The other major winter activity is youth hockey. When a northern Minnesotan finds out you’ve got young sons his first question is “They play hockey?” If you answer no, the inevitable follow-up comes: “So when are you gonna put some skates on those boys?” Hockey around here is kind of like a cult. For parents and kids involved it consumes the entire winter, and for the really serious ones, much of the spring and summer, too. Because there aren’t a lot of people in these parts, teams have to travel long distances to find someone to play against. That means hockey tournaments are often all-weekend affairs once you factor in driving time. “Affair” is an apt term as well—while the hockey kids are generally well-behaved on these trips, rumor has it that the parental chaperones get into all sorts of trouble—boozing, fighting, late-night flings in roadside hotel rooms. The winters are long, the hockey season is relentless, and sometimes you just need a release.
I consider ourselves fortunate that the Brumwells, our closest friends here, are not a hockey family. Growing up, the boys played basketball, which most folks here consider a second-tier winter sport. That put a chip on their shoulder with respect to all things hockey related, and they’ve subsequently informed us that if any of our boys play hockey we’ll be disowned as friends. This suits Briana and me just fine—the kids already make life hectic enough without having to factor in midwinter excursions to Warroad, Hibbing, and other far-flung corners of the state on their behalf. The hockey parents say it’s not all bad, though—one of the dads told us that the long hours in the car opened the door toward long talks with his sons that simply wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Now that those sons are in college he says he wouldn’t trade those drives for anything in the world.
There’s also plenty of hockey to enjoy purely as a spectator sport. There’s an ice rink in town, of course, where the local teams practice and play their home matches. It has a reputation among parents in the region as being the coldest rink in northwest Minnesota, a point of quiet pride among the locals. We’ve taken our boys there to watch the neighbor kids, Marley and Henry, play some of their home matches. Once you’re there you realize the point isn’t really to watch hockey—it’s an excuse to get out of the house, to socialize, to shoot the shit and catch up with friends and neighbors. There’s no coffee shop in town, but in the winter the hockey rink becomes the “third place,” between home and work, for many of the residents of Red Lake Falls.
We amused ourselves in other ways that first winter. I love the snow, which made winters back east an emotional roller-coaster ride of anticipation and loss: the snow would come, and then it would melt away. As a child I understood the tale of Frosty the Snowman as a profound tragedy: his promise to “be back again someday” did nothing to alleviate the pain of his loss, the horror of watching a fragile, magical friend melt into a misshapen puddle of slush.
But in northern Minnesota, Frosty never melts.
We played outside with the boys when it wasn’t prohibitively cold, building snowmen and snow forts and teaching them how not to get their boots and mittens filled with the stuff. Igloo making became an unexpected pastime. Our second winter here I ordered four dozen plastic shoe boxes from Wal-Mart at a buck apiece. I filled them up with snow and set them outside to freeze. After a day or so they would turn to ice. The boys and I stacked them together, mixing water from the house with snow to form slush to use as a kind of mortar to hold the structure together. Several hundred blocks later we had an igloo made of ice large enough for the whole family to sit in. We ran Christmas lights along the interior to light it up at night, and built a small ice block table to have picnics in it during the day. The work, and the sense of accomplishment it brought, kept us sane through the darkest part of winter.
I came to understand the cold itself as a natural amenity. Northern Minnesota is one of the few places in the United States that you can freeze a block of ice in November and have it stay that way until at least March. That’s something rare and special, particularly at a time of global warming when winters are generally spoken of in the context of loss and recession. We owed it to ourselves to embrace that cold, to learn from it, to experience what it had to offer.
We had to deal with the darkness, too. Jason often said that it wasn’t the cold that got you in the winter so much, it was the dark. On the winter solstice the sun is only up for a hair over eight hours. That’s sixteen hours of darkness, every day. Even at noon the sun hangs low in the sky casting long, cold shadows. But you learn to make the best of it. The low-angle sun provides a gentle, paradoxically warm cast to the winter landscape here. On some clear mornings the entire landscape sparkles, practically crackling with light.
The dark isn’t all bad, either. Seeing the northern lights undulate through the sky is an experience you never forget, and up here, particularly in the winters, it’s almost a common phenomenon. The sparse population means that there’s hardly any light pollution. You can lie on your back and look up at a sky twinkling with thousands of stars you’ve never seen before. You can make out the structure of the Milky Way and even view some deep-space objects, like galaxies and nebulae, with the naked eye. Viewing the night sky is like looking out not just across space, but across time as well. The Andromeda Galaxy, for instance, is 2.5 million light-years away—the light we see from it was emitted long before the first modern humans walked on Earth. You can actually see it without a telescope from Red Lake County—it’s the largest, most distant object viewable with unaided human eyes. Seeing that galaxy for the first time, understanding what it is, understanding what has to transpire for the photons emitted by its stars to travel across space and time and strike your eyes at precisely that moment, is a profoundly moving experience. Out here the full moon can seem almost blinding, and even the darkest new moon nights are filled with starlight.
Dark skies: another unacknowledged natural amenity.
Still, a certain amount of cabin fever is inevitable out here. Nobody wants to send their three-year-olds outside to play in temperatures that could make their lungs explode, starlit skies or not. For weeks at a time it felt like we were stuck—crammed into the house with no place to go and nothing to do. Surprisingly, indoor amusements for children are difficult to come by up here. The McDonald’s in Thief River Falls, with its indoor play place, became our default excursion for when we absolutely had to get the kids out of the house. We’d pay for it later though, as more often than not the kids would bring home a nasty bug they caught deep in the dark, swampy recesses of the fiberglass play tunnels.
We tried to embrace the Danish concept of hygge, making the house as tidy and cozy and inviting as possible while the winter roared outside. We failed. Briana was pregnant all winter and grouchy. There’s nothing hygge about morning sickness, or about a three-year-old screaming at the top of his lungs because he dumped milk on himself for the third time that day. The animals grew restless, too. In November we adopted an orange barn kitten from John’s farm that we had named Ella. By January the cat was so tired of being cooped up in the house that he—we later found out he was in fact a boy—had taken to launching sneak attacks on the back of the twins’ heads as they sat on the couch watching Paw Patrol.
Ice fishing is another big winter pastime. The ice on the lakes and rivers up here grows to prodigious thickness—four, five, six feet or more. Thick enough to drive a convoy of trucks across. The prime ice fishing destination is Lake of the Woods, which sits at the northernmost point of the state—on U.S. maps it’s that little promontory of Minnesota that pops up above the rest of the 49th parallel border with Canada. After the deer hunt Jason and Ryan were determined that ice fishing was the other great northern outdoor pursuit that I needed to experience. So along with Dick and Justin Carriere, a former New Yorker who’d cooked up a memorable walleye fry on my first visit out here, we booked a cabin on the lake in February 2017 at Arnesen’s Rocky Point Resort.
As before, my upstate New York expectations of ice fishing didn’t prepare me for the reality of no
rthern Minnesota practice. I had actually been a couple of times as a kid, with friends of the family. Back then we drove out to a frozen lake, and the dad brought a giant ice auger and drilled a couple of holes by hand, and we sat around on the ice, exposed to the elements, freezing our asses off and waiting for a nibble that never came.
I told this story to the crew on the way out to Arnesen’s and they scoffed at me. “Barbaric,” Jason said. “That’s not ice fishing.” Once we got to the resort I understood why. Parked at the edge of the frozen lake was a fleet of rugged treaded vehicles. Their cabins were all shapes and sizes—parts of buses and F-350s, trucks, golf carts, scrap metal, all of it haphazardly thrown together with little thought to consistency beyond a general postapocalyptic vibe. Once we were properly registered at the front desk, a guide led us out to the cabin of one of these vehicles and drove us out about nine miles onto the ice, where he promised the best walleye were to be found. There were markers driven into the ice as we went out, roughly delineating the paths of the ice roads that crisscross the frozen surface all winter.
Our destination was an ice house literally at the edge of the American frontier. The scene was otherworldly—gray sky and ice fused together to form a landscape more barren and undifferentiated than the landscape photos sent back by Martian probes. There was a stark, minimalist beauty to it, along with a sense of wonder that we humans could plant a flag on this inhospitable terrain and make it our own. Inside the ice house, six holes had already been drilled through the four or so feet of ice, casting the interior in a greenish light, the faint memory of sunlight filtered down through ice and back up through dark water. A small gas heater kept the house warm, and as our guide rumbled off in his ice tank we put our packs down, cracked open a few beers, and set to preparing our poles.
The Brumwells had brought strange electronic devices called Vexilars that looked like props from a 1960s-era Star Trek episode. The way they worked was by dropping an attached probe through the ice holes and into the water. After lowering the probe to the desired depth and fiddling with the knobs some, a circular array of lights lit up in yellows and red, which indicated the positions of nearby fish. Or so the Brumwells claimed.
I’ve spent the better part of my career visualizing information in various ways, from simple charts to more complex abstractions of multidimensional data. But no matter how hard I tried I could not make heads or tails of what the Vexilar device was supposed to be telling me.
“See that yellow and red?” Jason would say. “That means there’s a fish right about . . . there.” He dropped his line and gave it a wiggle. Nothing happened.
“There, huh?” I said.
“Well, it’s a little touchy,” he said. He fiddled with the knobs, which caused a completely different pattern of lights to emerge. “Ah there it is.” He jiggled the line again. Nothing.
“You guys are fucking with me, right?” I said. “This is like some spare bus gauge that you had sitting around at the campground?” They cussed me out up and down and told me to fetch them more beer while they aimlessly twiddled their knobs.
As it happened we were due to have a TV crew accompany us that day. Steve Hartman from CBS News and his longtime cameraman Bob were in the area to do an On the Road segment on my move to Minnesota, and they wanted some footage from the ice-fishing trip to see how I was faring in the rugged environment.
When they arrived they got Jason and me set up in an icehouse next to each other and had us shoot the bull over our respective holes, like something out of Grumpy Old Men. We were going through my initial story and first trip out here when I felt a tug on my line. Excitedly I started reeling it in.
“Is that . . . is that a fish?”
“I think so!” I said. “First catch of the trip if I’m not mistaken.” Jason shook his head in shame.
It was indeed a walleye, long enough to keep at just over a foot. More important, it was a rebuke to Jason for all the master fisherman shit-talking he had been spewing on the way out to the resort.
“Look at me,” I said. “I’m the fisherman now. Your Minnesotan Vexilar witchcraft is nothing compared to my superior upstate New York technique.” Even better, it was all captured on film. I went on to catch the next fish, and then the one after that. By the time Steve and Bob had wrapped up their segment the score was Me, 3; everyone else, zero. Of course I didn’t catch a single other fish for the rest of the day, and everyone else started getting bites all over the place.
This trip, and the CBS interview, happened at a not particularly great time during that first winter. Everyone else in the household was sick that February. For Jack and Charles, in particular, it had been one raging illness after another since Christmas. We were getting tired and worn out—Briana particularly, since she was at that point five months pregnant with the as-yet-unnamed Minnesota baby. Briana had let me go on that trip on one condition: that I made clear to the CBS guys, in no uncertain terms, that they were not to stop by the house without me present. Bri could barely talk, she hadn’t showered in days, the kids had snot coming out of every orifice, it was a nightmare. “The film crew can talk to you and that’s it,” she said. No problem.
Steve and Bob left the lake before I did that day. They said they were going to meander back to town, catch some landscape shots along the way. I gave them my cell number and told them to give me a ring if they wanted to do an at-home interview that evening. At the end of the day as Ryan and I pulled into the driveway I saw their rental car sitting there. “Oh no,” I said.
I ran inside, flung the door open. I heard commotion downstairs, the kids chattering excitedly. I headed down. Briana, Steve, Bob, Jack, and Charles were all in the playroom. The boys were busy pulling every single one of their toys out of storage and showing them to their new friends. “Look!” Charles screamed when he saw me. “Bob’s here!”
“There you are,” Briana said, with an icy smile that would have struck me dead had I had the courage to gaze directly at it. “Here I am!” I said. “I see you’ve met Steve and Bob.”
“If you’ve got everything under control, finally I’m going to go change out of my pajamas and do my hair,” she said.
The rest of their visit passed uneventfully. We had told our story a thousand times by then, knew when to jump in and complete each other’s sentences when describing key events.
“You know, you came at kind of a bad time of the year,” I told them. “Winter’s wrapping up, the snow’s turning brown, everything’s ugly as hell, and we’ve all been sick for months.”
“That’s why we wanted to come now,” Steve said.
I tried to sell them on everything we saw in the place, on the people, on the stark beauty of the landscape even in the midst of the cold. But they weren’t buying it.
“I dunno,” Bob said. “If I could live anywhere in the United States, I sure as hell wouldn’t pick here.”
I wish I could show Bob the midwinter evening our second winter here, when a ceremony was held at the gazebo by the frozen river for the inaugural lighting up of a decorative train sculpture that residents had organized to place across the railroad bridge, visible when people first drive into town. Briana and I took the kids since it was right around the corner from home, but we weren’t expecting much. It was hockey season so lots of folks were likely to be away, and it was freezing to boot. But when we got to the gazebo we were surprised to see hundreds of people—drinking hot cider under the gazebo itself, huddled around a blazing fire outside it, gathered in clumps throughout the trees along the length of the frozen river.
It was something out of Currier & Ives, a throwback to a time when people gathered close during the winters for warmth and companionship, a time before TVs and electricity and computers in everyone’s pockets. It was the type of gathering you’d never see in a place like Baltimore—can you imagine an organized event that let a bunch of kids run loose in subzero temperatures, at night, along the bank of a frozen river with ice of an unknown thickness?
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sp; There was a true fellowship that night, a true sense of community, something that Briana and I have not experienced anywhere else in the country where we’ve lived. When the train lit up everyone clapped and cheered. The people of Red Lake Falls brought light to the darkness and warmth to the cold. We were home.
Chapter 10
Sometime around February in northern Minnesota you’ll usually get a stretch of a few days where the sun is out, the temperature doesn’t dip below zero, and you notice there’s still a bit of light left in the sky at 6 p.m. If you’d asked me back in 2015 if a five-day stretch of single-digit temperatures could ever feel like spring I would have said you were crazy. But as you come around winter’s final turn in northern Minnesota, weather like that makes you want to put on your shorts and go catch some rays.
On the first calendar day of spring in 2017 in Red Lake Falls the temperature topped off at about 20 degrees. There were still several inches of snow on the ground, but the mercury was rising. Months’ worth of compacted snow and ice on our road were finally starting to break up and in some places you could even see the pavement. A thick layer of ice still lay on the Clearwater River as of March 31, but on April 1 it was as if it had shattered all at once, miles of it. All day long, chunks of ice, some of them as big as cars, floated down the Clearwater toward the junction with the Red Lake River, and onward to the Red River of the North in Grand Forks.
One thing we were unprepared for that first spring was the dog shit. We had gotten behind on picking up after the dog for much of the winter, in part because on really cold days the turds would freeze in place almost immediately, making them impossible to remove with anything short of a pickaxe.
“What are we gonna do about the poop?” Briana kept asking all winter.
“It’s fine,” I would say. “No point busting our humps to pick it up if it’ll just get covered in snow in another couple days.”
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