'The Modern West' Explores Struggles Small Towns Face To Survive

MELODIE EDWARDS: We want the stories to be real, to reflect the lived experience of Westerners. A lot of art and writing about the West feels a little out of touch with the real place, like they might be intended more for tourists or summer residents than locals. So we’re telling stories for and about self-identified Westerns, in all our mixed up, funky varieties. We’ve been referring to this hilarious Venn diagram: picture the word “hippies” in one circle, “rednecks” in the other circle, and “Westerners” in the overlap. That might just capture The Modern West’s attitude.

MOJO: What do you love most about radio and podcasts as mediums?  

EDWARDS: I love hearing voices. I’m so addicted in fact that I now get kind of frustrated when I’m reading a really good article and I can tell that the person they interviewed was a real character and I want to hear them, the emotion there, the humor, the anguish, the mayhem going on in their house behind them.  

But it’s a medium that’s especially conducive to telling stories about the West because our places and wildlife are such visceral characters in our lives. So I have this collection of favorite sounds I’ve collected over the years: the trickle of a glacier melting away, the cry of a baby fawn, the flop of a trout on ice, a mountain lion mom purring in her den, the huff of bison about to be released onto a reservation. Audio storytelling skips over the intellectual frontal lobe in the brain and goes straight to the heart.  

   

MOJO: As a journalistic downstater, how would you describe the view Wyomingites have toward Jackson Hole? What's accurate about the perception? What's inaccurate? And what can the two learn from each other?  

EDWARDS: Most of Wyoming has this idea of Jackson as this place where the super wealthy are sort of obliviously taking over and where the gap between the haves and have nots is widening rapidly. A lot of that is factual. It is the highest property values in the US. And even before the pandemic, the struggles of the immigrant community that keeps that town running were soaring and now those struggles to survive are worsening by the minute.  

But I think there’s also a lot of folks that live in Jackson that care about this place deeply and that it has the potential to be a great example of how a community can take some very difficult issues—poverty, climate change, housing shortages, adapting to predators, decline of ranching lifestyles—and come together to find real solutions that could work as models for the rest of the country.  

MOJO:  If Wyoming is really just a small town with the longest rural Main Street in America, as some say, how does that shape culture and what are some of the things worth noting about the promise of better telehealth which you'll be exploring in The Modern West?  

EDWARDS: The stereotype of the American West is often that of the “rugged individual,” this tough guy (always a guy) who can handle anything, can live for months on a bag of dry beans and a flask of whiskey. But that’s only one narrow version of the Westerner. Like Wallace Stegner said, actually the West at its best is all about community and finding common ground to make real change.  

But we’ve bought the stereotype we have to suffer alone. And so rural Westerners have the worst suicide rates in the country, we suffer from high childhood health disparities, we drink way more alcohol than the rest of the US, we die of drug overdoses. We’ve been forgotten by the U.S. healthcare system. And we haven’t banded together enough as communities to ask for help or to demand that telehealth live up to its promise and provide real care for those suffering in isolation from rural despair. 

But it’s looking like the pandemic may help that a bit. Finally, the health system has been forced to figure out how to topple a lot of regulatory hurdles and get doctors onto people’s screens in their homes where they’re the most comfortable. It remains to be seen if that sticks. We’ll have an episode in this season that takes a look at the viability of telehealth for rural Westerners.  

MOJO: You cover a lot of terrain in upcoming episodes, including issues of race in the West. Give us some sense of what we can look for in your piece about African-Americans living in Wyoming during the Jim Crow era?  

EDWARDS: Another stereotype Westerners cling to about themselves is that we’re so White. But actually the history of the West is extremely colorful and diverse. We’re going to have an episode all about the history of escaped slaves fleeing West to escape Jim Crow laws. Colorado, in particular, had over 20 Black towns, some of them quite successful and built on agrarian know-how. But some of these towns were destroyed through violence and racism. 

Yet the imprint of that Black history is very much alive in places like Five Points in Denver. And just like immigrants helped build a viable West in the frontier era, immigrants are helping save the West in many dying towns that otherwise can’t find employees to nurse the elderly, run the motels, build the affordable housing, etc. The West is diversifying fast while the White population is growing older and older. And that’s means there’s an exciting and vibrant infusion of energy and innovation we can see headed our way, and hopefully that’s something Western communities can learn to embrace—especially since it’s already part of our region’s history.

MOJO: You're a small-town Coloradan by origin, a book store/coffee shop owner in Laramie, and a reporter. When you think about community and your own inherent bias of what brings people together, what comes to mind?  

EDWARDS: If there’s one thing I’m most grateful for it’s my town of Laramie, Wyoming. While so many other small towns are struggling, I’m getting to raise my kids in a town with a strong sense of community. I think one thing that makes a town bond together is having a wide array of people living there. We’re a college town so we have an influx of intellectuals and international students. 

But it’s also Wyoming so we still have plenty of ranch kids and coal miner’s kids and oilfield workers roaming around. So watching your words, thinking about how someone who disagrees with you might take something, that’s built into the way our community governs. Yes, we have Black Lives Matter marches. Yes, they get pretty heated. But in the wings, people are listening to each other and trying to find solutions. That’s why small towns are valuable—they’re a model for how democracy functions on the small scale. If you can’t solve societal problems in small-town America it’s hard to imagine how to solve it nationally. That’s why we’re hoping The Modern West can be a catalyst for conversations about the issues facing our communities.

MOJO:  Why does journalism matter?  

Can I add a word to that question? Rural journalism, in particular, is foundational to a healthy society. I had the economics historian Samuel Western give me a definition of a ghost town. He said, when a town loses its school and its post office, you can consider it a ghost town. I might add the local paper to that list. 

My hometown newspaper, the Jackson County Star, is hanging on by a thread. A few years ago, it sold to one of my classmates who doesn’t have a background in journalism and lately I’ve been hearing rumblings that he wants to sell. I sometimes think I might have to drop everything and buy it. One of our episodes, we tag along with him while he gets the paper delivered for the week. 

Good journalism is how society talks to itself. It’s like our conscience, our inner voice. We don’t know what we think without good journalism. Because news happens in everyday lives, from the bottom up. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are badly, badly out of touch with rural America. And I can’t help think that has happened in tandem with the slow, painful death of rural journalism. One of the most important things you can do, no matter how slapdash it is, is take out a subscription to your town paper. Or better yet, help turn it into a nonprofit. Some of the most stable news organizations these days have gone that route.