Hoping for 500

I grew up in a small place – a town on the prairie just north of the Iowa line that I’ve come to refer to as “the unfortunately named” Kiester, Minnesota.  The name was (I’ll just get it out of the way) the consistent butt of jokes throughout my youth – there’d be at least one “Kick ‘em in the Kiester” themed float in the parade for any school we happened to play for homecoming.  I mention this mostly as a reflex, having found that it’s a necessary sort of brush clearing before I can say anything meaningful about the place.

What I want to try to say – and I’ll warn you right now that this is going to ramble some – has little to do with law in a narrow sense.  It is instead partly about the decline of rural America and partly about community, and mostly about a place that to most of the world is not even a dot on the map unless you’ve got the right map.

Two weeks ago my hometown’s newspaper brought news of the 2010 census figures.  It also included an anguished piece by Cindy Matson, the paper’s owner and publisher.  She writes of waiting for the census numbers to load on her computer “desperately hoping for one small favor – not below 500, please, not below 500.” 

I am mystified by people who do not have a strong sense of place.  When I meet someone new, I find myself asking where they are from much more often than what they do.  I’d like to imagine that I have some sort of thought-out reason for doing so, some firm belief that you can tell more about a person that way.  But I don’t, really.  It’s just how I think.

Place-wise, I don’t have the deepest of all possible roots.  We moved twice when I was a kid.  Once, when I was three, from an apartment above the grocery store that my grandparents had once run in the nearby town of Walters (population 73).  That move was to a farm, where we lived for the next seven years as my Dad tried to make a go as a farmer on 80 acres just as Ag Secretary Earl Butz was famously telling farmers to “get big or get out.”  I wandered all over that farm, and I can conjure up vivid memories of the landscape over thirty years later.  Sometimes I daydream about one day buying it for a summer place, and can only imagine how deeply attached to that patch of land I might now feel if we’d never left.

But Earl Butz proved to be a worthy prophet in one sense, at least, and so we moved to a house in Kiester.  Perhaps because of this move I consider myself to be from a place that includes both the town proper and parts of the township with its corn fields and gravel roads and rolling prairie.  But what's more important than geography is that it’s a community.  A place where I not only knew my school bus driver’s name, but where he lived and where he worked when he wasn’t driving bus – and, decades later, how he died on a wintry road as he drove to visit his wife in the hospital.  A place where I walked into a store over twenty years after I had left and conversed with the cashier like I’d been there the week before and would undoubtedly be back sometime soon.  Folks generally don’t greet one another with a handshake where I am from, and I think that’s because handshakes are for people who enter and leave your life rather than for those who are part of the community and therefore always around.

The people of this community – my people – are by many measures deeply conservative.  A lot of what I took from growing up is that you work hard and you don’t complain and you say the Pledge of Allegiance and mean it and you go to church and mean it.  But I also learned that education is important.  (To refer to it as public education would, in this context, be redundant.)  And that while you don’t ever want to be seen looking for a handout, if you see that somebody’s car is stuck in the snow you stop and help push them out.  It’s a politics that seems natural to me, and yet one that is tough to map onto the current national political climate.  Even so, these conservative, rural heartlanders gave Obama-Biden 73 percent of their votes, while their counterparts in the surrounding township gave 59 percent.

Kiester topped out, census-wise, in 1960, at 737.  Cindy relates that the town’s increase – up from 541 in 1950 – occasioned an editorial in the Minneapolis Morning Tribune, which disclaimed knowledge of the secret to small-town growth, but noted that “it helps if people care enough about their town to improve it.”

I write this from a distance, with all the advantages and disadvantages that confers.  I am 350 miles and 25 years removed, and my direct experiences as a resident featured me as an insecure, self-absorbed, and generally disagreeable teenager.  But even accounting for the distorting effects of my perspective, it is clear that the people of Kiester have cared about their community.  They kept their houses up.  They paid enough in taxes to have nicely paved streets with curbs and gutters and sidewalks, and to build what in retrospect was undoubtedly more water tower than they needed when the old one started leaking.  They funded a school system that punched well above its weight in terms of fancy degrees earned by its graduates, even though getting fancy degrees was not the point, and even though that good school led to opportunities for their kids that were almost always somewhere else. 

When I was young there were two grocery stores, two hardware stores, two farm implement dealers, a drug store, a clothing store, a bowling alley, a movie theatre, a TV store, two cafes, and four gas stations.  But Earl Butz and the forces that have devastated rural America did not pass over Kiester.  The population started to fall.  We were down to 672 by 1980, and 606 by 1990.  My high school class had only 15 people in it.  Everyone hoped it was a blip, but it was part of a trend.  The gradual process of school consolidation started the year after I graduated.  Ten years later my younger sister graduated from a high school in a town 15 miles away.

The school building and the still-open theatre are now owned by nonprofits created by community members – who still care about the town – but that are struggling to find the money to keep them going.  The lone remaining grocery store has been through a couple periods of municipal ownership to keep it going.  (Some might call that socialism.  I think the folks back home would call it doing what needs to be done.)  Cindy sees how things have become and is not optimistic: “So my tears roll and my heart sinks and there goes the theatre and the school and only the Lord knows what else.” 

I hope that she is wrong.  I am encouraged by the trend toward agriculture that is more local and more sustainable, and can make a persuasive case to myself that a place like Kiester that’s maintained itself through the past few decades could with just a little luck and a spot of marketing find rejuvenation.   But maybe it is just easy for me to see what I’d like to see.

Too often, in the circles I now tend to find myself in, I am part of conversations in which I hear a casual disdain for rural people.  I find the prejudice inherent in these comments every bit as misguided as the prejudices the speakers seem to imagine all rural people harbor.  No doubt there are small places where many or even most – it is never all – of the people hold views that we should rightly condemn.  But I can assure you they are not all that way, and I am skeptical of the suggestion that there are even all that many that are that way. 

What I know for sure is that there is one town out there in the middle of America – a town that the Census Bureau tells us is 501 people strong – where the local newspaper routinely carries messages reminding readers to “embrace tolerance” and “celebrate diversity,” and where I am pretty sure that most everyone (it is never all) still believes in the importance of education, of making sacrifices for the good of the community, and of stopping to help someone whose car is stuck in the snow.