Fargo: Does memory impose Responsibility, and, if so, how can such Responsibility be avoided?

 

Fargo: Does Memory impose Responsibility and, if so, how can such Responsibility be avoided?

1.

North Dakota ends at an inconspicuous bridge crossing the Red River of the North at Wahpeton.  Breckenridge, Minnesota occupies the east bank of the river, here just a narrow rut half-full of water.  Wahpeton is a pleasant-looking town with a zoo and an orderly downtown with square brick buildings arranged in square brick blocks.  A tavern on Main Street is named The Oasis and features an old neon sign no doubt very handsome if it could be lit.  Since I pass through the town at 5:30 in the afternoon, broad daylight at this time of year, it’s unclear to me whether the cursive neon squiggle designed to illumine a painted dune through which palm trees have sprouted is operable.  The color scheme under the neon calligraphy suggests a glare of hot pink light, perhaps, sunset on the desert.  

Breckenridge is more scattered, empty lots where floods have killed buildings, some residential houses on levees, junk yards full of crushed or twisted metal.

It’s fifty-five miles southeast on Highway 9 to Morris.  The land is utterly flat, with scattered shelter belts thinned by storms to pillars of broken tree.  You can see forever.

On the left side of the road aimed toward the southeast, a drainage ditch runs the entire distance between Breckenridge and Morris, Minnesota.  Oddly shaped and very old concrete bridges have been inserted at intervals over the ditch to afford access to the fields stretching east to the horizon.  The bridges seem to be equipped with weir features, although I can’t be certain whether these water-gates are functional.  I suppose someone must examine every bridge along this right-of-way, perhaps 20 or more, to determine if the concrete remains intact or whether spalling compromises function and weightbearing capacity.

To the right of the arrow-straight highway, a train track runs parallel to the road.  Sometimes, crossroads bump up over the track, marked by signs warning motorists to look along the rails for approaching trains.  

The sky is clear and the sun remains pasted over the horizon.  No one is about.  It’s fifty miles to Morris and only eight vehicles pass by in the oncoming lane.  (And one of them is a bemused man driving what seems to be an antique tractor.)  It has rained in these counties a few days ago and water proves out the slight variations in grade, here and there darkening the fields where there is a very slight swale or indentation, a contour that would be invisible except for the moisture marking it.

The bridges flash by on the left, each of them opening into a field drive or, in some cases, lifting travelers to the mouth of a gravel road that angles out across the corn and soybean fields.  The identical bridges were molded in some other place, poured into a form, then, brought to this plain and lowered into the humid drainage ditch.  They impose a memory upon me.  

2.

This report is about the mausoleum of memory.  Here is a cadaver interred in that crypt: I had come to Wahpeton to see my children who were living there with my ex-wife.  This was in April, I think, a cold month with sleet falling.  I don’t know how I reached Wahpeton because most of the bridges over the Red River had been disabled by flooding.  

In Wahpeton, a bulwark of sandbags had been built to contain the river.  The wet, leaking wall was eight feet tall and it formed a sluice where water was jetting past, a brown torrent clogged with chunks of ice that shot by the parallel roadway above the level of my head.  Some figures armored in dark mud stood on the rampart, illumined against the sky that was spitting sleet.  On the other side of the dike, the river was dismantling an old supper club board-by-board.  

3.

The Present: a day and a half earlier, I drove up to Fargo to see my son, Martin, and my grandchildren, Hannah and Lucas.  It was the end of the first week of school and Lucas was sick, feverish, with a snotty nose.  He wasn’t able to eat with us on the evening that I arrived.  And the next day, he was too ill to travel on our excursion to Inspiration Peak and Glendalough State Park.  It was his birthday and so his illness was particularly unfortunate.  About 4:30 in the afternoon, I began the long drive back to Austin.  I spent the night in Willmar and, then, returned home the next morning.  Invasive and destructive thoughts troubled me and I rose early each morning with an unquiet mind.  Memories skittered out of dark corners of my brain like cockroaches.  

4.

The word that occurs to me to describe this wretched state of mind is “abject” or “abjection.”  To be abject is to be in a state of misery that has an element of squalor that is justified by the debased character of the person suffering from this condition.  Abject, therefore, means both miserable to an extreme degree but, also, lacking in self-esteem, craven, cowardly – I am abject because I deserve to be in that state.  In other words, a fundamental aspect of my personality tints my thoughts to cause them to be craven and squalid.  (The etymology of the word is the Germanic prefix “ab,” meaning to cast away,  and the Latin iactus – that is, to throw.  In German, there is no single word that is synonymous: the thesaurus tells me the word should be translated as gemein or erbaermlich – that is, “common/vulgar/of low station” and “miserable.”)

Here is an example of how my mind processed memories: I am struggling with anxiety – everything makes me afraid.  So I imagine a time when I was happy.  I am walking on a path that skirts the edge of a forest.  The path is soft with fallen pine needles that dye the trail a rich russet color.  A complicated pattern of interlaced shadows fall across the path because the sun is bright over the forest.  A cool breeze ruffles the boughs of the trees and makes them dance and so the shadows are also alive on the forest floor, patterns of green darkness amidst a shimmering mosaic of bright-colored spots.  Some roots protrude through the ground and I take care to step over them and not stub my toe.  Everything is alive with the breeze and the path is sinuous, curving around particularly large and imposing trees.  It is a “green thought in a green shade” as Andrew Marvel wrote.  For some reason, I find this image comforting and, so, as I felt unhappy memories invading my imagination, I focused my thoughts on this path in the woods.  But, then, another thought baffles me: what kind of person is so cowardly, so lacking in resources and mental resilience to seek refuge in a memory of this sort.  Then, I come to despise myself for the very comfort that I had taken in this recollection.  Certainly, I have enough unhappy memories to provide myself with much evidence that I have acted badly or in an abject way.  So, in this way, my mind fills up with carrion.  

5.

Unable to sleep, I set out early from Austin.  The Straight River Rest Stop is off the north-bound lanes of I35 about five miles south of Owatonna.  The place has an emotional significance for me.  On the afternoon that I married Julie, we left a friend’s house where people had come to congratulate us and were a little giddy and flushed with champagne on the road up to Minneapolis where we planned to spend the weekend.  So we pulled in to the Straight River Stop to use the toilets.  The afternoon had darkened and earth-bound clouds of snow were drawing themselves tightly over the freeway and a blizzard was threatening.  It was February, in fact Valentine’s Day, and the land was frozen and the air flickered with tongues of snow.  Probably, it was foolhardy to continue to Minneapolis with the winds gathering and snow just beginning to roar across the stormswept freeway.  But we were young and reckless and, so, we continued on our way, passing wrecks along the side of the highway, people standing disconsolate and hunched against the gale next to their crashed cars.  

Later, vandals burned down the Straight River Rest Stop, the building standing on the edge of a steep wooded defile that drops down to the stream in its brushy meanders.  (The river’s name is ironic - the “straight” river is anything but.)  The rest stop was rebuilt, although it was closed for more than a year.  It was open again for a couple years, and, then, someone burned it down once more – so build back, build better.  I hadn’t stopped at this place for several years and, so, I was surprised to see how beautifully the facility had been made.  It is, I think, nothing short of the most beautiful roadside toilet in the world.  The exit loops back from the freeway climbing to the forest that stands on the crest of the bluffs dropping down to the river.  At the end of the arc, an exquisitely proportioned building, a black cube, stands on the threshold of the hillside forest. The facade of this austere cube is subtly asymmetric: a dark inverted trapezoid hangs over the door which is slightly offset to one side.  Pale aluminum-colored trapezoids with edges sloping up to the roof flank the door.  This geometry is contained within two featureless pillars of black brick.  The asymmetry on the facade, nonetheless, seems to follow strictly ordained geometrical rules and seems designed, I think, to offset the otherwise minimalist character of the structure, a dark block inserted into the edge of the woods.  The pavement leading into the building is similarly patterned and some sapling trees have been planted between an open lattice of white deck.  

Inside the building, it seems hushed, as if the traveler has entered a mausoleum or temple of some kind.  The broad space between the toilets, marked with glowing pink and green figures (a stylized man and woman and a family toilet with similarly stylized parents with a small figure about one-third their size between them) is tiled with brown paving, also in geometric array.  At the far end of the interior, a broad window opens onto a green tapestry of trees and vines that entirely fills the picture frame.  The woods seem to be just a few feet beyond that window.  Again, the window is asymmetrically patterned with a glass door to one side.  A bench, like an altar, faces the window.  The glass door can be opened onto a slender white metal balcony broadest at the middle of the window and, then, tapering back on both sides to join with the back facade of the building.  On the balcony, the wall of trees that fills the picture rises vertically only a few feet from where you stand, at this time of the year an impenetrable mass of foliage, dripping with rain on the day that I visited.  

The effect of the place is startling.  I left with a sense of being wonderfully inspired and refreshed.  

6.

I drive to Mankato, then, west to New Ulm, but on the north side of the Minnesota River where there are no towns of any significance.  In the green valley, across New Ulm, hidden by the dense forests on the river terraces, I turn north and drive a zigzag path gradually westward with the plan of entering I94, the most direct route to Fargo at Montrose, a place where I stayed on the trip home a month before.  

The entire way, my windshield is fogged with drizzle, not an insistent rain, but just mist in the air that dampens everything and turns the shelterbelts along the highway into a green blur.  The fields are sere, ready for harvest, the crops turning a little brown.  A great hush hangs over the world.  My plan is to avoid Willmar midway on the cross-country drive to Fargo since I will be staying there on the way back and, in any event, the town is invested with some bad memories.

7. 

Each little town seems somehow empty and desperate at the same time.  The main street shops are boarded and banks that were once the pride of the place have been abandoned to the encroaching wilderness.  The fields are cultivated and have a civilized mien but the villages haven’t been rationalized like the row-crops and they are dismal, overgrown places.  

8.

At a highway intersection in Stearns County – I think it is St. Martin – an enormous Catholic church with two massive towers rises over a tic-tac-toe grid of four or five streets with little crumbling houses and hedges gone wild.  The church is vastly disproportionate to its environs.  The huge brick towers have elaborate porticos, heavy arches and entrances like the gates to Hades.  One of the openings into the hollow earth is hidden somewhere near St. Cloud.

9.

It’s impossible to tell the season because many of the fields have been stripped down to the bare black mud.  Vast wet land angles out into the country toward the horizon.  The farmhouses are all gone, demolished, and only the sheltering trees around those place remains, islands of wet green tossing in the wind.  For a moment, I’m lost in time – is it late Spring or the end of Fall or, even, a dry winter without much snow.  The windshield wipers whisper to me: August - August - August.  But this is also wrong – in fact, it’s first weekend in September.

10.

A colonnade of wind turbines stand atop a low promontory above the wet fields.  The clouds are so low that I can’t see the tops of the turbine rotors.  From the ceiling-bank of fog, the rotors sweep by like the second-hand of a clock, inscribing an arc between the banks of mist.  

11.

It’s still raining at Montrose where I stop to eat at a Mexican restaurant where I had supper a month ago when returning from Fargo.  The food isn’t cooked right and has no taste.  Mexican food that is tasteless is a failure of a particularly abject kind.  A plaster statue of the Virgin of Guadulupe stands at the entry way.  The waiter, whose wife is cooking, has a bad leg.  One of his knees seems to be completely reversed and he walks with his injured leg buckling backward on each step.

12. 

In one small village, the place where the county highway turns passes a couple acres where about seven houses have been dragged on big barge-like trailers and, then, abandoned.  Shingles are flayed and the sides of the houses, evidently dropped here for years, are cracked and peeling.  This display seems evidence of someone’s manic-depression.  The houses were lifted off their foundations and trucked here to be resold but this was all done on speculation and no purchasers could be found.

13.

This town is called Cosmos.  Drizzle blurs the small buildings spread out around the State blacktop named “Milky Way” where the speed zone slows traffic through the village.  Aliens live here, as evidenced by storesfronts lettered with Spanish words.  The intersections are with cross streets named Libra, Gemini, Hercules, Capricorn, and Taurus.  The water tower is blue, shaped like a flying saucer, and decorated with paintings of stars and galaxies.  Then, the speed limit increases again to 65 and the town is a memory, slipping into the wet fog in my rear-view mirror.

I’m curious about the village’s name.  Apparently, a man named Jackman was the first settler, living alone in 1864 in a cabin on the fork of the Crow River that now flows through the town.  Later in 1867 some people from Maine, New Brunswick, and Massachusetts arrived.  These were bachelor pioneers, enthusiasts and dreamers.  One of them, Daniel Hoyt persuaded the few residents in the area to christen the township, Cosmos – the place had originally been called Nelson Town after a family with that name living on the prairie.  Some writers suggest that “Cosmos” which means “ordered and beautiful universe” derives from New England transcendentalism.  I tend toward the hypothesis that the name is a tribute to Alexander von Humboldt, the German explorer and polymath, who had published a five volume survey of geology and zoology named Kosmos – Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung (“Cosmos – A Sketch of the Physical World”).  Cosmos, in its English version was a best-selling series of books between 1845 and 1862 – it influenced Edgar Alan Poe among others.  Hoyt hoped that the town’s name would attract scholars and a university.  His endeavors to that effect were cut short in 1870.  Hiking to visit a friend in Lake Lilian, nine miles distant, Hoyt was caught in a blizzard and froze to death.  The “kosmos”wasn’t as kind and serene a place as he imagined.  

Today, the town hosts an annual Space Festival in June.  The celebration features frisbee golf, a bean-bag pitching tournament, and pig races.  

14.

A memory: I am a young man, a lawyer in practice for only about a year.  I’m not sure of the rules of the place where I work.  One of the senior partners is a bully and I’m afraid of him.  Nonetheless, I have an engagement several hundred miles away and, so, mid-afternoon, without advising anyone as to my plans, I simply leave the building, go to my car, a small unreliable Chevette, and drive out of town.  This was before cell-phones and, so, once I was in my car on that day in early summer, I am incommunicado – no explanation, no apology for shirking work in the middle of week, although even now, forty-one years later, I feel a twinge of shame about absconding from my duties.  In those days, I didn’t even have a credit card (it’s 1980) and buy gas using twenty-dollar bills that I have husbanded.  I’m very poor and concerned that if I run out of money somewhere out on the prairie, I won’t be able to make my way home.

The drive is long, crossing empty flat plains that stretch out to the horizon.  When we’re young and haven’t traveled much, distances seem immense.  The flat endless highway between small towns seems to stretch into infinity and driving exhausts me and the radio reception out in this desolation is spotty, tense with sizzling static.  I still recall the names of the towns that I count on the way to my destination – Hector, Bird Island, Olivia.  The afternoon turns to evening and the skies go gray.  The car has no air conditioning and the great, empty fields, just planted with rowcrop, exhale their hot breath on me.

At last, I am on the outskirts of Willmar, entering town from the southeast.  The land is all preternaturally flat.  Some transmission towers make a blinking grid in the sky.  

15.

The sky clears fifty miles from Fargo.  The fallow fields are blossoming with a low, yellow flowers and, where the sun strikes them, they seem plated with gold.

16.

I learn that Lucas, who is the birthday boy, has a fever of 101.9.  His nose is running.  Of course, the surmise is that he has covid.

With Hannah and Martin, we go to a sports bar.  The oil boom has left Fargo with a hundred enormous restaurants, capable of seating hundreds.  But now the oil patch has been abandoned and these vast restaurants are shadowy and silent, even on a Friday night on Labor Day weekend.  Some booths around the huge horseshoe-shaped bar are occupied but the entire dining room on one side of the building, tables all set for service, is completely empty.  In any event, if a crowd suddenly appeared what would happen?  All of these places are operating with a sullen, listless skeleton crew.  

Hannah is a Type One diabetic.  Before she eats, Martin calculates the carbohydrates and sugar in the meal that she has ordered using an App on his cell-phone.  Then, she takes out her injection pen, dials the dose of insulin that Martin reports to her, and stabs the needle into her mid-belly.  

When we leave, the head cook comes out of the kitchen and stands surveying the empty dining hall.  She’s a big woman with sad eyes.

17.

Inspiration Peak looks close to Fergus Falls on the map, but, in fact, is another forty-miles away.  The hill is the highest point in a formation of drumlins and moraines called the Leaf Hills.  As the country empties out into the cities, places like this are increasingly depopulated.  The rolling countryside is now heavily wooded and the hills aren’t really visible.  The highway just runs through a patchwork of small cultivated fields that seem to be slipping down into round pothole lakes and densely forested ridges.  The most prominent hill among these glacial tumuli, now known as Inspiration Peak, isn’t really visible, even though the summit rises four-hundred feet above the valley.  The highway shrinks to a narrow lane between trees and, then, there is a parking lot, this Labor Day weekend full of cars and pickups.  

The trail to the hilltop is very steep and without any curves or flourishes of any sort.  It simply rises like a clay and gravel ladder up the side of the slope, mostly straight as it climbs through the oaks.  Along the way, a couple of benches invite the hiker to sit, although it seems somewhat pointless since the ascent is continuous and steep and even the benches seem tilted by the relentless slope.  There are about two dozen people on the hill, crying out merrily as they trudge upward.  It’s only about a quarter of a mile to the top where the trees thin and, then, give out entirely on a bald, windy crown of drought-killed prairie grass veined with golden rod.  The green landscape falls away on all sides, forested country brightly lit by the noon sunshine and glinting with the shards of blue lakes like broken pottery embedded in the crumpled landscape.  A dirt path leads along the ridge to a perilously steep and exposed descent.  Another better maintained path drops less steeply back down to the parking lot.  Like all places of this kind, there’s a lot to see and, ultimately, nothing much to see at the same time – the hills are a chaos of tilted forests with little ponds in basins fringed with cattails.  

Sinclair Lewis came to this hilltop every time he returned to Sauk Centre, his hometown, and, with his characteristic derisive irony, mocked the local people for not making more of this modest hill.  In those days, the place had no name at all.  Lewis influenced the State to make a wayside park here and name the height of land “Inspiration Peak.”  The Indians had a better name Gaskibugwudjiuie – that is, “Rustling Leaf Mountain.”    

      

Martin didn’t know the place until we arrived.  Then, he recalled coming here once when he was twenty, late in the day, climbing the hill with buddies to drink beer at the top.  

18.

My destination was the Willmar Holiday Inn on that long-ago day in 1980.  For some reason, I recall entering the hotel from a parking lot on the backside of the building and walking straight into my girlfiend’s room from the outside.  How could this be?  Holiday Inn buildings ordinarily don’t have access to the rooms from the parking lot.

19.

Battle Lake is a village in Otter Tail County about 30 miles from Inspiration Peak.  Main Street is sunny with queues of people waiting outside the Dairy Queen and a couple of cafes.  Evidently, this is a resort town crowded with people this holiday weekend.  Cars and SUVs creep along the street, backed up by the town’s one traffic light, tourist vehicles hesitating at intersections – is a right turn better than a left?  It doesn’t seem to matter – the town is symmetrical around its main drag.  A Wine Bar with a purplish facade, Stella’s, invites visitors to sit along the sidewalk at little tables under aluminum parasols. The small grocery on the outskirts of the village cooperates with the cafes down the street – it has no deli and no prepared food in its coolers.  We’re looking for something to eat because Hannah’s blood sugar keeps rocketing up and down, as high as 320 and, then, dropping to 65 with the exertion of climbing the steep hillside at Inspiration Peak.  

Battle Lake bounds the town on the north and east, a big blue circle of water with park-like woods along its shores.  Breezes blowing over the water encourage bikers and joggers traveling along the level asphalt paths at the edge of the water.  Next to a public toilet and information kiosk, a giant Indian wearing a headdress raises his arm in a salute similar to a Fascist greeting.  The roadside Indian is about 20 feet tall and scowls at the parking lot and highway skirting his moccasined toes.  The monument is undoubtedly racist, but, also, I suppose, invisible to the locals who have lived beside the thing for seventy years.  The figure commemorates two noteworthy battles fought between the Lakota Sioux and the Anishanabe (Ojibway) Indians in the area.  There is little actual evidence for these battles and, perhaps, they are apocryphal.  In the first, said to have occurred in 1795 (or by some accounts 1793) a large Anishanabe war party, claimed to be about a fifty men, attacked a Dakota village on the shore of the lake.  The assault was ill-advised: the Dakota warriors defended their women and children vigorously and most of attackers were killed.  The surviving Ojibway retreated while a war-chief named Uke-ke, with his three sons, fought a valiant rear-guard action, covering the retreat of the surviving soldiers. (Uke-ke’s fourth son was earlier shot down in front of the village.)  Uke-ke and his sons were killed and scalped, but the rest of the troop successfully escaped, led by a wily warrior named Vulture (Wenonga.)  The monumental fiber-glass Indian represents Wenonga, a square-shouldered square-hipped square-jawed colossus, said to be saluting the site of the battle.  The story is garbled and the choice of hero seems a bit arbitrary – why not memorialize the valiant Uke-ke?  And, in any event, it seems a bit questionable to build a heroic monuments to a group of Indians who were slaughtered, after all, in an attempt to annihilate another tribe living peaceably next to the big glittering lake.  Another battle was fought between the Anishanabe and Dakota in 1850 – even less seems to be known about that affray.  Thereafter, the Dakota Indians were driven out of the State and the Ojibway relocated to reservations at Leech and Red Lakes.  Wenonga lived a long life on the reservation at Leech Lake and, in his old age, boasted that he had shot seven Dakota in the attack on the village.  (Even in the 1790's, inter-tribal Indian warfare was fought with long guns and involved much sniper fire from ambush.)

French fur traders called the body of water where the fight occurred Lac du Battaile.  The Ojibway had a better name Ish-quon-e-de-win-ing (“Where but few survived”).  The only account of the fighting here derives from an 1852 history by a half-breed Ojibway, William W. Warren. He describes the Dakota village as comprising 300 lodges, probably over a thousand people in the settlement, more than the current population of Battle Lake.  But numbers of combatants in old histories are always questionable and Warren needed an excuse for the bad defeat that his compatriots suffered.  It’s possible, I think, that several fights are conflated in the account.  No one knew anything about this in 1852 except for Warren and, so, not much can be reliably said about these battles.  Visitors point out that the giant Wenonga is identical to a similar colossus once on display at the old Thunderbird Lodge on 494 near the airport in Bloomington.  Some even claim that the figure is a refurbished muffler repair man, one of a race of titans often called “Harold Huge” giants. These advertising colossi were made by the International Fiberglass Company in the late fifties and early sixties to demonstrate the durability and expressive potential of the firm’s product.  (There was a Harold Huge muffler-man called Mr. Bendo at Ced’s Muffler Shop in Chicago around 1960 that raises his arm in a Hitler Gruess identical to Big Chief Wenonga’s gesture in Battle Lake.)  Of course, Battle Lake hosts Wenonga Days each July – the celebration features turtle races.

The town was platted as a railway stop on the Great Northern line.  If the tracks are still active, I didn’t see any sign of them.  Compared to neighboring places, the village founded in 1881 is a belated.  The first people in the area, arriving “three years after the Indian massacre of 1862" were a party of dissident Mormons, venturing into the north country from Nauvoo, Illinois.  These Mormons rejected Brigham Young’s doctrine encouraging polygamy and settled here at a place called Clitheral Lake, about five miles from present-day Battle Lake.  (There’s now a rural Lutheran church where the village once was located.) The Saints arrived in a company of about 15 to 20 families, built a small town, and held property in common.  By the turn of the century, the village had evaporated and the Mormons were just a fading memory in the area.  

Present-day Battle Lake is a cheerful place, mostly devoted, it seems, to serving the lake cabin people who have summer places in the hundreds lakes nearby and, also, providing gateway amenities to visitors to Glendalough State Park about three miles away. 

20.

Glendalough State Park preserves a modest lake shore chalet owned by the Cowles’ family, publishers of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspaper.  The nature reserve was added to the State Parks in Minnesota in 1990 when Cowles’ family members donated the place to the Nature Conservancy which, in turn, deeded the camp over to the Department of Natural Resources.  The place is very pretty, with rolling hills, apparently glacial moraines and drumlins that are lightly forested with old oak.  The park isn’t wilderness and, indeed, has something of the character of a well-kept and neatly groomed golf course.  A thin strait of wooded terrain separates the big body of water next to the town of Battle Lake from another oval lake with park-like forests growing down to its sandy beaches – this is where Glendalough Lodge is located.  The Cowles’ cabin is a two-story rustic structure with three gables covered in weathered wood that looks a bit like a cottage on Martha’s Vineyard or Cape Cod.  (A duplicate of the lake-front house is impaled on a metal pipe a few feet way from the building – this miniature model serves as a bird-house.  From inspecting the one-twentieth scale bird house, I observe that the original structure once had a covered porch extending along its facade facing the lake; this has been eliminated so that a handicap-access ramp can channel visitors into the building.)  

The lake is shallow in front of the cabin, a brown sand beach just below the eroded shore-line extends some distance into the water.  The lake is warm and Martin and Hannah wade in the water lapping gently up against the sand all patterned with shallow craters where people have walked.  Where the water is about knee-deep, thousands of fractured shells make the bottom prickly for those wading in sunlit, mild-looking lake.  

The inside of the cabin is entirely paneled in stained-brown pine veneer.  In the living room facing the water, big windows let in the light and some duck decoys are displayed on shelves in the wall. A small nook, annexed to the main sitting room, contains an old-style hi-fi with a turntable set inside a cabinet made from the same pale brown wood as the walls framing the rooms and the windows.   Book cases display sober-looking volumes about public affairs and policy.  The Cowles were well-connected and Dwight Eisenhower fished here.  Later both Nixon and the Soviet premiere, Brezhnev, were guests at this Dacha.  A kitchen and dining room stands apart from the lake-house, premises that look at bit like a dining room at a church camp.  Trails extend into the nearby forests.  It is a sort of locus amoenus – a bucolic place for relaxation and pleasure, not ostentatious and, indeed, built on a pleasingly humble scale. 

Many people are visiting.  A sign two-hundred yards from the lake-shore cabin warns park-goers that the parking lot ahead is full.  But it isn’t.  Cars come and go.  There’s not much to see here – a glance, more or less suffices. 

 

21.

A morose, heavy set lawyer named Ezra Valentine moved to Breckinridge on the Red River, about forty-five miles away.  He came north for his health and pictures show him gazing sadly at the camera, his face a melancholy mask, shoulders hunched and defeated. In fact, he was a successful local figure and made enough money to buy the land around the lake where the park is now located.  This was around 1923. Valentine put in some access roads, built the lake-front cabin, and installed a fishing pier.  He had the camp up and running in August 1925, declaring to friends and family that he would “rather spend two weeks on Battle Lake than live one-hundred years on the flats” – “the flats” was apparently his term for the level, empty plain through which the Red River of the North flows.  About ten days after making this declaration, while touring his lake shore on foot, he suffered an “attack of apoplexy” and dropped dead on the spot.  A land speculator acquired the property and, then, sold the cabin and grounds to F.D. Murphy, a rich man in Minneapolis and the publisher of the Star-Tribune.  Murphy established an exotic game park on the premises, raising exotic quail and pheasants and peacocks.  He had a hatchery building and installed a bowling alley in the cellar of Valentine’s lake cabin.  Three tennis courts were built at the edge of the woods, two of them clay and a third asphalt.  After Murphy died, his heirs sold the place to the Cowles family, who had also acquired the Star-Tribune from them.  Cowles re-named the property Glendalough Lodge, the name that the State Park preserves.  (Glendalough is a Scottish place-name).  

The history of the place is that it has no history.  Some famous men came and stayed for a weekend or two.  But no great decisions were made here.  Time spent at a lake cabin is inconsequential. The game park closed in 1989 and a year later the cabin and grounds, together with some adjacent prairie, shapely with wooded hills, were sold to the Nature Conservancy and, then, the State of Minnesota.  The lake is still, reflecting the cool, cloudless skies.  A sort of hush hangs over the place.   

22.

It was an unhappy relationship. 

In the Spring of my first year studying law, I met a girl that I had known from my class at Eden Prairie High School.  I had admired her from afar in high school but didn’t recall ever speaking with her.  She was shy and came from a poor, farming background.  But her family’s truck farming acreage was exactly where the city was growing into the country, was sold to a developer so that a shopping mall could be built on the land, and, so, in a matter of months, her parents became extremely wealthy.  They moved from their skeletal-looking old farmhouse surrounded by tomatoes on the vine, cantaloupes and cauliflower, to a prestigious mansion overlooking the Minnesota River Valley.  When I knew her, T. was attending the University of Minnesota studying for a degree in forestry management.  I encountered her by accident at the library at the University where I spent my days reading law.  

Despite her parents’ money, T. lived like an impoverished student.  She had a barely functional car and commuted to school – her classes were mostly at the Ag campus in St. Paul.  T. lived in a farmhouse that had been swallowed up by suburban Hopkins, one of those relics that you see half-hidden in a stand of ancient trees behind a strip mall and row of fast food places.  T’s elderly grandmother, a woman that I can’t recall ever seeing, dwelled in the farm house’s ground level.  I suppose T was looking after the old woman although I wasn’t really much aware of that relationship when I knew her.  The old are mostly invisible to the very young.  

T. lived in a couple of rooms on the second story of the farmhouse.  I spent weekends with her.  Since I had no car, I rode a bus from an apartment where I lived near the University to Hopkins.  Then, I hiked from Main Street about 20 blocks to the strip mall and the wooded hillside where her house was located.  We were mismatched and, after a few months, the love affair soured.  Nonetheless, I continued to trudge up to the old farmhouse for another year or so, even, though, by that time, our relationship had curdled to recrimination and acrimony.  Like many young women, T. wasn’t willing to release me from the relationship – I suppose she felt a proprietary interest in me, even though it was obvious that her affection had faded away.  And, for my part, I clung to my relationship with her out of some sort of damaged self-regard – it seemed to me that this was a problem that should be soluble if only I applied enough energy to it.  I feared rejection, although, in effect, this had already occurred and thought that if I whined and pleaded with her enough things would improve.  I was selfish and didn’t understand that the will of others can be just as implacable and unrelenting as your own desires.  It takes half a lifetime to fully appreciate that others are more than mere instruments.  

Later, my roommate at the campus apartment and I lost our lease.  I had to return home to live with my parents.  I had no money, no car, rode back and forth to my various jobs by bus.  This further compromised my affair with T.  She seemed to regret the fact that I didn’t hike up to her house and spend weekends with her as I had the previous year, although, in truth, she always seemed to despise me a little for being willing to do this.  She embarked on some other casual affairs.  I was jealous and redoubled my efforts to win her back.  And, so, it went for another couple of years, until I finished law school and took the bar exam.  I recall that on the weekend before the examination, T. made a particular point of tormenting me and I spent several sleepless nights tearfully quarreling with her.

I took a job in Austin a hundred miles from T.’s place in Hopkins.  I urged her to visit me, but she never made the trip – claiming, I think, that her car was inadequate.  We spent hours in fruitless debate by telephone.  Several times, I traveled to see her, but it was Winter and my own vehicle was unreliable and those visits usually ended in long hours waiting for a tow-truck to come to spark my frozen car back into life.  

T. graduated in the Spring.  She took a job working for the Department of Transportation.  Her assignment was to inspect bridges out in the country.  I never fully understood her work, but, I think, it involved locating bridges on country roads, photographing them, and making notes as to the condition of these structures.  During the week, she traveled from place to place, spending each night at a motel in one of the small towns in her territory.  I didn’t think she was well-suited for this kind of work.  She was used to living with her grandmother and didn’t like being alone.  In fact, I knew that she abhorred eating alone in a restaurant.  

On the phone, T. said that she was lonely and that the job was agony to her and that she was always fearful, driving the State car far out in the country on gravel roads among the fields and abandoned farmhouses, remote from anyone who could help her if something went wrong.  The bridges were all cracked and unserviceable, half-crushed by heavily laden grain trucks that lumbered over the country lanes.  The little towns where she stayed were full of menacing people and the motels were, mostly, squalid.  T. said that she couldn’t sleep at night and lay awake in her rented bed listening to the couples in the rooms nearby or hearing heavy steps trudging back and forth above her in the middle of the night.  Her territory was northwest Minnesota and she told me that it took her a whole day to get to the rural counties where she was assigned inspections.  Oddly enough, her job seemed interesting to me, probably the sort of thing I would have enjoyed doing.  But she was ill-suited for the work – the country roads were too remote and sinister.

T. told me that next week she would be working in Kandiyohi County and staying at a Holiday Inn at Willmar.  She wondered if Willmar wasn’t close to Austin where I lived.  I said that it wasn’t that far away and that, if she didn’t mind, I would drive out to see her, take her to dinner, and, then, spend the night at the Holiday Inn.  Although she sounded reluctant, she told me she didn’t mind.

22.

On the highway between the North Dakota border at Wahpeton and Willmar, very small towns are spaced at 10 to 12 mile intervals.  The land is so flat that, leaving one village, you can see the green island of the next hamlet, ahead on the horizon – a low spine of trees spiked with a grain elevator and church steeple.  To the left of the straight, level highway, between towns, many small concrete bridges span the drainage ditch running parallel to the road.  The bridges seem scarcely functional, more like half-eroded boulders lying in the creek bed than proper roadways.  

Each village is identical in form, but different in details.  The grain elevators are to the right, flanking the railroad tracks.  A few derelict businesses face the fat steel cylinders where the grain is stored – sometimes, it has overflowed into a yellow mound next to the road.  Speed limit signs caution that it is 30 mph ahead and, at the town’s single commercial crossroad, a blinking digital display records for a moment, your speed.  A tavern, feed store, and a coop card-controlled fuel pump is all that remains of the village’s commerce.  In some villages, there are tiny branch banks exiled from the ostentatious brick heaps with carved facades on Main Street that these places once occupied.  The banks are now in small modern piers of steel and glass at the outskirts of the village, the implacable and enduring buildings in town all boarded-up.  Agencies advertise hail insurance.  The right-of-way between the businesses and the grain elevator is barren, empty, a couple grain trucks parked in the shadow of the millwork, no one out and about.  The leafy side streets are deserted.  The fields come up to the edge of town and crouch next to the grid of streets like a tawny lion waiting to pounce.  

But each town also has its own unique punctum, some curious structure or folly, that marks the place out as unique.  According to the map, Donnelly, where six streets crisscross, sits on the continental divide – water drizzled onto the ground in the north half of the village flows to Hudson Bay; the same drizzle of water south of Main Street ultimately runs into the Gulf of Mexico.  Yet, the place is wholly level, without even a suggestion of a hill, and, so, how the water knows which way to go over this flat land of fields, roads, railroad tracks is completely unclear to me.  In one town, the ornate jewel-box of an old bank is occupied the Delaware Insurance Agency.  Why Delaware? At Kerkhoven, a concrete tower made from open modules rises above the highway – it looks like the sort of structure on which firefighters train for skyscraper rescues and, in fact, the hollow center of the building is like a flu in a hearth.  But the curious tower, about sixty-feet high, stands in the center of town, useless except to be burned again and again, and, of course, I wonder how this can be accomplished without setting the rest of the village on fire.  A few blocks to the south, next to the State Highway, a curious modern-looking wall runs along the road, a geometric assembly of aquamarine panels that rises to a triangular gable.  Behind the gable, a compound of inscrutable buildings lurks.  Glimpsed down a side-street: a small ivy-clad house with its lawn full of concrete creatures, gazing balls, iron and tin trees, robots and bears and unicorns welded together in strange chimeras, in another village, a light house at the terminus of the dead end with a single, blind eye, fallen walls and a half-burnt church.

For 75 miles, the railroad track has run on the right side of the road.  At Kerkhoven, the highway swings more sharply to the east and, now, the railroad tracks are on the driver’s side.  The drainage ditch, flooded and tilting down into white-water rapids, is now on the left side of the highway, cut across by identical concrete bridges that seem half-dam and half-span, not arching the flood in any way, but just a shelf of grey-brown cement extended over the waters.  The sky is bright, but the endless fields trembling in the evening breeze, are now dim, the earth under light extinguished all the way to the gloomy eastern horizon.

23.

Willmar is a railroad town, bisected by a black spike of old train infrastructure.  Main Street runs parallel to an elongated switching yard, complete with tanks of diesel fuel, big stub-nosed locomotives, iron sheds and repair bays and, even, blackened-looking carousel turn-tables.  Rows of inky bullet-shaped petroleum cars are parked on side-tracks.  Other rolling stock crowds close to the edges of the yard.  Machines lumber over the crisscrossing tracks and I can hear bells sounding.  Sometimes, a train hoots in the gathering gloom.      

24.

My motel is on the southwest edge of town, next to where a four-lane highway intersects with Main Street.  The place is run by Indians from Mumbai or its suburbs.  The air in the stairwells is warm and musty, as if recalling a flood some time in the past.  The woman at the desk makes me sign on a half-dozen lines, certifying that I understand that there is no smoking, that pets aren’t allowed, that I will abide by all rules, that murder and other serious crimes are forbidden on the premises, that I will refrain from shooting myself or otherwise spoiling the room by committing suicide there and that, if I do violate this clause, I will not haunt the place or otherwise linger as a ghostly presence.

25.

After checking in, I drive back through the town, paralleling the big switching yard.  Some red lights are creeping along the tracks.

The town is dark, poorly lit.  A few months before, I passed through here in the mid-morning and saw a hugely fat Indian man with a small pony tail walking his tiny white dog along a battered row of houses.  In the growing gloom, I see about ten Indian kids (or, perhaps, Mexican emigrants) walking along the side of the road, shadowy figures on some sort of mission.  The street-lights are dim downtown on this Saturday night. If the bars are open, they don’t seem inviting – long wooden sheds with no windows and hidden alley-way entrances.  The only place showing an “OPEN” sign is a glass-fronted café, with tinted windows apparently, because I can’t see clearly within.  A few women wearing full middle-eastern burkas are sitting across from one another at a table in the café, possibly drinking tea and eating pastry.  The women are like ghostly presences themselves in the dark niche behind the glass facade.  

I don’t find any place inviting to eat downtown and so I drive back toward the Days Inn where I am staying.  I pass a Holiday Inn Express that is attached to a Best Western motel that has the characteristic appearance of a nineteen-sixties-era Holiday Inn.  I see that there’s a Green Mill pizza place in the Best Western, a motel that seems to now have no name.  The Green Mill franchise was associated with Holiday Inn and, so, I assume that the shell of the motel is the place that I visited years before. 

26.

Service is good in the Green Mill.  I have spaghetti with three outsized sweet meatballs.  The spaghetti sauce has a metallic taste.  When I am done eating, I pay for my meal, and, then, walk out of the restaurant through an empty dining room that opens into the stale, warm corridors of the motel.  I am troubled by the fact that I can’t recall anything about what occurred when I finally reached the motel where T. was staying forty-one years ago.  My memory brings me cross-country, through some of the little desolate towns on the great, flat prairie, and, then, I can recall the grey sky, turbid with storm clouds, and the parking lot to the rear of the nondescript building and, then, somehow entering T’s room through a glass sliding door, but, then, there is nothing, no memory of any kind at all.  Whatever occurred in the motel room remains a complete mystery to me, locked away in some inaccessible vault in my mind – I don’t remember seeing T., nor can I recall anything I said to her or that she said to me.  I don’t know if we went out to eat or had some food in her motel room.  It’s almost as if I drove all the way to Willmar, ashamed of skipping work, and, then, arrived to find that she wasn’t there at all, that the entire journey had been in vain, that she had misled me somehow.  But I suppose I would have some memory of that event, if I had been deceived, and so I’m baffled by the fact that this expedition, a trip that I have thought about, infrequently to be sure, but still many times in the past, terminates in my mind in a scene of arrival that is, even, vivid enough to include clouds and the location of my parked Chevette and the door that I entered, but, then, nothing at all about what transpired at that place.

I know that whatever happened was unsatisfactory and that I never saw T. again after that encounter (if it was an encounter) and that I never spoke to her again either.  Perhaps, there was a fight of some sort in which I murdered her or she killed me and, then, left my unquiet spirit to wander over the earth, not knowing that I was dead, driving over endless flat plains beside dark railroad tracks and little scuffed cement bridges in a mere, mocking semblance of life. 

 

I walk down a hallway between locked doors.  The carpet smells of mildew, as if it has recently been flooded.  It’s a short hallway and that ends in a glass door.  Beyond the door, I see the painted blue square of a small swimming pool, some damp tiles, and a shadowy two-story atrium with a walkway fenced by an iron rail to keep drunk guests or children from wandering from their rooms into the heavily chlorinated water.  I push through the door and see that there is a little hot tub, shaped like petal spewing some hot, stinking chemicals into the air.  A girl with her back turned to me walks gingerly across the wet pool-side tiles.  She is only her shoulders and hair with a towel around her hips – I’m sure that she has no front side at all.  The rooms around the pool have sliding glass doors and, behind them, heavy vinyl black-out curtains that fall from ceiling to floor.  The ceiling is clamped down heavy over the little lightless atrium, a dismal shell of metal and fiber-glass that looks as if it has been inadequately repaired after being shredded by a windstorm.  The small hot space is perfectly square.  The edge of the pool is stenciled 3' 6'’.      

This place is familiar to me.  It is heavy with memory oozing all over the walls and floor.  Apparently, T’s room was one of those around the edge of the pool, behind the iron rail, accessed by a glass door that could be slid open.  My memory is backwards.  What I recall, it seems, is leaving the room before dawn, pushing aside the heavy black-out curtains, and stepping into the steamy walkway leading around the enclosure where the pools were located.  The somber, dense atmosphere is what recalls this thought to me, really more of an idea than a memory.  But the lightless, vacant enclosure, the silent rooms all heavily curtained facing the chemical broth in the pools, the stillness and emptiness of this motel swimming pool deep in the core of the building and shut off from the wind and light outside, the warmth from the heated water and the humidity like a flood of tears, all of these things seem familiar to me.  Indeed, I find that there is a door that opens out of the swimming pool atrium, down a short hall – beyond I can see cars parked to the southwest of the building.  This seems a partial solution to vexing aspects of my memory – why did I pass through a glass door seemingly outside of the motel to reach T’s room?  How would I have known where her room was located?  Presumably, what is preserved are my crestfallen steps leaving the place, not whatever happened when I arrived.

27.

I can’t sleep and arise before dawn.  I am always fleeing Willmar before the sun has risen.

I pull apart the black-out curtains on my east-facing window and look out across the four-lane highway.  It’s dawn as painted by Casper David Friedrich: the sky to the east is pale yellow, shedding a curious green light on the ribbons of clouds in the sky.  Far away, a big cumulo-nimbus cloud is rim-lit with pink radiance.  My room is still dark.

I try to take a shower but the inscrutable plumbing defeats me and so I have to wash with lukewarm water cupped in my hands.  When I leave the bathroom, the sun’s rays are now blazing through the window.  It’s like summer solstice at the passage grave at Newgrange – a spotlight of sunshine pours momentarily into the dark, grim room and makes the wall by the door a blinding screen where a shadow puppet moves.  The shadow puppet is me.

28.

I want to see the waterfall at Redwood Falls and so I drive south toward that town.  But Redwood Falls is resistant – it wants to obstruct and defeat me.  Out in the country, there are detours and the principal road from Willmar to my destination is blocked, a stretch of black top behind barricades running to horizon where I can see some stalled-out earthmovers.  I have to take a zigzag way south and lose my directions several times, finding myself on dead end gravel lanes where I have to turn around.  Just when I despair of ever reaching the town, I see a scarp of trees and towers on the horizon and know that I have found the place.

29.

It’s a Sunday morning and no one is about.  I stop at a Burger King and get a breakfast croissant and some bitter coffee. Ramsey Park is at the end of a quiet residential lane where little houses seem to slumber against a backdrop of big old trees.  The park is edged by a golf course and, then, the road spirals into a very dark, shadowy forest, dense with trees and underbrush.  There is a wild chasm along the narrow park lane, a deep ravine full of woods, and, after a quarter mile, the road corkscrews down into the gorge, crossing a small arched bridge through which a stream flows.  Then, the lane runs along the foamy, swift creek for a quarter mile, before turning uphill again.  At the top of the hill, a small parking lot is marked with a picture of a waterfall spewing out of a cliff colored like firehouse brick.  

An asphalt trail leads down a steep slope.  There’s a crossing and I take the path that dives back into the river valley.  This just leads to another road crossing with the white water of the river underlining a row of shadowy trees beyond a grassy meadow.  I huff and puff up the steep hill to the other branch of the trail.  The air is hissing with the sound of falling water.  

A hundred yards down the trail, I come to an overlook on the falls.  A small marshy lagoon intervenes but at the head of the water-meadow, a waterfall pinwheels down from the cliff-side spraying froth in all directions.  The waterfall is small and shapely, an energetic little beast at the head of the small, tight canyon.

For just a moment, the river’s flow reverses.  (Something similar has happened in New Orleans where the storm surge of Hurricane Ida has sent the Mississippi flowing backward, current lunging upstream toward St. Louis and Itasca State Park.).  The water rises from the marshy lagoon, accelerates upward and, then, surges like sea surf against the rock wall, jumping out of the gorge like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, bursting into spray on the cliffs and, then, decelerating as it flows through the calm of the upper canyon.  

It must be an optical illusion and, after an instant, everything reverts to normal.

30.

In the park, a sign says: This is not a Bank.  Don’t let your pet make a deposit.

On the hilltop, I find the parking lot to which I came several months earlier in a pelting rain storm.  It’s dry now and sunny.  I walk over some redwood planking to a steep descent that leads to a swinging suspension bridge.  Under the bridge, the river dives over some rocks rounded and crouching in the gorge like lionesses.  The cataract surges down into the river bottom.  Upstream, a stark wall of dam rises over the lake.  The ruins of a hydroelectric plant are set against the side of the gorge.  Once, power was produced here.

31.

Just before I fully awakened, I imagined my entire trip as the surface of a vault or dome rising over the small sealed space of the old Holiday Inn swimming pool.  The sides of the vault were covered with bright scenes, landscapes and vistas, roadways aimed toward the horizon, farms and small towns.  This colored dome hovered over the locked box of the motel swimming pool.  This sealed chamber was like a mortuary, full of bones and other foulness.  But what was really in the crypt?  Perhaps, there was a wide corridor with reflecting metal walls, the schematic image of a man glowing against a wall, a big plate of wet glass opening onto a wet forest as densely interwoven and impenetrable as a tightly knit tapestry.

32.

I recall driving from Willmar before dawn – this was 41 years ago.  I reached Austin at 7:30, bone tired.  My bed was cool and comforting.  I set my alarm clock for 9:00, maybe I could sleep for ninety minutes before getting up, showering, and going to work.     

September 11, 2021