Mark Anthony Rolo When the word got out in Willows, California, that my brother was working with the wood found in old furniture, people started dropping used pieces off in his yard.

Throughout his career as a skilled wood craftsman and as an artisan who sculpts and colors recycled wood, David Rolo has traced his deep connection to trees to the days of his youth. 

Wandering through the northern Minnesota winter woods my brother was in awe of how some of Earth’s most majestic creations sojourn from their roots to lumber mills to factories and into living rooms with the silent hope of one day returning home.  

“If you strip away the varnish and other harsh chemicals from old furniture you will find that the tree comes back to life,” David says. “A process of cellular regeneration occurs. The wood begins to curl, wants to become a circle again – back to its original creation state. I’m constantly humbled when I release wood that has been held in captive form as a dining chair or an oak table for many, many years.”

Discovering the “rebirth” of trees took on a new twist for David two years ago. One day while cutting and sanding old pine bed posts and maple bureaus he was taken by the diverse patterns of grain on each stripped piece. The flow of the grains seemed to be more than a record of the tree’s journey. Rolo was curious to learn more. And that inspired him to take a paintbrush, a tube of tempera paint and apply it to the wood. 

The points of this column are briefly stated: 

• If you want to know which medical school applicants will become country doctors, ask them three questions.

• Medical school programs aiming to select and train students for rural careers are effective.

• Rural docs and hospitals may be much more influential than they realize, particularly if they join with other primary care interest groups.

Currently, allopathic schools, i.e., those that grant M.D. degrees, are increasing in size and number. With notable exceptions they have generally disavowed any responsibility for their graduates' career choices — for their choice of specialty or location.

There is a lot of information on who is likely to become a country family doc scattered through the journal Academic Medicine over the last 40 years, but the April 2012 issue, with its papers and bibliographies, can get you started on the subject in a couple of evenings.

In this article, Howard Rabinowitz, who has spent a professional lifetime on rural medical education, followed up graduates of Jefferson Medical College 30 years after graduation to see who was in rural practice.

He analyzed his results on the basis of what was known at the time of admission, examining three self-reported factors. These are the three questions that a medical school could ask if it wanted to pick students who would take up a career in rural America.

1. Did the candidate grow up in a rural community? 

Robert Cushing/Census This chart divides the nation's adult population into four equal groups each decade. The 1st quartile (green line) are the quarter of U.S. adults in the counties with the highest percentage of those over 25 with college degrees. The 4th quarter are those adults living in the counties with the smallest percentage of people with college degrees. You can see that since 1970 the gap between the most and least educated counties has widened significantly as the nation has sorted educationally.

The country is growing increasingly unequal in the location of its educated residents.

The percentage of people in the U.S. who have a college degree has increased dramatically since 1970. Both rural and urban counties have seen a dramatic increase in the percentage of their residents who have at least a college degree.

But the distribution of highly educated people has grown increasingly unequal. People with college degrees are clustering in some counties and not others — a demographic divide with serious economic consequences.

This was not the case 40 years ago. In 1970, the distribution of people with college degrees was fairly even across the country.

Since then, however, counties have become increasingly dissimilar when it comes to educational attainment. In particular, the group of most highly educated counties has zoomed far ahead of everyone else.

You can see that happening in the chart above. Our friend Robert Cushing ranked counties each decade since 1970 by the percentage of adults with a college degree, highest to lowest. Then he divided those counties into four equal groups of adults (those over 25 years of age) — four groups, or quartiles, each with about 50 million people.