If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now

by Christopher Ingraham

  Impossible to say, in the end. What we do know is that everyone at J. A. Hughes took the incident seriously and have put in place different protocols for bus boarding to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again. And when they say it won’t happen again, Briana and I believe them. We can’t protect a kid like Charlie from the world forever. But in a place like Red Lake Falls, he has the freedom to face a world where the scale is smaller, the faces are friendlier, and the consequences for screwups are less severe.

  On the other hand, there’s no question that a big school in Maryland has more to offer a bright kid than a small one in rural Minnesota. At J. A. Hughes the gym doubles as a cafeteria, and the library is used as the auditorium. There is no full-time librarian. The school shares a band teacher with the high school. Phys ed classes are mysteriously referred to as “phy ed.” Sitting here it’s easy to imagine all manner of wondrous, world-expanding extracurriculars that my kids are missing out on because they attend a tiny school in the middle of nowhere.

  This, in fact, was one of Briana’s primary concerns about moving out here. She had attended a tiny K–12 school in upstate New York—eighteen kids in her graduating class! The education she received there was substandard, at best. She was one of just four kids who went on to a four-year degree. Most of the kids simply planned to work on their parents’ farms after graduation, or worse, they didn’t have a plan at all. The school was poor and had little money to attract decent teachers, much less make them stick around for more than a year. Staff turnover was high. Bri had five different English teachers her senior year in high school. Most of that year was spent watching movies with various subs rather than reading real books. They didn’t have Advanced Placement tests. They didn’t even offer calculus. Briana recalls that her twelfth-grade physics teacher spent much of the class time wrestling and horsing around with the guys in her class. At the end of this year, this teacher handed another student, one of the boys who hadn’t bothered to hand in any work, her lab folder. The teacher told the boy to copy what he needed from Briana’s folder in order to fill out his missing work, so he wouldn’t fail. Bri didn’t know about any of this until after graduation.

  But these drawbacks only instilled in her a desire to rise above them all. She took advantage of every extracurricular she could get her hands on. Some of the better teachers—and there were a few—keyed her in to life-changing experiences like Outward Bound, which made her realize the world had a lot more to offer than what Owen D. Young Central School let on. She graduated valedictorian and got accepted into Cornell. She remains pissed off, to this day, that her high school math level was so below the level other incoming freshmen received that she had to take remedial classes in her first year of college, mostly because her school didn’t have enough student interest in what was considered “advanced” math.

  Her principal, in fact, had made a point of telling her, during her senior year, to “get off your high horse” regarding her class ranking. Owen D. Young Central School was tiny, he said. She was just a big fish in a small pond. Compared to the other kids across New York State? She was nothing.

  Nevertheless, she persisted. She made it to college, and she made it out. And she—and I—want our kids to succeed because of what their K–12 education offers, not in spite of it. In all honesty we don’t know if the schools in Red Lake Falls can make that happen. They don’t offer calculus, either. Or trigonometry. They have a robotics club, but no school paper. For the time being we’re pinning our hopes on two factors.

  The first is that parental involvement can pick up a lot of educational slack. A kid’s success in school is largely dependent on his innate curiosity and his willingness to learn new things. That’s something we can help our kids develop; it just means we’ll have to take on more of the work of their education ourselves. Jack, now six, wants to play the violin, for example. There’s nobody at his school who can teach him that, which means we’ll have to ferry him off to lessons in Thief River or Crookston.

  Looking forward, the bigger point we discovered is that high school students in the state of Minnesota are allowed to take college courses, for college credit, at a local postsecondary institution for no charge through the state’s Postsecondary Enrollment Options program. If we’re still here by the time Jack and Charles get into high school, and they find that the courses there aren’t challenging enough, we can simply ship them off to classes at the University of Minnesota in Crookston for their junior and senior years. Our neighbors Rob and Alice told us that their son Alex took advantage of this program, and they couldn’t speak highly enough of it. In addition to advanced coursework he was able to get involved in the school’s music and theater programs, eventually parlaying that experience into admission to the music program at Oberlin College, one of the best music departments in the country. No such program existed in New York State when Briana was watching her physics teacher tackle her classmates in lab.

  For the time being, we’re at a place where we know the elementary education being offered to the boys is ideal, particularly for Charles. And we know that beyond elementary school there are more challenging instructional opportunities available to the boys, should they need it. For the moment, that’s enough.

  Honestly, it’s a relief to not have to game out the educational arms race that so many parents grapple with on the east coast: placing your toddler in the right day care, so they can get admitted to the right pre-K program, so they can go to the right private elementary school, followed by the right prep school. It’s exhausting to even contemplate the triangulation necessary to put a kid through school in that kind of environment.

  When there’s just one school, those concerns are largely rendered moot. As a country we’ve become so fixated on “choice” in our educational systems that we’ve forgotten how freeing it can be when you don’t have to choose.

  Shortly after we moved, incidentally, the Annie E. Casey Foundation published its annual rankings of the best places to grow up in America. The rankings were drawn from various official data sources, concerning things like education quality, poverty and hunger, family structure, test scores, rates of grade repetition, you name it. Minnesota came out at the absolute top of the list. “Where the children are all above average,” indeed.

  As summer trundled into fall our first year in Minnesota, we were feeling good about things. We had made peace with the neighbors. We were figuring out the schools, the doctors, and where to buy food. Our cupboards were stocked with applesauce made with apples from our tree in our yard, and jam made with chokecherries from another. The boys were three, somewhere between toddlers and little boys, and they were becoming easier to manage. We lived in a house that, for the first time, felt truly like home. There was space to stretch out in and fresh air to breathe. Work was going well—my output hadn’t imploded since leaving the D.C. newsroom. It was refreshing to be able to log off at the end of the workday, to step away from the social media madness of the news cycle and into a home life that was more grounded, more solid, in many ways more real.

  It felt like we were getting everything we had hoped for when we first moved. Yet somehow, it felt like something was missing. We couldn’t quite put our finger on it. The feeling didn’t express itself as a lack, or a shortcoming, necessarily, but rather as a space for something more. Space that had never even been imaginable back in Maryland.

  Briana blames me for suggesting what came next, and I blame her. Regardless, whichever one of us gave voice to it first didn’t face much opposition from the other: “What if we tried for a girl?”

  Throughout the twins’ infancy we had made dark jokes about having another kid, usually during the most trying moments. One memorable day in Maryland, for instance, both twins had been sick, the drain hose to the washing machine had come undone, flooding the basement, and the dog had eaten something he shouldn’t have and was alternately puking and shitting all over the house. “At least we don’t have triplets!” we would say at times like those.r />
  But we had never seriously entertained the thought of another kid in Maryland. We were barely getting by with just two of them. We, evidently, were not alone. The U.S. fertility rate has been on a long, steady decline, from nearly ninety births per woman age fifteen to forty-four in 1970 to about sixty in 2017. A lot of that decline is due to things worth applauding: expanded access to abortion and contraceptive services, and greater autonomy for women and men to decide whether and how to have kids.

  But economic pressures are playing a role in this, too. Middle-class wages have stagnated. Housing has become staggeringly expensive, particularly in coastal urban areas. Day-care and educational costs are skyrocketing. And among the world’s wealthy nations, the United States remains a stubborn outlier when it comes to policies like paid parental work leave (the United States doesn’t mandate any) and universal child care (ditto). In many states, day care is now more expensive than a college education.

  Those competing pressures have made it more difficult than ever to have kids, and Americans aren’t exactly happy about it. Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the General Social Survey show, for instance, that the gap between how many children women say they want to have (2.7 on average) and how many they’ll actually have (1.8, on average) is the highest it’s been in forty years.

  If you want to be strictly utilitarian about it, you might say that policy makers have pursued such an aggressive probusiness agenda over the past forty years that they’ve overlooked the question of whether parents will be able to afford to continue producing the customers who will buy stuff from those businesses in the future. To be more blunt, as a country we’ve pursued economic policies that are good for corporations and their shareholders, but lousy for their employees and their families.

  We weren’t interested in producing another future Wal-Mart customer, of course. But we suddenly found ourselves in a place where we had the time, the money, the space, the community support, and the love to bring another life into the world. Given my own anti-kid past, I’m not the kind of person to go around insisting that people who don’t want kids will someday change their minds, or that people who already have kids secretly want more. But our own experience does make me wonder how many other couples might not realize that, given the right circumstances, there could be space for more children, more love, in their own lives?

  The big thing we were worried about was the possibility of another set of twins—or worse. Parents who have twins once are more likely to have twins if they get pregnant again. At Johns Hopkins, where the twins were born, Briana’s doctor told a story one day about a couple who had twins—two boys—and then decided to try for a girl. They ended up getting pregnant with triplets, and subsequently found out that all three would be boys. The parents left the office sobbing that day.

  We decided to go for it, though. Briana was pregnant within two months of going off birth control. We were greatly relieved to discover that this time there would be just one baby. Our Minnesota child was on the way.

  Chapter 7

  It’s 9 a.m. on a crisp northern Minnesota fall morning. I’m standing in the driveway of a Red Lake County farmhouse, decked out head to toe in hand-me-down blaze orange from the Brumwell brothers. There’s a dead deer hanging from the raised bucket of a tractor in front of me. It isn’t mine. Two or three guys with knives circle around it, slicing downward through gut and tendon to remove the hide.

  They eventually give it a mighty tug, stripping it clear of the back and rear haunches until it remains attached only at the shanks. One final heave and the hide drops to the ground with a plop. The carcass steams in the morning sun. The farmer’s dog looks up briefly from the severed foreleg it’s been chewing on, and then gets back to business.

  “Now that’s Minnesota deer season,” Dick Brumwell, who’s been overseeing the whole operation, announces with a grin.

  It was the opening of deer season in 2016, November 5, three days before the election. We’d been out since well before dawn, part of the local hunting party that the Brumwells have been a part of for decades. I’d shivered alone in the indigo predawn hours, listening to the birds wake up around me. I didn’t see a single sign of a deer myself, which was just as well—after the group reconvened at the house in midmorning I realized that I’d forgotten to even load the rifle the Brumwells loaned me.

  My own dad loved guns. He was a champion skeet shooter as a kid, and went target shooting all his life. But as a veterinarian he preferred healing animals to shooting them. As a result, while I’d shot the occasional handgun in the course of my life, I’d never been deer hunting before, much less fired a gun at an animal. The Brumwells were determined to change that.

  Hunting’s on the wane across America. Since 1980 the national population has grown by one hundred million, while the number of people hunting each year has slowly dwindled. Urbanization has taken its toll.

  But the hunt is still huge in northwest Minnesota. Statewide nearly half a million people go hunting each year, five times as many as back in Maryland. Even if you didn’t hunt it would be impossible to miss deer season up here. Once the season opens it’s hard to drive a block in town without seeing a deer carcass hanging from a tree, waiting to be butchered.

  Dick Brumwell and his buddy Russ Coenen, a retired high school science teacher, had been hunting the same patch of Russ’s land religiously, every single year since the 1970s. As soon as Dick’s kids were old enough to get a hunting license they started going out with him. As a born-again Minnesotan the Brumwells were adamant that I experience the hunt for myself. For starters that meant getting my own license. Because I’d never had one in Minnesota before, I had to take an online hunting safety course intended for teenage hunters. I had to sit through several hours of videos full of idiotic safety tips, like “do not point the gun at yourself,” and then take a test afterward. Ryan and Jason thought it was hilarious. I demonstrated my on-paper hunting prowess by scoring a 92.

  Now that I was qualified to haul a rifle through the woods, the next step was target practice. The brothers planned a special treat: one afternoon in late October, Ryan picked up several pounds of Tannerite from a hunting supply store in Thief River. Tannerite’s an explosive that only ignites when it gets hit with a fast-moving gun round. You can pour it, shake it, throw it around, no problems. But when you shoot it, it explodes. You can find YouTube videos of guys (yes, almost always guys) stuffing old cars and appliances full of Tannerite and then nearly getting beheaded by a flying door or wheel.

  We were going to stuff it into pumpkins.

  “Does that really sound like a smart idea to you?” Briana asked as I geared up to join the brothers down at the campground.

  “No,” I said, “but I kind of have to do this. It’s part of my Minnesota education.”

  “It’s fucking stupid is what it is,” she said. “Did you see the video of the guy who blew his leg off with a lawn mower full of this stuff?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s just pumpkins, though. Worst that’ll happen is I get hit with a flying stem.”

  “Right through your eyeball and it would serve you right,” she said.

  In all honesty it was kind of amazing to me that you can just walk into a store and buy the stuff by the bucketload, with no special permits needed, no placement on a government watch list. But I went down to the campground, where the Brumwell boys had already laid out a veritable arsenal—handguns, long guns, everything in between.

  “Pour this into that pumpkin over there,” Ryan said. He handed me a bottle of Tannerite, thousands of tiny white pellets, like mini mothballs.

  “Why aren’t you doing it?”

  “I don’t feel like losing a hand today.”

  “It won’t explode unless you shoot it, right?”

  “Sure.”

  I filled the pumpkin up to the top. Once I’d placed it on the ground, the Brumwells handed me a rifle. “This is the one I used when I was a kid,” Ryan said. �
��Should be just right for you.” They showed me where the safety was, showed me how to load it, sat me down at a picnic table, then told me to point it at the pumpkin and pull the trigger.

  “You sure this is legal?” I said. “I mean there’s houses right over there.”

  “We’re just outside town limits; anything goes out here,” Jason said. “Pull that trigger, find out what freedom feels like.”

  I inhaled. Exhaled slightly. Held. I pulled the trigger.

  The sound was cataclysmic. My understanding of gunfire acoustics is drawn primarily from video games, where small guns go “pew-pew” and big ones go “BOOM-BOOM.” I was expecting a pew but the rifle BOOMed. Almost instantaneously there was a second, even louder report as the pumpkin exploded in a cloud of yellow smoke. Chunks of orange meat rained down, seeds flying everywhere with pumpkin gobs attached.

  The Brumwells hooted and hollered. I hooted and hollered with them.

  “Gotta tell you—I thought there was no way you’d hit it on the first shot,” Ryan said.

  “Yeah, well, I did score a ninety-two on that test,” I said. “Hope you’re not mad when I bring home a bigger buck than you.”

  The season started off inauspiciously, however. My alarm didn’t go off on the day of, which meant Ryan had to bang on our door for ten minutes at five o’clock in the morning to wake me up, and then wait around another fifteen minutes while I rushed through the house gathering my gear for the day. That subsequently made us late to meet Jason and Dick at Jason’s house, and the three of them chewed me out up one side and down another all the way on the drive out to Russ’s property.

  Once at Russ’s, the brothers and I hopped on a four-wheeler and took a bumpy ten-minute ride through the pitch darkness, across fields and through oak woods to the stand they had decided to post me at. I didn’t find out until later that it was by far the worst stand out of the dozen or so on Russ’s property, being located near a dirt road and far away from any of the well-trod deer paths.