH DAKOTA IS HOW IT IS DEAD AND DYING.

Let me say, once again, that THIS IS NOT THE CASE. North Dakota is unique among the nation, currently experiencing an economic boom instead of economic decline. That outmigration of the 1980's and 1990's? It was part of a large wave, part of the natural ebb and flow (I address this later in the article).

But don't let that stop any journalist from writing yet another dismal piece of trash in which the usual negative adjectives* are used to highlight a story on one cherry-picked downer about the state of this state. Don't forget to sprinkle in the usual local odd characters. Get all the "remember when" stories that you can. And then, when you're through, you'll get something similar to Charles Bowdon's "North Dakota: The Emptied Prairie", an article in the latest issue of National Geographic. The subtitle of the article? "North Dakota Ghost Towns Speak of an Irreversible Decline."

Ghost towns, abandoned buildings -- they got what they deserved
The subtitle itself is a wondrous work indeed. Most ghost towns, by their definition, are very much in an "irreversible decline." If, however, a single ghost town is supposed to speak for an entire state's future, some of the burgeoning states of the Southwest have a lot of explaining to do.

I know, for patronizing people like Bowdon, North Dakota is merely fly-over country and makes for a good weepy piece of journalism when such a "know-better" type of person decides to land, snap a few photos, and interview a handful of colorful locals.

The robin's-egg blue kitchen looks out on the brown grass of the empty plains. The gas stove lurches away from the wall, and, in the wild yard, the white bones of a deer bleach in the sun. Plaster fragments litter the floors of the rooms, and down in the cellar a galvanized wringer washer stands watch by the long-dead coal furnace. In the upstairs bedroom, a window sash has slipped and become a trapezoid framing the abandoned orchard to the west. Two old cars rust nearby, caressed by the moan of the wind. The stone footing of a vanished barn stares east at wheat and grass. Ghost towns stud North Dakota, and this empty house is just one bone in a giant skeleton of abandoned human desire.

So much moaning and lurching and wind-caressing. (That wind, incidentally, is helping to bring in one of the largest wind farms in the nation, just 30-some miles north of where I live.) Clearly, things are going downhill. Certainly, the population, as Bowdon later mentions, is shifting. Some of the more rural areas are waning, while other towns and cities are booming. What is this journalistic fetishist love for finding an abandoned building and practicing the skills needed for purple prose? Are there no abandoned buildings in any other state? Do they all speak for the state of the state?

This is the place where American assumptions about the land proved to be wrong. The homesteaders believed rain followed the plow. In the grasslands of western Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, they learned better. And so for almost a century we've watched stranded towns and houses fall one by one like autumn leaves in the chill of October. In most of the United States, abandoned buildings are a sign of change and shifting economic opportunities. On the High Plains, they always mean that something in the earth and the sky mutinied against the settlers.

Things have special and different meanings here on the High Plains? Poetic nonsense, disguised as philosophy. An abandoned house is an abandoned house.

For anyone to point out the foolishness of trying to settle inhospitable land, and then suggesting the people who made the attempt are getting what is deserved for making the mistake of that effort, I would recommend a hearty read of Marc Reisner's book Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water. Upon doing so, I think we could all take collective turns pointing fingers at the foolishness of attempting to settle and civilize Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, et. al.

Bowdon's article, of course, follows my guide on How to Write About North Dakota almost to a perfect "T." He has, essentially, written the same article that's already been written about the state for the past 15 to 20 years. Kudos to Bowdon. He can ape a style. He joined the chorus of people who, scratching about for something to write on and feeling a little uninspired, decided to write about the joke that North Dakota is for people who have never been here or have the slightest clue. Every mindless chump has a punch line about this state, some just hiding behind better credentials and a glossy magazine.

The miserable state of being
North Dakota, apparently, reserves the right to torture her people like no one else.

North Dakota is among the windiest states in the Union and one of the coldest south of Alaska. Twice the legislature has considered changing the name to simply Dakota to shake the chill from its image. [...] But out on the land, the population has relentlessly bled away. So there is money and prosperity and the numbing sense that comes from living in a vanishing world.

So it gets cold in North Dakota some of the year. It's livable. It also gets hot, and then it also is very lovely and mild. It's not as if we don't have vehicles and heat and modern life. We are, in no way, suffering as the truly early settlers -- back when the population numbers were higher, incidentally -- did. A blizzard doesn't usually sock us in for weeks on end. We have electricity and are mobile and heated and have lotion for dry skin. Good grief.

Bowdon hints in his article suggesting suicide and self-destruction might possibly be normal here in North Dakota, as if to say it couldn't be found elsewhere, for other reasons, too.

What happens is that some people cash in on their property and move someplace warmer and easier. The rest grow old and die.

Tell me, does this statement not apply to anywhere else? Any other people from any other state, or nation, for that matter? Are there places where people don't move to what they see as better grounds? Where those that choose to stay don't grow old and die? What is Bowdon's point, here?

The west is like the rest
Most pointedly, the western part of the state, the section with the Badlands and the least population, are the areas that all these journalists go to visit when they need such a story. The state is very large. There's more than the west. The western part of any of the Great Plains states will tell a similar story to what Bowdon is trying to pin on North Dakota.

If you look at just about any article of this nature, you'll surely see mention of Slope County, Marmath, and Amidon. The reason? Slope County is the least populated in the state. It's a nice county for cherry-picking proof for an article like this. By no means is Slope County the norm for the rest of the entire state. Write an article about Slope County, if you must, but don't substitute the name "North Dakota" if you're pointing out the sparseness of the western Great Plains.

If you plot out on a map the towns Bowdon visited, you'll see most lie to the far west. Some, in fact, barely out of Montana. How is it that Montana is the state of "The River Runs Through It" and South Dakota is "Dances With Wolves" but North Dakota is reserved for adjectives like "barren" and "dying"?

It is interesting to also note that most of the people he interviewed were in their upper years. Don't you think, to present an article on the state, that interviewing the newcomers, the younger generation, the people who stayed -- anyone east of the Missouri, for that matter -- would be relevant? Talking to people in their late 70's and 80's is a for-sure way to glean "remember when it was better" instead of "the future looks good" or "I embrace the change instead of rue it."

If you want to write an article to prove that there are ghost towns, or disappearing towns, you go to those towns and do your research there. If you want to write an article to prove that there are dying people, you find the oldest people you can and ask them about the past. If you want to write an article, however, on an entire state (which is suggested by the title of "North Dakota, The Emptied Prairie"), you make a concerted effort to sample a larger variety of input and interviews.

No better, no worse
North Dakota, despite all joking around, has good infrastructure. It has pretty good percentages of a citizenry online, and high speed internet (in my case) that rivals the urban areas. We have an educated population, low crime, and low commute times. A low level of student loan defaults. The cost of living is low, and it isn't a given, in all cases, that your income will be lower than elsewhere. The people are just as friendly as anywhere else (maybe too friendly in some cases). In some areas, the population is few and far between, indeed. And in others, not so much. It varies across the entire state, as it does in other states.

I sometimes wonder if these journalists think they are doing us sad little country folk a favor, painting us as hardy and tough and survivors against the losing battle. What a patronizing way of viewing a world not understood! It is as bad as the Band Aid Christmas song "Do they know it's Christmas?" implying, essentially, that people in less developed parts of the world were to ignorant to know the season.

In transition, nearly stable
Bowdon, with quivering pen and, no doubt, violin music in the background, seems to want to lock North Dakota into one definition, one place, only: his.

Something is ending here that no one ever saw coming. There is nothing to be done: It is simply the acting out of an economic reality.

Nothing to be done. Ending. No one saw it coming. Really.

In September, during a conference I attended in Langdon, North Dakota, Tom Isern presented a brief talk on the history of North Dakota, and how the very real problems that did and are occurring were predicted as far back as the 1950's, back when the state was looking robust. As Elwyn B. Robinson noted, "The themes of North Dakota history are not, can not be, unique. The state is a part of the nation. The themes of our national history -- nationalism, democracy, secularization, urbanization, industrialization, and emergence as a world power --are reflected in events in the state."

Robinson is known for categorizing some of the state's woes as the "too-much mistake" (which Bowdon briefly touches on in the fourth paragraph but neglects to fully flesh out): "The Too-Much Mistake is any name for too many farms, too many miles of railroads and roads, too many towns, banks, schools, colleges, churches, and governmental institutions, and more people than opportunities -- numbers of all that history shows have been far beyond the ability of the state to maintain. Adjustment means both the painful cutting back of the oversupply of the Too-Much Mistake and the slow forging of more suitable ways of living in subhumid grassland."

This suggests that instead of viewing the state as dying out, it is, instead, merely compensating for a previous surge it could not sustain. The new economic growth, stabilizing population, and general up-turn for the state seems to hold to this theory. In other words, the state of North Dakota is not dying, as Bowdon simplistically paints, but is at last, through the surges and crashes of our history, stabilizing. Painful times we've come through, indeed, but the aches are the symptoms, and not the cause. Periods of transition are always painful.

Bowdon mentions the Too-Much Mistake and interprets it, apparently, as suggesting that anyone here in North Dakota was never meant to be and that the rectification of the mistake means a continual dwindling population that has no end in sight.

People are returning. People are wanting to find ways to return, to move here. Granted, they may not be moving out to the far west reaches of the state, but those areas of the state traditionally have always had a lower population, regardless. Admittedly, since so many people did leave, and left some towns and houses to disappear, upon coming back they are finding they can't just set up shop out in the country and tend to flock to the larger towns or outlying areas.

North Dakotans could speak differently
It would behoove North Dakotans, despite being open and friendly and suffering from what I call "worse-itis" (i.e. a bizarre way of bragging with other people by trying to portray how bad things are, and how much worse off one is compared to the other), to stop sitting down with these journalists and talking to them like a bunch of farmers standing around glorying in how bad everything is, and how much worse it will get. The outsider, like Bowdon, doesn't know this language.

It is high time, instead of merely educating the outside world about the good things of North Dakota, to educate its own people and tell them that it is time to change our story. Stop taking comfort in worse-itis. Stop finding the need to brag about how cold it is to the cousin from Florida. What does it matter? What is the point? To prove who is the bigger martyr in some odd masochistic existence? North Dakotans need to learn that the story has changed, even if they haven't.

What are you looking at?
Bowdon is bizarrely fixated on describing the color of the walls in his article. Robin's egg blue. Yellow. Crumbling. I would suggest to him, and others similarly out of touch, to quit staring at the walls, made by humans. They crumble and fall no matter what place you're in. That is the true inevitability, North Dakota or elsewhere: what is made by people will never last.

To Bowdon, and all of the other journalists that seem to do this to North Dakota at least twice a year: Stop looking at the walls and the things that are dead and dying. Looking for death means that that is all you'll see. Instead, look at the sky; it's wide open. And the ground beneath your feet? It is stable.


*Adjectives and other descriptives used on Bowdon's story, which are anything but neutral in the image he is trying to subtly portray: empty, lurched, wild, abandoned, stranded, void, isolated, decline, windiest, chill, relentlessly, littered, reeks, endless, hardest, last, dead badger, dead cat, wind blows, feral edge, survivor, dissolution, nothing to be done, reality -- just a sampling. If he was attuned for the negative, he more than mastered it. The editors at National Geographic should be ashamed that this article passed for anything but a one-sided, ill-written, travelogue of an opinion piece.

NOTE: I have sent an email to National Geographic regarding this article. The email is as follows:

Your recent article on North Dakota is the typical tripe that national magazines and newspaper seem to churn out with great alacrity. Charles Bowdon's efforts to paint an entire state as "dying" while only investing his time in the far west of the state is humorous at best, and absolutely terrible, disingenuous journalism at worst.

At long last, National Geographic has set itself apart as being as predictable as the writers from any handful of publications that find themselves with space to fill and no unique ideas. "Head west, young man! Go to North Dakota, find a dying town, interview the elderly, and write your observations as if they speak for an entire state traditionally beleaguered as the national punchline!"

I have seen fit to blog about this on my blog because I have become accustomed to, at this point, finding these moronic, simplistic articles written by patronizing no-nothings with expensive camera equipment and travel budgets, and saying point blank: you are wrong.

UPDATE: Further discussion this article can be found here. You can also read Rob Port's original post, which includes the comment you see below, here.

UPDATE 2: My comment, at Rob Port's blog, is in response to "Good Ole' Boy" who felt I was "freaking out" and defensive in my writing, and also based his take on population changes on his subjective experience ("the small town I come from blah blah blah") instead of a possible different way to interpret facts of population flux.

Freaking out? Hardly. Defensive? Obviously, I was on defense. What's wrong with that? I see no insult there; Bowdon was offensive, and I am merely being defensive. Basic battle theory. Anyway, the comment:

And to freak out on some overwrought wordsmith's boilerplate prairies-are-dying screed just struck me as being too defensive.

I highly doubt that what I wrote could be considered "freaking out", Good Ole' Boy.

what NG portrayed wasn't a true reflection of what is happening in North Dakota, when actually it was, in most all rural areas.

There are many ways to write an objective piece based on facts. The list of adjectives I included at the bottom of my post would not be found in such an article, at least to the excessive extent that Bowdon relied upon. The population continues to shift and people continue to move out -- not once do I disagree. I do point out, however, that it is less than it used to be (Michigan tops ND for out-migration now) and that the idea that it might be about stabilization rather than pure uni-directional hemorrhaging should have been considered.

Now my little town's population is barely thirty people, the elevator is the only business that is left, and this decay has come amidst some of the best farmland in the whole state. A trip home truly is a depressing sight.

The same technology advances that are allowing people to move back to rural areas are also the same culprit for making farms much larger and the need for many farmers much smaller. Again, part of the stabilization concept: things are still in flux. It is too early to say it is only about endless depopulation until there is nothing. Instead, there are other ways to interpret the numbers.

There's no doubt the way of life is changing; not once do I indicate otherwise. We're not going to have hundreds of little towns like we used to. However, to say the entire state is DYING is quite a leap.

Sentimentality can run both ways. You seem to suggest I'm unwilling to look in the mirror, and I'm telling you that you are unwilling to to view the changes as anything but negative since they seem to be only that in comparison with "how it used to be."

"Used to be" is past. Done. Something new is coming. And it isn't the death knell of an entire state.

There are different ways of portraying facts.

UPDATE 3: Rob Port has written another post in relation to the NG article and aftermath. I did leave a comment on this post, written by GOP gubernatorial candidate Ryan Cunningham who agrees with the article, which is as follows:

If the emptying out of the state is rapid and accelerating, I have a short list of people I hope hurry up and leave.

That way, the rest of us Head-In-The-Sanders can blissfully slide into the vacuum writing with nothing more than fighting spirit with nary a wise word from the already-gone.

Sounds good to me.

/subtlety

At the risk of starting up yet another flame fight with certain people... if you've left the state of North Dakota, consider: You already left. You are part of the statistics that are under interpretation, here. You obviously are part of the crowd that decided it was best to leave, and so of course your view is as tainted as those of use who think it is best to stay. Of course your interpretation of why people leave and the state of the state will reflect a "leaving is better" or "leaving is the norm" position. why do you have to shout from afar at those who remain in the state and interpret and believe more positively that they are wrong? Why not let your leaving be your vote in the matter and, essentially, stop harping on it? It's not your problem anymore. You voted on the matter when you walked out.

UPDATE 4: The author the article, Bowden, now says that a 10-year-old in Arkansas could understand the true meaning behind his article while those of us in ND couldn't. You can read more here. Why doesn't he just stop moving, sit down, shove his foot all the way down his throat up to mid-thigh, and be done with it? Bowden is an elitist prig, which any 10-year-old from Arkansas can pick up on every time he opens his mouth or picks up his purple pen.

LINKS:

• You can read more about Gov. Hoeven's reaction to the National Geographic article here.
• You can read mention of it in UPI's "watercooler stories" here.
• Clay Jenkinson responds to the article here.
• Hal Neff chimes in briefly, touching on the validity of disparaging the past.
• A few non-North Dakotans respond to the article in this discussion, though some of the responses contain errors in understanding ("if only ND had high speed internet for its villages") that are why such articles as find an audience: it is already believed before it was read. The Duluth News Tribune covers the story, too.
• Deiussum's Blog
• I'd point you to the Ed Schultz discussion board, but it's filled with crap about North Dakota needing more hippies and an end to the drug war. Really relevant.
• Here's a blog post written by a fellow from Texas now living in West Virginia opinining about North Dakota. He has this to say: blah blah blah. Pretty much the usual: farmer welfare, not pulling our weight, not that unique or important a state, yada yada yada. A post written only as a true outsider is able to put their finger on the "true pulse" of the state. But, it's well-written. So there's that.
  

Labels: media, north dakota

Copyright (c) Julie R. Neidlinger  1/02/2008 05:15:00 PM   (12) comments   Links to this post    

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