Summer Monsoon Moon
Got to thinking about my posts about stuff that’s different here in Colorado. Watch for falling rocks and wildlife highway signs, for example. Reminded me of my first years in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
I lived in Appleton, Wisconsin for a year before I moved to Minnesota and the first winter there was brutal. Lots of snow, really cold. Just what I had imagined and wanted. I had not anticipated that some folks would take their battery inside at night. Or, that others would have engine block heaters. I’d never experienced local option over bar licenses. Appleton was dry; the county wet. Deer hunting was a season when grudges could be settled. The Great Lakes were a nearby reality, not a distant notion from U.S. history books.
When I moved to New Brighton to go to seminary, it puzzled me, even after a year in Wisconsin that there were posts with electrical outlets at each parking space for the dorm. Oh, the block heater thing again. The epic cold. I still recall translating 20 below zero into centigrade for my Taiwanese roommate. His face? Priceless.
Inside the city limits of Minneapolis/St. Paul there are several lakes. Full sized lakes, not ponds or reservoirs, but lakes. This means getting to learn the streets takes a while since many have to curve at some point to go around a body of water. Not to mention, speaking of water, that the Mississippi is the river that runs through them.
Then, most puzzling of all for this Indiana boy used to Indiana and Illinois politics, Minnesotans seemed to actually care about politics. Corruption and cynicism were not the two C’s of government in Minnesota, more like caring and compassion.
Like Wisconsin, Minnesota was part of that strange U.S. creature, the Upper Midwest: Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. All three of these states shared lots of border area with the Great Lakes and the greatest lake, Superior, washes up against all three of them and only those three in the U.S. Also in all three, as you drive north, you enter the northwoods, the arboreal forest that begins in Canada at the edge of the tundra.
This is still wild country, not rich enough in resources, except for the Iron Range of Minnesota, and far enough from the usual transportation routes to be pretty hard scrabble for folks who choose to live there. The exception are those communities that have ports on Lake Superior or Lake Michigan. That’s right, ports. These are lakes with a thriving shipping industry, huge lakers carrying coal, wheat and other goods from state to state and to Canada.
