If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now

by Christopher Ingraham

  Suddenly it was real. We sat down with the boys, then two and a half, to discuss what was happening.

  “We’re going to live in Minnesota,” we said.

  “Minnsota,” they said. They had no idea what it meant, but the word soon became a universal totem of anticipation in the house, encompassing all our hopes, dreams, anxieties, our struggle for a better life. Minnesota.

  One thing I figured I should do was let Jason and the other folks I’d met know we were coming. I didn’t know exactly how to do this, though. “Hey, I called your community a shithole and then turned it into a circus for three days, and now I’m moving my entire family there!” What if it was an imposition? What if they were simply like, “What the hell is this guy on about?”

  Eventually I shot Jason an email describing our plans. “I hope this doesn’t seem too weird!” I wrote. “But the truth is I’ve thought about the place and everyone I met there a lot since my visit, and I think it would be a great place to live and raise the boys for a year or two. And we’re ready for a change—we’ve lived in plenty of places on the coasts, but never in the Midwest.”

  Then I waited for a response.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  Five days later I still hadn’t received a reply back. Jason had always been quick to reply in our correspondence leading up to and immediately following my visit, so I naturally assumed this was an ill omen. He had talked it over with some folks in town and was trying to figure out a way to tell me that no, maybe it might not be best for us to come out there. Or maybe it seemed like a completely weird, bizarre stalker thing to do. As Briana had wondered earlier, who the hell actually moves to northwest Minnesota?

  Fortunately he put an end to my suffering later that evening with a characteristically chipper reply. “Wow Chris, this is unbelievable!” he wrote. He suggested we come out to visit and look at rentals and homes immediately. “We’d absolutely love to have you and whenever you plan your visit, plan on staying with us! I’ll get some listings for area homes for you as soon as I can too!!!!” His exclamation points were reassuring.

  Finding homes, as it turned out, was proving to be a challenge. We scoured realtor.com but there were never more than a small handful of places available in the area. Still, what we saw was promising: a five-bedroom house in Oklee for $45,000. A farmhouse with acreage for $100,000. With a D.C. salary, even on one income northwest Minnesota was our oyster.

  Online, at least, there were no rentals to speak of. The closest Craigslist was for Grand Forks, North Dakota, and it listed zero rental houses for anywhere in or near Red Lake County. The papers, like the Red Lake Falls Gazette and the Oklee Herald, didn’t have websites. It was looking increasingly like we’d actually have to buy something.

  But as the months went on, even the promising listings started showing cracks. The $45,000 house in Oklee? A “fixer-upper” needing work. Same for the farmstead, on an even larger scale. Could we maybe camp in the barn while we fixed up the house? We were starting to find out why nobody ever moved to northwest Minnesota—it was impossible to find a place to live.

  I started getting desperate, searching listings farther afield: Polk County, Pennington County, Duluth. It was all northern Minnesota, right? But Briana quickly put the kibosh on this. “You can’t make a big stink about the ‘worst place to live’ in America and then move to the second- or third-worst place; that would be stupid,” she said. She was right, of course. And capping my whirlwind romance with Red Lake County by moving my family next door to, say, Polk County would probably whip up an entirely new set of controversies. Best not to stir up any regional rivalries; I was already on thin ice.

  Meanwhile, we started cluing in friends and coworkers to what we had planned. Reaction among other colleagues tended to be mixed, with a definite dividing line by age. Older coworkers, particularly ones with small kids, would come up to me and tell me how great an idea it sounded. “Wow, that’s so cool!” is something I heard over and over again. “God I would love to get out of D.C.” Clearly we weren’t the only ones struggling with work-life questions.

  Twenty-something coworkers, meanwhile, were curious but slightly horrified. “Do they even have internet out there?” a number of them asked. Yes, I explained. “What do people even . . . do out there?” Well, I said, I’m going to find out.

  Briana faced a similarly divided reaction among her coworkers, particularly among the women. Some questioned whether she’d be okay walking away from a promising career that she was finally beginning to get established in. But others said yes, it’ll be amazing for the kids and you can always come back to the career later when you’re ready. Hearing that sentiment, particularly from some of the older women in the office, helped reinforce the idea that this didn’t have to be a permanent change—she could come back. This was particularly true of jobs in the federal government, which has rules in place making it easier for people who’ve stepped away for a few years to return to work at their previous level of pay and responsibility, provided that a job is available.

  My mom was ecstatic, a reaction driven primarily by her safety concerns. She fretted endlessly about the possibility of one of the twins tumbling down one of the three sets of steep stairs that linked our current living space together. The sidewalks around our place were dodgy and abruptly ended in odd locations, which combined with narrow twisting roadways meant that a grandson getting struck by a car was always in the back of her mind.

  Briana’s family was supportive, but a little more guarded in their response. Her parents, having lived the military lifestyle of frequent moves that took them far from family, understood that this kind of thing can happen in the course of a person’s career. But a number of them asked, “If you’re going to do that, why don’t you just move back to New York to be closer with us?” We had, in fact, briefly considered this. But putting a few thousand miles between ourselves and upstate New York was a feature, not a bug, of our new plan. Our New York families were complicated, and all things considered it would be nice to have some distance between us and them.

  As winter turned into spring I wrote to Jason and told him we’d like to take him up on his offer to stay if it was still open—it would be just Briana and me for a long weekend. We’d fly in to Minneapolis, rent a car, and drive up the state to Red Lake Falls. Bri would get to see some of the countryside that way, which she insisted on—keep in mind she had agreed to this whole adventure sight unseen, on the basis of my recommendation alone.

  I mentioned we’d been having difficulty finding places, and Jason and his dad, Dick, got to work right away. They set us up with a Realtor friend of theirs and started asking around town to see who was privately selling a home, or would be considering doing so in the future. Dick and the Realtor, Loren, managed to rustle up a list of eleven properties to look at. Most of them had no internet footprint whatsoever—they were all but invisible to anyone looking for housing online. As we came to realize, private sales—direct transactions between a buyer and seller, unmediated by any Realtor or other professional—were a lot more common out there than in Baltimore.

  On March 10 we arrived in Minneapolis and began our trek up the Minnesota countryside. Much of the Minnesota landscape, particularly in the eastern half of the state, resembles upstate New York—dense maple and pine forests covering rolling hills, dotted with small towns and lakes. Along the way we stopped at Lake Itasca State Park, where the mighty Mississippi River starts its journey from its source, just a tiny trickle a child can jump across.

  We pulled over at a scenic overlook and turned off the car. The silence was profound, almost deafening. We hadn’t heard anything like it in months, years maybe, so accustomed were we to the background din of a dense urban environment. After several minutes of adjustment our ears became attuned to a whole new soundscape, the subtle rhythms of nature that usually get buried beneath humanity’s hue and cry—a rustle of leaves, a creak of ice on the lakeshore, an unseen animal skittering beneath the
snowline.

  The silence was a relief, and helped put our minds at ease about what we were getting ourselves into. Surely nothing but good could come of taking our children out of the clamor and bustle of the city to a quieter, slower place—one where they would have the space and silence to think, to develop an interior life, to learn to listen to and appreciate life’s quieter, subtler rhythms.

  Briana told me later that that moment at Itasca was a turning point in her decision that moving to Red Lake Falls was the right thing to do. “The silence . . . it filled me up,” she said. “It was peace. I wanted our family to have that kind of peace.”

  We continued north and west, following the thinning forests to the plains. We got to Jason’s house that evening, a little later than we thought we would. Dick came stomping down the driveway to meet us. “Well where in the hell have these east coasters been, who told us they’d be here at seven?” he thundered. Briana was mortified. Dick laughed a hearty laugh. “Welcome to Red Lake County,” he said, offering her a big bear hug. “Nothing to worry about, you can’t be any worse than that husband of yours.”

  We went in for a meal Jason cooked while Dick laid out the itinerary for our whirlwind real estate tour, which stretched out from one end of the county to another. “We’ve had people beating the bushes all over the place looking for somewhere for you to stay,” he said. “You remember Chuck Simpson?” Commissioner Kiss-My-Butt. “He’s been out there working harder than everyone; even he’s excited you’re coming to stay.”

  The next day started early. Most of the places we were scheduled to look at were for sale, not rent, but they were well under our price limit of $150,000. Dick and Jason drew what appeared to be a big distinction between places that were “in town” and those that were “in the country.” Briana and I thought this was hilarious, since as far as we were concerned everything from here to Grand Forks was “the country.”

  But we soon understood that when folks in northwest Minnesota say “in the country,” they mean it. One of the stops on our itinerary was a tidy little place on the edge of the county. To get there we drove through the fields of the western county on the paved roads, then turned off on a dirt road. No problem, we had lived on a dirt road for a period of time in Vermont. We could handle this.

  After bumping down the road for a few miles we hitched a right onto an even smaller and more rustic dirt road. It appeared to be somebody’s driveway but no, Jason assured me, it was a road. “I got the bus stuck at the turnaround up here a few years ago picking up the kids who live out here,” he said.

  After several bumpy miles we at last arrived at the property, a low-slung modular home on six acres. Aside from the house, a barn, and a shed there were no other buildings to be seen anywhere, in any direction. The nearest neighbor was miles away.

  We toured the property and talked to the owners, Shari Rolf-Baird and her husband. “Yeah, it’s pretty peaceful out here,” Shari said. “Lotta space for the kids to run around; there’s the whole barn for them to explore and build forts in.” I could just picture it: Jack and Charles running about in the country, no cars, no strangers, no hassles. It was beautiful.

  “Of course, you gotta keep an eye out for the wolves and the bears,” Shari added nonchalantly.

  “I’m sorry, what?” said Briana.

  “We keep the rifle by the door for the wildlife, especially the bear. He’s around so much we’ve got a name for him; we call him Brutus. Haven’t had any problems with him yet but you never know.”

  After the tour we got back in Jason’s car.

  “No,” Briana said before I had even opened my mouth.

  “Come on,” I said. “We can teach the kids about, like, wildlife safety.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “But there’s nobody around for mi—”

  “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of!” she said. “You think I want to be cooped up all alone in that house with you all winter? Me taking care of the twins and you trying to write and doing some kind of weird Shining thing? No.”

  “Okay, fair enough.”

  So that was “the country.” We kept looking, visiting homes within the limits of the towns of Brooks and Red Lake Falls. We stopped for lunch in the middle of the day at Carol’s Cozy, the only bar-restaurant in Brooks. When we walked in a bunch of workers from nearby farms were already in there, and it felt like a classic record-scratch, freeze-frame moment—conversation stopped, and all eyes turned to us as we walked in. I saw what I thought were a few familiar faces from my trip the previous summer, but they either didn’t recognize me or didn’t care to extend a greeting. Forget Minnesota Nice, it was downright Minnesota Nippy in there.

  I began to feel a mild panic attack coming on. What the hell were we doing, anyway? Walking into a strange community a thousand miles from anywhere, assuming we could just set down roots and elbow our way into society? People usually move for familiar reasons—a job, a spouse, a family. According to the census, among people who moved five hundred miles or more in a given year, half moved for job-related reasons, a third moved for family, and about 18 percent moved for housing. Just 2.4 percent of long-range movers cited a reason that didn’t fall neatly into one of those categories. But our move was 100 percent of our own volition, prompted by little more than a desire to get the hell out of D.C.

  It was nearly inevitable that at some point I would write a story that would piss off a bunch of people in the country. Say, about gun control, or about the Republican Party. What would happen then? Would they show up at my door? Leave threatening messages on my phone?

  I’d received plenty of angry and unhinged emails during my time at the Post, but nothing that ever made me fear for myself or my family. We lived in a large metro area where there was some safety, I felt, in anonymity. I came home from work and I wasn’t Chris, the National Reporter, but Chris, the guy from 738 Pleasant Hill.

  But that anonymity would be gone in Red Lake County—even if my relationship with the place hadn’t been the subject of a media circus, there’s no getting lost in the crowd in a small town. That’s great for raising kids or feeling like a part of the community, but what happens if you do something that really pisses that community off?

  Despite my misgivings, lunch went by uneventfully. At the end of it, in fact, the waitress surprised everyone in the place by bringing us all out a free slice of pie, on the house. Maybe I was overthinking things.

  I didn’t have high hopes for one of the last places we looked at, a property in Red Lake Falls that the Brumwells referred to as “the purple house.” It wasn’t much to look at from the outside—it was basically a large, light purple box with a garage attached. Given slightly different trim it would have been easy to mistake for an auto repair shop. But it was on a big lot, even by northern Minnesota standards, somewhere between a half and whole acre as best as I could tell. There were lilacs, lilies, and Concord grapes planted along much of the perimeter, although under the previous owners they hadn’t been tended to for years. There was also the shadow of a huge garden near a spacious shed. If nothing else, there was lots of room for the boys to run around.

  We went in through the garage and it looked like, well, a garage. No surprises there. I was prepared to write the whole place off until we stepped through the door to the house proper, where we were surprised to see a large, wide-open space with a gently vaulted ceiling. Everything had a fresh coat of paint. John and Sandy Klein, the neighbors who had purchased the place from the prior owners and cleaned it up to sell, assured us it was move-in ready—a big plus, given that we weren’t going to have much time for any remodeling with a pair of two-year-olds in tow. Even more surprising, there was a spacious finished basement below, with three bedrooms in addition to the master bedroom on the main floor. One for the twins, one for guests, and one for my home office. Plus, a roomy play area where all the twins’ toys and assorted toddler paraphernalia could go.

  We tried to play it cool but I could tell by the look in Bri
ana’s eye that she was sold already—this was the place. Just thinking of what we’d do with it felt like winning the lottery. It had a staggering two and a half large bathrooms, more than either of us had had in a home in our entire lives. The two main bathrooms each had two sinks—one for each member of the family. I’d never lived in a place with a garage—this one had a double attached to the house. I’d also never lived in a place with more than a patch of a yard—this one practically came with a hayfield. The refrigerator even came with a built-in ice machine, an unthinkable extravagance. That comfortable, well-apportioned life—the one that seemed impossibly far away in D.C.—was now tantalizingly within reach.

  We told the Kleins we’d get in touch with them and let them know the next day. But that night, over dinner at Jason’s house, we resolved to put an offer in. The Brumwells, of course, got into motion right away to help us make it happen. Dick called on his Realtor friend Loren, who lived about an hour north, in the town of Grygla, to help us draw up the necessary paperwork. We inquired about a commission and Loren said he wouldn’t hear of it; the house wasn’t officially listed so he couldn’t technically do anything with it anyway.

  “Tell you what, get me a nice steak dinner after you get settled in town and we’ll call it square,” he said.

  Late in the evening, when we were almost done with the paperwork, things hit a snag. Someone mentioned that there had been rumors of drug activity at the place before the Kleins had bought it.

  “What was it?” Loren asked. “Were they manufacturing there?”

  We had no idea.

  “Because if it’s a meth house,” he said, “and there’s chemicals soaked into the walls or the foundation or something like that, you might not know until six months after you move in and one of your kids starts having a seizure.”

  Holy shit.

  This new information was paralyzing. I had done enough drug policy reporting to know that that assessment seemed extreme, but on the other hand I was no expert. How the hell would we get around this?