by Howard Mohr
Personally, I could sleep easier at my sister’s house in St. Paul near the freeway than I could at our old lodge, which no longer exists you should know, sold to a developer and bulldozed to make condos.
Rebuilding Paradise
Harold Mire’s second cousin Sidney built the first ecolodge on Lake Winnibigoshish in 2010. He advertises no phone service except by using the lodge’s phone. No air-conditioning, no TV. The boats are all powered by oars. Guests fish from rowboats, no fishfinders allowed, and no microwaves—too dangerous according to Sidney’s dad, who was a radar operator in the Korean War, where they used to roast chickens with the radar in less than three minutes as long as there were no incoming targets. He assumed Sidney would not like his guests to be roasted to perfection by some poorly wired microwaves.
CREAKING CABIN LODGE on Leech Lake was a mom-and-pop establishment on the verge of being sold, cabins and all, in 2009 by the owners Marvin and Trish. At their age they could go back to farming a few acres and having Marvin drive the school bus. They would have Social Security to help, but they had no health insurance except Medicare. CREAKING CABIN LODGE never did have a whole lot of amenities, and when the other cabins on Leech Lake put in Wi-Fi, Marv and Trish did not own a computer or quite understand the fascination of the Internet. Besides they could not afford putting it in even if they had wanted to, which they didn’t.
Marvin and Trish decided to hold out one more season: if the bookings were good, they would hang in there. Their granddaughter Cathy, who had an advertising degree from the U, said she would do their advertising. She set up a website for CREAKING CABIN LODGE with a counterintuitive (her words) campaign. No air-conditioning, lots of fans though, no Jet Skis, no flat- or round- or square-screen TVs. No DVD player. No cell phone service. Emergency calls on the lodge phone were free, if it was working. The sagging mattresses were as welcome as ever and the rusty water out of the faucet was considered a health tonic. “What we guarantee is good walleye fishing and a week of peace and quiet, at a pace and price your grandparents always enjoyed.”
Marvin and Trish filled all the cabins for the summer and into September, because the old customers were coming back and the new ones were bringing their children so they could enjoy a return to nature and some good fried walleye.
In early 2012 some of the highly digitized lodges were filing for bankruptcy, with ever-declining reservations and increased media bills. As reported in the papers, their customers cancelled because they saw no reason to go north when they had everything they needed back home in the way of smartphones, flat HDTV, streaming movies, Facebook, and Twitter.
1 “Fabled” not because there aren’t that many, but because there are several thousand more than that, and not even Google knows how many for sure.
2 “Shacks” would better describe these accommodations.
3 Wolves, bears, and cougars are smart creatures. I could believe them capable of sarcasm. I personally think they are sick of us.
Directions
ASKING DIRECTIONS
If you need directions on a motoring tour through rural Minnesota, simply stop the car when you see a Minnesotan and speak through your rolled-down driver’s window. If the directions get involved—which is very likely—you can get out and stretch your legs. Nearly 50 percent of Minnesota conversations are conducted through the side window of a car or pickup or while leaning on the fender or hood, 30 percent are conducted over a little lunch at the kitchen table, 15 percent in a rowboat, and the remaining 5 percent take place in movie theaters during the movie. According to a recent study.
Words and Phrases
I think I took a wrong turn.
Howda ya git ta?
Run that by me again, would you?
Dialogue Practice
DRIVER: “Say, howda ya git ta the Anderson farm? I think we took a wrong turn.”
MINNESOTAN: “I figured something was up—this is your fourth time by and the sightseeing ain’t the greatest here, unless you count my brother-in-law, but he don’t get out much. Which way’d you come in?”
D: “From the north, I think. We went by this house with old tires in the front yard and the windows boarded up. It looked like it’d been struck by a high wind.”
M: “It was, in ’79. Some people said it was a tornado. That’s where I live. I been meanin’ to fix it up. So it wasn’t north—you came in from the south.”
D: “Does it matter?”
M: “Not to me it don’t. But if you want to get where you’re going, it does. Did you see the elevator?”
[Note: This is the grain elevator, which is several stories taller than everything else in small towns except maybe the water tower. It’s where corn, soybeans, oats, and wheat are elevated and stored until they are shipped out in boxcars or trucks, and it’s where all directions start. —H.M.]
M: “Okay, so, you go past the elevator then, on the blacktop. There is a gravel road there, but don’t take it, take the blacktop until it comes to a tee where the welding shop used to be. It’s just a field now. I think it’s got corn in it this year. Ya go left there. You could go right there, but it’d be longer. A lot of people go that way, but I wouldn’t. Ya go left then for, oh, say, I don’t know, half a mile, three-quarters, maybe. It’s just before the road dips where the sewage lagoon flooded last fall. You can’t miss it. You take a left and go past the Pepper place—nobody lives there now. Past the big grove of dead elms. The next place is the Anderson farm, that’s Orv Anderson. He married the oldest Peterson girl. That’s Pete Peterson. Not Jack Peterson. He never had any kids, Jack didn’t. The place after that is Arnie Anderson’s. Orv and Arnie are brothers. Sven was their father. But if you’re looking for the Olaf Andersons, then that’s another matter. Remember the elevator? Well, take that gravel road south around Dead Gopher Lake. You can’t miss it.”
D: “Run that by me again, would you?”
M: “Why don’t I just draw you a map then?”
Here’s what the map will look like, only it’ll be in pencil on part of a grocery bag or the inside of a cigarette pack:
Saying “Run that by me again” to a Minnesotan who has just given you directions goes without saying, because all directions will be given at least twice—three times is the average. No way to get around it, stay where you are and listen. It could be that he wasn’t completely sure how to get to where you wanted to go but told you anyway to the best of his knowledge and then got more confident as he talked. By the second or third version he’ll be as confident as you are about how accurate he is. (Myself, when I give directions I remember things I didn’t know I knew. And frankly, telling people how to get to where they want to go is something I always do gladly. It’s as selfless as turning off somebody’s headlights in a parking lot.)
VISITOR: “How do you get to the Murphy Apartments?”
MINNESOTAN: “Murphy Apartments. Murphy Apartments. Murphy Apartments. They used to call ’em the Lakeview Apartments. Does that sound right to you?”
V: “I don’t know. It’s a woman I used to go to school with lives there, she’s from Illinois, which is where I’m from. She said Murphy Apartments. I thought it’d be easy to find.”
M: “You’d think so, wouldn’t you then? Illinois, huh? You’re a long way from home.”
V: “Murphy Apartments…”
M: “Murphy Apartments. Murphy Apartments. I think it would be the Lakeview Apartments you’re looking for. When Jasper Brandenot bought ’em all and fixed ’em up and raised the prices, I think he changed the name—it could’ve been Murphy before. It sounds right. Half the people moved out on Jasper and the people that moved in didn’t like Jasper’s notion of redecoration, which was mainly to put down orange carpet on all the floors and panel the walls. He said he liked it just fine in his house.”
V: “Murphy Apartments…”
M: “Lakeview, that’s where you’re headed. They used to be the Murphy Apartments. Sure. See that radio tower way off over there? Go down this street to th
e stop sign, turn left and go up that hill past the radio tower and then you’ll see the Armory on the right and the Avon headquarters on the left. Go another hundred feet or so, you can’t miss it.”
V: “Thanks. I’ve got it.”
M: “Yep, you just go to the stop sign and head for the radio tower. The Avon regional manager lives there. She’s quite the lady. Sometimes you can smell perfume when you drive by, especially on delivery day. That’s it, all right.”
V: “Well, I appreciate it.”
M: “You bet. Just go up here to the stop sign and head for the radio tower, until you smell perfume, and then you’ll see the Lakeview Apartments—the old Murphy Apartments. They thought about starting a college in that neighborhood and those apartments were gonna be dormitories, they said. I don’t what happened to that idea.”
At this point, you should be in your car and moving. Give a little open palm wave as you drive off.
FLYING MINNESOTAN: AN UPDATE
It was not long after How to Talk Minnesotan was published in 1987 that I started getting letters from out-of-state pilots as far away as New Jersey, and Florida, and even Canada, informing me that they did not drive to the lodges. They flew in their own planes, some of which were float planes that could land on the lake and dock next to their fishing boats close to the lodge. What they mostly told me was how useful they found How to Talk Minnesotan for flying in. After three or four years of flying into Minnesota they were, they said, finally beginning to talk flying Minnesotan like a pro.
The Immersion Method for Out-of-State
Pilots (Not Recommended)
Here’s a pretty dramatic letter dated 2007 from a private pilot, John, from Austin, Texas:
My first time comin’ to Minnesota, back around July 1990, I had no trouble along the way talkin’ to air traffic controllers in Oklahoma, or Missouri, or Kansas. I could even understand Iowans, but Holy Smokes, when I crossed the border headed for the Duluth area, I can fess up without the FAA fining me retroactively. I could not understand a lot of what the air traffic controllers wanted me to do. You gotta know that can be kinda dangerous when you’re fixin’ to land, or takin’ off. What happened is, I missed the part where Duluth tower said two F-16s were on long final for runway 9. But a few seconds later I heard it clearly when tower yelled it. Yelling I understand, including all the other words tower used instead of my name. I had already seen the Air Guard F-16s coming in hot and was not about to get in their way. “It was not a good deal” is what I can say today because we have been coming to Minnesota every summer since and I can talk the lingo and hear it, “you bet.” I wish I had known about How to Talk Minnesotan on my first flight to Minnesota.
A Few Words About Minnesota’s Rural Grass Strips
Quite a few Minnesotans own their own planes, and normally hangar them at a local airport, where maintenance is conducted by certified airframe and power plant mechanics. But the truth is that plenty of farmers have an older single engine Cessna or Piper, mainly hangared in a barn or shed near the self-made grass strip, which is rarely longer than 2000 feet, plenty of runway for a Piper Warrior or a Cessna 150. It would be safe to say, or maybe unsafe to say, that birds invariably get into the improvised hangars and do what comes naturally. The favorite site for bird nests is the air intake for the engine. It is widely understood that an internal combustion engine needs air to mix with the gas in order for the propeller to turn at the appropriate speed.
The flying farmers pull the plane out of the barn (hangar) with the tractor or four-wheeler ATV. The next step is to check the fuel, oil, and all the other items on the official checklist, if you can find the checklist. Kick the tires. Search and remove bird nests if it has been a few months since the last flight, or it’s the first flight after the winter snow melts off the grass strip. Crank her up, check the mags, and put on the headset and do a radio check in case a mouse or two has munched on the wiring. Since it is a private strip, you test the radios by calling your wife or whoever in the house has the handheld transceiver. There is always a chance that other pilots farther away will hear you on the common frequency.
PILOT: “Okay, then, it’s me, can you hear me, Sally?”
SALLY: “Yes, honey, I can hear you. Did you remember to take the sandwiches?”
MALE VOICE: “We read you loud and clear, honey. We’re at 30, 000 feet in a 737, heading for Detroit. Have a good day!”
PILOT: “I’m in a Cessna 150 ready to depart from my farm, heading for Appleton, Minnesota, climbing to 3000 feet. I see your contrail, 737.”
Rules and Regulations
For the farmer, or anybody else with a private strip who wants to fly his plane, the basic legal requirements are a pilot’s certificate and a current FAA medical, but it would not be too far-fetched to think that farmer pilots and other rural pilots might be cutting a corner or two.
I wouldn’t want to be questioned too closely about whether I know any World War II pilots who might be stretching the FAA rules. A good friend of mine was a B-24 engineer in the 307th Bombardment Group. He survived fifty bomb runs from a strip on an island in the South Seas and made it home in one piece, sort of. He loved flying his Piper Archer off the grass strip on his son’s farm north of town. A great guy, gentle, easygoing, and I can tell you all this because he has been out of reach of the FAA (I hope they don’t have that kind of reach) for four years. I do miss him. He was a natural pilot, who had learned to fly when he was seventeen, a year before the military snapped him up for the Pacific Theater.
In his later years Bud did not have a medical from the FAA, and no official pilot’s certificate, though he did every four or five years go up with a young instructor who put him through the paces for a checkride, picking up a few good flying tips himself from Bud.
Bud was well-known at the little airports and grass strips where he landed to do some hangar flying, the pilot’s term for drinking bad coffee and exchanging aviation stories. Bud was never ramp checked by the FAA, a pretty good streak of luck, really.
One time in early 1982, Bud got a phone call at home out of the blue and the guy on the other end said, “Is this my engineer I’m talking to?” It was Bud’s pilot. He had not heard his voice for thirty-six years, but it seemed like yesterday.
I Don’t Know
I don’t know as used in Minnesota can have the same meaning as I don’t know elsewhere in the nation—that is, it can mean that the speaker doesn’t know something.
—“Honey, where’s the spring that goes inside the roller for the toilet paper holder?”
—“I don’t know.”
—“You took it out and then you put the roll on top of the toilet tank. How could somebody just lose the spring?”
—“I don’t know.”
—“How do you figure you can function in the real world with an attitude like that?”
—“I don’t know.”
However, the more common use of I don’t know in Minnesota is to hang it at the end of a sentence—or rarely, at the beginning—as a kind of verbal shrug of resignation. In this case it doesn’t mean you don’t know, it means you do know but you’re not going into detail for some reason, usually because you’ve said too much already, or implied it.
A: “I never saw two more unlikely people to be dating than Craig and the Swenson girl, I don’t know.”
B: “They say they’re gonna get married. I don’t know.”
A: “The Swensons are nice enough, nothing you could really fault ’em for, but those kids of theirs, sometimes I don’t know.”
B: “Yeah, sometimes a guy just don’t know, you know.”
After a conversation of that sort, you end up knowing something, not that it’s a whole lot of consolation. But in some cases you don’t know even when you clearly do know.
—“I took algebra, I took calculus, I took computer studies. And here I am running a backhoe. I don’t know.”
FURTHER PRACTICE
Here’s a Minnesotan reporting on the condition
of his new car:
—“Barely 5,000 miles on it, and there’s oil dripping down off the crankcase. I don’t know.”
(Among other things you don’t know in this statement is how come they can’t build a car that’ll run a ways before it breaks down and starts dripping oil, which your ’49 Ford did not do until it turned over a 100,000, and then the gasket only cost you seventy-five cents and the garage put it in for five bucks. But although you don’t know, you do know. You know you’re gonna have to pull the valve cover and put in a new gasket, and the way they build engines these days you’re gonna have to take off a hundred hoses and who knows what else. Just to stop an oil drip.)
A farmer during spring planting:
A: “You get a couple of dry days, and you get the planter in the field and then it rains. I don’t know.”
B: “It’s bad enough dealing with the banks, but the weather, I don’t know.”
A: “They say it balances out, but I don’t know.”
Of course he knows: it balances out, but that does not mean that you will ever get a perfect spring or a bank that won’t patronize. Somebody will, but not you.
Reading the newspaper:
—“Look at this story. I don’t know.”
(Sure you know: You don’t know what this world is coming to.)
I don’t know, like so many Minnesota phrase workhorses, is used to keep from saying too much. It puts the burden on the listener. If you want to know more, if you need elaboration, you have to ask, otherwise your guess is as good as anybody’s. (Unless of course you have asked a Minnesotan for directions or wonder what he’s driving—then you’ll get all the elaboration you need, and a little more.)