Tag Archives: hibbing

Camino 2024, Part II: Finding a Stride

This is Part Two in a four-part series. Part One is here.

Day 1: Wet

It rains. And then it rains. And it rains some more.

We begin the Camino on a riverfront promenade and then cross the long span of the Ponte, built to stay above any flood. The Camino turns out of town and quickly becomes a country lane along a rushing watercourse, and we struggle around a marsh before finding easier paths. At first the Portuguese countryside looks to be in a state of crumbling disrepair, but the town of Arcozelo is well-tended, stone walls and gates holding fine lawns with swimming pools. Garlic-domed churches peek up here and there, their bells tolling out the walk in 15-minute increments, and roosters serenade us through the morning. The rain picks up.

Statistics would suggest about 200 people finish the Camino Portugués on any given day this time of year, but in Portugal, all above and beyond the 100 kilometers necessary for a compostela, the crowds are sparse. The first fellow pilgrims we see are a mother and a 10-year-old son on bicycles, plastic bags on over the kid’s legs to keep off the mud, the scallop shell that identifies a pilgrim strapped to the back of his bike. Later, by a thundering waterfall on the crystal clear Labruja River, two German girls march past, followed by a Frenchwoman who idly twirls a stick like a baton. We catch them all and collect a few more at a stop for coffee and sandwiches and a dry roof at Cunha Nunes in Revolta, the first of the classic Camino cafes that cater to passing pilgrims.

In our infinite wisdom, we have started our Camino on the stage with the biggest ascent on the whole route. Granted, summitting the 1,000-foot climb up the Alto da Portela Grande is no technical struggle for someone who tackles passes in the Rockies with a much heavier pack every summer, but it is long and steady, and did I mention it was wet? We slog upward, fixated only on the muddy path in front of us. Never is this truer than on the last great push up, where the trail has become a flowing cascade the whole way down, a lengthy dance up this dancing brook to a completely obscured overlook.

The descent is speedy, and as we have not booked any lodging between Ponte de Lima and Santiago ahead of time, we are enticed by a sign for an option with heat, private bathrooms, and rides to a restaurant in the otherwise sparse rural hamlet of Rubiães. We cross one last Roman bridge, are overtaken by rapidly marching Germans, and turn to find Sofía’s hideaway, where we arrive just behind the two younger German women we’d seen in Revolta, who have made their way back here after learning the municipal albergue has no heat or hot water. A crew of Taiwanese roll in a bit later, too, and we all populate the bedrooms on the upper level of Sofía’s house.

Despite strong defenses, everything is wet. So wet. We set about rigging everything up to dry, clothing draped all over the place, passports and papers placed over the heater to rescue them. One of the Germans, Ariane, joins us for 5:00 dinner at Bom Retiro, a mile down the road, where we consume heaping portions and a carafe of wine for about the price of a single American glass. The downpours come and go as they please, though we still hopefully note every time the sky grows lighter. The hope is always false. We pass out early in the evening to the soundrack of Sofía’s kid’s faltering trombone practice.

In past hikes I have been in more brutal downpours and I have climbed steeper slopes, but their total effect here makes for one of the most punishing days I’ve ever had on a trail. And yet, with the ability to wring everything out and take a warm shower and clear it all out with a hearty meal and some wine with good company, I am sold. If the Camino can be this enchanting on a day when the trail turns into a waterfall, what can it bring on a good day?

Day Two: The Fortress of Silence

On day two, though the rain threatens occasionally, is liberatory by comparison. We manage to turn the wrong way out of the hostel—we hadn’t realized the access road to Sofía’s was the Camino itself—but before long we’re at a glass box of a snack shop staffed by a woman from Massachusetts beside Rubiães’ main church and a Roman milestone used by later inhabitants as a sarcophagus. Much of today’s route is on the old imperial road, beginning with a big bridge over the River Coura followed by a series of mile markers, those same roads built for legions two thousand years ago still guiding pilgrims today. We wind up through a few hamlets, climbing again past sheep and garlic domes, and we pass a stream that boldly claims the be the troutiest in the universe. Before long we enjoy a steady plunge through a eucalyptus forest and moss-shrouded paths before a grand view of the Minho River valley opens up, our destination of Valença on the Spanish border looming in the distance. The pace differences between pilgrims are obvious on the descent, as we are both passed and overtaken.

At the bottom, the town of Fontoura proves a disappointment: first we are hounded by a Russian woman trying to sell us overpriced snacks, the ATM doesn’t work for me, and the café is closed. (If the Russian had told us this, we might have been more convinced to pay up.) Two Danish pilgrims are swimming off the medieval bridge over the Rio Pedreira, but from here the path is fairly nondescript, tame woods and clusters of homes, and then a long slog through suburban Valença. We stop at a roadside diner, pricey but filling, a pitstop for a bunch of local blue-collar men on their lunch breaks. After two days of pastoral Portuguese countryside Valença is a bit jarring, as we walk up sidewalks with backpacks while city life moves on, the once ubiquitous yellow arrows to guide our path now few and far between, dwarfed by the urban landscape.

A push up a long incline, however, takes us into a new world entirely: the walled medieval compound of old Valença, a fortress town for thousands of years, guarded by great earthen bulwarks below thick stone walls, all from a perch commanding the Minho valley, the bridges to Spain within reach of a good cannon volley. Inside the town are a bunch of narrow streets and a lot of shops, all of which seem to sell towels. Towels, sheets, comforters, pillowcases: this is indeed the historical craft of Valença, and they carry it forward now, selling them all by the kilo. (If you were to ask “who could possibly need a kilo of new towels,” my response might be “most lodging options on the Camino de Santiago.”) We find its 11th century church, groaning with history, and get to know São Teotónio, a native son and Portugal’s first saint. We eat pizza at a trendy little shop staffed by a woman who responds to Portuguese speakers in Spanish.

After a rest at the hotel we head out for a drink on the town, but we quickly learn the drawback of turning one’s town into a medieval theme park by day: by night, it achieves zombie apocalypse levels of deadness. No one is out, save for the tame cats by the church. We retreat to the room. My blisters have started to bloom, and I am in a blah mood. Valença is all very lovely, but it is a museum now, the pilgrims as unwitting accoutrements, and while it is perhaps the appropriate use of an old fortress atop a hill, one should not mistake it for Europe’s present. Take this night of quiet retreat, I suppose, and move on to Spain.

Day 3: Spanish Hibbing

After the torrents of day one and a vaguely ominous day two, day three dawns brilliantly, scattered sun and clouds but no hint of rain. An older northern European couple exits our hotel at the same time we do, but otherwise, Valença is as dead as it was the night before. We trudge down out of its dark gates and cross the Minho (or, now, the Miño) into Spain, past an austere Franco era guard station and on into Tui.

Spain is clearly wealthier than its peninsular partner. Fewer homes lie in ruin; there are real drainage systems. The pedestrian infrastructure is significantly better, and drivers actually stop for people. Every drink order comes with a snack. We are in a refined, thoughtful culture. There are trade-offs: gone are the blue tiles and garlic domes of Portugal. Rigid, solid stone now reigns supreme, especially in the locally mined granite, a building block to stand the test of time.

The seeming wealth is all relative, of course. Galicia is a poor corner of Spain, and like much of the country, its rural areas are emptying at such a rate that the moniker España vacía, or Empty Spain, has been slapped upon it. Next to well-tended homes are picturesque ruins, the slow decay of centuries-old structures no longer necessary to house the population here. Rural Europe in general is re-wilding at an unprecedented rate, with more and more greenery and the return of once-failing species such as the Iberian wolf. Of course this rush for the cities is happening in the United States as well, albeit blunted by immigration and somewhat higher birth rates. But immersion in a place where construction is very old gives a sense of just how complicated it can be to live among structures that predate modern technology, and just how much the run to the cities is reshaping the countryside. There is an eternal tension here between preservation and keeping things livable and letting them fade, a blurry spectrum for each small community we visit on this walk.

We rise up to the old city of Tui, a fortress to counter an invasion of towel-wielding Valençans, broad stone cathedral on top. As snake through the streets, we pass herds of pilgrims emerging to blink at the sunlight. At just over 100 kilometers from Santiago, this is the most common starting place on the Camino Portugués, and for the first few miles out of Tui it shows. We are caught up in a clump of 10 Spaniards plus a British expat named Alan, an Aussie herd, and a clump of British girls with unfortunate laughs who cackle at everything. These and other groups begin to leapfrog each other, with Alan and the Spaniards brimming with energy on day one but stopping to photograph everything. We pass another Roman bridge, ford a stream by a cross to a sainted pilgrim who fell fatally ill here, and enjoy placid, leafy lanes. The lack of breakfast in Valença has my dad growing hangry, but we’re delighted to find a snack break at a new establishment in A Magdalena, which manages to space out the pilgrim crew a bit and leave us in tandem with Marcia and Michelle, two American sisters who are good company.

We come to the massive granite works of O Porriño, complete with signs protesting its growth and a bevy of large houses from that very stone built to withstand the millennia. The debate here is familiar to anyone who comes from a place where people pull things out of the ground. There are more gentle lanes up and down wooded hills, a bunch of lazy dogs, a hobbled German pilgrim with a wounded knee, and our Taiwanese friends from night one. Porriño is not the most enchanting place on the Camino, but a river walk into town does some good in crowding out the factories on the opposite bank and the freeway on the near one, and the historic center, while not large, teems with life. Our lodging is basic but well-appointed, its view down over a busy bus stop. After Valença, I appreciate just watching humanity go about its business.

It strikes me, after a couple of beverages at the Underground craft beer bar, that Porriño is just a Spanish Hibbing, the equivalent of a blue-collar Minnesota mining town I know well. It has 17,000 people, a handful of historic buildings in its downtown, and is near enough to some pretty landscapes, but is itself otherwise forgettable in its urban form. And yet there is wonderful food, top notch wine, good craft beer even though that scene here has nothing on America’s, and it teems with life and bustles with families late into the evening, long after any American town of the same size goes dead outside of a couple nondescript bars.

I come away with a soft spot for Porriño, even if it has few clear charms. Here there is none of the museumification that consumes the centers of many small European towns. It is here where Galicia lives in its present, striving, dreaming like our enthusiastic craft beer convert behind the bar at the Underground, caught up in a debate over saving the verdant forests or mining the stone that has built this region’s wealth and newer homes. Kids pour out of a nearby school, bum around squares, settle into social circles even as they dream of a life beyond the bland apartment blocks that surround the old city core. In some deep sense, people in places like this will always be my people, the steady believers in a land that is anything but empty to them.

Day 4: Galifornia

Day four dawns grey and misty. Breakfast is jamón and tomato atop a large slice of bread from a harried woman as Alan and the Spaniards dine a few tables over for the third meal in a row. Porriño departs slowly, long damp streets before a winding road and the 100 kilometer marker to Santiago. The next few kilometers stroll through the town of Mos, a sleepy place that welcomes its pilgrims brightly and then turns them loose on a series of steady ups into the Galician hills. We trudge up with groups of Spaniards, including one jolly older man with a deliberate pace, though we lose him when we turn aside for lunch near the hill’s summit, a sandwich with a killer view. From there we go down, first on gentle slopes with the loud Brits behind us. We escape them at a churrascaria, however, and are alone for the plunge down into the outskirts of Redondela.

This walk down the hill is both incredibly steep and incredibly beautiful, rich green hills dotted with farms and cottages, fruit and flowers, resplendent in sudden sun, a snippet of a Ría Baixa, an inlet off the Atlantic, visible in the distance. Our hostel-keeper for the night calls this region of Galicia Galifornia, and I understand why. Everything is resplendent and lush, all that rain now showing its gifts. Closer to the mouth of the strait sits Vigo, one of the largest cities in Galicia, but our destination is Redondela, a city of 20,000 known for its towering train viaducts and old town on a hill, close to the sea but removed from it.

After a short urban trek we find the old town, and we’ve lucked out with our lodging. A Casa de Herba stands on a small square the middle of narrow stone streets, and our second floor room has a long balcony from which we can survey a small square and the narrow lane the Camino traces through town. The smell of cooking seafood wafts over us, and I sit on the balcony and write as we wait out a slow laundry load. We wander about, meet Julie and Susan from Saskatchewan at a sidewalk table, eat fish, stumble on a place with a craft beer fridge and retire to the balcony. The city life of old town Redondela flits by below us, pilgrims wandering in, locals heading out, kids chasing each other about, even some nuns.

We are halfway to Santiago, at the peak of the walking experience, all the buildup to this point now beginning its release, an exhale as we settle into this way of being, a pace set for the rest of the walk. I have little to write today. I am one with it.

Part 3 is here.

The Range of Control

Four years ago, not long after I moved back to Duluth and began a job that takes me to Minnesota’s Iron Range with some regularity, I drove down Chestnut Street in downtown Virginia. I nearly ran a red light as I gawked at boarded-up shops and strung-out addicts and imposing old architecture framed against a steely winter sky. The Donald Trump phrase “American carnage” was the first thing to lodge in my mind. I was a witness to the fracturing of small-town America, and I realized just how daunting my new job might be.

I work with Rangers on a daily basis and am the day-to-day economic development staff for a four-community economic alliance, but the coronavirus pandemic has deprived me of any effort to embed myself in the places I serve. Between March and September, I went to the Range exactly once, and that just a brief stop at a favorite coffee shop on a camping expedition further north. And so, eager to view it with new eyes, I guide my Twin Cities friends D and M on a day trip across the Iron Range on a Saturday in early October. M has never been, while D has only been for hockey purposes, so they head in with only loose preconceived notions. Just what do we make of a region that once was the engine of American industry, but has suffered steady population loss since the American steel industry convulsed through its greatest crisis in the 1980s?

We start toward the western end of the Range in Hibbing, the region’s largest city at 16,000 people, and long the capital of the American iron ore mining economy. The drive north from Duluth shows a Range in deep autumn, the trees near peak color and a fresh coolness in the air. For reasons lost on us, the road to the overlook over the Hull-Rust-Mahoning mine pit is blocked off, so we’re denied a vista of the hole in the ground that won two World Wars. We settle for a spin around old North Hibbing, a few vacant streets left from the days before the entire town picked itself up and moved south to make way for the mine. That power of industry to move cities is no relic of the past: just ask nearby Virginia, where the new Tom Rukavina Bridge towers over the Rouchleau Pit after a federal highway was rerouted off of mining land.

Hibbing impresses my travel companions more than anywhere else on this road trip, and the Iron Range’s century-old wealth is evident here. The homes in the center of town have a welcoming, well-tended feel, and the high school and Hibbing Memorial Arena are stunning monuments to past glory. Howard Street, the main drag through the old downtown, has enough refreshed storefronts to make it feel like a cozy slice of Americana. D has brought a Polaroid camera and snaps shots down the street, catching the old Androy Hotel with its columns and arches. M appreciates the crossed pick axe and fork on the logo of the newer Boomtown Brewery, a restaurant whose presence reminds me of a day maybe a decade ago when my mom and I spent a day spinning about the Range and failed to find an adequate lunch spot in Hibbing.

The progress feels uneven, though: whether due to the coronavirus or the proclivities of Rangers who would rather spend a sunny Saturday outside, the Range’s downtowns are quieter than I’ve ever seen them. We feel like we’ve stepped back in time to a preserved Main Street from yesteryear, a sense that D’s washed-out Polaroids under moody skies only enhance. When we make it over to Virginia, there are no addicts on Chestnut Street today; just more quiet, dusty grandeur. They feel like movie sets, a blast from the past; the carnage is gone, but the grit remains.

The Range towns are not uniform. M finds charm in Chisholm’s Main Street as it slopes down toward the rows of flags along a causeway across Longyear Lake. Eveleth’s downtown likewise still has that quaint feel, its hockey monuments adding a distinctive local flavor that D and I both eat up. Gilbert has the largest proportion of boarded-up storefronts, and on the far east end, Hoyt Lakes faces the challenges of any community whose major industry has packed up and left—LTV Steel closed in 2001—and whose housing stock is uniformly dated to a single era. A friend from neighboring Aurora tells a tale of how his high school graduating class declined by a third after LTV disappeared, and the numbers at Mesabi East have only inched down since.

The big news in the central Range these days is the impending merge of the Virginia and Eveleth-Gilbert school districts. These two age-old rivals, just a few miles apart, are shutting down their big, old school buildings and building a new one off the highway between the two. The Rock Ridge Wolverines, leaving aside the misfortune of the identity-devoid lowest-common-denominator name and logo that seems to come with any new school these days, are in many ways a no-brainer. The two districts are next door to each other, have been bleeding students for years, and received a generous funding package to unite and provide their students more resources. Eveleth, Virginia, and Gilbert combined have less land area and population than Hibbing. The new school will pioneer an innovative academy model designed to prepare all students for the reality of the contemporary economy instead of cramming everyone on to a college prep track that may or may not make sense.

Still, it’s hard for anyone with a sense of history not to lament the merger, and D decries the changes afoot at the Miners Memorial Arena in Virginia, which will transform one of the state’s most unique, historic hockey venues into a more modern facility. Perhaps not coincidentally, two towns that have already lost their schools (Gilbert and Hoyt Lakes) are the ones M identifies as the biggest downers on the trip, though Biwabik, which like Hoyt Lakes has folded into the Mesabi East School District based in Aurora, still charms with its Bavarian Main Street theme. As economic development has lurched toward embracing the revitalization of old things and a skepticism of big box new development on the outskirts of town, the realities of enrollment numbers and repair costs for schools militate in the opposite direction.

I am often asked what it will take to revive or diversify the Range’s economy. If the answer were easy, we would have figured it out thirty years ago. The new economic development consensus emphasizes existing local assets, place-based development, and growing local business instead of chasing big new investments from outside firms. Broadband connectivity has become a bipartisan rallying cry, and the tales of kids parked in school and library parking lots after hours so they can do their homework exposes the depth of our digital divides. In principle support all of these things, though the Range has its own unique challenges on many of them, given its distance from major markets and rocky and swampy soil. We plug away and make incremental progress, even as national politics seems to have decided that incrementalism is for the weak.

On this trip, there are signs of that place-based formula going to work. The downtowns look better than they did four years ago. Recreational assets such as Giants Ridge and some new biking networks are certainly bringing in some outside cash and making the place somewhat more attractive to outsiders than it has been. Since the pandemic began, there is strong anecdotal evidence of urban-dwellers poking around the Range for affordable properties where they can live remote lives in wide open spaces, especially on the lake properties that dot the region. (Rarely, however, are those properties inside the limits of the Range’s towns.) The Department of Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation, the state agency that collects a mining production tax and reinvests it in the communities, is now beating the drum of broadband funding and trail networks and downtown revitalization to go along with its longstanding business recruitment war chest.

Mining is still king, though, and taconite mining is not coal mining: while it will have its ups and downs, it’s not going anywhere. The big news this week is the purchase of ArcelorMittal USA by Cleveland-Cliffs, leaving Cliffs as the largest mining company on the Range and one of just two now operating (along with venerable old U.S. Steel). It’s a stunning turn of events; a few years back, ArcelorMittal USA (a subsidiary of the world’s largest steel producer) looked prime to rule Range mining, while Cliffs teetered on the verge of collapse. A series of aggressive moves by Cliffs have resurrected this now vertically integrated American company, and they’ve been on the cutting edge of new pellet technology. At the same time, domination by a single firm is never a reassuring thing, and the Range’s mining future is now in the hands of Cliffs’ bombastic Brazilian executive, Lourenco Goncalves. We’ve come a long way since the days of Congdons and Carnegies.

Any taconite mining intrigue, however, has taken a back seat to other proposed projects on the Range. The proposed PolyMet copper-nickel mine near Hoyt Lakes received all of the permits it needed to mine before the inevitable rush of litigation, while Twin Metals near Ely is a bit further behind in the permitting process. Copper-nickel mining draws more concern over its potential environmental effects than the old taconite mines, and the resulting split has torn apart pro-mining Democrats (mostly the old guard on the Range) and environmentalist Democrats (mostly in the Twin Cities or Duluth) and almost singlehandedly taken down one of the longest-lasting political fiefdoms of a single party. Political implications aside, the copper-nickel debate is a fight for the Range’s soul, and a trip through Hoyt Lakes, the “mining town without a mine” on the far east end of the Range, makes it clear why so many Rangers want to revive the old engine.

After Hoyt Lakes, we head east on the Superior National Forest Scenic Drive, which takes us 60 civilization-free miles clear over to Silver Bay along the shores of Lake Superior. The leaves are brilliant, and from the overlook at Skibo, a golden carpet stretches back toward mining plants on the horizon. In Silver Bay, the parking lot for the Bear and Bean Lakes trail overflows so much that we see people parked half a mile from the trailhead along the road into town. We catch the glow of sunset by the Silver Bay marina and work our way down the shore at dusk, the leaf-peeping traffic stacking up miles outside of Two Harbors. After some dark days in spring, northern Minnesota’s tourism economy has roared back with a vengeance.

The past four years have been hard ones for localists. The escalating rhetoric of national politics has leeched down into every level, with Donald Trump and the leftist resistance as twin poles of totalized worldviews. It’s not wrong: there really are consequences to that national-level debate. But as we drive about, my fellow travelers and I—a heterodox group in our politics—are surprised at the relative lack of Trump signs in a region that became a national poster child for the white working-class flip to the red column in 2016. We’ll learn in a month or so if the romance has faded or if the transformation is now so complete that it doesn’t merit loud signs anymore. But it’s hard not to suspect that something else is afoot here.

As politicians bluster about tariffs and permitting battles carry on in distant courts, the Range sits at cold remove from so many of the trends roiling America in 2020. Its successes over the past four years, such as they are, have come from bipartisan or nonpartisan local efforts to clean up streetscapes and plow in fiber. The coronavirus pandemic has only heightened feelings of powerlessness over forces beyond immediate control, and the inability of too many Americans to make peace that lack of control has been revealing. But even amid crises near and far, humans still have agency over parts of their fates, and those who do seize the opportunities before them are the ones who write history. And because some people have, I have hope for the future of Minnesota’s Iron Range.