COLUMN: ‘The talk of any town’

This is my weekly column for the Sunday, Sept. 27, 2009 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune.

The talk of any town
By Aaron J. Brown

The best part about being from somewhere is knowing the story of that place. I still can’t understand the transient nature of my generation, the random iPod shuffle between Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles, apartments changed like underwear, all furnished from a big box store that looks the same everywhere.

We’ve got to find ourselves, you see. We are from the rust belt cities, the mining and farming towns, the long bypassed burgs forgotten by interstates, and the vast countryside visible from space, but we are taught early in life that we must leave to find ourselves. And in this exploration we often find, as Stan Rogers sang, “but the road back home again.” That’s true of many here in northern Minnesota and I suspect that the numbers will only rise, even as our population drops.

You can’t shake where you’re from. Whether you live in your birthplace or far from it you’ve eventually got to reckon with how the place shaped you and shot you out into the world. Maybe, like the city kid who farms organic carrots or the miner’s kid who paints in a Manhattan studio, you change your stripes along the way. Even so, that process probably amounted to the most important struggle of your life. Can’t escape gravity. Not without a fight.

I find it comforting to see a place and know what it was three generations ago, 20 years ago and today. When you know how something like the Hull Rust mine pit came to be you can’t help but drag people, kicking perhaps, up to old North Hibbing for a look.

Around Hibbing, like any Iron Range town, most of the points of interest were forged in by some kind of large, industrial affront to nature. The back-story often involves fatalities described by newspapers of the day with words like “immigrant,” “crushed,” and “the company is not to blame.” Words like these are never going to be in the promotional brochures of places like northern Minnesota, but these stories and our people’s reaction to them continue to shape the region.

Though born in Hibbing, I grew up out in the country around the Iron Range. I tell people I’m from Cherry but only because it’s quicker than saying I’m from the swamplands of Zim, itself part of the larger Cherry metroplex that also includes Forbes, Lavell, Clinton and Iron Junction along with vast tracts of unorganized land traversed only by deer and railroad tracks.

This area doesn’t offer much in the way of tourist attractions. You’ll find some natural beauty, a big owl watching hubbub out in the bog each year, and a few small businesses clinging to a recession proof specialty like sod, beer or gun repair. I remember touring a friend around my childhood stomping grounds as we prepared to embark on a writing project about the Cherry area. I showed him the “Zim Rec” where I used to go sledding, the old Zim Store which was then (as it is now) an aging empty ghost structure and my old elementary school at Forbes. Of course, you might know that the Forbes Elementary is now a bar, so we went in to facilitate the reminiscing.

On this particular day the workers of what was then Eveleth Taconite were packed into the joint, having learned that day that the nearby mine was shutting down indefinitely, possibly forever but that’s what they always say. The crowd was angry and uncertain, still in work clothes. My friend and I were dressed like writers. We ate our burgers while bobbing on the turbulent seas of what it’s like to live on the Iron Range, looking down at the free throw lines from my first gym class still visible on the barroom floor.

Very few can declare a certain future, myself included, but at least I know where I’m from.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune. Contact him or read more at his blog MinnesotaBrown.com. His book “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range” won this year’s Northeastern Minnesota Book Award.