Middle of Everywhere Man Transcript
Prologue
(Haunting music starts)
VO: Rural America cannot be saved.
VO: American cities are leaving rural America behind.
VO: The graying of rural America.
VO: The hard truths of trying to ‘save’ the rural economy.
VO: Rural America is dying… (‘dying’ echoes)
Ben Winchester: The negative narrative is so powerful. People will do whatever they can to prove it’s true.
Ariel Lavery: Austin, with these distressing headlines dominating news about rural America, is this the narrative you grew up with about the fate of your hometown?
Austin Carter: Well, I do remember growing up in west Kentucky in the 90s and hearing and noticing when small groceries and mom-and-pop businesses started to close down as big box stores moved in. And it did seem like a dire narrative and it convinced some people that we were headed for rural despair.
Ariel Lavery: You must have felt a lot better once we found Ben Winchester, and heard what he had to say about that.
(Theme music starts)
Ben Winchester: The story of rural is much more nuanced, much more diverse than ever before, and much more regional than ever before.
Austin Carter: Absolutely!
Ben Winchester: So, I’m a data guy.
Austin Carter: It was a kind of relief to hear this “data guy” call attention to the overlooked reality of what is actually going on here, but I do have to admit, I still have some questions about the big picture, and maybe how the big picture might change post-corona virus.
Ben Winchester: Let’s talk about it then, let’s look at the data.
Ariel Lavery: We can definitely get into those questions.
Austin Carter: I’m glad we found him to set the record straight.
Ariel Lavery: And to get our namesake.
Ben Winchester: This is how we start to get into the conversation about living in the middle of everywhere.
Ariel Lavery: Today we’ll have a different sort of episode where we’ll hear from Professor Ben Winchester about what the real story is about rural America’s prosperity.
Austin Carter: And the reason we decided to call our show Middle Of Everywhere.
Ariel Lavery: Big stories from the small places we call home. I’m Ariel Lavery.
Austin Carter: And I’m Austin Carter.
Scene 1 - The History of Small Town Change
Ben Winchester: There’s this whole mythical narrative that exists in our rural communities that I’ve really dedicated my life to dispelling.
Ariel Lavery: We spent some time talking with Winchester about where this mythical narrative about rural and small town America comes from.
Austin Carter: There are a few different origins, but even more reasons for its persistence.
Ben Winchester: Nostalgia.
Ariel Lavery: This was something I asked him about. Do Americans have an ideal about small town America that makes it seem like something from a time gone past?
Ben Winchester: So on one hand your nostalgia could be like Gunsmoke. (laughs)
(Gunsmoke theme briefly plays)
Ben Winchester: On one hand your nostalgia could be Leave it to Beaver.
(Leave it to Beaver theme briefly plays)
Ben Winchester: Or the Andy Griffith show, which my kids love.
(Andy Griffith show theme music and audio from the show briefly plays)
Austin Carter: I like Ben’s kids, and am a dedicated Andy Griffith fan. (Chuckles)
Ben Winchester: I mean I think there is this broad Norman Rockwellish view of what rural could be and should be. You know I think that was a blip.
Austin Carter: Well, things certainly don’t look like that around here. I’d say it’s more of a Parks and Recreation kinda situation.
Ariel Lavery: Haha, not so much a Schitt’s Creek? (Both laugh)
Austin Carter: But, there were other histories playing into the perception of rural decline also, right?
Ben Winchester: We have a narrative that’s based on things that happened 120 years ago. The mechanization of agriculture reduced the rural populations because, you know, your six kids in the family weren’t going to be able to find a job on the farm anymore.
(Upbeat music starts)
Ben Winchester: Essentially, as we saw the mechanization of agriculture take place, we started to see the rise of regional centers across the rural landscape, we started to see a really different rural kind of propels itself, all the way up through the 1950s-1960s, where, you know, ag essentially came and went as a primary industry, manufacturing came and went as a primary industry.
Really, the story of rural America, since the 1970s, is really rich and diverse with I would say, a lot of really great indicators happening right under the radar. Since 1970, the rural population has gone up by 11%, not gone down.
Austin Carter: Wow, I didn’t know that rural populations have been on the rise since 1970, even having lived here my whole life.
Ariel Lavery: Yeah, me neither! But I’m still a bit wary of accepting this 11% increase as an outright positive sign of rural prosperity. I mean when you look further at the numbers, the population of the rest of the US has gone up by about 60%. So that’s a pretty big disparity.
Austin Carter: Yeah, I see your doubt there. But I do think you have to understand how Ben looks at the data.
(Upbeat music starts again)
Ben Winchester: In some of our rural communities, our populations are going down, but the number of households stays the same. So what's happening there is that I call it total population, infatuation, that we're very infatuated with how many people are in a town. But what happened to that household, compared to like 1940? 1940 the average household size was 3.6. Now it's 2.6. So our population is going to go down in our rural communities without us doing anything, except existing in the modern world.
Ariel Lavery: This bit of information was so revealing of the way Ben analyzes the data.
Austin Carter: So this whole analysis was saying… our households are just smaller now.
Ariel Lavery: Right, so areas that have the same number of households can often account for population declines because of this.
Austin Carter: Right. (Drawn out)
Ben Winchester: So we're going to lose 29% of our population because of demographic destiny.
Ariel Lavery: I just love the titles he comes up with for these phenomena.
Austin Carter: Yeah, I know! He also talked about the pattern of urban growth infiltrating rural areas right?
Ariel Lavery: Oh yeah!
Austin Carter: And how did that affect the data?
(Upbeat music starts again)
Ben Winchester: When you look at the pattern and growth of urban areas, urban areas have not grown taller, they've grown wider. And many of our small towns in our rural places have become so popular over the last 80 years, they become urbanized. The pattern of urban growth is a pattern of rural desire.
Ariel Lavery: The urban-rural relationship is a complicated and, maybe kinda contentious one.
Ben Winchester: I think a lot of times rural is painted by what's left over after you describe urbanity. Rural for many years is not defined by what it is. It's defined by what it's not. It's a residual category of what's left over after the urban descriptions kind of take hold.
Scene 2 - The Origins of the Middle of Everywhere Man
Austin Carter: Ok, now we know that this rural decline we hear so much about really isn't the full story. So let’s talk about how Ben got to the expert cheerleader, slash, statistician that he is.
(Soothing prairie audio)
Ben Winchester: I grew up in Winona, Minnesota, and along the Mississippi River. I was a river boy and spent a lot of time stomping around all over southeastern Minnesota growing up. I wanted to get out… I did start going to school at Winona state at the time. And then I ended up going to college at the University of Minnesota Morris campus. It's out in the prairie of western Minnesota, it's in a town of about 5,000 people. And that was my first exposure to small town life. It was easy to get involved, you know, just really great people, overall a theme of service that people had.
Ariel Lavery: This theme of service comes up for him a lot now.
Ben Winchester: My undergrad was in math and statistics.
Austin Carter: Oh well, there’s his data roots!
Ariel Lavery: (Laughs) While he’s in college he starts working for some groups proactive in small town prosperity. And then he gets an offer from a professor.
Ben Winchester: How would you like to be the first employee at the Center for small towns?
Ariel Lavery: This is a center that was developed at the University of Minnesota by using university resources to help small towns. So Ben starts doing this research for them.
Ben Winchester: I started to travel around the states and just kind of hear about what's going on.
(wandering bass music starts)
Ben Winchester: And this is where it began.
Ariel Lavery: This is the first time he starts hearing this negative rural narrative.
Ben Winchester: I'm reading books about rural and articles. It's like holy cow, rural areas are terrible. Why? Why are they so bad? But, it didn't seem to match up with my day to day work traveling around town to town. Like, people are very positive, very optimistic, very hopeful, they love this life! How can the narrative be so bad, but life be so great?
Austin Carter: Ben was really bothered by this, right?
Ariel Lavery: Yeah, he wasn’t sure what his role was if these places were just dying out.
Ben Winchester: Am I only going to be around here to help our small towns die in a respectful way, like, yup first we're going to shut down your grocery store and then we're going to get rid of your gas station.
Ariel Lavery: This first exposure to the power of the negative narrative also came along with a huge disaster event that, oddly enough, helped shape Ben’s fondness for small towns, and propelled him toward his career!
Ben Winchester: This was a year that we had a lot of snowfall in April of 1997. The Red River flood hit. So, I was out of town and I got back to my friend's house and there are two messages on my friend's machine. And, “Hey, Ben. This is Brian. There's a couple inches of you know, water in the basement. No big deal. I'm just hanging out.” The next message was from about 45 minutes later, “There's like five feet of water in your basement, I've taken your cats to my house, you got to call me.”
(____ music crescendos)
Ariel Lavery: The flooded basement had fuel oil leaking in.
Ben Winchester: … Meanwhile, the sub pump is spitting out fuel oil water to my backyard.
Ariel Lavery: Just months before this Ben had started a disaster team with the Red Cross in Morris. So, he took himself and his cats to a local hotel and told his newly assembled Red Cross team…
Ben Winchester: We've never done this before. I’m calling you all together. You're going to practice the paperwork.
(Heartening music starts)
Ariel Lavery: His new Red Cross team got a chance to practice disaster relief on him. Meanwhile his local community in Morris gets together to save their neighbors. They start sandbagging and cleaning up the town. A bunch of people, friends and others, come into his house and helped clean every inch of fuel oil off of his stuff. He really saw his local community come together in a profound way.
Ben Winchester: Typically, this is why rural communities tend to have higher levels of social capital is because they are very good at it. They're, you know, they're good at getting things done together. They're good at just making it work and making it happen.
Austin Carter: I remember that seeing this spirit of volunteerism in his neighbors helped cement his future goal of working with small towns.
Ben Winchester: So, you know, this was just my own personal struggle I had which, ultimately, you know, within a short amount of time reevaluated my future there. It honestly did not take me too long to go from, “I need to put my life back together,” to, “I'm going to use this as an opportunity”. Within a couple weeks after I lost literally half my stuff and was starting to put my life back together I realized I didn't know enough. I just didn't know enough about the history of rural America and what I was talking about to really be good at this… So I went to graduate school.
Scene 3 - Newcomers
Ariel Lavery: Post-flood, Ben starts down his new path in graduate school at the University of Missouri - Columbia and gets a masters in Rural Sociology.
Austin Carter: A little different scene for a data guy. (Ariel hums in agreement)
Ben Winchester: It was during this time that I really started getting my feet wet and just going headlong right into documenting this brain gain. Documenting the growth in the nonprofit sectors, documenting the economic diversity.
Austin Carter: Documenting all this influx of people and resources was game changing for Ben. And it changed the terminology he used.
Ben Winchester: And this was before I even had the term narrative, like, this was just rural at the time. Like, how can we describe rural? And it wasn’t until I really started to advance and collect data around what this new narrative would even look like.
(Thought-provoking music starts)
Ariel Lavery: Using the term narrative totally changes the way we talk about the negative headlines and what people think of small town America. Narratives have traction!
Ben Winchester: You can actually have competing narratives in one town. And a lot of times, you know, folks who've been there a long time, their narrative is right roundville; the best days are behind us; I remember how life used to be.
Austin Carter: This is like a narrative coming out of nostalgia, like we were talking about earlier.
Ariel Lavery: Yeah, it produces an expectation of how things could be and should be.
Ben Winchester: It has changed. But, change does not always mean negative for the people, especially the people that are just moving in.
Ariel Lavery: So probably one of the most important things for small towns to realize is that there are a lot of newcomers in their communities. And these people are not coming in to retire. Rather, they are coming to expand their lives.
Ben Winchester: And we call this the brain gain trend of people in their 30s 40s and 50s moving into our rural communities.
Austin Carter: That’s right, and there was a lot of data showing that many people who had moved away from their hometowns for college came back to rural areas with their degrees, their money, and their families.
Ben Winchester: Every day there are people moving into rural America, and they're not moving for pity. They're not moving to, you know, help out towns from 40 years ago, they're moving because they're seeing hope and opportunity in the middle of these regions. And these are not just prairie towns, they’re not just recreational towns. These are all rural communities across the country.
Ariel Lavery: And townies may not be welcoming these newcomers the way they should be.
Ben Winchester: We don't really know anything about these new people moving in. We don't know where to find them. We complain that they don't show up at our meetings when they're involved in their meetings. And many times, the negative narrative is very loud and holds leadership positions. So on one hand, we've got old guard folks who are like, you know what, those new people, they don't care about this town, because they're not showing up at my meetings. And meanwhile, the newcomers in town were like, I came to one meeting, and they said, my idea was dumb. And they told me to go home, or, you know. (Laughs)
Ariel Lavery: I can’t say this particular scenario happened to me, but it has taken a while for me to feel integrated into the community.
Austin Carter: Really? I hope you do now.
Ariel Lavery: Oh yeah! Hard to work on something like this podcast, where I’m interviewing tons of people, meeting tons of people, and not feel like part of the community.
Austin Carter: So, this topic of local group meetings kinda gets us closer to the concept of the middle of everywhere.
(Dramatic western music starts)
Ben Winchester: Now, today, the biggest shift we've had civically has been a shift to regional groups with a very narrow focus. And they're not doing everything in the region. They're snowmobiling.
Ariel Lavery: So, these newcomers are kinda redefining how groups serve local populations. These aren’t groups that are trying to solve every need, but rather a focused need that a lot of people have or want across a whole region.
Austin Carter: Hence, the “everywhereness”, as we might call it, of these groups.
Ariel Lavery: Yeah! And, unfortunately, Ben hasn’t always seen this new way of living in a region being embraced by people who've been there forever.
Ben Winchester: When there is somebody new in your town, if we don't find ways to actually support and realize the interests and the passions that people have, we end up with this kind of, ‘these folks just need to learn how we do it around here’ attitude, which ultimately helps no one.
Ariel Lavery: There’s one key thing small towns need to do to keep these newcomers.
Ben Winchester: Successfully integrate people into our groups.
Austin Carter: So basically, we need to focus on integrating newcomers and stop all the self-deprecating talk.
Ben Winchester: We regurgitate these negative narratives ourselves in our rural communities, and at the same time, completely shoot ourselves in the foot by doing so.
(Dramatic western music swells and fades)
Ariel Lavery: When we return, we’ll hear what living in the middle of everywhere means for people’s lifestyles, and we’ll get into some of the more difficult questions.
Scene 4 - Language Becomes Ammunition
Austin Carter: We’ve heard a bit about what the middle of everywhere phrase refers to as far as geographical reach of regional groups. What about how people are living in their small communities today?
Ariel Lavery: Right! That was kind of at the center of middle-of-everywhereness.
Ben Winchester: There's this kind of idea that nobody, no town is a one stop shop. If this was 1880, you probably didn't get out of your county much. But this isn't 1880. This is 2020. And, people have highly mobile lives, especially in our rural communities where, you know, owning a car is part and parcel of living the rural life.
(Gentle folk music starts)
Ariel Lavery: So living in the middle of everywhere is living in a place where you probably don’t work in the same place as you shop. And you probably end up somewhere totally different to do your recreation.
Ben Winchester: When we start to look at the choices people make about where they place their home and where they choose to buy their home, is in the middle of everywhere. It is in the middle of where they eat and shop and work and play.
Ariel Lavery: And another thing to think about as far as being able to live in this everywhereness is just that our local economies allow for this. Like, there are all these different industries and shops that support a regional economy and also create a lot of diversity.
Ben Winchester: Today, we're really blessed to have a diverse rural economy too because you know, if this were 150 years ago, and you have a downturn in the one industry that dominates your community, that's going to affect everybody. Today, we have a much more diverse economy than ever before. And this should be viewed as a good thing!
(Inspiring music starts)
Ariel Lavery: For example, look at this radio station housed in a major university! Our very presence in Murray provides a whole different level of economic diversity in our local economy.
Austin Carter: I have to agree with that.
Ariel Lavery: But, I have to admit, I do miss having a natural foods store within a 15 minute drive. We have nothing like that in Murray. I have to go all the way up to Paducah!
Austin Carter: Yeah, well, this kinda gets into some other pain points Ben has about how living in this everywhereness battles it’s own negative narrative.
Ben Winchester: Because of the kind of parochialism, you know, you want to be a cheerleader for your own town, you'll be like, “Oh, you know what, Hancock is great. Starbuck has nothing going on this is the place you want to be.”
Ariel Lavery: Hancock and Starbuck are a couple of small Minnesota towns.
Ben Winchester: Unless we start seriously considering how we complement each other. And when I say compliment, I mean, both, like fit together, like how do our assets fit together with our neighbors? But I also mean compliment, like, say nice things about your neighbors. Because why would people want to move to your town if all you're doing is bad-mouthing your neighbors?
Austin Carter: I have heard people here talk about our neighboring towns this way. Except, Murray really is the best place to be around here. (Both laugh)
(Playful bluegrass music starts)
Ariel Lavery: This kinda leads us to one of my favorite parts of the interview, when Ben described how he gets people to stop doing this.
Ben Winchester: My last name is Winchester. So I say I give people ammo. I give people ammo to shoot down this negative narrative.
Austin Carter: He really does own that name, doesn’t he?
Ben Winchester: It's one of the real pleasures I have in my life is that I give people language, I give people tools, I give people data, I give people facts. All of the trends about rural communities, since the year I was born, since 1970, have been upward. The rural population is growing, the rural economy has diversified, the number of nonprofits in our rural communities goes up at a large rate. So really, I mean, this story for me is diversity, demographically, socially, economically, I mean, we are in a better spot than we have ever been in many ways.
Scene 5 - How has 2020 Affected Small Communities?
Austin Carter: As a small town resident, everything he’s talked about is good news… for me and for my family.
Ariel Lavery: And for our community!
Austin Carter: Yeah, and maybe all these newcomers we’re supposedly going to see coming into small town America because of coronavirus will really feel this prosperity. Did you ever ask him about this potential mass migration people keep talking about?
Ariel Lavery: I did! But being a “numbers guy” he was a bit reluctant to say anything definitive.
Ben Winchester: There still is no firm data on that. There is a lot of speculation, there are a lot of you know, “Hey, we've got four real estate agents that all say this is happening,” but from from a research point of view, and I’m a researcher, I need some more solid data behind me before I make any grand proclamations around, you know, how many people are or where they're moving. We just know interest is really through the roof.
Austin Carter: Interest is through the roof?
Ariel Lavery: Yes, this has been measured by a Harris Poll that showed that, since the pandemic, nearly 39% of Americans are considering moving from the city to a less populated area. And 43% of urbanites responded they had been browsing real estate options.
Austin Carter: Wow! That explains my difficulty finding many good listings around here lately.
Ariel Lavery: Yeah! Maybe you’re already feeling it? He did comment on how quarantine has affected local rural economies. And, in true Winchester fashion had some really positive things to say.
Ben Winchester: In a normal non-pandemic day, we'd be traveling out and about in fairly wide distances, but the pandemic has kind of lessened that. We've seen retail sales bump up in a variety of reporting sources. So, I think we're just we're seeing a renewed focus on local foods, and local retail spaces on local redevelopment of Main Street buildings to accommodate some of these trends. So, in many ways, this has been a really great things for small towns to look inward and see how can they better serve the people they've got.
Austin Carter: So, everything he’s described in these interviews fits what I see around here a lot more accurately than the story of rural death and despair we’ve heard for years. But there’s something we haven’t talked about here that has come up quite a bit for us outside the studio.
Ariel Lavery: Yeah, what’s that?
Austin Carter: Well, we’ve been talking about the Black Lives Matter movement and how we’ve seen it take hold in our town, or in our region, and we’ve wondered about the police response in small communities.
Ariel Lavery: Mhm, yeah, we’ve had a lot of discussion on that.
Austin Carter: So, I wonder what Ben has to say about police relations in small towns and rural areas. You know, being such a cheerleader, I wonder if he has any data that shows that police have a more friendly relationship with their communities, kinda fitting with the Andy Griffith picture we’re all in love with?
(Disheartened music starts)
Ariel Lavery: Well, he wasn’t willing to say anything on the record on this. And, from what I
I’ve learned, I can’t say that there’s evidence that rural police departments are any more connected to their communities, in fact, there may be more evidence to the contrary given that so many police are posted to various communities they don’t even live in.
Austin Carter: Hmm, that’s a little disappointing. But, I know Ben really wants to stay on the positive side of his messaging. But, I was hoping he might tell me my ideals about small town life in a Mayberry setting, (Andy Griffith mayberry whistles replay briefly: are slowed and haunting) where the sheriff is your friend and mentor, were accurate.
Ariel Lavery: I’m sorry Austin. But, I think this harkens back, yet again, to what rural towns really are these days. They’re just not Mayberry.
Ariel Lavery: But this question does remind me of a Pew research article that came out: Why Rural America is Joining the Movement for Black Lives. In this article, they discuss the way residents of rural areas are responding to the Black Lives Matter movement, in that they are protesting the same brutality that urban areas feel, but that it’s on a much more personal level... and this can actually be a leveler.
(Disheartening music starts to turn more inspired)
Austin Carter: What do you mean?
Ariel Lavery: Well, Ben talked about this a bit. Small communities have to deal with each other on a level that doesn’t necessarily happen in urban communities.
Ben Winchester: In many ways for me, small towns are a great leveler. When you know each other, you've got to find ways to get past some of these divisions that may be very prominent nationally, to be able to have conversations about how to improve your community, or build that church, or whatever it is that needs to be done.
Ariel Lavery: And, again in true Winchester fashion, he wanted to talk about the positive values that people in rural communities often share, whether they’ve been around forever or they just arrived.
Ben Winchester: I would rather talk about all the values that these newcomers have that may be similar around environmental stewardship or recreational opportunity or wanting to take care of your family. (Laughs)
(Hopeful country music starts)
Ben Winchester: I think there are a lot more similar values than different values in many ways. And even I mean, we're getting into a differentiation in value systems even has become political. But we do know from the research we did at the University of Minnesota that, you know, 68% of workforce movers said they move to be to live among people with similar values. And that doesn't always mean conservative values.
Austin Carter: And I know around where I live, I don’t always share the same political views as my neighbors, but we do share similar values about space and recreation.
Conclusion
Austin Carter: You know, Ariel, I’m glad that we got you here as one of these small town newcomers.
Ariel Lavery: Thanks Austin! I have been a bit surprised to find out how much I actually have in common with people who grew up around here, just like Ben said. And, I’m glad I remembered to ask permission to use the phrase...
Ariel Lavery: I do want to get your formal blessing to use this phrase that you've been using so long as our title for our podcast.
Ben Winchester: Yeah, that's great! Go ahead and use it.
Austin Carter: Middle of Everywhere Man saves the day!
Ariel Lavery: (Laughs)
(Comforting bluegrass music starts)
Visit us at middleofeverywherepod.com. While you’re there you can sign up for our newsletter so you’ll always be the first to know about exciting updates and new episodes.
This episode of Middle of Everywhere was produced by me Ariel Lavery with editorial help from my cohost, Austin Carter. Our Editor is Naomi Starobin. Our theme music was composed and recorded by Time on the String sound studio in Paducah, Kentucky. Other scoring was from APM music. Marketing and sponsorship support comes from Dixie Lynn.Thank you to our intern Serenity Rogers. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook at middleofeverywherepod. Middle of Everywhere is a production of WKMS and PRX. This program is made possible, in part, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private organization funded by the American people.