My time on the Prairies triggered an ongoing interest in the issue of rural depopulation on the Great Plains. This NYT Magazine article looks at the abandonment of northwestern North Dakota (an area I know reasonably well) and the solution for repopulating it.

An excerpt:

It is as you imagine it: Vast. Open. Windy. Stark. Mostly flat. All but treeless. Above all, profoundly underpopulated, so much so that you might, at times, suspect it is actually unpopulated. It is not. But it is heading there.

In our national consciousness, America is a land of perpetual growth. But for the past half-century or more, much of the middle of the country has been slowly, quietly emptying out. A few people left, then more and more, until it started to resemble an organized exodus. For a while, it looked as if the area might indeed one day resemble the Great American Desert it was mistakenly labeled on early maps.

That didn't happen. At some point, throughout middle America, the population hemorrhage stopped, bottomed out.

But not here, in North Dakota. North Dakota has continued to lose people. And it didn't have that many to begin with. In 1930, its population peaked at 680,845. In 2000, it was down to 642,200, and by 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, it had dropped to 634,366. (By comparison, the national population more than doubled, to 294 million from 123 million, during the same period.) Of the 25 counties nationwide that lost the largest portions of their populations in the 1990's, 12 were in North Dakota.

Statistics are ethereal. For tangibles, all you have to do is drive the long, straight roads in the northwestern part of the state, the ones that run roughly parallel to the old railroad tracks and the Canadian border: Highway 5, Highway 50, U.S. 2. You won't pass many cars; depending upon where you're driving, and when, you may not pass any at all for a half-hour or more. What you will pass, in no small numbers, are the things left behind in the exodus: Abandoned houses. Empty stores. Churches without congregations. Community buildings gone dark. Closed schools, never to reopen.

Wry North Dakotans have suggested that such sights are now so common that they should perhaps be represented in the state seal. All of them, that is, except for the schools. No one jokes about those. Empty houses and stores and community halls and even churches are signs of a fading past; empty schools are signs of a fading future.

But even as the American small town continues what often seems like an irresistible decline, some in northwest North Dakota are mounting a resistance, an organized effort to draw people — new people, young people, families — to their small towns. And a few have taken things even further by reviving, in a fashion, the very institution that generated them in the first place: homesteading.

Check out PrairieOpportunity.com for more info (and read the rest of the story; I think writer Richard Rubin captured the different dimensions of the subject quite nicely).

The article's ending is wistful:

Tourism, which has been a savior of sorts for so much of rural America in decline, has never been as big in North Dakota as it has been elsewhere; the least-visited state in the nation, North Dakota's biggest draws are sites that Lewis and Clark passed through 200 years ago. But folks who are nostalgic for Small Town America might want to consider taking their next vacation in northwest North Dakota, where, if they visit soon, they can see such places before they disappear forever, where they can walk the streets and chat with the few folks who remain and drop in on quaint little establishments like the Centennial Bar in Grenora, where they happen to serve excellent hamburgers. Get one while you still can.

If you're a pheasant hunter (no doubt a big hobby for what I suspect is my mainly urban Toronto-based readership :) ), North Dakota has got lots of the gorgeous, ring-necked birds.

There's great fishing near Williston in Lake Sakakawea, a reservoir on the Missouri River -- well, there used to be. The Missouri depends on Rocky Mountain snowpack to restore it, and global warming is working its magic on water levels there too (see this post for details).

Theodore Roosevelt National Park has much to recommend it in terms of scenic grandeur.

And now for a total digression ...

Back in 1994, when I was still a Saskatchewanian, I was driving with some folks from a journalism conference in Ottawa to Toronto. We stopped at a westbound 401 rest stop somewhere between Belleville and Cobourg (if I remember correctly) early on a Sunday evening.

Trying to relate the huge, overwhelming volume of whizzing traffic and number of people I was experiencing at that particular moment in the time/space continuum to the lonely backroads I had driven down in far southwest Saskatchewan, where you're more likely to see an antelope before another vehicle, literally made me dizzy for a moment.

I'll guarantee you that if you go straight to a depopulating area like rural Saskatchewan or North Dakota from a densely populated city like Toronto, you'll experience the same sensation in reverse. The sparseness will blow your mind.