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Colorado kids from town of 330 head from ranch to "real world"

By Lisa Ryckman, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published January 17, 2009 at 1:21 p.m.

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Dana Anderson, 18, center right, holds the cowboy hat of Charlie Hartman, 18, far right, as students gather recently during their lunch period at Revere Junior/Senior High School in Ovid, population 330. Hartman is one of four Revere students in the 40-student school who will be going to Washington for the inauguration.

Photo by Matt McClain © The Rocky

Dana Anderson, 18, center right, holds the cowboy hat of Charlie Hartman, 18, far right, as students gather recently during their lunch period at Revere Junior/Senior High School in Ovid, population 330. Hartman is one of four Revere students in the 40-student school who will be going to Washington for the inauguration.

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OVID — Everybody knows everybody in this speck of a town too small for a stoplight, a place tucked so far into Colorado’s northeastern corner that Nebraska is just a thought away.

Charlie and Emily Hartman grew up here on their family’s ranch, wide open spaces sliced by ribbons of fence. They attend Revere Junior/Senior High School, home of the Raiders — all 40 of them, from seventh grade on up — in a tan-brick building on the edge of town, where the road turns from asphalt to gravel.

On Tuesday, these teenagers from the middle of nowhere plan to be smack dab in the middle of the nation’s biggest somewhere, watching President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration in a crowd expected to be as much as 1,000 times the size of tiny Sedgwick County, population 2,500.

It’s an event of such magnitude that it might overwhelm anyone. But for kids from a place where there are five people for every square mile and four cows for every person, it’s unimaginably huge.

“I don’t think I’ve ever even been in a building with more than 100 people,” said Charlie Hartman, 18. “Even when I was in New York, walking down the street, bumping into everybody everywhere you went, that was disorienting for me. I’d never even seen that many people before. So this is going to be insane.”

Charlie and his 15-year-old sister Emily, a freshman, have been to Washington before, but it will be a first for sophomores Makenzie Ault and Bradon Schneider, both 16.

“I think he’s looking forward to the social aspect because we are here out in the middle of nowhere, and he has the same 30 to 40 people he sees day in and day out,” said Tammy Schneider, Bradon’s mom. “I think it’s going to be neat for him to see the real world.”

Social studies teacher Samantha Jacobs organized the trip last spring, long before the Democratic nominee had even been decided. It’s part of the Smithsonian Student Travel and costs about $1,200 a person, which was too pricey for many Revere students, more than half of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Coming from a place as small as Ovid, with its 330 residents, sets these kids apart. But they have another distinction: in this always-red county, three of the four have parents who voted for Obama. For Lisa Ault, Makenzie’s mom, it was a last-minute decision; but the Hartmans are die-hard Democrats who love to discuss politics, at least in the confines of their home.

“My parents get pretty worked up,” Charlie said. “They watch news all the time, comment on every subject, try to explain why their opinion is this way. Beyond the household, there isn’t much talk of politics. We tend to say our opinions but try to keep the arguments down because there are more important things to do than argue about politics.”

There’s a ranch to run, a 16-hours-a-day, seven-day-a-week job that involves the whole family and often their friends, too.

“It’s nice, because in this small community, you can get just about anybody to help you, anytime,” Charlie said. “All my friends, I could invite them over for a day to hang out, and they know they’re probably going to end up helping me put up electric fence or vaccinate some cows or something.”

City kids don’t understand what it’s like to know everybody’s name everywhere you go, or to consider branding calves a festive event that brings together family and friends, or to have a rumor that starts in the morning be common knowledge by midafternoon.

And the Revere students know their experience isn’t easy to explain.

“They don’t understand how a school can survive with that few of kids in it,” said Charlie, one of seven seniors in the Class of 2009. “Conversing with these people, it’s almost like trying to speak in another language to get them to understand. It’s something you have to see or live.”

Elections come and go, but things change little around here. In 2008, Sarah Palin was much admired, and she and John McCain won the county with 63 percent of the 1,351 votes cast. For many folks, politics boils down to guns and agriculture, and they have little use for politicians who don’t understand the need for both.

“Most people are so removed from the farm and ranch now that they have absolutely no idea what it’s like to try to make a living,” said Charlie’s mom, Dale Parker. “They don’t realize that if they think it’s bad importing our oil, try importing all our food.”

As smaller farms and ranches have been swallowed up by larger ones, the population of Sedgwick County has dwindled and aged: It dropped 10 percent in the first six years of this century, and nearly half the residents are over 50.

“There isn’t an industry here for kids to come back to work at,” Parker said. “So a lot of kids don’t come back.”

But there are exceptions. Makenzie wants to get a nursing degree and work at the local hospital. Charlie plans to go to the University of Colorado to study aerospace engineering, then get a job that will make money he can put back into the ranch.

“I’m going to be walking into these classrooms at CU where there’s going to be a sea of kids, overwhelmingly huge. I think I’ll get used to it, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop missing being here,” he said.

“There’s a certain beauty to the land out here, and it’s nice not having to drive down busy streets with houses all over the place — you can go twice the distance in half the time. And then there’s being able to see open, empty spaces.

“Being able to stand in your backyard and see for miles.”

Comments

  • January 18, 2009

    11:51 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    pagelambert writes:

    Lisa, thank you for giving Rocky's readers this rural perspective on young people, politics, and ranching. Your article, and Temple Grandin's booksigning this weekend on her new book ANIMALS MAKE US HUMAN inspired a new blog post on "Connecting People with Nature, and Writers with Words." I hope you'll check it out. Thank you. Page Lambert <a href="http://www.pagelambert.com>Page Lambert</a>.