For Janna and Randy, the visit became a relocation. They bought a 700-square foot cabin on an acre of land near Hill City for $42,000 – a price that seemed incredibly low compared to Southern California real estate prices. And for awhile Janna was happy to “hang out in my house in the woods, and unwind from the California pace.” But when the euphoria of inspiration and impulse began to wear off, the couple realized that their employment opportunities in the Hills were not what they had hoped.

Sioux Falls natives, Janna and Randy had met and married in the 1980s. She was an Augustana graduate with a degree in Social Work and Sociology; he was a carpenter. In Sioux Falls winter weather often affected his ability to get work, so they decided to move to California. He became a master craftsman, doing high-end woodwork for expensive homes in coastal communities like Laguna Beach and the Newport Coast.  Janna went looking for work. The job she found challenged her intellect, provided an outlet for her creativity and eventually offered her a path to the untethered world of New Pioneers. But it started as a simple typing position.

Registered with a temporary employment agency, Janna was sent one day to the offices of a Laguna Beach-based film production company that needed someone to type a script. MacGillivray Freeman Films had pioneered the development of spectacular IMAX films like TO FLY, which debuted with the opening of the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. in 1976. By 1987, it was involved in a variety of exciting projects.

Over the next seven years, Janna’s work with MacGillivray Freeman expanded from typist to producer’s assistant to researcher to premiere planner. She worked on dramatic films about the nature of time, sailing and the wind, the performance limits of the human body, the cultures of Indonesia, life on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, and the wonders of the world ocean.. It was exotic work. She collaborated with smart, creative people from all over the world.  “Essentially, I got paid to learn,” she adds, “it doesn’t get better than that.”   Nevertheless, she and Randy never imagined that they would live the rest of their lives in California.

“We always knew we were coming back,” she says. But there was no plan, just a dream. When they moved to Hill City, she said goodbye to her colleagues in California. Randy imagined that he would be able to do the same kind of carpentry in the Black Hills that he had been doing in Southern California, but as it turned out, there was no market for his high-end work.

Initially, the lack of work was tempered by the excitement of being home. “We have a big family” Janna says, “and we had lots of visitors, including friends and relatives from Sioux Falls and Minneapolis.” Janna set up a little desk in the cabin and Randy had a work bench. But after a 3-month hiatus and a couple of job interviews, Janna made a call to California.

“I asked my old boss if there was anything I could do from South Dakota,” she says. Soon she was researching, working with scriptwriters and collaborating remotely from her little cabin in the Hills. Three or four times a year she flew to Southern California for meetings, production work, or – best of all – film premieres. Eventually Janna used her Social Work skills to help the company establish a non-profit foundation for which she is now Director of Development and Programming.  As her work expanded, Janna even employed a local writer, Kristin Donnan-Standard, as a researcher and collaborator. Kristin, who spent part of her childhood in the Black Hills, had worked in television in L.A. and New York.  She understood the world of scripts and production.

Meanwhile, Randy began designing custom frames for artwork, experimenting with his own concept that blended woodworking with leather. They began selling the frames at art shows around the region and discovered a strong market for Randy’s designs. In 1997 Janna and Randy opened Warrior’s Work, a Main Street art gallery in Hill City.

With a business in town Janna and Randy became more socially connected and increasingly involved in economic development and the arts. Some long-time members of the community didn’t know what to make of Janna and the work she does on IMAX films. “People make the assumption that she is not like them,” says Kristin, “because what she does is not in their realm of experience. They think she has some magic skill and all these connections with famous people.” Janna laughs, reminding us her work is on educational documentaries and the film premieres are most often in museums!

Together Janna and Kristin have worked with others to promote the arts and make Hill City a destination for visitors to the Black Hills. They have asserted that the community’s future lies in attracting the kind of people that writer Richard Florida calls “cultural creatives.” Some of these efforts, including a new sign ordinance, sparked friction in the community between newcomers and long-time residents. But other projects, such as the commissioning of a sculpture of a buffalo – THE PATRIARCH – for the entrance to downtown have fostered cooperation.

“People came together,” Janna says, “to raise the money for that sculpture, arts people and business people, long-time residents and new.”

These efforts to position Hill City as a cultural center have begun to pay dividends. Business investment in the community is rising. Last year, the NEW YORK TIMES featured Hill City as a good place to retire to. For prospective retirees, cultural creatives and others, THE PATRIARCH symbolizes the confluence of the past, present and future of the community. It represents the natural history of the region, and it reflects the promise of creative minds like Janna Emmel, Randy Berger and Kristin Donnan-Standard.

At the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology in Rapid City, he studied computer science and thought about becoming an astronaut. That dream dissolved, he says, after he spent several months as an intern at IBM in Rochester, Minnesota. “I realized that if I kept chasing this unrealistic dream, I would end up in a cubicle somewhere doing something I wasn’t passionate about.”

Instead, after graduating, Reinbold took a job with Digitech, maker of the famous “Whammy” pedal for electric guitars. With his college classmate and new wife, Valarie, he moved to the suburbs of Salt Lake City to work in the town of Sandy.

Despite the Whammy’s role in the music industry, Reinbold discovered that his job wasn’t especially creative. Then came the attacks of September 11. In the economic downturn that followed, Digitech laid off staff and just before Christmas, Reinbold found himself without a job.

“I had been weaned on WIRED magazine,” he says, “and believed that if you write code, you will be set for life. That Christmas I discovered the stark reality: you have to fend for yourself.”

Out of work, Reinbold went back to school to learn more about business. At the University of Utah he earned an MBA with a focus on emerging technologies. “I had been focused on hardware at IBM and Digitech,” he says, but he developed a strong interest in web-based applications. “You can work from any computer, put things up and get feedback right away.”

Soon after earning his MBA, Reinbold launched his own company – Vox Pop Design. Working from the basement of his home, he designed web pages for local clients. As his business grew, “the clients became more sophisticated,” he says, “and so did the sites.” He began doing remote work for companies as far afield as New Jersey and Oregon.

Reinbold networked with other programmers in the Salta Lake City area. He got involved with a technology user group. From that group he recruited a number of people who work for him on a project basis. He also found more remote collaborators including Matthew Orstad in South Dakota (see earlier profile below) and several programmers in the Chicago area.

Reinbold has read the work of Richard Florida who writes that the rise of the creative class is the driving force in economic growth in the world today. Florida shows that members of the creative class tend to concentrate in a handful of cities in the United States and he suggests that this tendency is like to continue for years to come.

Reinbold understands this dynamic. “In an urban area like Salt Lake City, you see the talent, the off-the-wall energy and the excitement. You can get together for a social media meet-up, a Twitter get together or a geek dinner,” Reinbold says. This kind of professional social interaction helps overcome the isolation of working at home.

Florida asserts that the continuing rise of the creative class will lead to further declines in rural America. Reinbold sees a somewhat different scenario framed by his personal dreams.

Every year he and Valarie take their two young children back to South Dakota for long vacations in the spring and around the holidays with either her parents or his. “When we go back to the rural areas,” he says, “it helps us to get a sense of what’s really important and valuable in life.” In the future, he believes, more people will shuttle back and forth between rural communities and big cities.”

Ultimately, Reinbold hopes to move his family and his business back to Timber Lake, but he is not going to move home and “wait for something to happen. I want to put together the capital and connections so that I’m able to go back to Timber Lake and provide jobs,” he says.

In the meantime, Reinbold continues to grow his business, and he looks forward to what the federal government’s stimulus program might do to improve access to broadband in places like Timber Lake. “That rutty, broken-down community is home,” he says. “I would love to take my kids back there. I got a great education, and I want my kids to have that same small town opportunity.”

Orstad grew up in Crooks, South Dakota, a small farming community along the rail line northwest of Sioux Falls. Surrounded by corn and soybean fields, his high school served several nearby towns and rural areas. After graduation in 1997, he moved across the state to attend the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology or “Tech,” where he majored in computer science and fell in love with a classmate named Keri Bachmeier. She graduated in 2001. He graduated the following May, and they were married in June.

“At Tech it was assumed that you would move out of state to find a job,” he says, but that option wasn’t open to Matthew. Keri had been accepted at the University of South Dakota’s School of Medicine in Sioux Falls. For the next three years, while she went to school, he worked for the EROS Data Center northeast of the city.

“As a student I figured I would a traditional job,” Matthew says, “and so did most of my classmates.” As traditional jobs go, EROS was an interesting place to work. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) operates the Earth Resources Observation and Science center to collect and manage satellite data. But after Keri finished her course work and accepted a residency in Mason City, Iowa about 225 miles away, Matthew had to decide what he was going to do for work.

Fortunately, the federal government is one of the most progressive employers in the country when it comes to telecommuting. Matthew’s bosses let him work from Mason City. “It was convenient,” he says, “but there was still the expectation of the 7:30 to 4:30 work day.” Like many in the millenial generation, he chafed at the rigidityof the structure which seemed so out of synch with his increasingly virtual worklife.

In Mason City, Keri and Matthew welcomed their daughter into the world, and suddenly Matthew’s work-at-home life changed. To gain more flexibility to take care of his daughter, Matthew took a leave from EROS and began freelancing. He developed websites for local clients. “But I had trouble finding the magic mix,” he says. At Tech he had learned how to program, but “there were no marketing courses. I learned nothing about how to run my own business.”

As he struggled to make it on his own, Orstad discovered an unlikely source of work. Matthew Reinbold, a fellow alum from Tech, was living in Salt Lake City and had launched his own business developing websites with complicated backend elements. Reinbold needed programmers he could trust. He began feeding Orstad work. “I knew him from school,” Reinbold says, “and I knew the quality of his work.”

When Keri finished her residency in Mason City, the couple decided to move back to South Dakota. “We are both country mice,” Matthew says, “I grew up on my parents’ farm. Keri was raised on a ranch south of Rapid City where they had ostriches.”

Small towns in South Dakota are hungry for doctors, so the Orstads had their pick of communities. They chose Wessington Springs, a town of less than 900 people east of the Missouri River in the heart of the state. “We wanted to be reasonably close to family,” Matthew says. They also wanted a community that made them feel welcome.”

“The community welcomed us with open arms,” he says, “and it’s been that way since we moved in.” While Keri goes to the clinic, Matthew continues to work from home, taking care of their daughter and lending his expertise to the community as it tries to develop its presence in the on-line world. He continues to learn more about how to market his skills and sees a business model evolving from his work with the local newspaper.

He is concerned about the declining population in rural South Dakota. Wessington Springs, for example, has lost nearly a third of its population since 1980. “Not everybody can move to the cities and have a Starbucks on every corner,” he says. “Somebody has to farm.” Maybe there’s hope in the life and work that Matthew has found for himself as a new pioneer in the heartland of America.

With this work in 1995 Jill began her professional consulting career studying radiation and other contaminants in the environment. In recent years, she has collaborated with teams of scientists evaluating sites including the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Although she travels to collect data and meet with colleagues and clients, most of her work is done from her home office in the small town of Freeman, South Dakota.

Growing up in Sioux Falls, Jill loved math and science, as well as playing basketball and the alto sax. Her teachers recognized her academic talents and encouraged her to look far and wide at colleges, but Jill chose to stay close to home. “I am a momma’s girl,” she confesses, “and I just wasn’t ready to leave yet.”

At Augustana College in Sioux Falls, she was challenged academically. During the summers, she applied for and accepted interships at various national laboratories, including Brookhaven in New York, Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington, D.C. These jobs gave her a chance to see other parts of the country and work with top scientists from around the nation.

Offered a NASA scholarship for graduate school, Jill enrolled at Colorado State University to study radiation and its effects on living organisms. But biology was never her first love. As she progressed toward her degree, she became increasingly interested in the dispersion patterns of radiation and other contaminants in the environment. Answering questions in this arena demanded sophisticated math, which she enjoyed.

Near graduation, Jill began looking at jobs that demanded a physics background, but none of them appealed to her. One of her professors suggested she talk to John Till. A Naval Academy graduate, former submarine commander and a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, Till had launched Risk Assessment Corrporation (RAC), a consulting firm, to perform environmental assessments of radioactive contamination.

When she interviewed with him, Jill discovered that Till had a very unusual organization. Wanting to maintain the rural lifestyle he had grown up with and offer that to his family and children, Till lived on his family’s dairy farm in South Carolina. To do his consulting work, he had assembled a virtual team of scientists from around the country. There was no central office. The team communicated by telephone, fax and dial-up modem.

In the interview, Till made it clear that he would not be supervising Jill’s every move. “One of the things that I need from you,” he told her, “is to trust that you’re going to do the work and that I’m going to get what I’m paying for.” It was a very adult agreement, Jill says.

Fortunately, even in her mid-twenties, Jill was not intimidated by this kind of autonomy. Although many people who work from home find establishing boundaries and schedules difficult, Jill made the transition pretty easily. “It’s probably some weird personality quirk of mine,” she says. “I was always one of those kids who did my homework right away.”

The Rocky Flats project was the first thing that Jill worked on with RAC. As she became involved in other studies in other parts of the country, however, she began to think about moving back to South Dakota. She could have moved anywhere, “but I’ve always been a homebody,” she says. “I didn’t want to move in with my folks, but I wanted to be close enough that I could have that relationship.”

In Sioux Falls, Jill also had friends from high school and college that she would run into from time to time, including Jason Aanenson. “We ran into each other at Best Buy,” she says with a smile. “I was buying a new mouse for my computer and he was buying a big TV.”

Jason had grown up in a small town in northern Minnesota. Like Jill, he graduated from Augustana. Then he went to dental school at Creighton University in Omaha. With his small town roots in mind, he was purchasing a dental practice in the town of Freeman about an hour west of Sioux Falls.

As they started dating, Jill hesitated over the idea of moving to Freeman. It seemed small and remote, but she was increasingly committed to the relationship with Jason. When they decided to get married, Jill thought “I’ll figure it out.” Fortunately, her work with RAC gave her the freedom to live anywhere as long as she had a telephone line and an airport relatively nearby.

When she made the move to Freeman in 1999, Jill was still on dial-up, as were most of her associates at RAC. But soon after she moved MediaCom, the local cable company (now Golden West), installed high-speed coaxial cable. Jill was one of the first people in town to sign up. She was also one of the first on the RAC team to get high-speed Internet. “Nobody could believe it,” she says, “because here I was living in this small town.”

For Jill, the social transition to Freeman was more challenging. She traveled frequently and people in the community did not understand her work. “Instead of a physicist, they thought I was a physical trainer,” she says. Others understood that she did science and studied radiation and the environment, so they associated her with Hollywood’s Erin Brockovich.

After she and Jason had their son Tryg, however, Jill’s roots in the community grew deeper. Through Trig’s daycare she met other parents. She started joining community groups and helped promote the construction of a new library. At times, there were tensions over her insider/outsider status in the community.

Nevertheless, Jill likes living and working in Freeman. “I think it’s a lot less distracting,” she says, gesturing out the window to the open yards of her neighbors and the fields beyond the highway. She talks about the noise in urban areas. “I know for  a lot of people that’s white noise, but for me that’s always been very distracting. I like to be focused and able to really concentrate. That’s a lot easier to do in a place like this than it is even in a city the size of Sioux Falls.”

Jill also like the connectedness she feels in Freeman. She doesn’t worry about leaving the keys in the car when she goes to the store. “Everybody knows whose car that is,” she says, “so if somebody other than me gets in and drives away, it’s going to cause a stink.”

In Freeman, she says, people watch out for one another and for the community’s children. “I like having everybody know who I am, and everybody knows who our son is.”

Winner, South Dakota was a long way from Disney’s studios in southern California. The town of 3,000 people offered no role models or mentors for a would-be animator. At 18 she had shouldered serious adult responsibilities, becoming the mother of a baby girl. She and Albert Miller, her daughter’s father, needed to make some tough decisions.

Growing up, Kara had lived in various small towns in South Dakota. Her father was a teacher and school administrator. Between kindergarten and graduation Kara had lived in McGlaughlin, Hurley, Hoven, Freeman and Winner. Her mother worked as a writer and editor for various small town newspapers. After her parents divorced when Kara was in third grade, she and her four brothers had lived off and on with each of her parents.

With their new daughter, Kara and Albert decided to move closer to Kara’s mother who was living in Grand Island, Nebraska. Trying to keep herself on track, Kara enrolled at the University of Nebraska, Kearny as a graphic design major. She took various jobs so that she and Albert could keep a roof over their heads, but trying to be a student and a working mom didn’t go well. When her younger borther was killed in a car accident, the family was devastated. Kara’s mother moved to Columbus, Ohio to be closer to her own parents. Kara and Albert packed up the baby and went with her.

Columbus was a shock. With as many residents as the entire state of South Dakota, the city “was a mad house,” Kara says. The day that she and Albert moved in an FBI agent knocked on their door to ask questions about a neighbor. She couldn’t get used to the traffic. The cost of living was so much higher. Albert got a job with a pavement contractor. She looked for work. When she found a job selling fine art out of a catalog door-to-door, she took it because she thought it would keep her closer to her dream. She also enrolled in a distance learning program with the Art Institute of Pittsburgh to major in game design.

She liked learning online. After her son was born, distance learning gave her the flexibility she needed to tend to the children, work, and go to school. She often studied late at night after the rest of the family had gone to bed. The faculty made her feel comfortable with what she was doing, but Kara soon realized that game design was not for her. It was very technical and expensive, demanding a powerful computer and high-priced software.

Fortunately, one of her professors at the Art Institute told her about Guru.Com. Founded in 1999, Guru was one of several online start-ups hoping to build a business by connecting freelancers with employers in a world increasingly reliant on outsourcing. On Guru, Kara could post her resume and scan lists of projects offered by people looking to commission art work. Bidding for jobs was extremely competitive. With people in India and other developing nations competing for the work, the pay could be very low. On her first job illustrating a number of children’s books, “I worked for pennies.”

The work for Guru clients gave her a portfolio. She began to build a loyal clientele of her own. Working part-time as a secretary as a local church and illustrating for various clients, Kara began her transition to a career as a professional artist with clients scattered around the world.

Kara and Albert were still not comfortable living in Columbus. They were barely getting by. They had purchased a camper and were living in it with their two young children, moving from one place to another throughout the year. They often talked about returning to South Dakota.

In 2003, Kara’s father offered them an option. He was leaving his job as superintendent of schools in Hoven to teach in another community. Located far from any metropolis in the north central section of South Dakota with a population of only 500 people, Hoven didn’t have an active real estate market. Kara and Albert could have his house if they were willing to take over the mortgage payments.

Moving was a gamble. In a small town economy, Albert might not find a job right away. Commuting more than eighty miles to Pierre or Aberdeen, the closest cities with more than 5,000 people, would cut deeply into whatever take-home pay he would earn. Kara’s income from illustrating would have to continue and grow. They wanted that small town quality of life, and they were willing to take the chance.

Since moving to Hoven, Kara has had to overcome a number of challenges to make her work viable. She invested in a satellite dish to give her a broadband connection. To meet her deadlines, she sketches while the kids are in school and then returns to the work at night. Because she spent so much time at home, a lot of people in this tight-knit community weren’t sure what to make of her. ”A lot of people didn’t understand what I do,” she says. Her anonymity disappeared in November, however, after the Hoven paper ran a front-page story on her “Free Lance Home Office.”

After four years in the community, life has settled into a rhythm. Albert works for the school district as a custodian. Kara designs business logos and T-shirts for clients far away and shows her art in a gallery in Florida. She has become the art director for a publishing company in Canada. She frequently does illustrations for another publisher in Indiana. Her illustrations appear in children’s stories and steamy romance novels. From her home on the prairie, her art travels digitally to clients and printing presses hundreds and thousands of miles away. 

Don grew up in Watertown, South Dakota, the youngest of five boys. The last to graduate from Watertown High School, Don played football, ran track and served as president of his senior class. He chose SDSM&T for the in-state tuition and on the recommendation of one of his older brothers who had already become a Hardrocker.

IBM recruited Don to the sales side of the business, using his technical expertise to help customers understand the potential uses of IBM’s systems. Over the next 11 years, he moved around the Midwest with assignments in Sioux Falls, Sioux City, Denver, Omaha and Minneapolis. Benefiting from IBM’s superior management training programs, he deepened his technical knowledge, improved his management skills and gained expertise in sales and marketing. Along the way he was climbing the corporate ladder. ”At IBM, your name was in a box on an organizational chart,” he says. ”The goal was to get your name in the box above.”

Unfortunately, IBM was in trouble. Blindsided by the rise of the personal computer and distributed networks, IBM was losing money in the mid-1990s. The company’s 1993 losses of nearly $5 billion set a record at the time for U.S. corporations. IBM’s financial woes, combined with Don’s growing interest in entrepreneurial organizations, led to his departure from Big Blue in 1995. He joined Minnesota-based Winthrop Resources, a leasing company helping to finance corporate acquisitions of high technology equipment and software. At Winthrop, Don discovered lots of new challenges.

He also met the love of his life. An administrator at Winthrop, Kelly was born and raised in Minnesota. She too had known a small town childhood. Married in 1997, Don and Kelly began their life together in central Minneapolis, but like many Americans today, when they started their family, they moved to a distant suburb. “To tell the truth,” Don says, “I never imagined living so far out of the city, but we wanted a big yard so the kids could be outside.” They also wanted better schools.

Stuck in morning and evening traffic on the days he wasn’t traveling to visit customers on the East Coast, Don thought about his own childhood. A friend from his youth was talking about moving back to Watertown. Don thought it would be good for his kids to be closer to their grandparents. “Since my sales territory was the Washington/Baltimore area,” he says, “living in Watertown wouldn’t really add much cost to what I did.”

When he approached his colleagues and the executive team at Winthrop, they were initially hesitant about the idea. Don realized that telecommuting would impact his relationships with the staff. He would have fewer opportunities to mentor the younger employees. Distance would probably impact his ability to be promoted. But he was resolved to make the move for quality of life reasons, and Winthrop was willing to give it a try.

Don and Kelly and their first two children moved to Watertown in 2003. Since the move, the family has grown with the birth of their third child. With the children sometimes coming in to check on dad, Don now works out of a home office and travels to the East Coast about once a month. Through family and the children’s activities, they have gotten connected in the community. Even though Don didn’t do business in Watertown, he joined the Rotary. Talking to local business leaders got him interested in the local economy. 

Recently, the wisdom Don gained at IBM and Winthop has begun to pay dividends locally. With a former high school football teammate who now lives in Dallas, Texas, Don has invested in a struggling manufactured homes company in Watertown. The pair brought in a new CEO, and with the fresh capital and marketing and management expertise that Don and his partner have brought to the business, the company has turned the corner. Employees are no longer worried about losing their jobs.

Don enjoys taking his kids to the lake outside Watertown in the summer, sharing some of the places he remembers from his childhood. On fall afternoons, they sit in the stands watching the football team. Instead of being painted blue these days, he once again cheers for the purple and gold of Watertown High.

She didn’t intend to move home. But then her father contracted Lou Gehrig’s disease. In the mid-1990s she made the roundtrip from O’Hare Airport to Rapid City once a month. The two-hour drive north gave her a chance to think about the pace of life in Chicago and the importance of her family.

On one of these trips home, she met John Teigen. He was a rancher with a place south of Camp Crook just across the Little Missouri River and into Montana. He was older than Sharlet with children from a previous marriage. She liked him. On her trips home they began to date.

John was serious enough about the relationship that he visited Chicago and “got a sore neck” from looking up at the buildings. She introduced him to her former colleagues and current clients at the National Cattleman’s Beef Association, and he got a better understanding of her work as a freelance marketeer. But she knew he would never leave the ranch. “This is what he was born to do,” she says.

When they talked about getting married, Sharlet explained that she couldn’t be the traditional ranch wife. She had grown up around animals, riding and showing horses. She understood the life, but she loved the writing, strategizing, and designing that she did for a living. She struggled to imagine how she could put these two worlds together.

Sharlet had a couple of clients she could count on, even if she moved a thousand miles away. In August 1996, she had her belongings packed when she got a call and learned that her father had died. She came home to grieve and to start a new life with John.

As a communicator, Sharlet depended on the telephone and the fax. Located more than 30 miles from paved road, John’s place received telephone service from West River Telephone Cooperative based in Bison, South Dakota. When the technicians installed the fax line for Sharlet, they couldn’t get enough power running through the attenuated line to make the machine ring. After they solved the problem, she still struggled with dial-up, paying long distance rates to reach her internet service provider and leaving the computer on “send” all night to get documents to her clients.

For the first eight months Sharlet kept her apartment in Chicago. Once a month, she drove the gravel roads and highways under big skies to Rapid City to catch a flight. For a week she met with clients and collaborated with graphic designers, scheduled back-to-back meetings to stay connected and got her “big city fix.” “I realized that you had to keep your face out there,” she says. “You can’t rely on doing everything remotely.”

But after awhile the face time for its own sake didn’t matter as much. She was getting the work done. There were always conventions and conferences that brought people together. In the meantime, her clients trusted her. When satellite brought broadband to the ranch in 2003, the stresses of communicating diminished.

Often Sharlet took a break from her work to help John in the corral or the barn. Saddling horses, they rode out to check animals or for the pleasure of the open air. If deadlines were hanging over her head, she worked in the evenings to make up for the time outdoors. She talked to John about her work. He listened graciously, but the issues of strategy, language, and client relationships didn’t belong to his world. Despite the technological improvements, Sharlet sometimes felt incredibly isolated.

Sharlet knew other women from her days in Chicago who were freelancing. Several were mothers trying to work from home and raise children. Although none lived as far from the city as she did, they faced similar issues of isolation. “Individually, we had no backup, ” she says. “We couldn’t do big stuff, and we couldn’t take a vacation.” In 2004, the group came together in Champaign, Illinois. They talked about forming a virtual company. After a two-year experiment with the concept, the women incorporated in 2006 as Demeter Communications.

Working long distance underscores the relationshp between Sharlet’s work, her marriage and her way of life. “It’s hard to shut off the office,” she says. “I love what I do.” In that regard, she says, she is like the man she married. “A rancher’s hours never quit. It’s a way to live rather than a job.”

You can learn more about the work that Sharlet and her partners do at: www.demetercommunications.com.

After turning in her resignation, Annette had an idea. A couple of years earlier she had a attended a workshop where she heard about Sylvan Learning’s online tutoring program. They were looking for teachers. Through Sylvan, she could continue to do what she loved and supplement the family’s income. She could do it on her own schedule because Sylvan had students in a dozen different time zones. The only challenge she faced was getting connected.

The Slaba ranch is located outside Ludlow, South Dakota, a wide spot on the two-lane Can Am highway that runs along the western edge of North and South Dakota. It’s gorgeous, but desolate country where herds of antelope and deer grazed the wind-blown grass protruding from a thin layer of snow on the day of our interview. The telephone cooperative that serves the area has a territory as big as some states but a population smaller than many urban high schools. The cooperative didn’t offer broadband in 2003, and without broadband Annette couldn’t work for Sylvan.

Annette and Ron tried satelite, but the latency delays made real-time two-way communication difficult. They heard that Consolidated Telecom in North Dakota had a super cell 30 miles away that could deliver line-of-sight broadband wireless to a dish on their roof.  They signed up for the service, installed the antenna and Annette was in business.

As a teacher for Sylvan’s online program, Annette logs in on her computer from her ranch house. During each one-hour session she has up to three students assigned to her virtual classroom. They may be working on reading or math skills. They log on from Montana, Michigan, Illinois, California, Japan, the United Kingdom and a host of other places far from Ludlow, South Dakota.

Annette often tries to imagine the lives of her students. She grew up attending one or two-room rural schools surrounded by wide open prairie and sky. When she went away to college, she went as far as she could go and still pay in-state tuition. At the University of South Dakota (USD), she studied education, and she met Ron. As soon as they had both graduated, they moved to Ludlow. Ron went to work with Annette’s father on the ranch and Annette began teaching in a rural school. Her only colleague in the building was her aunt.

Despite her isolation, Annette has always been curious about the world. As she works with her online students, they talk about their different lives. “Some of them have no idea what we do on a ranch,” she says. In turn, she tries to imagine the lives of her students in inner city Chicago. She is awed by the multi-lingual capabilities of the immigrant children she teaches. She worries about the situations that a few of her students face at home.

Comparing teaching online with the years she spent in the classroom, Annette is extremely positive. “I don’t have to worry about writing lessons, going to meetings, or dealing with parents, administrators or paperwork,” she says. Her supervisor at Sylvan can monitor her teaching remotely. “Now I spend 100 percent of my time with the students.”

Sitting at the kitchen table in their modest ranch house, Ron and Annette talk about the opportunities that the online world is bringing to them and their community in Harding County. It’s a region that has been losing population for decads. Some have even proposed that the land should be given back to the buffalo and returned to wilderness.

Annette’s teaching offers the promise of other possibilities. Her income pays for the extras in Slaba household. It helps to stabilize the family’s cashflow if prices drop in the livestock markets. It could provide the margin of difference for some families.

Locally, people often ask her about her work. “They are amazed,” she says. “It shows others that with these new technologies it is possible for people to make a living from home.” On any given day, she comes in from the wind, the snow or the summer heat with the smell of grass in her hair and sits down to teach children worlds away from her home. For Annette, a flat world means she didn’t have to choose at all.

To learn more about Sylvan Learning opportunities for teachers, check out http://tutoring.sylvanlearning.com/about-us/jobs.cfm

As a child growing up in Rochester, New York McGraw didn’t see much of the world. Her father worked for an office supply company and her mother was a homemaker. Her grandmother was an entrepreneur who made awnings and decorations for parties. When Kate graduated from high school in the late 1960s, she thought she would go into human resources and work in a school or a nursing home. She didn’t imagine herself as a jet setter.

McGraw’s life took a turn in the late 1970s after her first husband was transferred by Kodak from New York to Colorado. Living in Windsor, about halfway between Fort Collins and Greeley, she took care of the children and worked a couple of part-time jobs in bookkeeping and banking. When she and her husband divorced in the early 1980s, she moved with the children to Las Vegas. Thinking she might pursue a career as a travel agent, she took a course in travel planning.

With a new interest and new skills, McGraw got a job in reservations at Heavenly Ski Resort at Lake Tahoe. Over the next eleven to twelve years she worked for a variety of ski industry associations creating and booking winter vacation packages in California and then back in Colorado. Working on commission made her increasingly entrepreneurial.

Since summers were slow, Kate followed the suggestion of a friend and contacted a “destination management company” based in Chicago. DMCs organize and manage large events for corporate clients. From her home in Colorado, McGraw began traveling to sites all over the country.

One night in Hawaii she realized that she had arrived. Amid a crowd of Pepsi bottlers celebrating the Pepsi centennial she stood listening to The Rolling Stones, Lord of the Dance, Kool and the Gang and Ray Charles. She realized: “I was working, seeing all of this, getting paid to fly to Hawaii, to be in a beautiful place and to see all of these people. That was my job.”

The job gave her incredible freedom, and the flexibility to live anywhere she wanted — as long as there was an airport nearby.

Kate jokes that appliances brought her to South Dakota, but actually it was her second husband. By the late 1990s, Kate had met Hugh McGraw. They were both living in Windsor. He had friends who were building a house in Canning, South Dakota in the rural countryside northeast of Pierre. One weekend, he helped his friends transport appliances from Colorado to Canning. A Nebraska native, he felt an affinity for the landscape. When he discovered a small house for sale down the road, he decided to buy it.

Kate and Hugh made trips to Canning to fix up the house. To some of the farmers in the community, the site of Kate running on the gravel roads was a surprise. As they got to know the neighbors, however, Hugh and Kate liked the community even more. When Hugh retired, they moved. Married at the St. Charles Hotel in Pierre in 1999, Kate remembers the disbelief of her relatives from New York. “They thought they had come to the ends of the earth.”

But air travel out of Pierre was a challenge given Kate’s line of work. On a visit to Deadwood, she and Hugh were charmed by the history of the town. Deadwood was less than an hour from Rapid City’s airport with more airlines and options for flights east and west. In 2000, Kate and Hugh bought a house to fix up and moved to this historic gold rush town.

Most of the people she knows in Deadwood aren’t quite certain what it is she does. As one woman recently remarked, “I know you get to travel everywhere, but I don’t really understand what you do.” Kate explains. She plans parties — for 20,000 people at a time.

He had played guitar in high school. In his early twenties in Chadron, his play turned serious. He spent long hours teaching himself and practicing. “I learned a discipline then that paid off years later when I began telecommuting.” He played with several rock bands, and it was through one of those bands that he met his wife Betsy. In the early 1980s, they moved to Fargo/Morehead so Michael could join a band that seemed to be going somewhere.

 After months on the road playing in clubs in Minnesota and the Dakotas, the rock star dream began to fade. Betsy convinced Michael to go back to school. He applied and was accepted to the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City. Ten years removed from his last high school class, he was surprised to discover how much he liked math, chemistry and the other classes he took at Tech. He decided to major in computer science.

When he graduated in 1986, there were no jobs in Rapid City for someone with his skills. With a brand new baby, Michael was anxious to find something.

He and Betsy moved back to her hometown — Chicago. Michael landed a job with a company in Northbrook, Illinois that was developing software for property managers. He liked the work, but living in a working class Chicago suburb was tough. The year their first child was ready for kindergarten there was a drive-by shooting at the neighborhood elementary school. In another incident, a woman shot and killed her husband on their block — both husband and wife were police officers.

“We just wanted to get out of there,” Michael remembers. After five years with the company, he convinced his boss to let him telecommute from South Dakota. “He had young kids as well,” says Michael, “so he understood.”

Michael remembers the day that he and Betsy and their young family arrived with the U-Haul at their new home in the Black Hills. “It was one of the best days of my life.” As they stood outside that night, Michael said, “Listen.” “What do you hear?” Betsy asked. “No noise,” he replied.

Michael worked so hard in those first few months to prove to his boss and the company that telecommuting would work, he put in 60-hour weeks. Having taught himself to play music, he understood how to work alone and stay focused. Back in Northbrook, they were astonished by his productivity. Three months after arriving in the Black Hills, Michael was named employee of the month.

Over the last 15 years, Michael has continued to telecommute from his home office in Rapid City. Neighbors curious about what he does have been amazed. His company has changed ownership and management and it has also gone global. Betsy works at the neighborhood elementary school where their children went to school. She walks to work. Now that the kids are older, Michael has started playing rock and roll again. After a long day staring at computer code, a little Pink Floyd does wonders for the soul.