Western and Eastern Minnesota Have Little in Common
What kind of person are you? What environment feels like “home” to you? Are you as tied to geography and environment as I? For me, I can handle just about anything other than flat without copious trees and bodies of water.
So, the western half of Minnesota? The part that was covered in prairie grasses until the white settlers brought their wagons across in the 19th century (and must have just stopped out of depression on the prairie) and cleared it all away to build houses? Yeah, that’s NOT my part. As I’ve said my whole life, I could never live there.
Except I did, for nine years.
Photo Credit: Land.com
For my first full-time teaching job. In the southwest part of Minnesota. Where the only trees are the wee groves planted around farmsteads, and when you look out around the land (and you can see a looooooonnnnnngggg way) these farmsteads look like ships far away on the ocean of land. Flat, treeless, and waterless.
When I drove to work those years, I could see the next town as I left mine. Twelve miles apart.
I consider those years penance for my sins.
I mean, I can be happy with flat land if there’s trees and water (the towns I grew up in were like that). I can be happy with topography and trees without water, or topography and water with few trees (but that’s pushing it…I really, really like trees). But missing all three: never again, if I can help it.
The people were wonderful, I must say. My job was exactly what I needed as a new teacher, and I have very fond memories of students and colleagues. But.
So, I moved back to the land of a lot of trees and water (mostly in the form of rivers, but a few lakes) on the other side of the state in 2011. My home is nearly five wooded, undeveloped acres. Birch (my favorite), pine, maple, everywhere. My house is shaded by trees so much it’s hard to find. (Was much shadier a few years ago with the GIANT century+ elm in the back shaded the deck and roof and everything for like 300 feet in diameter), but it got the dreaded elm disease and we had to take it down.
I cried. And cried. It haunts me still.
But, suffice it to say that I’m a few hundred feet from a river, and I have acres of trees. Not much topography to speak of, but I do have a meadow in the back that’s raised with a single tree on it, so I’ll count that. Two out of three ain’t bad.
What I’m getting to is this: last weekend my husband, his mother, and I traveled TWO days to various points “out west” to clean gravesites and place flowers. Memorial Weekend, doncha know, which is the time Minnesotans do this. The first day, we went northwest to Little Falls, Bertha, Long Prairie, and the like.
And the second day, we went southwest. Back to the area where I was doing penance for those years. Brought up lots of memories, yes, especially as I have so many relatives in that part of the world. It also made me so very glad I no longer live there. (My husband and I have a habit of saying, after something goes horribly wrong and we’re panicking, that “Hey, at least we don’t live in TownName!”)
Photo: my own, last weekend.
It was sweltering (on the prairie it’s always either unbearably hot or unbearably cold without windbreaks) and down there the sun just beats down on you with zero shade, zero cool spots, unless you trespass on someone’s farm and sit under one of their trees in their planted grove.
My dad, who was forced to leave farming–his greatest desire–because he kept getting pneumonia from the dust involved, back in the 1950s–would LOVE driving around SW Minnesota to look at the fields. He’s been gone now nearly 11 years, and I can still hear him saying, “Oh, that’s good soil there in that field!” or “Those soybeans look great!” as we drove nearly anywhere.
Okay, that I miss. Not the fields, but Dad talking.
Dad wanted his houses to be open, with the ominous trees back a civilized distance–say, 30 or more feet. He felt claustrophobic when we took one of our many drives “up north” (as we say in Minnesota, though we all disagree on where the line starts) through huge forests. He wanted the trees cleared many meters from the sides of the roads; I wanted them hanging over the road creating canopies.
One of my favorite essayists (and poet, and musician, and storyteller, and teacher) is Bill Holm, who’s been gone quite a long time (and I’m still not over it). I miss him. He said there are grass people and tree people, and he was a prairie grass person. Therefore, he loved it in Southwest Minnesota. My dad was a field person, which I would say is a subset of the grass people organization. Flat, trees tamed and held at arm’s length, big sky, both of them.
I am a tree person. Dark, cool, dappled sunshine at most. Leaves, acorns, pine needles at my feet. Smelling of fir and spice, like a favorite air freshener but without the fluorocarbons. Swaying branches. Cozy. Protected. Out of the evil, lifegiving sun. Taking tea with pixies. Tripping over tree roots and Ents. That’s my kind of life.
Traveling last weekend brought it all back, that difference between grass and tree, the good and the bad (and the merely uncomfortable).
I recall the moment when I accidentally stumbled on a title for the book I intended to write about my first three years as a teacher. (Never happened, of course…ask any teacher about their first three years and it’s a wonder even a shower happened, most days.) It was on the very day I accepted that teaching job in the early aughts as I was driving past Granite Falls, headed south, and I saw a rise in the land off to my right. A hill! I thought. It’s not totally flat afterall! But as I got closer, I realized it was simply a strange curved ramp to access the highway. Not a hill, a sad parody of one. The title that spontaneously popped into my head? I felt lulled into a False Sense of Topography.
Photo: my own, last weekend.
Photo Credit: Mnland.org
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