From the courthouse, Brumwell and his dad loaded me and a gaggle of reporters and local luminaries onto roofless red tour bus—one of the fleet they used to ferry tubers to the river launch—and took us to a dairy farm outside of town owned by brothers Carl and Joe Schindler. They milk about 120 cows 12 at a time the old-fashioned way, with a simple pump system installed in their dairy barn.
Unbeknownst to my hosts, I had had some experience with dairy farms growing up. My dad, the large animal veterinarian, saw a lot of dairy cows. For several summers in my childhood in upstate New York I would ride around on farm calls with him in lieu of day care or any other more structured and costly activity. I had come to know and love the sensory overload of a working dairy farm—the hot, earthy pungency of the manure, the lowing of the cows, the odd combination of astringency and liquid warmth in the dairy parlor.
It had been ages since I had pet a cow, though, and I couldn’t wait to do it again. I bounded off the bus as soon as we stopped and made my way over to the calf pens. A newborn calf suckled my thumb as the brothers told me about life on the farm. The earthy smells of a dairy operation—manure and hay and sawdust and dirt—hung thick in the air.
Carl asked if I wanted to check out the inside of the barn and yes, of course I did. We walked around back and into it, chatting a bit more as the huge industrial fans did their best to move the hot midwestern August air around. A member of one of the camera crews tried to follow us in for some footage but ended up retching near the entry of the barn, overcome by the smell.
“I’m really impressed you’re in here, actually,” Carl said. I told him about my dairy experiences growing up. “Smells great to me,” I said. “Smells like home.”
Carl’s story was similar to what I’d heard at city hall. Yes, life was challenging. A lot of the dairy farms had closed up shop years ago, victims of the relentless trend toward bigger and more high-tech operations that was happening all over the agricultural industry. Red Lake County wasn’t immune to any of this. In the 1950s, for instance, there were close to one thousand active farms in the county, according to USDA data. But by 2012 the number had fallen by more than half, and their average acreage had roughly doubled. Fewer farms means fewer families: the population of the county fell from 6,805 people in 1950 to just a hair over 4,000 people in 2012.
But Carl and his brother were still here, and despite their small size they were doing okay. Five years, ten years down the line? Who could tell. But for now the numbers added up.
I found myself thinking of Jack and Charles as we toured the property, petting calves and feeding hay to the lumbering heifers. Wouldn’t it be great for them to grow up in a place where they could have this kind of experience? There was a petting zoo fairly close to home in Maryland that we had visited several times. The disinterested animals did their best to avoid the crowds of kids always running around the place; they’d seek out the shady corners of their enclosures to escape the sweltering Maryland summer sun. My own kids would quickly tire of competing with others for the attention of a stray goat and would be clamoring for snacks and other diversions within fifteen minutes of arrival.
After the farm, the next activity was a chance to reckon with the reality of the Red Lake County landscape via a kayak ride down the Red Lake River. I was prepared to be underwhelmed. On the bus ride over to the kayak launch, I learned that there were no lakes in Red Lake County—the name derived from the Red Lake River, which in turn was named after its source, the Red Lake, a massive body of fresh water about fifty miles east of the county.
“What about the falls?” I asked.
“What falls?” Jason said.
“Red Lake Falls?”
“Oh, there aren’t any falls in Red Lake Falls.”
“So there’s neither a lake, nor falls, in the town of Red Lake Falls?”
“Nope,” he said.
Still, you can’t complain about an afternoon kayak trip on work time. We got to the launch and Jason shoved me off onto the river in the company of four locals.
Our boats glided silently under an old railroad trestle. The tracks above had been converted to a paved trail some years back, my companions told me. As we rounded the river bend we came to the brick shell of a power station that used to sit on the river. Someone mentioned it would be a perfect place to convert to a riverside dining establishment, and it was hard to disagree.
The river wasn’t particularly large, maybe just ten kayak widths across. In the Northeast any river of this size tends to be shallow and rocky, but this one was tranquil, carving deep meanders through the landscape as it went. Dusty cliffs rose up on one side and then the other, pocked with holes where swallows nested. It felt like a western river but on miniature scale.
At one point one of my companions, a woman named Melissa Benoit, surreptitiously pulled out her phone and played the dueling-banjos theme from Deliverance. Melissa was a Red Lake Falls gal roughly my age; she’d moved around the country a bit after high school and ended up settling down back here, where friends and family were. She knew I’d probably been expecting a bunch of toothless rednecks and figured she’d have some fun at my expense. And indeed, to my surprise there was nothing about the place that suggested redneckery. The homes visible from the riverside were well kept, tidy. The rural areas of upstate New York where I grew up had a different feel to them—houses were often ramshackle, lawns overgrown with chunks of old cars or faded playground equipment strewn about. There was none of that here. The word that kept popping into my head was “tidy.” The area conveyed a sense of quiet, working-class normalcy.
Two of our other companions were a ten-year-old boy named Jayce, a student at the local elementary school, and his grandfather. Like many kids in the area Jayce was wild about hockey. Because the region was so sparsely populated, teams, even elementary school ones, would sometimes travel two, three, even four hours for the sake of a hockey match.
Jayce also gave me a sense of how the locals viewed themselves vis-à-vis Minneapolis, the state’s largest city, some five hours to the south. Jayce said he’d been there with his family and didn’t care much for it.
“Why?” I asked.
“There’s cars everywhere,” he said. “And the people are crazy-looking!”
I found that people up here spoke of Minneapolis the same way upstate New Yorkers talk about New York City—a far-off urban hellscape populated by millions of strange people who manage to draw a disproportionate share of attention and state resources. This was odd for me, since as a lifelong east coaster I’d always imagined Minneapolis as a sort of charming little hobbit village, full of farmer’s markets and artisanal craft stores.
Our tour ended at a place known to locals as the Point, where the Red Lake meets the Clearwater at a park in town. I hitched a ride back to my rental car with Jason, and then stopped by my motel room to check in and get a shower before dinner, which was evidently to be open to the public, at T&J’s.
My lodgings were at the Chateau Motel & Liquor Store, which is exactly what it sounds like: a regular roadside motel with a liquor store attached to it. Everything a weary traveler needs. As I fired off a few texts to Briana, letting her know I was safe and untarred, I noticed I had literally dozens of Facebook notifications. I opened the app to find that they were nearly all friend requests from Minnesotans I had met earlier in the day. Minnesota Nice, indeed.
The folks at T&J’s were outgoing and eager to talk about what made their community so special. Al Buse, for instance, was Red Lake Falls’ oldest resident at 101—“like everyone’s grandpa,” Jason told me. He was the grandson of one of the town’s original founders. He still lived alone, in a house on Main Street that was a veritable history museum—photographs and memorabilia of the town’s history, and, naturally, an arsenal of firearms stored in the basement.
Al, it seemed, was the living, breathing avatar of the sense of civic pride and duty that made the town of Red Lake Falls tick. In the summers when the weather was nice, every mor
ning he would load his tools in the back of his bright yellow golf cart and make his way through town, fixing things that need fixing, watering plants, generally doing whatever he could to keep the town, well, tidy.
For dessert, the restaurant served a cake built as a map of the county by baking prodigy Matt Weiss, a local high school student. I helped myself to the Red Lake Falls portion of the cake.
“See all these other little towns?” Jason said, pointing to places on the cake labeled Brooks, Oklee, and Plummer. “That’s where we’re going tomorrow.”
Jason had procured a tour bus from his friend Jesse, the guy who owned T&J’s. They had decked it out for the occasion, with a sign reading “America’s Worst Tour” splayed above the windshield. He had also invited a number of luminaries from the county’s four major towns to accompany us.
We visited a wheat farm in Brooks (pop. 139), where fourth-generation farmer Alex Yaggie, twenty-seven, showed me the cockpit of one of his forty-foot combines and let me drive it around an empty lot as much as I dared. We stopped at an asparagus farm outside Red Lake Falls, the first of its kind in the region, and sampled from a fiercely flavorful jar of pickled asparagus.
We stopped for lunch—fried cheese curds and a “Minnesota burger”—at T.J.’s Tavern in the town of Oklee (pop. 418). U.S. representative Collin Peterson, a Minnesota Democrat, swung by and sang an ode to ugliness on the bar’s main stage. Ugly women in particular, something he probably wouldn’t have done in our current post-#MeToo era.
We stopped at the Plummer Area Sportsmen’s Club, where county commissioner Chuck Simpson—the gruff fellow who’d given such spicy quotes to Minneapolis media about my original story—showed me around the shooting range.
By the end of the day I was worn out from all the glad-handing. It was a good kind of worn out, though. Over and over, the folks I spoke with told me it was that sense of community that kept them here and contributed to that enormous outpouring of civic pride in response to my original article. “There’s lots of freedom here,” Jason Brumwell told me later that night, at a barbecue at his dad’s house. “But everybody’s still watching out for each other.”
Chapter 2
The next day, following my whirlwind tour of Red Lake County, I packed my bags and flew back to Baltimore, to Briana, the twins, and the job. I had plenty to think about on the flight back home.
The trip had been a jarring break in the well-worn routine I’d established for myself in D.C. and Baltimore. It cast the shortcomings of our family’s situation in a jarring light. When I told people in Red Lake Falls about the length of my commute, for instance, their jaws dropped. I realized I had built up a protective layer of apathy around myself that allowed me to ignore the steep cost of the big commute, the small house, the disconnect among the crowds, all of it. After all, it was simply something that everyone did, on some level or another, out in D.C.
And yet, Red Lake County—and other places like it—were filled with people whose lives were radically different. They had space. Yards. Breathing room. Small communities where people knew and looked after one another. The very existence of Red Lake County and the people who lived there was a direct challenge to the way of life we had slid into in the city. It undermined the inevitability of modern urban life.
Like many people on the coasts, I had a foggy notion that places like Red Lake County were out there. We all knew about the rural-urban divide in the United States. But I had previously thought of rural places as fundamentally other, strange lands where unfamiliar people held tight to ancient customs and beliefs. Even though I grew up in upstate New York, after a decade in D.C. a rural midwestern farming community seemed about as remote and foreign to me as an Amish enclave, or an Amazonian tribe that hadn’t yet made contact with modern society.
But the most earth-shattering revelation of my trip had been this: the people in Red Lake County were just like the rest of us. They watched the same TV shows, followed the same news, consumed the same popular culture, and cracked the same dumb jokes. I went out there expecting to find a tribe of people who were radically different but instead I was shocked to find out they were just like me. How, then, had I ended up wasting my life in a cramped town house, riding a cramped train, while they got to enjoy the clean prairie air and the wide-open spaces of northwest Minnesota? Why couldn’t I be more like them? Where had I gone wrong?
Back at the grind in D.C., my days in Red Lake County took on a positively Norman Rockwellian cast. While there I had relentlessly poked and prodded the people I talked to, puzzled by the optimism, the pride, the sense of belongingness. “Yes, but what about all the bad stuff?” I asked. What about the drugs? The crippling poverty? The squalor and misery of a benighted life in the countryside?
Yet no matter how hard I pushed, I couldn’t find any sign of rot beneath the region’s bucolic exterior. The people had their trials and headaches, of course. Downtown Red Lake Falls wasn’t what it had once been. Affordable health care was a challenge. The sheriff’s office had the occasional speeder or shoplifter to deal with.
But while the rural communities I had known as a child seemed to be almost devoured by their challenges, the people in Red Lake Falls were rising up to meet theirs. There the pressures of modern life seemed manageable, in a way that they must have seemed across the entire nation in say, the 1950s and 1960s. I wanted that manageability in my own life. I wanted to take my family to a place where it didn’t feel like the trend lines of time and money were always converging, squeezing us into an ever-narrowing sphere of existence. I wanted to turn the trends around, set them outward and away from each other, opening up wide spaces of possibility with room to breathe. I wanted what the people in Red Lake County seemed to have.
I wrote my follow-up story on my visit, closing it with these lines: “When people and places halfway across the country are just a mouse-click away on your computer, it’s easy to assume that we live in a nation made small and manageable by technology. But traveling to a place like Red Lake County, hours away from any major metro area, is a reminder that in much of the country, the rhythms of daily life are, still, markedly different than the coastal city grind of long commutes and high-octane jobs.
“For some of us, it takes a place as small as Red Lake County to drive home just how big this country really is.”
As I got back into the D.C. grind I found myself unable to shake the memories of the trip. Jammed into a hot, overcrowded Red Line train, I thought of the guy I’d talked to in Plummer who complained about how sometimes getting stuck behind a tractor would add five minutes to his fifteen-minute commute.
Wading through diesel fumes on the streets of D.C., crowded in by the city’s squat, blocky buildings, I would have given just about anything for five more minutes on a dirt road out on the prairie, hemmed in by nothing but a warm breeze.
I dreamed about the people I had met, nothing crazy, just about running into them and chatting them up at the store.
My wife noticed a change in my demeanor when I returned. I am not exactly what you’d call a people person. I’m a natural introvert; given the choice between socializing with others or doing something by myself, I’ll nearly always choose the latter. There’s a reason why I spend most of my reporting time interrogating datasets, rather than people.
The running joke in the Ingraham household is that Briana is a normal, functioning social adult while I am “dead inside.” Yet when I came back from Minnesota, Briana noticed that I wouldn’t stop talking about how great the people were. Their warmth, their friendliness, their fiercely held determination to make their communities better. Even for an introvert it was striking to see.
I contrasted that with what I had known from the neighborhoods I had lived in. In our early twenties Briana and I spent a particularly miserable year in grad school in Southern California, living in a corporate-managed apartment complex that catered mostly to low-income families. The apartments were crammed in on top of each other and it was impossible to escape t
he sight, sound, or smell of your neighbors at any hour of the day or night. But nobody talked to one another—everyone kept their heads down, desperate to avoid having to humanize the people you knew only as, say, the source of the music that blared every weeknight at 11 p.m., or the arguments you could hear through your paper-thin walls.
We had lived in Vermont for a couple years shortly thereafter—our initial goal in relocating there was simply to put as much space between us and Southern California as we could manage. But New Englanders, as we discovered, are not known for their openness to outsiders. We were able to find nonsqualid rental accommodations and managed to make a couple of close friends there. But the communities we lived in, outside of Burlington, made zero effort to help residents get to know each other, or to develop a sense of community identity beyond the occasional appeal to NIMBYism whenever someone wanted to install a new windmill or power line.
After Briana got recruited to work for the Social Security Administration, we moved to the Baltimore area and came to like it much more than we thought we would. We settled in the historic district of Ellicott City, a charming collection of shops and restaurants tucked away into brick and stone-crafted buildings. The historic district had something of an identity of its own, but its location in the middle of one of the east coast’s largest metropolitan areas tended to dilute that. It was also marred by a busy connecting road that cut right through the middle of the district, essentially shoving the town’s civic life to the margins of the roadway.
We made a number of friends when we moved to Oella, many of whom were struggling with the same issues we were—how to raise children in a cramped, pedestrian-hostile space? How to pay bills without burning most of your nonworking hours on interminable trips to D.C.?
That fall Briana and I were coming to the realization that we had to do something about our current situation. It was killing us, in both a metaphoric and also a very literal sense. The problem was that no matter how hard we tried, no matter how far outside the box we started to think, we couldn’t make the numbers add up.
If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now Page 4
