If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now

by Christopher Ingraham

  “Come on, you’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said. “I really have to go!”

  “You realize we have two other bathrooms now, right?” she asked before shutting the door in my face. I was thunderstruck. It was a revelation—no more fighting over the one cramped little commode of our Maryland house. If we both had to take a dump at the same time we could do so, in private and at our own pace, like civilized people. It seemed extravagant. According to the U.S. Census’s Survey of Construction, in 2016 just 3.7 percent of new homes were built with one bathroom or less, while about 35 percent had at least three or more. Moving from Maryland to Minnesota vaulted us from the bottom 4 percent of the American toilet distribution almost all the way to the top third.

  The house seemed huge to us. After we’d lugged all our belongings in—everything that had our old place bursting at the seams—there was still empty space everywhere. We turned some of the leftover space downstairs into a play area for the twins. In the coming weeks Briana filled it with maps and educational posters, as well as the twins’ collection of toys brought from Maryland. It was like having a preschool classroom right in the house. The twins were thrilled to have a space of their own to ransack and make a mess of, as they saw fit, provided they cleaned it up somewhat before bedtime.

  The house isn’t huge by any stretch of the imagination—maybe 2,000 square feet, roughly 25 percent smaller than the typically newly constructed home, according to census figures—but to us it may as well have been a palace.

  We started to understand the profound effect of living space one evening after dinner, when Jack and Charles linked arms and announced they were headed off to the playroom together to play. They were typically fractious; they often quarreled and squabbled over toys and attention and countless perceived slights, real and imagined. But after years of constant policing and keeping a watchful eye on their every move, suddenly here, in Red Lake Falls, in a house with space they could truly call their own, for the first time they were ready to go off and be themselves by themselves, with no need for parental intervention. They finally had the space to become themselves without constantly chafing against each other. If tall fences make good neighbors, large playrooms make good siblings.

  People with an affinity for dense urban spaces—many who happen to be employed at the universities and media outlets that shape so much of contemporary public opinion—tend to take a dim view of the classic single-family home. They take up too much space. They foster car culture. They’re unsustainable from an environmental standpoint. High-density housing—condos and apartments—is far preferable to suburban sprawl, or so they tell us. It’s better for everyone.

  But a lot of the writing on this topic doesn’t really grapple with the draw of the single-family home to begin with, the huge place it occupies in the American psyche and culture. For a body of thought that deals with the proper role and uses of physical space in society, it’s remarkably blind to the importance of space to individuals. It doesn’t wrestle with what it can really mean to a person to not have to share walls and floors with noisy neighbors. It doesn’t fully appreciate the difference between living out one’s life in a cramped space versus an expansive one. To have ample outdoor space to run, to breathe in, to call your own. The market urbanists in the nation’s media centers acknowledge, on some level, that people tend to desire these things. But many of the people who write about the topic don’t seem to truly understand these desires themselves. That’s a big blind spot, especially considering that so many of these people are responsible for creating the culture consumed by the entire country.

  Beyond that, the market urbanists seem to view the choice of living spaces as a binary one: either you’re in the cities (high density, good) or the suburbs (low density, bad). Given that roughly 80 percent of the country lives in the cities or their suburbs this is an understandable place to start the discussion, but it overlooks the completely different modes of living available in small towns and rural areas.

  Then there was our new lawn. Given the sheer size of it—approaching three-fourths of an acre—it was clear we’d have to get a proper lawn mower to take care of it, something I’d never had to do before—we’d relied on a small human-powered reel mower to deal with our tiny patch of Maryland greenery.

  I picked up a proper gas-powered push mower from Wal-Mart that spring and was excited to give it a spin for the first time. But the instruction book said I needed to add some oil to the engine before I fired it up, and damned if I couldn’t figure out how to get the oil cap off. The cap was an odd-looking yellow thing. I twisted it, pulled at it, tugged it this way and that. It didn’t budge. I referred to the instructions. I pulled up YouTube videos on my phone. Nothing.

  Miraculously, after I’d been puzzling over the mower for about an hour a pickup truck pulled into the driveway. It was Michael Baker, the fire chief in the nearby town of Plummer and an engine mechanic at Arctic Cat in Thief River. He’d been one of the local voices gently chiding me on Twitter after my first story ran, sending me photos of the view of the Red Lake River from his back porch.

  “Gonna do some mowin’, eh?” he asked.

  “Only if I can figure out this oil cap,” I said. He walked over, crouched down, and popped the cap off with a flick of his wrist.

  “Here you go,” he said. I thanked him and finally got to mowing. As of this writing, more than two years after that day, I still haven’t changed the oil on that mower. The truth is I still can’t figure out how to get that cap off.

  At the Post I’d penned a number of columns railing against lawns. “Lawns are a soul-crushing timesuck and most of us would be better off without them,” I wrote on August 4, 2015, less than two weeks before I saw the words “Red Lake County” for the first time. They soak up water—nine billion gallons a day nationwide, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—they kill native biodiversity, and according to the American Time Use Survey the average American spends more than seventy hours a year on lawn and garden care. What a waste!

  I still believe all this on some level. And yet that summer, when I stopped to consider my own lawn—my own patch of land, an environment for me to shape and cultivate as I pleased, a place for my children to play, grow, explore, and run free—I couldn’t wait to get out there and start mowing for myself. One of the foundational principles of statistics is that what’s true at the population level is often not true at the individual level. The average American can expect to live 78.6 years—but that doesn’t mean that you, the individual reading this book, will live that long. Maybe you’ll live to be a hundred. Maybe you’ll get hit by a bus tomorrow. Who knows? The point is, things can be true for populations that aren’t true at all for individuals. Do I still believe the median American lawn is a waste of space? I do. Would I defend my own to the death, weed whacker in hand? Absolutely. The numbers often make hypocrites of us all.

  Lawn care in northern Minnesota is a highly fraught topic, filled with land mines for unsuspecting newcomers. People here trim their grass down to about the length you’d find on a putting green. If your grass is much higher than that you’re expected to apologize for it to everyone you meet, especially if someone catches you outside doing something other than mowing it. You’re responsible for upkeep of the sidewalk in front of your house, too, which includes keeping weeds from growing in the cracks. One day that summer I was outside with the boys and Rob, the half-naked neighbor, came by. He gestured toward a couple of dandelions springing from a gap in the sidewalk. “Growing a hedge, eh?” he said. He didn’t need to say anything else. After the boys were down for a nap I slunk back out to the sidewalk with the weed whacker.

  One of the first things we wanted to do after moving in was to start a garden. There was already space on the property set aside for that, a partially fenced-in corner of the yard that had been used as a garden in years past but which was now just a tangle of weeds and long grass.

  We spent several weekends cleaning out the light brush and men
ding the fence all around the garden plot—we’d see regular patrols of deer in the neighborhood in the evenings, and rabbits were everywhere. Plus, Dick Brumwell showed us a picture of a black bear that he’d been watching rummage through his bird feeder that spring. We didn’t know what bears do to gardens and didn’t want to find out.

  Finally, it was time to work the soil. The garden area was too large to till by hand, but the Kleins had a large, gas-powered roto-tiller from the farm they let us borrow. One thing we came to understand was that pretty much everyone up here owns “equipment.”

  One mild Saturday afternoon I finally took the tiller to the garden. It was satisfying work, guiding the machine along a gridded path, turning dead grass and compacted dirt into rich, fluffy black soil. At one point when I was nearly finished I took a break and turned the tiller off, and that’s when I heard the sounds.

  They were tiny, almost imperceptible squeaks. Kind of like little birds, but the pitch was a little off. I searched for the source and found it coming from the ground, one of the patches I had just finished tilling. I shoved some dirt aside, and realized with shock and horror that I had roto-tilled a nest full of baby rabbits.

  They were tiny, with their eyes barely open. They had been grievously wounded by the blades of the tiller, but unfortunately none of them was quite dead.

  Shit.

  When I was a kid, about eleven years old, a group of my friends and I came upon a baby bird on a sidewalk that had fallen out of its nest. It had no feathers yet and its eyes weren’t open. It was very badly injured and appeared to be gasping for air. We knew we’d have to put it out of its misery, and after a few minutes of hushed discussion it was decided that one of us would ride over its head with our bike tire, which was the most humane option for ending its suffering among the limited tools we had at our disposal. As the son of a veterinarian I was elected to carry out the mercy killing. I rolled my tire forward and there was a quick crunch and then it was over. To this today I have occasional agonizing dreams involving small, delicate creatures past the point of mending and in horrible pain.

  The rabbits were the bird all over again. It was obvious that they were beyond repair—taking them to the local veterinarian was out of the question. But I couldn’t simply leave them there to suffer in the dirt until they expired. Instead I opted for the humane choice—I walked into the shed and grabbed a metal shovel. I used it to decapitate each of the wounded rabbits as swiftly as I could. The work was excruciating, but mercifully short. I placed the tiny bodies in a bag for the garbage and worked the blood-soaked dirt back into the bed of soil with my boot. Thus was the Ingraham family’s Minnesota garden consecrated.

  I had kind of a queasy, uneasy feeling afterward, like a nightmare had come to life. But part of me was strangely invigorated. After all, wasn’t this part of what we came out here for? To get out of the city and closer to the land, to live a life where the stakes were real and messy, where we’d be exposed to nature’s teeth and nails and learn whether we had any of our own?

  Granted, killing five baby rabbits with a shovel didn’t exactly make me Grizzly Adams. But it made me a little different than the person I’d been back in Maryland. When I told coworkers and friends from the east coast about the rabbits, they recoiled in shock and horror: “Oh, the poor bunnies!” they’d say. When I told folks in Red Lake Falls about the mishap, on the other hand, it barely merited a reaction. “Eh. Gotta do that sometimes,” John Klein told me.

  Several weeks later another baby rabbit appeared in our garage one morning. It was older than the ones I’d killed in the garden, old enough to be out hopping about on its own but not smart enough to avoid getting stuck in the garage. I saw an opportunity for redemption.

  “We talked about getting a pet rabbit when we came out here, right?” I said to Bri, holding forth the baby rabbit in a cardboard box. “Maybe this is a sign. This is how we atone for the dead bunnies in the garden.”

  “You realize wild rabbits die pretty much immediately when you try to bring them into a house, right?” she said. “They freak out. They literally die of fright. Their hearts basically explode.”

  “Not this rabbit,” I said. “You watch. This rabbit is here for a reason. It has a purpose. This rabbit will live.”

  It was dead by the next morning. Another tiny corpse wrapped in a grocery bag and set in the trash.

  After that we decided the only thing to do was to purchase some proper domesticated rabbits. We picked a pair up at a nearby county fair later that summer. We bought them off a kid who was charging ten bucks apiece, cash, for them. We gave him a twenty and he handed us a box with two rabbits inside. Easy-peasy. The kids christened them Mubba and Bubba, since “mubba” had been Charlie’s word for rabbit when he was still learning how to talk.

  Among our other animal adventures that first summer was a memorable trip with the kids to Carl Schindler’s dairy farm. This was the same place I visited during my reporting trip, where I proved my regular guyness by letting a calf suck on my hand. Now it was the twins’ turn.

  Carl took us all to the main barn so the boys could feed the cows some hay. He showed us how to pick out the tightly packed leafy bits of the hay that the cows really liked. The boys were a little put off by being surrounded by a herd of thousand-pound beasts with big wet noses and long, rough tongues, but they took to it surprisingly well.

  As we petted the cows, I saw out of the corner of my eye the mangy old yellow farm dog from my prior visit trotting up to us. His tail was wagging and his head was high. He had something in his mouth. When he got a little closer I realized it was a dead kitten.

  Charles turned and examined the gruesome spectacle. “Kitty sleeping!” he said.

  “Ha-ha, yeah, kitty . . . sleeping,” I said.

  “Oh geez, sorry,” Carl said. He shooed the dog out of the barn. “Been a while since he did that,” he said nonchalantly.

  “Kids, we’re not in Baltimore anymore,” I said.

  “Kitty sleeping,” Jack said.

  That first summer we spent many of our evenings and days down at Voyageur’s View, the Brumwells’ campground and tubing business. The place had kind of a perpetual spring break vibe—on the weekends in particular big groups of college-age kids would rent out campgrounds and spend the days drinking on the river and the nights drinking by the fire. Large groups would often come down from Canada—the border was only ninety minutes away. Those groups had a particular reputation for rowdiness. Canadian kids evidently treated Red Lake Falls the same way American kids treated, say, Tijuana—a place to drink and go wild south of the border.

  But as many people in town explained, when the Brumwell siblings took over the business from their dad, Dick, they actually cleaned things up a lot—requiring advance reservations to camp and cutting down on after-dark partying, among other things—in an effort to put a more family-friendly face on the business. It seemed that everyone in town under a certain age had worked at the campground as a teen one summer or another, and they all had hair-raising stories to tell—drunken brawls, knife fights, late-night debauchery of all sorts. Ryan and Jason had spent nearly all their childhood summers at the campground and partook in the madness from a young age, drinking and partying with friends and campers starting in their early teens.

  Those days were over, however. They had spent enough beer-soaked nights at the campground for many lifetimes and now, as adults taking over the business, they wanted to dial things back. Folks in town generally gave them credit for their efforts, even if there was still work to be done.

  One of the twins’ favorite things to do at the campground was ride around in the short red bus the Brumwells used to deliver firewood to the various campsites. They’d clamber into the back, where the seats were stripped out and replaced with a wobbly pile of firewood rising up to the ceiling, and then hold on for dear life as Ryan or Jason or whoever tore ass around the property, stopping to drop off wood and shoot the shit with their often drunk clientele.

&
nbsp; Briana and I were mortified the first time they did this—is there anything more dangerous than letting a two-year-old bang around on top of an unsecured wood pile in the back of a bus rattling down a bumpy dirt road? But the Brumwells seemed unfazed by it, as if it were something they did every day. Eventually their ease became ours.

  The campground was an education for all of us that summer. The boys got to ride around the place on all manner of recreational vehicles the Brumwells had lying about—golf carts and ATVs and beat-up old buses. Going fast, off-road, atop a vehicle powered by a combustion engine was simply part of the fabric of childhood out here. For the boys’ third birthdays Briana and I had got them tricycles. I had dreams of teaching them the simple pleasures of being outdoors on a bicycle. But the Brumwells one-upped us by getting them Power Wheels, the little battery-operated vehicles that kids sit on and operate with the push of a button. I was trying to teach them the joys of human-powered transit, but the Brumwells were giving them an education in how kids in rural Minnesota got around.

  The nights at the campground tended to go late. One of the most disorienting things we experienced after the move was the length of the late spring and early summer days in northern Minnesota, on account of how far north we were. Red Lake Falls is farther north than the northernmost tip of Maine. It’s farther north than Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City in Canada. In fact, it’s farther north than more than half the entire population of Canada, owing to how much of the Canadian population is packed into the southernmost section of the country that dips down into the Great Lakes. Demographically speaking, it’s accurate to say that Red Lake Falls is farther north than Canada.