Day 4: Two dogs and the scar that built America
No bookstores or book signings today, just the 250 mile drive from the upper eastern corner of the state to the western edge of the forests where the land begins to open into the prairies. It’s forest roads the whole way — two lane asphalt winding through pines and lakes, with an occasional small town interspersed on the journey.
In geological terms, it is a movement from the ancient rocks of the Canadian shield, which creates a lake country of craggy promontories and crystal blue waters, to the less dramatic, but still heavily forested land of lakes and streams and bogs that make the land seem almost more water than earth.
You don’t notice the change unless you are watching closely. The forests get slightly less stately and the perimeters of the lakes slightly less rocky. But it is still just mile after mile of forested pathway.
There is one great punctuation, though — the iron range, or, “the range” as it is known; a long, thin stretch of land that contains the iron ore that fueled America’s industrial revolution and shaped the culture and the people that lived, and still live, upon it.
The range is characterized by the “open pit” mines; breathtaking man-made Grand Canyon-like gashes in the land miles wide and hundreds of feet deep where earth moving machines three stories tall dig and move the ore that makes the steel that made America. They look like insects as you peer down upon them from the overlooks on the edge of the pits.
We made our way across that dividing line of the Range and continued through the forests to Bemidji, our old home town. It’s a town of 13000 people in the middle of three Indian reservations, situated on the margins where the forests begin to give way to the vast prairies of North and South Dakota.
As we arrive, we see that nothing has changed, but everything has changed. Like any place you return to that you left years ago, it is unnerving for its combination of familiarity and strangeness.
I do a ZOOM interview with a native language and culture group in upstate New York, and we settle into a 1940’s cabin on the shore of Lake Bemidji, the lake where the Mississippi passes through on its way from its origin in Itasca 60 miles to the west to its ultimate terminus thousands of miles south at the Gulf of Mexico. The cabin is part of a once grand lakeside resort that has fallen into its current shabby state and now survives as a nostalgic curio with only faint echoes of its former glory.
We visit old friends and see old haunts, drive by our one-time homes and reminisce about how it was to live here and how we ended up where we are now. A million thoughts, a million memories.
I could write epistles about this homecoming, but rather than sort through the memories and sensations, I would rather give you pictures of two of my canine friends with whom I had joyful reunions: Sevvie, the dog I looked after last year when his owners were out of town, and Adele, a “dog dog” as I call her — the Platonic vision of a dog as I understand them — and the fourth in a line of excellent golden retrievers owned by an old friend of ours.
A better man, a wiser man, would talk about those old friends. But I am not that man. I am satisfied to leave you with images of Sevvie and Adele. More human encounters are coming soon. For now, these two fine doggies are all you get, and for most of you dog folks, that should be quite enough.
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