River Falls

The making of the earth seems more recent here. The rain and sleet here blow across a continent and race over glacial lakes. Streams, brown with iron, tumble to the lake through lava that seems just now cool. A moment ago this land was the Northwest Territory. I have lived for nearly a third of that time.

Here, at least the names remain: Minnesota, Minnetonka, Minneapolis, the difference between the French and the Spanish.

In a picture hanging on a gray wall in a diner in Duluth, the Edmund Fitzgerald steams across Lake Superior from the ore fields of Minnesota to the smelters on the shores of Lake Michigan. The photograph was taken long before the ship became a legend in suburban America. The Process, the mines, the conveyors, the steamers, now that it doesn’t end in Chicago where does it end?

At 6:00 on a Saturday night in Minnesota, it is cold and grey. It snowed the night before even though it's the first week of May. It is getting dark and the air is thick with Garrison Keeler and the Prairie Home Companion.

A pair of eagles glides over the sandstone crags at the confluence of the Kinnickinick and the Saint Croix rivers.