“No, it’s a combine,” Charles said matter-of-factly.
Exactly one year, to the day, after I had penned the initial story that eventually brought us to Red Lake Falls, I sat in a dunk tank in the parking lot of the American Legion, on Main Street, as part of a fund-raiser for the town pool.
Being in a dunk tank is one of the few occasions a grown-up can hurl invective at elementary school kids in public without fear of censure, and I took full advantage as kids stepped up and lobbed softballs in my direction. But the finest arms of J. A. Hughes Elementary School were out in force that day and they were hungry for revenge—I was dunked into the lukewarm tank, mercilessly, over and over as kids squealed in delight, a fitting vengeance for the journalistic malfeasance I had inflicted upon the unsuspecting town.
Red Lake Falls isn’t a wealthy community by any stretch. But when there’s a call for help people respond. That day in August, for instance, the town of 1,400 people managed to pull together $70,000 to fund some needed maintenance on the town pool—the equivalent of $52 for every single man, woman, and child in the community.
Service and volunteerism—the forces that keep many rural Minnesota towns afloat—happen to be the same things Briana thrives on. Economists and demographers have a name for this—social capital. “The links, shared values and understandings in society that enable individuals and groups to trust each other and so work together,” as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development puts it. Many places in America are suffering from a social capital deficit, most famously outlined by sociologist Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone. Americans are withdrawing from one another, Putnam’s argument goes. Social trust is declining, neighbors are becoming strangers to one another, political divisions are putting up walls between people. Instead of joining a league to bowl with others, we’re increasingly just bowling by ourselves—if we get out of our houses and away from our screens at all.
One way sociologists indirectly measure social capital is via census response rates. People who take the time and effort to diligently fill out their census questionnaires every ten years are, the thinking goes, more likely to be civically and socially engaged in their communities. They understand or intuit that an accurate census count is necessary for a representative government to function properly.
As it turns out, the upper Midwest has the nation’s highest rates of census response. Red Lake County’s response rate of over 86 percent puts it in the top tier of counties nationwide on that measure. By contrast, the median U.S. county’s response rate is 81 percent. Some of the lowest rates of response are found in places like Alabama, where in one county fewer than half of residents filled out their census forms in 2010.
You don’t even need to trust the spreadsheet on this one: spend a little bit of time in a place like Red Lake County and it’s impossible not to notice that people here are highly invested in their community. See that little park with the gazebo on Main Street? Dick Brumwell built it as a memorial to his late wife, Diane. See that garden on the hill across the street from the county courthouse? That’s a project of the local Lion’s Club. See that train-shaped light display on the old railroad trestle during the holidays? That’s the brainchild of Jim Benoit, who thought people should have something nice to look at when they drive into town.
Social capital is built, in part, on trust. Americans, in general, have grown more wary of their neighbors over the years. Data from the General Social Survey, a long-running survey of American attitudes, show that the share of Americans saying most people can be trusted has fallen from nearly 50 percent in the 1970s to just over 30 percent today. A 2014 YouGov survey found that more than three-quarters of Americans said they keep their doors locked when they are at home.
In Red Lake Falls, on the other hand, I haven’t met anyone who locks their doors when they’re at home. Many rarely even lock their doors when they’re not home. People here trust each other so much that they often leave their cars running with the keys in the ignition when they run into Brent’s to pick up some groceries. Neighborhood kids, as I’ve mentioned, often run about unsupervised well into the evening hours—not a problem when you trust the folks in your neighborhood to keep an eye out for any trouble. And of course there was the time Dick Brumwell wrote us a five-hundred-dollar earnest-money check for the house we eventually bought, despite his having known us for approximately thirty-six hours.
Crime in Red Lake Falls is virtually nonexistent—mostly bad checks and the occasional drunk driver, if the weekly sheriff’s report in the Gazette is to be believed. The latest county-level federal crime data for Red Lake County, from 2014, show that that year there were 0 murders, 0 rapes, 0 armed robberies, 1 aggravated assault, and 13 reported instances of property crime in the county. That works out to a violent crime rate of about 25 cases per 100,000, or one-fifteenth of the national average.
In 2018 I got summoned to serve on jury duty at the county courthouse. It was essentially a three-month, on-call deal: I had to be ready to show up for any cases that came to trial in a three-month period. To my disappointment, none did.
Trust and social capital are so high in Red Lake County in part because it’s so demographically homogeneous. A number of researchers, including Robert Putnam, have noted with some dismay that diversity tends to erode social capital. Americans simply tend to trust people more when those people look like them. Red Lake County, if you’ll recall, is 93 percent white. It’s one of the whitest counties in the country. The biggest demographic schism is between Catholics and Lutherans.
I’ve thought a lot about this during our time here. Would the people of Red Lake Falls have been so welcoming if I were, say, a black reporter? And what about me—would I have moved my family halfway across the country if the ugliest county had turned out to be, say, a majority-Hispanic county along the Mexican border?
I wish I could answer an unequivocal yes to both those questions but the truth is I don’t know. Social scientists know that all of us are subject to beliefs and attitudes that are motivated by racial attitudes we barely understand or are even aware of. The technical term for this is “implicit bias,” which is really just a polite way of saying “racism.”
What I can say definitively is that, as a white guy, I see a lot less casual racism tossed around in Red Lake County than I’ve seen in upstate New York. Not long after the twins were born, for instance, Briana and I visited a bar in the town of Little Falls, New York, near her parents’ home. At the end of the night we stopped on our way out and struck up a drunken conversation with an older couple who were standing outside having a smoke. Somehow the topic of kids came up and we mentioned we had twins.
“Oh, good,” the man said. “Be sure to raise them white.”
“Raise them right?” Briana asked. We thought we had misheard.
“Raise them white,” he said, poking the air with his cigarette for emphasis.
We didn’t need to ask what that meant. “White” was code for “one of us,” an upstanding citizen, a full person, a member of the in-group. Nonwhite would be, well, everything else—everything wrong with the world.
Imagine what kind of environment you have to live in—what kind of people you have to surround yourself with, the types of things you have to believe and discuss with them on a regular basis—that telling strangers to raise their kids white is a just a normal utterance that pops out in the course of a casual conversation. How saturated with racist ideology does a community have to be before “raise them white” passes almost for a greeting between strangers on the street?
Briana exploded with rage before I even fully registered the comment. “What the FUCK?” she yelled, stepping up close to them. “Who says that? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?”
I had known her for about fifteen years at this point and had never seen her like this. I had to physically pull her away from the situation, dragging her toward the car as she screamed profanities at the couple. My only thought was avoiding a brawl with dru
nk racists outside a Little Falls dive bar at 1 a.m. on a Saturday.
That’s upstate New York, where a lot of people assume that it’s safe to say racist things if you’re talking to another white person. You’re on the “same team,” after all.
In conservative, rural northwest Minnesota, by contrast, I’ve never observed even the slightest inkling of these things. I don’t assume it’s some magical realm where racism doesn’t exist—Minnesota folks are subject to prejudices just like anyone else. But any racism here isn’t the type that openly speaks its name to fellow white strangers on the street.
Research, incidentally, backs this up. In 2015 an economist named Seth Stephens-Davidowitz compiled reams of Google search data on variants of the n-word. He controlled for usage that wasn’t as likely to be linked to prejudicial attitudes—for instance, appearances of the word in the context of hip-hop lyrics.
That study found that the highest percentage of racist Google searches occurred along much of the Appalachians, extended well into upstate New York and parts of New England. Certain pockets of the South, unsurprisingly, were also hotbeds of search engine racism.
Nearly every region of the study west of the Mississippi, by contrast, had much lower than average instances of racist Google searches. That includes nearly all of Minnesota, with the exception of the northeastern region of the state.
Again, this doesn’t mean that those regions have liberated themselves from racism. It only means that the prejudices at work in those parts of the country aren’t the type that you type directly into your Web browser, looking for racist jokes, perhaps, or for like-minded people to subject to a rant.
Jack and Charlie’s godparents happen to be black, close friends of ours from Maryland. Kelly, the twins’ godmother, worked with Briana at Social Security. “How are you gonna expose those boys to different cultures when you’re living all the way up there?” Kelly asked us once.
It was a good question. How do you raise children to appreciate everything the world has to offer when you live hours from the nearest “real” city? Would we be depriving them of the rich cultural experiences that cities and more diverse areas provide by raising them in Minnesota? Kelly and her husband, Sean, have come out to visit us a couple of times now. They had their concerns, initially. During Kelly’s first visit here, for instance, she had been worried about driving while black in northwest Minnesota. She didn’t have any issues, fortunately, not then and not during any of the other trips she’s taken out here to visit. But as a black motorist visiting an area that’s roughly 95 percent white, it’s the kind of thing that never really leaves your mind.
After several trips out here, experiencing the place, meeting the Brumwells and some of the other folks in the area, Kelly and Sean feel a little more at ease about their godsons’ upbringing. Sean grew up in a tiny little community in Virginia, just a few thousand people. So he understands the draw of the small-town life, even if it’s not what he chose for his own kids. But they still do little things to make sure the boys don’t lose touch with their Baltimore roots. They made the boys an “essential black music” Amazon playlist, for instance—Prince, Stevie Wonder, Al Green, the classics. For Christmas in 2018 Kelly and Sean got the boys a book called K Is for Kwanzaa. I’m reasonably certain they’re the only six-year-olds in northern Minnesota who know what a dashiki is.
On the other hand, there is culture of a sort up here—plenty of it, in fact. Norwegian festivals abound in the summer, where you can eat lefse, learn about Scandinavian history, and watch re-creations of famous Viking battles. There’s a rich agricultural tradition in the area, memorialized in places like the Tri River Pioneer Museum in Plummer, the Engelstad Pioneer Village in Thief River Falls, and the annual Western Minnesota Steam Threshers’ Reunion in the town of Rollag.
Every fall L’Association des Français du Nord, a local nonprofit, hosts a French-Canadian festival in the largely forgotten town of Huot, in eastern Red Lake County. The festival draws French-Canadian musicians and artists, as well as members of the Métis Nation—a primarily Canadian community of mixed Native American and Anglo-French heritage.
There is culture and diversity here, in other words; it’s just the type that you have to actively make an effort to seek out and experience. It’s not like living in a big diverse city, where you can experience the world simply by walking down the street.
We did, however, find Minnesota culture to be sorely lacking in at least one respect: the food. Minnesotans have forged deep attachments to their culinary traditions over the years, which is unfortunate because Minnesota food is almost universally bad. Minnesotans are particularly fond of “hot dish,” which is a folksy midwestern term for what normal people refer to as casserole.
Minnesotans wax rhapsodic about their hot dish, particularly to newcomers. This is puzzling—during my childhood, casserole was typically something my mom made when she was too busy to cook a proper meal. Casserole was always something to be served with an apology. In my experience there’s little to distinguish Minnesota hot dish from casseroles served elsewhere. It typically consists of a mishmash of spare ingredients held together with a glue of cream of mushroom soup.
Minnesotans are particularly fond of “tater tot hot dish,” which is basically a casserole in which one of the ingredients is frozen, pre-made tater tots. It tastes about as good as it sounds, although Minnesotans consider it the ne plus ultra of upper midwestern cuisine.
Hot dish is probably held in such high regard in part because Minnesotans have very little in the way of real cuisine to compare it to. The dominant culinary tradition in the state is Norwegian, and if you aren’t familiar with Norwegian food it’s probably because there’s very little reason to eat it outside of Norway. The most famous Norwegian dish in Minnesota is lutefisk, which is freeze-dried cod reconstituted to a gelatinous texture and baked in an oven. It’s exactly as appealing as it sounds.
Minnesota’s lutefisk tradition is largely kept alive in community suppers held in the basements of Lutheran churches around the holidays. Nobody in Minnesota actually likes lutefisk, but they hold on to the tradition partly out of spite (if I had to eat this as a kid, the thinking goes, then I’m going to subject my own kids to it as well), and partly because when it comes to food there simply isn’t a whole lot else to cling to.
The counterpart to lutefisk is lefse, which is a bland flatbread whose primary appeal is that it isn’t lutefisk. Lefse is okay. It’s a perfectly serviceable product for human beings to ingest. If you were a member of an advanced alien civilization raising a large number of humans as pets, you’d probably feed them lefse for the same reason that alfalfa pellets are fed to captive rabbits: it provides adequate nutrition and is not likely to upset anyone’s stomach. Lefse is what a food scientist would invent if she were tasked with creating a less exciting alternative to white bread. Lefse is fine.
There’s also walleye, of course, a favorite of anglers that Minnesotans rave about despite it being a perfectly unremarkable type of whitefish. Like lefse, walleye benefits from the comparison with lutefisk. Minnesotans love walleye; it’s the state fish and the Department of Natural Resources keeps strict quotas on the number that anglers are allowed to catch and keep in a season. Walleye is the lefse of fish: bland and inoffensive, and cherished by Minnesotans simply because it’s here.
Minnesotans view intense flavors with suspicion. The driving principle behind Minnesota cuisine is blandness: if in doubt, add water, flour, or mayonnaise. Minnesotans display a quiet sense of pride at taking their coffee black, for instance, but this is only because what passes for coffee here would be charitably described as coffee-flavored water elsewhere.
In 1984 the Minnesota legislature designated an official state beverage: milk.
Minnesota pizza is universally bad. Shortly after we moved we ordered a takeout pizza from one of the local bars and were shocked to discover it was topped, among other things, with cheddar and American cheese. Last summer I was hanging out at the
Brumwells’ campground when one of the campers brought over a homemade pizza to share with the staff. It was topped, no joke, with sliced grapes. I screamed.
The best pizza in Minnesota is DiGiornio’s. The second-best is Domino’s. Eating any other pizza is not advised.
On another occasion we went out to try the food at the closest Mexican restaurant, which was twenty miles away, in Crookston. The fare was not noticeably different from what the median Minnesotan might be expected to concoct from an off-brand supermarket Mexican meal kit: the tacos, for instance, were topped with iceberg lettuce and shredded cheddar cheese. Perhaps they got this idea from the very popular “taco in a bag” found in hot trucks here. It’s literally a bag of Doritos, with lettuce, tomatoes, and sour cream added on top.
Another product you won’t find in northwest Minnesota: any type of sparkling wine drier than grape soda. Ask for “champagne” and you’re likely to be served a Moscato that tastes like carbonated corn syrup. Try to order a “Prosecco” and you’ll be asked to speak English, please. One benefit of a small town, though, is that you can typically wheedle storekeepers into carrying stuff you want, especially if you buy a lot of it. That’s how Bri and I solved our Prosecco problem—once we explained what it was to Mike Swendra, titular owner of Mike’s Bottle Shop, he was happy to keep some of it in stock for us. Judging by our monthly alcohol bill, I suspect it was a wise business move.
The sad truth is that northwest Minnesota may be one of the most culinarily impoverished regions of the nation. One thing I expected northwest Minnesota to excel at, given the popularity of hunting here, was venison. I was sorely mistaken. There is no rich tradition of venison steaks or venison rib or venison soups in this part of the country. No, the common thing to do with venison up here is to grind it up, adulterate it with large amounts of ground pork, and turn it into sausage. It’s nominally referred to as “venison sausage,” but you’d have a hard time distinguishing it from a typical store-bought sausage. This is partly on account of the pork adulteration, and also due to the fact that northwest Minnesota deer feast on soybeans and corn all throughout the autumn. The mild diet removes nearly all trace of gaminess from the meat, which, from the standpoint of the typical Minnesotan’s taste buds, is just fine.
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