Catching up on rural healthcare stories

I wrote several posts about rural healthcare this summer, mostly prompted by the consideration and passage of Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill, which was widely discussed as undermining rural health care and rural hospitals.  Since then, I've neglected the issues except to address some of them in this forthcoming law review article, which focuses on the challenge of maternal mortality for rural women.  

In this post, my plan is just to provide links to the stories I've seen about rural health care since the summer, making this something of a repository of resources to study how rural health care is faring in the Trump administration's first year and likely further degradation of services as a consequence of recent Republican policies.

First off, the Trump administration is withholding support to tsunami proof this hospital.  Katia Riddle reports from Astoria, Oregon.   One interesting aspect of this story is how local Republicans who supported Trump are flummoxed--or worse--about his administration's failure to support a rural hospital that has saved many local lives.  Here's some context:   

The Trump administration has canceled billions of dollars in federal grants across multiple agencies, and one of those grants is for a program that was designed to help local governments fortify places that are vulnerable to natural disasters.

* * *  

[The hospital in Astoria], called Columbia Memorial, was built decades ago. Now that we know more about earthquakes, it's hard to imagine a worse spot to build a hospital. Not only is the whole town in a major subduction zone, the building is just a few blocks from the water, on top of dangerously unstable ground.

And here's a key quote from a former mayor of Astoria, Willis Van Dusen, a Republican who voted for Trump but now is frustrated by the recent turn of events regarding the needed hospital work: 

Van Dusen: What is more important than a hospital in a rural community like Astoria? Now, it saved my life.

Riddle: Van Dusen points to a framed photocopy of a piece of paper - the EKG reading when he had a heart attack some years ago. At one point, he flatlined.

Van Dusen: All these are (imitating electric current), and they're hitting the paddles. And I had actually died.

Riddle: It was doctors at Columbia Memorial that brought him back. Van Dusen says he and many other people in Astoria wouldn't be here without this hospital. Making sure that it can keep providing care during an earthquake and a tsunami, he says, is the opposite of waste, fraud and abuse.

Van Dusen: And just to jerk that money away from us, I can't just say it makes - it's frustrating. It makes me livid. It makes me angry.

Riddle: Van Dusen says he's not the only one in this town who's mad.

Van Dusen: I know every single Republican that I have talked to is livid over what's happening.

This is a rare instance when I've seen a Trump voter whose mind has been changed by Trump's spending priorities--and how those priorities have played out in the voter's own community.  It shows that Trump voters can be swayed when Trump's spending priorities impact them, something rarely illustrated.  

Regarding the $50 billion "rural health fund," sometimes referred to as the rural slush fund, Sarah Jane Tribble of Kaiser Health News reported about ten days ago on how states are competing for these funds.  It hardly seems like a fair fight.   Tribble provides details on how and why substantial chunks of the funds might not even wind up in rural places:  

Nationwide, states are racing to win their share of a new $50 billion rural health fund. But helping rural hospitals, as originally envisioned, is quickly becoming a quaint idea.

Rather, states should submit applications that "rebuild and reshape" how health care is delivered in rural communities, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services official Abe Sutton said late last month during a daylong meeting at D.C.'s Watergate Hotel. Simply changing the way government pays hospitals has been tried and has failed, Sutton told the audience of more than 40 governors' office staffers and state health agency leaders — some from as far away as Hawaii.

"This isn't a backfill of operating budgets," said Sutton, CMS' innovation director. "We've been really clear on that."

Rural hospitals and clinics nationwide face a looming financial catastrophe, with President Trump's massive tax-and-spending law expected to slash federal Medicaid spending on health care in rural areas by $137 billion over 10 years. Congressional Republicans added the one-time, five-year Rural Health Transformation Program as a last-minute sweetener to win the support of conservative holdouts who worried about the bill's financial fallout for rural hospitals.

Yet, the words used by CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz and his agency's leaders to describe the new pot of cash are generating tension between legacy hospital and clinic providers and new technology-focused companies stepping in to offer new ways to deliver health care.

It's "what I would call incumbents versus insurgents in the rural space," said Kody Kinsley, a senior policy adviser at the Institute for Policy Solutions at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing.

I further detail possible non-rural uses of the fund in my forthcoming law review article, which relies on Tribble's reporting. 

Finally, Abigail Ruhman reported for the Texas Tribune a few weeks ago on how Texas' rural hospitals are competing for a piece of that "rural slush fund."  

As Texas develops its application for a new rural health funding program, rural hospital leaders say the priority should be financial stabilization for their facilities.

The recent sweeping tax and spending plan includes a $50 billion appropriation for the Rural Health Transformation program. States will receive funding based on applications they submit in early November.

During an hours-long public hearing Monday to discuss the program, several hospital leaders raised concerns that without direct funding, the state may experience more rural hospital closures.

Erin Clevenger, CEO of Memorial Medical Center in Port Lavaca, southeast of Victoria, said her hospital is high on the list of Texas hospitals at risk of closure.

“Every day is a battle to make sure we don’t become one of those statistics,” Clevenger said.

In the last decade, Texas has lost 14 rural hospitals. Of the 156 rural hospitals currently in the state, about 70% have lost services, and more than half are at risk of closing, according to a report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform.

Memorial Medical Center is in the southern part of the state, but it provides critical services that benefit people across Texas – even patients in Dallas.

“When even large urban hospitals could not take on more patients, we opened a COVID care unit and accepted their transfers, even flying patients in from Houston and Dallas,” Clevenger said.

Keep an eye out for more news about whether rural hospitals are getting the benefit of the "Big Beautiful Bill" and its rural slush fund--and whether any funds they receive are sufficient to keep them open.  It'll also be interesting to see if the anticipated closure of rural hospitals will turn rural Trump supporters against him--if those closures happen during his presidency.  

Meanwhile, the reduction and reinterpretation of other federal funding streams, along with other strains,  have been threatening--and in one instance, closing--hospitals in rural California.  Read more here (Inyo County in the eastern Sierra) and here (Imperial/Riverside County).  

New immigration fee will hurt rural schools relying on international teachers

Sequoia Carrillo reported from Hardin, Montana for NPR on a school system's heavy reliance on teachers from the Philippines and what that reliance means given the new Trump administration rule requiring a $100,000 fee for each H-1B visa application.  Here's an excerpt from Carrillo's story:  

Hardin, like many rural districts, relies on international teachers to fill out its staff. Out of 150 teachers in the district, about 30 are in the U.S. on teaching visas. Many are on short-term J1 visas, with hopes to one day graduate to the longer-term H-1B visa.

Now, things are about to get even tougher — for the district and for teachers like Tomimbang [who has taught middle school math in Montana for four years after doing so for 18 years in the Philippines]..

Last month, President Trump unveiled a plan that requires employers pay a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visas. In his announcement, Trump specifically called out high-paying tech jobs that he said were filled by too many foreign workers.

However, the impact on schools and educators will be significant. According to data from the Department of Homeland Security, more than 20,000 educators are in the country on H-1B visas — the third most common occupation group for the program.

"I don't have a teacher in my district that makes $100,000 a year," [Hardin school superintendent Tobin] Novasio says. For school districts, "to pay that fee on top of a salary is just gonna kill the H-1B for education."

The change is a blow to some districts' long-term strategy to keep teachers in classrooms.

More relevant context fron superintendent Novasio:  

"We don't have candidates." ... Earlier in his career, [Novasio] says that if he posted an elementary teacher position, at least 20 people would apply. Now, "if we get two, we're ecstatic."

An unduly provocative headline from the Ezra Klein Show about rural-urban tension

Image from today's New York Times Ezra Klein Show podcast.

The headline for the Ezra Klein podcast today--the one that popped up on my NYTimes audio feed--is "The Rural Power Behind Trump's Assault on Cities."  I found that very provocative--unhelpfully so.  It seems to place blame on rural America and rural Americans for Trump's assault on urban America.  In fact, it's not only provocative, it's a bit misleading regarding the content of the podcast, which is an interview with Suzanne Mettler about her book, with Trevor Brown, Rural versus Urban:  The Growing Divide that Threatens Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2025).  I'll come back to that, but first I want to excerpt the part of the interview where Klein gets closest to backing up the provocative headline: 

Klein:  

I’ve heard a lot of people who study civil wars say it is a bad sign when the federal government is ordering armed troops from some states into other states over the objections of those states’ governors and — these are all cities they’re ordering them into — those cities’ mayors.

And you can look at this, and I think I have been looking at this, and say: This sure looks like a rural coalition militarily occupying the cities it has come to see as the power centers of their enemies. (emphasis mine)

What I don't understand is how Klein can assert that a "rural coalition" is militarily occupying U.S. cities.  Who makes up this purported "rural coalition," exactly, when there are too few rural voters to have put Trump in the White House?  Klein's assertion completely overlooks the much more robust numbers of urban voters who chose Trump.  (Nicholas Jacobs, co-author of The Rural Voter, has commented on this in various publications, most recently here).  Perhaps Klein is thinking about the disproportionate power of red states in the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College?  If so, he should consider that the rural voters in California and New York are as underrepresented as those states' urban voters--and that "red states" like Idaho and Arkansas have "blue cities" like Boise and Little Rock, whose urban residents are overrepresented.  (I wrote more about this here and here).  

Or is Klein somehow claiming that rural is occupying urban because a disproportionate number of rural young people join the armed services?  whatever Klein means, I see this framing--this attribution of what Trump is doing to a "rural coalition"--as inflammatory and therefore unhelpful.  Of course, it is also inaccurate unless one uses a really capacious definition of "rural."     

Here's Mettler's response to Klein's comment.  Unfortunately, Mettler doesn't actually respond to Klein's assertion that some rural coalition is militarily occupying U.S. cities.  She says:  

Well, it’s unthinkable. It’s so un-American to be telling the military you can use cities as training grounds and to be sending in federal troops and federalized National Guard into cities. And this comes on top of Trump, for the past few years, using a lot of rhetoric against cities — but now using actual violent force against cities.

So how is this possible? It’s possible because of the rural-urban divide. It’s possible because this us-versus-them politics has become so deep.

By the way, the headline for this podcast on the NYT home page right now is a less sensational "How the Democratic Brand Turned Radioactive in Rural America."  Both the provocative and less provocative headlines show up when you click through. 

Here are some of the more interesting exchanges about the book that are featured  in the podcast:

Klein: 

Before we get into what created the divide, beginning in the ’90s, what kept urban and rural America politically united for so long?

Mettler:  

If you go back to, say, the late 19th, early 20th century, as industrialization is happening, rural areas really feel left behind. There’s a big agricultural depression in the 1920s. Then the Great Depression comes. And rural people at that point are really upset, and policymakers are worried there’s about to be a revolution in the countryside, as they call it.

But what happens is that Franklin D. Roosevelt steps in and creates this big rural-urban coalition. And to an extent that I was unaware of until we wrote this book, he really put rural Americans front and center in his vision of what needed to happen for the country and created all of these policies that were really designed to lift up rural America.

Archived clip of Franklin D. Roosevelt: 

I cannot escape the conclusion that one of the essential parts of a national program of restoration must be to restore purchasing power to the farming half of the country. Without this, the wheels of railroads and of factories will not turn.

* * *  

Rural Americans really appreciated that. They felt the Democratic Party was there for them, and many of them remembered it for their lifetimes. And then their kids did, as well, all the way up until the 1990s.

In the 1980s and early ’90s, rural places were more likely to send Democrats to Congress than Republicans. Only a few decades ago, there was still a coalition where there were rural politicians who were really at the forefront in Congress in brokering compromises on all sorts of important policies.

Klein:

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. And that kicks off this process of ideological polarization, where the parties sort into liberal and conservative. The Dixiecrats die out.

And I think the most commonly believed story about what happened in the urban-rural divide is that they hated the Civil Rights Act. I think if you look at a lot of Democratic accounts of this, you’ll see something like that.

But you don’t buy that account. Why?

Mettler:

Yes, that’s wrong. So for one thing, just look at when the rural-urban divide emerged: It’s not until the late 1990s.

The story that you’re telling, usually the follow-up is that the South left the Democratic Party. Well, in fact, there were a lot of urban Southerners who left the Democratic Party. But rural Southerners stuck with it up until the 1990s, and then they left.

Klein:  

The way your book is structured, you sort of say: There’s this economic divergence, and then layered on top of that very quickly is what you call elite overreach. That’s what we’re talking about here.

The way you describe it is: “It was not any one issue that tipped the scales but rather the persistent commonality that ran across them. From 2008 onward, rural Americans perceived an urban elite that sought to impose itself on far-flung places, controlling residents’ lives through new rules and procedures, in which they felt they had little voice.”

And you argue that the issue here is not the policy but the sense of respect or disrespect, of listening or not listening, of representation or absence of representation — that there was something sort of beneath policy that drove this.

Klein: 

Political scientists use this slightly strange tool called the feeling thermometer, where they ask people to rate other groups on a 1-to-100 scale.

You have this data for white rural America, and on a scale of 1 to 100, they put Black Americans at a 70 — pretty good; Hispanic Americans at 67; gay men at 57; illegal immigrants at 39 — pretty low; and Democrats at 14 points.

So Democrats are rated at less than half illegal immigrants’ rating.
By the way, this is not just rural America — white urban Democrats put Republicans at 17 points. But the hatred is much more concentrated at the political outgroup, at least in these measures, than at any other group.

Klein:

White rural America’s sense that the Democratic Party sees all these other groups as in need of help and respect and is prioritizing them ahead of them — Arlie Hochschild’s idea about other groups getting to cut in line. And then there’s a real rise of discourse around white privilege. And this creates — we’ve seen this in our politics — a lot of anger.

Like: You’re telling me — in a poor community that has very few jobs now, where life expectancy is going down — that I have white privilege, and your urban coalition is what needs the help? Or that illegal immigrants need the help?

I’d like you to talk a bit about that distinction between the divide being discriminatory, and the divide being a feeling: That coalition doesn’t prioritize me, so I’m going to go with a coalition that does.

Mettler:  

It’s a really important issue in that I think a lot of urban Democrats assume that what’s at play in this rural-urban divide is that rural white people are racist. What we find is that it’s not reducible to that.  (emphasis mine)

The way we understand it is that it’s in this same period that there’s the sense of elite overreach on the part of Democrats, where rural Americans are looking at the Democratic Party and thinking: They don’t understand us. They don’t care about our communities.

And on this, they’re viewing the Democratic Party as really prioritizing the needs of people of color in urban communities and immigrants — but not really understanding or caring about rural people who are struggling, as well.

This last bit from Mettler is, to my mind, so important.  What Mettler doesn't say is how academics contribute to this problem of saying that so-called rural resentment is all due to racial animus.  See some nuanced and thoughtful pushback to that notion--or at least the notion it is all so simple--in this academic article.   

I'll no doubt have more to say about Mettler and Brown's book in future posts, after I've read it.   For now, I'll just say that three of my recent publications aim to take a more optimistic tack regarding rural voters.  They encourage progressives to play to rural residents' rural identity--to show them that they and their needs are seen.   Read more here, here, and here.  I'm somewhat less optimistic here, while still taking seriously the need for politicians--including those on the left--to respond to rural needs.  

No Kings protests in rural California

October 11, 2025, Point Arena, California

I was struck this weekend by reports of "No Kings" rallies in northern California, including the region referred to as the "North Bay," including Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino County.  What's striking, of course, is that rural areas are reputedly conservative.  That said, coastal California is certainly more progressive than the interior parts of the state.  (This point is well illustrated by recent debates of redistricting in California and Proposition 50, which will link these parts of the North Bay with uber-rich and uber-progressive Marin County, just north of San Francisco).  The photos in this post I took on October 11 in the town of Point Arena, in coastal Mendocino County.  

Here are the places listed in The Press-Democrat (based in Sonoma County but also covering Napa and Mendocino counties) where "No Kings" rallies were held on Saturday:  

∘ Protest General Dynamics. No Bombs, No Borders

Time: 10 a.m.-noon

Location: Healdsburg Farmers Market at the intersection of West North and Vine streets (first and third Saturday of the month) or the traffic circle at the intersection of Mill Street and Healdsburg Avenue (all other Saturdays)

∘ Gualala Weekly Protest

Organized by: Let Freedom Ring ~ Pro Democracy March

Time: 10 a.m.-noon

Location: Gualala Hotel, 39301 South Highway 1, Gualala

∘ Point Arena Weekly Protest

Organized by: We Are Democracy

Time: 10 a.m.-noon

Location: Downtown Point Arena

∘ Fort Bragg Weekly Protest

Time: 11 a.m.-noon

Location: In front of Guest House Museum, 343 North Main St., Fort Bragg

∘ Healdsburg Weekly Protest

Time: 11 a.m.-noon

Location: Healdsburg Plaza, Healdsburg

Point Arena, California (Oct. 11, 2025)
These signs were plentiful in businesses of coastal Mendocino County merchants.

∘ Petaluma Weekly Protest

Time: 11 a.m.-noon

Location: East Washington Street and Petaluma Boulevard, Petaluma

∘ Trump Regime Takedown Banner Drop

Time: 11 a.m.-1 p.m.

Point Arena, California (Oct. 11, 2025)

Lots of rural (and Southern) stereotypes in today's NYT opinion

Today's NY Times opinion podcast featured three southerners in conversation under the headline, "There is No Trump Without the South."  Here are some excerpts that play to stereotypes of the South--and its conflation with rurality. (That conflation is not entirely inaccurate in that the South is the most rural region of the nation).  Rural-urban tension is also touched on, as a sort of parallel to the tension between the South (and what it represents) and the rest of the nation.  

Jamelle Bouie:  

One observation everyone in this conversation has made and other people have made is the way that there has emerged an almost generic national rural culture.

It’s a certain kind of country music. It’s a certain kind of pickup truck. You see it if you go to rural New Hampshire, if you go to rural Montana, if you go to rural Illinois. It’s very much rooted in a franchised version of a white Southern rurality.

And I bring that up to say that it’s both the case that the country will shunt its difficult conversations, as Tressie said, about race to the South and make it a Southern problem. But it’s always been the case that the rest of the country has been fascinated by the South in really important ways.

* * * 

Tressie McMillan Cottom: 

Every time a Southern politician goes out and they congratulate themselves about building the new car factory or the new battery maker in some rural part of their Southern state or municipality, what they have generally done is they have made a deal with either a national or a transnational conglomerate that says: You do not have to worry about unionizing.

* * * 

And what we are seeing here is not just a transplant of people but of ideas that don’t necessarily create that kind of mobility for Southern workers across the South, which then leads to a war, a battle for the soul of rural America that you can feel very tangibly in the South.

David French: 

I come from a town — when I was growing up there, it was about 8,000 people. We had three stoplights in a rural town in Kentucky. That’s where I spent my elementary and high school years, and it’s unrecognizable now because a Toyota manufacturing plant came there and completely transformed the city.

But these are good, high-paying jobs. They are transformative jobs in these parts of the South, but it is absolutely true that they also pull and draw jobs from other parts of America. And it’s one of the reasons I think so many people have been moving to the South.

Bouie:

But I also want to say that part of the allure of the South as a cultural object — and this is getting back to what Tressie had said earlier about cost of living — is not simply that things might be cheaper but that you have an opportunity to use your wealth, for lack of a better term, to dominate other people.

You can have a big compound in the middle of Texas and drive a gigantic vehicle and use all the resources you’d like and boss people around.

McMillan Cottom: 

It’s the “Yellowstone”-ification of the country, Jamelle.

Bouie: 

Yes. And that aspect of it — there’s no policy you can do to compete with that, I guess. Because what a place like California is offering, the trade-off is it’s going to be more expensive to live there. Unless you are in the highest echelon of income earners, you’re not going to be able to hire someone to look after your house for dirt cheap, right? You won’t be able to exploit someone so easily.

But you are going to live in this multicultural, cosmopolitan place where people are going to exist, at least culturally, on some plane of equality. And if you like that kind of life and experience, that’s what you’re in L.A. for, that’s what you’re in New York for, that’s what you’re in Chicago for and all the places that are their own places but offer a smaller or more manageable versions of that thing.

* * * 

McMillan Cottom: 

Now, I think at the state level — again, especially in a place like North Carolina — we tend to prefer a more socially conservative performance of Southern politics. But on the ground, especially when you’re talking about local elections, it is that the Democratic Party wants to run a far more conservative candidate than can excite the base across the rural parts of the South.

Bouie: 

I think that it would be a good idea for the Democratic Party to make serious investments in Mississippi, a state where Democratic candidates with no investment routinely hit the mid-40s in statewide elections. That’s a clear sign.

It’s going to be really hard to close that gap because of racial polarization in the state. But the gap can be closed, and making Mississippi competitive would be a huge blow to Republicans if you’re a Democrat. It changes the game.

More on gerrymandering and its impact on far nothern California

Several stories have been published about California's Proposition 50, which would permit re-districting immediately, between the decennial censuses.  It's a topic I first blogged about here, in late August.   

The first is Jeanne Kuang's deeply reported story for CalMatters, from mid-September.  

The headline is a telling, "These rural Californians want to secede. Newsom’s maps would pair them with Bay Area liberals."  Here's the lede: 

Over several rivers and through even more woods, flags advocating secession from California flutter above hills dotted with cattle, which outnumber people at least sixfold.

This ranching region with a libertarian streak might have more in common with Texas than the San Francisco Bay Area.

But it’s not Texas. Five hours northeast of Sacramento on an easy day, Modoc County and its roughly 8,500 residents are still — begrudgingly — in California.

And California is dominated by Democrats, who are embroiled in a tit-for-tat redistricting war with the Lone Star State that will likely force conservative Modoc County residents to share a representative in Congress with parts of the Bay Area.

Modoc County and two neighboring red counties would be shifted into a redrawn district that stretches 200 miles west to the Pacific Coast and then south, through redwoods and weed farms, to include some of the state’s wealthiest communities, current Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman’s home in San Rafael and the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge, all in uber-liberal Marin County.

“It’s like a smack in the face,” said local rancher Amie Martinez. “How could you put Marin County with Modoc County? It’s just a different perspective.”

* * * 

Though Modoc County supervisors have declared their opposition to Prop. 50, there’s little else locals can do. Registered Republicans are outnumbered by Democrats statewide nearly two-to-one. Rural residents represent an even smaller share of the state’s electorate.

“It’ll be very hard to fight back,” said Tim Babcock, owner of a general store in Lassen County, a similar and neighboring community that’s proposed to be drawn into a different liberal-leaning congressional district. “Unless we split the state. And that’s never going to happen.”

Here are some key quotes highlighting the rural implications of the proposed redistricting.    

County Supervisor Geri Byrne said she knew it was a longshot — but thought, “when’s the last time The New York Times called someone in Modoc County?”

Byrne, who is also chair of the Rural County Representatives of California and of the upcoming National Sheepdog Finals, said the secession resolution was about sending a message.

“It wasn’t conservative-liberal,” [Byrne] said. “It was the urban-rural divide, and that’s what this whole Prop. 50 is about.”  

Even a Democratic resident running a produce pickup center in Alturas observed that her neighbors are “not that Trumpy.” Instead, there’s a pervasive general distrust of politics on any side of the aisle.

* * *

Flourishing wolves are a problem

At the moment, all anyone can talk about is the wolves.

The apex predator returned to California more than a decade ago, a celebrated conservation success story after they were hunted to near-extinction in the western U.S. Now they’re flourishing in the North State — and feeding on cattle, throwing ranching communities on edge. Federally, they’re still listed as an endangered species under the landmark conservation law signed by President Richard Nixon.
Under California rules, ranchers can only use nonlethal methods to deter the wolves, like electrifying fencing or hiring ranch hands to guard their herds at night.

* * * 

Few Republicans in the state and nation understand “public lands districts,” said Modoc County Supervisor Shane Starr, a Republican who used to work in LaMalfa’s office. “Doug’s the closest thing we’ve got.”

“This whole thing with DEI and ‘woke culture’ and stuff,” he said, referring to the diversity and inclusion efforts under attack from the right, “it’s like, yeah, we had a kid who goes to the high school who dyed his hair a certain color. Cool, we don’t care. All of these things going on at the national stage are not based in our reality whatsoever.”

At a cattlemen’s dinner in Alturas one recent evening, Martinez said she once ran into LaMalfa at a local barbecue fundraiser for firefighters and approached him about a proposal to designate parts of northwestern Nevada as protected federal wilderness. Her 700-person town of Cedarville in east Modoc County is 10 minutes from the state line.

Martinez worried about rules that prohibit driving motorized vehicles in wilderness, which she said would discourage the hunters who pass through during deer season and book lodging in town. Even though the proposal was in Nevada, LaMalfa sent staff, including Starr, to meetings to raise objections on behalf of the small town, she said.

“I know we won’t get that kind of representation from Marin County,” she said.

Reached by phone, Huffman defended his qualifications to represent the region.

Adding Siskiyou, Shasta and Modoc counties would mean many more hours of travel to meet constituents, but Huffman pointed out his district is already huge, covering 350 miles of the North Coast. And it includes many conservative-leaning, forested areas in Trinity and Del Norte counties. A former attorney for the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, he’s the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, where [first district congresswoman Doug] LaMalfa also sits.

Then there is this more recent story by Bloomberg's Maxwell Adler, which features the following lede: 

California’s Marin and Modoc counties lie more than 200 miles apart — and several worlds away.

Modoc, tucked into the state’s remote northeast corner, lacks a single traffic light. Many of its 8,500 residents once lost internet service after squirrels chewed through a fiber-optic cable. Ranchers fear wolf attacks on cattle.

Tech-industry wealth, meanwhile, has transformed Marin from a bohemian refuge outside San Francisco into one of California’s richest communities. Traffic regularly jams the freeway into the city, and residents fight over efforts to build more homes.

On the same day, the New York Times published this story about Kevin Kiley, a Republican congressman from greater Sacramento who represents a very rural district stretching down the eastern Sierra.  He would almost certainly lose his seat if redistricting occurs.   

Here's coverage from the California Farm Bureau, "In Rural Districts, Backlash Mounts Against Prop. 50." 

In contrast to these rural-focused stories, Politico published this September 7, 2025 piece  covering the California GOP meeting.  It does not even acknowledge the concern regarding lack of representation of rural concerns.  It includes no use of the word "rural." 

On the USDA Economic Research Service website right now: a reference to the "Radical Left Democrats"

 
A banner at the top of the USDA Economic Research Service website reads:  

Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown, this government website will not be updated during the funding lapse. 

President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep government open and support those who feed, fuel and clothe the American people. 

Frank Morris reported yesterday for NPR on how the government shutdown is impacting farmers. 

Rural lack of anonymity in the wake of Tennessee explosion

An explosion yesterday at an ammunition plant in McEwan, Tennessee, population 1643,  left several dead and many missing.  In the Washington Post's coverage of the disaster, I was struck by these comments from the Humphreys County Sheriff in that they reflected rural lack of anonymity.  

Nearly 12 hours after the explosion, law enforcement officers were still trying to contact victims’ families, Davis said, adding that officials planned to work through the night to keep looking for possible survivors, interviewing witnesses and family members, and trying to find out what happened.

“It’s hell on us,” he said. “It’s hell on everybody.”

The close-knit nature of the community compounded the pain. Davis said that he’s “very close” with at least three families involved in the explosion and that the sheriff of the neighboring county could say much the same. That closeness drove Davis to keep looking for survivors, caring for the injured and consoling the bereaved, he said.

“When you have small counties like this, we know each other, we communicate with each other, we love each other,” Davis said. “And that’s what — honestly, it’s what keeps my motivation alive.”

“We’re working for our people,” he added.

This is from the New York Times coverage of the explosion: 

The explosion has shaken the small, tight-knit communities in Hickman and Humphreys Counties, which have a combined population of about 44,000.

One of the communities is known as Bucksnort, where there are winding dirt roads, ample hunting ground and just a handful of businesses. Steven Anderson, who runs a trout farm there, said there were only three points of interest in town — the trout farm, the munitions plant and a gas station with a convenience store where he said workers from the plant often eat lunch.

Postscript:  On October 13, the New York Times ran this story, "A Tennessee Sheriff Becomes the Face of Grief after Plant Explosion."   

Maine Law Review Call for Papers. Rural Perspectives in Law: Challenges and Opportunities

The Maine Law Review is seeking article proposals for our topical issue: Rural Perspectives in Law: Challenges and Opportunities.  This issue will be published in spring 2026 as Volume 78.2 of our legal journal.

Abstracts of 300-500 words will be reviewed on a rolling basis and should be submitted no later than October 1, 2025, at 5:00 PM.  All submission should be sent to mlreditor@maine.edu.

Rural communities across the United States face unique legal challenges that often differ from those in urban and suburban settings.  Issues such as access to justice, scarcity of adequate legal counsel, limitations due to aging infrastructure, and the impact of shifting industries and demographics shape the practice of law in rural America.  Maine is the second most rural state in the country with 62% of its population living in rural areas. However, most of the legal providers are located in the more urban, southern portion of the state.  Rural communities outside of Maine face similar challenges.  

This volume is meant to speak about the challenges and potential opportunities rural communities across the nation face, and contribute to a broader conversation about how the law and policy can better serve rural America. 

Articles published in this upcoming volume of the Maine Law Review have the opportunity to contribute to an evolving area of law and to provide practical guidance and commentary on a pressing issue many rural communities across the nation are facing. Potential article topics could include but are not limited to: 

• Access to legal services in remote communities.
• The rise of virtual court hearings and tele-lawyering, and their impact on legal services.
• Infrastructure challenges in rural communities including broadband, utilities, etc., and legal solutions to them/the role of attorneys in rural economic development. 
• Unique issues to rural communities in areas of interest like family law, criminal law, property law, or impacts to rural economies or heritage industries.
• Property issues including zoning ordinances, land use regulation (farming, fishing, forestry, cannabis, etc.), or the impact of pollution/climate change on economic revitalization.
• The impact of federal funding priorities and the potential disproportionate impact on health or public services. 
• Recruitment, retention, burnout, and retirement of attorneys in rural communities.  

 The editors encourage creative and diverse viewpoints, and encourage interested authors to submit proposals on legal topics of interest that impact rural communities. 

Literary Ruralism (Part LI): Attention to "rural" in Dan Wang's Breakneck, on China's rise

Breakneck:  China's Quest to Engineer the Future by technology analyst Dan Wang was published last month by W.W. Norton.  The promotional blurb touts the book, in part, thusly:  

Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China—one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad.

I came to the book after listening to Ross Douthat's interview with Wang on the "Interesting Times" podcast.  While Wang's book primarily contrasts the differing approaches to development and infrastructure of the United States and China, it often raises the matter of rural-urban difference and how those differences play out in the two countries.  I was intrigued, for example, by Douthat's comparison of Guizhou, a backwater Chinese province that Wang uses to illustrate an underdeveloped place, to West Virginia.  The transcript from the podcast features this from Wang: 

Guizhou... is a land where a local said, “Not three feet of land is flat, not three days go by without rain and not a family has three silver coins.”  China’s fourth-poorest province, I was surprised to see, had much better levels of infrastructure than one could find in much wealthier places in the United States, like New York State or California.

We saw very tall bridges all around us. We saw a guitar-making hub. We saw a lot of fancy new roads that were a cyclist’s dream. And it was only afterward when I realized how bizarre it was that China’s fourth-poorest province — about the level of G.D.P. per capita of Botswana, much less than Shanghai or Guangdong — was able to build all of these things.

It is a province with 11 airports, 50 of the highest bridges in the world and brand-new, spiffy highways — and that’s because China was just building a lot in its equivalent of a South Dakota or West Virginia.

That's a good introduction to the book excerpts that follow.  I have highlighted the word "rural" in context.  

Modern China has many tools of social control. Within living memory, most Chinese residents worked inside a danwei, or work unit, which governed one’s access to essentials like rice, meat, cooking oil, and a bicycle. Many people still live under the strictures of the hukou, or household registration, an aim of which is to prevent rural folks from establishing themselves in cities by restricting education and health care benefits to their hometown. Controls are far worse for ethnoreligious minorities: Tibetans are totally prohibited from worshipping the Dalai Lama, and perhaps over a million Uighurs have spent time in detention camps that attempt to inculcate Chinese values into their Muslim faith. 

The engineering state can be awfully literal minded. Sometimes, it feels like China’s leadership is made up entirely of hydraulic engineers, who view the economy and society as liquid flows, as if all human activity—from mass production to reproduction—can be directed, restricted, increased, or blocked with the same ease as turning a series of valves. (pp. 5-6)

* * * 

The Guizhou locals we chatted with were prouder of their bridges than anything else. My friends and I cycled across bridges that were set above plunging ravines. State media boasts that Guizhou has become a “museum of bridges,” a few of which are trying to develop into tourism sites: The tenth-highest bridge in Guizhou (which is twenty-third globally) hosts the world’s highest bungee jump. Each time the engineers build a bridge, they inevitably announce that travel times between two towns have been cut from many hours to perhaps a few minutes. That creates real convenience and connection for rural people. Some of these are bridges to nowhere, but after a few years, they become somewhere. 

(I am reminded of what a "bridge to nowhere" connotes in the United States; read some of my analysis of the political implications of the phenomenon here). 

Still, beneath Guizhou’s engineering marvels are counties mired in poverty. At $8,000 per capita, the province has the income of Botswana, 40 percent below China’s national average and less than a third that of rich coastal cities like Beijing and Shanghai. One day, Christian remarked on how few working-age adults we saw in Guizhou: Those who don’t have a job making guitars have mostly migrated to other provinces, leaving small children in the care of grandparents. In 2010, only half of Guizhou’s children attended high school—the lowest rate in the country. News reports often featured stories of children having to rise at the crack of dawn and hike through harrowing mountain paths, some with rope ladders, to be able to attend school. 

In spite of the challenges of deep rural isolation, China’s fourth-poorest province—where household income is one-fifteenth that of New York State—has vastly superior infrastructure: three times the length of New York’s highways, as well as a functional high-speed rail network. And Guizhou isn’t exactly an exceptional Chinese province. Across the country, the engineering state has relentlessly built public works, making Guizhou an extreme case of China’s growth strategy rather than a deviation from it. 

Modern China has been on a building spree. It began in the 1990s, after economic reopening took hold, and then received another boost in 2008, when the central government approved vast public works to respond to the global financial crisis. (pp. 27-28)

* * * 

The Fourteenth Five-Year Plan outlines interstellar research and other state-directed megaprojects. There’s something for the ordinary consumer too, but it’s nowhere near as exciting. To promote consumption, the plan suggests measures like “expanding the coverage of e-commerce in rural areas,” “improving product recalls,” and “improving in-city duty-free shops.” Fine measures, but puny relative to orbiting Mars. The economic planners have obviously poured their hearts into the scientific projects, whereas the consumption measures look like a hasty afterthought. When Chinese officials talk about promoting consumption, it often involves building new malls or replacing old industrial equipment. In other words, it’s still more about investing to build stuff rather than shifting the propensity of households to spend a greater share of their income. 

Under Mao, China practiced a more literal form of Marxism, with full state control of the means of production. Deng Xiaoping pivoted the country away from that failed experiment. As Deng was fond of remarking, the defining feature of socialism was not economic redistribution but rather “concentrating resources to accomplish great tasks.” That flexible definition allowed for greater adaptability, generated higher growth, and sustained the regime into the twenty-first century. Under Deng’s definition, the United States has also achieved plenty of socialism. The Manhattan Project, the Interstate Highway System, and the Apollo Program all concentrated resources to accomplish great tasks. Maybe even Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative could have been understood as socialism. When the engineering state works, it can produce beautiful cities like Shanghai. But Shanghai is exceptional: It has been China’s richest and most westernized city for the better part of a century. The engineering state also produces a lot of problems. To see them, we should return one more time to Guizhou. 

Under the gleaming new bridges lurk not only poverty but also a massive debt burden. The underlying hope of Guizhou’s construction is that infrastructure will invite lasting economic activity. Part of that has worked out: Guizhou incomes have risen by nearly 10 percent annually from 2011 to 2022, driven partially by urbanization and by the tourism facilitated by new infrastructure.  (pp. 37-38)

* * *  

But most of Guizhou’s infrastructure spending looks dubious. Its super-high bridges aren’t producing the revenue to recoup anywhere near their super-high costs. Of Guizhou’s eleven airports, five have less than a dozen flights each week—and there are three more airports still under construction. Guizhou has become one of China’s most indebted provinces, and it’s starting to feel real fiscal distress. In an unusual move, Guiyang’s finance bureau issued a public outcry in 2022 that it was at the end of its ability to deal with the debt. Quickly afterward, the government deleted its own admission. 

Guizhou’s debt has kindled Beijing’s wrath. In China, the only people scarier than debt collectors are political inspectors from the central government. The Communist Party has unleashed teams of officers from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to descend on Guizhou. They are unbound by even the modest levels of legal niceties afforded in China. Rather than investigating legal crimes, their remit is to find “violations of party discipline,” a nebulous charge that includes not only corruption but also misuse of public funds and political disloyalty to the Communist Party. That makes the commission akin to the Inquisition, enforcing doctrine and discipline on its members. (pp. 38-39) 

The worst-affected people are targeted minority groups, who have to bear Beijing’s social engineering. The state has singled out, for example, Tibetans, who are forced to relocate from high-altitude mountains, where they are able to graze their yaks and horses, to lower-altitude farms in part to monitor them more easily. What are yak herders supposed to do when they move down to apartment blocks? Rural people who know only their farming or pastoralist lives are often at loose ends when the government resettles them into rows upon rows of high-rises. Two researchers at the University of Colorado have documented China’s coercive tactics to compel locals to leave their homes. It is a process it calls “thought work,” ranging from presenting resettlement as a voluntary and happy choice to holding intensive one-on-one meetings with recalcitrant folks who do not want to leave. Officials mix inducements with threats until they wear down the farmers. Thus, the state has been able to achieve “voluntary” resettlement rates of 100 percent. 

Reckless construction has often produced rubbish quality. Builders employed cheap materials to construct even schoolhouses. The 2008 earthquake that tore through Sichuan also shattered thousands of schoolrooms, killing five thousand children (according to official figures).  (pp. 48-49)

* * * 

Though rich students in Shanghai score splendidly on international exams, education in China’s rural areas is still often abysmal. The Covid pandemic revealed that the country’s health care system is weak, with shortages of doctors and nurses and six times fewer intensive care unit beds per capita than in the United States. An official like Li Zaiyong might be more interested in building a gleaming hospital filled with sophisticated equipment. Their attention drifts, however, when it comes to installing the trained technicians capable of operating the facility, since the Communist Party is better at rewarding new construction than health outcomes. 

The engineering state is focused mostly on monumentalism. Though there are many public toilets, provision of toilet paper is only a sometimes thing. Nowhere in China is it advisable to drink tap water. Not even Shanghai. The engineering state has engaged in wild spasms of building over the past four decades. That has achieved considerable wonders and a fair degree of harm. The future would be better if China could learn to build less, while the United States learns to build more.

I’ve come to realize that there are many ways that China and the United States are inversions of each other.  (pp. 49-50) 

* * * 

China’s overbuilding has produced deep social, financial, and environmental costs. The United States has no need to emulate it uncritically. But the Chinese experience does offer political lessons for America. China has shown that financial constraints are less binding than they are cracked up to be. As John Maynard Keynes said, “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” For an infrastructure-starved place like the United States, construction can generate long-run gains from higher economic activity that eventually surpass the immediate construction costs. And the experience of building big in underserved places is a means of redistribution that makes locals happy while satisfying fiscal conservatives who are normally skeptical of welfare payments. 

Rather than worry about bond vigilantes, the engineering state has focused on delivering material improvements for the people. Rural folks in Guizhou have seen their material conditions of life improve immeasurably over the past few decades. The mixture of permitting free enterprise while building big infrastructure is part of the reason that the Communist Party has held on to consent of the governed.  (p. 54) 

I'll write a separate post later about the rural-urban divide in relation to China's one-child policy.  

Will proposed California redistricting undermine rural interests?

The answer most folks from rural California would give to this question is "of course."  But I want to look a bit deeper than that in this post and consider how it is that rural interests will lose ground if gerrymandering runs amok in California, depriving rural interests of the representation they currently enjoy in the U.S. Congress.  I'll begin with some of the coverage of the proposed re-districting, coverage that does justice to the rural concern. 

The most comprehensive coverage I've seen was in the Sacramento Bee, where Nicole Nixon and Lia Russell reported from Redding.  The August 22 headline was "What’s in a district? Rural Californians react to Democratic gerrymandering play."  Here's an excerpt that provides the big picture on what's being proposed: 

To help Democrats win, the proposed congressional map would carve up rural Northern California areas — which are heavily represented by Republicans — and put them in bluer urban and suburban districts.

State Sen. Megan Dahle, R-Bieber, called the proposed map “a straightforward attempt to disenfranchise rural voters.”

Dahle represents the North State, with many of the same constituents as LaMalfa. The proposed map creates more compact congressional districts by breaking up large rural ones to include voters in more urban areas. In particular, it would carve up two sweeping districts in Northern California into four new ones, each with an arm stretching to the coast or into Sacramento-area cities, to include higher concentrations of Democratic voters.

“Nobody who claims to represent rural California can support this,” Dahle said.

Newsom’s office declined to comment on the consequences for rural Californians and directed questions to members of the Legislature.

Nixon and Russell also quote Darek Velez, who recently moved to Redding, the county seat of Shasta County and long the largest city in the "north state."  Velez calls himself a centrist. 

Redding is its own area. It’s been fought for. People have a lot of pride in calling it the North State up here.

* * * 

Redding, which often serves as a stopping point for visitors on their way to Mount Shasta and Lassen National Park, would be included in the new second district — a cockeyed gerrymander that would bring conservative corners of the North State together with northern parts of Marin and Sonoma counties, one of the wealthiest and most liberal areas in the state.

The journalists call Velez a "rural resident" (a stretch given the 95,000 population of Redding), and quote him as saying the new maps would take away "rural voters’ 'freedom of speech.'"  Here's a further quote from Velez:  

To change our minds and call (the North State) the mid-state just doesn’t really reflect what everybody wants.  And I think people come up to Redding too from all over the state that like the solitude and what it represents up here. Going to Marin County, like being part of San Francisco, doesn’t make sense.

Nixon and Russell then quote Doug LaMalfa, who has represented the state's first congressional district since 2013 and whose seat would become more more competitive:

So now, as a Bay Area representative, are you going to care that much that the wolves are devastating the wildlife and the livestock in Modoc and Sierra and Lassen County?  Are they going to care that much? Or are they going to listen to Marin constituents and say, ‘Well, wolves are great. They’re wonderful.’

James Gallagher, Republican Assemblyman from Yuba City and chair of the Republican caucus, has also focused on the consequences of the re-districting for rural Californians.  Indeed, Gallagher has called for a "two-state solution" that would divide California.  

Literary Ruralism (Part L): Farming debates and farmer decision-making in Louise Erdrich's "The Mighty Red"

In a prior post about Louise Erdrich's The Mighty Red, I highlighted some excerpts about small-town life.  In this post, I'm going to feature some excerpts about farming decisions, in particular the debates about soil health and how to deal with weeds.  For those who read the first post, you may recall that the crop of choice in this area of North Dakota is sugar beets. 

I found the commentary on different types of farming--and on urban ignorance of farming--fascinating.  A few reminders about who's who:  Winnie is Gary's mother (see prior post).  We start with part of hte story of how Winnie's family lost their farm to the Geist family, into which Winnie married.

People in towns and cities had strange ideas about farming. People thought you just put a seed in the ground and it grew. Winnie Geist’s husband, Diz, called farming a war, but Winnie said it was a conflict. True, something was always trying to kill your crop, but there were ways and there were ways . . . she drifted off thinking of her parents’ ways. Driving to town over the summers, she had looked out to either side and seen that a field of sugar beets was going to be a good stand, that corn was growing unevenly, that soybeans had been planted too early or too late, that the sunflowers were outstanding. She knew who owned each field too, and so she was glad for or irritated by various families along the way. Now, driving toward the book club meeting, she let her mind relax. 

* * * 

While she was in high school, the government accelerated her family’s loan payments and blow after blow had landed. They’d lost their home, their farm, everything. Except one another, they kept saying, except us.

Sport Geist, father of Diz, had bought Winnie’s family farm from the bank for half of nothing. Her parents had sold their cattle at a loss, the equipment at an auction, moved out of their hand-built home into a rickety little white house in town. Her father had held her shoulders, looked into her face, said that as long as they worked, no job too menial, they’d hold their heads up. She held her head up. And anyway, in town people didn’t care. Most of the town kids had no idea what life on a farm was like. Losing a farm had no meaning for them. Winnie had kept her girlfriends and stayed Diz’s girlfriend, in spite of everything. She’d always loved Diz as much as she hated his father. Sport had mostly regarded his sons as free labor and rarely addressed them except to give an order. All through high school, Diz asked her to marry him. She said the best she could do was go to the local junior college and take bookkeeping so she could keep books for the farm. It was a kind of promise but she wouldn’t marry him until after Sport was dead and buried—in the earth he didn’t deserve to inhabit.  (pp. 84-85) 

This chapter is about Diz and his brother Gusty, both farmers.  The date is 2009.  

As boys they were husky. As men they are bulky. They loom like monoliths. They are chainsaw art. As Diz and Gusty lumbered across the yard, strong bulwark guts atop leg beams, they talked. Their thin exquisite lips barely moved. Their handsome wind-whipped faces were impassive in the shadow of billed caps. They had survived their father by sticking together. They never discussed the past. To speak about the way their father, Sport, had treated them, would be like grabbing an electric fence. 

The sun was fierce, the ground already kicking up heat. Their narrow blue eyes of Roman generals glinted as they entered their shadowy arsenal. Diz unlocked the back room of the tan and green metal pole barn, switching on the light, and the brothers frowned at the supply. Gusty lifted his hand and counted containers, which were kept in a chain-link enclosure with a padlock. 

Dual Magnum. Roundup. Warrant. Outlook.  Chloroacetamide. Betamix. Ethofumesate. UpBeet. Gramoxone. 

‘We should scout again. But I know what we’re gonna find,’ said Gusty. 

Diz switched off the light and they adjusted their hats before they walked into the field planted with his non-improved seeds. In that field the beets were past the emergent stages, the soil dry and powdery despite the recent flood and rain, and the sun was now relentless as hate. But worse than the glare of sunlight was the presence of the 2009 weed of the year, Chenopodium album, one of the most noxious and difficult to eradicate. 

‘Hot damn,’ said Diz. 

His shoulders sagged, and Gusty even took off his hat. They’d sprayed proactively, pre-emergence, using the big guns. But lambsquarters was back. Such a meek name, but their devil had a lot of names—goosefoot, pigweed, shitweed, baconweed, wild spinach. Cheerful shallow lobed leaves, silver undercoat winking in the sun. The men turned. Trundled or strode back toward the same outbuilding and the ninety-foot-boom self-propelled sprayer they had gone into deep debt to purchase. 

In some places, lambsquarters is considered the Prince of Greens, one of the most nutritious greens ever analyzed; it was one of the earliest agricultural crops of the Americas. It also resembles amaranth, but the brothers rarely spoke of that. The rough-cut men were preparing to eradicate one of the most nutritious plants on earth in favor of growing the sugar beet, perhaps the least nutritious plant on earth. Evolution thought this was hilarious.   (pp. 220-221).

This is Kismet's interaction with her mother-in-law, Winnie, Gary's mom, about Kismet's desire to plant a small garden on their propert: 

Kismet started by raking the dirt in the yard smooth. The nice loamy soil that she’d clutched earlier on had disappeared. Scratching at field dirt, she broke up clumps of gray grit and spread the dust around. She was wearing lots of sunblock and a big straw cowboy hat. She would need more sunblock to live out on the land. And for later, she would need more beer to reward herself through the long evening and keep herself in a trance. 

‘Honey, that won’t work,’ said Winnie, coming up behind her. 

Kismet straightened up, holding the rake. 

‘What won’t work?’ 

‘That dirt.’ 

‘What do you mean? It’s dirt.’ 

‘It’s not real dirt. It’s that dirt.’ 

Winnie pointed out into the field. ‘This is sugar beet dirt. Don’t you see? To plant anything else we have to get a pile of real dirt.’ 

‘Dirt’s supposed to grow anything,’ said Kismet. 

‘Regular soil dirt, sure, but this is sugar beet dirt, like I said. Diz and Gusty get this fertilizer that helps the dirt work for the seed. The seed is fixed up so the beet won’t die when it’s sprayed for weeds. Also, bugs. See, it’s all a system they have with the companies.’ 

‘Okay.’ Kismet threw down the rake. 

‘My farm had a lot of real dirt,’ said Winnie vaguely. ‘When I was a kid, my mom had us spreading chicken shit on the garden.’ 

‘Let’s go in and make iced tea.’ 

‘It sounds ridiculous,’ Winnie continued. ‘But we can call up Prairie Lawn to get the dirt. I was going to make a garden someday. But you can do it. I’m going to the grocery so let’s make a big list.’  (pp. 228-229) 

Fast forward to Diz and Gusty in 2023.  This chapter is titled "Evolution." 

Diz said to Gusty, ‘Follow me.’ They drove out to the field that had been the first field where they had used the Roundup Ready sugar beet seeds. He’d never forgotten how after spraying that year, 2009, there just wasn’t a weed in sight, and how the weedless wonder continued until they’d lifted out the beets. Since then, they had rotated the beets every three years with barley. Every time they planted beets the seeds lost some magic. 

‘Remember?’ Diz asked. 

‘I do,’ said Gusty. 

They walked out to the rows. Here and there dead pigweed had nearly melted into the earth. But also, here and there something else was happening. Some of the dead plants were turning green again. A few were lifting their heads. Across the field, as the brothers turned their great bodies, faces keen, eyes implacable in the shade of their caps, hands cupped at their hips, Diz and Gusty saw the resurrection. Silhouetted against the white haze of August heat there were spears of Palmer amaranth. Just here and there. But those plants could mean a million next year. 

‘The goddamn stinkers just pretended to die,’ said Diz. ‘They were dead a week ago, I swear. But now it’s their Easter Sunday out there. Pardon my’—he choked a little on his words—‘irreverence,’ he mumbled. 

‘It’s just a fuckin’ dickens of an outrage,’ said Gusty. 

Diz grabbed his hat and threw it on the ground and stamped on it. ‘There. I feel better,’ he said. He reached down to pick it up. Gusty noticed how his hand shook. Diz dusted the hat off by slapping it on his thigh. He put the hat back on his head. Put his hands in his pockets to try and still them. 

‘If we could grow that monster,’ said Gusty, almost in admiration, ‘bombproof crop.’ 

‘Maybe,’ said Diz, as they walked back to the truck. ‘Soon as we figured out a market for it, yeah. I think it’s something like quinoa. Quinoa ain’t sugar. And there’s nothing on it like a price protection.’ 

‘Sure not. Soon as we tried to grow it, some bug would come along and clean it out anyway.’ 

‘I know,’ said Diz. ‘Nobody ever said farming was easy.’ 

‘It’s not for dummies,’ said Gusty. 

They laughed silently because they’d said exactly this a thousand times before. To outwit nature for even a few years, you had to be a brilliant SOB. 

‘I can see a lot of steps ahead and this weed is gonna win.’ Gusty plodded along, kicking at the half-living weeds. 

‘Ichor says it’s actually metabolizing the poison now. Just eating it. Whatever you throw at this thing, it can break it down. We’re gonna have to handpick. Pay a church group or a football team or hire a bunch of kids and migrant labor like back in the day.’ 

‘Darva’s book group,’ said Gusty. 

‘Oh. wouldn’t that be . . . didn’t Darva hoe beets when she was a kid?’ 

‘Didn’t everybody?’ 

‘What goes around . . .’ 

‘What does go around?’ 

‘Weeds.’ 

‘Believe it.’

That night Diz lay awake staring into the bedroom gloom, Winnie softly burbling and snorting beside him. He saw himself running the thresher on one of those bright cool fall days and the obedient crop was falling into the rolling blades and the amaranth seeds were hissing onto the conveyer belt and down into the bed of a giant grain truck. He and Gusty were slapping their hands together, the way they did that time they’d temporarily beat the weeds. He was talking to Gary at the screen of a computer and they were looking at drone footage of the Red River Valley covered with amaranth. Field to field, that was all there was. His arm was big, a smooth honey bear arm, but he had the sudden childish sense of how tiny their farm was on its plot of earth, and on that plot a house, and in that house a bed with two people on it no bigger than gnats. He felt the weight of all he couldn’t control, tiny little human that he was, working and striving, without really knowing how big it all might be.  (pp. 362-64) 

There is more on weed control in the next chapter, Evolution 2024. 

Look at this,’ said Winnie. She pulled up an issue of Agweek on the computer. The magazine featured a firm of young fellows from the Northwest, based in Fargo now, who’d programmed their robots to recognize weeds and leave crop plants alone. There was a video of the robots plucking weeds out early on at the sugar beet two leaf stage. Winnie called Gary over. Grace came too, her wan crooked little face round now, her eyes bright, cheeks apple red and shiny. 

‘We should hire these guys,’ Gary said to Grace. 

‘Probably an arm and a leg,’ said Diz from his chair. 

He had a special weighted coffee cup because his tremor was getting worse. 

‘I bet you get a good deal for being one of the first,’ said Winnie. ‘And you’ll cut down, maybe cut out, dicamba or whatever.’ 

‘Why not call Ichor?’ said Grace. ‘He must know.’ 

‘Weed resistance,’ said Ichor. ‘Give it a try.’ 

Diz and Gusty talked about the pigweed resurrection and decided why not. 

A few weeks later, they invited people over. Eric held hands tightly with Orelia DeSouza, whom he’d met in college, and Bill and Bonnie stood together with their arms crossed, grinning. Spiral pulled up honking. Ichor brought a pan of bumble bars. Everyone stood at the end of the field watching the robot van pull into the yard. Two thin young men with an urban vibe shook hands all around, then rolled up the back of the van and attached a ramp. Three smallish contraptions came rolling out. The technicians tapped information into their laptops, then guided the robotic weeders onto the first field, ninety acres of beets. There was something appealing about the mechanisms as they trundled along, something earnest, sturdy, slightly comical. The watchers nodded, laughed, broke out in soft applause. (pp. 365-366). 

Here's the last part of the bit about different types of farming:  

Although he got farmers to use them all the time, Ichor didn’t like crop protection chemicals, the ’cides—fungicides, molluscicides, insecticides, rodenticides, bactericides, larvicides, and, most of all, herbicides. The world needed food, but farmers couldn’t keep going this way, ratcheting up the kill strength, adding layers of product. No chemical could be precise and there was no way to really quantify the overall effect. Nobody could adequately factor in the big picture, which was really big, being all of creation. Sometimes he woke at 3 a.m., sweating, having absorbed, say, a new study about the link between the herbicide paraquat and Parkinson’s disease. Glyphosate and depression. Insecticides and schizophrenia. The plunge in insect life was disturbing. The velocity of loss was exponential. He kept going by hoping better things than more chemicals were coming along. He saw no way for things to end well unless they changed course. Most farmers knew this or were becoming aware of it or even agreed, but nobody liked anyone not trying to survive off farming to tell them what to do. 

There were other ways to manage the most pernicious weeds around. In fact there were some methods that made him happy. Take for instance the nemesis of pastures—leafy spurge—a plant to reckon with, sinking roots down fifteen feet and spreading top root systems too, shooting seeds out over twenty feet. The spurge had been considered almost ineradicable, it had taken over whole pastures, crowded out the good forage, killed cows and horses. Poisons had to be applied and reapplied, to only modest effect. Then Ichor started hearing about how leafy spurge beetles went to town on the spurge. Season by season you could see those yellow pastures turn green. 

A while ago, Ichor had been to a barbecue hosted by another weed control officer, Ron Manson Jr. There he ate famously well and took home a cooler of those beetles. Now Ichor was turning those caramel-colored beetles loose regularly on all the pastures in his county, and beyond, too. The beetles went wild eating the stuff they were named for, and better yet, multiplied and sent their larvae down to eat the roots. Every year Ron, and now Ichor too, express-mailed tens of thousands of beetles to farmers and ranchers with infested ranges. The rancher would open the cooler of leafy spurge beetles, release them out onto his problem, and bugs would start eating the problem. After a few years the bugs would be so numerous that Ichor would drive over to shake them off the plants into his tarps. The pasture he was going to was even restoring a section of the river it sloped down to meet. One thing he especially liked about the beetles was that they controlled the weeds but never quite ate all of the spurge, never ate themselves entirely out of existence. They weren’t like people. They respected their existential limits.  (pp. 341-342).

Here's Gary (son of Winnie and Diz) talking to Ichor, the farmer from the passage above who is committed to sustainable practices, about his thinking on how farming should be done.  The first quote is from young Gary, the second from Ichor.

‘Used to be my mom’s pasture.’ 

‘I know.’ 

‘She talks about how farming’s going off a cliff; she wants to farm like her dad and mom farmed, more like Eric’s dad and mom.’ 

‘What’s your dad think?’ 

‘He won’t say it to her, but I know he thinks it’s bullshit. It won’t work at the scale we’re farming.’ 

‘What do you think?’ asked Ichor. ‘Me? Nobody asks.’ Gary cleared his throat. ‘But I read stuff. They’re both right. First, I’d get out of beets, over time because we have a contract. I’d plant nitrogen-fixing crops, plowing them back in, using less fertilizer. I wouldn’t go full-on organic, not for a while, but for every problem that comes at us I’d look for a solution that gets us further along, like toward a goal of getting certified. I think the fastest-growing market’s in organics, so I want to get in there. I haven’t told anybody.’

 It took a second for Ichor to ask, ‘Why not?’ 

‘Obviously,’ Gary said, ‘I’m a dumb jock.’ (pp. 347-348). 

What follows is Diz ruminating about farming with fellow farmer and brother, Gusty:

‘Nobody ever said farming was easy.’ 

‘It’s not for dummies,’ said Gusty. 

They laughed silently because they’d said exactly this a thousand times before. To outwit nature for even a few years, you had to be a brilliant SOB. 

‘I can see a lot of steps ahead and this weed is gonna win.’ Gusty plodded along, kicking at the half-living weeds. 

‘Ichor says it’s actually metabolizing the poison now. Just eating it. Whatever you throw at this thing, it can break it down. We’re gonna have to handpick. Pay a church group or a football team or hire a bunch of kids and migrant labor like back in the day.’ 

‘Darva’s book group,’ said Gusty. 

‘Oh. wouldn’t that be . . . didn’t Darva hoe beets when she was a kid?’ 

‘Didn’t everybody?’ 

‘What goes around . . .’ 

What does go around?’ 

‘Weeds.’ 

‘Believe it.’  (p. 363). 

Literary Ruralism (Part XLIX): Rural life in "The Mighty Red" by Louise Erdrich

I've very much enjoyed Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Mighty Red (2024), set in the farming exurbs near Fargo, North Dakota, along the Red River.  I'm going to share some excerpts here that reflect on small-town life.  The protagonist is Kismet Poe, a high school senior when the story begins in 2008.  Her mother is Crystal, a Native American.   

Early in the novel, Kismet marries Gary, the somewhat hapless scion of a local sugar beet farming empire. She does this even though she is in love with another young man, the brilliant high-school drop out, Hugo.  Also looming over the novel, Gary has an ominous secret that gets revealed close to the novel's end.  Along the way, we get some vignettes that provide incisive commentary on small-town life.  Indeed, the entire novel is about a community entirely involved in each others' business. 

Also of note are Erdrich's ruminations on farming and different ways of being in relation to the natural world.  I'll save most of those for a separate post.  

In this opening scene, Gary and Kismet are out driving.

However, within a mile or two, Gary’s question whether she was bored made the silence complicated and exposed the fact that she actually was bored, very bored, and being consciously bored reminded her of what her cynical best friend, Stockton, had said—how boredom was a part of small-town life that you had to get drunk to accept. She wasn’t drunk now. She wasn’t drunk very often. She did think that if she spent much time with Gary, though, she’d have to have a bottle handy.  (p. 13) 

Kismet wanted to forestall Gary from sharing his thoughts. He might get solemn and talk about his farming ideas or his philosophy, which was that you should do what your mother told you to do. Kismet had met Gary’s mother and she questioned that. Gary believed that radio frequencies could carry disease. He started many sentences by declaring ‘There are two kinds of people . . .’ He didn’t believe in God but said he could get behind the idea that aliens had manufactured the skein of life. He also talked about, say, the Ten Commandments, and would wonder whether ‘Thou shalt not kill’ applied to deer. He loved deer. He cried when he saw a dead one. He also cried when he saw a living one. This was a thing about Gary that really got to Kismet. He didn’t hunt. His father and uncle tried to take him out hunting. He refused. He loved animals, not only deer, but every animal. Still, she didn’t appreciate it when he said that she reminded him of a deer in winter with her dark brown eyes and matching hair. Deer were lovely creatures but they were prey animals. 

College will get me out of here, thought Kismet, and a tiny rush of fear made her want to sleep. She pushed her seat back. The sun was beaming through the windshield and it was autumn sun, the mellow light of early afternoon. She fell into a dreamy nap as Gary meditated aloud about whether dinosaur bones were real or had been placed there by a super-intelligent race of ancient humans, or by aliens. ‘Aliens again,’ she murmured. 

‘Damn straight,’ said Gary in a heroic voice. 

‘You know the bones are real,’ said Kismet. 

‘Probably,’ said Gary. ‘Here’s the turnoff to that place. Remember Blosnik? He was a hands-on man. There’s two kinds—’ 

‘I know,’ said Kismet. ‘Your mom and dad . . .’ ‘

Yeah, Winnie and Diz.’  

He liked calling them by their first names. 

‘They always say there are two kinds of people, hands-on and hands-off. They really liked how Blosnik took our class out to dig fossils—’  (p. 13-14)

This scene from one of Gary's days at high school, when he is upset about something a teacher has said to him about Gary's still unrevealed secret:      

He knew that Kismet had social studies during third period. He paused outside her classroom. Instantly, his breath slowed and his heart calmed. There was something mysterious and magical about Kismet and dating her helped Gary feel sane. He suspected it was her Indian, oops, Native American, blood—though he never mentioned it again after the first time. Gary was awed by her effect on him, but for most of the years he’d gone to school with her she just seemed weird.  (p. 24) 

On Kismet and her relationship with her mother, especially when Kismet went through a goth phase: 

Like all mothers and daughters, both Kismet and Crystal went through Kismet’s phases. Before she took a job and cleaned up her act, Kismet was a goth, a dollar-store goth, but wasn’t that the point? One bleary night she self-dyed her shiny hair a harsh lusterless blue-black, set off her narrow eyes with thick black lines, and brushed her eyelids with gradations of purple and maroon. Crystal didn’t react when Kismet came downstairs the next morning and went to school. So she upped the ante. Tried to be secretive about her stick and poke tattoos. Kismet and Martin had memorized some of their namesake Edgar Allan’s work. Crystal caught a glimpse of the word nevermore on Kismet’s shoulder blade and a raven that came out looking like a pigeon. She pretended not to notice. In truth, she was depressed about it for weeks. Kismet’s clothes were from rummage sales or Thrifty Life, all black of course. Some she shredded artfully, others were ripped or worn thin already. Kismet was sent home for the slashes beneath her butt that went too high and showed violet panties. She was sent home again for sneaking out of the house wearing a T-shirt printed with fake breasts including nipples—she’d found the T-shirt in a garbage can. 

‘Stop wearing garbage!’ Crystal yelled at her. She was on a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. schedule and had been roused from crucial sleep by the call from the principal.

‘All we can afford is garbage,’ Kismet said.

This stung and Crystal teared up. Kismet got all hangdog and mumbled she was sorry. (p. 25) 

What follows next speaks to the community and lack-of-anonymity themes.  It has Winne, Gary's mom, arriving at book club--a book club in which it seems every other woman in the novel--and perhaps in their town--is a member:    

[Winnie] turned into Bev’s drive. She cut the engine, but her hands were stuck to the wheel. The others lived in Tabor and saw one another all of the time. She had gone to school with Bev, though, and stayed friends with her. Bev had been a Pavlecky before she’d married Ichor. Bev would stick up for her. Still, Winnie Geist sat outside in her car. She’d arrived early to the book club and had to gather her courage before facing the women who would walk into Bev’s house. This was only the second meeting she’d made it to since the accident, and at the first meeting she hadn’t said a word. So she needed to see who was coming before she entered.

Many women she knew from church would be at the book club meeting. She knew that some actually prayed for her and her family. But on dark days Winnie believed that some prayed against her. She found it hard to bear the sting of their eyes when they’d watch her enter a room, and it was even more difficult to open her mouth and speak. (p. 84-85) 

Here's a scene following Kismet and Gary's wedding, which takes place shortly after Kismet's father and Crystal's long-time partner, Martin, runs off with the local Catholic parish's building fund, also leaving Crystal's home mortgaged without her knowledge.  That gives rise to the need for a lawyer, a very unusual event for folks of such modest means in rural-ish North Dakota: 

Kismet raised the skinny glass to her lips and the gentle bubbles grazed her nose. She took her first-ever sip of champagne. The ghost of a taste, an emotion in her mouth, unreadable. She drank again to try and understand. But it was too fleeting. Then she got it and smiled. An ephemeral blip. She drank until the champagne stopped thought, stopped taste, stopped emotion. People whirled, talking in her face. People watched from the sides of the room. They were talking about her, talking about her father, trying to corner Crystal, who eluded them all. 

After a brutal set of photos, Kismet’s mother squeezed her arm and said that she had to leave. Early. 

‘Are you going to see a lawyer?’ said Kismet. 

‘Oh, honey, yes,’ said Crystal. 

They wrapped each other in a silent hug with eyes squeezed shut. Getting a lawyer? It had never happened to them. It was as apocalyptic as Kismet getting married. They hugged harder, trying not to cry. Everybody looked away. (pp. 126-127) 

What follows is a scene from very near the end of the book, where the women's book group gathers again, this time to discuss Cormac McCarthy's The Road. 

There followed a pleasurable babble containing many theories: nuclear winter, the Rapture, aliens, the flu, ozone holes, this thing about the climate, which split members off in subarguments, China conquers us, Russia conquers us, or maybe . . . Tania White waited patiently so that her theory was the last. She stood up and with a smile of satisfaction unrolled a chart of the Yellowstone volcano, the probable epicenter of destruction, as well as the outlying circles of poisonous gas and falling ash. 

‘So we have here the super-volcano. You see the red circle? Kill zone. Right here, this is us. In the pink zone. We’re in the primary ash zone. The secondary ash zone is this peach circle from Lake Superior over to California, taking in the Texas Panhandle. If this volcano erupted, and I guess it’s overdue, we get covered in volcano ash. It would be another ice age. Everything in the Upper Midwest would die—just like in the book—only a few random apples left—just like in the book,’ said Tania. She paused for maximum effect and tag-teamed Tory, who rose and spoke. ‘This is why we wanted to bring it to the club. This book is a very realistic look at the aftermath of the Yellowstone super-volcano.’ 

‘I’ve read where an asteroid is more likely to hit,’ said Mary Sotovine. 

‘You guys are way off the mark,’ said Winnie, pointing out the window, at the fields. ‘Look. There’s your answer.’ 

The women leaned sideways or forward to stare out the picture window and saw that, as usual, the wind was sending up curls of earth dust and dust devils were crisscrossing the fields. ‘I don’t get it,’ said Tory. 

Across the horizon a band of gray dust wavered. The sun would go down in a bloody stew. Every night was like the end of the world. It was gorgeous! ‘What is going to happen?’ said Mrs. Flossom, excitedly. ‘What can we expect?’ Jeniver went over to the table and opened another bottle of white and one of red. Even Karleen had a few sips. 

‘Don’t you see?’ said Winnie. ‘Every time you look out the window there’s dust rising up.

That’s dirt. We are losing our dirt. No dirt, no food.’ ‘Okay,’ said Karleen, eyes glittering. ‘Round that out for us.’ ‘No dirt, no food, no life. General starvation. My parents’ fields were surrounded by shelterbelts and they left stubble in their fields the way Pavlecky does now. They planted cover crops, but . . . sorry . . . I did some historic reading before Diz and I went to Russia years ago and it curdled my bones. When Stalin made the little farms into humungous collective farms . . .’ ‘

Like the sugar beet collective?’ someone asked. 

‘That’s a voluntary collective and a functional one,’ said Winnie, with a hint of scorn. ‘In Russia it was total and complete retooling where the Soviets kicked out . . . well, starved and murdered, all the landowners and farmers who were growing the wheat and turnips and food crops. Then they tried to organize giant farms, but nobody knew how to farm because most of the farmers-in-charge were dead! It was like when Stalin killed the doctors in Moscow, then he dies because there’s nobody to save him!’

‘Let’s get back to—’ Bev started. 

Winnie blew right past her. ‘Anyway, let’s say present practices continue in our case. No dirt. Nothing to eat.’ 

‘Except people,’ said Jeniver with a stern, conclusive nod all around, as if they were on The Road or on a lifeboat, ready to draw lots. Karleen shrank back. Jeniver’s brown hair, held on top of her head by a small golden sword, flashed in the bloody sunset light. 

‘Correct,’ said Winnie, though Jeniver had stolen her punch line. Winnie nodded her head and looked down into her fuchsia lap. ‘Starving, that’s a bad way to go. You don’t just fade out. Extremely painful, and the cravings! One of the worst . . .’ 

‘Not as bad as—’ Mary Sotovine began like a pitcher winding up. 

‘Let’s not go there,’ Darva cut in. 

Once Mary and Darva began competing over worst-case ways to perish, the book club usually spiraled into ghoulish hysteria. Mary’s glowing round face flattened in disappointment. 

‘How about getting pickled?’ Jeniver wondered. 

The other women looked at Jeniver and she held out her empty wineglass. 

‘Oh, pickled!’ The general mood shifted. 

‘Wasn’t that last line of the book really beautiful?’ said Tiny Johnson, and the book discussion was soon complete, except that suddenly Bev stood up. 

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘While we’ve been talking about the end of the world like we’re looking forward to it, I’ve been thinking how the world as we know, used to know, it really is ending. I thought of what the world was like even when I was a kid, how it was more . . . it was more full.’ 

‘Last call,’ said Tiny. ‘I’m bringing out the ice cream.’ 

‘Don’t you remember?’ Bev went on. ‘How there used to be meadowlarks?’ She looked around. ‘C’mon, when’s the last time you heard a meadowlark? You know, our state bird. When I was growing up they were everywhere, in all the ditches, as soon as you got to the edge of town they started. Am I right?’ 

‘She’s right,’ said Mary Sotovine. ‘I’m older, so ten years before Bev remembers, they were in the ditches, as soon as you got to the edge of town. You’d hear them all the time.’ 

‘She’s right,’ said Winnie. ‘There used to be flocks of those cedar birds, cedar waxwings, and bluebirds, even. And bugs, which they ate. Grasshoppers. Mayflies when you went out to the lakes. Now you don’t even see grasshoppers. And there’s only a mayfly or two. It’s the pesticides.’ 

All of the women suddenly began to talk. 

‘Do you notice how you look at the grille of your car and there’s no bugs? No bugs hit your windshield? And moths. How they used to swirl in the streetlamps?’ 

‘They did. Like snow.’ 

‘And how when it rained the frogs came out and they were everywhere and the grass was thick with frogs?’ ‘Toads. You could always go out and pick up a toad.’ 

‘Now it’s surprising. A toad! It’s special!’ 

‘And there were nighthawks, lots of nighthawks swerving around, after the mosquitoes. And bats everywhere and how we used to scream if they dived at us. And flocks of pigeons on the grain elevators.’

‘What does it mean that prairie falcons are living in town?’ asked Stockton. 

Everyone fell silent. 

‘It means there’s less to eat in the country,’ said Winnie. 

Kismet waved her hand. Winnie recognized her with a nod and called out, ‘Kismet has something to say!’ 

Kismet looked at her mother and said, ‘I don’t think this book is about the end of the world. That’s just the setting, to show what happens between people in extreme situations. The end is about consolation. The father goes to the end of the earth for his son, then dies, satisfied. I mean, it’s a really sentimental book. McCarthy’s not afraid of that. And it’s a brutal adventure book—exciting when they find the food cache, and then there’s that cannibal army.’ 

Jeniver stood up and spoke with urgency. ‘This book is about what’s most important. You know, this kind of love between a parent and a child.’ 

Crystal put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders, and Kismet leaned on her mother. Winnie saw that Kismet would leave. She thought of Gary and started to cry, wondering how she could possibly save him. All of a sudden she had a thought that dried her tears right up. She’d searched for a way to thank Gary’s angel. Well, Kismet was his angel. Oh no! Oh yes! Again she wept. Bev thought about how Hugo had escaped that terrifying pre-apocalyptic landscape [the Bakken oil fields of western North Dakota], and she also started to cry. ...  Mary Sotovine was moved to tears at the thought of the days when she’d see bluebirds in a strip of grassland, now planted in soybeans.  (pp. 328-332).