The extreme latitude means that summer days run long. On the solstice the sun doesn’t set until 9:30 p.m., a full hour later than in D.C. But the sky remains light far longer than that, owing to the tilt of the planet. True darkness doesn’t arrive until well after midnight, and the sky begins to lighten again less than ninety minutes later. D.C., on the other hand, gets more than five hours of total darkness on the summer solstice.
The long evenings mean that the neighborhood kids are often out late on summer nights. The playground at the park down the road didn’t really start to get hopping until about eight o’clock at night. One evening one of Melissa Benoit’s sons, four-year-old Henry, rang the doorbell to see if Jack and Charles wanted to play. It was quarter after nine.
That playground was something else to get used to. It was made of wood and steel and dated back at least to the time the Brumwell boys were small children, and maybe even earlier. It was huge, towering at least three times the height of the more safety-oriented play structures the twins knew from Maryland. The slides were fast and the modern safety features, like rubberized surfaces and rounded corners, were virtually nonexistent. It was the kind of place where a kid could really break a femur. Naturally, the twins loved it.
One thing we couldn’t get over about the neighborhood kids was how nice they were. Even the older kids would welcome Jack and Charlie into their games that summer. Without any prompting they’d help the little ones clamber up a difficult playground ladder, or loosen the rules of whatever games they were playing to accommodate the clumsy toddlers.
Briana and I had never seen anything quite like it. When I was a kid, for instance, if a younger child attempted to horn in on whatever game we were playing we’d tell them to fuck off, in exactly those words. Here, however, the kids were kind, warm, welcoming to little strangers. You could tell that they enjoyed it, too—they weren’t taking Jack and Charlie under their wings simply because adults expected them to.
One day we saw a group of older kids, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, hanging out by one section of the playground. One of them was holding what appeared to be a packet of cigarettes, and they were all discussing it heatedly. They had clearly found it in the park and were trying to decide what to do with it. In upstate New York in the early 1990s there would have been no question: we’d take those cigarettes off to a secluded corner of the woods and then we’d smoke them.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the kid holding the smokes eventually broke off from the group and walked over to the garbage can near Briana and me and tossed them in. “We found these in the park,” the kid said. “And we didn’t want the little kids to pick them up so we’re throwing them out.”
“That . . . is absolutely the correct thing to do?” I said, dumbfounded. Was this some kind of weird trick they were playing? Like some kind of knockout game variant where they were gonna crack me over the head with a rock and then put it up on Snapchat? But no, they tossed the cigarettes away and then went back to whatever it was they had been doing before.
“Did that really just happen?” I asked Briana.
“That really just happened.” Rates of teen smoking have fallen by roughly 75 percent since the two of us were in high school, so perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised.
These Minnesota kids are okay, I thought. We might actually make it here.
Chapter 4
The transition from commuting to D.C. to working from home was, so far, everything I could have hoped for. We would get up early with the boys, get them fed and dressed, and then I’d head down to the office, coffee in hand, to fire up Twitter and catch up on whatever fresh horrors the 2016 campaign was dishing up on that particular day.
Things were proving to be more challenging for Briana, however. She had the hardest of our two jobs: managing the children all day long. She would take them on hikes at a local nature preserve or go on a day trip to see the headwaters of the Mississippi on Lake Itasca, ninety minutes away. But whatever the drawbacks of working for the federal government, there was no question that her new bosses, at three years old, were proving much more difficult to manage than her old ones.
Our new life was, in some ways, a double whammy: she was feeling both the acute isolation of being cooped up at home with small children all day, and the loss of the many close friendships she had forged in Maryland. Unlike me, she thrives on human contact. She missed her “tribe”—friends, coworkers, fellow moms—back in Ellicott City.
Briana and I are, strictly speaking, high school sweethearts. We met the summer after my senior and her junior year of high school, interns at a biological research station on Otsego Lake in Cooperstown, New York.
Briana and I sparked a friendship, then a romance, over tubs of seaweed and cultures of fecal bacteria in the lab. I went off to college at Cornell University and a year later she followed. We dated through most of college, with a few breakups thrown in for good measure. And we married not too long afterward, when I was just twenty-four and she twenty-three.
From a big-picture economic standpoint our upbringings hadn’t been too different—if the Ingrahams were middle-middle class for upstate New York in the 1990s, the Wilsons were lower-middle. She was one of four children in a very religious military family. In the course of her childhood her dad had been stationed in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Germany, and Arizona, so she had moved around a lot. After her dad retired from the military when she was ten, they moved to the tiny town of Jordanville in upstate New York to be closer to family roots.
Their first night in Jordanville the family stayed in a camper on the property where their new home was being built. It was nearly finished and would be move-in ready in a day or two. That night the family was awoken by the sound of shattering glass. Briana’s dad jumped out of the camper and ran toward the house, where he found several young men in the midst of trashing the place—smashing windows, kicking in cabinets and doors, tearing fixtures off the walls. The men fled to a pickup truck and drove off. In the course of speaking with the police and other people in the community they found out that a rumor had been started that Briana’s mother was black. Somebody had paid a group of yokels twenty bucks to trash the house and send a message that “that’s not okay around here.” Briana’s entire family is white but it didn’t matter. In upstate New York in 1991, the mere rumor that a black person was coming to town was enough to prod the good old boys into action. Briana’s dad got the plate number of the escape vehicle and gave it to the police. The police told him that the truck owner denied he was involved and that there wasn’t anything else they could do about it. The racially motivated violence would go unpunished and uninvestigated. Welcome to New York.
For most of her childhood her family was just barely holding on to the bottom rung of the middle class. They were fiercely proud of the fact that they never had to rely on food stamps, and looked down on those who did with a ferocity that only people who’ve barely missed the cutoff for government assistance will understand.
Briana’s mom wanted her to be a nun, but by the time she was in her teens Briana had gotten other ideas in her head. She was the only one of her siblings to fully throw herself into her studies at school, driven in part by her Catholic-girl fear of letting down the adults in her life. But even at a young age, she knew she wanted a better future for herself than what her parents were able to provide. A foundational moment in her childhood happened at the age of twelve, when she stumbled upon her mom’s bank statement and saw that the balance was negative. “How could a family have less than zero?” she asked herself. At that moment the precariousness of her parents’ financial situation became apparent to her, and as she tells it she vowed to herself, that day, that she would do whatever it took to ensure that as an adult, there was never a negative balance on her own bank statement.
She excelled at school—she was involved in sports. Art. Singing. Theater. She didn’t just join academic clubs, she became the president of them. With that drive came opportunities from completel
y outside the family orbit—an Outward Bound trip to Maine, environmental camp in the Catskills, a congressional youth leadership summit in D.C., a summer scientific excursion to Puerto Rico. Since her parents couldn’t pitch in to cover family costs, Bri saved up the money herself from the jobs she worked after school, and researched and applied for all sorts of scholarships and grant programs to help make the trips a reality.
Those trips had opened her eyes to the possibilities of the world that lay far beyond the borders of Jordanville, and by the age of seventeen she had come to see the small town as a dead end and couldn’t wait to go off to a four-year college—the first in her family to do so. We met that summer, when she was headed into her senior year and I was already off to Cornell. In the throes of a summer romance she decided to apply there, too, and unlike myself (the beneficiary of legacy admission preferences, thanks to my dad) she qualified for admission solely on the basis of her own talent and drive. She was one of just a handful of students in her graduating high school class of eighteen kids to attend a four-year school, and it was an Ivy League one at that.
From the minute she set foot in Ithaca, New York, the town of Jordanville represented the past, a place of limited viewpoints and few opportunities. It would always be her childhood home, with all the attendant messiness and complication, but it stood in opposition to the bigger, brighter, more exciting world beyond.
She dove into her studies at Cornell with the same enthusiasm she’d shown in high school, managing a double major, a double minor, and a year abroad in Geneva, Switzerland, some theater and singing for extracurriculars, all while also working constantly at two, sometimes three jobs to support herself (her parents had made it clear from day one that any educational expenses were hers alone to bear).
From Cornell we traveled together to Southern California for an ill-fated year at the University of California, Irvine. I was enrolled in an English PhD program, primarily because I dreaded the idea of entering the workforce and wanted to prolong the lax academic lifestyle for as long as possible. She was working on a master’s in history.
That year I essentially crashed and burned; having lived in bucolic corners of upstate New York my entire life, the suburban madness of Orange County was simply too much to bear. I stopped going to class and spent my days mountain biking, the landscape (or what was left of it) being the area’s one redeeming feature. Briana, having bounced all over the place as a child, was more adaptable. She didn’t much care for the place, its materialism, its politics, its utter unaffordability. But she didn’t mind it as much as I did, either. It was just another place, after all, like Pennsylvania or Arizona or Germany.
I ended the year with two “did not completes” and an F on my aborted graduate school transcript. Briana, on the other hand, had managed to accelerate her coursework and escape with her master’s degree a full year early, despite the additional burden of a thirty-hour-a-week waitressing job to help pay the bills. At the end of the academic year we fled to Vermont, and then several years later Briana’s government job brought us to Baltimore, where she went to work for the Social Security Administration.
She excelled at her job, rising up rapidly through the ranks on the basis of her talent and her enthusiasm for the work. She solved thorny policy problems in the disability arena, helping spearhead an initiative that drastically reduced the waiting times for federal disability assistance for people with the most intractable medical conditions.
There were headaches, of course, but the work provided a deep sense of meaning—she could confidently say that she was helping people, that the world was made a better place by her actions. Plus, the job was the ticket to the solid middle-class security that life at her parents’ house had lacked. It had become a big part of who she was.
Now, in Minnesota, that part of her identity had been stripped away. It’s a shock to go from days filled with meetings and high-stakes policy decisions to the full-time care of two small children. You start to forget what it’s like to be a professional adult. The person that you are slowly gets replaced by the person your kids need you to be. Every parent goes through this on some level, but Briana experienced this transition in its most extreme form.
We talked a lot about it those first few months, after the kids went to bed. Or rather, she did—I’m a crappy conversationalist but a half-decent listener. It wasn’t that she regretted the move, exactly, but it was a big change for her in a way that it wasn’t for me. I still had a job, coworkers, obligations to the wider world. She no longer had any of those things. I tried to tell her things to put the situation in the best light. Think of all the time we have now, I’d say. All the things you get to experience with the kids that you missed before. Think of the incredible privilege we have to be in this situation.
The privilege, of course, was all mine, and she reminded me of that. There’s nothing privileged about chasing three-year-olds around all day. Nothing privileged about being thousands of miles away from your dearest friends. Nothing privileged about giving up a career that you worked decades toward.
There were good moments in those first few months, magical ones even. But there was no doubt she was in a funk. It was proving more difficult than I’d expected, too. One thing that we, as a society, don’t fully acknowledge is just how difficult, how taxing, how utterly exhausting and draining it is to care for little children. It is work, in the purest, rawest sense of the word. And in early childhood, a time of screaming and fighting and boundary-pushing and frustration and potty training and neediness, above all the endless, incessant neediness, the rewards can be few and far between. I would get off work and go straight into the living room to relieve Briana from twin duty. There were many days when I missed that long commute, the hours of peace and quiet on the train. The twins were just so much.
I began to doubt whether we’d make it here. The strain it was all putting on her made me nervous. Maybe she was heading toward a meltdown like the one I’d had in Southern California, where I couldn’t take it anymore, just had to get out, as far away as possible. I had made us abandon SoCal, so it would only be proper and fitting for us to leave Minnesota for her sake.
But Briana, as I should have known, is a much stronger person than I am.
We started by putting the kids in day care a day or two a week, with Jason Brumwell’s sister, Heather. It felt like a weird thing to do at first—wasn’t the whole point of coming out here to get the kids out of day care? But Briana needed it, and hell, I needed it, too. The extra time freed her up to respond to one of the probably dozens of volunteer opportunities that people had dangled in front of us since we got here.
She started with the Zehlians, a local chapter of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. It’s a service club, and they put her to work doing everything from teaching art history to fourth graders to delivering meals on wheels. Then she joined the board of the Northwest Minnesota Arts Council, a nonprofit funding arts projects in the region. Then a local chorus. Then the University of Minnesota, Crookston Concert Band, which happened to be short on oboe players. At the urging of Dick Brumwell, she rounded up some local business leaders to restart the Red Lake Falls Civic and Commerce Committee.
Soon she was being invited by various civic groups all around the region to deliver talks about our experience moving out here. I had been doing this as well, until the Post put the kibosh on it—scrutiny on the media is tighter than ever these days, and my bosses didn’t want to give the impression that their reporter was in the pocket of the Northwest Minnesota Soybean Growers’ Association.
After one of these events, Briana overheard a pair of women talking in the lobby.
“I saw her husband give a talk about their move, too,” one of them said. “Honestly hers was a lot better.”
But that remark encapsulates a lot of Briana’s experience of moving out here. When we first got here, it irked her somewhat to be known primarily as “that reporter’s wife.” Now, more often than not, people in the area know me as
“Briana Ingraham’s husband.” My identity basically hasn’t changed since coming out here—I’m still the Washington Post reporter. But she’s had to rebuild hers from the ground up: first as a mother, then as a volunteer, and now as a pillar of her community—a phrase I’m able to say, for the first time in my life, without the slightest hint of irony. Because there’s a true community out here, in a way that there wasn’t in upstate New York, or in Vermont, or in Maryland. And a community like this one needs people like Briana—people who thrive on making things better. It’s not a difference that you’d necessarily even notice if you were just driving through a place like Red Lake Falls. You have to live here for a while to understand it, have to feel how people like Briana, and the Brumwells, and Al Buse are the lifeblood of a small town.
Chapter 5
This is going to sound strange to anyone who hasn’t spent much time in the Midwest, but the prairie is a lot like the ocean. It’s broad and vast and flat and has a way of making you feel tiny, insignificant, but in a good way. The texture of the landscape is also constantly changing: black soil sprouting tiny shoots in the spring, growing to a green riot in the summer and then turning to shades of gold and brown in the autumn, and then finally, as winter approaches, returning to black as the last remnants of the harvest are plowed back under to await the spring.
In the summer you can sit by a field and watch the wind blow its designs on the tassels of the corn, as mesmerizing as a rolling sea. It’s hard to learn to appreciate these things from the window of a car going eighty miles an hour down a highway, which is how most of us experience farm country (if at all). But as our first summer in Red Lake Falls went on we were learning to watch and listen to the land. The boys acquired an odd taste for dried soybeans and the freshly hulled wheat kernels that a friend who worked at the local grain elevator had dropped off in a bucket—“wheat crunchies,” they called them. One day in late summer as we drove out of town on some errand or another I pointed out to the boys a lumbering green machine ambling through the fields. “Check out that tractor,” I said.
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