The New Rural?

I rode across the country with eyes wide open, curious and eager to examine the people and places I encountered on the long but narrow sliver of land through which I passed. I’d be lying if I told you that I merely observed passively and absorbed it all like a sponge. The truth is that I carried my biases with me, like extra but weightless baggage. As for what I witnessed, there were some things I understood immediately but there were so many others that I didn’t quite comprehend, which required me, upon my return, to research and consider further to make sense of what I saw.

Most of the trek took me through rural America, what coastal folks refer to (often with disdain) as “flyover country.” While I love the panoramic views and perspective one gets from gazing at the earth from 30,000 feet, there’s nothing like getting a taste and feel of a place when you pass through new landscapes on a bike and stop in towns so unlike the one where you live.  Othello, Washington was one such place. I was in the heart of Washington’s rural Adams County (10.71 people per square mile), but Othello did not look or feel like what I considered a traditional rural town.

Is there even such a thing as a traditional rural American town? Perhaps only in my mind, influenced no doubt by watching movies and TV shows in my youth or gazing at Grant Wood’s American Gothic. More recently, those images have been reinforced by riding my bike through central Ohio’s farmlands. The result is that I carry a mental image of a stereotypical “traditional” rural America: long, uniform rows of corn with a red barn and a silo painted with strong, inorganic lines standing at the edge of the crop rows.

My stereotype is not only absurd (rural America as a farming monoculture?) but it is patently untrue. This is a large country, and rural Ohio is nothing like rural Idaho, which is different than rural Massachusetts, both of which are totally unlike, say, the vast deserts of rural Nevada and Arizona.  

In his excellent book about rural America (The Lies of the Land), Steven Conn, a professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, writes that there is no such thing as one “rural America” and that rural Americans no longer make their living from the land anymore. “There is a country mile between our rural mythologizing and rural reality,” he writes. Leaving aside the myth of “rural values” (what many a politician refers to as the ”real America”-- more on that later), Conn’s thesis is that rural America today embodies four major forces of American modernity: militarization (large bases and defense complexes), industrialization (such as massive automobile assembly plants in what was once exclusively farmland in Ohio, Indiana, and Tennessee), corporatization (the presence of large extractive industries or data centers in rural spaces), and suburbanization (the loss of farmland to suburban sprawl).

So where does Othello fit?

Geographically, Othello, with a population of around 7,000, meets one definition of rural because it is bordered by thousands of hectares of crop land and the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge and is far from large urban centers. But my overnight visit revealed that there was little of what most people casually consider rural about it. With its potato processing plants that supply the nation with half of its frozen French fries and the cold storage warehouses with 18-wheelers pulling up to the loading docks, the town looks (and smells) more business-like than farm-like. Othello is where bountiful potato harvests meets industrial scale processing and storage for large agribusiness concerns.

Processing potatoes for french fries in Othello

In the 1950s, the Columbia Basin Project transformed the region from a sagebrush-covered high desert to a food basket, which also began a long-term change in the town’s population. The predominantly white settler families who arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were soon outnumbered by migrant workers from Mexico, who came in large numbers and stayed. Their second-generation children along with additional waves of itinerant workers have created an overwhelmingly Hispanic community. In the heart of Washington’s farm country, I passed businesses and churches with signs in Spanish advertising all manner of commodities, such as body’s craving for nourishment (Chuy’s Mi Carniceria) and the soul’s need for salvation (La Luz Del Mundo Iglesia Del Dios Vivo). I see in Othello a bilingual symmetry: rural is spelled the same way in both English and Spanish.

In its current state, Othello is emblematic of one face of rural America in the early 21st Century: a booming economy predicated on America’s love for fast-food fries, where the money flows upwards to local farmers and agribusinesses, but which also provides for a solid, middle-class living for its largely immigrant population.  Aquí el español es la lengua del nuevo rural!

But this new rural boom depends on water. While there is no Iago plotting to ruin Washington’s Othello, a water crisis looms down the road. The wells that provide irrigation for fast-food fries have a finite amount of water. The old wells were “recharged” in 1951 when water deliveries began for Adams County and are estimated to run dry by 2028. If the wells aren’t replenished, nature will have its way, and the land will eventually revert to sagebrush. Work on extending the Columbia Basin Project which would provide additional water for local wells stalled in the 1970s, but now there are plans to construct canals from the Columbia River, a massive undertaking they’re calling the Odessa Groundwater Replacement Program. However, completing the necessary infrastructure comes with a hefty price tag and it’s unclear how exactly the work will be funded.  

I think the challenge to define “rural America” -- to nail down what exactly rural America is – becomes a fruitless exercise. I say this because, just like us, rural America is continually changing, evolving, and becoming -- for a host of complex and interdependent reasons. Whatever definition we come up with, given time, will be dated.

It’s also important to keep in mind how politicians and their supporters mythologize rural America to serve their political agendas. Many wax eloquently in praise of “traditional American values” personified by hard-working, independent, family-owned farmers and ranchers. We are told this is the “real America,” ignoring the fact that family farms represent less than 1 percent of the total US population, and these values can just as easily be personified by the millions of hard-working minority business owners. Still, they wield this myth bluntly and effectively as a divisive tool to score political points, pulling the wool over our eyes in the process.

Lift that wool and you can see that in Othello, rural es rural, which contains its own poetic and ironic myth-busting fact: Many of the workers that form the backbone of the labor force no son de aquí.