Minnesota Mild: North to Bemidji

How do I write about something normal? This is the challenge at hand.

In my professional career, I’ve rubbed latex elbows at the Bondesque Rubber Ball USA Fetish Party; attempted to down a pint at every brewery in Los Angeles County in a single day; made contact with Hazel, the long-dead daughter of Ralph and Christena Palmer, during a guerrilla ghost tour of the Palmer House Hotel in Sauk Centre; gotten absolutely drunk with a high priest from the Church of Satan on a sunlit Portland patio; and, among many other things, attended—but did not participate in—something of an abbreviated orgy at a Hollywood mansion with a time machine on its roof.

In my personal writing career, I’ve put myself into so many compromising situations it’s nothing short of amazing that I’m still intact, much less alive.

But stories don’t always need a serrated edge to be interesting. Some stuff just is. Take Bemidji, Minnesota, “The First City on the Mississippi,” Ojibwa, meaning “lake with crossing waters,” home of Bemidji State University and Lake Bemidji State Park and the fabled Bemidji Woolen Mills, the city itself a strip of land among water, Bunyan and Babe standing sentinel as gods where the lake meets the river.

So, come with me. Let’s get normal.

Bemidji is a relatively easy four-hour drive from the Twin Cities, although Interstate 694 westbound to U.S. Highway 10 westbound on a Friday afternoon in late April are a snarl of construction and closed lanes and, farther north, languorous boat traffic with few passing lanes.

Whenever I take these types of assignments, I try to mentally latch onto one or two songs—or, winter camping in St. Croix State Park, Indigo Sparke’s entire 2021 debut, Echo—a mnemonic device, or retrieval cue, that immediately transports me back to wherever. For this trip, I latch onto the latest Beach House single, “Holiday House,” from their 2023 EP Become.

These trips can be difficult, too, especially without the dogs. My ex and I traveled around MN a lot, memories together cast all over the Driftless, Wild River State Park, a castle on the St. Croix where we got married.

I swap Beach House for 100 gecs, and my head empties like a drain.

The following morning, I wake up in my lakeside suite at Ruttger’s Birchmont Lodge. It’s a beautifully appointed room with a private entrance, fireplace and balcony. I step out in my robe, and a loon bristles near the shoreline.

Breakfast at the Minnesota Nice Café, five miles away, at the intersection of Irvine and 4th, kitty-corner from both the Harmony Natural Foods Co-op and the aforementioned Woolen Mills. Two eggs over medium, two slices bacon, hashbrowns, coffee.

College-aged waitress: “Are you gonna miss your dog?”

College-aged waiter: “No.”

I eat quickly, taking note of little detail: whenever I look up from my plate, at least three people seem to avert their eyes.

Afterwards, I swing by Paul Bunyan Park to snap a photo of the somewhat impressionistic American/Canadian folk hero and his beloved ox. According to VisitBemidji.com, “the statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox are recognized as the second most photographed roadside attraction in the nation.” (I couldn’t find data on the most photographed.) Paul, constructed in 1937 by local resident Cyril M. Dickinson, is 2.5 tons of cement, wooden framework and rebar, and stands (upon his 5.5-ton concrete footing) at 18 feet. Babe, on the other hand, is unceremoniously described as “a skeleton of wooden ribs, sawed and nailed together at a local boat company plant” whose “eyes were made of automobile tail lights and connected to a battery.” There’s a little girl cradling a small goat, German Shepherd at her side wagging its tail like a metronome.

Another short drive along the shore, past Ruttger’s, to Lake Bemidji State Park.

“Here for the wedding?” asks the clerk in the Park Office.

“Uh, no,” I say. “I’ve never actually been here. Anything I need to see?”

She flattens a map between us. “The Bog Walk—here—is really nice.”

“And how do I avoid the wedding?”

She smiles. “Well, that’s down by the lake. And it’s not till three.”

The Bog Walk is surreal, a peaceful boardwalk stroll among towering black spruce and tamarack. It’s early yet, so none of the lady’s slipper or dragon’s mouth or starflower have bloomed. At the boardwalk’s end, two swans—two reincarnated poets, so said Pythagoras—take turns submerging, end-over-end, in the semi-frozen lake.

Then I make the 40-mile drive to Itasca State Park. But my experience visiting the Mississippi headwaters is vaguely lost; the cynic in me keeps thinking about the Most Photographed Barn in America from DeLillo’s White Noise.

“We’re not here to capture an image,” says the novel’s hyperanalytical Siskind, “we’re here to maintain one. […] Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future.”

I cross the river on a log, aware that I am now being photographed.

Above the urinal in the (absolutely stunning) Jacob V. Brower Visitor Center, there are a series of informative Q&As, one of which As reads like an unintentionally poetic missive: “That, of course, depends on your mode of transportation, but if you were a drop of rain, and you fell into Lake Itasca, it would take you 90 days to reach the Gulf of Mexico.”

After a delicious dinner at Mi Rancho Cocina (chile relleno, house marg, expensive shot of Añejo, professional tennis players on the big TV all lean and tan as smoked meat), I head back to Ruttger’s. But I’m too tired to check out the rooftop bar, and my knee hurts. I turned 40 this year, which hit like an open hand.

Instead, I take a beer out onto the balcony and think about nothing.

It’s so windy the next morning that I lose my footing at the gas station, and the gigantic American flag outside town stands stiff as a road sign.           

I get pulled over for speeding south of Chamberlain. After the officer approaches my passenger window, we both look at my rearview air freshener—an anthropomorphic pine tree smoking a joint—at the exact same time.

“This is your current address?”

“No,” I say. “I live in Saint Paul.”

“You know you’re supposed to get a Minnesota driver’s license 60 days after moving to the state.” She turns my license over in her hand. “How long have you lived here?”

“Six years.”

Later, passing the exit for St. Cloud, something spurs a memory: I’d met my ex 10 years ago through a mutual friend, and decided I’d move across the country and reconstruct everything to make it work. I imagined terraced conversations, a front lawn in the country, starlings rippling like constellated eels through the marbled sky. Or the tang of sea kelp and brine riding an easterly spindrift off the Atlantic, the haunting reverb of surf, foghorns knelling like cattle in the dying light. We’d make love deliriously, with unstoppered resolve. And, among the millions of eggs and sperm, two would eclipse and create life, as serendipitous as pollination or the birth of a star in an elliptical galaxy.

And our child’s existence, for a time, would be full of firsts—their first rainfall would be as significant as their first swim, and we’d feel, in an abstract way, as if it were our own first rainfall or swim, that our child’s joy and thrill in the experience were being somehow imparted to us. And nothing about our life would feel sardonic or dull—not the wedding, the portico columns framing our front door. Not the ultrasound photo like a relief map pinned to the fridge. Never the lengthening shadows on our presence in this world and the desperation they imply, faith and logic changing hands as we age and grow fearful of an afterlife, the immunization of the soul and its terminal purge of guilt. And not even our final days, one having outlived the other, the surviving party just a breathing protein in a bed somewhere, the heart like an alkaline battery, but living off what memory still serves them, and that memory would be of the other.

But anyway. If I were a drop of rain, and I fell into Lake Itasca, it would take me 90 days to reach the Gulf of Mexico.