A Small Tale of Two Small Cities

Attempting to Understand Rural America

For a committed, near-lifelong suburbanite, I've spent a nontrivial amount of time in rural America; I lived in a small, rural college town for a couple years while in grad school, I spent most of a summer in rural Wisconsin, and I've logged hundreds of thousands of miles on non-Interstate highways.  Often, I've found those last forays can bring insights you couldn't hope to pay for from any amount of demographic research and statistical analysis.  Given all the commotion about the rural South and Midwest this year, I thought a pair of contrasting anecdotes were in order.

Sweetwater, Texas, 2005

Sweetwater caught my attention on a road trip back to Dallas from Phoenix; it was my final overnight stop on the trip, and I rolled into town about an hour before sundown, roughly this time of year.  Sweetwater, like many other towns I encountered in West Texas, had seen far better days.  Its Main Street was a litany of closed businesses and failed dreams.  Yes, it had a Wal-Mart along the freeway, which skirted the city leaving its Downtown several blocks from useful traffic, and it's hard to say which of those had hit the Downtown harder.  However, and more to the point, it was an indicator of just how tenuous rural living can be, and how one or two key employers can make or break a small city.  That tenuous living is the fear-friendly environment certain types of politicians tend to thrive on, and this year's rural electorate is no different in the slightest.

Hermiston, Oregon, 2011

Hermiston is an interesting counterpoint. I'd been to Hermiston before: it sits on a convenient highway cutoff between/along the freeways between Boise and Seattle.  But what took me aback on that particular trip was the presence of a Fuddrucker's.  For those of you unfamiliar, Fuddruckers is a fast-casual burger chain usually found on outlots near suburban shopping malls.  And yet, there was one in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere in a farming community known for watermelons.  What I came to learn, however, was that Wal-Mart can giveth as well as taketh away; Wal-Mart had built a massive distribution center in Hermiston precisely because it was so conveniently positioned. The resulting logistics work had made Hermiston into a boomtown.  Not that working in a Wal-Mart warehouse is the sort of job a twelve-year-old might dream about, but there again, hand-to-mouth work in tenuous places is expected and not to be taken lightly.

What's Really Not to be Taken for Granted

The reality is that my current town is roughly the size of Sweetwater, or Hermiston, or even Moscow, Idaho, where I went to grad school.  However, unlike those places, within an easy commute around here are more employers for highly-skilled jobs than I can even dream to keep track of.  In those cities, a single factory, or warehouse, or university makes or breaks the entire county and beyond.  And thus, the roots for disproportionate local power take hold... but that's for further discussion later.