Day 7, Bemidji, Minnesota
“My god! You look just like someone I used to know, except a lot older.”
“Funny, I was thinking the same thing about you!”
And so went the good-natured ribbing among those of us at the Lone Dog Road reading at Four Pines bookstore in my old home town of Bemidji.
What a warm evening! Dear old friends, folks I recognized but didn’t know, folks I knew only slightly, but with whom I shared a common history on these too familiar streets. This was not the Red Lake taproot. This was the Bemidji intertwining of branches.
Four Pines bookstore felt courageous. I know this town in the lakes and pines country 100 miles from the nearest freeway and 100 miles from the Canadian border. I lived here for25 years. I know how it has fought against meaningful social change and clung tightly to a culture of nostalgia. But things are changing. The young people are forcing it. They are saying, “We want more. We want the bigger world.” And they are getting it.
Micro-breweries, Thai restaurants and ramen shops. Home grown businesses started by young, courageous entrepreneurs who want to embrace change, not resist it.
Four Pines Bookstore is one of these. It has a brightness, an earnestness, a hopefulness. Other bookstores have come and gone in this town — a crazy, topsy turvy bookstore of used books on jumbled shelves in an old Victorian house, a weirdly insular tiny Christian bookstore, an off-brand chain whose heart never really seemed in the enterprise, and now, Four Pines. It has the modern, welcoming openness that puts it right in the mainstream of colorful, brightly lit independent bookstores around the country. You can feel it enhancing the texture and dimension of the community by its presence.
The reading went well. I am figuring out how to present this sprawling, hard-to-categorize novel. But, even more, there was discussion about the interwoven nature of the Native and non-Native communities here. The pain, the rupture, the commonalities and differences, are all being brought out into the open. I like to think that my work has played a part in this. After all, here in this forgotten corner of northwest Minnesota is where my eyes were opened, where I first put pen to paper, and where the land grabbed me with a force that has never let go. And I have tried to give it voice through my work.
I’m fond of saying that we each have to live in a way that pays the rent for our time on earth. Between the wonderful engagement in Red Lake and the warm evening in Bemidji, I get a good feeling that maybe my rent is partially paid.
My reward for these days was a touch with people who have touched my heart, the lapping of lake waters and the nighttime cry of the loons outside our window, and a pontoon ride along this northern most part of the Mississippi with my wife at my side and a dog on my lap.
If there was nothing more, I could die happy.
But I don’t get to die, happily or otherwise. Bemidji is in the rearview mirror and we’re off to Park Rapids and Beagle and Wolf books, who have been among my strongest supporters for 35 years.
Another precious homecoming. I could get used to this.
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