Everybody knows everybody in this speck of a town too small for a stoplight, a place tucked so far into Colorado's northeastern corner that Nebraska is just a thought away.
Charlie and Emily Hartman grew up here on their family's ranch, wide-open spaces sliced by ribbons of fence. They attend Revere Junior/Senior High School, home of the Raiders -- all 40 of them, from seventh grade on up -- in a tan-brick building on the edge of town, where the road turns from asphalt to gravel.
On Tuesday, these teenagers from the middle of nowhere plan to be smack dab in the middle of the nation's biggest somewhere, watching President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration in a crowd expected to be as much as 1,000 times the size of tiny Sedgwick County, population 2,500.
It's an event of such magnitude that it might overwhelm anyone. But for kids from a place where there are five people for every square mile and four cows for every person, it's unimaginably huge.
"I don't think I've ever even been in a building with more than 100 people," said Charlie Hartman, 18. "Even when I was in New York ... I'd never even seen that many people before. So this is going to be insane."
Charlie and his 15-year-old sister Emily, a freshman, have been to Washington before, but it will be a first for sophomores Makenzie Ault and Bradon Schneider, both 16. The trip, arranged through Smithsonian Student Travel, costs about $1,200 a person, which was too pricey for many Revere students, more than half of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch.
"I think he's looking forward to the social aspect because we are here out in the middle of nowhere, and he has the same 30 to 40 people he sees day in and day out," said Tammy Schneider, Bradon's mom. "I think it's going to be neat for him to see the real world."
Coming from a place as small as Ovid, with its 330 residents, sets these kids apart. But they have another distinction: in this always-red county, three of the four have parents who voted for Obama. For Lisa Ault, Makenzie's mom, it was a last-minute decision; but the Hartmans are die-hard Democrats who love to discuss politics, at least in the confines of their home.
"My parents get pretty worked up," Charlie said. "We tend to say our opinions but try to keep the arguments down because there are more important things to do than argue about politics."
There's a ranch to run, a 16-hours-a-day, seven-day-a-week job that involves the whole family and often their friends, too.
City kids don't understand what it's like to know everybody's name everywhere you go, or to consider branding calves a festive event that brings together family and friends, or to have a rumor that starts in the morning be common knowledge by midafternoon.
Elections come and go, but things change little around here. In 2008, Sarah Palin was much admired, and she and John McCain won the county with 63 percent of the 1,351 votes cast. For many folks, politics boils down to guns and agriculture, and they have little use for politicians who don't understand the need for both.
"Most people are so removed from the farm and ranch now that they have absolutely no idea what it's like to try to make a living," said Charlie's mom, Dale Parker. "They don't realize that if they think it's bad importing our oil, try importing all our food."
As smaller farms and ranches have been swallowed up by larger ones the population of Sedgwick County has dwindled and aged. "There isn't an industry here for kids to come back to work at," Parker said. "So a lot of kids don't come back."
But there are exceptions. Makenzie wants to get a nursing degree and work at the local hospital. Charlie plans to go to the University of Colorado to study aerospace engineering, then get a job that will make money he can put back into the ranch.
"There's a certain beauty to the land out here," he said. "You can go twice the distance in half the time. And then there's being able to ... stand in your back yard and see for miles."
Email Lisa Ryckman of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colo. at ryckmanl(at)RockyMountain News.com
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