Mar 23, 2008 - 04:05:06 CDT
Gertrude Stein wrote, “In the United States, there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.” I wish Stein (1874-1946) could have seen North Dakota in the early 21st century.
This is not another lament about rural outmigration. Au contraire. My theme is how gloriously empty most of North Dakota is. I’m calling attention to the happy flip side of the outmigration coin. Most Americans regard North Dakota as an empty place in the Empty Quarter. They are right. But what they don’t know is what population we have (635,867) is mostly huddled in a few places in North Dakota, and the really empty part is, well, really, really empty. Scary empty. Magically empty.
The cliche is that the Great Plains is godforsaken country. But my sense is that God likes empty places, and we have a better chance to wrestle with God out on the “emptied prairie” than more densely settled places.
North Dakota ranks 47th in population density. That means that only Montana, Wyoming and Alaska have fewer people per square mile. New Jersey ranks first in population density with 1,138 people per square mile. (Weighing the quality of life, including crime statistics, hmm.) North Dakota provides only 9.3 people per square mile. If you organized them in pairs and spread them out on a section of land, it would be like a five on dice (a quincunx), with one loner in the middle. They’d be able to see each other — barely. Of course, at any given moment, they would not be out, manning their stations. They’d be indoors, watching “American Idol” or reruns of “Friends” or checking corn futures on the Internet. If they were out at their stations, they would almost certainly not be standing at attention, but slouching in their pickups, listening to Rush or NPR.
We live mediated lives, and at any given statistical moment, we see nature, if at all, through a stout pane of glass. Even farmers, come to think of it.
At a time when there is more clamor in America for open space than ever before, we North Dakotans have open space in glorious, stupendous abundance, almost in infinite supply. If I were the state tourism department, that’s what I’d try to sell to the rest of the world. Come to North Dakota to have it “all to yourself.” Commune with “Nature and Nature’s God” (as Jefferson formulated it). In the great circle of land and sky that is North Dakota (America’s true Big Sky Country), you can stand alone between the Earth and the end of the universe and ... pray, shout down the gods, dance to the music of the spheres, listen to the wind, rehearse your proposal, cry for your losses, put your fingers in the ground, recall (or reinvent) your life. But if you just shut up and look around in wonder, the sheer vastness of the Great Plains will swallow you up in all the right ways and you will ask some big questions before you get back to town.
So we rank 47th, with 9.3 people per square mile. That’s a misleading statistic, of course, because the population of North Dakota is not evenly distributed. Pitiful little Slope County (my favorite, home of Marmarth) has only 713 people, while at the other end of the state, Cass County, which is not significantly larger, has a population of 132,525. Thus, Slope County has .6 persons per square mile. I happen to know Point Six. Her name is Patti Perry. And I’d put her in the scale with any 20 urbanistas.
Cass County has 69 people per square mile. That, interestingly enough, is just a little more than the Minnesota average, which confirms my dark suspicions. Nearly one in five North Dakotans lives in Cass County. Only one in 900 lives in Slope County. And, I can hear Patti Perry vociferating, “That’s the way we like it!”
People don’t diffuse themselves evenly over landscape. They tend to cluster. It’s not at all surprising that people accumulate along the main transportation hubs. But that means that the rest of the countryside is almost unbelievably empty. A third of our population lives in the Red River Valley. The biggest chunks of the rest of it live along the I-94 corridor. Those counties—Cass, Barnes, Stutsman, Kidder, Burleigh, Morton, Stark, Billings and Golden Valley — have a combined population of 292,519. That’s 46 percent of the North Dakota population.
As the 21st century begins, 36 of North Dakota’s 53 counties are now regarded in demographic circles as new “frontier” counties, meaning that they have fewer than six people per square mile. So in those 36 counties, our quincunx consists of singletons, not couples, or perhaps one on the middle of the section.
I wonder how many North Dakotans live more than 30 miles from a four-lane road? It would be possible, if a little tedious, to work this out from U.S. Census statistics. My answer, which is not altogether technical, is: not many.
Last week, I flew out of North Dakota toward the east. It was a magnificent, perfectly clear day. I had a window seat. I was able to study the landscape and look for things I recognized all the way to Minnesota, where clouds obscured the view. I felt that strange patriotic surge as we flew over North Dakota’s unusual Capitol building. I was able to pick out my house, perched (for the moment) right on the edge of the gigantic prairie. A little later, I saw Long Lake, and soon Jamestown Reservoir, which looked rather menacing from 35,000 feet.
There was a dusting of snow east of Jamestown, which did not cover the ground, but accentuated the section lines in a wonderful way. I sat entranced by the vastness of the place we call home and its amazing beauty, and I did not mind its emptiness one bit. In fact, I gloried in how big and free our place is, so far from the corridors of trouble. By now, we were angling southeast toward Minneapolis, but I was able to spy the Sheyenne and the Wild Rice and then the Red River. In the distance, I could just make out the brown smudge (not so large, really) that is Fargo.
I wanted to be down on the plains walking somewhere I have never explored before. And I resolved, on Easter (today), to venture out into the middle of nowhere (Genesis 32) somewhere west of the Missouri River to wrestle with God.
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at jeffysage@aol.com.)
REX wrote on Mar 29, 2008 8:07 AM:
MamaMia wrote on Mar 28, 2008 9:56 AM:
Tommy Boy wrote on Mar 26, 2008 4:00 PM:
LL wrote on Mar 23, 2008 9:29 AM:
Dale A. Swenson wrote on Mar 23, 2008 7:42 AM:
An Easter grappling with God should rightly be found where there is "Glory in the Empty." The empty tomb expressed the glory of God. So, too, might North Dakota. Blessed Easter!
Dale "
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