There is this group of people that gathers now and then in a converted gas station in Rapid City for what they call the Morning Fill Up. The agenda is to have a conversation with some interesting thinker with ideas about life in rural America, to have a “national conversation” within the context of the Great Plains. Now and then the contributions are gathered into a book and published by North Dakota State University Press. So now we have Rethinking Rural, Volume 2, with the subtitle, Reflections on Changing Communities.
It’s an anthology, with multiple voices, including, among others, a physicist writing about how rural communities produce scientists, and are affected by them; a Lakota (Cheyenne River) former tribal chairman speaking to the shared characteristics of rural people on-reservation and off; a health administrator making the case for new models to deliver medical services; an energy utility manager posing public utilities as models for regional community; college officials sketching a plan for delivery of higher education to neglected quarters; and a Benedictine nun contemplating the future of the Great Plains. How do you review a work like that? Let me focus on three contributions.
Nigel Lockyer, a physicist from Cornell, invokes a traditional trope: the idea that prairie boyhood or girlhood is good preparation for intellectual and scientific achievement. Rural America at present, though, is “totally different” from the environment that propelled Ernest Lawrence from rural South Dakota toward a Nobel Prize. It has hollowed out—but there remains the potent appeal of lifestyle: recreation, nature, open spaces.
“Modern science,” offers solutions “that change how we work and where we live.” Lockyer is talking about hybrid employment, that sort of thing. He says, too, “Rural America needs science and all that it brings.” All that it brings? I don’t share his faith. I’ll keep reading.
Amy Novak and Joe Roidt, a couple of academic administrators, recount a venture in mixed-format delivery intended to bring higher education to Pierre, South Dakota, a state capital without a college or university. Trouble is, it seems to me, their vision comprises only skill-specific job training desired by local employers. This seems reductionist to me. Call me crazy, but I like the land grant university ideal of education for whatever career a person desires, and also for life, and citizenship, too. I know that is an ideal never fully met, but it seems the model here posed values people only as workers with certain skills. It seems, too, to say that if you live in Pierre, or Ellendale, you have to accept a less elevated life. So, still reading on.
And I come to this remarkable essay, “The Land,” by Sister Lorane Coffin, a Benedictine nun born in 1933. She grew up on a West River ranch, and we can speculate just what led to her monastic vows, but is wasn’t distaste for the life into which she was born. “We kids roamed the countryside,” she writes. They hid in plum thickets, marveled at the skies. “Our land had personality,” she says, and “families looked out for one another.”
Then came all the changes post-World War II, along with her embrace of a life of teaching and monastic management. And she witnessed, in her holy order, the same declensionist trends that affected the countryside. “Some people had the idea that a monastery would continue forever,” she concludes; “our community was coming to an end … It is hoped that new life will arise on the prairie.” Are you praying for that, sister? Should we all be doing so? Sister Lorane’s essay in Rethinking Rural is the conversation I would most like to extend.
