is because city people have stopped listening to those living in the country, and it's easy to see why.

In the past hundred years, America has changed from being mostly rural to overwhelmingly urban and suburban.

A time when cross-country travel shifted to being by air, or, if by car, using the interstate highway system.

As a result, many people no longer know what rural living is all about.

That is the purpose of this film.

To listen to those who live in rural places and learn from their experiences.

Using a 1500-mile, five-state stretch of U.S. Highway 2 from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the Sweet Grass Hills of Montana, one of the most continuous rural areas in the country, to spotlight the joys and challenges of rural America, a region where precious resources were depleted.

Like the buffalo, killed to near extinction.

Beaver pelts, used as a fashion statement by wealthy Europeans.

Clearcut its timber in order to build large cities.

Mined its iron ore and copper, leaving massive scars on the earth.

Over-farmed its land, creating the Dust Bowl and its poverty during the era of the Great Depression.

Drilled its oil, resulting in multiple booms and busts.

And with the money earned from what was taken or extracted from rural America, the money left the region, never to return.

Yet most of the food and energy consumed in this country is produced in far away rural places.

Ironically, to those in power, the politicians, big businesses, and media, rural places between the coasts are often referred to as flyover states.

Still, the people have not only persevered, they have built the region into the best-kept secret in America.

(dogs barking) (bright music) ♪ (man) So the townhouses were built, like, with a living room and kitchen and two bedrooms.

(man) Yeah, so right now we're at the Rose Wreath Company in Montreal, Wisconsin.

I was five years old when this mine closed down.

(man) It's kind of nice when you can look at the sky and see the purple.

I'm not saying there aren't some people that are still altruistic and still pure of heart and have the right motives, but politics has become a business.

(male singer) ♪ I've made up my mind ♪ Gonna keep on driving ♪ Gonna put this pedal down until I see the sun ♪ ♪ With a big lake on my left side and scrub pines on my right ♪ ♪ Nothing in between except all we've left behind ♪ (humming) ♪ ♪ Highway 2 ♪ It's always good for lovers ♪ Always good for poets ♪ And people passin' through ♪ And the road to Marquette is the birthplace of my father ♪ ♪ Open your arms wide ♪ I'm not good at starting over ♪ (humming) ♪ ♪ And Highway 2, ya know my name ♪ ♪ Or where I bow or where I came from ♪ ♪ And do our sins, do they feel the same ♪ ♪ And these wheels on your back ♪ ♪ Spinnin' round and round and round ♪ ♪ (radio announcer) This is WHNC, licensed to and operated by the Mackinac Bridge Authority.

Currently, we are experiencing winds of sufficient force in the Straits area to issue a warning to all motorists currently on the bridge and those preparing to cross.

(narrator) U.S. Route 2 from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan through the plains of Montana are among the most continuous rural places in America, averaging fewer than 10 people per square mile.

This documentary was shot over a one-year period, a span of time that included four distinct seasons.

(radio announcer) ...the outside lane.

Strong winds are blowing across the surface of the bridge.

I learned it when I grew up in Detroit, or a suburb of Detroit, you don't realize what it's like up here until you actually get up here.

And I moved up here in '73, so I've been up here well more than half my life.

I can't stand going down.

I don't even like looking at the Mackinac Bridge in the rearview mirror because everything starts to just narrow in on you as you get closer to the cities, and that's not for me.

(Bruce) We are a fourth-generation family farm.

My great-grandfather moved here in early 1900s, I believe.

Bought the land and started clearing it.

Lost it or sold it to the land bank for a while during the Depression, and then bought it back again.

They moved over from the Netherlands, settled into what is known as the Dutch community north of Rudyard where we're at.

-Started farming then.

-When I came to the UP the first time, I walked on the beach.

And I found so many stones that all had different colors, and the waves came in.

It made such a music to my ears, and the wind was rustling leaves in the trees.

I fell in love with the UP.

(Miles) I grew up in Bessemer, Michigan, and some people in my town encouraged me to apply to Julliard.

And now I have the great fortune of traveling all over Europe and North America singing in the most beautiful and prestigious opera houses in the world.

But my favorite stages to come back to are here in Ironwood, Michigan, and being surrounded by the people I grew up with.

And that love, out of everywhere I've traveled in the world, it's only in the UP that you find people like that.

I grew up in Minneapolis, and I moved here to go to Northland College.

I grew up in a very artistic family, which is why I think I kind of gravitated towards that realm to kind of bring art and community together and how powerful that can be.

I have lived here in Northern Minnesota on the Mesabi Iron Range virtually my whole life.

Went into journalism, and did that for a couple years.

Wanted to have a family, wanted to have a normal life, so to speak, so I went back to school to be a teacher, as a community college teacher.

Bemidji is one terrific community.

One of the more spectacular things going on here is the reinvention of doing things in a brand new way.

The first organ in the world with a Native American flute rack inside of it is at First Lutheran Church in Bemidji.

Something--those are the kind of things that were happening.

So Grand Forks is kind of a fascinating community, at least for me.

It still really is that embodiment of the last frontier.

There is so much opportunity here, and since it is a smaller community in a smaller state, the whole state has less population than some metropolitan areas.

So, it's such an advantage that we have here, is that the collaboration across the entire state can work really well.

is that we're so based on the river and the train tracks and where those two meet, that it does create this connection with-- all the way with the West Coast as well as as far north as you can go.

And then with the Red River you can get all the way down to the Mississippi and get all the way south.

(John) I just love it up here.

You know, I grew up on this farm.

I was away when I went to college for a couple years, moved back, started farming.

Ran my own farm here for 18, 19 years.

It's a great place to live.

I got no--I don't know, Yothey don't do much for me.

(Mirek) North Dakota has the most octogenarians, I believe.

You can still get these stories.

They had a blizzard in May.

All of a sudden, there's a snowstorm, you know, and they're all in short sleeves.

And people went to towns on horse buggies, you know, and the weather changed.

I don't know many-- 50 people froze to death that day, you know, just one day.

This country can really surprise you sometimes with the weather, you know.

I'm a third-generation rancher in Western North Dakota.

My grandfather homesteaded this ranch in 1914.

It's a cow-calf operation, and our ranch exists within the Bakken oil field as well.

We move our cattle with horses.

We also utilize the grass and provide a meat supply without anything other than using the grass that God gave them to manufacture healthy meat products for our consumers.

(Claudia) This is my grandfather's, my grandmother lived here.

I am Sioux, I'm enrolled as Sioux here on Fort Peck.

They were farmers.

This is where I was born and raised.

We understand, we respect our traditions, our culture.

Here we are in the middle of nowhere, but this is our land, this is our home where we grew up.

(Grant) We have a total of 27,000 acres up here that all our buffalo run on.

I look at it this way, being a Native American, the buffalo took care of us.

We're lucky to have 370 up here of genetically pure buffalo.

Now I take care of them.

Home is where you make it.

It doesn't matter where you are.

You can find beauty in any setting, really.

It's not like I've spent a ton of time in the cities, but there's always something to see, always something new, right?

It's always tons of people.

It's always interesting.

And then the--you have this-- you know, the sun sets there, too, and you get the beautiful cityscapes So, I mean, it is what you make it.

If you want to hate it somewhere, you can hate it anywhere.

And if you want to love it, you can, well, almost love it anywhere.

Like U.S. 2 and other major highways that go from east to west like that, reminding us of the medicine wheel.

And the medicine wheel begins, in our awareness, with the sun traveling from east to west every day.

And when it does, it shares its gifts with us.

And that makes it possible for life.

And Natives know that they have to follow that same principle.

And when we're on that path, we share what we know, and we share the gifts that we bring with us.

And then we learn new things wherever we go.

(Jonny) When you hear from a variety of different people that there's nothing out there, that there is-- rural America is very inaccessible, in one way that's a great blessing because it protects us from having outside corruption.

It gives us a barrier and a safety for the creativity and innovation to occur.

It allows us to be inventive.

It allows us to have the type of serenity and appreciation of the elements, which I think we, in a way, want to protect.

But we also recognize that we need the outside world to help us do that.

So how do you get urban communities to be able to experience the rural community?

(Emily) If you're flying over, you're missing so much.

You're missing people, you're missing a culture, you're missing a huge piece of the American fabrici that you can't get just by flying over.

You need to get in a vehicle or, you know, on a passenger train and come see for yourself what there is to see and what there is to experience.

I moved to Willow City, North Dakota, in 2012 when I was 18 years old.

And I thought I was gonna be up here for six months.

So, I fell in love with the area and I ended up staying.

I like to say I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado, -but I grew up in North Dakota.

-A lot of people think North Dakota's just a-- I don't know what they think of us.

I had lots of neighbors around here that farmed, and, boy, if you had a breakdown or you were stuck in the mud, they got done or you got done combining early, you just went over and helped.

You didn't really ever have to really ask for help.

I mean, just people just were just, that's how they were, you know, just helping everybody out.

It's still a thing around here, absolutely.

(Gene) You know, I'm 63 years old, and in those 60-some years people stopped coming to the country.

It used to be urban people would send their kids to the country to get a taste of what life is really like.

We quit doing that totally.

People want conveniences, and sometimes living in a rural area It's not easy to live 30 miles from a town of 5,000.

Two and a half hours from a town of 100,000.

I think some of the people who move to Grand Forks from the Minneapolises or even from the Fargos, kind of look at us as a country bumpkin small town, And even if we were that, that's awesome.

We should have a lot of pride in that.

What we do in this region with farming I think that people don't recognize how much they rely on the grain basket of the United States.

I didn't know that we carted soybeans across the nation on trains and that we exported 'em and all of these things, and now I do.

And now I know where it comes from.

And when I sit down and I have beer in front of me and it's Summit Brewing and it's, uh, got the little map of North Dakota, I can say, "I saw the field where this barley was grown."

And I think that's part of the charm.

People in big towns, a lot of times you don't even know who your neighbor is.

I can name all my neighbors here, 10-mile radius of my place.

And either know their kids or, uh, the rest of their families.

(Gene) When we first moved here, my wife and I, It's a cool place to live.

we had two television stations and we had a party line.

That's in my lifetime.

Now, of course, we have access to digital streaming and every kind of internet capability.

So it's easier to live in a rural area now.

With technology and high-speed internet, and the interconnectedness now that people have, is the ability for people to have businesses, to--to create economies in their hometown and not having to leave, not having to say, "Well, we gotta move to a bigger town to have a store or to run a business or to sell a product."

But saying, "We can do it right here and be successful at it."

There are very few places like this left in America that are unspoiled in the same way that other parts of America are, that have this sense of place.

It is, you know where you are.

And where in other parts of America, sometimes you wonder, you know, "Am I in Kansas City or Oklahoma City?"

Is that sense of place the same?

When you're here, you get a feeling that you are someplace else, it is unique.

And we want to keep that as much as we can.

And that's a balancing act too.

I feel like in the state of North Dakota and some of these communities, we have the benefit of 700,000 people in the entire state of North Dakota.

You go to Minneapolis, and within seven miles, some directions, you can have that many people.

Like, that density factor really changes.

So you don't get as much combatancy of, well, this is how an urban lifestyle should be and this is how a rural lifestyle should be.

It really is melded into kind of a combination meal in that sense of people understand that it's not one lifestyle or the other.

I grew up in the '90s, graduated in 2001.

Never thought I'd come back home again.

Never thought that was something that was going to be available to me.

my husband and I moved back to my family's ranch.

First and foremost, I'm a writer and a performer, but also we are raising two young girls on the family's ranch and trying to figure out how that all works together in the grand scheme of living here and existing here and thriving.

When I was growing up in the '90s, the mines were running, but we had just come out of the '80s, which was this regional depression.

My dad was laid off from a mine, never to return.

And that was my upbringing.

I don't know that I was told I would have to leave, but there was a broad assumption that unless you wanted to live subsistence with whatever you could find around here, that I shouldn't count on the mines hiring.

That was not considered an option.

None of my friends wanted to be miners, even the sons and daughters of miners were not talking about working in the mines.

It was considered what our dads did or our granddads did, but not what you did.

And, as a result, um, yeah, a lot of people left.

So I remember when I was touring in college, so I was barely-- I wasn't even 21 yet, and I toured up and down the Midwest, and I didn't know that fast-forward 15 years, my job or my livelihood would be based on telling the stories of rural America and singing the songs and still being inspired by it.

I came back, I was not a candidate to come back.

I wasn't--I was journalism, I was, you know, I was into politics, I was into all sorts-- education.

I wasn't supposed to come back.

I didn't fit the profile.

But I did, for various reasons.

It's always so fascinating to me that we wound up here again, being able to be on the ranch, because we were told that just couldn't work.

People weren't moving back home.

People weren't trying to take over the family places in that size, in that small ranch, because it wasn't economically possible.

For my one year down in Iowa, I was at a party.

And I was talking to a beautiful woman.

Uh, and, uh, I don't remember how or why that happened, but I was.

And in the get-to-know-ya conversation that people have, I found myself describing taconite and the process of, you know, blasting and crushing and producing taconite ore to make steel to a very disinterested young woman.

And it went about as well as you'd expect.

Later, I thought about, "Why did I do that?

Why did I find that interesting?

I wanted to leave this place."

But what I've always wanted was to be a writer, and what writers like is conflict, they like context and history.

They like characters.

They like, you know, dramatic events that happen.

And all of that is in abundance here.

There's plenty of that.

It's not all happy stories, but it's very fascinating and it's very much part of the broader world.

And what's interesting is that people here don't realize that they're part of that broader world, -quite often.

-The area was, for millions of years we had all kinds of different dinosaurs roaming all over.

We have different specimens that are found on a fairly regular basis.

Some of them are very, very unique, like Zuul, which was uncovered here not too long ago.

And then, of course, here comes the Ice Age with the prehistoric mammals, and then, of course, prehistoric man.

We have tribes that have been here for thousands of years.

My name is Ramey Growing Thunder.

My Dakota name is Owl Shield Woman.

My grandma, picture of my grandma is right behind me.

I'm named after her.

I was born and raised here in Poplar, Montana, right off of Highway 2.

The importance of this program and me wanting to focus on language revitalization is because it is our ancestors' identity.

And if we don't use it we're going to lose it.

When a young person, or even a person in general, knows their identity, where they came from, who they are initially, then they become grounded.

They have a stronger sense of belonging and they're able to engage more in the community to help us, you know, towards the greater good.

Basically what they did is they stripped our people, basically, of all the duties that they had.

What'd they do?

The first thing they did is they took the bison away, so the men had nothing to forage for and they depended on the federal government to provide sustenance for their whole family Not only that, andbut what'd they do?ibe.

They took our children away.

And what'd they do with our children?

Stripped 'em of names, everything.

And the parents were left at home with nothing to do.

The parents had no...

They had no goal in life 'cause they didn't have their children.

Their children were just ripped from 'em.

And a lot of those children died of a broken heart because they were stripped of everything they knew.

Take the savage out of the Indian, I guess, is what they said, which is ridiculous.

You know, when you take someone's culture and their language from 'em, they got nothin' left.

'Cause you basically left them with nothing.

And they basically depended on the federal government for everything, and that's generational.

I mean, my father went to boarding school till he ran away.

My grandfather went to boarding school and got beat.

He never, ever did teach us his language because he was afraid that eventually one day it would go back to that.

And that his grandchildren or his great-grandchildren would get beat if they knew their language.

So I'm in a situation right now where, yes, I'm Native American, but I never, ever got taught my culture or my language, so I missed out.

And I think of that every day.

I missed out on a great advantage that I could have had if the federal government didn't step in.

And I have basically denied my children that and my grandchildren that because I never got that opportunity.

Our history really involves a lot of colonization.

There was a point in time where we lived in teepees.

There was a point in time where we relied on the buffalo for food, for shelter, for clothing.

They were basically our Walmart back in the day.

We could get everything we needed from them.

And it's still like that today.

And the belief of the elders now is there's a strong resurgence with the buffalo.

They're back, so our identity is coming back even stronger.

And with identity is a culture, and language is the carrier of culture.

So, we've really been inflicted with a lot of atrocities, whether it was education.

There was a point in time in our history where the Carlisle Boarding School, Henry Richard Pratt was the one that pushed, "Kill the Indian and save the man."

And from that began a curriculum that had students that were shipped from all over the United States to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and they were placed.

Through my research in my master's degree, I realize and I understand that the students were placed in rooms with other students from, like, for example, a student from Montana was placed with somebody from Arizona and Washington.

And the idea was the main language was English.

They wanted the students to assimilate, to be colonized.

One of the greatest days I ever had as an accomplishment for me, and that was the first time I was chairman.

And I went out there in the middle of that storm and watched them turn 'em loose here on our reservation.

And I thought, they weren't even here when my grandfather was here.

And I thought, "How big of a historic event is this that after over a hundred years we have our bison back here on our reservation?"

And just to see them out there, you go drive out there, and you see them out there roaming, and it's just--I don't know.

I think it's only a Native American can have that feeling and the pride and the joy to see them back there on their original lands, back here over a hundred years later.

I don't know how to explain it, but it just made me feel really good inside.

And every time I go out there I think of that.

(soft guitar music) ♪ (male singer) ♪ Now choppers grind your axes ♪ And sawyers, file your saws ♪ And teamsters mend your harnesses ♪ ♪ For these are the lumbering laws ♪ ♪ The blacksmith and the tinker ♪ ♪ They mend their tools so neat ♪ ♪ ♪ We dare not fear the work day, boys ♪ ♪ The tools they are complete ♪ ♪ (radio announcer) ...away on this road.

We've seen a couple people pull off and try to wait for a few minutes, but all of them are driving with their flashers on right now.

(engine humming) (mining whistle) (Ivan) There ya go.

That's what I wanted you to hear.

The mining whistle.

(mining whistle continues) The mining whistle.

That's a symbol that, uh, lunch time, noon hour, or it's 3:00 or 3:30, uh, time to go home, shift is over type.

And they've kept it all these years, even if it's been since the '60s since the mine closed, just as a memorial and a tribute.

I think that's really important.

I love to hear that go off, and sometimes I can hear it off way in Ironwood, -you can hear that.

-The late 1870s, people started coming up here and looking for that iron ore. there was more and more Anof these prospectors' coming through the woods here and digging test pits.

And they were finding where the-- where the iron ore formation was.

'Cause iron ore formation was something like 80 miles long.

It runs, like, in a northeasterly direction all the way to Lake Gogebic.

But that's what they're looking for and that's what they mined here.

They couldn't really mine anything because there was just a big wilderness back then, About 1884, the Milwaukee Lake Shore Railroad started coming up here from Wisconsin.

It came up north.

When it got to Watersmeet, they went all the way here.

And that's when they started and that's when they started really opening up iron mines.

The first iron ore was shipped out in October, I think, of 1884, from Bessemer.

Now, over the years, all together in this whole range on the Michigan and Wisconsin side, they shipped out 325 million tons of iron ore.

It was these iron ore miners here that helped build this country.

All the skyscrapers and the railroads and the ships and everything that we needed over the years.

And farther away from here in the Copper Country, they had all these copper mines, so, really, iron--iron and copper, two of the building blocks of civilization.

You know, you can't do much without 'em.

And that--it's these people living up here that, you know, produced all that, mined all of it.

You go to the Soudan Mine here, the underground mine on the Mesabi Range, you go down to the State Park, which is a display of all the mining activity, and you go down in the same shaft that the miners used to go down, and you walk around down in the ore face And there'll be guys whwho tell ya,d to "Oh, yeah, this is just one finger of a vast body of ore, and if they ever figure out how to get further down, there's even more down there."

And so it's this kind of-- the myth of there's always more that you're just missing.

And, "If only they let us work and kept paying us to keep digging, we could really get even more."

But it's an economic issue.

It's the cost of getting that ore. if it's too expensive to get it out,point, that's when the mine dies, not because they run out of ore.

I mean, the Earth, at its core, is a molten ball of iron that's pure, you know?

And so if you could get down to the center of the Earth and pull out some of that liquid iron, I bet that'd be really easy to work with if I was making steel.

But getting it from the center of the Earth up to our--up to our level is, uh, economically unfeasible.

(Ivan) But the mining companies were only for the mining companies.

They got their people in the city commission and did whatever they could to keep out any industry, while they were racking in all the wealth.

Me being a kid in grade school, I didn't understand why the following year a lot of the classmates weren't there anymore.

When they pulled out, we were left without an industrial base, so, people had to move.

So, now, at this stage, I think it's time that they started giving back to the communities that really built them.

In other words, you know, it's time you start putting some money into projects that we want here to-- as memorials to all the 1100 men, say, who died underground.

(Aaron) At the core of this, this is a story of what corporations, in their modern form, are capable of.

And when they were very unregulated, when they first formed, you know, we see just playing with the lives of men and families and whole communities in how they conducted their business and how difficult it was to resist the enormous amount of money that those early big corporations could command.

U.S. Steel was like a godhead.

They depicted it in the newspaper as an octopus with tentacles that could reach and grab everything.

It was--it was literally called, in the newspaper, "the Corporation" with a capital C. Just imagine that kind of power and having it wielded in a town of 10,000 to 15,000 people, how much power it would seem that you were up against.

The wealth that left this area, never to return.

I mean, when you look at all the opera houses and clubs in places like Cleveland and New York City, Rockefeller and Carnegie are names you've heard of and their various charitable works and money they've spent and things they've done are things you might have heard of.

Both those guys became the number one and two richest guy in America because they sold out to U.S. Steel.

U.S. Steel, J.P. Morgan bought them out.

That money came from here.

If we're gonna have economic development, especially in the rural areas where we're gonna harvest natural resources, ship 'em away to someone else, the real wealth didn't stay here.

And the money from the iron ranges went to the Carnegie Mellon banks, it went out East, it went to other areas.

Carnegie didn't set up their banks in Duluth.

The real wealth has gone out.

We see that possibility occurring again up in the Iron Range with the development of new mines.

It's very difficult to be opposed to mining and then want to drive a car or wear jewelry or do anything else.

It has to come from somewhere.

The issue we're gonna wrestle with, that my students, tomorrow's youth will wrestle with, is how do we extract these resources so we preserve the treasure of our fresh water and the treasure of our natural beauty for future generations.

And secondly, which is almost never talked about, which has been the great tragedy of this region, how do we keep the money here?

Because we are, in essence, a colonial economy where the wealth is pulled out of the ground.

And, yes, the miners' jobs are good jobs.

My wife's family were miners and they made a good living.

When the mines were there.

But when the mines were gone, there was nothing left for them.

Carnegie still had the money.

Mellon still had the money.

They didn't care about the mine disappearing because they kept that most valuable resource.

So, I'm not here to discuss politics and how we do this, but if we don't do it, the tragedy of colonial resource extraction occurs again and again in our region.

And it just plays out again.

(soft guitar music) ♪ (traffic whizzes past) ♪ (engine revving) (engine revving) (engines revving) ♪ (group vocalizing) ♪ (Tasha) We both grew up in Michigan.

Growing up, nobody lives in the UP.

You know, who are those people that live up there.

I mean, we maybe took one family vacation up here to probably see Tahquamenon Falls This area has some history of dog mushing.

So this kind of fit the right bill for what we were looking for.

Our lifestyle, with 200 dogs and a business that relies on snow, and we need a rural environment for so that we don't have to cross paved roads.

Unfortunately, there's not many places in the U.S.

So this was it, we thought we'd try it for a couple years, and 17 years later we're still here.

(laughs) With really no intention of leaving.

I've been in Ironwood for 45 years now, and what drew me up here, basically, was the out of doors.

But I spent almost 20 years in economic development in the city of Ironwood, where we did nothing but physical, backbreaking work to try to get jobs in the area, and it didn't work.

I was the head of Coleman Engineering at the time.

I made a conscious effort in about 2000 to change the game up with a company, and I moved our whole firm into Downtown Ironwood.

We talked about starting a brewery in about 2015, and so we found this building, this really cool old building, did all the remodeling ourselves, and opened it up in the spring of 2017.

People were really waiting to have something else, some other place to go to like this, and what better place than craft beer in a cool old building.

(Tom) You know, we wanted to be close to the Iron Belle Trail, which is right across the street from us.

We wanted to be in downtown.

We wanted to utilize the local assets that we were here for.

It was good timing because Andy, him and his family were moving back to town, so it was a really perfect timing thing -for all of us.

-Our kids are nine and seven now, but it's two and a half hours to the hospital.

So, um, that makes a difference in just what's available for everyday services.

And the biggest question we get asked are, -"Where do you shop?"

-It's weird to think that, you know, when there's so many parts of the country that they think of snow as a negative thing, and, really, snow is probably one of our biggest assets here.

(John) We see people driving just a few hours, but where they're coming from they don't have any snow and we have lots of snow.

and 30 miles in any direction gets an inch.et over a foot We have a lot of people coming up from Chicago, Madison, the Twin Cities, to come up here to use our snow.

(Tom) The snow is something that brings people back year after year after year.

We're seeing people that come here, they come here once and then they come back -and they buy a house.

-There was a time when it wasn't necessarily a positive thing to be a UPer.

And a lot of people, they wanted to leave.

I mean, I think of my parents.

They left the UP to go downstate to work in the 1960s.

My generation, there was some of the similar feelings.

So it was more of there's a big world out there and I want to see that world, and the UP is so small.

But like a lot of people, once I got out there, as much as I loved wherever I was, whenever I'd come back to the UP, I'd say, "There's something about this place."

And if I could come back there and get a good job, a meaningful job that made a good living, I'd do it, I'd do it in a second.

And so we've been back 12 years now.

And this is something that I see a lot happening with people wanting to come back.

There's more people who want to come back than want to leave.

And more and more younger people who are growing up here don't want to leave.

They're only leaving because of financial pressures to do so.

You know, even if they go to college here, they're just not finding meaningful work and sustainable work.

But I also see a lot of young people not just who are from here but who are going to school here, who are figuring out ways to stay because they love this place.

Our university kind of specializes in that kind of young person who wants to explore, wants to get out, loves the outdoors.

Because they love this environment and they want to stay.

And so the hardest part is finding something to keep them here and, uh, but they're being really creative in figuring out how to do that on their own.

So I think that's one of the great changes that you're seeing, and I think it's also that identity of the UPer isn't something that people look at as a yoke anymore.

It's something they celebrate.

And it's also changing.

It's not just a stereotype of, like, tomorrow's opening day hunting season.

But there's another UP, a new identity of the UP that's been growing that is what some people would call the quiet sport identity of recreation, respect for the environment, and appreciation for what makes the UP special and wanting to keep it that way as much as we can with the fact that there are gonna be people that want to come here and discover this place and will continue to do so.

When I leave my home, which is in a placed called Balsam Township, Itasca County, Minnesota, I live in a township where you bring your own garbage to the dump and you have your own septic system, you take care of your own property, you have to plow your own driveway.

And that's our world.

And if I'm gonna go, as I have, say, give a speech in Minneapolis, and I'll drive on the township road, I'll drive past a sign that says "End of Maintenance."

In other words, the local government, won't go past there even to do anything.vernment, I'm gonna drive on a series of county roads, a series of state highways, and then finally on an interstate.

And each time I turn, I'm turning into more civilization.

And as I approach the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, I'm entering what feels like a different country, a different nation.

And here's the thing, I will do that and I will see that, but there are no conditions where a person from that world ever has to drive the same roads back and go and haul garbage to the dump on Saturday morning the way I do.

The city's become that foreign land, and, really, repel a lot of rural people, like they can't handle driving there so they don't.

They don't want to see Thethe people there.

They don't know anything Tabout the people down there.

They just know that they're different and that, "They'll never understand me and so why should I bother to learn about them?"

And--and that's a perspective you see a lot.

They just see that place as foreign and almost like a walled city.

That drives a lot of the what they call rural-urban divide in shorthand, which, of course, has that impact on our politics, but, really, more than our politics, our culture.

How people relate to one another.

The notion that America is one thing is, I think, slipping away a little bit, and there's America for us and America for the people who are not like us.

(soft, bright music) ♪ (male singer) ♪ Of all the tradesmen going ashore ♪ ♪ A peddler's my delight ♪ For if he rambles all the day ♪ ♪ He'll comfort you at night ♪ With his little pack upon his back ♪ ♪ He'll travel to and fro ♪ He's called the jolly rover wherever he will go ♪ (vocalizing) ♪ (Emily) For the most part we're very fortunate to have people in key positions that care about their job, they care about what they work for, they care about their employees, they care about the community, and they--they--they care that everything works together.

And you don't always get that in other places, but in small areas, small rural areas that are used to working together whether you like each other or not, it--it works for us and...

So sometimes when we see what happens in bigger communities, we don't-- we don't always understand because that's not how-- that's not how we do things here.

(Rone) So when you cross that river, you don't know what you've crossed.

You might drive through this highway and not ever notice what's going on.

But there's a lot more, I think, attached to that Highway 2.

Once you land here and you try to bring your big city perspective here, you get an immediate, um, lesson on how to slow down.

(Jeff) Headin' over to some ground that we call Ross's.

Just because that was the name of the homesteader that had that ground way back in, you know, early 1900s.

The area around that, there's a little knoll or a little hill that pretty much opens up the view from the west all the way around through the south to the northeast.

You'll have, like, a 270, 300-degree view of the surrounding area.

So we're just busting across a section line here, you know, every mile's square.

You've got the section lines.

This is how everyone gets in and out.

(wind blowing against microphone) Where the grainery is on the horizon there, we call that the Adobe Ridge because it's adobe soil.

You go further up onto the horizon there, just tucked below the horizon a little bit is Chester.

You can kind of see the buildings in a little bit.

As the crow flies, we're probably 15 miles away.

So if you come southeast from the Sweet Grass Hills, there's a couple fields that are mixed in there, some hay fields and stuff, but for the most part it's native grasses all the way to that fence line.

I'm trying to find the actual pea seed down in here.

Right there.

Got a good ball of roots on it.

Already startin' to nodulate.

So, peas, your legumes, will nodulate in those little white balls.

They're little balls of nitrogen.

So, fertilizer, which we spread out here, helps everything grow in the simple sense of it.

These plants create their own nitrogen.

So the next crop that goes down will be able to take advantage of the nitrogen that these plants put into the soil.

It's looking good right now.

You can see, it's actually a little bit wet, still got some moisture down there.

It's still really good soil.

We just need a little more rain to make it work.

If we get the rain, you know, it's great.

If we don't, it--it's not.

Supposed to come this weekend, so, hopefully, we get another drink on it, and then we'll be -really off to the races.

-The type of person that is drawn to western North Dakota and the Bakken region has changed over the last decade.

Initially, we had exploration, and so we had single men, typically, or men that were living apart from their families that were coming up here to work their hitch, and then they would head back home on their off week or their off two weeks.

What we have now is, we have fam-- we have families.

And so, I get really kind of choked up about that, because we were told for years, "You'll never get that.

You will just be an oil boom community."

But we have diligently worked to define ourselves as a family community, and in doing so, our school district numbers have tripled.

We've been building schools, we've been building facilities that focus on family, from hockey skating rinks to gymnastic space to an indoor swimming pool for the swim teams.

We've just really focused on family.

We focused on daycare, and now we're working very diligently on single-family housing.

So, clearly, those projects are so much more fun and exciting as a community develops than building roads and sewer treatment plants So we're so excited for the people who are coming here, and the first thing they always kind of point out after spending about a year here is this community is defined by its people, and a lot of people are drawn to that.

(Lela) We may be a state, but we're like a big community.

And we care about each other.

And if things don't go right for the other part of the state, we're all going to suffer.

If our farmers don't succeed this year, we're all going to suffer.

Town and in the country.

I think there is that big-family feeling.

We're gonna take care of each other.

Ranches like mine that, you know, the small farms and ranches in this country are just-- they're, you know, no matter what we want or don't want, it's just-- it's the day of the past.

This ranch here has 12 homesteads on it, and those are 12 families that once lived and worked on this ranch that have been absorbed by the Veeder ranch over the years, and now, the Veeder family, myself and my daughter and son-in-law, it's our ranch, and it could probably sustain one family, but likely, we'll always have to have some outside income as one of a number of businesses.

On our smaller ranch, we're still trying to figure out how to diversify that so that we could maybe do that work full time, and that's where we're at.

So what it looks like is my husband working in the oil field, me working as a creative person.

Couldn't have done that 20 years ago because of lack of the internet, right?

The world has shrunk for me, professionally, which has been wonderful, also also, the world has come to Watford City.

Right now, we have Mom and Dad down the road.

So if we're home and he's gone, that's okay, because someone's on the place.

But we can't take a family trip, because we have to be home and take care of the animals.

We start calving here later than many people, we start in, like, the first of May.

The operation starts with early morning gathering of the cows that have had calves.

Two different bunches to brand and get them out to the grass they need to have.

My gathering, we start early in the morning, because cattle don't do well in the heat, So we start at-- try about 7:30 in the morning.

And you have a number of riders that, throughout the course of the last week or 10 days, have been moving cattle from other pastures into one kind of gathering pasture, so the riders are somewhat familiar with how we do this.

We gather them all into one big bunch on a flat, then you take that and kinda use a funnel-shaped fence designed to get 'em into corrals.

Once you get 'em into the corrals, then the cows and the calves are mixed up, so then you sort the cows away from the calves so that you can actually pay attention to the calves.

The calves are then moved into a smaller enclosure where, the way we do it is we have young wranglers that just throw them.

They grab a leg and throw 'em.

They castrate them and give them shots to prevent pneumonia and communicable-type diseases in cattle, which are required.

A lot of those, you have to do that with your cattle to keep your herds clean.

We administer one insecticide tag on them, and that keeps the flies and things away from the wound when they're castrated, and it also-- when they nurse on the cow, it rubs on the cow and keeps the flies away.

In this country, in the summer, flies are really hard on cattle.

So you inoculate them and brand them.

We brand them because we're in big, wide-open rough country that, if they leave the place or wind up getting outside the place, then you don't have any proof of ownership to them, and it's a way to provide ownership throughout the lifetime of that animal.

And then, we also put a number identification in their ear too, so when they're out in the summer, those calves in that group, there is a huge bunch of animals that are all straight black, and it's hard to tell one from another.

So you put the tags in the ears so-- mainly, that's for health reasons.

You see one that's not doing well, then you can identify it.

And it just happened, we moved cattle this morning now from this gathering ground to pastures, and some of the calves got away and got back, came back to where we started.

Well, when they have a tag in the ear, now I'll know which ones they are and I'll get 'em back with their cows.

But that's the process.

We won't really gather them again and separate them again till probably mid-October.

Then they'll get a booster shot, and then, end of November, they'll get sold.

In North Dakota, we wanna make sure we have enough grass.

And that's what happens up here.

You really breed your herd so that they can withstand the weather.

We have a really sheltered ranch.

They have lots of coulees and gullies to protect themselves, but they're also bred to be hardy and to withstand the environment.

They're animals just like the deer, so of course, you feed them more in the winter.

If it's really, really cold, you make sure they have hay to bed down in.

You do everything you can.

So to ease the burden of calving season but also to protect our cattle, because we can't be out with them every day.

But I remember being a little girl and calving in March, or the end of March, and there's a big snowstorm, and my dad and my grandpa going out there and hauling calves into the basement and warming them up with a hair dryer and just being devastated when they couldn't save them.

Not because of the bottom line, but because it's an animal, it's their animal.

(Tim) Tourism is a big industry up here.

Kinda the three Ts up here in the Headwaters region are timber, taconite, and tourism.

When it comes to the tourism part, keeping these trees, going to Itasca State Park, visiting the natural beauty.

That's why people come up here.

The reason we have clean lakes is because of the Mississippi Headwaters Board and our zoning restrictions that we place on this.

If you go on most of the major rivers, like the Nile or the Amazon, you'll see people right up next to the river working, living by the river.

When you come up to this, you won't see a lot of that, because we moved the houses back.

We require, like, a hundred or so, 200 feet away from the river.

That's to help protect the river.

So you can go down the Mississippi River and feel like you're in the Boundary Waters area, because you won't see homes.

Even though they might be over the lip of the bank, you won't be able to see 'em from the river, and that's all about protecting the natural beauty and the recreational values of the river.

(Sally) I've lived on the Mississippi River my whole entire life.

and the Mississippi River comes right through Cass, Northern Cass Lake.

It's really beautiful.

It's really clean.

You know your neighbors.

One of the things that I really, really love about this area That's is the fact that it is so peaceful, so quiet.

As kids, Mom would just say, "Okay, go out and play," and we'd say, "Okay, we're gonna go swimming."

"Sure, go ahead."

We'd walk to the lake and go swimming.

None of us drowned, thank goodness.

Bena, Minnesota, is my home.

I own the Big Winnie Store, RV Park, and Campground.

I've been owning it for about 14, 15 years.

I own it with my husband, Matthew Dahl-Wooley.

My name was Arnold Dahl.

With the marriage, we became Dahl-Wooley.

We hyphenated our names.

About 14, 15 years ago, me and Matthew had come back, because there was a funeral in my family.

And so, we came over and were walking the grounds, and it was very much in disrepair.

As we're walking the grounds, Matthew looks at me and he goes, And I'm thinking, "S"Think about what?"

And he says, "Well, what do you think about purchasing this place from your father?"

We're literally standing in weeds up to our knees.

"Dad, it's kinda run-down over here,"e, and he goes, "Well, I'm getting old."

So me and Matthew decided to come back and purchase this place from my father and start the restoration process.

It's been a real labor of love, I have to say.

Literally, my blood, sweat, and tears are in this place.

This building has been in my family since 1932.

There's a lot of history here with my great-great-grandfather, my great-grandmother.

She was a very wonderful woman, Native, 'cause I am Native American as well.

But we knew that we just needed to basically roll our sleeves up and start the restoration process.

'Cause it's a beautiful building, it has such beautiful history, and a lot of it's related to my family and the Native Americans and the other populations This building is more than just a property.

It's kind of a step back in time as to see what the architecture used to be, and then, what the history of the people used to be, and the families as well.

So we have our convenience store and little laundromat and our restrooms, and the restrooms were a big thing for people to stop, because there's nothing else along the way, It's like, "Oh, hey, there's a convenience store, we can get some gas, get some snacks, use the restroom," and then, "Oh, hey, there's an RV park here, what is this?"

It's a campground.

When people stop, we always have to let them know, if they're curious as to what Bena is, there was a German prisoner camp that was here, the CCC camps, and those were quite popular in the area, 'cause it's so remote.

We always have to stress to people that the German prisoners were treated very, very well.

We do have pictures of the historical history throughout our store, 'cause my family has been a part of this history for many years.

And so, that's why it became important to me to bring different jobs and opportunities to this place, because once you're in rural America, it's-- like, well, "I wanna live here, it's beautiful, it's gorgeous.

Well...how do I take care of myself?"

There's a lot of business opportunities that are in the area, but you have to look or you have to be creative.

Here, we wanted to make sure there were jobs as well, so we do have jobs for our community.

'Cause this is what's important for the restoration of our community so we don't lose that history.

We don't want to lose that family connection, we don't want to lose any of that, because it's very important.

(Anthony) The first time I came down Birch Hill on Highway 2, and the vista opened up before me, it just created a feeling in me that I really liked.

I've always been partial to water.

I grew up near Lake Michigan, have always had to live near water.

I love to fish, just the nature, the lack of the fast pace of the city.

It just all appealed to me a great deal.

(Rose) I really like being outside, so really, that's what I like about this area, and just the community and how people really support one another, so that's why I like it up here.

I love bringing people together.

I did the tunnel, a mosaic mural project.

It was so awesome how many people -were supporting us.

-I grew up in Ashland.

Like many kids, when I turned 18, I couldn't recognize what a gem it was.

Nothing to do here, everybody's got a bad attitude.

I'm gonna go out into the world and see all these wonderful things.

And I'm really, really glad I did.

I got a chance to travel quite a bit.

Only then could I put my hometown in context, in perspective.

It was really a valuable learning experience for me.

Coming back to Ashland to take care of my mom, who was needing some help as she aged, and then deciding to stay here, and being able to use some of those lessons that I learned living in other communities, to be able to bring the best of what I learned back to my community, and we see, we see these people that are returning to their communities all over, and how dedicated they are, because they've seen-- they've been able to compare.

But so many people come to Ashland-- come back to Ashland or move here for the first time because we're looking at a place that is a little off the beaten path.

We're up here way on the shores of Lake Superior, in Northern Wisconsin.

We're not that easy to get to, Ironically, that's what therthe beauty is up here.ghway.

I can't imagine living anywhere else.

I have lived in a lot of places, but I've never lived anywhere as beautiful as Ashland is.

There's something about Lake Superior, and I have a hard time being articulate about it, kind of like a really strong grandmother, you know, that you love her and you appreciate her magnificence, but you need to respect her power and make sure she's taken care of.

People are gonna come, they're gonna discover this place, and they're gonna wanna live here, and they're gonna want homes, and they're gonna want condominiums, or they're gonna wantt to be in the forest,, so they're gonna want this.

And we have to think now so it doesn't change the place in a way thate mitigate that makes it unrecognizable?

(feet crunching) (Bill) This is one of my favorite trails in the UP.

I like this one for a couple of reasons.

One is that it's not very well known, so it's not very busy, and two, it runs through working forest, so for me, as a forester and a biologist, I can see different practices being implemented and then I can watch those as the years go by, as I hike these stretches of trail.

But I like this little grove of red pines, 'cause these are fire origin pines, and they predate the historic logging era.

They were youngsters at the time, so the loggers didn't pay much attention to 'em, but all throughout here, there's about maybe two acres of these really big, old veteran red pines who had their origins in a wildfire, before the loggers and the settlers got here.

You think back to maybe during that logging era, this would have been about the size of most of the trees that were harvested.

The heyday of the logging period was roughly 1870s to 1900.

In the UP, a lot of the pine logging was done by 1900, then they shifted to logging the hardwoods, maples, broadleaf species.

They picked the pines first because there were a lot of big pines close to the lakeshore, so they were easy to get at.

And the river access was fairly easy, and pine floats, so they could float 'em down the locks.

Of course, history is rich with the river rats and the picaroons and the log booms and the dams and the sluices, and the logging camps, you can almost hear the echoes of their voices in here.

But after the pineries were largely exhausted, then different technologies came on board.

It became feasible to log the hardwoods, the maples.

They made it into furniture and chemicals and other materials.

But they couldn't float the hardwoods very easily because they don't float.

So they used the narrow-gauge railway and a combination of older horse technology to pull those logs to a rail head, a spur that was put in.

But anyway, I want to drill one of these trees.

Try to pick one that's not... absolutely huge.

I got pretty close to the center.

Pith would be about right there.

Put that so the youngest wood is up here.

The wood up here is only a year old.

I'm just gonna estimate a little bit.

At least 135 years old.

We were in the thick of the logging era around here in the 1890s.

This grove of red pine here were probably just seedlings or saplings when the big logs were being cut out.

Lot of history that you can read into an increment core.

Forestry, logging, and the forest industry are three different entities.

They're related, of course, but they involve considerably different skills and abilities.

A forester is the one who grows the forest.

She understands the silviculture, the needs of the trees, how they regenerate, how long it takes, how frequent they are, what sort of light conditions and soil conditions are favorable for different species.

A forester manages the forest using the ecological principles of the forest itself to produce outcomes for society.

A logger is a highly skilled businessman who specializes in merchandizing standing trees into cut-length products that he or she can resell to the industry.

Now, the forest industry takes roundwood products bought from a logger and turns them into products that you and I use every day.

Wood products are the most environmental raw material we have at our disposal.

They're renewable, which is great.

You manage them properly, the trees grow back generation after generation after generation.

But it also takes less power and other resources to produce wood products than it does steel, concrete, petroleum products or anything else.

So what's part of what makes me happy to be a forester is that I'm working with a resource that has multiple benefits.

In addition to having real environmentally friendly raw material at our disposal, there's also high water quality, wildlife habitat.

We're on a hiking trail.

And forests are very complex systems that we basically know how to manage, but we do need habitat, we do need water, we do need wood products, so we do need to manage forests.

As long as a forest stays as a forest and doesn't get converted into a second home, a subdivision, or something else, as long as it stays as a forest and as long as it stays as a working forest-- and those are big ifs-- the forest will be in good shape.

(mellow guitar music) ♪ (male singer) ♪ Feel it through the window on a warm summer's night ♪ ♪ Hear it in your ears, lets your heart take flight ♪ ♪ There's a crackle in the sky ♪ There's a twinkle in your eye ♪ ♪ The Ahwahnee wind down that lost narrow road ♪ ♪ ♪ The Ahwahnee wind down that lost narrow road ♪ ♪ Cools down your skin and it warms in your soul ♪ ♪ Gonna conjure this spirit when friends move on ♪ ♪ They half new moon rises and stars fall down ♪ ♪ (Kipp) Well, we're right at the homestead right now, I guess, if you wanna call it.

My dad bought this in '71.

This side of the farm actually sits where an old town used to be called Fair Oak.

The population was not very many.

My two other brothers and myself and my dad used to farm together for many, many years, and my dad passed away two years ago.

We're in about the eighth or ninth inning of harvesting spring wheat.

That's my brother Cory in that combine.

We try to raise the healthiest, best grain possible, just like what you're seeing.

it's as good as you can get for the area that we are in.

No different for the cattlemen.

They are trying to raise the healthiest, best product that they can, the best cow, the best hog, the best lamb, whatever livestock it is.

And that's what we're trying to do out here.

We're trying to survive by producing the healthiest crop that we can.

And I think so many people don't understand that, because they don't know what is-- the hard work that is put into raising these crops.

And they hear terms of "genetically modified."

We have been genetically modifying wheat from the very beginning of time.

Corn and spring wheat and durum.

If the scientists and the people that are working with wheat don't genetically modify the products that we're raising, they're gonna die off, because they only last so long.

The wheat that was grown 500 years ago won't survive now, so we've crossbred and created these different varieties to create better wheat, better quality, so we can feed the world.

'Cause there's a lot of people.

And I just--I wish people would understand that.

It's, um--because I'm giving this food to my family, and they're gonna give it to their family.

In a small community like Rugby, everybody is affected by the cattle market, the grain market, how the farmers are doing, and they feel it on Main Street, they feel it everywhere.

They always used to say, Main Street and Smalltown USA are doing well,s doing well, and that's really true, because when the farmer is doing well, we want to spend that money.

We need to update equipment, we need to buy new stuff that we've been putting off for years, and that makes such a huge difference.

If it's a good year, we wanna go buy a different vehicle or a piece of equipment.

And when the dealerships are doing well, the manufacturers do well, it just goes down the line.

You have to be able to learn from history.

this country was devastated with the great Dust Bowl, the Depression, people leaving by the hundreds because they couldn't survive.

This land was parched from being dry.

And, you know, the people that survived that era are remarkable, because they must have been a strong-willed people.

But they probably didn't have anyplace else to go, so they survived with family, friends.

If we don't learn from how they farmed, we'll do it again, because this used to be plowed, and it was plowed and plowed and plowed, 'cause that was the only way we could kill the weeds.

Well, then they created shelterbelts, and that helped.

And then, they were able to create certain herbicides that that helped.

And then, all of a sudden, we didn't have to till the ground.

We could no-till, and we could seed right into the stubble.

The dirt doesn't blow away like it used to.

It's just fantastic that we're able to farm the way we do, compared to how they used to.

We farm about a thousand acres.

Currently, we are a crop farm, we're just raising hay, we have that for market, for sale.

The process starts now the way my brother's out mowing.

We start to, once the hay crop gets high enough, we go out with a tractor and mower, mow it down, and it's put into a windrow.

For our process, we make silage bales, we'll be ready to bale this afternoon, and we'll bale it up, pick it up, wrap it.

That's our basic process.

It's pretty straightforward, You're done with the process until you're ready to feed or ready to move it out, come wintertime.

(Jeff) So we just finished harvest on Wednesday night.

Right at dark, we wrapped up the final bit of cutting we had.

Elevator closes at eight, so we, uh-- we were able to get everything cut in the field, and we just filled the trucks, filled the cart, and filled the combines.

Shut down, took our celebratory picture, we hauled everything in to the elevator.

The crew I had is all family and friends.

My younger brother is a banker, and he took a couple weeks off to come and help.

My older brother is a software inventory and accounting tech, and he took time off and came up and helped.

Got a buddy from Missoula, he came up and helped for the whole harvest.

He actually was here a couple days before we started and just left early this morning.

It's really indicative of the crew that comes to help.

They're not coming to make a ton of money, they're not obligated in any way.

It's a time for them to get away from the rat race, come out here to scenery like this, and be a part of a team, a different kind of camaraderie, you know?

You get up, you get dirty, you work all day, you work as a team.

We get through it, and it's always a great time.

So, these were rib-high Austrian peas.

They were blooming, or just on the verge of blooming, when we were out here, and now, this is all that's left.

I don't remember if we mentioned last time, when you plant peas, they're kind of a lower crop, so we roll it with a big roller to press the rock in.

'Cause when you're cutting, you gotta get down on the ground.

And it's kinda tough on the hilltops, you'll see how it undulates, to be perfect, but this is-- this is short, and this is all that's left.

This is leaves and stems and--and we pulled all the profitable stuff off it, and now we've got, you know, the organic matter and the nitrogen that the peas put back into the ground, and the cycle repeats, I guess.

(Damon) I've owned the store for about seven years.

Grew up in Chester.

Moved away to go to college in the late '90s.

Graduated from Montana State University, and then moved to Phoenix to start commercial construction.

Stayed there for 10 years.

Had a couple kids and decided that Phoenix life wasn't best for them, so we moved back here, where we purchased the lumberyard from my parents.

We provide building materials for quite a large geographical area.

So there's 95 miles of Highway 2 that we cover, geographically, and then, to the Canadian border.

It's a huge area, but just one store does all that.

Not a lot of population in that area, you know, It's definitely declined in population.

r You don't notice it so much with just the quantity of people around town, but you do notice it in the school, and you notice it with church enrollment.

I think when I graduated in '98, there were probably 110 kids in the high school.

Now, we're roughly about half that.

A few of the business have left.

Like, the implement dealer used to have a huge inventory here, lots of tractors and combines.

We used to have two grocery stores, so you see all that declining.

In town here, we have-- the big employers are the hospital, the school, the county seat, 'cause we're the county seat, and then the Town of Chester.

everything else in this area is based on agriculture.

So all the jobs come from family farms.

Well, 20 years ago, a farm could get by on a third of the acres they do now.

So all those farms have consolidated.

So what used to be three is now one, and thus, there's a third as many people running that establishment, and it makes the population slowly decrease.

I noticed in Phoenix when we were living there, the internet moved-- it was faster.

You could download a program or a movie in five minutes or ten minutes.

Here, it takes, you know, three or four times that.

(Jonny) If you get an education and you excel in your educational endeavors and you get higher education degrees, or you go into a trade and you learn a great trade, the issue is, where is the type of employment that will pay you the type of salary in order to allow you to pay back your student loans, to pay back the debt it took you to get to that degree, and who is your competition?

In a rural community, there may be 15 plumbers.

But there's not enough work to even sustain one plumber.

And out of those 15 plumbers, you may be related to over half of 'em.

If you wanna get a good job that's gonna provide for your family, you're gonna have to leave.

So you leave to a larger community, maybe Bismarck, maybe Great Falls, maybe Billings or Havre, along the Hi-Line, and you're still within driving distance of being able to come home once in a while.

But you may not be that lucky.

You may end up having to go to a big metropolitan area.

And so, you end up leaving to have to be able to do that, to support your family until you get older, and then you can retire and come home.

That was true, and it is still sort of true today, but not necessarily.

Because of technology.

Technology now allows people who have those types of skills to be able to come home and work at the type of jobs that they want.

So how do you use technology to be able to empower rural America so that the people who leave for the education and want to come home are allowed and able to come home?

That is a challenge, because you have to change everyone's viewpoint.

The challenge to rural America is to find the types of jobs here that they can do that with.

Or they need to work for a large corporation, like Google or Apple or some other big type of corporation who understands telecommunication and has no trouble with them living in rural Montana.

Because they can video cam in for meetings.

We have transportation here.

If they need to fly out to go to a meeting, they can do that.

So I think the world is changing.

I think that my age group is just coming into the beginning of that.

But my great-grandchildren, telecommunicating is gonna be there, available for everybody.

So I think the fabric of rural America will change in the next 20 years, and a lot more people are gonna be telecommunicating.

We do not have the infrastructure for it right now.

Not everybody has access to the internet, and if they do have access, it's not high-speed internet, it's very slow.

So I would say that the opportunity to not have to leave is coming, and soon, they'll be able to stay home and do that.

(Bernadine) Communities today cannot survive, let alone thrive, without access to broadband and the skills to use it.

And it's a hard issue to get rural people to organize around.

I like to say everything's better with broadband, but when you ask rural leaders what they're concerned about, guess what?

Broadband isn't on the list, even though it's an enabling condition for everything else we want, which includes, of course, education, quality and access, access to quality healthcare, and jobs, household-supporting jobs.

(Gary) We're all about broadband, and we have 25,000 customers spread over 6,000 miles, and we just continue to grow, trying to reach out to those that need very good broadband in rural Minnesota.

We were the first provider in our region -to offer broadband.

-We have the best Wi-Fi in the United States out here in the rural woods.

Paul Bunyan Communications.

I came up out of Dunwoody College in the Twin Cities.

It was better 10 miles north of Bemidji on the lake than it was in downtown Minneapolis -when I left there.

-My wife's a schoolteacher.

She's been a schoolteacher for 30-some years, she's teaching kindergarten.

And it surprised the heck out of me, because I can go into her classroom and half her students will be on a computer We got some of the best schools in Montanak because we have a lot of the technology in there.

One of the things that I value about this whole area is the parental involvement and the amazing teachers, too, of course, but the parental involvement was unique to me, because you call home, and on the most part, something's gonna happen.

Teachers want to teach here because of the amazing students and not having to deal with the kind of discipline that they would have to in an urban or suburban kind of an area.

However, you can't keep great teachers when they could drive 20, 25 minutes and get an $8,000 to $12,000 increase in pay and have post-employment benefits.

So we were seeing a revolving door.

After 33 years, I will tell you that quality teaching is a profession the same way clerical, medical, law enforcement, all of these are.

If they feel they're disrespected, not compensated... By compensation, I don't necessarily mean pay.

Pay has to be reasonable, but compensated by how they're viewed by the community is critical.

If they don't receive those, they will enter a different profession.

And then, pretty soon, you end up, especially in rural areas, with people who are there more by default than by design.

Due to the difficulties of trying to get lake home owners who-- this is their second home.

They've already raised their kids in Milwaukee, Madison area.

Now they're coming up and are retiring up here.

But the gorgeous lake property still is pricey, and they don't want their taxes to go up, and their concept is, "I already paid for education for my kids.

Why should I have to pay it again?"

And getting that through to the voters that we're all in this together is very difficult.

The baby boomers may be new to the community and don't have kids anymore going to school.

But you'd better be willing to foot up the money to have quality education, otherwise, you'll never get the people you need to provide the healthcare and all the other services you want.

And you're gonna find yourself selling that property at a loss or to another baby boomer who thinks it's heaven, and moving back to the cities to live in some small condo.

Many of the doctors that are recruited don't stay, because we don't have the population that would give them, you know, the higher wages.

Medical personnel in rural communities are difficult to find, very difficult to find.

You're gonna have to have a critical mass of 'em.

You're gonna have to pay 'em a lot better than we historically have in these regions.

And so, a lot of the specialty things that are needed, people have to drive for.

And the drive from here to the Detroit area is a five- to six-hour drive, depending where.

I drove three hours to have my babies.

Three hours.

If you're living in Watford City, you drive 40 miles to Williston or you drive 60 miles to Dickinson Now, that's changed because we have a population boom, okay?

So then, we were able to get money to build our hospital and get more of those services.

But that's not the case for other communities.

We are lucky in that regard because we have a new industry.

You go down the road to a smaller community in North Dakota, they don't even have a hospital anymore.

So if you have a heart attack, you wait for the ambulance and you go to Bismarck, and Bismarck might be two hours away.

-That's huge.

-A few years ago, I came home and I noticed a difference in these towns that I grew up in, in Ironwood and Bessemer.

Suddenly, we had a craft brewery, and we had a really good coffee shop, and suddenly, there was a young business professionals group with our area, and it's like, "What is happening?

This town was dying."

But it only reminded me that first, you have to clear the land, but then, you also need to cultivate it.

And if we cultivate the land, we have all of the possibility and all of the potential.

And that's something I do every day in my artistic work.

I really try to clear Miles out of the picture and say, "Okay, how can he get better today?

What can we do to get to that dream that I have for tomorrow?"

because as I was beginning to discover that in myself, I began seeing it in my town.

In small ways-- we have a long way to go.

I have such a love for this area that all of my friends from college and Juilliard and Interlaken, they know how much I love the western Upper Peninsula.

Then I tell them, like, no, no, no, it's really, quote-unquote, "rustic."

We're in nature, and sometimes, you don't have high-speed internet at the house, and cell service just doesn't exist in large portions of our community.

My favorite thing to do is to bring my friends up here for a little vacation, and they go, "Whoa!

It's like going back into a different time period, but it's not, we're still in the 2000s," and then they fall in love with it.

I think Julie Andrews said it best.

♪ The hills are alive with the sound of music ♪ I mean, we have what we need around here, and I think that's really ingrained in our thinking.

and it's untouched, and it is incredible, and it's fierce in the winters and the storms in the summers.

and we're aware of what's happening around us.

Because when we walk outside of our doors, we're not in a concrete jungle with a concrete river of Fifth Avenue.

We actually have a river, and it's right outside our front steps.

(narrator) There you have it.

But the story continues.

You've met some of its people and heard a few stories.

People, 1500 miles of them, who feel besieged from all angles, forgotten and misunderstood.

Their livelihood is threatened by those who hold the power yet seemingly could care less at what level they survive or not.

As long as city folk get their lakefront cottage getaway, have food in their freezer and gas in their tank, few seem to care if the schools, hospitals, and jobs in the region are quite up to snuff.

The people along the route ask for little and get even less.

Yet these are people who are tough as nails.

Forged in steel, they live in a region with the most beautiful landscapes on the planet, with weather that can change in an instant or less.

Northern nice folks who take others at their word and care for all they meet.

Whip-smart and burnished.

Hardworking and fun-loving, with the sweetness of a country ballad.

It's an economic juggernaut waiting to be discovered.

Community with a capital C. Sunsets and sunrises that stretch on forever.

Freshwater lakes, massive forests.

Prairies as far as the eye can see.

Cities and towns with plenty of open space betwixt and between, along a highway that follows the rails that followed native trails.

Long trains and abandoned homesteads.

Dreams that turned bust.

Treaties that were broken before the ink could dry.

It's all of that.

It's the America of possibilities that lives on even when its very soul is near broken.

it is about survival and joy, all wrapped in one.

In a word, it beckons.

(male singer) ♪ First light, headlights on a western sky ♪ ♪ Back road, no weather in my way ♪ ♪ Forest creek, prairie gold ♪ ♪ In lives and land our stories told ♪ ♪ ♪ Rain and snow, a-blowing smoke ♪ ♪ Hauling logs and farmers' loads ♪ ♪ As an arrow straight to narrow ♪ ♪ Wide northern sky and lake divine ♪ ♪ Blue water, silver slippin' highway ♪ ♪ Home road, no stranger do I see ♪ ♪ Open sky, empty mind ♪ Blue highway, bloodlines lost in time ♪ ♪