The not so lonesome prairie
April 19, 2016 5:34 PM   Subscribe

Rex Sorgatz grew up in Napoleon, ND - population about 750, and a hundred miles from nowhere. So what's it like growing up there today, with the world at your fingertips?
posted by Chrysostom (24 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
Interesting piece, but seemed a lot more about the author's own meditations than his putative investigation of how technology has changed the town.
posted by Wretch729 at 6:02 PM on April 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


I completely agree. As with many pieces of this length/type, it's introspection titled as reporting
posted by timdiggerm at 6:09 PM on April 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


Nice photographs. I could relate somewhat, having growed up in the 20th century wintery midwest farmville, CA version. I wasn't really a fan of Chuck Klosterman before, but he did compose a rather swell novel about this milieu in the 80's: Downtown Owl.
posted by ovvl at 6:17 PM on April 19, 2016


Wow, I had utterly forgotten about Rex, and the blog I used to read on the regular. Thanks for this.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 6:17 PM on April 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


I remember Rex Sorgatz from the early days of blogs and interesting tidbit gathering sites.
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 6:18 PM on April 19, 2016


Jinx, sandettie!
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 6:19 PM on April 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


“Basically, this story is a controlled experiment,” I continue. “Napoleon is a place that has remained static for decades. The economics, demographics, politics, and geography are the same as when I lived here. In the past twenty-five years, only one thing has changed: technology.”

Hate to break it to you, but this is not how history works. Or controlled experiments, for that matter.
posted by RogerB at 6:23 PM on April 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


It's definitely introspection rather than reporting, but I suspect the author is well aware of that. And as he grew up in, pretty much, the exact opposite circumstances of how I grew up, introspection and telling his own story was absolutely fascinating to me.

The photos are breathtaking. Again, about as far from growing up in a large East Coast city as you can get...
posted by kalimac at 6:25 PM on April 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


I really enjoyed this essay - it's pretty much how I grew up - and it's been fascinating to watch how tech has slowly changed my old community.* The really big difference I notice is clothing - the kids are much more likely to be dressed more on trend.

But it's also the more things change, the more things stay the same. So. . .well, I may not have had radio or tv, but I did have The Library, and in many ways I was surprisingly informed about the world. My parents still don't have internet, but they, too, have The Library, where they can check their email and place their orders. So while they used to order from catalogs, now it's Amazon. (Or I order it for them.) And when their package arrives and it's too big for the giant mailbox at the end of the road and goes back to the local P.O., Maggie the postmaster, when she sees your vehicle coming down the hill, will still dart out in her robe and slippers from their house across the road to re-open the post office after it's been closed when she knows that you have a package. . .just like she always has for the last 30 years. But now - now she'll also text them to let them know if she's running into town and won't be around. I love it.

*They're closing our local one room schoolhouse after this year (K-3 only, to save them from a tortuously long bus ride) because it's gotten so much easier to home school the few kids. It's been open for almost 75 years; my great-great and great grandmothers taught there. I would love to see their reaction to the tech that caused this.
posted by barchan at 6:26 PM on April 19, 2016 [12 favorites]


As with many pieces of this length/type, it's introspection titled as reporting

Nope. This piece clearly established that no town rocks fucking harder for AC/DC than Napoleon.
posted by asperity at 6:33 PM on April 19, 2016 [8 favorites]


This piece didn't really go anywhere, but it did paint an atmospheric portrait of an America quite different from the one I know. And the photos make me feel strangely homesick for this place that I've never been. I liked it.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 6:47 PM on April 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


He did go on a bit, but I still enjoyed it because it could have been written about me and my hometown.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:34 PM on April 19, 2016


ovvl: "I wasn't really a fan of Chuck Klosterman before, but he did compose a rather swell novel about this milieu in the 80's: Downtown Owl."

Yeah, I find Klosterman pretty hit or miss, but I do like his reminisces of growing up in rural ND. Fargo Rock City, in particular.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:42 PM on April 19, 2016


I grew up in mid-sized Midwest towns (Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Quincy, Illinois) but my kids grew up in a rural farming community in NE Missouri. I enjoyed the piece, particularly the photos. I live in SE Arizona now, but I remember the bleak snowscapes!
posted by Agave at 9:16 PM on April 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


How has radio changed your life? Of course you can't answer, because it's always been there.

If you want to ask how technology changed things you have to ask people who were in the midst of the change. I grew up several hundred miles North of this guy during the same general time period, in an even more bleak and frozen wasteland. Access to BBSes was a godsend, it showed you that you didn't have to be trapped in the same place with the same few people, none of which thought like you or was interested in the same stuff.

The other lesson from this piece: never let your Mom choose the teenagers to interview, of course they will all be nice young men and women, not surly loners looking to escape.
posted by benzenedream at 9:28 PM on April 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


I like the piece, there's a weird element of strangeness from people who experienced rural america in the 80 and 90s. It was a place not just separate from disconnectedness to the common culture, but time as well. I'm from the Catskills, the part of NY state that the city froze in time to preserve its water supply; I went back to live there in 2012 and there still wasn't high speed internet or even enforced building codes. BUT, if you went into the towns of the county and saw the libraries and the schools, they all had contact to the real world. Hell most of them had cell phones, albeit ones that only worked in a tiny geographical area, but it was connectivity.

The idea that from basically 1998 to now, these areas jumped from being essentially in the 40s to modern era is nuts. One generation of high schoolers were raised on whatever podunk ass country music station came in on FM, and the next could access the most obscure scene possible on a myriad of platforms.

I love this dammed world for all it's failings because there's a whole living group younger than me who will never have to think that achy breaky heart is the be all end all of music because that was all that was available to them.
posted by Ferreous at 10:02 PM on April 19, 2016 [5 favorites]


In a way I wish he had spent more time there. He remembers so clearly what it was like to be inside his head when he was a teenager, but forgets that the person that his mom saw, that teachers saw, was not the same. That exterior person I bet was not so different from the kids his mom sent him --- polite, good students. Whether inside they're just as restless as he was, you'd have to get to know them better to understand, and he was too haunted by the ghost of himself to do that.
posted by Diablevert at 3:37 AM on April 20, 2016 [4 favorites]


This was an interesting article, but the more I thought about it, the more I wished he would have approached it differently. He made a big deal of how isolated Napoleon was, but there are hints that the outside world (not including the obvious AC/DC and JD Salinger) still had some influence. How could it not? Did his school library not have an atlas or an encyclopedia? Did his teachers not leave the town to go to college? Did his family never take a vacation? (Even a weekend to Bismarck, which is only an hour's drive away?) He mentioned attending a basketball camp, and he attended college somewhere. It's clear he had ways of knowing about the world beyond Napoleon, and that affected his post-high school plans. He was interested in getting out, and he did. I'd like to know how that happened. And then, I'd like him to compare his outside influences with those of the kids. Are their 100 Instragram and 50 Snapchat followers all from Napoleon? Now that they have access to more national (and international) media, what do they choose to read/watch/consume? Are they planning to go to college? If so, where? UND/NDSU, or are they looking outside the state? That question (how do people get out of small towns in 2015 compared to 1985?) would be more illuminating, although this was otherwise quite enjoyable. The prose was vivid without being ostentatious, and the photographs were beautiful.
posted by kevinbelt at 8:19 AM on April 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm struck by what a different piece it would have been if written by someone who had struggled with their identity while growing up in that fishbowl, or who was aware of others who did. There must have been a couple of gay kids in his graduating class, and in the 2016 class. Expanded world or no, focusing on that in a piece everyone in town will read could probably still wreck a life.
posted by Scram at 8:38 AM on April 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


It's interesting that the rural parts of North Dakota appear to have one of the highest rates of economic mobility in the US. If you start poor, you don't have to say poor.

I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that all the kids in town went to exactly the same school and got exactly the same relatively-small-classroom instruction. Wealthier people couldn't make themselves into an educational hereditary elite like the wealthy in big cities, because there is no "good" school and "bad" school with vastly different educational quality, there is just "the" school.

I grew up in an even smaller town (pop. 120) with a similar dynamic, which is what made me wonder. It's not that all the poor people got rich, but if you were poor and smart, or poor and hard-working, there was nothing in the culture of the town that told us "you are on the bottom and will always be on the bottom no matter what you do."

Being on the prairies was part of that, too. The prairies were settled by a lot of people who had run away from class structures, whether it was Eastern Europe or England or the East Coast. They were adamantly against recreating them on the prairies.

(With one major exception to all of this, of course: The original Native inhabitants. I was acutely aware of that in my small town, but it sounds like it was maybe invisible in his small town.)
posted by clawsoon at 8:42 AM on April 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


I'm struck by what a different piece it would have been if written by someone who had struggled with their identity while growing up in that fishbowl, or who was aware of others who did. There must have been a couple of gay kids in his graduating class, and in the 2016 class. Expanded world or no, focusing on that in a piece everyone in town will read could probably still wreck a life.

I doubt it. 26 kids? It's a notoriously tough thing to estimate, but last census data I've seen suggests about >4% of the US pop. identifies as LGBT. Pure random statistics would suggest you'd get maybe 1 person. It's entire possibly that you'd get none, but perhaps more to the point, even if there is one kid in his class who as an adult in 2016 identifies as LGBT, I imagine that it's highly unlikely they'd have done so as a teenager in a very small rural town in the 1980s. Probably not even to themselves.

I'm sure there's some gay people out of the whole population of the town. But that the author would have known them, or known about them, that'd they'd have been close enough to his age, or close enough to him to talk about this, doesn't strike me as likely at all.
posted by Diablevert at 10:10 AM on April 20, 2016


I want to know what the town thinks of Axl Rose taking over as lead singer of AC⚡DC. Does the town still rock fucking harder for the band than any other town, or are they now bitterly divided?
posted by clawsoon at 11:34 AM on April 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


There were LGBT kids in the school I graduated from, which was only a bit larger than the author's. But I only know about them in retrospect, because back then they were so deeply in the closet they had cedar chips coming out their ears. And I don't blame them, because the culture of homophobia in that town was incredibly toxic.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:24 AM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


Growing up in a tiny prairie town, I didn't even know what homosexuality was until I was in my teens. When my gay cousin came down with his girlfriend for dinner, I said afterwards, "He talks funny, like those comedians on TV!" There was no response. Everybody in the family liked my cousin (including my Evangelical-as-possible father), and nobody wanted to explain why it was complicated.
posted by clawsoon at 12:17 PM on April 21, 2016


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