Frostbite Falls

The tracks I left
with chains on my boots

I put chains on my boots
to reduce slipping on ice.

I came to the coldest place in the lower forty-eight states to experience real winter.  I was here for two months in the winter of 2009-10, and found life honest and very cold for the unprepared.  But if there is anything I do well, I think it is being prepared.  I research, anticipate and plan carefully.  If with a little bragging, I can say that it usually works out satisfyingly.  Many of you can say the same for your poetry, painting, ceramics, collage, and music.  Travel to wild places is my primary form of satisfaction and possibly my contribution the general artistic community.  But this time it didn’t work, not here in Frostbite Falls. 

Poverty-level houses
along the Blue Ox Trail

Main Street
International Falls, MN

I drove here on dry roads.  My engine heater isn’t even needed, nor are my winter tires, winter antifreeze, nor my windshield washer solution that will not freeze at fifty below.  I feel like a polar bear in the desert.  Everyone here complains that snow fell, then above-freezing temperatures melted it, and now it is ice and dangerous—not the way extreme winter is supposed to work.   

Katrina 2009

Sandy 2020

Maybe you remember Katrina at Sandy’s  Café, the smart girl I liked so much in 2009.  Well, in the intervening ten years, she’s graduated from college and holds a high position in Minnesota State government helping the underprivileged.  Her mother, Sandy, for whom the place is named, served me breakfast this morning, proudly praising her daughter.  Here they are together, with a gap of ten years, that seems to me like a week.  

Jerry and Sandy Netland 2009

Jerry and Sandy Netland 2020

Here at the Voyageur Motel, mom and pop, Jerry and Sandy, pose as they did ten years ago, still at it, still busy all the time, but now cynical.  They want to quit, give up the motel and go traveling.  The town’s gone to pot and help in impossible to find.  Ten years ago, they bragged that Minnesota people are the best workers in the country.  

A pile of winterwear that, if I wore it all,
would look like a kaba,
better known as a hippopotamus

So here I am sitting in Room 25, just three doors down from where I sat in 2009, wondering how to spend two weeks.  Happy, in a way that weather is relatively warm, and I can go out without much fear of frostbite, and sad to see so many people complaining.    

I walked the Blue Ox Trail this morning.  It looks the same as in 2009, groomed and ready for snow machines.  I took pictures of low-income housing along the trail,  thinking they are not the ones complaining.  I don’t see them at Sandy’s, maybe at the low-cost bar uptown.   

Sculpture in packed snow

Michael Angerman of Corvallis, Oregon, has prepared an interactive map of my trip showing mv daily locations.  Please see Michael’s Map:    Michael's Map