The Town That the Internet (Almost) Forgot

Pat Goff didn't set out to bring the Internet to the town of McDermitt, Nevada. It just worked out that way. Goff, a 33-year-old high-school business and computer teacher, wanted his students to learn enough about the Web to prepare them for life after graduation, whether that was technical school, junior college, four-year college, or a job. He saw that outside of rural Nevada, computers and the Internet were becoming as commonplace as the telephone. Point, click, connect with the world. It was that easy.

But it wasn't that easy at McDermitt Combined School. Goff and his students live three hours northeast of Reno, alone in the desert, where this blink of a town straddles the Nevada-Oregon border like a lone cowboy on a fence rail. How could kids from McDermitt compete, Goff wondered, if they'd never built a Web site? Never used a search engine? Never even sent an email message?

In class, he tried logging on to the network provided by the state, but it was a perpetual bottleneck -- too many schools and too few modems. He resorted to using an Internet provider in Idaho, but the long-distance charges added up, limiting the time online. What he needed was an affordable, reliable, and fast connection. But the community didn't have local Internet access -- and for good reason. McDermitt (population: 756) isn't just out of the way, it's positively secluded: 74 miles from Winnemucca, the Humboldt County seat and the nearest town of any size (population: 9,238). McDermitt's few hundred households weren't enough to attract a provider to the area.

With the help of school principal John Moddrell, Goff found a solution. McDermitt Combined could get high-speed service by connecting via satellite through Intellicom, a provider based in Livermore, California. The catch: It would cost $1,900 a month, far exceeding Goff's budget. But if the school sold residents access to its Internet connection, Goff could afford the service. And that's exactly what he and his students did. They formed McDermitt-Humboldt Internet Provider (M-HIP) and rounded up enough customers to cover expenses. Because M-HIP was a local call, unlimited Internet access was available to anyone in the northwestern corner of Nevada -- or at least to anyone with a phone and a computer.

That was almost three years ago. So what has happened since McDermitt got wired to the world? High hopes. Big fears. Small changes. And maybe -- just maybe -- a road to a better way of life.

In some ways, McDermitt is more up-to-date than it's ever been: Students are researching homework assignments and college scholarships online; parents are taking college courses online; farmers and ranchers are on the verge of selling hay and cattle online; and residents are sending email far and wide, reestablishing old connections and making new ones. But in reality, the Internet hasn't transformed the town. Not yet anyway. McDermitt looks much the same as it has for years -- like a former mining community that's seen better days. Rather than generating a tidal wave of changes, the Internet is making ripples -- subtle changes in people's lives. The technology and its potential are spreading, but they're doing so gradually. Not everyone sees the possibilities and wants to change. After all, McDermitt got by without the Net for more than 100 years.

There are, it seems clear now, practical limits to what the online world can do. Internet evangelists have talked for years about how physical location has become irrelevant: People in rural Nevada and, say, Silicon Valley can have equal access to information and tools. For McDermitt, though, location matters very much. The community is one of the toughest places in Nevada to earn a decent living. And the Net hasn't done much about that. Unemployment here is three times higher than it is for the entire state. Many residents work as waitresses, store clerks, and ranch hands and get by on minimum wage or little more. The median household income is about $18,000, compared with $45,000 statewide. Homes are considerably cheaper -- the median value is about $25,000 -- but they tend to be older. And a quarter of households still don't have a phone.

Even when the Net does have a real impact, there are questions about just what kind. It has the potential to unify residents as well as to divide them -- those who go online versus those who don't. It has played a part in attracting new people to the area, but it is also responsible for encouraging young people to leave town to seek better opportunities elsewhere. It's too early to say definitively whether the impact of the Net on McDermitt is good or bad, consequential or inconsequential. The answers are still emerging, person by person, case by case. And many of those answers playing out in this tiny, isolated town shed light on the Net's impact on the rest of us.