Back in February of 2018, the Washington Post, for no apparent good reason, used a massive travel-time database developed by Oxford researchers to ask a deceptively simple question: how far are Americans from civilization? For the study, they defined civilization as a metro area of at least 75,000 people. Using these criteria, roughly 98 percent of people in the contiguous United States are anchored within an hour’s drive of an urban area.
Surprising.
But
the study also asked the inverse question: which town is the most remote?
The
answer landed in northeastern Montana. As it turns out, Glasgow, a prairie town
near the Canadian border, emerged as the most isolated town of its size in the
lower forty-eight, roughly four and a half hours from a city in any direction.
Once buoyed by a nearby Air Force base that closed in 1976, Glasgow now sits
amid distances measured in hundreds of miles. To most, it looks like the middle of nowhere; to
Montanans, it looks like room to breathe.
—Mitchell
Hegman
No comments:
Post a Comment