"Towns Like Alice," Plains Folk #540 (Copyright Hoy & Isern)

The newspaper in my old home town, the Ellinwood Leader, is going through some changes in management, which sets me to thinking. For two generations now the country towns of the plains have suffered through a winnowing, a survival of the fittest-or-luckiest, many dying, others becoming mere service centers. It puts pressure on people. If the newspaper editor, or the local physician, or the hardware store proprietor decides to call it quits, he has to wonder whether anyone else will take over, whether he may be letting the town down.

Anyway, while reading about the changes at the Leader, I was watching the BBC production of A Town Like Alice. I already knew the story from the book by Nevil Shute, a copy of which I picked up for a buck New Zealand (60 cents U.S.) in 1991. The title of this book, published in 1950, makes reference to Alice Springs, the most celebrated outpost in Australia's outback.

The book isn't really about Alice Springs, though. Told through the eyes of an aging solicitor, the story concerns an English heroine named Jean Paget. In Malaya during World War II, she is captured by the Japanese, suffers all sorts of hardships, but is befriended by an Australian captive named Joe Harmon. Turns out this chap is a ringer on a cattle station near Alice, which he says "is a bonzo town."

Years after the war Jean, having inherited money, comes to Alice looking for Joe. He meanwhile has moved to a station near Willstown, Queensland. Willstown is a dump--"a fair cow," one ringer tells Jean, "two unmarried girls for fifty men."

Jean and Joe marry, of course, but she also sets out to change the town. She brings a skilled craftswoman from England to start up an alligator shoe factory, so that young women will have a place to work, and opens an ice cream parlor and a swimming pool, so that young folks will stay around. Everything works out.

It's a wonderful story. But not many American plains country towns have English heiresses dropping in, and if they did, I wonder whether things would work out so nicely.

They might work out, instead, the way they do in The Fifth Archangel, a new book by Sharon Butala. She hails from Eastend, Saskatchewan--wheat and cattle country. And Butala has the feel and the ear for plains country.

She writes about the fictional town of Ordeal, Saskatchewan, a town in danger of losing its post office and fading away, in the year of the millennium, 2000. The whole town is agitated and wants to do something. They hold protest rallies, pass petitions. A Christian fundamentalist group produces miracles, the old guys at the cafe intrigue, the old widows of the town chain the prime minister to the post office railing, television crews arrive, a country singer offers a ballad about the town--there is action all over the place.

The problem is nothing comes of it. Near the end of the book the prime minister is coming to town, and the people plan a big rally to get his attention. It falls apart in a shambles, and all their efforts just fizzle away.

I happen to think that the relatively favorable capital situation of agriculture and business on the plains today offers a lot of opportunities for building communities. We don't need English heiresses. But I am not quite confident that many towns can pull things together much better than those in Butala's Ordeal.

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