Minnesota against my will

and tubular bells

it’s really weird to have a memory resurfaced against your will. sometimes a certain smell brings me back to the dressing room of a libby lu smearing glitter gloss on my 10 year old face. or, the way the light filters in will remind me of that weird venue that smells like a barn in Milwaukee. or, the song of a bird brings me back to the creek where I used to catch frogs. this week, a picture brought me back to my brief stint in Barnesville, Minnesota, which in my opinion is the most desolate town in America.

it’s not something i’ve ever really talked about. because I used to be ashamed about the stuff we had to do to survive. although I do think I wrote a short story about it when I was 16, which I cannot find for the life of me.

(sorry, I can’t help it, i’m a bit depressed at the moment. I lost my job.)

wikipedia describes Barnesville as a Fargo-Moorhead “bedroom community.” on its own, I like the sound of that, that phrase - a bedroom community. like something a hippie or a swinger would aspire to build. like some grand vision for a more peaceful world. reality is not as dreamy though. when you call a place a bedroom community, what you mean is that everyone who lives there commutes out to work*. which means there’s even less going on in a bedroom community than a suburb.

*except for my dad, who was there for work, which is why we had to hang out there.

this nothingness matches up to my experience in barnesville. we were living in an a-frame about the size of a one bedroom, without running water or electricity. this I can normally tolerate if i’m on the lake, at least, with pretty views, because then at least i can “romanticize” my experience at the “cabin,” but no dice. it was spooky as shit.

the trees look scraggly and dangerous up north. every single campfire ghost story i’d been told about the wendigo suddenly seemed super, super plausible. I had several heart attacks the few nights I had to find the outhouse in the dark. because when you’re out there in such a remote place, there’s absolutely no light pollution. but barnesville is not like being in the boundary waters where the stars are magnificent and bright. no,, it’s just dark.

these are the places where the end of the world feels palpable.

I have a hard time, now, driving through some of these insane lonesome towns that litter America - like when you have to go through Nebraska on your way to skiing in Colorado. I always think “who lives here? what do they do?” and I feel a horrible gnawing, because I know the kind of desperation a person feels in these places. you don’t really live, in these strange towns. you become an ant. you survive.

on the weekends, my dad would cut down trees with a chainsaw, and we’d spend time chopping shit up with axes. it was an effort to clear a little yard next to the a-frame, which previously had been choked up by trees. I think all of us look at our fathers in a particular astonishment: how the hell do you know how to do that?

my brothers and I would use pocket knives to cut chunks of summer sausage and cheese, and eat lunch on the tree stumps like it was little house on the prairie. we would grill garlic bread and ribs or tenderloin for dinner and sit around the campfire until it was too cold and too dark to be out talking.

then we’d sleep like sardines in sleeping bags in the a-frame house, and that claustrophobia, that total crushing sense of “this is what it’s like to not exist” would give me panic attacks.

but not sure if that’s just what it’s like to be 16 or if this was unique to me.

this time in my life is very foggy, small and scary to me.

There’s only one image that is crystal clear and redeeming. I would drive around in the minivan listening to a CD of Tubular Bells. There wasn’t much to look at on these drives - besides maybe one bar and a dilapidated pepto bismal pink shed with the faded words “The Jesus Center” painted on the windows.

I had forgotten Mike Oldfield existed because I tried to bury all these things that hurt. I remember how much in a literal sense this album “saved” me - it made me feel like a real person, and that other real people existed, too, even if I could only access them through the things they created.

Tubular Bells allowed me to imagine color into the gray scenery. It made me realize then that you can make your mind a safe place to retreat. It doesn’t matter if it gets really bad. you’re always in your body. and so you’re always home.

you can always put on tubular bells and affirm to yourself that you’re alive. you are the only person who needs to be convinced of that fact.

at 27, I assumed I had shoved myself away from all of this hard enough, propelled myself out west, away from all the misery and smallness of poverty, that it would feel foreign to stare at this shit in the face. because now my family is “good,” my brothers all have security and safety, I assumed I couldn’t mentally go back there, to barnesville. but you can’t really put these things down.

It’s painful to think about all this. but I keep landing on this idea, about why I write: that by writing, talking about it and trying to make something of it, suddenly this period of my life wasn’t all wasted time. that if I go back to it, if it can be described, there might be something of value there, even if it’s not riveting like a Hemingway adventure or clear like a Didion essay.

I can’t really figure out what was valuable about it until I start spilling my guts, though.