| |
It came by regular mail, a digital document delicious
in its apparent contradictions. It is an amateur video of a meeting of
the Enderlin Lions Club back in November. The setting is typical small-town
service club, a somewhat dingy back meeting room. The speaker is wearing
faded jeans and a plaid shirt. And yet the content is powerfully new-age,
except that it sounds like simple, common sense.
I’ll explain. I’m the director of a modest project called “Newcomer
Narratives.” The idea is to collect the stories—not data, as
in a survey, but stories—of newcomers to small-town North Dakota.
We figure that study of these stories will help North Dakota communities
market themselves to prospective citizens and just be better places to
live.
Bill and Sonja Hurlburt, then, are newcomers. In Enderlin, North Dakota.
And the Enderlin Lions invited Bill to talk to them about how they came
to relocate in Enderlin and how they are making a living there.
Bill is a computer programmer who works as a contractor for a firm in
Nevada, from which the Hurlburts moved to North Dakota. They checked out
other places, through the internet or by personal visit, but decided on
North Dakota, and selected Enderlin, for several reasons.
First, the cost of living, specifically housing. They sought, Bill says,
“value for money” through a “thorough search.” He
concludes, “North Dakota in general is the screaming deal in the
United States.”
Getting around to Enderlin specifically, they looked at properties in
Fargo, but the prices and circumstances were not attractive. They checked
out Kindred, which has become a bedroom town of Fargo, but found the market
had overshot value there, too. Driving through Enderlin, though, they
spotted a house for sale, which they thought would be a reasonable buy
for $60,000. Bill recounts, “I called a realtor, and it’s $15,000!
Suddenly I had all these thoughts of freedom going through my head.”
So they bought the house.
Comment from one savvy old Lion at a table: “Bill, if you had negotiated
a little bit, you could have gotten that house for less.”
A bargain is no bargain if it has no future prospect, but Bill sees future
prospects in North Dakota that make investment in property here promising.
As he sees it, North Dakota has a commodity-dominant economy (agriculture
and energy). Mega-cycles of commodity economies are long, but we have
entered a positive one. “This thing is going to come roaring back,”
Bill says: “This place is just blessed.” North Dakota has “nowhere
to go but up.”
The Hurlburt family—Sonja and Bill, kids in school—are wonderfully
pleased with their move. They were “pleasantly surprised” by
such amenities as the Enderlin Public Library and Maple Valley Meats,
purveyors of high-quality, identified-origin meats. They like the friendly
people and low crime rate. Auto insurance is one-third what they paid
in Nevada. When they moved in a year ago, someone brought them a Christmas
tree. Most of all, Bill says, “I sleep at night.”
Will others do the same? Will there be more newcomers? “It’s
a no-brainer,” Bill says. “This place can’t help but do
well. If word gets out, it could be a stampede.” (Murmurs from the
tables, a mixture of approval and concern.)
Not everyone is a computer programmer who can work from anywhere, and
not everyone will take to the North Dakota lifestyle the way the Hurlburts
have, but consider the larger trends. Over the past ten years we have
begun a new historical era on the northern plains, an era of some kind
of renewal. Until recently I thought this would be a slow, generation-long
process. It won’t. It will be swift, and it has begun.
This text and audio may not be copied without securing
prior permission from Plains Folk.
|
