If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now

by Christopher Ingraham

  The photographs eventually morphed into a hashtag campaign, #ShowMeYourUglyCounties, inviting Minnesotans to showcase the state’s natural beauty and refute claims of a lack of amenities. Many of the responses contained a variant of the word “uffda,” an all-purpose Minnesota-ism roughly synonymous with “good grief!”

  To be honest, I felt pretty good watching this all unfold from my desk in D.C. People were clicking, reading, and sharing the article, which is just about all most of us in the media asked of our audiences in that era.

  One striking thing, however, is that the volume of feedback wasn’t accompanied by much vitriol. I write about all sorts of controversial topics, like guns and politics, where even mundane observations can incite frothing rage. There was none of it, though, in the response to the natural amenities story. To the extent that I knew anything about Minnesotans it was that they had a tendency toward humility and politeness, an impression I had gleaned solely from hearing Garrison Keillor on NPR growing up. The weird thing was that, in my first interaction with Minnesotans as a class, they were valiantly living up to their stereotypes.

  The other thing: they didn’t let up. The social media campaign escalated throughout the day, to the extent that regional news outlets decided to get in on the action.

  “Red Lake County was minding its own business,” Minneapolis alternative newspaper City Pages wrote. “Then out of the blue prairie skies some East Coast media type with a hogwash government index calls the swath of northwest Minnesota ‘the absolute worst place to live in America.’”

  That reporter called up county commissioner Charles Simpson to ask what he thought of the fracas. “What they’ve got to say, it’s bullshit,” he said.

  The Star Tribune subsequently asked Simpson what he thought of me, personally, for their own story. “He can kiss my butt,” Simpson said.

  By this time the story had received wide enough traction that then-senator Al Franken weighed in. “You’re totally right @washingtonpost—Red Lake County has no natural beauty,” he wrote in a sarcastic Twitter post accompanied by a bucolic photo of the county’s Old Crossing Treaty Park. Tagging my employer’s account in that tweet was a nice touch, ensuring that our social media team were aware of the abuse Minnesotans were facing in my careless hands.

  I want to pause for a minute here to point out something interesting. If you go back to the original map, you’ll see that it’s not just northwest Minnesota—there are a lot of places in the United States that don’t look good on the USDA’s index. The North Dakota side of the Red River Valley fared just as poorly, as did a wide swath of the rust belt region running down through Iowa, Illinois, and up through Ohio.

  I didn’t hear a single word of complaint from any of these states, though. Not even one. No indignant Iowans. No outraged North Dakotans. I did, however, receive an email from a resident of Nebraska. He had noticed that his region of the state didn’t look good on the map, and had considered lodging a complaint. But the more he thought about it, he told me, the more he felt he agreed with the ranking. “I guess Omaha really is kind of a dump,” he said.

  I must have written dozens of similar pieces to this in the course of a career—find a dataset, map it out, call out the highs and lows, and call it a day. But I had never received a torrent of feedback from a low-ranking locality like I did from Minnesotans that August.

  In fact, there’s a phrase among statisticians: “Thank God for Mississippi.” The idea is that in just about any state-level ranking of a given quantity—whether it be economic, demographic, cultural, social, or anything else—Mississippi usually ends up at the very bottom of the list. If you’re from, say, Alabama, that’s something to be thankful for.

  I’ve done an awful lot of stories where Mississippi ends up at the bottom of some ranking or another. And again, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a single word of complaint from a Mississippi resident. Minnesotans were a different breed entirely.

  In a lighthearted attempt at amends-making, I rounded up a bunch of the best responses to the original article and published them in a follow-up piece several days later titled “Thick Coats, Thin Skins: Why Minnesotans Were Outraged by a Recent Washington Post Report.”

  For the piece I asked one of the original instigators, Matt Privratsky, what his deal was. “Minnesotans are known for being very humble and even reserved,” he said, “but as this reaction shows we’re also very proud of our state—especially when in competition with those around us.”

  If Red Lake County wasn’t the ugliest place in the nation, what was? “I wouldn’t be doing my job as a born and bred Minnesotan if I didn’t tell people to avoid Wisconsin,” Privratsky wrote.

  Later in the week I got an email with the subject line “An invitation to come visit Red Lake County.” It was from a guy named Jason Brumwell. His family, he wrote, owned a river tubing business based in the town of Red Lake Falls. “I would like to cordially and officially invite you to come and check out our little county which has now been dubbed, ‘The Worst County in the United States,’” he said. Citing the online criticism that had been going on, he said that “I would also like to reassure you that you would be given plenty of good natured ‘ribbing’ but would be greeted with open arms and a lot of people showing you why they feel our county is far from the worst.”

  Hmmm.

  The first thing I did after reading the email several times over in search of obvious signs of mental instability was to google Brumwell and his business, Voyageur’s View. Everything seemed to be on the up-and-up. The Francophile spelling was an interesting touch—a nod, as it turned out, to the French explorers who played a major role in settling the region in the 1600s and 1700s.

  I have to admit that at this point I was plenty curious to see what the place was actually like—to get the view from the ground, rather than from a spreadsheet. I had never been to Minnesota; in fact I’d never really even spent any time in the Midwest.

  When Briana got home that evening I told her about the email and asked her what she thought. I should point out that even under the best circumstances my job was a source of anxiety for her, given the torrents of vitriol I’d often stir up in the comments section of my stories and on social media.

  “So, a guy out there wants me to come and visit,” I told her.

  Her eyes grew wide. “Oh my God, they’re going to kill you aren’t they,” she said.

  “Come on, no,” I said. “You saw how polite everyone was. This guy seems really nice; there’s like seven exclamation points in his email.”

  “So they’re gonna what, tar and feather you instead? It’s a trap. Don’t do it.”

  It took some convincing but I finally got Briana on board with the idea. My editors were easier to convince. In fact, they were suspiciously enthusiastic about the idea. “D.C. Reporter Gets Tarred, Feathered by Indignant Minnesotans” would be a nice story to end the summer with.

  At any rate, a few days later I was on a plane headed to the North Star State. It was time to experience Red Lake County firsthand.

  Getting there, it turned out, was a bit of a challenge. Red Lake Falls is so far out of the way that the closest “major” airport (with just two gates) is in Grand Forks, North Dakota—an hour away and across the state line. As I flew in for my visit, the view out the airplane window was a rigid grid, straight roads stretching out to the horizon interrupted only by other straight roads running perpendicularly. Everything was flat, square. It certainly looked like it could be America’s worst place to live.

  I did some reading before I left to find out what kind of place I’d be parachuting into. By most economic metrics, the county seemed to be doing okay. The unemployment rate that July was 4.6 percent, well below the national average. The median household income was $48,000—less than half the typical income in the Washington suburbs.

  The median home value, on the other hand, was just $89,000, or one-fifth the typical home price where I was living. That works out to a home price to income rat
io of about two-to-one—a hell of a lot more favorable than D.C.’s eight-to-one ratio.

  The county was home to just a hair over four thousand people, 95 percent of whom were white. The median age of 42.1 was about five years greater than the U.S. average. Overall the county’s population density was ten people per square mile—approximately 99 percent less dense than Baltimore County, Maryland.

  The big business in the county was farming—more than three hundred farms, according to the U.S. Census of Agriculture. In terms of landscape it was 80 percent farmland, 10 percent forest, and 7 percent grassland. Just 1.6 percent of the land area was devoted to towns and residences. It was home to approximately twice as many cows as people.

  A picture was starting to emerge in my head of a place older, whiter, sparser and struggling—I imagined it not wholly unlike the hardscrabble farming communities that surrounded the town of Oneonta, New York, where I had grown up. People in the “big city” of Oneonta (pop. 13,000) looked down on these other communities, and I had been no different. We thought of them as hicks.

  Secretly, though, I had always been fascinated by these places. In high school I dated a number of girls—Briana was one of them—from these strange, small towns. I was struck above all by a sense of familiarity among the people who lived there. The kids, for instance, seemed to move around these towns as if the entire place belonged to them. They would enter stores and have long conversations with the people behind the counter, or hang out at the schools long after the closing bells, striding confidently along the halls like they had the keys to the place.

  It wasn’t like that in Oneonta. Boundaries between places you were and weren’t supposed to be were strictly policed. People were more anonymous and you didn’t know everyone. The town was full of strangers, which is a key difference between a place with 13,000 people and one with 1,300. Social science literature talks a lot about third places, like coffee shops and libraries, that serve as community focal points. Places not home, and not work or school, where people can gather and feel like they belong. In the small communities outside Oneonta it seemed to me that the entire towns were third places for many of the people who lived there. In Oneonta, by contrast, it felt like there weren’t any. More often than not, kids who were bored after school would end up at the local Wal-Mart with a group of friends, seeing what kind of trouble they could get into.

  Jason Brumwell was extremely enthusiastic about the visit. Ahead of my arrival he sent me an email detailing the plans he was making—lining up people to talk about why they stay; even in “mid winter when it’s 40 below zero we have six hours of sunlight . . . there are so many people who want to show you so many things that I’ll try and narrow it down so you can take in the best of the best and we’ll cover more when you inevitably want to come back again!” I was skeptical, to say the least.

  He closed his missive by offering to put me up at his house and warning me to prepare for “a huge helping of Minnesota nice!” The email contained nineteen sentences, twelve of which ended in an exclamation point.

  Jason told me to meet him at the county courthouse in Red Lake Falls once I arrived. “Some of the community actually wanted to greet you,” he explained. I rented a car from the rental desk at the airport, which was near a large, possibly military-grade lawn mower on display from a local retailer. A scale model of a drone hung from the ceiling, an evident nod to the University of North Dakota’s aviation program.

  I drove through the city of Grand Forks, crossed the Red River marking the border between North Dakota and Minnesota, and hit the upper midwestern prairie roads for the first time. At Jason’s suggestion I took the “back way,” a county highway traversing the forty miles of nothing between East Grand Forks and Red Lake Falls.

  What struck me first wasn’t the flatness or the emptiness or the complete lack of people or cars anywhere within my field of view—it was the sky. Unencumbered by hills and valleys, the sky seemed impossibly vast to my east coast eyes that afternoon, a clear blue dome dotted by plump, poofy clouds straight out of a children’s book. The horizon was truly infinite, the sense of scale and space and openness almost humbling.

  Agricultural fields vectored off in every direction. The road I was on shot eastward indefinitely, crossed every mile by dirt roads running north and south, bearing well-ordered names: 170th Street, 160th Street, and so on. It was vast but tidy.

  At one point I pulled my car over to the side of the road to take pictures and ended up standing there for a few minutes, luxuriating in the silence. The only sounds were the occasional bird chirp rising above the rustle of the wind through cornstalks.

  As I approached Red Lake Falls some unexpected variation presented itself—after twenty-two miles of straight-arrow eastward driving, the first turn. As I got even closer to town the road veered south, and then dipped down a small valley toward what a sign proclaimed to be the Red Lake River, the county’s namesake.

  Crossing the river I saw the sign for Jason Brumwell’s business, Voyageur’s View Camping and Tubing, overlooking a wide swath of mowed grass leading to a collection of red-roofed wood buildings.

  Passing the campground the road broadened as I entered the town of Red Lake Falls proper, demarcated by a large wooden sign that proclaimed “Welcome to Red Lake Falls” over a background that suggested mountains and lakes, rather incongruously given the flat agricultural landscape. A large, handcarved wooden loon was propped up against one of the sign legs.

  I drove past tidy homes with trim, tightly cropped lawns, the domestic counterpart to the orderly fields outside town. There was what appeared to be a bar, T&J’s, on one side of the road, standing next to an evidently vacant building that resembled nothing so much as an old bank.

  Turning onto the town’s main drag, the first order of business was crossing a large sloped bridge over another river, the Clearwater. Looking down the riverway I saw a series of large chalky cliffs rising fifty feet or so above the water. They offered just the slightest hint of the stark, arid landscape of the Dakotas, a reminder that the region stands at the border between the forests of the east and the more dramatic landscapes of the west.

  I found the courthouse—not difficult, given that it was the largest building in town—parked the car, and didn’t even manage to get the door all the way open before I was surprised by a microphone in my face. It was a member of the local media, asking me what I was doing and how I liked the place so far and what my plans were for the next few days. I did my best to answer his questions before an older gentleman pulled me aside. I noticed he was wearing a Voyageur’s View shirt.

  “Are you Jason?” I asked.

  “No, I’m his dad, Dick,” he said. “Jason’s over there,” he added, gesturing toward the courthouse. At this point I was able to take in the scene for the first time.

  There weren’t just a “handful” of people waiting to meet me, as Jason had suggested—there were dozens. There were camera crews, four or five of them. I heard music—there was a color guard from the local high school in full uniform, arrayed along the courthouse steps and striking up a patriotic tune.

  Dick led me over to a guy about my age with a thick layer of facial scruff and a Minnesota Twins hat, sipping from an energy drink. This must be Jason. I noticed then that the air was thick with yellowjackets, and that a number of them kept trying to crawl into the drink can. He was swatting them away absentmindedly.

  We greeted each other, then Jason took a swig from his can and made an odd face. “Oh, I think I just swallowed one,” he said nonchalantly. There was a certain odd forwardness to the “oh” that made him sound like an extra from Fargo, the Coen Brothers movie.

  We stood there in awkward silence for a few minutes to watch the band play its number. I was quite literally dumbstruck, slowly grappling with the full realization that at this point I was less reporting a story than becoming one myself. I quietly fretted over whether I’d get in trouble with my editors for creating a stir.

  Jason led me in
side the courthouse. Given the amount of media interest, the locals thought it best I sit down with the reporters for an impromptu press conference before getting on with the day’s business. I knew they’d probably be expecting a snooty east coaster, so I tried to answer their questions with some humility and gee-whizzedness to play against type. I told them about the nice emails I had received from Minnesota people, the response from politicians, and my wife’s misgivings. I tried to frame the whole thing as a useful refresher on the limitations of viewing the world through a spreadsheet—limitations that would be obvious to a normal person, but easy for someone in my position to lose track of.

  After that I chatted with the town’s mayor, Kevin Harmoning, and city administrator Kathleen Schmitz. I asked them about the biggest challenges facing the town, hoping for something juicy—crime? Meth? Crippling poverty?

  No, it was “just making ends meet,” Harmoning said, referring to keeping the town running, the bills paid, and the lights on. During the recession, they had actually been forced to turn some of the streetlights off to keep everything else running, Schmitz said. But all in all, the downturn’s effects hadn’t been as harsh here as elsewhere. Many of the farms outside of town that form the economic backbone of the county weren’t affected much at all. “People still needed to eat,” Schmitz said.

  It reminded me of what a social studies teacher had told me way back in high school, back in upstate New York. The class had been talking about economics, of booms and recessions, and how neither one of those things ever seemed to affect the small towns the way they did the cities. “We don’t get the highs and we don’t get the lows,” he had said. “But we always do pretty much okay.” I had thought at the time that there was some comfort in that. After eight years of living in the D.C. area, hearing similar thoughts delivered in a county courthouse 1,400 miles away gave me a pang of homesickness.