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GETTING THERE
DECEMBER 30, 1997NEWSHOUR TRANSCRIPT |
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Essayist Jim Fisher of the Kansas City Star considers the rebirth of a small Midwestern town.
JIM FISHER: This is Meta, Missouri, part of the Midwestern back roads that could be a poster child for every cliche about rural America--asphalted over railroad tracks, a closed school, empty streets, vacated storefronts, a closed-down lumberyard. A mini-mart is the biggest retail business. You know the litany. Kids flock to the city. Old-timers get older. Wal-mart sells cheaper. Good-bye Mayberry USA. Except what's this? A no parking sign in a town of 300? Or this--spiffy bank; every house sold, rented, or occupied, and above all this--commerce in the form of monster trucks which at the rate of 20,000 a year rumble in and out, raw materials arrive, finished goods leave, pet food, seed, fertilizer, and charcoal briquettes.
Say Meta and you define the phrase "value added." Say unemployment in this town where the weekday work force almost doubles the population and people say, "What's that?". You can see a bit of the future here in Meta and hundreds of places like it. This is a place where relatively low-skill workers toil at labor intensive jobs to turn out the products of other Americans buy without a second thought. In return, people here are able to fulfill one of the deepest yearnings many Americans have, life in a small, untrendy, rural town--neighbors they actually know, big yards where kids can play in, schools that teach the basics, low taxes, and above all elbow space and room to breathe. Rex Campbell, a University of Missouri professor of rural sociology, says that Meta defines what he calls the end of the friction of distance.
REX CAMPBELL, University of Missouri: Because of improved transportation, improved communications, people can live anywhere today. People don't have to be in New York City to be in the stock market. They can be in Meta, Missouri, and be in the stock market, or wherever, and so people have much more choice now on where they live.
JIM FISHER: Almost overnight the perception of distance in rural America has changed. Not so long ago a trip to the nearest big town, Jefferson City up the road, meant a jarring two-day ride in a wagon behind a team. Then came a Model-T, quicker, but fraught with problems. Even a 1977 Chevy Impala wasn't entirely worry free. Today's vehicles are far more dependable, able to easily amass six figures on their odometers. Fuel, factoring in inflation, is actually cheaper than it was in 1967, and roads are better. Now people jump in their new sedans or pick-ups and take along a cell phone. The friction of distance barely matters. The new way of looking at distance is a given for people who live out here, but, for most, the change is almost unnoticed.
REX CAMPBELL: Why is it? Because it's not visible; because it's not seen. People fly; people go through on the interstate; they don't--it's invisible in many ways. Rural America is not seen, and, so, therefore, it's forgotten, except by those people who want a good way of life.
JIM FISHER: In 1977, it took just two numbers to complete a telephone call in Meta, Missouri. Not now. And Diamond Pet Foods' home office, which sells to all 50 states, and an unbelievable 46 foreign countries, now resembles an insurance firm, rather than its antecedent, where farmers' grain was converted to flour, bran, cornmeal, even hog slops. But change can also be silent and less visible. Take the Rock Island Railroad tracks. Once an annihilator of distance, they've been rusting from disuse these past 18 years. But see those white poles beside the rusting tracks. They mark part of what's changed. Buried beneath them is a new highway, so to speak, a new annihilator of distance. It's called a fiberoptic line, one that can take people anywhere.
I'm Jim Fisher.
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