If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now

by Christopher Ingraham

  “Well, why don’t we just give the sheriff a ring?” Jason said.

  Briana and I were dumbstruck. “You can just do that?” we asked.

  “Well sure, it’s ten o’clock, Mitch is probably home right now,” Jason said. “I’ve got his number right here on my phone.”

  Jason proceeded to give the number a ring and launched right into a chipper conversation, as if calling up the sheriff to inquire about meth houses was something he did every Saturday night.

  “Yep. Okay. Thanks, Mitch!” he said, as he hung up. “Yeah no, there was no meth lab there,” he told us. “They had some calls about possible drug use on the property, but they never heard anything about manufacturing on premises.”

  So there you had it. A question that could have derailed a home transaction for weeks in Baltimore County was resolved in Red Lake County with little more than a neighborly five-minute phone call on a Saturday night.

  Early the next morning, paperwork in hand, we drove back over to the house to make an offer to the Kleins. John was a farmer and a trucker, gruff and a little intimidating with a horseshoe mustache, while Sandy was chipper and full of sunshine. We stood around the kitchen counter and hashed it out—within about five minutes we were all shaking hands over a deal. Dick and Jason were there, too, and though the topic hadn’t even come up, Dick announced he’d put down the five-hundred-dollar honest money deposit. We objected, but we hadn’t even thought to bring our checkbook. He had nothing of it. “Just send me a check whenever you get a chance,” he said.

  So that was it—later that day we were on our way back down to Minneapolis, purchase agreement in hand. We were going to be Minnesota home owners. It was starting to get real.

  Over the next couple of months we packed up our life in Baltimore and prepared for the move as the Brumwells oversaw the home inspection and other technicalities in Red Lake Falls.

  As May rolled up we finalized our packing and said our good-byes, and on the fourth we closed the door on our old house for the last time. We were going to Minnesota.

  Chapter 3

  Cross-country moves are generally a horrible affair and ours was no exception. I had the easy job, driving the rental truck stuffed with our belongings. Briana followed in our little Honda CRV, stuffed with Jack, Charles, Tiber (our seventy-pound beagle-basset mix), and Ivy (our twelve-year-old cat).

  The CRV crew could only tolerate a few hours cooped up in the car before everyone started having meltdowns, so we stretched out the twenty-two-hour drive over five exhausting days. Technically, at this point, we still didn’t even have a home to roll up to. We’d be getting in on a Sunday but the closing wasn’t scheduled until the following day. But the Kleins told us they’d leave the door open and put the keys on the kitchen counter, letting us move in a day early. Not typically the way a real estate transaction would happen in Baltimore.

  Eventually we pulled up to our new home in Red Lake Falls. The boys knew it by then only as the Purple House. We hadn’t even gotten the kids out of their car seats before we were enthusiastically greeted by a sweaty, half-naked man. Rob Conwell, his name was, our new neighbor who lived across the street.

  He was shirtless and sweaty because he’d been mowing his lawn, he explained. In about five minutes we’d heard half his life story—he was from Oregon, met a Minnesota girl who’d grown up in the area, they ended up moving back here to start a family two decades ago.

  He and his wife, Alice, were active in music and theater in the area—did we play any instruments? There was a great little community band the next town over and they were always looking for new players; the conductor was fantastic and rehearsals were on Monday and Wednesday nights at 7 p.m. and—

  “That sounds amazing,” I cut him off, hopefully less rudely than it felt. “Maybe we can talk it over once we’re all moved in?”

  Of course, Rob said, of course. Welcome to the neighborhood!

  We experienced a lot of this in the coming days and weeks—invitations to get involved. The Civic and Commerce Committee needed volunteers. The Northwest Minnesota Arts Council needed board members. The school needed a guest to come read to the kids. Churches needed folks to staff their basement dinners. Rural areas may not have a lot of people but they still needed to get stuff done. In the cities, economies of scale mean either these tasks are professionalized—people get paid to do them—or competition for the most desirable activities, like music and theater groups, is stiff. Here, by contrast, getting involved is easy. If you want to join a band or help with kids or put out fires, just show up. There’s plenty of work that needs to get done.

  As soon as we got the kids out of their car seats, Jack tore ass up the garage stairs and into the house. Charlie, however, was transfixed for the moment by the garage. “Dad!” he screamed. “The Purple House has a garage door!”

  The first order for the kids in the new place was to run around, opening and shutting all the doors and then flipping all the light switches they could reach. For the first several days you could always tell where in the house Charlie was by the “boi-oi-oi-oi-oing” of the spring door stops he was compelled to flick every time he entered a room.

  “There’s three bathrooms?” Jack said. “That’s crazy.” Indeed, compared to our old row house, where there was just one bathroom for all four of us, it was downright extravagant.

  That first day the Brumwells and the Kleins came over to help us get all our stuff out of the van. Northern Minnesota boys don’t fuck around when it comes to lifting and moving heavy things, and with their help we wrapped up the job in just a couple of hours—even though Ryan, Jason’s brother, was deathly hungover from a wedding the night before. A few neighbors wandered over to pitch in as well, perhaps more out of curiosity than anything else. One of them, an old guy with a gray ponytail, brought over a six-pack and introduced himself as Larry Eukel.

  Larry told us he had actually grown up on the property we now lived on, had swung on a tire swing from the very same oak tree that now overlooked the yard. “It’s a great place to grow up,” he said, “and boy is it nice to see a young family in that yard again.”

  We subsequently came to learn that the property had something of a checkered past in more recent years. Neighbors told us of how, one summer, the electric company had shut off power to the place because the people living there hadn’t been paying their electric bill. Well, the Presbyterian church sits right across the alley from the Purple House, and one morning staff arrived to find an extension cord running from one of their external outlets over to the garage. A handwritten note said it was connected to the freezer and could they please not unplug it? In the spirit of charity, they didn’t. There were mean dogs in the yard, neighbors said. At one point somebody had parked an RV on the lot and appeared to be living out of it. Just a lot of weird stuff going on, and in a quiet, tiny midwestern neighborhood like this one, weird is bad.

  The house is in an area of town known as the Hollow, a little quarter circle of the Clearwater River floodplain that’s protected to the south and east by the modest hill leading up to the main level of the county. It bears the distinction of being the coldest neighborhood in town. One winter several years back, the Kleins told us, the water main under the street froze up and they were left without water until spring. The town told them to run a hose from a neighbor’s house and they’d prorate both the bills. What else could they do? You can’t unfreeze a northern Minnesota water main in February. I was glad Briana didn’t learn about this until well after we had moved. And sure enough, our second winter here it happened again. The Kleins’ water went dry, and they again had to run a hose to the other neighbor’s place. Our water appeared to be fine but the folks at city hall instructed us to keep a tap running at all times, until the spring thaws came. They told us they’d just bill us our usual amount on our water bill so we didn’t have to pay extra for the privilege of helping the town keep its infrastructure working.

  Red Lake Falls feels like the kind of town your gran
dparents lived in, and I mean that in the best possible way. The town’s 1,400 residents keep tidy homes on tidy lawns with sprawling vegetable gardens out back. To an adult living here for the first time, it feels like the kind of place you remember visiting during summers in childhood, where memories are built on lazy afternoons spent on broad, sunny lawns while the adults relax on a screened-in porch, cocktails in hand.

  The town is home to a weekly newspaper, the Red Lake Falls Gazette, which publishes mostly high school sports news. In the summer when things get slow a new lawn gnome in someone’s yard is enough to merit a front-page spread. While it’s nice to see a small-town print newspaper alive, nobody would mistake the paper for a bastion of hard-hitting journalism. The contents are mostly taken up by photos of goings-on at the schools in town. Coverage of genuine local events, like city council meetings and the like, is virtually nonexistent. There was no coverage of local political races in 2016 and 2018, even though a dazzling array of candidates were on the ballot for everything from school board seats to county water commissioners. At one point the paper ran what appeared to be a story about a local college professor who gave his students a clever lesson illustrating the dangers of socialism. The story was fake, and had been cut-and-pasted from an email forward.

  The town has two gas stations that double as social hubs—in the mornings different crews of cantankerous old-timers shuffle off to their favorite tables to discuss the day’s news. There are two bars serving nearly identical foods and drinks at opposite ends of town, the kinds of laid-back midwestern places where little kids can be found running around in the back until late at night when their parents finally go home.

  There’s an independent grocery store, Brent’s, that offers roughly the same variety of goods as the Grand Union in Oneonta, New York, did thirty years ago. Avocadoes are the most exotic produce they stock. For cheeses they have Swiss, cheddar, and something called “farmer’s cheese,” which is sort of like a milder version of Monterey Jack, if such a thing were possible. Transplants to the area inquiring about delicacies such as “goat cheese” or “cilantro” are met with quizzical stares. The meat section offers Norwegian delicacies like pickled herring in a jar and slabs of lutefisk around the holidays. There are large sections of the store devoted to pickling, canning, and sausage-making, with an underlying assumption that many locals grow or shoot much of their own food. Pet owners can purchase dried cat food at Brent’s but not canned—the cats of Red Lake Falls are evidently expected to do their own foraging as well.

  There’s a town library, which keeps a surprisingly liberal section of children’s books in stock, including Jacob’s New Dress, about a young boy who decides to wear a dress to school. Some controversy attended the addition of this book to the library in nearby Thief River Falls, where it was nearly banned, but parents in Red Lake Falls either didn’t care or didn’t notice.

  There’s a post office, of course, where you never have to offer your name or ID to pick up your mail because the employees already know who you are. There’s the town pool, the one that residents fund-raised and built themselves, where Alice, the head lifeguard and our neighbor, will encourage your children to strap on a life preserver and take a plunge off the diving board even if they haven’t fully mastered how to swim yet.

  The town’s four houses of worship encompass its religious diversity: one Catholic, one Presbyterian, and two flavors of Lutheranism. The pastor at Bethany Lutheran, Gary Graff, made a point to stop by our house, welcome us to town, and invite us to attend worship there if we were so inclined. There are two small doctor’s offices offering limited standard services like checkups and X-rays several days a week.

  There’s a small pharmacy, open nine to five Monday through Friday, where the staffers inquire about your ailments with genuine concern, and will gladly tell you all about theirs if you’ve got a minute to stop and chat.

  There is industry in town—Homark, a manufacturer of modular homes, and Wood Master, a maker of outdoor wood furnaces. A paved trail runs from the golf course at one end of town to the farmland at the other, following the length of the old railroad bed and traversing the Clearwater and Red Lake Rivers via sturdy steel trestle bridges.

  Those first few days were a whirlwind of new faces—smiling ones, much to my relief. People from all over town dropped off welcome baskets—baked goods, fresh produce from gardens, a surprising variety of pickled vegetable products. Beth Solheim, an older woman with roots in the town who now lived several hours away, stopped by to drop off a watercolor portrait of Tiber that she had painted, based on a photo she’d seen of him on Facebook.

  After a decade in the city it’s a shock to move to a place and realize that everybody already knows who you are. People we’d never met would stop us on the street and ask how we were liking it so far, diving into deep personal conversations as if we were familiar friends who’d just had lunch together a few days ago.

  One day not long after we moved in we got a call on our new landline phone, which we had to put in since the cell reception was spotty to nonexistent. Briana answered; it was a receptionist at one of the doctor’s offices. This was odd because we hadn’t been to the doctor’s yet.

  “Hey, are you guys home?” the receptionist asked, casually.

  “Umm, yeah, why?” Bri asked.

  “Well, the UPS guy is here and he says he tried to drop off a package at your place but nobody was home, but I told him I was pretty sure you were there today. Do you want me to send him back down there?”

  “Uhh, sure, thanks?” Bri replied.

  After a while we started to get used to our notoriety. Part of it was due to the publicity that had attended our decision to move, sure. But eventually we realized that this was simply the kind of place where everybody knows everyone—and they even know whether or not you’re home.

  A few weeks after the move we attended the wedding of Heather Wallace, Jason’s sister. The reception and dinner were held at the American Legion on Main Street, which we thought was weird—did we have to be veterans to get in? But no, out here the Legion posts were basically just public bars, where anyone could walk in and grab a drink. Inside, dusty old photographs of previous Legion luminaries with strange Scandinavian names lined the wood-paneled walls. The wedding was closed-bar, but the Legion beer was cheap. For dinner there was an enormous vat of pulled pork, a staple at large gatherings in the area. Jack and Charles mingled with a crowd of kids of all ages at the back of the hall, where the door was propped open and children ran freely in and out well into the wee hours of the warm early summer night.

  The sense of community contrasted sharply with what we had previously experienced in places like Vermont and Maryland. One of our neighbors in our old row house, we’ll call him James, kept mostly to himself, for instance. He was a strange guy, a little older than me, and didn’t work because he was on disability due to an ankle problem, or so he told us.

  Since he didn’t have a job he was always around, and he could be prickly toward his neighbors. Shortly after we moved into our home there he blew his top because, in mowing our tiny patch of a lawn, we had mowed a little bit over onto his portion of the grassy hillside. Weird guy, in short, and we generally tried to avoid him (bad neighbors connected by a common wall: another drawback of high-density living).

  One day early in the summer before the twins were born we noticed that James’s car had been parked outside his place for several days but nobody had heard or seen him around. This was strange because we’d usually see him coming or going, or hear him or his TV through the walls, often at late hours of the night. But for several days now, silence.

  After a week went by we spoke to some of the other neighbors on our row of six houses. No, they hadn’t seen him, either. It was odd, of course, but none of us were what you’d call his friends, and nobody wanted to try to dig deeper and risk getting involved with whatever weirdness he was surely involved with.

  As we learned later, James’s mother, who lived acros
s town, had been trying to get in touch with him, too. No luck. Roughly two weeks after we had noticed him missing, she came by his house with flowers. It was his birthday.

  She knocked on the door; no answer. She tried the handle; it was locked. Windows were locked, too. The house was all sealed up. Not knowing what else to do she called a locksmith and the police. They forced their way in and followed the smell to where his body lay alone in the basement, dead by his own hand. He had killed himself two weeks ago and nobody had any inkling.

  We felt a little bit of guilt—was there anything we could have done? But of course, there wasn’t. We didn’t know the guy, our interactions with him tended to go poorly, and if we were being honest, life became a little easier knowing we wouldn’t have to hear him banging on the walls at 3 a.m. or screaming at us because of a lawn-mowing impropriety. James’s tale became a macabre story we told acquaintances and friends. Bri was about six months pregnant with twins around this time; one of our close friends remarked that during the two weeks his body lay in the basement, James’s ghost had traversed the wall between our units and taken residence within one of the twins. We all laughed. But that’s life in a lot of cities—surrounded by humanity, you can still die alone.

  Needless to say, when I tell this story to folks in Red Lake Falls they gasp in shock and disbelief.

  The thing I remember most from those first few weeks is the collective sense of wonder at having a home—a real, honest-to-goodness single-family home. I had grown up in one of these, after all, so it represented something of my default expectation for what a family should live in. But after a decade on the pricey east coast it had seemed like the expectations of childhood were being trampled by the cold fiscal realities of metro life in the twenty-first century. Out here, though, it was different.

  Perhaps our greatest sense of having “made it” as adults came one evening shortly after our move. The kids were in bed and we were watching TV on the couch. At the show’s end I got up to go to the bathroom, prompting Briana to leap off the couch and run into the room ahead of me, a trick we often played on each other in Maryland.