This river has always drawn me to its banks. I packed sandwiches and sodas for picnics on its banks. I took my young sons on bikes to trails under the Camden Bridge where we stopped to skip rocks across the water. I took my camera there, to capture reflections and wildflowers and boys growing to men. And I bike or walk the riverbanks still, along the many trails that follow the mighty river. I look for the woodchucks, and the mallards, the albino squirrels, and the white egrets fishing from trees above the water.

It has been a stressful day at the hospital. I walk along the river road. The water, far below me, is visible as patches of blue between the tangle of trees and brush. I walk fast, the pace of a busy nursing station is slow to leave me. I pull a handful of red leaves from a sumac, the first shrub to announce the coming cold days. My pace slows as I turn a corner to cross the bridge. I pause half way across, lean over. I drop the leaves. My eyes follow one as it flutters down, down, down to the water far below. The current takes it and twirls it and pulls it downstream. It takes my stress with it, to Hannibal, to New Orleans, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Perhaps the builders and architects forgot these small woods- a place where maple trees still show green beneath their bark, and you can retreat from car horns and footsteps. Here, the trees meet the calm of lock-in dam number one. Their barked trunks backbend over the water to awe in their own reflections. The arched trees create a bridge leading to the water’s glass dance floor-this is where the otters live. They rest, lying on their backs to see Minneapolis. To see the form followed function towers of Louis Sullivan. To see office lights turn off one at time-men and women returning their children.

Just past the waterfall rush of the dam, they can see the sign. This sign is the ever constant amongst the never constant. A molding city of generations grows, birthing new generations, and yet the sign is always there: This sign, composed of many red lights. Some of them are burnt out, others flicker, but there are always enough lights lit to read the sign. One word lights up at time- GOLD, then MEDAL, then FLOUR. The sign goes dark for five seconds before its cycle begins again, its rhythm never broken.

This, this dam, these buildings, this sign, this city, is what the painters and lovers and writers and workers need to see. Hidden amongst stacked building blueprints of hustle and footstep after fast paced footstep are the urban otters. They remind us that an assembly line city is able to stop and cherish a moment to breathe, before it rushes to the next item on its palm-piloted schedule.

The smell was sour and overpowering, but the sights were fascinating to my four-year-old eyes – ice-boxes without doors, tables with missing legs, splintered wooden doors in a rainbow of colors, bedsprings, radios with broken tubes. I wondered who had used these things and then thrown them away. I asked Ernie if we could take an ice-box home and repair it. He said, “This is junk. There’s nothing worth fixing.”

Ten years later my friends and I rode our bicycles in search of the dump. Instead we found a gray sea. A dredging machine pumped sand from the bottom of Crystal Lake spreading it over decades of refuse. The stairs were gone, the dump manager with his cane was gone, the gulls were gone and the smell was almost gone. I wondered why anyone would take away the fascinating collection of castoffs and replace it with dull, gray mud.

A year later, my parents built a home overlooking the reclaimed dump. Truckloads of black dirt concealed gray sand while carpenters raised the walls of our new home. We moved in that winter and in the spring, the dump was magically transformed into a meadow.

Today, mothers park their mini-vans where the dump manager would begin his long descent to Ernie’s truck. Four-year-olds frolic on monkey bars, slides and merry-go-rounds. Children on T-ball leagues learn to swing bats. Neighbors pitch horseshoes. Young men challenge each other to one-on-one basketball games. Families have picnics sheltered from sun and rain under a pavilion. In winter, aspiring skaters do school figures and slap hockey pucks. Canadian geese fly in formation over the park making their approach to the lake. No one imagines the piles of refuse entombed below.

The squawking of gulls has given way to the whine of sirens on emergency vehicles on nearby highways and the roar of airliners climbing over Robbinsdale. The families enjoying Sanborn Park don’t notice.

The sounds of the city seem far away.

The majestic hills of Duluth serve as a striking backdrop to the Lake. I feel like I am at the highest roller coaster peak, ready to drop out of sight, whenever I ride from the top of Skyline Drive to the lake below. And when I take the winding drive up to Enger Tower Park I feel the rhythm of the city, the way it twists and turns, bumps and grinds as if to a slow salsa beat. Once in the park, I wander paths that make me feel like leaping into the sky and flying over the city and the lake, the ships and the beaches. From this cold rock I am perched upon, I can see the top of the hills and the Tower.

Fall dresses my city in riotous layers of red, orange, and gold. The city looks like a giant, terraced rock garden descending from the clouds to the lake. In the spring, that same granite garden pushes out pastel petals of new blossoms and green trees.

In the winter, the hills are treacherous with snow and ice. They challenge the most adept drivers to maneuver their vehicles upwards and sideways, slipping and sliding to their destinations. Gloves, hats, boots, layers of dryness and warmth are required to enjoy the months of December through March. True natives push their snowmobiles over the mountainous, white terrain at night under a full moon, or they fly down the sides of Spirit Mountain on wings called skis.

No matter where I travel or live, my heart is permanently connected to Duluth and the Lake. This is my favorite part of the world.



John Ayd's Mill, 1889 St. Anthony Hill Graphic, Minnesota Historical Society

Completed in 1960, Ayd Mill Road was intended to link I-35E at the south end of the ravine to I-94 in St. Paul’s Midway district, two-and-half miles to the northwest. But neighbors blocked that final connection, and the ravine retained some of its wild charm. At night I could glide down a ramp into darkness that swallowed the noise and lights of the city.

By the time I moved here, the freeway link had essentially become a neighborhood street in St. Paul’s west end. Locals nicknamed it the Shortline after the railroad tracks that ran alongside the road; the name also designated its use as a shortcut. Some of us had another name for it too: The Phantom Highway. It was a highway that began and ended nowhere, a road whose scale far outweighed its use as a local thoroughfare – three concrete overpasses, eight ramps and four paved lanes jammed into just over two miles.

On autumn nights when the fog rolls in and pools across the floor of the ravine, these shapes loom like abandoned ruins, the hubris of another civilization. It’s not hard to imagine this valley already reverting to its former state of woods and wetlands, slowly eroding the roads and overpasses and burying them in a jungle of brush.

In 1887, the St. Paul Board of Park Commissioners began making plans to turn the mill site into “one of the finest parks of its class in the country,” but the 1893 depression made financing nearly impossible. In 1998, a citizen task force recommended converting the 40-acre Ayd Mill Road corridor into a linear park, but in 2002 the city instead opened the connection to I-35E. Now a flood of traffic pours through the ravine. Yet sometimes on a hot summer night when the traffic’s hushed, I can still feel the rugged ravine release its dampness, filled with the sweet musk of leaves and pollen, composting plants, and new shoots creeping alongside the pavement and quietly reaching for the overpasses.



Today I wrap the sights and sounds of my suburban home around me like a comfortable old blanket. I must admit they are as sweet and clear as in days gone by. Cicada buzz in rounds in my backyard. Crows “caw” to feathered friends in a neighbor’s tree. And a skywriter writes in white ink on blue paper far overhead. As I lean back in my lounger, I close my eyes and reminisce of people I knew then and of those around me now. I find that the generosity and warmth of old farmers lives in the hearts of my neighbors. Jeanne offers cucumbers from her garden. Don brings syrup from his Maple trees. Pam, Mary and Loris share sugar and spice from their cupboards.

But what about family and roots – do I have a history? Extended family live within walking distance. My father-in-law eagerly shares stories of Bloomington’s transformation from farmland into cityscape. He recalls the verbal battle of the City Fathers over whether to name their growing settlement “Bloomington” or “Oxboro.” He remembers the first “stretch” of blacktop covering the gravel on Old Shakopee Road – “all the way” from Penn avenue to France Avenue, just a mile away. His eyes look deeper into the past as he recalls March Gardens on 100th and Lyndale. Mrs. March paid him ten cents an hour to pot flowers. He tells me about a woman affectionately known as Grandma Bradbury who fed the hungry and clothed the threadbare during the Great Depression. Her garage was piled floor to ceiling with government food staples and second hand clothing. He remembers blustery winter afternoons sitting around the potbelly stove at Sunde’s Garage on 98th and Lyndale absorbing Old George’s wisdom.

His stories give me a sense that I have not been plunked down in a cold and rootless maze of streets and freeways, but in cornfields gently shaped by the lives of real people into a town that a farm girl gladly calls home.



Often it’s a guilty pleasure because appropriating someone else’s space seems at least faintly illicit. It involves asserting urban squatter’s rights – a legal fiction and an ethical question mark. But what might be seen as a renegade land grab, from another perspective can be viewed as an act of enlightened environmentalism: getting maximum use out of a finite resource.

Not that such a lofty motive is what brought my friends and me to the Minnesota State Fairgrounds some 40 years ago. We just wanted to play baseball, and because we lived near the Fairgrounds, we decided to check out its possibilities as a ballpark.

We discovered that while much of the Fairgrounds was asphalt or concrete, there was one expanse of uninterrupted grass at the northeast corner. Called the Green Parking Lot, this area was used during the Fair by people with tents and trailers and was the first to fill up every August. Until then, though, the Green Parking Lot became our turf. We laid out a baseball field within its confines and held almost daily games there throughout the first two months of the summer.

What we called “the Green” was heir to a noble village tradition: the commons, a plot of land owned by no one in particular and everyone together. Of course, our green was owned by someone, and we worried at first that we’d be seen as trespassers with our balls and bats and gloves. But the cop who regularly patrolled the Fairgrounds left us alone, as did the maintenance workers whose trucks we often saw. In fact, after we had been playing at the Green for several seasons, Fair officials erected a backstop for us, thus conferring an official stamp of approval on our land grab.

Our backstop has long since been torn down, and permanent hook-ups have been installed for trailers, making the area unfit for baseball. But there will always be other fields. As another generation of urban pioneers scours the city, looking for an unused spot, Yankee ingenuity will rise to the occasion.

The ruin’s architecture of decay surprised and enchanted me. Window frames hung half in space with neither mortar nor glass. Stairways rose to nowhere. A sapling grew out of a sink. Floors sprouted carpets of patterned moss. Brick lay down with concrete. Everywhere, beauty and putrefaction shared quarters, like sex and excrement, and these incongruities stimulated my imagination like the random images from which a sleeper constructs dreams.

I liked to climb up into the empty buildings and breathe the smell of sour grain, charred wood, and stagnant water. Inside it was cold, even in the wet heat of August. Water dripped and echoed. The building sighed, then paused. One spring day I startled a flock of pigeons sunning themselves on the windowsills of a chilly upper chamber. In their panic, the birds took to the air as a body and crashed through the half-shattered window glass. I’ll never forget the scene: the tick of all those frenzied wings; the alarmed cries of the birds; and the glass shards catching the sun, flashing sparks, ringing like chimes as they fell to the floor.

In recent years, the ruin has been cleaned and stabilized against further decay. Soon it will open to the public as a museum of flour milling, the centerpiece of a bustling, new district of condominiums and attractions. It will be tidy, safe, and intelligently designed: in a word, civilized. City hall calls this work revitalization. But I consider it a loss. True, I would rather see the old mill domesticated; so much of our city has been demolished. But I will miss those untamed ruins. They were wild and alive – an interpenetration of natural and human forces, a symbol of our common destruction, a reminder of our impossibly brief moment in time.

All those words on paper and in the air, all those images, have moved to the temporary location of the Pelican Rapids Public Library, a warren that was once city hall. Just inside the door, Dorothy the librarian smiles as she checks in books, checks out books, and answers questions. “The bathrooms are through the door, then turn right, then right again. The newspapers are all the way to the back. The children’s books are upstairs. So are the computers.”

Upstairs, the winter sun streams through the arched windows of the old police department, gilding the bindings of the young adult books; books by Avi, Judy Blume, Edgar Allen Poe. Head Start children, blue eyed boys with cowlicks, ebony skinned girls, russet children with sparkling black eyes, listen, intent on the story that Tammy the children’s librarian, is reading aloud.

Beyond the children’s room, eight computers hum, screens alive; a Bosnian man answers his email in Bosnian, a woman in a beautiful green hajib reads a newspaper printed in Somali, a Mexican man works at the Spanish language computer, three boys watch the latest DVD movie, a high school student downloads a resume writing template and one of the librarians does a Google search on ice houses for a patron. The fax machine chatters.

At the newspaper table in the back, two elderly gentlemen discuss the latest blizzard. A mother and child look up fringed lizards in the encyclopedia. Outside the windows between the magazine racks lining one side of a hall, the wind swirls clouds of snow.

It isn’t the library we had, or the library we will have, but for now, the temporary home of the Pelican Rapids Public Library does just what a library should do. It offers a warm place to sit and read, a warm place to talk with friends, a place to warm your heart and feed your mind. The library is the place in our city where everyone feels welcome, where refugees find hope, where children dream, and in one of the oldest buildings in town, where anyone can explore new worlds.



Osterberg scowled at Swenson and replied, “Becuss efree day in Alekssandria iss like da Fort-uff-Yuly in Kensington.”

The dynamics of population were such that, for Osterberg’s purposes, Alexandria was a preferable community. This point is of such importance we shall refer to it as the Osterberg’s Factor.

It is not uncommon to find boosters in small towns promoting growth and commercial forms of progress, without realizing they are endangering the peaceful, bucolic quality of life to be found there, often promoting growth for growth’s sake without recognizing the relative nature of their invidious comparisons.

For example, a cultural oasis like the Twin Cities compares itself to Chicago and New York, and consequently always wants to be bigger and better. Cities like Duluth and St. Cloud want to be Minneapolis and St. Paul. Alexandria is working itself into a sweat to be another St. Cloud, and the more aggressive folds in Osakis, population 1,500, would like their town to become more Alexandrified.

But the Osterberg’s Factor carries a warning. For every benefit conferred by the Fourth-of-July-quality of the busy city there is an equivalent disadvantage in the form of traffic, noise, glut, crime, pollution, etcetera.

Unfortunately, Alexandrification is seldom reversible. Once a town achieves a certain density of stop lights, fast food joints, and car lots, it becomes just another mile in the endless sprawl that is suburban America. The small town has its own character, based on demographics, history and tradition. After achieving strip mall status, its distinctive qualities tend to be molded of plastic and suggested by a public relations firm or planning commission.

It’s time to recognize that small towns are an endangered species – and to try to preserve a bit of authentic Americana for those of us who love it.

The answer, of course, is to encourage the Ostergbergs of the world to move to cities that already have the dynamics they are seeking, and let the Kensingtons and Osakises retain their individuality.



Nothing to do in this predicament but doggedly seize every passing moment and breathe deeply the rare air of fall.

October opened unexpectedly today, as I sat with co-conspirator bikenuts and mapped out the future of our neighborhood. We are now an official non-profit with a website, Star Tribune article and growing clout with the powers-that-be. Now even people in Kunming, China could keep tabs on the “bicycle bandits” of the southside.

Post-meeting I wandered into a Mexican market on Lake Street and struck up a conversation with a purple-haired anarchist punk from Mexico City. Enrique had a pretty cool perspective on things and seemed to be quite a culture jammer. It is refreshing to meet people who seem to take freedom seriously. He does silk screens.

Next I biked over to a blind friend’s building in Bryn Mawr for a birthday visit. We ended up watching (she listened) to the Twins’ playoff game. When they won, she and I whooped and wailed and looked for high fives. Unfortunately, the room was full of severely disabled folks with no clue about the game – I wonder what went through their minds as they watched.

The most thrilling moment of the day followed as I wandered down by Bassett Creek and perched myself on an old rail bridge for some quality alone time. The light receded into that mystical evening glow and two boys played catch along the water’s edge – no doubt inspired by the game.

The tracks diverge just beyond the creek and disappear into the horizon. They seemed to suggest decision between two paths – being human, I ponder my own pending decisions, but alas, with no resolution. Sometimes I feel like a bold decision to go back to school for languages or pursue professional urban planning (my two primary interests) would be premature. Each day’s discoveries instruct me on the course of my life’s journey, even as I take on odd jobs and volunteering and wear many hats. You might call mine “self-education” – it’s cheap, though not all employers recognize it. (Even less my parents!)

But thoughts of jobs and study and activism quickly dissipate. For a moment time stands still and the creek follows its lazy course and the wind whispers secrets and my restless soul is calmed.

Right then and there, and this almost always happened while we were outside, we heard it. It was a sound that brought the brightest of smiles to our faces. We searched for whom ever was home at the time to ask the question that haunted our parents nearly every time: “Can we have money for the Ice Cream Man?”

Most days the answer was ‘yes’. As we approached the heat yet again, our next search began. I remember looking up and down the streets of our quiet neighborhood with only one thought in mind: we better not have missed it. And there, right before our eyes, was every child’s joy.

It took me a while to find exactly what my tummy craved at that moment, but when I found it, I was in heaven. It usually ended up being a bomb pop or a drumstick with the extra treat of chocolate in the cone. The heat no longer bothered me, and neither did the drips of ice cream on my hands. My sister ant I would always remember to say ‘thank you’. And we always knew he would be back, on the next hot day, looking out for us, making sure we all got our treat.

I have since moved away, but the ringing of the ice cream truck will stay with me wherever I am. I hope all the children in my old neighborhood get the same feeling I did – the feeling of a delicious chill on a hot summer day. And they may even have been interrupted in their own pursuits of creating their future. Yet, the chalk on the driveway would only stay until the next rainfall that would wash away all those futures. But we know that we can always go out and create more.