Mr. Burgess gets housekeeping assistance under a state program that helps older people stay in their homes and out of nursing care. But if he could not socialize in town, he said, he would be lost.

“I might be on roller skates,” said Mr. Burgess, still cowboy-thin in cinched-up Levis, his booming outdoor voice filling his home on a recent snowy afternoon. He glanced around the tiny, cluttered living room  the coal stove, the broken television, the walls lined with pictures of his wife, Laura, who died just over a year ago after more than 60 years of marriage.

“I wish it was different, but it isn’t,” he said. “So you endure it.”

Some people who study rural America say the tough economic times and new budget woes could make it too difficult for many rural stoics to hang on. But others suggest the fortitude of the rural elderly simply runs too deep for that.

“The people will remain, because they’re rooted and anchored to the land,” said Teresa S. Radebaugh, the director of the Regional Institute on Aging at Wichita State University. “They’ll stay no matter what.”

Verna Bairn, 67, is a farm widow who has lived all her life in Oshkosh, Neb., about 115 mostly empty miles southeast of Lingle. She has seen the young people leave, she said, and the businesses on Main Street close. She has seen the median age in Garden County  where Oshkosh, population about 900, is the county seat  climb to 45 to 50 years old, according to the census, more than 10 years older than the nation’s as a whole. The counties in northwest Nebraska are now some of the oldest in the country.

“One foot in the grave, the other sliding,” said Ms. Bairn in describing her town. Ms. Bairn has a daughter in Wyoming and a son in Wisconsin. Her husband, Edgar, died in 1998, of cancer, at 60.

“He and I had one plan for our life, and God had another,” she said of her husband’s early death and the personally hard times that followed. “We played our cards the best we could.”