This is my weekly column for the Sunday, March 29, 2009 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. A version of this piece will air on next week’s “Between You and Me,” Saturday morning on 91.7 KAXE.
News from the equinox
By Aaron J. BrownLast week we welcomed the spring equinox. Note that I did not say “spring,” but rather “spring equinox.” Equinox means that the days are as long as the nights. That much we can see, and believe.
For northern Minnesota “spring” is not exactly a recognizable season. Sure, the wildlife goes through its annual machinations of migrating, flocking, herding and mating (a process similar to our human “freshman year of college”). But “spring” implies warmth, water and flowers, all foreign to the season as we know it. People of the north accept that spring means violent winds, heavy unpredictable snow and difficult choices as far as jacket-wearing is concerned. What gives us hope is that spring means a change from bitter cold being the default to merely a likely possibility. Patience will allow summer to wash in, melting whatever ice remains.
This year the spring equinox coincides with an economic downturn that I’m sick of writing about and you’re sick of reading about but that creeps into our lives like bigger pants and grey hair. As with the turn from winter to spring and summer, we have every reason to assume this economy will improve. But we in northern Minnesota know that the conversion might be anything but seasonal or predictable. The change can, however, be marked by observations of the world around us.
Most mornings my drive from the woods north of Nashwauk to my job in Hibbing orients around the enormous steam cloud billowing out of Keewatin Taconite. The wind points the steam like a finger, to the north on a warm day and angrily to the south on a cold, bitter day. On a calm day the finger points upward to the heavens.
The plant has been in temporary shutdown since the new year and I’m still not used to a horizon that doesn’t include the steam out of KeeTac. People on the Iron Range are starting to realize, slowly, that this temporary idling and the other shutdowns in process or planned at all the Range’s taconite mines are vague in scope. New projects like Essar Steel in Nashwauk also suffer from a life bond to the international demand for steel products. And while long-range projections show that steel prices will recover (they always do, you know), an Iron Ranger can’t help but feel powerless if we just sit back and watch. Because even as national economic indicators begin to stabilize this place is, as it has always been, the final length of pipe in the economic drain. The manna from heaven always gets here last. Maybe that’s why the steam finger always points at the sky.
We are told that an efficient new steel industry will rebound quickly. We are told many things. The only thing we know for sure is that the days are getting longer and somewhat warmer. That fact remains encouraging and should serve as a signal for work to begin.
I won’t invoke the need for a spring “rebirth” to cure this economic mess. Rebirth is a cliché, for one, and not entirely accurate. One finds many things under the melting snows of a new spring. For instance, a dead partridge. A flat football. A sea of doggie doo. None of these things will be reborn. Rather, they will be removed and, where possible, repurposed. Something about our country’s addiction to debt and greed, the contradictory bleating of the pundits on TV, reminds me more of doggie doo than it does the Great Depression. We must shovel it out and begin the summer business of growing a green lawn for the kids to play.
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” is out now.
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