Don Welch

Don Welch and Rural Outmigration

By Robert Brooke, John E. Weaver Professor of English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

I want to consider Don Welch’s “Advice from a Provincial” and “Fall, Nebraska” in relation to the problem of rural outmigration.
Don Welch’s “Advice from a Provincial” raises the question of how rural Nebraskans might respond to the characterization of their region by outsiders. The poem addresses an imagined “you” driving along I-80 towards the ski slopes in Colorado. Welch’s speaker chastises this imagined traveler for not being able to see, for being too locked in the stereotypic vision of the Great Plains as flyover country:

spare us your talk about our backwardness,
of how mile after unrelieved mile dispirits you,
of how there is nothing, simply nothing to see.

Go home and work on your eyes,
Bring back a sight which can co-create meaning.

In contrast, Welch encourages the imagined traveler to become “the right kind” to see into the natural and civic presence of this land. He encourages his listener to think beyond the wider culture’s stereotypes.

The cultural stereotype of life on the Great Plains is currently identified as one of the main reasons for rural outmigration. It’s common knowledge that rural areas of the Great Plains are losing population. The biggest loss is in young people—some economists claim that half of most high school classes leave their towns after graduation, and few return. The Rural Futures Institute at the University of Nebraska, for instance, has examined the census numbers for the last few decades. They show that while Nebraska as a whole gained 115,000 people between 2000 and 2010, this gain occurred in metropolitan areas (Lincoln, Omaha, Grand Island). These three cities gained a disproportionate 128,000 people, while rural communities across the state actually lost more than13,000 people. The 2015 progress report of the Coordinating Commission on Postsecondary Education further shows that Nebraska as a whole is losing young people after they get their college degrees. Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas explain (in Hollowing Out the Middle) that it’s the most talented and able youth who tend to leave the rural Midwest – while working class youth, less successful in K-12 school, are the ones who stay. Peter Kilborn’s Next Stop, Reloville has personal testimonies from young Nebraskans, forced to leave their hometowns because of the lure of greater earning power in metropolises far, far away.

Welch’s “Fall, Nebraska” portrays one such young Nebraskan, a gifted football player, caught in the tensions of outmigration. In a telling stanza, Welch contrasts the glittering hope of success elsewhere to the rural confines of the young athlete’s life:

But 30 universities
are interested in him. Even the governor

has graced his palm. At night, when cruising
Mian, that four-block, dim-lit thoroughfare
of town, the sirens come to him. His fever
climbs, odes on written on his glands,

the re-tooled motor of his Mustang sings.

For the high school football star of “Fall, Nebraska,” the wider culture’s myths of what’s valuable prove too powerful to ignore. As Welch describes him, he’s “fated by talent, public taste, and newspapers” to take on a life far away from his small town. He doesn’t know why he should leave, or for what end. He is merely caught up in the media circus of sports mobility. At the poem’s end, the young man is almost pathetic –glorified by the culture, but also used up by it. Welch describes his interior state:

the outcome’s knotted in his gut, the dream
of who he is, and was, in doubt.

Welch ends the poem with the curious statement that “this is his life after death,” as if the young athlete unknowingly gives up life itself to the dreams of the NCAA, as if by following the media dream of the wider culture’s glory, the young man enters a kind of death. The ultimate sacrifice.

Welch’s portrayal of the trapped football player — journeying unaware toward the eternal emptiness of the coliseum – brings to mind the late Paul Gruchow’s oft-quoted dictum about rural children:

These are the lessons we teach our rural children today: that their parents were expendable and their duty is to abandon their dreams and become cogs in the industrial machine. Here is another message we give them, in ways both subtle and direct: if they expect to amount to anything, they had better leave home. (98)

In many ways, the entire corpus of Don Welch’s poetry is a way of speaking back to the culture of outmigration. Rather than have the youth of tomorrow listen naively to the dominant messages that “you have to leave your place to be any good,” Welch’s poems invite readers to consider deeply the values resonant in local place.

In the twenty four short lines of “Advice to a Provincial,” Welch offers two striking alternatives to the values of outmigration. Impatient with the stereotypical gaze of the interstate traveler, Welch suggests we consider the enduring natural and cultural grandeur of the Platte River valley. “Notice at sunset how our river is on fire,” he writes:

And in spring, if you’re the right kind,
catch the wind with its invisible fingers
making love to the water.

In addition, he encourages the traveler to “pay a momentary tribute” to

The settlers who waited it out,
who felt their sod houses thaw,
who survived this place and were scarred.

In these images, as in so many of his poems, Welch writes of the two main strands of local understanding identified by rural advocate Wendell Berry: the watershed and the commonwealth. Berry uses the term “watershed” to designate the interdependent natural resources of a place – the landscape features, like a river’s watershed, that create value in a region. The “commonwealth,” by contrast, designates the cultural heritage that is also a crucial resource to a region. In Berry’s advocate work for rural peoples, local communities are urged to speak back to the cultural obsession with migration by reclaiming the specific watershed and commonwealth of their region.

Don Welch’s poetry shares some of Berry’s vision. He too imagines a different value system for lives on the rural Great Plains. Poems like “Advice from a Provincial” and “Fall, Nebraska” allow us to glimpse this alternative vision of how life might progress, and why that alternative might be important.

Works Cited

Berry, Wendell. The Citizenship Papers. Washington, DC: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2003.

Carr, Patrick and Maria Kefelas. Hollowing Out the Midde: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America. Boston: Beacon Press, 2010.

Gruchow, Paul. “What We Teach Rural Children.” In Grassroots: The Universe of Home. (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 1995). 83-100.

Kilborn, Peter. Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America’s New Rootless Professional Class. NY: Times Books, 2009.