The hollowing out and slow collapse of rural America has been happening for a century or perhaps only since the nation rediscovered its cities in the 1980s or any of several other times in between depending on the point being made, but the trend is obvious and seemingly inexorable. No matter how many towns try endless combinations of tax incentives, college-loan forgiveness, spec-building programs, the result, with only slight variation, is the same: young people leave, the downtowns fade, the restaurants disappear and, fatally, the schools close.

Slipped into the middle of an excellent feature story recently about yet another rural town fighting, and seemingly losing, this war of attrition so familiar to Maine was a comment at once well known and yet often overlooked. New York Times reporter Timothy Egan wrote last week of Superior, Neb., which, like its Great Plains neighbors, has lost population, businesses and, to some extent, hope. It is situated in a region that depends on industries – corn, soybeans, oats, pigs – that grow more efficient each year and need fewer and fewer people to operate. It is growing older and its teen-agers are either bored or packing. The few people who return, while appreciating the kind of life they can live in Superior, sometimes find it hard to make a living there.

Wal-Mart, according to the story, has made it even harder because it out-prices local stores and the stores close, the downtown shutters and the individual savings of $100 a year from shopping at such an efficient place doesn’t compensate for the lost taxes and dismantled town. But people were leaving before Wal-Mart arrived, going to major cities where, interestingly, Wal-Mart has the least presence.

The heaviest population losses, Mr. Egan notes, look like this: “Over the last half-century, when the United States added 130 million people and the population grew by 86 percent, rural counties in 11 Great Plains states – those counties without a city of at least 2,500 people – lost more than a third of their people. The farm-based counties, and those away from interstate highways, lost the most.”

Very little has worked to save rural America; those places away from an interstate highway have been hurt worst. It is something for the nation’s easternmost state – a state without an interstate highway going west – to consider more strongly. Distance matters, and in an age in which productivity is measured in minutes of travel time, distance matters a lot, no matter how many miles of fiber optic cable are strung.

Maine’s situation is not unique; its proposed solutions are not unique, nor have they been especially successful elsewhere. Yet there stand the highways and the countless communities across the country clinging to them for survival. Maine continues to wonder what to do about that.