Dirk Wierenga and Paul Sturgul, Route 2 Elsewhere Documentary

David Haynes sits down with Dirk Wierenga, director of Route 2 Elsewhere, a documentary which “tells the story of challenges that face rural America communities adapting to a changing economy, from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Montana” and his colleague Paul Sturgul who helped promote the film.

In this episode, David talks with Dirk and Paul about the documentary, their backgrounds, and aspects of rural culture and rural living as it pertains to the Upper Peninsula.

Transcript

David Haynes:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another session of the Rural Insights podcast and video series and today we’re really excited to have two guys with us who are doing some really exciting things with film, and documentaries, and I want to ask them about, but first let me introduce Dirk [Weirenga 00:00:24] and his colleague, Paul [Sturgul 00:00:28], and welcome guys. Glad you’re joining us today and they’ve been working on a… They have a film that you’ve got to watch. All of us in UP know where Route 2 is. You got to get on it to get most places, to get out of the UP, you’re on Route 2 somehow at some point and a lot of people don’t know how far Route 2 goes around America, and we’re going to talk about that today. So, Derek, I’ll start with you and you and Paul can figure out where you want to jump in. Tell us about Route 2 Elsewhere.

Dirk Wierenga:

Okay. Route 2 Elsewhere is really not about the highway, but it’s about the people living along the highway, and I chose it as a project in order to tell the stories of rural America because the 1500 miles that I picked, which are from the Straits of Mackinac to the sweet grass plains of Montana. Five states are among the most rural areas in America and basically, it’s about the joys and challenges of living in rural America.

David Haynes:

And just as a quick observation, can you tell us anything… One of the things we write about and talk about at Rural Insights all the time, especially with policymakers as we say, there is no clear definition of what every rural area looks like. Just like there’s no intersection-

Dirk Wierenga:

The government, you’re right, the government does not have a definition.

David Haynes:

No.

Dirk Wierenga:

They say rural is what’s not urban and then they define, sort of define urban. However, the way I define it is that you are probably going to be an hour away from a hospital. You’re going to probably be an hour away from most services that we find in our normal living, and so I actually use a metrics of 32 people per square mile or less. And the average throughout the route that I’m covering is 10 people per square mile.

David Haynes:

And as you know, in the UP, that would… There are lots of areas that do have health services within an hour. You could take Marquette or Hilton, but it depends where in Marquette or Hilton you live. In the city of Marquette, you don’t have that problem with the immediate suburb. You could be out on the border of Delta county, or you could be up in Hancock and have to get in, so it’s an interesting… That’s an interesting [crosstalk 00:03:16].

Dirk Wierenga:

Yeah, in the 1,500 miles that I’m covering, because I’m not going to take a small, tiny hospital, but I’m going to take a good size hospital that’s able to handle virtually all major services, and so when I look at it, it’s Marquette, Duluth, Grand Forks, Minot, and possibly Williston, North Dakota, and that’s it.

David Haynes:

That would have a hospital big enough to-

Dirk Wierenga:

Of size enough to do more than just real basic services, so in other words, I’m not going to count Munising. Not that Munising doesn’t do a good job and that they’re not well connected to UP Health, but that if you have a heart attack and I used to live in Grand Marais, if you have a heart attack in Grand Marais, first of all, they have to send an ambulance from a place like Munising. They then have to then take you to the closest hospital, which is Helen Joy Newberry.

David Haynes:

Yes.

Dirk Wierenga:

And if they need anything major, they have to then take you another two and a half hours the other way to Marquette.

David Haynes:

Well, the only city in the UP that I’d add to that might be Iron Mountain.

Dirk Wierenga:

Yep.

David Haynes:

[crosstalk 00:04:44]

Dirk Wierenga:

And that’s true.

David Haynes:

Johnson there and they have a new affiliation in Marshfield, so that might be-

Dirk Wierenga:

Yep, Yep. I’ll agree with that. Yes.

David Haynes:

Yeah, yeah. So, were any people common denominators as you looked at folks who lived along the route of the 1,500 miles that you’d like to tell us about whether there are commonalities that did stick out, jump out?

Dirk Wierenga:

Commonalities are that people love where they live, which is easy to see. The other commonality is going to be a much older population than what the national average is. Typically, it’s going to have a birth rate that’s less than the death, or that’s less than what the death rate is. The county that I live in West Michigan, our birth to death rate is two to one. In the UP it’s less than even.

David Haynes:

What about the issues of employment, besides healthcare, are the other social issues that [crosstalk 00:06:01]?

Dirk Wierenga:

Employment is huge. Employment is huge because you’re not going to have young people unless they’re full-time jobs benefits. And one of the commonalities is because there are so many lower-skilled jobs, it’s real easy for an employer to hire only part-time, so it’s not uncommon for somebody to have four, or five, or six part-time jobs, and absolutely no benefits. So, there’s not much of a draw to bringing families into an environment like that.

David Haynes:

We’ve been writing about rural childcare issues, afterschool childcare, preschool, and the expense of it, and in the UP in our study at Rural Insight Institute, we found it’s an average of $672 a month, some number like that. And of course, that impacts your employment, that impacts a lot of things. Is that true you found along the route?

Dirk Wierenga:

It’s an issue, however, a couple of towns have dealt with it very well. One being Watford City in North Dakota and the other being Ashland, Wisconsin.

David Haynes:

[crosstalk 00:07:17].

Dirk Wierenga:

Both of them have started a nonprofit that actually does childcare and adjusts to the income of the parents, and they did it as a community function. They did not wait for somebody else to do it.

David Haynes:

No. Yeah. I’ve written a little bit about that in Marquette, that in Hilton, and in Sault Ste. Marie, where you have a sizable university, by the way, that’s the other town that would be with healthcare, substantial healthcare with I feel the U of M right there.

Dirk Wierenga:

I was actually thinking level one or level two trauma.

David Haynes:

Oh, yeah. Yeah, then that would be War Memorial. It’s pretty sophisticated, but that the universities and the hospitals, you look at it, you think about it, they could be these nonprofits that provide healthcare, especially since they’re the largest employers.

Dirk Wierenga:

Absolutely.

David Haynes:

Maybe that’s something you want to step up to.

Dirk Wierenga:

Yeah. Probably the town along US 2 that is really hitting it out of the park on every level is Bemidji in Minnesota.

David Haynes:

I’ve been there.

Dirk Wierenga:

And they have just… They hit all the metrics. They hit them all. They have a four-year university. They’ve got a good hospital, not top-level, but a good one. They actually have programs for attracting people from Silicon Valley who are willing to move there and they actually work with the employers, so they’ll work with the [inaudible 00:09:00] or they’ll work with somebody else. They are just unbelievable what they’ve done.

David Haynes:

Well, the other thing they have is an incredible hockey team.

Dirk Wierenga:

Oh, they do. Yeah.

David Haynes:

Bemidji built the arena. The city actually built this incredible arena [crosstalk 00:09:16].

Dirk Wierenga:

Oh, I know. I’ve interviewed people in there and it’s not only that, I’ll bet you that the Detroit Red Wings wouldn’t mind moving into there.

David Haynes:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Dirk Wierenga:

But it’s a town of 15,000 people.

David Haynes:

I know. It’s not that big. It’s almost you know, Marquette is 20,000 or 22,000 with the university, so I mean I was amazed when I went there. I was fascinated by that city.

Dirk Wierenga:

A commonality that I noticed there that seems to be is that there’s a pride in the city just right across the border.

David Haynes:

Yeah and I think that’s a big, and that’s true in a lot, as you said, people don’t want to move out of rural areas. There’s this sense of belonging. A sense of [crosstalk 00:10:08].

Dirk Wierenga:

One of the issues though in a smaller rural area, is an unwillingness to accept any new ideas.

David Haynes:

Yes, yes, or to accept new people coming in.

Dirk Wierenga:

That’s true.

David Haynes:

They come in and we always talk about it in the UP. If you’re not from the UP, you can never be full Uper. You got to [crosstalk 00:10:28].

Dirk Wierenga:

I [crosstalk 00:10:30] Grand Marais for 15 years and it’s 250 people in the middle of the wintertime and I was lucky if I could get a hello.

David Haynes:

Yeah, yeah, exactly, but if you’re from there, they know who you are.

Dirk Wierenga:

Oh, yeah yeah.

David Haynes:

What about… This leads me to a discussion of I’m fascinated about the… Do you think rural community people have a better understanding of who they are, and what it means to be an American or American citizen with your responsibilities, and your rights, versus, in a big city? Is there more cohesiveness or it really is not? It’s like America just split.

Dirk Wierenga:

If you would’ve asked me that five years ago, I might have agreed a little bit more, but so many of these communities split in 2016.

David Haynes:

Yeah, yeah.

Dirk Wierenga:

I mean it’s amazing how they flipped. And so, I look at that and think they’re basically saying stick this up your you know what to the country.

David Haynes:

Right.

Dirk Wierenga:

And so, I can see that there’s a joint feeling among people in these communities, but I wonder about their understanding of how America works.

David Haynes:

And that would be true you would say not just in rural areas, if I’m hearing you, right. It’d be true in suburban and urban.

Dirk Wierenga:

Yep, yep. Very much so.

David Haynes:

What would either one of you, when you got all done, what jumped out when you got all finished you said, now here’s something that I didn’t think I would find out about a rural era or I didn’t think was involved in it?

Dirk Wierenga:

Well, I think the first thing is that I did an amazing amount of research. See, I basically lived on US 2 for over a year, so I embedded myself.

David Haynes:

Yeah, yeah.

Dirk Wierenga:

Back and forth and back and forth because I needed to have all four seasons as part of it, so I had to live the seasons in order to understand. But also, what that did was it allowed people to keep seeing me back and forth, and back and forth, so in other words, a rancher, or a farmer, or somebody else in a lumber, somebody in lumber, they knew what I was up to. They began to trust a little bit more and what jumped out at me in that experience was that a lot of them had seen major news publications or networks do stories on their areas, such as the Bakken oil fields out in western, North Dakota. What they found was that a New York Times, let’s say, or Fox News, or whatever network you want to pick, would basically fly in. They’d find a coffee house. They’d sit down. They’d say, “Tell me what you think.” They’re not going to tell them anything.

David Haynes:

Yep, yep, yep, and then pack up and go.

Dirk Wierenga:

And then they’re gone. They’re on the next train up the town. They’re like a fill-in minister, you know? Put them on the next train out of town.

David Haynes:

Right, exactly. Paul, do you, do you have anything that you found jumped out at you?

Paul Sturgul:

Yes. Well, I lived in rural America most of my life. I live in Hurley, Wisconsin, but I am a native of the Upper Peninsula because I was born at the Newport Mining Company Hospital in neighboring Ironwood, and I was raised in Hurley and after law school, I chose to return to my hometown, which is an old former mining lumbering community, which has seen better days. I first saw Route Tales, where at its premiere as part of Ember Light Arts Festival in Ironwood, Michigan this summer, and I really enjoyed it, and I got to know the director, Dirk. And so, I helped arrange a reshowing of it at the Ironwood Theater in November and we also had a panel discussion talkback with some of the people who were interviewed in the documentary, as well as my friend, Gary Sherman, who was our state representative and a retired court of appeals judge, and Dirk was also there.

I really enjoyed the documentary. And one of the things I came across with, and this go those to one of your first questions, is all of the people who appeared in it, who were interviewed in it, really had a sense of place of who they were, and where they came from, and where they lived, and a deep and abiding attachment to the land.

David Haynes:

Yeah.

Paul Sturgul:

And one of the things that’s interesting about rural America is that if you look at the percentages of people who are native-born, Iron County, Wisconsin for instance, is about 98-plus percent native-born, and yet people who have lived here all their lives, refer to themselves often in terms of their national origin. And yet, these are some of the most native-born populations in America because, in the case of a lot of the communities in the Upper Peninsula, they stopped growing in the 1920s when at the same time the immigration gates were closing, and they were pretty stable until the 1970s.

Dirk Wierenga:

Yeah. Very much so.

David Haynes:

Very interesting. Very. If somebody, Derek wants to watch this, how do they do it because some of them-

Dirk Wierenga:

If they’re a member of a… If they have PBS passport.

David Haynes:

Okay.

Dirk Wierenga:

So in other words, they’ve given a donation to PBS.

David Haynes:

Right.

Dirk Wierenga:

All they have to do is put Route Tales. We’re in the search bar and it comes up.

David Haynes:

[crosstalk 00:17:21].

Dirk Wierenga:

Because we’ve been on three PBS stations so far, and Duluth has just signed up, and so yeah, it’s rolling out there. The hope that we have though is that actually what people are saying is urban America needs to see this film because they don’t know what a branding is. They think the meat that they buy in the store came from the grocery store.

David Haynes:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that was certainly me growing up in Brooklyn, New York. I just thought somehow the turkey got put in that package. So, they can go there and it’d be interesting, I was thinking about how it’d be interesting to get this shown to the Michigan legislature.

Paul Sturgul:

Yes.

David Haynes:

Policymakers and their staffs for them to understand because that’s what we are about for us is showing you and trying to make you understand rural America and the UP part of that.

Dirk Wierenga:

Yeah. I agree because people these days, they either take… If they’re going to go across the country, they’re going to fly and if they don’t fly, they’re going to take an interstate.

David Haynes:

They’re never going to go.

Dirk Wierenga:

And they’re never going to see rural that from an interstate because every town at an interstate juncture looks the same.

David Haynes:

Right. Yeah, so thank you. I may get back to you and talk to our state reps about getting it shown. We’re going to try to do a little urban, excuse me, we’re trying to do some rural sessions down in the legislature about issues. Independent thinking on it and not lobbying groups and we thought this might be really good to show. Tell us a little about before I let you go, excuse the background noise, tell me a little about your project on… documentary on looking at rural elderly Americans.

Dirk Wierenga:

Well, Paul can maybe go a little bit further into detail on this because Paul has been an elder law attorney for his whole career and he’s very well respected across the country. So, I look at it like I would, as an example, I did a project based in the villages in Florida. 120,000 people and everybody thinks they’re old people, and it’s mostly young people, and it’s mostly young people because old people need young people to take care of them. And so, when you start looking at the needs of rural America, there are incredible opportunities.

Paul Sturgul:

Yes and picking up on that. I founded, and developed, and dedicated my career to elder law in rural America. We all know that America’s population is aging, but the number, the percentages of elderly in rural America are much higher than in the rest of the country. For instance, in Iron County, Wisconsin, almost 34% of the population is over 65. And in Wisconsin as a whole, that’s 17%, so there are twice as many older people in these rural counties than in the rest of the country, so it has an aging population. And one of the purposes of the movie is to help shape public policy and how we deal with the elderly, beginning with the elderly in rural America that we’re most familiar with. And in a sense, Route 2 Elsewhere is a segue into that.

Dirk Wierenga:

Very much so.

David Haynes:

That’s great. We will look forward to that very much. I think one of the things that we hear constantly at Rural Insights is this issue of what’s happened to people, the elderly in rural areas, also to elderly veterans. We hear a lot about it. There tend to be more veterans in those areas, so I think we’ll look forward to that and I think they will love Route 2 Elsewhere. Go to PBS passport and take a look at it. It’ll be a wonderful evening for you to watch.

Dirk Wierenga:

And if they’re interested in the DVD, they can go to our website, which is principiamedia.com.

David Haynes:

Okay, say that one more time for everybody.

Dirk Wierenga:

Principiamedia.com.

David Haynes:

All right.

Dirk Wierenga:

I’m sorry.

David Haynes:

No, go ahead. Say it again.

Dirk Wierenga:

Yeah, principiamedia.com and it’s available there.

David Haynes:

Great and that’s great and get a DVD for those of you under 20 a DVD is a little round thing with a circle in the middle.

Dirk Wierenga:

Doesn’t come from the air.

David Haynes:

That’s. Right.

Paul Sturgul:

And also, we’re hoping to have a showing of Route Tales, where on my favorite PBS station, WNMU, Marquette, so stay tuned.

David Haynes:

Great, great. Everybody in the WNMU, everybody in the UP gets. That’s a great, great, good, good, and I’ll make sure I post that on our website.

Paul Sturgul:

Wonderful.

David Haynes:

How they can get it and also the fact that check out WNMU since it covers the whole UP.

Dirk Wierenga:

Right.

David Haynes:

Well gentlemen, thank you very much. This has been wonderful. I really enjoyed it and as an elderly person, I’m looking forward to the second document about how we live.

Dirk Wierenga:

Well, David keep up the good work. The work you’re doing is wonderful.

David Haynes:

Thank you very much. That’s very nice.

Paul Sturgul:

Thank you.

David Haynes:

Both, Dirk and Paul, have a great day. Stay warm.

Dirk Wierenga:

You too.

Paul Sturgul:

Thank you.

Dirk Wierenga:

Okay, bye-bye.

Paul Sturgul:

Bye.

Dirk Wierenga:

Okay, bye.