On the Differences, Where They Exist, Between Coast and That-Which-Isn't

Aitkin, MN--Richard is leaving later today for Minneapolis/St. Paul, and so in his honor we stayed in a motel last night (but also really to dry all of our stuff which was soaked after yesterday's downpours--during which I could feel the rain splashing through the tent a la a mist tent which is wonderful at Bonnaroo but less so in central Minnesota). Apparently earlier this weekend there was a NASCAR race in Brainerd or environs and consequently all the rooms in the area had been booked, which would have been bad news had the rain moved in a day earlier.

Going to cut this short because I'm typing it up rather than having written it up earlier in the journal, which for some reason always improves my writing, which throws another wrench into that whole business I posted yesterday but I'm not going to think about it now, I can't and I won't.

But but wait Mac hold on here a second. Aitkin's purported population (try saying that five times fast) is a shade under 2000, just about that of either Damariscotta or Newcastle. Yet Aitkin has a downtown area that I would say approximates the size of, well, at least Wiscasset, maybe even more like Waldoboro (I realize these examples are entirely useless without a detailed understanding of Midcoast Maine and that their sizes and characters can't even be experienced on the Mighty Interweb but bear with me--suffice it to say that Aitkin is bigger than its population would suggest) and I can't really figure out why. It has appeared to me for almost the entirety of this trip that the very concept of a town or village (or especially a city--there doesn't seem to be a firmly set tipping point at which a town becomes a city but it appears to be upon arrival of its first coffeehouse, by which standard, of course, the Village of Damariscotta would be a Metropolis) is quite different here, and I'm now going to work through why that might be, beginning with what, exactly, differs.

Let's begin with the smallest town I can think of (N.(B.?): size and descriptive-of-such adjectives--small, large, etc.--of these examples will be based upon populations as recorded by the 2000 U.S. Census, and while as a former employee of that organization I can attest that the methods by which its numbers are derived are sometimes highly suspect, I can only hope that the discrepancies between the real and reported numbers are more or less the same from town to town, though as an amateur statistician and, again, former employee I'm not intellectually confident of that hope's basis in reality): Ball Club, MN, given population as recalled by the author as something in the 100's (Jacobson, described by Wikipedia editor “Bkorman” as an “unincorporated community”, which I imagine to be something like the “townships” that cover most of northwest Maine, is at once too simple and too complex to be assessed by such a meager intellect and world-experience as my own, not that these other's aren't but I gotta have something to talk about). Ball Club, located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Leech Lake rivers, consists of little more than a gas station along U.S. Rte. 2 (which passes for what you could loosely call the town's “main drag” and which also bisects the campus of one “Williams College” which I suppose partly, alright mostly, explains my fondness for Ball Club, the rest being explained by the fact that when the gas station didn't stock any duct tape the lady at the register loaned me her personal supply and said I could return it “whenever” and when I did return it later that day her son was at the register and expressed absolutely no surprise when I said that she loaned it to me, and call me cynical--tough as that may be--but even I wouldn't expect such a thing to happen in my own hometown even though I might someday refer to it as “the kind of town where [such a thing] might happen”) and two or three side streets along which are placed maybe 20 or 30 depressing little houses (and I'm sorry for such a label because I'm sure most of their residents love their homes but I can't think of a way to describe them to the outside world that doesn't denigrate them (the houses, of course, not the residents) at least a little bit, and even though my readers might recognize “depressing little houses” as a subtle euphemism for “really run-down, cheaply constructed buildings scarcely bigger than a shed or a garage, the kind of buildings that, were one to spot it in a poor urban area, one might point at and shout, 'Crack den!'”, it's just the kindest way I can describe them without whoring myself to upper-middle-class white guilt) and not a single other commercial building I could spot with my tired eyes. It's quite a bit like Jefferson, ME, actually (again, an entirely unhelpful reference if you don't possess highly detailed knowledge of Lincoln County, and potentially even if you do, but I retain authorial privilege so I feel pretty good about myself) (Ed.: that was so egregious I don't even need to comment), but unlike Jefferson its sole function as a town seems to be as a gas station, like a highway rest stop, since its function as a stop (a gas station, if you will) along the Mississippi has of course eroded entirely. And because northern Minnesota, whatever its history, is not expanding in population or development at any great or even detectable rate, its status in both the present and the future is somewhat nebulous. It stands at the crossroads of yesterday's highway and today's, but today's doesn't really go anywhere and yesterday's, while it did go somewhere, is deceased, which put Ball Club in a difficult position. But what a great name for a town!

You start to wonder what might attract someone to a place like Ball Club. And I don't mean that in an absolute kind of way, because there are of course pleasures in rural MN that take experience to appreciate, experience you gain by growing up there, but what might bring an outsider? The way the Midwest was settled has given rise to an idiosyncratic stratification of communities--you get considerable permeability between its cities and those of the Coasts, but there doesn't seem to be much change in the small towns. It was settled at a rapid rate and without regard, as Eve has pointed out, for future generations, while up and down the East Coast you see development with an eye for the future. The term “the country's bread-basket” is apt not only in a simple economic sense but also in a cultural sense--the attitudes of both those that demanded settlements in the Midwest and those that settled them seem to treat the land and the settlers as servants to a function rather than as people who demanded long-lasting communities (which is of course ironic with regards to the treatment of Indians by everyone involved but this post is long enough as is), and consequently places like Ball Club don't seem to really know what to do with themselves.

Some of the larger communities, the “cities” of Grand Rapids and Bemidji and the towns of Aitkin, do seem to have been in a continuing process of reinvigoration and reinvention, the transition from function to form, as the understanding of a more or less self-sufficient community has developed. And this creates an odd conundrum, as the old mantras of development and growth and settlement has merged into, well, settled, and the communities have to deal with what it means to be a functioning community for itself rather than for the cities or the East Coast (the West Coast is of course a whole other story). And they call soda “pop”! Isn't that adorable?

And of course none of this is a problem as long as freedom of movement and growth and, if so desired, contraction and so on is maintained but that's always something to be watchful for because the consequences can be so disastrous, as the non-Indian residents of communities like Ball Club must know so well after seeing what a century and a half of forced stagnation on Leech Lake Reservation has done. Although I wonder just how much interaction there has been, or is now, between those outside the reservation and those on it, even between Indians on and off the reservation, and particularly whether those lessons have been learned. But that question is too heavy for what is already a heavy and mournful day as Richard leaves us, to seclude himself in the warm and dusty (in my mind) archives of the Minnesota Historical Society like an incommunicado monk. We're driving him down to Brainerd later today, where he'll catch a bus and we'll get our first glimpse of the city which is in my mind more closely linked with Paul Bunyan because I'm not sure I ever heard of Bemidji when I was a kid and because Brainerd is such a weird name--you'd think it would imply a kind of nerdiness but in fact it seems to do just the opposite, at least to my ears.