The Town That the Internet (Almost) Forgot

"He Had a Kind Heart. You Could Tell"

Barbara Pope never intended to stay in McDermitt for more than a year. Fourteen years later, she's a fixture at the school, a doting first-grade teacher. She moved to town when she was 24, thinking she'd get her foot in the door in the Humboldt County school system and then move back to Winnemucca. But by the end of the year, she couldn't leave the children -- more than half of whom are Native American and 70% of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch. Typically, classes have no more than a dozen students, so teachers get to know them well.

The community, however, took some getting used to. A devout Episcopalian, Pope eventually accepted not having a local church, the same way she accepted not having options about where to shop or eat out. On one level, life in McDermitt is simpler and more laidback, but the geography makes it more complicated. "You learn not to dwell on the compromises," she says. Over time, she embraced McDermitt's strong sense of community and made some close friends at the school.

Even so, McDermitt is a lonely place to be single. Pope, now 38, assumed that she would never marry. The only new faces in town were those of truckers hunched over coffee, beer, and slots at the casinos, which she avoided. Her serious relationships involved men in Winnemucca whom she'd already known. Then along came the Internet. After hearing about friends who responded to online personal ads, she decided to give it a try.

Pope sorted the listings using the following criteria: central- or northern-Nevada resident, Christian, and nonsmoker. One match read, "single man, brown hair, brown eyes, three kids, looking for a long-term relationship." It was succinct but straightforward. She liked that. So she emailed him, and he wrote back. His name was Robert Pope, he lived in Gillman Springs (a community about 200 miles south of McDermitt), and he worked as a heavy-equipment operator at a gold mine. "He had a kind heart. You could tell," Barbara says. "He seemed interested in what I had to say. We started emailing constantly. Then I downloaded MSN Messenger for real-time talk, and we'd talk every day for, gosh, three to five hours -- from the time I got home from school until 11 at night."

Six months later, Robert and Barbara married. Two months after that, he moved to McDermitt. (Their first child was due in late March.) It's everything that Barbara never thought she'd have, and the Internet helped make it happen. Despite her good fortune, though, Barbara may ultimately wind up leaving the area. "Robert was working in the mines before, and he agreed to give it a one-year trial here," she says. "But McDermitt doesn't have those same opportunities. Right now, he's installing a septic system in central Nevada. He's been going back and forth since August."

"We Were Our Own Little Self-Contained World "

If McDermitt is a miniscule dot on the map, Jackson Mountain School, about 75 miles outside of town, is a speck. With just five students, it is the smallest of six schools in rural northwestern Nevada with Internet access through M-HIP. "We were our own little self-contained world before the Internet arrived," says Carolyn Dufurrena, 47, a former geologist and the only full-time teacher at Jackson Mountain.

The community consists primarily of ranchers and their children, who have even less interaction with the outside world than people in McDermitt do. By incorporating the Web into schoolwork, Dufurrena brings faraway people and places a little closer to the one-room cinder-block schoolhouse. In one of their most thrilling assignments, her students corresponded by email with poets in the Australian outback. Each morning, the kids would run into the schoolhouse in anticipation of a reply. Dufurrena considers the Internet the biggest technological advance in rural communities since mechanized farming, but it has yet to solve a basic geography problem: There are no rural high schools. Once children complete the eighth grade, either their parents send them away to boarding school, or one or both parents move within reach of a high school. "It's hard on families around here," says Dufurrena, who herself moved to Winnemucca so her son, Sam, could finish school. Her husband, Tim, stayed behind to manage the ranch.

Even as the Internet is beginning to expose these children to the outside world, it's unclear whether they will explore that world. Principal Moddrell says that around 40% of McDermitt Combined students go on to vocational school, community college, or a four-year college, usually in Nevada, Idaho, or Oregon. About a quarter of high-school graduates receive a higher degree of some kind. As for the rest, many lack resources or ambition. Those who stay become bartenders, waiters and waitresses, ranch hands, or unemployed -- the main options in McDermitt. "It's discouraging," says junior-high-school teacher Michelle Hartley, "because the kids in our community have so much potential, so much talent, and so many of them don't use it. They could go out and become teachers and doctors, but they give in to the peer pressure to stay here and conform."