If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now

by Christopher Ingraham

  Politics is also experienced in a quieter, more personal way up here—that may be one reason yard signs for national candidates are so hard to find. Ideological disagreements tend to be hashed out in conversations between close friends, rather than shouting matches between strangers. Decisions and judgments about politics are subtler and less polarized than the election’s results might make it seem.

  At Eagle Square, Bertilrud and Dahle were arguing over the severity of future threats the country might face.

  “We’re nineteen trillion dollars in the hole,” Bertilrud said. “If interest rates go to five percent, we can’t even pay our interest.”

  “I don’t give a hang about that,” said Dahle.

  “Remember your great-grandchildren? They’re going to have to pay for this.”

  Dahle wasn’t buying it. “They’re not even going to be alive if we don’t get this global warming done and get rid of the damn coal. They aren’t going to be alive if they can’t breathe!”

  But at the end, the political talk was just talk and little more.

  “We’re friends,” Dahle said. “Politics is one thing. You disagree, and then you go on with your life. You can’t hate people forever.”

  Discussion soon turned to what Bertilrud intended to do, as the new mayor, about the plague of squirrels in Dahle’s backyard.

  Unfortunately, if you’ve been following the news since the 2016 election, you know that most major media outlets’ coverage of rural areas hasn’t exactly improved. There’s been a never-ending stream of Trump-voters-in-a-diner stories, which stopped being useful or illuminating right around the time the final vote tallies were certified. There’s also been the rise of an entire cottage industry of partisan journalists who view themselves as Trump-whisperers, sending dispatches from Pennsylvania gas stations where wise rural voters whisper gnomic truths about politics that media elites aren’t prepared to hear. Many folks in the media have reacted to their previous indifference to rural voters by bending over backward in the opposite direction, choosing now to perceive flyover country voters as keepers of a secret oracular wisdom that is something to be sought out, unlocked, and delivered back to the coastal public with wonderment.

  This characterization of Trump country strikes me as offensive to everyone involved. It turns rural voters into a white working-class version of the magical Negro—patient, wise, close to the earth, existing solely to help the heroes of the coastal upper class on their journey toward enlightenment. It reifies the falsehood that rural Americans are somehow more real, more true, more authentic than the millions who call cities home.

  Bad media coverage of rural areas didn’t start in 2016. As University of Minnesota sociologist Ben Winchester pointed out to me, the prevailing narrative of “dying rural areas” is shaped in large part by how media outlets cover these areas. In your typical rural America story, a newspaper from a large city sends a reporter to a small town for a day. He arrives at a diner or a gas station in the middle of the week, in the middle of a regular workday. The only people there at those times are retirees, because everyone else is at their job or taking care of their kids or otherwise busy doing whatever they do to make the world and their part of it a better place. The gas station geezers, on the other hand, do what geezers everywhere do: they complain about how the world’s going to hell in a handbasket, and talk about how much better things were fifty years ago. Their voices are the ones that end up in the story, simply because they’re the ones available to talk in a small town at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. Everyone else is busy.

  So the prevailing rural narrative in the national media becomes one of loss and decline, Winchester says. There is of course some truth to this—census data, for instance, show a relentless trend of migration from the countryside to the cities for at least one hundred years. But Winchester’s done some research that adds nuance to this picture. He’s found that the rural populations of certain demographic groups—particularly people between the age of thirty and forty-nine—are actually growing. They tend to be relatively well educated and highly skilled. They have kids. They’re searching for safety, decent schools, a slower pace of life, and above all, an affordable cost of living. Sound like anyone you’ve read about?

  In Minnesota at least, according to Winchester’s research, rural populations aren’t declining—they’re actually growing, albeit at a slower pace than big cities like Duluth and Minneapolis. Sure, the eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds move out of smaller communities—they pretty much have to if they want to go to college and get a decent start on a career. But by the time they start thinking about kids of their own, many are ready to move back. And many ultimately do.

  “We need to write a new narrative about our rural communities, not the story of decline that we’ve been told since the 1950s,” Winchester said at a joint talk he and I gave together in northwest Minnesota not long after we moved to Red Lake Falls.

  If there is one thing—one sole, solitary piece of information—that I can convey to you about rural America it’s this: rural America is not a nation apart. The people here are just as complex and fallible as people anywhere else. They consume the same media, cheer for the same sports teams, fight over the same political issues, and have the same hopes and dreams for their kids.

  I regret to inform you that after more than three years living here I have never been on the receiving end of an earth-shattering knowledge bomb while pumping gas at the Red Lake Falls Cenex. People here are just like people anywhere. Like any part of the country, northwest Minnesota is home to certain quirks and oddities, the cultural textures that make geography such a powerful determinant of how people live their lives. But the same is true of any place: Manhattan, Atlanta, or Kansas City. Coastal reporters who parachute into small towns on election nights have a tendency to mistake local quirks for cultural divides.

  Those of us who work with data for a living are forced, as a matter of necessity, to draw arbitrary lines through groups of people: these people are rural, for instance, and those are urban. These ones are middle-class, and those are wealthy. These hail from the Midwest, and those from the mid-Atlantic. It’s important to remember that these lines are largely made up. They exist to help us understand and make sense of a large, complicated, messy country. But our cultural baskets aren’t God-given; they didn’t form of necessity from the formation of the universe like the laws of say, mathematics or physics. They were created by humans, for humans, well after humans came along. Like humans ourselves, our cultural dividing lines are malleable, fallible, prone to error.

  None of this is to say that real divisions don’t exist. People who explain American society for a living tend to discount the power of race and class, in particular, in part because they’re difficult to talk about. Race and class reflect fundamental differences between people that are mostly (class) or completely (race) out of their control. It’s easier to focus on the superficial things that people do voluntarily, like choosing a political candidate. When you discuss Americans in terms of political preferences, for instance, you’re placing them all on a level playing field where differences depend primarily upon individual choices: abortion or pro-life, more guns or less, higher taxes or lower. This appeals to our egalitarian tendencies: all people are created equal, so all differences between people are matters of choice.

  Moving to Minnesota was much easier than expected for my family and I realize now, three years after the fact, that this was largely because there really aren’t many fundamental differences between us and most of the people who live here. We share a common skin color. We share a middle-class background. We are financially comfortable, generally speaking, but we have to work hard to stay that way. I am just as subject to the whims of modern capitalist society as the people who’ve lived in Red Lake Falls for all their lives. Our comfort is precarious: at any minute the rug could be swept out from under us, in my case by the tumultuous economics of the media industry, in their case by the ups and downs of commodity markets an
d trade winds blowing halfway around the world.

  Rural Minnesota politics are pragmatic above all else. Displays of partisan affect are discouraged—along with the lack of yard signs you see very few political bumper stickers around here, for instance. This marks a sharp contrast between Red Lake County and pretty much everywhere else I’ve lived, where people tend to wear their politics on their sleeves and take glee in the frankly bizarre notion that their beliefs “offend” the opposing side.

  The rate of gun ownership, as Allen Bertilrud suggested, is nearly twice as high in Minnesota as it is in Maryland. Around here it seems pretty much everyone has at least one, for things like hunting or target shooting or protection from bears. But good luck finding a pro-gun bumper sticker on a car in Red Lake Falls: northwest Minnesotans evidently don’t feel the need to go around shouting about their gun ownership. In Maryland and upstate New York, by contrast, pro-gun messages were everywhere: NRA stickers on cars, Smith & Wesson decals in windows, messages about “cold, dead hands” printed on yard signs. It’s fairly easy to find homes flying a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag emblazoned with the silhouette of an AR-style rifle and the words “Come and Get It” or something similar.

  Guns, in other words, are a tool here, a means to an end, whereas in many other places in the country they are an identity, a bold statement of who a person is and what they believe in. Minnesotans’ levelheadedness with respect to firearms means the state has one of the lowest gun death rates in the nation, according to the CDC.

  In the current political environment, no town, however bucolic, can escape controversy. On election day in 2018 a scandal erupted at the polling place in city hall. New curtains had been put on the voting booths for the first time in however many years. The old red, white, and blue striped drapes had been replaced by solid reds and solid blues. Worse, the booths appeared to be segregated by color: the four blue booths were on the left side of the room, while the four reds were on the right. Word got around and soon Facebook was abuzz with the news.

  “Why the symbolic divisiveness at a polling place?” our neighbor Alice Conwell asked. “The person who told me this wondered why they weren’t mixed up and had to pause to question which one to be seen going into. They did not like it. I think I will vote standing outside a booth.”

  Other residents agreed. “It felt awkward,” one of our other neighbors, Kate Mulvey, said. “If they are going to do that there should be a green one too. It was just weird.”

  Emboldened, Alice vowed to do something about it. She reported later in the day that she’d made a “dramatic” entrance to the polling place, doing a double take at the booths and registering a polite complaint with the polling workers. Shortly after she departed one of them messaged Alice to inform her that the curtains had been changed to alternate, red-blue-red-blue. Balance was restored, and Minnesota Nice was once again the order of the day.

  Two thousand eighteen was an important election year for another reason: Briana won a seat on the Red Lake Falls City Council. On primary day, August 14, Mayor Allen Bertilrud called her up and said there was a seat opening up on the council, nobody had filed to run for it, and would she please, please, pretty please consider it since today was the last day for a candidate to register? Briana is nothing if not civic-minded and she couldn’t turn down a request to serve the town that had treated us so well. So she filed, paying the two-dollar registration fee to the city clerk. She ran unopposed.

  She had made quite a name for herself in the past few years by volunteering with the town’s Civic and Commerce Committee. By this point in our Minnesota stay she was more likely than I was to be recognized on the street. Given her pleasant disposition and her talent for getting shit done, she was much better liked in town than I was, too. The first person to put a “Briana Ingraham for City Council” sign in their yard was our neighbor Missy—the orange cat’s mom. Briana didn’t even have any signs made up yet, in fact. Missy had just gone ahead and made her own.

  I let my bosses at the Post know of Briana’s candidacy for conflict of interest reasons. They informed me that in no circumstances would I be able to put up a sign in the yard, that I should limit my tweeting about the campaign to perhaps a congratulatory message after the fact at most, and that I would be barred from writing any stories involving the town of Red Lake Falls in the event she won election. Such is the state of journalism in the age of Trump.

  Victory wasn’t a sure thing, however, given the locals’ predilection toward write-in activism. Perhaps there was a secret whisper network in town working under the radar to install somebody else in the seat.

  When election day finally came, we took the boys down to the polling place. “Mom’s running for city council,” we explained to them. Jack’s lower lip started to get wobbly. “Well when is she coming back?” he asked, voice quivering. We explained to him that it didn’t actually mean she was running away.

  The result came in the next day. Briana had won 491 votes, 98.99 percent of the ballots cast, a margin that would have made Saddam Hussein proud. She let people on Facebook know and the response was overwhelming. She was deeply troubled, however, by the five write-in votes for somebody else. Who would do this? Why? Did they not like her? She made me pull up the precinct-level results to see if they were clustered in any particular ward. They weren’t.

  “We’ll find out who they are,” I said. “Now you have at your disposal the full destructive power of the Red Lake Falls City Council. We’ll use it to crush your enemies. We’ll raze their homes to the ground and salt the earth behind us. Your victory will be absolute.”

  She looked at me gravely. “Absolutely not,” she said. And that was the end of it.

  She was sworn in on January 2, 2019. She carried with her a handkerchief that had belonged to her great-grandmother, Johanna Loretta Bach, born in New York State in 1904. Before women’s suffrage. Briana’s middle name, Johanna, comes from her great-grandmother. Briana had held on to the handkerchief since 1993, when Great-Grandma Bach had passed away. Briana is the first woman in her family to be elected to public office. We explained all this to the boys and they seemed to understand it, on some level. That handkerchief bridged a gap of five generations in the city council room that cold January night, a tangible connection between three little boys in Minnesota and an ancestor born more than a century before they were, halfway across the country.

  Chapter 9

  By December I had what I felt was a solid northern Minnesota rind on me. I felt more rugged than I had six months ago when we arrived. I was growing out my stubble. My wardrobe had been purged of most of the button-downs, slim-fit slacks, and other appurtenances of the D.C. nine-to-five, replaced with a harlequin selection of fleece tops and hoodies bearing the names of assorted local establishments from the past and present—DiMaggio’s Sports Bar, Big Swen’s, Northern Grain, Minnesota Barley. Most of these had been scavenged in used condition at Wright’s, the town consignment shop–slash–department store. My hair was typically unkempt, and working from home meant there was little reason to shower more frequently than once every other day. A visitor to town could have easily mistaken me for someone who’d lived there all his life.

  Here’s the thing you need to understand about winter in northern Minnesota: it’s the real deal, the main event. I can’t emphasize this enough: northern Minnesota winters do not fuck around. The season is well underway months before the official start of Northern Hemisphere winter in December. If you define it as the period between the first and last snows of the season, it’s not uncommon for it to last from September through May. Most people who’ve lived here long enough have a story to tell of snow in June. Across the entire state of Minnesota, July is the only month without a measurable snowfall in the historic record.

  That broad swath of time—well over half the year even in the mildest years—means that winter has plenty of time to settle in and make itself comfortable before December even arrives. The temperature drops below 30 degrees in Novem
ber and, looking at the region’s climatic averages, doesn’t rise above it again until the following March. In the darkest months of the year Red Lake County truly earns its last-place spot on the USDA’s natural amenities index.

  Yet people carry on here with their day-to-day lives—and don’t bat an eye at celebrating huge life events, like weddings, in the dead of winter. That first December we were invited by the Kleins to their oldest son’s wedding. It was on New Year’s Eve. The ceremony was scheduled for 4:30. We arrived at the Lutheran church at 4:25 and barely managed to take our seats before the bride started marching down the aisle. Note to self: on Lutheran Standard Time, 4:30 means 4:30 on the dot. If you’re on time, you’re late.

  The reception was held at the VFW in East Grand Forks, which meant a frigid drive across open country in near-blizzard conditions. The temperature that day was somewhere just south of zero. Somewhere between Red Lake Falls and East Grand Forks we saw several cars pulled over to the side of the road, gathered around a pickup truck that appeared to have veered off and ended up in a field. As we drew closer to offer help, we noticed the people were wearing gowns and heels in the blowing cold. It was the wedding party. We pulled up slowly and rolled down our window. “You guys need help?” we asked. “Oh no, we’re good,” said the maid of honor with a smile. “Go on ahead! We’ll see you at the reception.” At the reception we learned that the stranded car belonged to the bride’s father. He was fine, was already seated waiting for things to get going, in fact. Somebody would get a tractor and drag the truck out tomorrow, maybe Monday, he said. No need to ruin a celebration over a minor inconvenience like that.