• 05/05/2008

    wisteria Wisteria, spring 2008, Blacksburg, Virginia
    Photo: Jennifer Schwanke

    When you’ve reached a certain age and leave a place you’ve loved, keeping in touch with friends left behind can involve as much heartache as pleasure. Deaths become a depressing staple of the news they pass along. And given that the place I left a little more than three years ago is Blacksburg, Virginia, there’s been awfully much in that category to report, most of it inspiring as much bafflement as heartache.

    Even before last spring’s massacre at Virginia Tech, there was the still-unfathomable rampage by a young local named William Morva. I didn’t know Cho Seung-Hui or any of his victims, but I did know William. Blacksburg’s a small town and I was a regular at the same downtown coffee shop he haunted. I talked to him often. He charmed my toddler daughter. He had some strange ways noticeable even to her; she once wondered aloud why she had to put on her shoes before going out to play when had we both witnessed William strolling barefoot in a snowstorm. But harmless eccentricities were all they seemed to be.

    Then William went bad crazy. First he got himself locked up in the local jail for attempted burglary. One night a while later he allegedly gunned down a hospital security guard during an escape. The next morning, the first day of Tech’s fall semester, he allegedly ambushed and killed a local deputy searching for him along a nature trail near campus. He cowered in the woods until he was caught hours later, but not before Tech went on lockdown and rumors swirled about a gunman taking hostages in various campus buildings.

    Only months later, of course, that very situation would come eerily to pass.

    Considering all that, the news in January of the death of my friend Trev Smith’s 73-year old mother Dawn came as a kind of relief. It wasn’t a happy occasion but it was expected, and peaceful. And if not for a rich vein of self-sufficiency pumping through at least a couple of generations of the Smith family, it might even have been ordinary.

    But it wasn’t ordinary at all, at least not by modern American standards.

  • 05/11/2008

    Farming counties from the Dakotas down the middle of the country to Texas showed the sharpest drop in personal income between 2005 and 2006, according to recently-released data prepared by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

    The BEA reported that personal income declined in 2006 in 227 counties. In all but five of these counties, farming accounted for the entire decline in income. And, 194 of the 227 counties with declining incomes (85 percent) were rural.

    (In the BEA's calculation, personal income is a comprehensive measure of the income of all persons from all sources. It includes wages, salaries, employer-provided health insurance, dividends and interest income, social security benefits, and other types of income, including farm subsidy or disaster payments. Also, in this study, "rural" counties are defined as those that are "non metro" counties according to the U.S. Census.)

    In metro areas, the average personal income was $38,564, compared to $27,403 in nonmetro areas. For the third straight year, nonmetro income fell as a percent of metro personal income. In 2006, nonmetro personal income was just 74.6 percent of the U.S. average. This is down from 75.1 percent in 2005; 75.8 percent in 2004, and 76.1 percent in 2003.

    The five counties with the largest declines in personal income were Campbell, Zieback and Hyde counties in South Dakota; Slope County, North Dakota; and Lynn County, in Texas. All are sparsely populated counties of the Great Plains.

    To see the fifty rural (non-metro) counties with the largest percentage declines in income between 2005 and 2006, click here.

    To see the fifty rural counties with the largest percentage increases in income, click here.

    To see the fifty rural counties with the lowest personal incomes in 2006, click here.

    To see the fifty rural counties with the highest personal incomes in 2006, click here.

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The 'Dakota Effect'
05/12/2008