We’re finally here: the 2019-2020 season begins with its first few games tomorrow night. A preseason podcast and my AA rankings have already made their way out into the world, and my next task is to write a foreword for a book. If you need more hockey coverage to pass the time between now and puck drop, though, here are five storylines as we head into a new decade of high school hockey.
Changing of the Guard? Three perennial State Tournament contenders, Edina, St. Thomas, and Duluth East, have been decimated by graduation and departure; while they will remain relevant to varying degrees, this season has a chance to bring out a lot of new faces. The top teams in St. Thomas and East’s sections, Rosemount and Andover, respectively, have never been to AA State; Edina’s chief antagonists include a Benilde team that has only been twice in AA and a Blake team that’s never been. These aren’t minor transitions, either: every one of those teams is a state title contender in a pretty open race. History tells us the old powers don’t go quietly, but there is a chance at a lot of fresh blood in the AA Tourney this season.
Eagles in Formation? Eden Prairie is #1, and
its collection of star power on the defending runners-up is among the more
impressive out there. The questions begin right after that, though. With Mason
Langenbrunner arriving from Cloquet, Ben Steeves from New Hampshire, and
Jackson Blake up from bantams via Shattuck, there are legitimate questions as
to how this team will jell. There’s also very little varsity experience beyond
their collection of stars. Can they get enough out of some very green depth
players to hold up against the other top few teams, most of which can go at
least three lines deep?
Defense wins championships? The unifying trend
across the top AA teams is the quality of the defense. Headliners like Eden
Prairie’s Luke Mittelstadt (now united with Langenbrunner), Benilde’s Nate
Schweitzer, Andover’s Wyatt Kaiser, and Rosemount’s Jake Ratzlaff will get the attention,
but these teams are all deep in back, capable of rolling two or three pairs and
confident they won’t see a drop-off. Goals could be at a premium in some marquee
matchups this season. And in a year when defense may lead the way, who can get
the most out of their forwards?
The Lake gets deeper For years, the Lake
Conference has been the undisputed cream of the crop in Minnesota, and the
small size of this five-team festival allowed its powers to load up on nonconference
schedules that were always the best in the state. Now, though, things are
changing: St. Michael-Albertville and Buffalo, two interesting though hardly
top-tier programs, have joined the fray. The powers now have smaller
nonconference slates, which creates less crossover and sets up a little more
ranking intrigue; the changes will also spare us three annual Edina-Eden
Prairie meetings. I, for one, am glad to see a new wrinkle in a conference that
tended to feel repetitive by season’s end.
A Class A Slugfest If AA is fairly open
this season, Class A is a different, though equally enticing story: the
front-end talent on the top three teams is the best it’s been in years.
Defending champ St. Cloud Cathedral returns most of its core, Hermantown boasts
Blake Biondi and Joey Pierce, and East Grand Forks has loaded up with some star
young talents and an acquisition from North Dakota. If those three make it
through to semifinal Friday in March, we’ll have a few heavyweight fights to
decide a state title.
It’s not always that easy, though: throw in some added intrigue
up north with rising Warroad, ever-present Thief River Falls, Greenway’s
continued relevance, and a peaking Eveleth group, and we have the makings of
some good races. Outside of steady Mahtomedi, the metro sections of Class A
feel as unsettled as they ever have, which leaves an opening for someone new to
crash the party. My fun pick to watch this season, though, is a North Branch
team that has a shot at being the first seeded team from 5A in its present
form.
As always, follow along as you please and send your thoughts
my way. I’m headed to the Twin Cities this weekend to catch my first few games
of the season, and action in the Duluth area will begin in earnest after
Thanksgiving. See you at the rink!
While The Topeka School aims to render contemporary America in grand moody sweeps, the book I read in conjunction with it, Alexander Tilney’s The Expectations, has seemingly more modest expectations. The allegory is more subtle and less grandiose, the language more measured, more matter-of-fact, a believable rendering of characters’ thoughts. Instead, Tilney worms his way into the mind of Ben Weeks, a third-former (high school freshman to the rest of us) at St. James School, a New Hampshire boarding school not-so-loosely based on the prestigious, if sometimes embattled, St. Paul’s. Ben is a sixth-generation SJS student, the son and nephew of prominent school benefactors, younger brother to a freshly minted SJS grad who was something of a campus legend, and an emerging squash star. On paper, he’s the embodiment of the WASP elite.
It would be easy to take a snapshot of Ben as a thoroughly
unlikeable character. He is caught up in an anxious, morally dubious world of
high school social striving, and the closest friends he develops have few
redeeming qualities. For most of the book, he at best offers compromised advice
to Ahmed, his Dubaian roommate with no concept of American social norms; at
worst, he enables other kids’ torment of him. The nagging voice in his head
does nothing to keep him from getting drunk enough to vomit all over the room
in his first month at the school or engaging in any number of other improprieties
large and small. He frequently lies to get out of trouble, and he gets away
with it.
And yet Ben retains a tender core. Tilney wallows deep in
Ben’s adolescent brain, an achievement both relatable and exhausting: in any
given moment, his actions make sense, always an effort to find his place in a
harsh social world and a long family history. His bluster always tentative, and
at no point do we feel his heart is in it; he remains sensitive and industriously
tries to make his way through an unforgiving environment. He is overwhelmed by forces
beyond him, struggling desperately to find his own self beneath the weight of
generations of expectations.
Part of the problem is the world in which Ben finds himself.
St. James is caught in a moral paradox best embodied by the St. James
Companion, a book of expectations it gives to its incoming students, a
relic of a different era that still calls students “boys” even though SJS has
long been co-ed. It wants to protect its students from the forces of the world
and teach them humility while preparing them to rule it. The isolation from the
rest of the world it so long enjoyed is beginning to break down amid modern
connectivity. Disciplinary hearings are a farce, tied more to the school’s
image than any sense of justice, an attempt to keep up appearances in changing
times. Ben’s family situation is not what it seems at the outset, and like any
family that finds its social situation fragile, he swiftly develops an anxiety
that his complex social world turns into outright paranoia.
The Expectations is an elegy of sorts for East Coast
old money. That includes its most redeeming qualities: frugality and taste in
the face of gauche free-spending from the likes of Ahmed, its dying moral code
an effort to tame the privilege the SJS kids enjoy. The WASPs aspired to their
virtues, and often those virtues aligned with the best of the American project,
but as that old aristocracy collides with new money and mass democratic
culture, it finds the world has left it behind. The Companion isn’t
relevant for Alice, Ben’s love interest, nor for Ahmed, who irks Ben with his
dismissal of SJS tradition until he suddenly does branch out in a way that
could destabilize Ben’s place at the school. Ben has few qualms about breaking
rules so long as they are in line with the traditions of SJS mischief, but other
forms of impropriety become existential threats.
As with Adam in The Topeka Project, Ben has a smart
but ultimately tragic father and a pillar-like mother, an arrangement that
seems either oedipal or an indictment of a particular era in American
fatherhood. Ben’s mother, a budding academic with a keen and sympathetic
understanding of her son’s motives, is the novel’s grounding force; his father,
meanwhile, is every bit the sorry heir at the end of the line, riding past
glory and fully consumed by a need to keep up appearances. The Expectations is
a more sympathetic rendering of how elite hunger for wealth and power overrides
a veneer of culture than The Topeka School, and for its efforts may
prove an even more searing indictment.
I knew approximately nothing about squash before reading
this book—another sign of WASP decline, perhaps—but the squash portions of the
book are among its most riveting. Squash is both Ben’s escape and a source of
stress, especially as the stakes get higher, and anyone familiar with high-stakes
high school sports (or any such activity) will relish the tale of his struggle,
at once both in search of prestige and cloistered in a narrow world of little
interest to anyone beyond the courts. The SJS squash coach, the aptly named
Manley Price, is probably a good barometer for readers’ reactions to The
Expectations. Readers who relish his efforts to push his students to the
brink probably understand the desire to elegize St. James; those who find him
an over-the-top manipulator will probably want to grab Ben and order him to
head back to his local public school. But if a culture of excellence is to
sustain itself, it needs its manly (or womanly) prices; if there is any virtue
in higher moral codes, they need to have arbiters and norms to maintain those
standards. That tension sits at the core of The Expectations, and the
moral questions it raises are some of the most crucial ones a changing society
has to ponder.
The Expectations is a debut novel, and as a result
has some of the rangy weaknesses of debut novels. Its third-person limited
perspective gives us an exacting portrait of Ben but comes at the expense of
depth for some of the supporting characters. Its occasional tendency to wander
into other brains or offer sudden insights from on high, while sometimes a
welcome break from relentless Ben thoughts, usually rings false; the need to
name-check every 90s brand also drained me, especially as someone who is a bit
too young to find any resonance in many of them. (This may be the point, of
course.) But Ben Weeks is a timeless exemplar of the status struggle of teenage
boyhood, and in the final chapter, when he has nothing left to lose, he starts
to find himself. ‘Let yourself bleed,’ Price tells him, and Ben pays the price
to learn the true nature of the world around him.
My fiction consumption lately has featured novels with 90s high school boys at their centers, a kick driven by some of my own preferences and a product of what some good younger writers have put out in 2019. The first, Ben Lerner’s critically acclaimed The Topeka School, operates on a different level from the second, Alexander Tilney’s The Expectations; the latter is content to present its characters’ thoughts as-is, but the chapters in The Topeka School often have extended allegories and drift into stream of consciousness to tie the threads together. Its style is one a New York Times review calls “autofiction”: borderline autobiographical, the fourth wall broken as the protagonist, Adam Gordon, writes in 2019 about his teenage self and includes excerpts from his parents.
At its core, The Topeka School is a meditation on the
power of language and an argument for its importance in how we understand our
world. Adam in his prime contends for a national high school debate
championship by mastering a technique known as the spread, an incoherent,
rapid-fire style designed to game the rules of the competition that Lerner none
too subtly suggests has leeched into American corporate culture and politics.
(The causal arrow most likely goes the other direction.) Another chapter
delivers a pained portrait of the loss of those faculties in old age, as
dementia removes any possibility of comprehension. Whether an intentional
debate tactic or a loss of bodily control, the collapse of language upends the
world.
Adam’s parents, two psychologists at an institute in Topeka
called The Foundation and direct stand-ins for Lerner’s parents, take over the
narration for extended stretches of the book. Jonathan, Dr. J, makes for the
most lyrical of the narrators, the man himself practically a living Hermann
Hesse novel. But Adam’s mother, Jane, is the book’s moral core, a celebrated
feminist author who withstands the misogynistic abuse she endures with
carefully refined tactics, a pillar even as some of her most vital
relationships crumble. The Topeka School has garnered deserved praise
for its treatment of toxic masculinity, and at its best, it shows a way out of
that hell, a love letter from a son to his mother for what she taught him, even
if he often failed to see it.
The Topeka School makes a concerted effort to
diagnose the ills of modern America through frequent references to the nation’s
imperial decline. One chapter, “The New York School,” lays bare the underbelly
of a glamorous life in the diplomatic corps at the apex of American hegemony,
an attempt to question the idea that those really were the glory days. The
novel checks the “end of history” phrase box several times and pokes at the
conceit that filters down from grandstanding politicians to self-important high
school debaters. More often, though, it lingers in the mid-90s ennui of
well-off white kids in Kansas, following their forays into sex and drugs and
gangsta rap. Each chapter begins with an interlude in the story of Darren
Eberheart, a childhood acquaintance of Adam’s and a social outcast who becomes
one of Jonathan’s “lost boys,” consumed by male rage. If this is the empire,
Lerner seems to say, is its demise all that sad?
While Jonathan is the narrator in “The New York School,”
Jane takes command of that chapter, which makes an extended metaphor out of
guiding an airplane safely to the ground. That great machine up in the sky, so
far beyond the imagination of previous generations, incredible until it
suddenly becomes a machine barreling along at hundreds of miles per hour, one
small mistake all the only thing between its passengers and certain death. While
reading this chapter my mind went to the “Flight 93 election” conservative
analogy to Trump, the claim that the salvation of the republic require that
people of good faith take down the hijacked plane. This, Lerner seems to say,
is exactly the wrong way to react when the plane starts to smoke. Jonathan and
Jane’s patients’ attempts to talk through their problems are an attempted
corrective to the spread, a hope for a halting path out from the incoherence.
When crisis strikes Adam, Jane is there to guide him down, and Jonathan is
there as our flawed and awed witness to both the heights and recesses of the
mind. Here, amid an otherwise fairly dark rendering of modern American life,
Lerner finds hope.
I have two great critiques of The Topeka School. One
is that, despite growing up in a comfortable Middle American community a decade
later with some talent of my own in academic competitions before heading East,
I could not relate to Adam at all. This isn’t to say he’s a false character;
maybe the world changed drastically in a decade, and maybe there’s a a red
state-blue state split or some other cultural divide between Duluth and Topeka
at play. I also don’t think relatability should necessarily be the foremost
concern in rating a book’s merits. But I never felt Adam come together as a
character the way Ben Weeks does in The Expectations, in part because it
skipped over the years between innocent ten-year-old Adam and troubled seventeen-year-old
Adam that would have described how he became the way he was. Though he is the
supposed protagonist, his parents came to life better than he did, more obvious
products of their own briefly rendered parents than Adam is of Jonathan and
Jane.
Why does Lerner not seem to care about Adam’s progression
through life? I’d hazard to say it’s because he sees his world as fundamentally
fallen, a product of nature and forces beyond anyone’s control. A pool cue
ball, a symbol of Darren Eberheart’s violent rage, “had been there all his life;”
Jonathan cannot say how his lost boys of privilege come to be, and his mentor,
Klaus, offers up a contradictory claim of both eternal failings and the product
of imperial decline. Some combination of male aggression is inherent, and
culture (especially in late capitalist America, a land of “adolescence without
end”) acts as an accelerant; the best we can hope for is to tame it. In broad
terms I’d buy this hypothesis, and Lerner captures many of its contours. But
I’m not sure he gives Adam (and, through Adam, his own teenage self) enough
credit; while Jane tells us that teenage Adam is really a pretty decent guy, we
see him only at particular flash points, and this never really comes through.
The portrait just doesn’t feel complete.
My second critique, related and more serious, is of the
ending, which I won’t spoil except to say that its attempt at a zeitgeisty
twist fell completely flat for me. I felt some unease when I read the first
chapter of the book when it was excerpted in the New Yorker this year: the
subject matter drew me in immediately, but I worried it might be too clean in its
vision of suburbia, too exaggerated in its effort to wash away nuance in its
quest to set a brooding mood and say Important Things about contemporary
American life. Beneath this desire to plunge into a full examination lay a
simplistic, rather ideological lens, and in the last chapter, it all came back
out again. If Jane’s plane had a gentle landing, Lerner’s skids along the
runway.
Perhaps this is the price we pay for having a poet for an autobiographical novelist, a writer more drawn to rendering moods and meditative auras than crisp declarative prose. (Either that, or I wasn’t on enough drugs when I read the thing.) The Times review, trading off a point made in the Zadie Smith essay I quoted on here last month, thinks Lerner’s lack of authorial authority is just what the novel needs now, an admission that this author who is trying to say something about contemporary life (notably, a straight white guy from the Heartland) needs to acknowledge where his own perspective stops. The point, surely, is a valuable one. But the counterpoint, right there before us, is Jane Gordon, a far more interesting character than the autobiographical Adam. If only Jane could’ve had the last word; she wouldn’t have needed to append an account of her wokeness to prove she’s on the right side of history. Her life, as rendered in the book, is testament enough to everything that she and Lerner stand for.
First, to explain my silence on local politics to the readers who don’t talk to me regularly: over the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of serving as the campaign manager for Arik Forsman’s at-large city council campaign. This blog’s ethos has always sought distance from any cheerleading I may do in private, and I much prefer to work with people directly than yell things out at the internet in the hope that doing so achieves things. Now that it’s all over, though, I’ll attempt to step back from my role over the past year and find the bigger picture.
Mayor Emily Larson rolled to a second term, though we always
knew that was going to happen. David Nolle did manage to win four precincts,
all of them in a row along the riverfront out west, from Irving to Fond du Lac.
While political winds blow here and there in many of the other races, Larson
holds a dominant center in Duluth politics. She’s heard some grumbling to both
the left and the right, and her campaign’s efforts to spend a lot of time out
west, knowing it had nothing to lose, didn’t yield stronger outcomes than her even
more lopsided win four years ago. For now, though, the mayoralty is firmly in
her hands, and she has a chance to see results from some of the longer-term
projects that were at the center of her first term, such as the new streets tax
and the medical district.
Elsewhere, however, some cracks in Duluth’s governing
consensus emerged, and they were most evident in the at-large city council race.
A somewhat conservative political newcomer, Derek Medved, paced the field, with
Labor-endorsed incumbents Arik Forsman and Noah Hobbs coming in second and
third. This at-large race was most notable for its surge in bullet voting, with
voters on the left and right choosing only one candidate in the hope of getting
theirs across the finish line. Forsman survived this new tactic, while the
collateral damage in 2019 Duluth was Hobbs, whose low-key style and prolific policy
work didn’t match the moment.
A Trump Era left rejects candidates who aren’t in lockstep with its vision. Mike Mayou, the left’s 21-year-old candidate, ran an interesting jumble of a race, at times displaying some real charisma with soaring rhetoric and at times making unforced errors like 6 AM primary election robocalls. Mayou broke through and seized the DFL endorsement, which seemed to have little short-term benefit but certainly emboldened the progressive wing of the party going forward. His general election performance improved somewhat on his somewhat distant primary showing, but in the end he appeared on a smaller percentage of ballots cast than Rich Updegrove did two years ago; his percentage simply looks a little higher due to all of the bullet voting. One moment he was a “UMD student,” and another he was a “community organizer,” which aren’t mutually exclusive but convey very different things; sometimes he seemed to just follow the incumbents’ talking points, even as some of his supporters trashed Hobbs and Forsman relentlessly on social media. Those supporters will no doubt blame Labor, which did not endorse Mayou, though that argument is difficult to sustain in a nonpartisan race in which one’s candidate is running against two incumbents who have delivered for Labor, and when one’s candidate finishes last among the viable candidates in both rounds; after the primary, I mostly stopped paying attention, as I knew the threat, so to speak, would come from the right. The Mayou campaign seemed an apt mirror for the progressive moment: filled with unbridled passion, devoted to national-level talking points, and at times more fixated on shaming its putative allies than the conservatives whose rise it may unwittingly enable.
City Council At-Large Results by Precinct
A well-funded and organized right, meanwhile, is well-positioned
to exploit the leftward internal warfare. Still, Medved ran a vague campaign
that really didn’t always align with the tighter messaging of his conservative
funders. He won not because he was BizPac’s man (though the money didn’t hurt);
he won because he made himself the face of the west side, and that east-west
divide is increasingly the fault line in Duluth politics. He even won in deep
blue Lincoln Park, and I’m not sure any more money or different messaging would
have made a difference. While Medved isn’t particularly Trumpy, the tribal
loyalty he inspired does have a whiff of national politics to it, and while
both Hobbs and Forsman can claim some working class cred and have taken on
bureaucratic red tape, it’s much easier to come across as pure on such fronts
when one doesn’t have a track record. As a newcomer to politics, Medved now
begins his education in governance.
The district races featured a fascinating mix. Becky Hall, a hard-working also-ran, lost by a substantial margin to incumbent Gary Anderson in the first district, while Janet Kennedy, after twice failing to break through in previous cycles, outworked Jeanne Koneczny in the fifth district. Kennedy improved her performance most notably in the Riverside/Smithville/Norton Park areas compared to her showing against Jay Fosle four years ago and became Duluth’s first African-American city councilor. BizPac’s two district candidates came nowhere near matching its at-large candidate. The third district race, which defied easy categories, saw Roz Randorf pull out the win over Labor-endorsed Theresa O’Halloran-Johnson. The gap closed somewhat after a lopsided primary, but Randorf pulled away with strong showings in the higher-income areas atop the hill and out on Park Point. One presumes Randorf’s loyalties lie more with the leftward core that ran her campaign than her initial BizPac donors, but she offers a potentially fascinating wild card on the council.
5th District City Council: Janet Kennedy (purple) vs. Jeanne Koneczny (red)
On the school board side of the ledger Alanna Oswald proved
resilient, winning a second election against a Labor-endorsed opponent despite
enduring health challenges in the closing weeks of the campaign. Her early work
got her out ahead of challenger John Schwetman, who kept the race fairly
competitive but only won in a high-income east side core of neighborhoods and
in a few of the precincts outside of city limits. Oswald’s cross-cutting appeal
captures both the old Red Plan critics and a new wave seeking to advance
greater equity, and the relative blurriness of school politics allows that pitch
to succeed in a way I’m not sure can work in a council race.
School Board At-Large: Alanna Oswald (orange) vs. John Schwetman (blue)
In the district races, two anti-Red Plan crusaders of the
past failed to win, though the margins map on to the traditional east-west
divide in Duluth school politics. Incumbent David Kirby rolled past Harry Welty
in the second district, while over in the third district, Loren Martell had his
best showing in his many races and gave newcomer Paul Sandholm a decent run
despite falling short in the end. Martell carried two precincts, one in lower
Duluth Heights and one on the near East Hillside. Welty has signaled this campaign,
his seventeenth, may have been his last; after a closer call, Martell may yet
give it another go. We are firmly on our path in a new era of school board
politics now, and after crossing paths with some of the newer members over the
past several months, I’m as optimistic about the district’s future as I’ve been
in a while. I look forward to seeing what this group can do with its impending
superintendent search.
The past few Duluth election cycles have been dominant for
Labor, which usually found a way to hold broad left-of-center center of Duluth
politics. Its success isn’t some magical formula: over the past 12 years, it’s
coupled union work ethic and business support to back a governing consensus
focused on collaboration and incremental progress. It’s overseen a substantial
rehabilitation of this city’s outward image, surges in investment with no recent
precedent, and incomes rising faster than national averages; while far from
flawless, it’s hard to argue with the overall trajectory. The Labor machine, in
the words of Don Ness, made Duluth politics boring for a spell.
Labor still won a majority of its races in 2019, but there
were some significant defeats and narrower margins. National polarization is
making its way into local politics, and when that happens, the center does not always
hold. As someone who just managed a campaign that made an effort to rise above national
level ugliness one of its core tenets, the end results are not overly
encouraging. But centrism (or center-leftism) for its own sake isn’t an
inspiring platform, and we can talk about “nuance” and “creativity” all day,
but at some point those have to manifest themselves in actual, measurable
results. I know the candidate I worked for is committed to that, and I can only
hope his interesting collection of new colleagues is as well.
In many ways, my job over the past year was easy: the
Forsman campaign was very well-resourced, my candidate worked relentlessly, and
he brought together a deep, strong team with good diversity of thought that
worked as a unit to keep any one task from becoming onerous. I had plenty of
fun with it. At the same time, it was my own education in the rigors of a
campaign and the unexpected twists it can take, and at times a striking
reminder that politics is not for the faint of heart. I’m not sure what comes
next for my political life; I’m not one to take deep pleasure at the mere act
of being in the arena, but I do enjoy winning, and the real work, of course, is
what we can achieve after an election. Time to get to work.
In this edition of my recurring feature, I highlight articles come to me from friends and colleagues who sent me articles thinking I’d like them. They were right, and each of them ties into some piece of my semi-recent writing. Hey, maybe this whole concept can take off.
First, we pay a visit to James Fallows at the Atlantic, who offers up one of the more impressive Karl-baiting articles I can remember: his theme is one I have played with, both subtly and not so subtly, on here before. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire, he argues, was not such a horrible thing for humanity. Instead, for most people, life went on. Many of the monasteries and breakaway provinces retained the most valuable pieces of antiquity and formed the foundations of the modern world. If our American moment is indeed analogous to the late Roman Empire, is that really such a horrid thing? Scale makes national politics nothing more than cultural signaling, and the real work of governance happens close to home. Fallows and his wife, Deborah, wrote about Duluth when they traveled the country looking for examples of how this localism could work.
In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik spends some time in my field of urban planning, and gives some nuanced revisionism of the critiques of mid-century urban renewal. Said renewal gave us a lot of ugly, bad buildings with no concept of the cities surrounding them, but it also aspired to grand solutions. Not all of them were elites glibly or malevolently displacing people of color to facilitate commerce; in fact, many had some of the noblest intentions, and at times they did a much better job of creating access for people than the contemporary ethos of preservation, which often has the effect (whether intended or unintended) of privileging people who already live in a place and making it different for others to break in. As with Pruitt-Igoe, maybe the fault is less with the planners and architects than with a political environment that never gave their ideas a chance.
Gopnik points out many of the ironies of urban political alliances–developers with housing-seeking liberals, conservatives and radical leftist preservationists–and nudges toward a conclusion that attractive architecture and design are what really matters. Our urban moment is very different from that of the past half-century, and Gopnik concludes by abolishing rent control (correctly) and urban planning departments (well, that’s awkward). This kid trained as a planner thinks he is on to something when he says that different times should make us consider rescuing the best of the past era of planning, such as its noble grand attempts to confront pressing issues, while doing away with the ugly architecture and the paternalism. Somewhere in this mess lies an answer, and we can yet find it.
Finally, since I’ve been writing some things about different generations lately, I’ll offer up a New York Times piece by Taylor Lorenz that shows how Generation Z is starting to have some snarky fun at the expense of Baby Boomers (or, at least, a subset of baby boomers that seems particularly naive to some of the challenges that now afflict young people). As noted in my June post, this broad-brush generational portrait is fairly narrow and perhaps enjoys some New York Times confirmation bias, but I am nonetheless amused.
[I]n our justified desire to level or even obliterate the old power structures—to reclaim our agency when it comes to the representation of selves—we can, sometimes, forget the mystery that lies at the heart of all selfhood. Of what a self may contain that is both unseen and ultimately unknowable. Of what invisible griefs we might share, over and above our many manifest and significant differences. We also forget what writers are: people with voices in our heads and a great deal of inappropriate curiosity about the lives of others.
He knows that a lot of literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured. When someone mentioned the austerity protests that night in the Stag’s Head, Sadie threw up her hands and said: No politics, please! Connell’s initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared in these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything. Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt that old beat of pleasure inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.
On a balmy Wednesday in October, I join some fifty members
of my Leadership Duluth class on a walking tour of downtown Duluth. This day of
Leadership Duluth is no stray leadership lecture: it’s a day that forces us to
confront reality in our city. From the CHUM shelter and food shelf to the Damiano
Center food kitchen, from the Safe Haven domestic violence shelter to an open
house of social service organizations, this day forces us to see people we
otherwise might not see.
A one-day orientation doesn’t allow for much close contact
with the people who use these resources; that’s not the point of this day.
Instead, we hear from those who spend all of their time working here, the personifications
of the leadership this program aims to show us. Among the most deeply embedded
is Deb at CHUM, who spends her days reaching out to people on the streets of Duluth,
always in some effort to bring them back in. She and her colleagues navigate
the tortured paths of love and frustration, of empathy and inability to
understand what motivates people to lives on the streets, the drastic turns
that a life on the edge can take in a few quick minutes. It is at once both
impossible and thoroughly believable to follow the logic that leads a person to
the transient inconsistency of a life defined by moves from couch to couch, the
transactional life on the street, the turn toward some substance to blunt the
cold or pain or demons in the brain.
Whether thanks to inspired leadership or the relative ease
of convincing donors to support children, Life House, the city’s largest youth
shelter, boasts a warm and welcoming modern space so rare among social service
nonprofits that target the poorest of the poor. As families crumble and
supportive networks fray, the struggles for Duluth’s youth tick upward. And as
I approach the start of my fourth decade on this planet, I now find myself looking
at kids and seeing some sense of what they might become, a haunted sense that
some of these fresh-faced teens loitering around downtown will someday become CHUM’s
clients. A place like Life House may be the last hope for rescuing any of them.
As we walk about, it’s hard not to notice the changing face
of First Street. On the west end, the News Tribune and Board of Trade Buildings
are both moving toward redevelopment; on the east end, Essentia Health’s
massive new hospital project stirs to life. In the middle, scaffolding covers a
building at Lake and First, another conversion to housing as Duluth’s downtown catches
up with where other cities’ centers were development-wise twenty years ago.
Even the bland ARDC building, where I officed for a couple of years before my
firm struck out on its own, is getting a facelift, its new façade a marvelously
depressing shade of grey.
Another potential project looms on the near east side of First,
where the city’s Human Rights Officer, Carl Crawford, delivers the tale of the
1920 Duluth lynchings in his stirring baritone. The Clayton Jackson McGhie
Memorial plaza frequently bustles with activity, often from visitors to the
Union Gospel Mission up the street; today, we share it with just one young
woman, who blasts some pop songs as backdrop to Carl’s sermon and sings along
in painful off-key tones. None too quietly, she mutters about the white people who
have invaded her space. Just the day before, a county court ruled that the
Duluth Economic Development Authority may proceed with the demolition of the
Pastoret Terrace building across the street, a sad but necessary ending for an
architectural icon that has long since crumbled away beyond repair. First
Street’s face will change yet again, and I wonder what this woman will think of
it when it comes.
Carl asks us to pick out a favorite quotation on the
memorial wall. Many are poignant, from Rumi to Oscar Wilde, but I pick out the Martin
Luther King quote that stuck with me when I first set eyes on this then-revolutionary
memorial over a decade ago: “He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid
of the power to love.” Of all the sentiments on the wall, it seems most absent
in our current discourse.
King’s words are grounded in a certain Christian theology, a
legacy of service on my mind when we walk up to the Damiano Center on Fourth
Street. The Damiano is on the site of an old Catholic campus in the heart of
the city: it was Cathedral Elementary School before it became a food kitchen.
The site of Cathedral High across the street is now a parking lot, while Sacred
Heart Cathedral has become a music venue and the priests’ and nuns’ residences
are now housing. Even the church has fled downtown in search of new digs,
whether east to Congdon and the Holy Rosary campus or up the hill to the
Marshall School, now stripped of any religious affiliation.
No doubt faith can feel absent here, and the tale of the Adas
Israel congregation, Duluth’s oldest surviving synagogue and a longtime downtown
inhabitant, offers a chilling metaphor for those inclined to that line of
thought. Their house of worship went up in flames in September, and initial fears
of a hate crime fizzled into a much sadder story of a man without a home who
set a small blaze next to the building in order to keep warm. I had reached for
some thundering quotes from Eichmann in Jerusalem but was left instead back
in the pages of The Human Condition, ever in search of meaning in a corner
of the world where life risks becoming a tautology.
The scaffolding and wrecking balls across downtown Duluth
hint toward a new future, and I am an unabashed supporter: downtown Duluth
above Superior Street is largely a relic of a Rust Belt city center, completely
at odds with a city looking for a spurt of fresh life. For that matter, it is
at odds with a more humane environment for those who drift about it because
they have no other choice, and only a narrow, reflexive idea of community would
reject this new development as if the status quo were in some way worth
preserving. But if it does go, it will take a few stories with it, and we need
to keep those stories somewhere if we are to have a true understanding of our
past. Whether the it comes from the Adas Israel congregation rising from the
ashes or the Clayton Jackson McGhie memorial ensuring we never forget the acts
of 1920 or a kid at Life House finding stability in a life that previously had
none, our knowledge of the darkest moments gives us that much more appreciation
for the light.
A
quick digest on what I’ve been reading now that I’m back in Duluth after two
weeks on the road:
Sometimes
I think I could just spend my entire blogging life commenting on George Packer’s
work, and he shows off his characteristic range of observation in his
account of raising children within the New York school system. He captures
the absurdity of the tracking system that tests two-year-olds for admission to
preschools, the anxiety suffused through the American meritocracy, and the
Trump era over-politicizing of everything by well-meaning progressives and its
ensuing effect on children. The opening paragraph is as brilliant a summation
of the conscientious parent’s paradox as I’ve ever encountered.
Sticking
with the education system, you’ve probably heard about STEM education and how it
is supposed to prepare students for the jobs of the future. In
American Affairs, Jared Woodward marshals the best data and literature
available to show that injecting technology into classrooms has a
detrimental effect on actual learning and is a colossal waste of money. One
could argue this conflates STEM with a more general influence of technology on
learning, but the results are clear enough: the emerging system serves
technology, instead of technology serving students.
As an
undergrad I
frequently took Amtrak back and forth between Minnesota and Washington DC,
a wonderfully leisurely way to start or end a semester and move large amounts
of personal goods. One of the great highlights of these journeys was a meal in
the dining car, where I got to meet random people and share a reasonably good
meal. To this, I bring you the deplorable news that Amtrak is beginning to
eliminate its dining cars. Most disgustingly, Amtrak is justifying the death of
the dining car on the backs of millennials because its officials think we enjoy
leading harried, cheap lives devoid of human contact. (Or maybe they know this lifestyle
is more a product of being overworked and enduring stagnant incomes, but they also
know lazy tropes can help them justify cost-cutting.) This millennial is
incensed, and so is Rainesford
Stauffer in the New York Times.
On a
lighter but still millennial-focused note, Jia Tolentino, the New Yorker’s
Official Scribe of the Millennial Zeitgeist, starts a review on the film “Hustlers”
but ends
up discoursing on her nostalgia for 2008 pop music and its ability to
capture that pre-recession moment. If your memories of 2008 also involve
slurping on jungle juice while “Love in this Club” pulses away at an underage
party, this article is for you. And yes, other generations, you now must endure
millennials finding nostalgia for the stupid pop culture moments that defined
our quickly fading youth, just as you subjected us to these reminders as we
grew up. How fleeting it all seems now. And does anyone else think M.I.A’s “Paper
Planes” is a glaring omission from Tolentino’s list?
The thing that worries me very much is how much
language we’re using now that is so abstract as to require no thought at all. I
mean very important words. Justice, for instance. I had a list, I think, of
eleven kinds of justice. Restorative justice, climate justice, economic
justice, social justice, and so on. The historian John Lukacs, whose work I
greatly respect, said that “the indiscriminate pursuit of justice . . .
may lay the world to waste.” And he invoked modern war, which kills indiscriminately
for the sake of some “justice.” He thought the pursuit of truth, small “t,”
much safer. I want to remember—and this comes to me from my dad, to some
extent—that our system of justice requires a finding of truth, and it labors to
see that justice is never done by one person. There’s a jury of twelve. There
are two lawyers, at least, and a judge. It doesn’t always work perfectly.
Sometimes the result is injustice. But, the effort to discover the truth that
goes ahead of judgment is extremely important. It requires us to think about
the process and what’s involved.
It’s a very humbling thing, finally. People
speak of “the environment.” They don’t know what they’re talking about. “The
environment” refers to no place in particular. We’re alive only in some place
in particulars.
My education on the travails facing St. Louis was a swift one. On a road trip there for a wedding last weekend, several family members, seeking some beer with which to amuse the group, ventured across the street from the hotel to a Circle K gas station. Each six-pack came to them one-by-one through a drawer from an attendant behind bulletproof glass, a security provision deemed necessary even on this unassuming commercial strip right off an interstate. Next to fried ravioli and Budweiser, St. Louis’s lingering image is one as perhaps the most complete representation of the crumbling of Middle America, a sign of what might await downriver for the rest of us if we’re not careful.
The population of St. Louis is down to about 300,000 from a high of 850,000 in the middle of the 20th century. Streets and buildings frequently nestle behind gates, the divisions of a third-world city brought right into a metro whose urban evolution has followed the same trends. Its many brick facades, I learn, are now often the most prized part of a house, and many get removed and shipped off for use elsewhere. Unlike many Rust Belt towns, St. Louis’s fate wasn’t tied to the rise and demise of a single industry; its struggles stem from the gradual decline of a range of industries and a steady stream of buyouts by larger multinationals. I now understand why Jonathan Franzen named one of his early novels about his hometown The Twenty-Seventh City to note its decline from a great American metro to a middling status. (My copy made this trip with me, but I never opened it.)
St. Louis also lacks the perversely romantic ruin porn of Detroit. Its greatest testament to urban planning failure, Pruitt-Igoe, is now partially repurposed and partially a vacant field. Pruitt-Igoe was to be the modernist model for how to build public housing: 28,000 units designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the celebrated designer of the World Trade Center in New York. Less than twenty years later the whole thing was demolished. The failure of Pruitt-Igoe is often billed as a failure of architecture; Charles Jencks, an architecture critic, called its demolition “the day modern architecture died.”
It’s certainly true that the complex suffered from shoddy construction, and that architecture alone cannot make good citizens in the way some of the more absurd modernist dreamers in that field liked to believe, to ruinous effect. But the greater tragedy of Pruitt-Igoe stems not from its design but from an environment that doomed it to failure: a crumbling economy, blatant segregation, poor city management that destroyed St. Louis’s tax base, and a political climate that had no desire to see public housing succeed. For those who defend those systems, explicitly or implicitly, the architects are a convenient scapegoat. The failures of Pruitt-Igoe endure, its ghosts appearing on the streets of suburban Ferguson in recent years.
As with Detroit, there is still plenty of growth and
commerce around St. Louis. It enjoys a large ring of well-off suburbs where
plenty of people, including some members of my family, have settled in to happy
lives. But it is also an ideal study in how major trends, from economic centralization
to government division, can be the lasting difference between cities that are
challenged but thriving and those that have come to exemplify the worst of contemporary
America. The St. Louis experience offers a compelling case for regional
governance and an indictment of a range of incentives and policies, whether
malignant or merely misguided, that created the divides of a power in decline.
I don’t want to linger on the negatives for too long. St. Louis has a dramatic arch, and two Grade A large city parks that date to its World’s Fair days, complete with a zoo and a botanical garden. The City Museum, which I explore with a couple of relatives after the reception, is a true marvel, a playground for all ages in the shell of an otherwise vacant old building, the wreckage of a shrinking city repurposed into tunnels and slides and other stray sources of amusement. I’ll be back here in the future, and I hope to find a few more worthy sights. But on this weekend I settle for rolling in and out in a heartbeat, with long drives across downstate Illinois and Iowa to slow down the time along the way. Rarely is it memorable, save for windows into the less dramatic but equally damning rural decay that line the four-lane rivers of commerce that have replaced the Mississippi as the lifeblood of these towns.
* * *
Some two hours north of St. Louis, on the banks of the
Mississippi, sits Hannibal, the boyhood hometown of Samuel Clemens before he
became Mark Twain. He didn’t live there long, but this town of 17,000 left an
indelible mark on one of America’s most celebrated writers. Like any small town
that has had a brush with fame (and many that haven’t but would like to think
they have), Hannibal is all in on its famed son, with Twain kitsch and a full
cottage industry around him on full display. We enter town down rather dismal,
run-down streets amid a rainstorm, but downtown Hannibal is cute and well-kept,
and the Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, which sprawls across several buildings
and blocks, is worth the $12. We get a full overview of Clemens’ early life,
and the town smartly keeps its emphasis on his early years which were so
formative for his two best-known works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn. Those two icons of American literature are clearly
children of Hannibal, and each of the major figures in those books had direct
real-life parallels.
Beyond Hannibal, Twain’s fortunes have risen and fallen over
time. The museum acknowledges the controversies surrounding Huck Finn,
both for its transgressive language at the time of its publication and its
contemporary fall from grace for its repeated use of a word we now consider
vile in polite speech. A panel in the museum shows dueling quotes from writers
on this flap, with Toni Morrison blasting anyone who’d shy away from an
accurate account of historical language and Jane Smiley suggesting that, if Huck
Finn is the book that sets the context for discussions of race in America,
it’s letting us set an awfully low bar.
Both points can probably be true. There are certainly more effective and searing testaments to the reality of racial conflict in America than the writings of a white man from over a century ago. The problem comes from trying to see Huck Finn only through that lens: it’s a major theme in the book, yes, and there’s certainly something to Huck’s growing understanding of racial divisions that readers can learn from, perhaps especially because Huck is by no means privileged but can still see injustice in front of him. (An exhibit in the Becky Thatcher House does a good job of laying out 19th century Hannibal’s class boundaries for a young audience.) And Twain also deserves judgment by the context of his day: sure, some language no longer resonates, but he was a dedicated and consistent champion of racial equality at a time when that was often a bold take. He wrote a book-length diatribe against the atrocities of King Leopold of Belgium in the Congo, and he blasted injustice around the world, from Boers in South Africa to servitude of Pacific Islanders in Australia. He also oversaw the rehabilitation of Ulysses S. Grant’s reputation through the publication of his memoirs, a vital corrective to a Southern narrative of Reconstruction as a failure and Grant as a bumbling and corrupt commander-in-chief. I have little patience for armchair critics of a man who consistently used his station to combat injustices everywhere.
Twain endures because he embodies the best of the American narrative. He is often wickedly funny, an astute observer of American reality using a vernacular, that, if sometimes less accessible now, was a vital step in literature’s move away from endless highbrow blather to something accessible to all classes. His realism was for everyone, and dedicated to a democratic spirit. He burst on to the scene documenting the freshness of American thought against stodgy Europeans in The Innocents Abroad, and he set his country to overcoming such ugliness as slavery and racism, which he himself had benefitted from as a child. In this vein, his great characters are adolescents: not yet fully formed, burdened by family history and their instincts but still capable of greatness or redemption no matter their backgrounds. Tom and Huck speak to the possibility of boyhood, and Twain’s nostalgia for his early days when a small-town American childhood blurred very real class lines. That formative experience may no longer be possible in the St. Louis metropolitan area, and if that is indeed the case, it’s a major loss.
A dive into a Hannibal childhood stirs some agrarian corner of my soul, itself grounded in an early-life sojourn in a town of 4,000 where I formed my first memories. As with Twain, that small town was my sandbox for my first steps into writing. This road trip’s final day includes a push through the land I associate with those early years: the hilltop farms and meandering coulees and oak savannas of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area. The towns here seem better kept, better able to avoid the shabbiness on display in Iowa or Missouri or, for that matter, northern Minnesota. On a golden early fall morning, I don’t much mind getting stuck behind a house on wheels as I wind up and down these verdant hills. These hills are reminders of a time when I, too, had no sense of the divides I can’t help but see now, and remind me that the dream embodied in Twain’s characters isn’t useless nostalgia, but a dream of how things could be.
Airports are normally among the more placeless places in
existence, but upon my arrival in Burlington, Vermont, I know I’m in a
different sort of place. Wooden reliefs with maps and quotes cover the walls, and
a row of rocking chairs runs down the center of the concourse. Most stunningly,
a series of quotes on the state’s opioid crisis lines the glass skywalk to the parking
garage, a raw admission of a glaring issue and a call for redemption all at
once. I develop an immediate appreciation for Vermont’s willingness to confront
reality and be itself. If jetting in and out in 30 hours can really give one a
true appreciation for a state, I got one in my two quick nights in the state
last week.
I make the 40-mile drive from Burlington to Montpelier
beneath a giant moon just past its full stage, gently coasting down I-89 through
the Winooski River Valley. The Vermont State House is lit up for the night, but
the town is silent, and half a block away I find my resting place at the
Capitol Plaza Hotel, a grand old thing with rich red carpeting and textured
wallpaper and some intricate woodwork here and there. It also shows its age at
times, with its questionable elevator and inconsistent updates to some of fixtures
in its bathrooms, but I decide this slightly-past-its-prime grandeur is exactly
my style. The night desk attendant, a middle-aged man in a sweater and suit
coat one might mistake for an English professor, sets me on my way, and after a
lengthy but successful struggle with an iron, I turn in for the night.
I wake to find Montpelier blanketed in fog, but get out for
a quick run so I can see the town before I confine myself to a conference and
then bid it farewell. The downtown is picture book New England quaint cuteness,
a couple of main streets lined with restaurants and bookstores and a few church
steeples rising above it all. The side streets are lined with more slightly
shabby grandeur, old Victorians and Federalist homes, many of them with peeling
paint or carved up into separate apartment units. I struggle up a hill to the
Vermont College of the Arts and make my way back down around town before an
aggressive climb up a steep hill in Hubbard Park, which lords over the city and
offers a few vistas through the mist.
I’m in Montpelier to speak at conference on opportunity
zones, a federal tax incentive that tries to make everyone happy by giving rich
people a tax break for investing in projects in designated low-income or high-poverty
zones. The incentive, a product of the 2017 tax cut bill, certainly can be
abused, as
recent accounts highlight all too clearly. But with up-front community
planning we can also drive conversations to focus these funds on projects with
a social impact, and in Minnesota, a couple of colleagues and I have worked to
do just that. Our grassroots effort is, to my pleasant surprise, one my new
Vermont friends would like to emulate.
While I don’t know if anyone explicitly planned it this way,
a northern Minnesotan is a good fit for a conference on economic development in
Vermont. The state’s chief metropolitan area, Burlington, is roughly the size
of Duluth, and both cities are regional centers for some old towns tucked away
in the hills. Despite its cool vibe, some of the figures wandering downtown Burlington
wouldn’t look out of place in downtown Duluth. Outside of those two outdoorsy
metros, the poverty isn’t extreme, but not much is growing, either. The opioid
crisis afflicts them all, but they also have rich histories and a promise of
renewal. I find no shortage of common ground with the conference attendees, even
though the visit is brief.
After the conference I take the scenic route back to Burlington. It follows U.S. Highway 2, the same road that works its way through Superior and Duluth, and it weaves around the interstate and the Winooski and through a few more classic New England downtowns before it heads into suburban Burlington. I head downtown after checking in to my hotel, and after an initial rush of envy over the Church Street pedestrian mall and a molten gold Lake Champlain at sunset, I start to do some calculus on how Burlington stacks up to my hometown. Duluth wins on stunning natural environment: its lake is superior, its ridgeline more prominent, its parks full of more hidden gems. It seems to have more prominent neighborhoods, while Burlington devolves into more of a series of urban strips out toward its airport and beyond. Burlington, meanwhile, wins for its compact urban form: a walkable downtown, a college campus with immediate access to said downtown, a planning regime that has figured out that bike lanes are not some great menace to urban commerce. Church Street is a gem, its food and beer scenes are superb, and the attractions are all in one general area instead of sprawled out across and segregated between a tourist-heavy Canal Park and a dead-after-five downtown and up-and-coming Lincoln Park. Duluth’s leaders should spend some times comparing notes with their brethren on Lake Champlain.
In many ways, Vermont exemplifies northeastern liberalism at
its best: tight-knit democratic communities, a sense of history and order and
progress, a belief in education and knowledge for its own sake, connections to the
natural world. The downsides: arcane state-level zoning limits that stifle any
development or drive it further outward, part of a broader struggle to
reconcile a wish for personal freedom with that puritan sense of order; an
abstract commitment to humanity that upholds laudable principles but sometimes
forgets that societies must meet their constituents at both their best and
worst, and also sometimes forgets that leaving a better world for future
generations means actually cultivating said next generations. All of those traits,
the good and the bad, are all too familiar from my own circles back in Duluth.
My early flight the next day gives me one last glimpse of
beauty, with a bank of morning fog spilled like a river of milk down the valley
of the Winooski. Vermont and I, I realize, have much to learn from one another.
Yes, I want to measure my Minnesota work against the efforts of a comparable place,
and I also hope to explore some Green Mountain hamlets, cruise Champlain, strap
on some skis at Stowe, meander Middlebury, and eat more food like that
incredible burger with foie gras and drink more beer from its many excellent
breweries. Vermont, I shall return.
Before the 2018 hiking season comes to a close, I want to get in at least one good overnight weekend Superior Hiking Trail trek. The timing isn’t ideal; it’s late enough to be a bit cold, but too early for most of the fall colors. I’m going to spend most of the next two weeks away from home for various reasons. But down time never seems to fulfill its desired function, and a 25-mile march will give a kid some focus to diagnose his writer’s block, to say nothing of his whole long quest, some ten years in the making, that guided him back to this shoreline he knows so well.
I leave my car at the scenic Pincushion Mountain lot above Grand Marais, and my dad drops me at the other end of my hike. We park at Judge C.R. Magney State Park, the eighth and final of the state parks the SHT traverses heading northward. Magney, named for a conservationist mayor of Duluth from a century ago, lines the Brule River on its way down to Lake Superior. Its star attraction is the Devil’s Kettle, a mile upstream along a path that rises gently until it plunges down a 200-step staircase to a few waterfalls. The Devil’s Kettle is a famed split in a waterfall, half of which behaves like a normal waterfall, and half of which plunges into a deep hole that long baffled geologists as to where the water actually went. Alas, there is no devilry on display when my dad and I arrive: the Brule, torrential in its force after a week of rain, overwhelms the whole cliff and bounces out of the kettle and back into the main channel. Instead of a unique geological feature, we’re left with a pretty waterfall.
We return to the parking lot, and I strap on my pack and bid
my dad farewell. After the rain there are countless small streams to hop, and
sometimes the trail itself becomes a small stream, especially in the unremarkable
first few miles out of Magney, where it follows a ski trail and then rigidly
follows property lines up and down a hill. Things brighten at the Little Brule River,
a small stream that still manages to carve a deep North Shore ravine on par
with its more voluminous peers. The trail hugs the high bank and passes stray white
pines before it breaks southward to the Lakewalk.
The Lakewalk is a 1.5-mile stretch along the shore of Lake Superior, the only wilderness portion of the trail that runs along the Great Lake. Its vast openness unfurls in stark contrast to the dense woods that line so much of the trail. The sun dances across rolling waves, the golden glow of the North; a bit larger and these rolling swells would be a surfer’s dream. The sound of the rocks pulled back with each retreating wave isn’t quite as powerful as the Pacific, but the dreamlike effect is the same. I eat a leisurely lunch from a seat atop a pile of rocks across a narrow channel from a small island.
I fancy myself a veteran beach hiker after my Lost Coast
adventure in July, but that experience only takes me so far: there are a
few easily traversed rock ledges, but much of the hike comes across bands of
small rock that only last for so long. Frequently, I’m forced to scramble up to
higher ground. The lessons of California do not apply, and the lake, at its highest
levels is recorded history, doesn’t offer a retreating tide to make passage
easier. At one point the trail disappears completely into the waves, and I’m
forced to crash through a thicket, perhaps the most challenging bushwhacking I’ve
ever done. One last beautiful stretch of beach follows my emergence from the
brush, though I wonder if the rising lake will allow this stretch of trail to
last.
My mind wanders to a debate that began over Grain Belts at Liquor Lyle’s, as all great pop debates do. A West Coast friend who’s guided my view of California as the mythic American frontier did battle with a fellow Georgetown grad, who stood his ground in defense of East Coast hierarchy. Our elites in Washington and New York may have their flaws, but at least they don’t pretend to be saving the world. That elite is wrapped up in a self-inflicted legitimacy crisis now, and while I too will lean in the direction of the devil I know, I’m more convinced now than ever that answers will come not from Park Slope or Pacific Heights but instead from wilds where we can restore ourselves, if only for a little while. The lessons of California again do not apply, mugged by reality; the East helps only in its acknowledgment of history, not in a pathway forward. As a society divides, Octavio Paz writes, “solitude and original sin become one in the same…When we acquire a sense of sin, we also grow aware of our need for redemption.”
The Lakewalk complete, I plow upward and pass a couple of
young grouse hunters, a sure sign of coming autumn. The Kadunce River had been
my tentative goal for the day, but the campsite atop a ridge with no view of
the river doesn’t strike my fancy, so I stop to refill my water bottle below some
falls past the site and push on. The trail here is immaculate, the fruits of a
diligent trail crew that I encounter rebuilding a bridge over the west fork of
the Kadunce. I thank them for their work, skip past their site, and waffle over
taking the passable campsite on Crow Creek before deciding to trust the guidebook’s
glowing description of Kimball Creek 1.2 miles onward.
Kimball Creek rewards my patience: after a long descent down from a road, I come to a pleasant site perched above a rushing creek. I set up camp, read and write in peace, content, and decide to prepare my dinner. I then discover my grave error: somehow, I’ve managed not to pack a lighter or matches; even if I’d wanted to make a fire, all of the wood around me is wet. I settle for a freeze-dried meal made with lukewarm water, all but the rice in my “Himalayan” lentil dish reconstitutes passably, and I wash it down with some bourbon. After spending a night at a site with 12 other people in May, I appear to have Kimball Creek to myself tonight, and I’m delighted at this chance to write in peace.
That all changes at dusk, when Jerry stumbles into camp. He’s
a middle-aged hiker with a t-shirt that proclaims him a “Drunkle,” and he’s
parked his car along the road at the top of the bank and is using this site as
a base for a hiking adventure up toward the Boundary Waters. There’s no escape
from my chatty new sitemate, but he’s an amiable veteran of wilderness adventures
and he shares some of his various sinful goodies with me, which further wipes
away the taste of my mediocre dinner. I write long into the night after we
retreat to our tents, and struggle through a fitful, cool night’s sleep.
Jerry asks me few questions. He walks away from our
encounter with no idea of my family life or what I do for a living or what I do
for fun besides traipse around the woods. At the time it annoyed me, but there’s
something freeing in frivolous talk, and the disappearance of my easiest
talking points allows my mind to get past them and on to something more existential.
This summer, my mind has often been caught up in a battle between pride in what
I’ve built in my three years back in Duluth and a gnawing sense that I made a
mistake and came back home too soon. It would be easy to lapse into careerism,
or to obsess over various power plays. Tonight, I end my night looking at the
last line in a passage from an old story I’d
screenshotted the day before so I could have it even when I’m unplugged on the
trail: “even the eternal striver knows his place.”
Jerry and I set out at the same time the next morning, him
up to his car, and me across the two branches of Kimball Creek before a long
climb up through a lush, mossy spruce forest. The rain that had loomed in the
forecast never materializes, but it is oppressively humid, and I’m drenched in
sweat despite a second day of ideal hiking temperatures. Faint views of the lake
peek out from the ridge beyond Kimball, and the rising sun paints a band of
orange across the horizon between the greys of the clouds and the lake. The
trail drops through groves of spruce to Cliff Creek, then passes over a
seemingly interminable stretch of peaks and valleys over nine gurgling streams,
one of which features a descent so muddy that one can only settle one’s boots
into it and slowly ski down, grasping at the trees lining the path for
stability.
A crossing of wider Durfee Creek signals the end of this endless
up-and-down, and it’s followed by a much steadier up. The reward at the end is
a beautiful Alpine meadow with views all along the shore and an array of flowers
lending color for the scene. The trail then loses itself in some ridgetop
woods, and Woods Creek comes as a mild surprise, its rushing waters audible
down below long before I can see it. The trail then plunges 800 feet down
alongside the creek, and I stop to reload on water when it makes its way down
from the top of the ravine to the side of the stream. I cross Lindskog Road and
work my way away from Woods Creek before abruptly coming to the gorge of the
Devil Track River.
The North Shore has no shortage of gorges, but that of the
Devil Track, I quickly decide, may be its grandest. Red cliffs tower hundreds
of feet over the river, and the trail works its way up the east bank with
scattered views. The climb up along the ridgetop is the most exhausting of this
trek, but a steady string of red pine stands, natural cathedrals that have always
been my favorite of northern forests, keep my mind off my burning quads. The
trail wraps around a couple of tributaries, beautiful ravines in their own
right, and finally plunges down to the river past a pair of excellent
campsites, one right on the riverbank and one right across the bridge. I pass
some other backpackers eating lunch and have one of my own on a convenient rock
beneath some cedars just before the trail rises up again. My delight at this
gorge justifies any muddy feet, any forgotten lighters, any lack of sleep. The
North Shore restores and redeems yet again.
The climb up a long staircase away from the Devil Track
punishes me, but at the top the SHT joins a mercifully smooth ski trail. Half a
mile onward I come to a quick spur up Pincushion Mountain, which angles up a
sheer rock face and traverses a giant granite dome to offer views in three
directions. I find a seat and put pen to paper as I gaze out over the Devil
Track gorge, silent from this high up, and back across toward the meadow I
traversed a few hours earlier. The breeze here on the exposed dome cools me,
and I wander about it freed of my pack to drink it in from every angle. Mission
accomplished, I trudge along ski trails for the last 1.7 miles of my trek.
This hike is bookended by devils, the Devil’s Kettle and the Devil Track River, names that my dad guesses are the result of poor Christian translations of Anishinaabe spirits. Devils don’t have a lot of purchase for a religiously sympathetic agnostic clambering past these roiling waters in the twenty-first century, but the concept, when stripped of stereotypical accoutrements like tridents and horns, still has some value. Whether we call it original sin or human nature, our species retains its dark and destructive sides that are difficult to shake, something that no love-is-all-you-need faith nor Silicon Valley change-the-world claptrap nor narrative driven by human power structures alone will ever overcome. Most of us blessed with some capacity for self-reflection can name the things that hold us back; the courage to find our way out remains both our greatest challenge and the transcendent task that makes us human.
Nostalgia is a complicated force, one that can both fuel or drown a life. I decided I wanted to go home out of nostalgia, both to honor a past that was and atone for a past that wasn’t. At times, I’ve achieved it; at others, I still have many miles to go. On to the next campsite, and may it bring me not a plaintive musing, but gratitude over what I’ve found.
A Patient Cycle 