Great wide open

RAPID CITY, SD — So many places in South Dakota now seem cruelly and ironically named: There’s Harreid — pronounced “harried” — which measures less than 2 square miles and has 438 residents left. They’re thriving compared to the folks in Cottonwood, a barren 0.9 square mile of brown grass and imploding structures right off I-90; as of the 2010 Census, it has a population of six. And then there is Scenic, a burnt-out husk of a saloon stop where about 10 freestanding structures remain, three of which are jails. Population: one.

These disappearing towns may seem extreme outliers, but they exist all over South Dakota and most rural areas in America, and this way of life, on the decline since the Great Depression, is now near death. Only four states — Vermont, Mississippi, West Virginia and Maine — have more people living outside cities than in them, with just 16% of Americans living in rural areas, according to the 2010 Census.

Entire swaths of America are emptying out, with people forced through economics and social hardship to live closer to more metropolitan centers, if not in them. Such is the drain that many airlines have cut back on flights to rural areas, jacking up the cost of tickets for the few that remain.

Cities saw a spike of 11% in population in 2010, and the Census reports that the top 10 most rapidly expanding places were all urban areas or closely surrounding suburbs, with the greatest gains in Texas, California and Arizona. The implications aren’t just social or even economic; as these well-established migration patterns continue, political power will be concentrated in cities, which will have more legislators. Blue states and red states are about to mix it up.

Scenic is the most compelling case study, and if you were to picture a Hollywood version of a midwestern ghost town, that would be a very good approximation of what this place looks like. Scenic was most recently in the news this summer, when it was put up for sale for $799,000. (It sold to a controversial Filipino church called Iglesia ni Cristo.) There are abandoned, collapsing houses left wide open, signs of life strewn through like some sort of Dust Bowl-themed art installation: a page of looseleaf paper with local debts listed in pristine cursive; children’s lesson books with titles such as “The Family You Belong To” strewn across the front porch.

Scenic still has a working post office (the ‘S’ in Scenic sways precariously from one nail at the top), and if you go in to this tiny box on a weekday around noon, you’re likely to encounter Peggy, who is very nice and would love to talk but needs about half an hour because, she says, “you’ve just caught me at the busiest time of day.”

The post office is often the last thing to go in towns like these, after the schools and then the churches. Scenic’s has 36 P.O. boxes, 16 of which are used by mainly by ranchers, and is set to close down soon. So is the one in Belvedere (pop: 49) and the one in Quinn (pop: 25). Peggy blames technology, and though it sounds simplistic, she’s not wrong. “My kids don’t see a need for the post office,” she says.

There is no one in else in town except a portly, middle-aged man who introduces himself only as Dave and says he represents the buyers of the town. He won’t say anything about the buyers or what plans they have for Scenic, though Peggy at the post office has heard something about turning the town into a rehab facility. There are also two middle-aged Indian men from the nearby reservation, each driving a school bus, and they both turned off I-90 and stopped on what they still call Main Street in the hopes of getting a Coke from the vending machine at the defunct gas station. You’ll probably not be surprised to hear that there was no Coke in the vending machine.

Sixty-six-year-old Howard Badmilk, who lives on a nearby reservation and drives one of the school buses, remembers when Main Street was a highway, when this was a “thriving town” of 50 or 60 people.

“The Interstate killed everything,” he says. “People used to stop in towns; now they just drive all the way through. The saloon used to have gang fights and drunkenness, and that’s why the jails were next to the bar.” He sounds thoroughly wistful. “There was sawdust on the floor and they used milk cans for stools. I hoisted a few myself.”

There’s a satellite dish still screwed into the awning. Satellite dishes, in fact, are affixed to nearly every inhabited home in these rural, un-wired areas. These towns are like the slums in Brazil or India — no matter how poor people are, they’re figuring out a way to pay for cable.

The lone resident here is an elderly widow, Rosalie Stangle, who has lived here nearly her entire life. When Peggy leaves for the day, Rosalie is alone, quite literally in the middle of nowhere. Her house stands in stark contrast to the detritus around her: It’s a modest one-story home with a white picket fence, meticulously clean and manicured, a shrine to the Madonna in the front yard. She has three sons who all come to check on her, and sometimes she stays with them, but according to Peggy, she is happiest here.

Those rural die-hards over 50 — and almost all rural die-hards are older, their children having long ago fled to more urban areas — comfortably live two hours from the nearest hospital. The flatness and vastness of the landscape only compounds the sense of utter and complete desolation. The few who remain in these microscopic, dilapidated towns leave their homes unlocked and their garage doors wide open, all the time. And they have so few residents paying property tax — there is no state income tax here — that some towns lack sewage systems and rely on septic tanks or pumps, as is the case in Quinn.

In many ways, what’s happening here mirrors what’s happening in Detroit, on the decline for so many decades but now in critical condition, with the population declining 25% in the past 10 years. The city is planning to raze 10,000 empty residential structures, with the goal of moving those holdouts who live in deserted areas closer to the centralized, functioning part of town, with its hospitals and grocery stores and taken-for-granted goods and services. America on the whole, it seems, is downsizing.

“Our small communities lack the threshold of people to keep kids doing their best,” says Mike McCurry, the state’s demographer. “I grew up learning that I was an export commodity — that there were going to be no jobs for me. The young people here have basically disappeared. If you want to keep a kid in South Dakota,” he says, “you want him to be a dropout.”

The kids who are most likely to stick around, in fact, are those who grow up, impoverished and with little education, on one of South Dakota’s nine reservations.

“We’re going to become a less white, more Lakota and Dakota population,” McCurry says. “It’s a natural blowback.”

As of the 2010 Census, 41 of South Dakota’s 66 counties, most rural, declined in population, while the state’s two major cities, Rapid City and Sioux Falls, saw population growth of 24% and 14%, respectively. These are not cities in the sense that New York or Los Angeles or Chicago is a city; Rapid, for example, is leisurely paced, ridiculously clean, almost entirely white (as is the bulk of the state), and the town’s tallest buildings, of which there are about three, top out at around nine stories. But Rapid and Sioux Falls attract those South Dakotans who’d rather not leave, and they are highly functioning and well-off; the unemployment rate here is 3.3%, and though it’s a conservative state, the government funds much of its operation.

“Rapid is a really nice place,” McCurry says. “But figure that the median job in South Dakota pays 80% of the median job in the US. And the median job in rural counties pays 80% of the state average. The economy forces people; it’s got a pull factor to other states.”

Clearly, in the modern age, the rural way of life in America is unsustainable. But as sad as it is — the erosion of part of the national DNA, characterized by its independence, ability to self-sustain, and an inherent, romantic wildness — is it a bad thing?

With the exception of agriculture, South Dakota lacks for private enterprise. This summer, the state has embarked on a public-relations campaign to convince young lawyers to relocate to its rural areas. A piece on the blog Lawyerist suggested that the cultural fear of living hours outside of civilization is an over-reaction on the part of city folk: “Rural residents just do a reverse commute,” albeit one that lasts three hours each way.

Otherwise, there’s Ellsworth Air Force Base in Rapid City, which was nearly shut down in 2005 and has more than 4,000 people living there, with a median household income of $39,919. The capital city, Pierre, runs almost entirely on government funds; the top three employment sectors are the state government, followed by the local hospital, followed by the school system.

Scott Carbonneau, the city’s community development coordinator, thinks Pierre can be competitive in attracting younger workers: “When you first graduate college, you say, ‘OK, I want to go out and see the world. And then you say, ‘OK, I’ve seen it.’ ”

Statewide, ethanol subsidies may or may not be abolished, but corn is one thing South Dakota produces in abundance, and according to the Renewable Fuels Standard, fuel companies must infuse a minimum of 12.6 billion gallons of ethanol into their fuel supply. “There’s an old joke about government subsidies,” says Dave Grettler, a professor of history at Northern State University: “How do you double your farm income? Add another mailbox!”

So much speculation has revolved around the sustainability of farming in South Dakota, from the condition of the land to extreme weather patterns to the corporatization of farming. (South Dakota is divided by residents into “east river” and “west river,” with the east anchored by Sioux Falls and vegetative farming, and the west anchored by Rapid City and cattle ranching.)

But nothing is killing the rural way of life, here and throughout the nation, as much as technology. It began in the 1950s, with the construction of the Interstate — or the “super-slab” as it’s called here — and continued with the increasing sophistication and power of farming machinery. The notion that “agribusiness” has killed the family farm, it turns out, is the rural version of urban myth: 99% of farming in South Dakota is done by family farms. They just happen to be very big families who have very large tracts of farmland.

“This is not a mysterious process,” says Jon Lauck, who has a Ph.D. in the history of South Dakota and serves as a top adviser to US Sen. John Thune, himself from the town of Murdo (pop: 488). “As technology got better and you could farm 15,000 acres of land or more, you lose people. And then the younger people move to Minneapolis or Denver for jobs. But it’s sad. It’s sad every time a small farm closes.”

Since the 1980s, papers have been written about the inevitable death of this way of life; in 1987, in “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust,” Deborah and Frank Popper posited the return of lands such as these to wildlife. Many of these areas, in fact, are beginning to resemble the landscape and conditions that existed before the Pilgrims landed; this spring, the town of McLaughlin, SD, tasked Sheriff Keith Gall with tracking the bison population, which, at 6,000, far outnumbered the people living there. “This is a first,” he said at the time.

The only small towns that have managed to survive have done so by scrubbing up what they once were — outlaw camps populated by prostitutes, gamblers, hustlers and thieves — and reinventing themselves as sterilized, pre-fab theme-park experiences for the not-so-adventurous tourist. (Tourism is a thriving industry in South Dakota, most driven by Mount Rushmore, which was conceived solely for this purpose.)

The gold-rush town of Deadwood, for example — made newly famous by the recent HBO series — was notoriously lawless. Wild Bill Hickok was shot and killed there; murder was so common as to be unremarkable and often unpunished. Today, Deadwood has a small population — only 1,270 — but, since blaspheming its history, opening “saloons” that admit toddlers and hosting events such as The Deadwood Jam (“rock, reggae and blues fill the Black Hills”), it’s remained economically healthy.

Same with the town of Wall, which has a population of 766 and which is powered by Wall Drug, which opened during the Great Depression and became a routine stop for tourists on their way to Mt. Rushmore, offering free ice water. Today, there is thoroughly and proudly nothing authentic about Wall Drug, which is basically a glorified strip mall that sells cheap beaded Indian-made jewelry, toy guns, and very, very bland food. It’s one of the largest tourist attractions in America.

And this is a town that has only 238 students in its entire school system. “Right now I would say we have a more elderly population,” says Lindsey Hildebrand, the executive director of the Wall Chamber of Commerce. “Compared to the 2010 Census, we’re down 6%.”

Lindsey is 27. Where are her friends? “Most of them,” she says, “moved away.”

“My children are not interested in this,” says Bernie Hanks, who has lived in the town of Cottonwood for over a decade. “When I die, they’ll sell.”

Hanks was born and raised in Long Beach, Calif., but would visit his grandfather here as a little boy and has fond memories of the old man buying him a 5-cent Coke while getting into brawls with neighbors at the local Buckhorn Bar. Hanks worked and raised a family in California, but when the bar went up for sale 13 years ago, he bought it, plus another 2.5 acres of land, for $13,000, and converted it into a house. His property taxes, however, are rising: “They used to be $992 a year,” Hanks says. “That damn school district in Philip incorporated us. Nobody goes to school here — there’s six of us!”

He’s long retired from the FAA, where he worked as an accident inspector, and lives here now with his second wife. He wears blue jeans and baseball cap, generous belly encased in a white cotton T and hanging over a large, thick brass belt buckle that reads BERNIE. Hanks spends his time fixing his yellow pick-up truck, which used to haul animal carcasses, and building stuff; as he did his own barn and storage house. “I have more things to do now than when I was 20,” he says.

Hanks spends about four months of the year here, and is losing neighbors at a rapid clip: “Over there” — he points to a thoroughly indistinguishable ramshackle house — “that woman was widowed. Then she went to Sturgis (pop: 6,627) with the preacher who buried her husband.” That’s about what passes for gossip in rural South Dakota. As anyone living in a rural town will tell you, people this dependent on each other do not pass judgment and do not talk about each other much.

Despite the near-total isolation — the nearest town is 13 miles away, and Cottonwood, like so many of its fellow hamlets, has no fire department, doctor, grocery store or police presence — Hanks says he fears nothing. Crime is freakishly, historically low in South Dakota, and if you leave your rental car unlocked to wander around one of these little pockets, you’re way more likely to find that a stranger will leave something in it (in my case, two jars of homemade dill pickles) rather than take something out.

Not that it’s entirely free of trouble.

Four years ago, Hanks says, he caught a guy trying to break into his old restaurant. “He had a crowbar and he was having trouble. I watched him. Then I just went in the cupboard, pulled out the handgun, shot a couple of rounds over his head and you should’ve seen him run.”

He chuckles. “This is a nice place to live, a nice place to retire.”

Quinn, the closest town to Cottonwood, is home to George Moore, 78, and his second wife. Moore grew up here and points to a flat patch of grass about 10 yards from his door; that’s where his high school used to be. Next door to him is Lana Pabst, 54, who is originally from a big city (East Grand Forks, Minn., pop 55,000) but moved here for her husband, who loves it. She admits that the isolation can be worrisome: “If I’m out here and the storms take down my tree and my clothesline, I guess I read my word,” she says. “I read my Bible.”

Down the road is Ron Dyvig, the town celebrity. Dyvig, 68, is a graduate of Deadwood High School (class president of ’61) and today is the owner and operator of the Badlands Observatory, where he lives and works part-time. He bought the building, which was the town’s former six-bed hospital, at auction for $68,000, but soon after, a fire swept through the place, and Dyvig lost nearly everything. He doesn’t feel that the lack of a fire department made the losses worse: “They get here quickly, from Wall,” he says. “In 20 minutes.”

His friends helped him reconstruct, and he took on a second job as a mail carrier to build his Newtonian reflecting telescope here; he wanted a northern site with low light pollution, and the town put filters on all 12 traffic lights just for him. He’s even able to switch the one closest to the Observatory on and off. “It was in appreciation for what I was doing with the space,” he says. He has discovery credit on 27 asteroids, and people around the world can log on and use his telescope through the Space Grant Internet Network.

Dyvig is a soft-spoken man with a sweet face, and in talking to him, it’s hard not to feel that the loss of a town like this, so perfectly matched to a gentle eccentric like Dyvig, would be a tragedy. Here, he can be alone with his stars, yet still feel that he belongs to a community.

But Quinn is about to lose its post office, which, as Dave Grettler so plainly notes, is the end. “Losing that stuff doesn’t kill the town,” he says. “The town’s already dead, and you’re cleaning up the body. People hate that kind of talk, but it’s true. Once the post office goes, farmers don’t go to that town for nothing.”

Dyvik may be a romantic, but he’s also resigned. “You can only go with the history of the last 50 years, and you can see what’s happening,” he says. “When I drive the mail route out there, I talk to these farmers and ranchers and they’re the salt of the earth, and you’d think it would never end — that there’s an American thread running through that’s not going to be easy to extinguish.”