Chapter 2

The next day, following my whirlwind tour of Red Lake County, I packed my bags and flew back to Baltimore, to Briana, the twins, and the job. I had plenty to think about on the flight back home.

The trip had been a jarring break in the well-worn routine I’d established for myself in D.C. and Baltimore. It cast the shortcomings of our family’s situation in a jarring light. When I told people in Red Lake Falls about the length of my commute, for instance, their jaws dropped. I realized I had built up a protective layer of apathy around myself that allowed me to ignore the steep cost of the big commute, the small house, the disconnect among the crowds, all of it. After all, it was simply something that everyone did, on some level or another, out in D.C.

And yet, Red Lake County—and other places like it—were filled with people whose lives were radically different. They had space. Yards. Breathing room. Small communities where people knew and looked after one another. The very existence of Red Lake County and the people who lived there was a direct challenge to the way of life we had slid into in the city. It undermined the inevitability of modern urban life.

Like many people on the coasts, I had a foggy notion that places like Red Lake County were out there. We all knew about the rural-urban divide in the United States. But I had previously thought of rural places as fundamentally other, strange lands where unfamiliar people held tight to ancient customs and beliefs. Even though I grew up in upstate New York, after a decade in D.C. a rural midwestern farming community seemed about as remote and foreign to me as an Amish enclave, or an Amazonian tribe that hadn’t yet made contact with modern society.

But the most earth-shattering revelation of my trip had been this: the people in Red Lake County were just like the rest of us. They watched the same TV shows, followed the same news, consumed the same popular culture, and cracked the same dumb jokes. I went out there expecting to find a tribe of people who were radically different but instead I was shocked to find out they were just like me. How, then, had I ended up wasting my life in a cramped town house, riding a cramped train, while they got to enjoy the clean prairie air and the wide-open spaces of northwest Minnesota? Why couldn’t I be more like them? Where had I gone wrong?

Back at the grind in D.C., my days in Red Lake County took on a positively Norman Rockwellian cast. While there I had relentlessly poked and prodded the people I talked to, puzzled by the optimism, the pride, the sense of belongingness. “Yes, but what about all the bad stuff?” I asked. What about the drugs? The crippling poverty? The squalor and misery of a benighted life in the countryside?

Yet no matter how hard I pushed, I couldn’t find any sign of rot beneath the region’s bucolic exterior. The people had their trials and headaches, of course. Downtown Red Lake Falls wasn’t what it had once been. Affordable health care was a challenge. The sheriff’s office had the occasional speeder or shoplifter to deal with.

But while the rural communities I had known as a child seemed to be almost devoured by their challenges, the people in Red Lake Falls were rising up to meet theirs. There the pressures of modern life seemed manageable, in a way that they must have seemed across the entire nation in say, the 1950s and 1960s. I wanted that manageability in my own life. I wanted to take my family to a place where it didn’t feel like the trend lines of time and money were always converging, squeezing us into an ever-narrowing sphere of existence. I wanted to turn the trends around, set them outward and away from each other, opening up wide spaces of possibility with room to breathe. I wanted what the people in Red Lake County seemed to have.

I wrote my follow-up story on my visit, closing it with these lines: “When people and places halfway across the country are just a mouse-click away on your computer, it’s easy to assume that we live in a nation made small and manageable by technology. But traveling to a place like Red Lake County, hours away from any major metro area, is a reminder that in much of the country, the rhythms of daily life are, still, markedly different than the coastal city grind of long commutes and high-octane jobs.

“For some of us, it takes a place as small as Red Lake County to drive home just how big this country really is.”

As I got back into the D.C. grind I found myself unable to shake the memories of the trip. Jammed into a hot, overcrowded Red Line train, I thought of the guy I’d talked to in Plummer who complained about how sometimes getting stuck behind a tractor would add five minutes to his fifteen-minute commute.

Wading through diesel fumes on the streets of D.C., crowded in by the city’s squat, blocky buildings, I would have given just about anything for five more minutes on a dirt road out on the prairie, hemmed in by nothing but a warm breeze.

I dreamed about the people I had met, nothing crazy, just about running into them and chatting them up at the store.

My wife noticed a change in my demeanor when I returned. I am not exactly what you’d call a people person. I’m a natural introvert; given the choice between socializing with others or doing something by myself, I’ll nearly always choose the latter. There’s a reason why I spend most of my reporting time interrogating datasets, rather than people.

The running joke in the Ingraham household is that Briana is a normal, functioning social adult while I am “dead inside.” Yet when I came back from Minnesota, Briana noticed that I wouldn’t stop talking about how great the people were. Their warmth, their friendliness, their fiercely held determination to make their communities better. Even for an introvert it was striking to see.

I contrasted that with what I had known from the neighborhoods I had lived in. In our early twenties Briana and I spent a particularly miserable year in grad school in Southern California, living in a corporate-managed apartment complex that catered mostly to low-income families. The apartments were crammed in on top of each other and it was impossible to escape the sight, sound, or smell of your neighbors at any hour of the day or night. But nobody talked to one another—everyone kept their heads down, desperate to avoid having to humanize the people you knew only as, say, the source of the music that blared every weeknight at 11 p.m., or the arguments you could hear through your paper-thin walls.

We had lived in Vermont for a couple years shortly thereafter—our initial goal in relocating there was simply to put as much space between us and Southern California as we could manage. But New Englanders, as we discovered, are not known for their openness to outsiders. We were able to find nonsqualid rental accommodations and managed to make a couple of close friends there. But the communities we lived in, outside of Burlington, made zero effort to help residents get to know each other, or to develop a sense of community identity beyond the occasional appeal to NIMBYism whenever someone wanted to install a new windmill or power line.

After Briana got recruited to work for the Social Security Administration, we moved to the Baltimore area and came to like it much more than we thought we would. We settled in the historic district of Ellicott City, a charming collection of shops and restaurants tucked away into brick and stone-crafted buildings. The historic district had something of an identity of its own, but its location in the middle of one of the east coast’s largest metropolitan areas tended to dilute that. It was also marred by a busy connecting road that cut right through the middle of the district, essentially shoving the town’s civic life to the margins of the roadway.

We made a number of friends when we moved to Oella, many of whom were struggling with the same issues we were—how to raise children in a cramped, pedestrian-hostile space? How to pay bills without burning most of your nonworking hours on interminable trips to D.C.?

That fall Briana and I were coming to the realization that we had to do something about our current situation. It was killing us, in both a metaphoric and also a very literal sense. The problem was that no matter how hard we tried, no matter how far outside the box we started to think, we couldn’t make the numbers add up.

We looked into selling our home and renting a place closer to D.C. The problem was there was no way to increase our square footage without drastically raising our monthly housing costs, and even then we’d be stuck on the fringes of some dodgy area like Laurel or Odenton, almost certainly living in cramped, factory-style quarters like we’d done in California. The only difference now would be even higher rent, and we’d have kids to manage to boot.

We looked at going in the other direction—what if we moved waaay out to the fringes, to the very farthest reaches of where the MARC train traveled? Make peace with the long commute, embrace it even. Live in say, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and cajole the bosses to let me work from home two days a week. The problem was that unless we got way out into the boonies—like six-hour-a-day commute instead of three—the home prices were still insane. Even in the easternmost reaches of West Virginia, a $300,000 single-family home is a rarity.

The truth is that that phrase—single-family home—meant little to me before the kids came along. I had absorbed and understood all the urban-lefty critiques of single-family home ownership that are so prevalent on the coast: high-density living, in condos and apartments and town homes, is better for the environment. It fosters interpersonal communication, and creates urban spaces better suited for humans than for cars.

But I had come to suspect that much of the urbanist critique of single-family home ownership was really a critique of suburban single-family homeownership. My time in Southern California had certainly illustrated the limits of the “planned community.” Despite the “master plan” governing Irvine and much of Orange County, the area was still a riotously unpleasant place to live. The landscape was shredded into pieces by heavily trafficked roadways, a necessity due to zoning regulations mandating that the places where people worked, gathered, played, and shopped be rigidly separated from the places where they lived.

The suburbs’ pitch, in theory, is that they offer the best of both possible worlds: reasonable proximity to urban centers with all their options for work and play, with a little bit of space to stretch out in and call your own. In reality, I began to suspect, many suburbs were just offering the worst: high-density, high-traffic neighborhoods rivaling the most congested urban areas, wedded to rural notions of car ownership and resource consumption.

After the kids arrived I wanted that single-family home. I wanted the yard, the space, the lack of neighbors sharing walls. But I didn’t want the suburban version. I didn’t want Southern California, or Columbia, Maryland. I didn’t want a city, or a suburb. I wanted a town. A village. Hell, a house in the country miles away from anything, I didn’t care. Whatever its faults, the town I grew up in, Oneonta, New York, was like this. We lived in a medium-sized house on a main road at the west end of town. There was an auto body shop on one side of us and a Dunkin’ Donuts on another. Just down the block and off the main road lay the quiet residential neighborhood where most of my friends lived growing up. We had free rein of the place pretty much as soon as we were old enough to pedal a bike. We played hide-and-seek in the cemetery, built forts in the adjacent woods, biked to the nearby Ames to buy candy, and terrorized the servers at our local Ponderosa. It was a childhood that was completely unremarkable, except for the fact that anything like it now appeared to be unobtainable anywhere within one hundred miles of a typical city.

I wanted that kind of childhood for my own kids, which is another way of saying that I wanted them to have that kind of childhood for myself. I wanted to live in a place where the economic, physical, legal, and cultural conditions all came together to make it possible: affordable homes. Reasonable commutes. Neighborhood spaces where you could walk, play, explore, get lost, maybe even get into a bit of trouble. Adults not accustomed to calling the cops every time they saw a kid unattended. Enough people to look out for one another, but not so many that crime was an issue.

As I was working through these issues, Briana was getting burnt out at work. She spent day after day in meetings and on conference calls, talking around in circles with career bureaucrats who seemed to be checking off time until they collected their pension. She wanted to make things better, but the federal bureaucracy didn’t make it easy.

She’d get home exhausted at the end of the day and hear about all the wonderful things Jack and Charles had done with Heather, the nanny. Jack took his first steps. Charles said his first words. They went to the park, to the aquarium, to McDonald’s. Milestone after milestone passed by, hours and days of priceless early childhood bonding outsourced to a third party while we labored to keep a roof over our heads, memories left unmade while Briana sat in conference rooms and drafted emails.

Early childhood is another realm where Americans have grown accustomed to going against their own best wishes in the name of paying the bills. In 2016 the Pew Research Center reported that about 60 percent of Americans said children were typically better off with a parent at home. This belief cut across political as well as gender divides, with majorities of nearly every demographic group holding it. Yet in close to half of two-parent households, both parents work full-time.

The actual research into the question of whether kids are better or worse off when both parents work is mostly a wash. To the extent that any effects are observed, they appear to stem from far more fundamental questions: if life at home is safe and stable and generally free from economic woes, the kids are probably going to be all right.

But the research has less to say on the nonquantifiable aspects of early child-rearing: how do you assign a value to the hugs missed, the boo-boos unkissed, the songs unsung, and the experiences unshared? Most of us don’t become parents in order to celebrate the outcomes tracked by economists and developmental psychologists: the endgame of parenthood isn’t a 90th percentile PSAT score or an above-average place in the national earnings distribution.

Rather we do it for more primal, fundamental reasons: biological necessity. The thrill of creating a new life. The human experience in all its agony and glory. Perhaps above all, love.

Yet those are the very things we deprive ourselves of when we outsource child-rearing to a third party.

Briana and I were both feeling that loss acutely. What if, instead of moving, one of us quit work to be home with the kids? What if we reclaimed that full experience of parenthood? To actually be there to watch our sons grow up?

Yet again, the math didn’t add up. Our salaries were similar at the time, which meant that regardless of who left work, our income would be halved. Yes, the child-care expenses would disappear, too, but it wouldn’t make up for the forgone income. Between the mortgage, student loans, and various credit card debts incurred in the first expensive years of the boys’ lives, one income in the D.C. area was simply out of the question.

We were back at square one.

It was October, and by this point the answer was practically staring us in the face, although we didn’t realize it yet. And we wouldn’t, until one long weekend when my mom and stepdad flew in from Tampa to visit their grandsons.

The boys were in bed and the four adults were unwinding in our tiny living room, glasses of wine in hand. Seating-wise that room accommodated little beyond a two-person love seat—my mom was sitting on a footstool, and I was squatting on the floor.

Briana and I were talking through all these issues—the boys, the house, the jobs, the commutes, and how we couldn’t find a way out of any of it. In the end, my mom was the first one to come right out and say it: “Well, what if you moved to that nice little Minnesota town Chris visited over the summer?”

We all laughed.

“No, really,” she said.

The room went quiet.

For me, in that moment, suddenly all the pieces fell in place. One of us would work from home. The other would take a break to be with the kids, which we could afford given the low cost of living. We could get a bigger, cheaper home. There would be no more commute.

“I don’t know,” I said, suddenly. “Maybe this idea is—”

“Ridiculous,” Bri said suddenly. “Who moves to northwest Minnesota?”

“No, wait,” I said. “Let’s talk about this.”

“We’re gonna, what?” she asked. “Buy a house in the ugliest county in America?”

“I mean . . . it’s not like we have a lot of other options at the moment.”

“Mm-hmm. And how cold does it get there in the winter?”

“Uh . . .”

This had the potential to be a problem. I don’t mind the cold but Briana is notoriously pro-heat and cold-averse. A big part of the reason that Red Lake County, the place, became Red Lake County, America’s worst place, was its bone-chilling winter cold. I prevaricated.

“Maybe it gets like, a little bit colder than upstate New York,” I admitted.

“Forget about the stupid cold!” my mom said, coming to my rescue. “Buy some sweaters, for Christ’s sake, who cares. Think about the time you’d have with the boys! Think about raising them among all those nice people you said you met there.”

“It’s true,” I said. “I hate most people, but those were some of the best people I’ve ever met. You’d love them, Bri.”

Bri raised an eyebrow. I realized this could be a fruitful line of persuasion.

“Now, wait a minute, just how cold are we talking?” my stepdad interjected. Goddammit, Jeff, I thought.

“Cold winters, warm hearts,” I said, sounding like an idiot.

“How are we going to work out there in the middle of nowhere?” Bri asked.

“I can work remotely,” I said, not sure if I actually could. “It’s the perfect place—the Post will want a correspondent in Real America for the election year. And you won’t have to work at all!”

“I’m not sure if I want to not have to work at all,” she said.

She had started building her career when we lived in Vermont, first as a disability adjudicator with the state’s Social Security office (we both applied for the job shortly after moving; she was the one who got it). From there she was recruited to the home office in D.C. and worked her way up to the front office, where all the big policy decisions were made. Despite everything she hated about it, by 2015 her career was a big part of her identity. She liked making more money than either of her parents did. She liked having an identity independent of her husband, her kids, or the rest of her family. The job was a pain in the ass, yes, but it was also independence, financial security, a seat at the world’s table.

Now she was supposed to throw all that away and what, move to a tiny midwestern farming community, sight unseen?

We didn’t make any decisions that night. But over the next few days, as we intermittently talked it over, the plan—if there was going to be any plan—gradually came into focus. It would obviously make the most sense for me to work and her to stay home. My job traveled—99 percent of it was done via phone and internet, which meant I could do it from anywhere. Hers did not—it required lots of meetings, lots of face-to-face time, access to government terminals that existed only within the physical confines of a specific building.

Beyond that it was clear that I simply liked my job a whole lot more than she did, at the moment at least. So if we went out there, I would work.

We grappled with what that would mean for a typical workday. Well, she’d be home with the kids and I’d be there, too, ideally sequestered away in something like a home office. But I’d be there to help get the kids up. To help with meals. To take over when work was done and she’d had about as much of them as she could reasonably handle.

We tried to run a more thorough accounting of the numbers. We figured that relative to our current baseline, each month we’d be able to save . . .

All told it added up to about $4,500 a month, which, while it didn’t exactly account for the loss of all of Briana’s after-tax income, sure made up a big chunk of it.

Plus, we’d be gaining time: fifty hours a week for her, and fifteen for me. We assumed that each of those hours had a dollar value equal to our respective hourly wages. When you added those up and factored in the decreased expenditures we came out way ahead in the ledger.

Eventually we talked ourselves into the view that it would be fiscally irresponsible of us to not move to Red Lake County.

In the end what it boiled down to for Bri was that she needed a break from her current job, and she didn’t want to miss out on any more of the twins’ childhood. Whether this was a long-term thing, whether she was abandoning her working mother identity to become a stay-at-home mom, whether this amounted to a betrayal or renunciation of all she had worked so hard for in high school and college? She didn’t know. She would figure it out. What she did know was that this was what she needed right now, what felt right for her and for her sons.

I assured her, over and over, that she’d love the people in Red Lake Falls, that it was a totally different kind of community than the hardscrabble upstate New York towns we’d grown up in.

“Tell me about this Jason Brumwell guy then,” she said. She saw a photo of him that had run in the story of my visit, all scruffy beard, dark glasses, and baseball cap. She wasn’t impressed.

“He looks like . . .” she trailed off uncomfortably.

“A redneck?” I asked.

“A redneck.”

“He’s not a redneck.”

“Honestly he looks a little scary.”

“He’s neither scary nor a redneck, and definitely not a scary redneck. He’s a nice, sweet, thoughtful, educated guy. And everyone there is just like him.”

“So they’re all scary rednecks?”

It was a tough sell. The cold was another factor. I had to promise a lot—flannel sheets, warm mittens, a well-insulated house with a fireplace, if possible. “Remember, there’s no such thing as bad weather!” I admonished glibly. “Only bad outerwear.”

I knew, finally, that Briana was on board one day when I opened a package that had arrived in the mail and found two sets of Minnetonka slippers inside, one for each of the twins. “So wait, we’re doing this? It’s officially happening?” I asked.

“Yes, let’s do it,” she said. “But first go talk to your boss.”

That, of course, was the remaining piece of the puzzle. All I had to do was convince Post brass that I should be able to stop showing up to work physically and instead live and file stories from a virtually unheard-of farming community 1,400 miles away from the action in the nation’s capital. Easy!

In reality, it wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. Newsrooms, perhaps more so than most other organizations, are ideally situated for remote work. At any given time the Post had perhaps dozens of correspondents filing stories from far-flung corners of the world and country. Some were traveling, some were based permanently in newsmaking regions like Silicon Valley and the Koreas, and some others had simply negotiated remote work arrangements upon hiring in order to stay in their current cities, chief among them New York. Telework, in other words, was already part of the fabric of the organization, and the Post already had the infrastructure—online meeting software, remote log-in capabilities, and the like—to handle it.

I was particularly fortunate in that my beat, such as it was, wasn’t tied to any one exact place. If you’re a Hill reporter, for instance, a big part of your job is wandering the halls of the Capitol and getting in-person quotes from policy makers. Being physically there is part of your job description.

My beat, on the other hand, was data. And in this day and age, data lives primarily on the internet, so that’s where I spent most of my own time. Instead of roaming the halls of Congress, I spent my days digging through federal and academic websites looking for statistical diamonds in the rough—that’s how I ended up with the ugly-counties story in the first place.

So in the middle of October I nervously scrawled some notes on a piece of paper and made the pitch to my editor: we’d move to Red Lake County in the following spring. I’d keep writing as I always did, via a home office that included a landline and high-speed internet access. Hell, I could even write periodic longer, data-driven feature-y pieces of interest to a national audience on life in rural America. I could come back to D.C. as needed.

We’d set a time period of a year, at which point we’d reassess: Were we desperate to come back to civilization? Was my work remaining consistent (or, ideally, improving)? Would we want to stay another year or move back?

And of course, we’d have an escape valve: if there was a sense that, God forbid, my work was getting worse as a result of being out of the office, I’d be willing to take any steps necessary to fix the situation—including uprooting everyone and heading back to D.C. for good, if needed.

My editor, Zach, was quiet throughout my whole spiel and when I was finally done he said, “Okay, sure, why don’t you put together a memo and we’ll run it up the flagpole and see what happens.” There was neither pushback nor encouragement; the man reacted no differently than he would have if I’d asked for something completely routine, like an afternoon off for a dentist appointment.

But I wrote the memo and sent it to Zach, who sent it to his editor, who sent it to his editor, in a chain of editors reaching all the way up to executive editor Marty Baron, whose generally gruff no-bullshit demeanor can be summed up by the fact that the same actor who played Marty in Spotlight, the 2015 Oscar winner about the Boston Globe’s efforts to uncover child abuse in the Catholic Church, also played Sabretooth in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

“So basically Sabretooth decides whether we go to Minnesota?” Bri asked, when I mentioned how the proposal was being received at work.

“That’s correct, yes.”

A month later the official word came in—we were going to Minnesota.

Suddenly it was real. We sat down with the boys, then two and a half, to discuss what was happening.

“We’re going to live in Minnesota,” we said.

“Minnsota,” they said. They had no idea what it meant, but the word soon became a universal totem of anticipation in the house, encompassing all our hopes, dreams, anxieties, our struggle for a better life. Minnesota.

One thing I figured I should do was let Jason and the other folks I’d met know we were coming. I didn’t know exactly how to do this, though. “Hey, I called your community a shithole and then turned it into a circus for three days, and now I’m moving my entire family there!” What if it was an imposition? What if they were simply like, “What the hell is this guy on about?”

Eventually I shot Jason an email describing our plans. “I hope this doesn’t seem too weird!” I wrote. “But the truth is I’ve thought about the place and everyone I met there a lot since my visit, and I think it would be a great place to live and raise the boys for a year or two. And we’re ready for a change—we’ve lived in plenty of places on the coasts, but never in the Midwest.”

Then I waited for a response.

And waited.

And waited.

Five days later I still hadn’t received a reply back. Jason had always been quick to reply in our correspondence leading up to and immediately following my visit, so I naturally assumed this was an ill omen. He had talked it over with some folks in town and was trying to figure out a way to tell me that no, maybe it might not be best for us to come out there. Or maybe it seemed like a completely weird, bizarre stalker thing to do. As Briana had wondered earlier, who the hell actually moves to northwest Minnesota?

Fortunately he put an end to my suffering later that evening with a characteristically chipper reply. “Wow Chris, this is unbelievable!” he wrote. He suggested we come out to visit and look at rentals and homes immediately. “We’d absolutely love to have you and whenever you plan your visit, plan on staying with us! I’ll get some listings for area homes for you as soon as I can too!!!!” His exclamation points were reassuring.

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Finding homes, as it turned out, was proving to be a challenge. We scoured realtor.com but there were never more than a small handful of places available in the area. Still, what we saw was promising: a five-bedroom house in Oklee for $45,000. A farmhouse with acreage for $100,000. With a D.C. salary, even on one income northwest Minnesota was our oyster.

Online, at least, there were no rentals to speak of. The closest Craigslist was for Grand Forks, North Dakota, and it listed zero rental houses for anywhere in or near Red Lake County. The papers, like the Red Lake Falls Gazette and the Oklee Herald, didn’t have websites. It was looking increasingly like we’d actually have to buy something.

But as the months went on, even the promising listings started showing cracks. The $45,000 house in Oklee? A “fixer-upper” needing work. Same for the farmstead, on an even larger scale. Could we maybe camp in the barn while we fixed up the house? We were starting to find out why nobody ever moved to northwest Minnesota—it was impossible to find a place to live.

I started getting desperate, searching listings farther afield: Polk County, Pennington County, Duluth. It was all northern Minnesota, right? But Briana quickly put the kibosh on this. “You can’t make a big stink about the ‘worst place to live’ in America and then move to the second- or third-worst place; that would be stupid,” she said. She was right, of course. And capping my whirlwind romance with Red Lake County by moving my family next door to, say, Polk County would probably whip up an entirely new set of controversies. Best not to stir up any regional rivalries; I was already on thin ice.

Meanwhile, we started cluing in friends and coworkers to what we had planned. Reaction among other colleagues tended to be mixed, with a definite dividing line by age. Older coworkers, particularly ones with small kids, would come up to me and tell me how great an idea it sounded. “Wow, that’s so cool!” is something I heard over and over again. “God I would love to get out of D.C.” Clearly we weren’t the only ones struggling with work-life questions.

Twenty-something coworkers, meanwhile, were curious but slightly horrified. “Do they even have internet out there?” a number of them asked. Yes, I explained. “What do people even . . . do out there?” Well, I said, I’m going to find out.

Briana faced a similarly divided reaction among her coworkers, particularly among the women. Some questioned whether she’d be okay walking away from a promising career that she was finally beginning to get established in. But others said yes, it’ll be amazing for the kids and you can always come back to the career later when you’re ready. Hearing that sentiment, particularly from some of the older women in the office, helped reinforce the idea that this didn’t have to be a permanent change—she could come back. This was particularly true of jobs in the federal government, which has rules in place making it easier for people who’ve stepped away for a few years to return to work at their previous level of pay and responsibility, provided that a job is available.

My mom was ecstatic, a reaction driven primarily by her safety concerns. She fretted endlessly about the possibility of one of the twins tumbling down one of the three sets of steep stairs that linked our current living space together. The sidewalks around our place were dodgy and abruptly ended in odd locations, which combined with narrow twisting roadways meant that a grandson getting struck by a car was always in the back of her mind.

Briana’s family was supportive, but a little more guarded in their response. Her parents, having lived the military lifestyle of frequent moves that took them far from family, understood that this kind of thing can happen in the course of a person’s career. But a number of them asked, “If you’re going to do that, why don’t you just move back to New York to be closer with us?” We had, in fact, briefly considered this. But putting a few thousand miles between ourselves and upstate New York was a feature, not a bug, of our new plan. Our New York families were complicated, and all things considered it would be nice to have some distance between us and them.

As winter turned into spring I wrote to Jason and told him we’d like to take him up on his offer to stay if it was still open—it would be just Briana and me for a long weekend. We’d fly in to Minneapolis, rent a car, and drive up the state to Red Lake Falls. Bri would get to see some of the countryside that way, which she insisted on—keep in mind she had agreed to this whole adventure sight unseen, on the basis of my recommendation alone.

I mentioned we’d been having difficulty finding places, and Jason and his dad, Dick, got to work right away. They set us up with a Realtor friend of theirs and started asking around town to see who was privately selling a home, or would be considering doing so in the future. Dick and the Realtor, Loren, managed to rustle up a list of eleven properties to look at. Most of them had no internet footprint whatsoever—they were all but invisible to anyone looking for housing online. As we came to realize, private sales—direct transactions between a buyer and seller, unmediated by any Realtor or other professional—were a lot more common out there than in Baltimore.

On March 10 we arrived in Minneapolis and began our trek up the Minnesota countryside. Much of the Minnesota landscape, particularly in the eastern half of the state, resembles upstate New York—dense maple and pine forests covering rolling hills, dotted with small towns and lakes. Along the way we stopped at Lake Itasca State Park, where the mighty Mississippi River starts its journey from its source, just a tiny trickle a child can jump across.

We pulled over at a scenic overlook and turned off the car. The silence was profound, almost deafening. We hadn’t heard anything like it in months, years maybe, so accustomed were we to the background din of a dense urban environment. After several minutes of adjustment our ears became attuned to a whole new soundscape, the subtle rhythms of nature that usually get buried beneath humanity’s hue and cry—a rustle of leaves, a creak of ice on the lakeshore, an unseen animal skittering beneath the snowline.

The silence was a relief, and helped put our minds at ease about what we were getting ourselves into. Surely nothing but good could come of taking our children out of the clamor and bustle of the city to a quieter, slower place—one where they would have the space and silence to think, to develop an interior life, to learn to listen to and appreciate life’s quieter, subtler rhythms.

Briana told me later that that moment at Itasca was a turning point in her decision that moving to Red Lake Falls was the right thing to do. “The silence . . . it filled me up,” she said. “It was peace. I wanted our family to have that kind of peace.”

We continued north and west, following the thinning forests to the plains. We got to Jason’s house that evening, a little later than we thought we would. Dick came stomping down the driveway to meet us. “Well where in the hell have these east coasters been, who told us they’d be here at seven?” he thundered. Briana was mortified. Dick laughed a hearty laugh. “Welcome to Red Lake County,” he said, offering her a big bear hug. “Nothing to worry about, you can’t be any worse than that husband of yours.”

We went in for a meal Jason cooked while Dick laid out the itinerary for our whirlwind real estate tour, which stretched out from one end of the county to another. “We’ve had people beating the bushes all over the place looking for somewhere for you to stay,” he said. “You remember Chuck Simpson?” Commissioner Kiss-My-Butt. “He’s been out there working harder than everyone; even he’s excited you’re coming to stay.”

The next day started early. Most of the places we were scheduled to look at were for sale, not rent, but they were well under our price limit of $150,000. Dick and Jason drew what appeared to be a big distinction between places that were “in town” and those that were “in the country.” Briana and I thought this was hilarious, since as far as we were concerned everything from here to Grand Forks was “the country.”

But we soon understood that when folks in northwest Minnesota say “in the country,” they mean it. One of the stops on our itinerary was a tidy little place on the edge of the county. To get there we drove through the fields of the western county on the paved roads, then turned off on a dirt road. No problem, we had lived on a dirt road for a period of time in Vermont. We could handle this.

After bumping down the road for a few miles we hitched a right onto an even smaller and more rustic dirt road. It appeared to be somebody’s driveway but no, Jason assured me, it was a road. “I got the bus stuck at the turnaround up here a few years ago picking up the kids who live out here,” he said.

After several bumpy miles we at last arrived at the property, a low-slung modular home on six acres. Aside from the house, a barn, and a shed there were no other buildings to be seen anywhere, in any direction. The nearest neighbor was miles away.

We toured the property and talked to the owners, Shari Rolf-Baird and her husband. “Yeah, it’s pretty peaceful out here,” Shari said. “Lotta space for the kids to run around; there’s the whole barn for them to explore and build forts in.” I could just picture it: Jack and Charles running about in the country, no cars, no strangers, no hassles. It was beautiful.

“Of course, you gotta keep an eye out for the wolves and the bears,” Shari added nonchalantly.

“I’m sorry, what?” said Briana.

“We keep the rifle by the door for the wildlife, especially the bear. He’s around so much we’ve got a name for him; we call him Brutus. Haven’t had any problems with him yet but you never know.”

After the tour we got back in Jason’s car.

“No,” Briana said before I had even opened my mouth.

“Come on,” I said. “We can teach the kids about, like, wildlife safety.”

“Absolutely not.”

“But there’s nobody around for mi—”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of!” she said. “You think I want to be cooped up all alone in that house with you all winter? Me taking care of the twins and you trying to write and doing some kind of weird Shining thing? No.”

“Okay, fair enough.”

So that was “the country.” We kept looking, visiting homes within the limits of the towns of Brooks and Red Lake Falls. We stopped for lunch in the middle of the day at Carol’s Cozy, the only bar-restaurant in Brooks. When we walked in a bunch of workers from nearby farms were already in there, and it felt like a classic record-scratch, freeze-frame moment—conversation stopped, and all eyes turned to us as we walked in. I saw what I thought were a few familiar faces from my trip the previous summer, but they either didn’t recognize me or didn’t care to extend a greeting. Forget Minnesota Nice, it was downright Minnesota Nippy in there.

I began to feel a mild panic attack coming on. What the hell were we doing, anyway? Walking into a strange community a thousand miles from anywhere, assuming we could just set down roots and elbow our way into society? People usually move for familiar reasons—a job, a spouse, a family. According to the census, among people who moved five hundred miles or more in a given year, half moved for job-related reasons, a third moved for family, and about 18 percent moved for housing. Just 2.4 percent of long-range movers cited a reason that didn’t fall neatly into one of those categories. But our move was 100 percent of our own volition, prompted by little more than a desire to get the hell out of D.C.

It was nearly inevitable that at some point I would write a story that would piss off a bunch of people in the country. Say, about gun control, or about the Republican Party. What would happen then? Would they show up at my door? Leave threatening messages on my phone?

I’d received plenty of angry and unhinged emails during my time at the Post, but nothing that ever made me fear for myself or my family. We lived in a large metro area where there was some safety, I felt, in anonymity. I came home from work and I wasn’t Chris, the National Reporter, but Chris, the guy from 738 Pleasant Hill.

But that anonymity would be gone in Red Lake County—even if my relationship with the place hadn’t been the subject of a media circus, there’s no getting lost in the crowd in a small town. That’s great for raising kids or feeling like a part of the community, but what happens if you do something that really pisses that community off?

Despite my misgivings, lunch went by uneventfully. At the end of it, in fact, the waitress surprised everyone in the place by bringing us all out a free slice of pie, on the house. Maybe I was overthinking things.

I didn’t have high hopes for one of the last places we looked at, a property in Red Lake Falls that the Brumwells referred to as “the purple house.” It wasn’t much to look at from the outside—it was basically a large, light purple box with a garage attached. Given slightly different trim it would have been easy to mistake for an auto repair shop. But it was on a big lot, even by northern Minnesota standards, somewhere between a half and whole acre as best as I could tell. There were lilacs, lilies, and Concord grapes planted along much of the perimeter, although under the previous owners they hadn’t been tended to for years. There was also the shadow of a huge garden near a spacious shed. If nothing else, there was lots of room for the boys to run around.

We went in through the garage and it looked like, well, a garage. No surprises there. I was prepared to write the whole place off until we stepped through the door to the house proper, where we were surprised to see a large, wide-open space with a gently vaulted ceiling. Everything had a fresh coat of paint. John and Sandy Klein, the neighbors who had purchased the place from the prior owners and cleaned it up to sell, assured us it was move-in ready—a big plus, given that we weren’t going to have much time for any remodeling with a pair of two-year-olds in tow. Even more surprising, there was a spacious finished basement below, with three bedrooms in addition to the master bedroom on the main floor. One for the twins, one for guests, and one for my home office. Plus, a roomy play area where all the twins’ toys and assorted toddler paraphernalia could go.

We tried to play it cool but I could tell by the look in Briana’s eye that she was sold already—this was the place. Just thinking of what we’d do with it felt like winning the lottery. It had a staggering two and a half large bathrooms, more than either of us had had in a home in our entire lives. The two main bathrooms each had two sinks—one for each member of the family. I’d never lived in a place with a garage—this one had a double attached to the house. I’d also never lived in a place with more than a patch of a yard—this one practically came with a hayfield. The refrigerator even came with a built-in ice machine, an unthinkable extravagance. That comfortable, well-apportioned life—the one that seemed impossibly far away in D.C.—was now tantalizingly within reach.

We told the Kleins we’d get in touch with them and let them know the next day. But that night, over dinner at Jason’s house, we resolved to put an offer in. The Brumwells, of course, got into motion right away to help us make it happen. Dick called on his Realtor friend Loren, who lived about an hour north, in the town of Grygla, to help us draw up the necessary paperwork. We inquired about a commission and Loren said he wouldn’t hear of it; the house wasn’t officially listed so he couldn’t technically do anything with it anyway.

“Tell you what, get me a nice steak dinner after you get settled in town and we’ll call it square,” he said.

Late in the evening, when we were almost done with the paperwork, things hit a snag. Someone mentioned that there had been rumors of drug activity at the place before the Kleins had bought it.

“What was it?” Loren asked. “Were they manufacturing there?”

We had no idea.

“Because if it’s a meth house,” he said, “and there’s chemicals soaked into the walls or the foundation or something like that, you might not know until six months after you move in and one of your kids starts having a seizure.”

Holy shit.

This new information was paralyzing. I had done enough drug policy reporting to know that that assessment seemed extreme, but on the other hand I was no expert. How the hell would we get around this?

“Well, why don’t we just give the sheriff a ring?” Jason said.

Briana and I were dumbstruck. “You can just do that?” we asked.

“Well sure, it’s ten o’clock, Mitch is probably home right now,” Jason said. “I’ve got his number right here on my phone.”

Jason proceeded to give the number a ring and launched right into a chipper conversation, as if calling up the sheriff to inquire about meth houses was something he did every Saturday night.

“Yep. Okay. Thanks, Mitch!” he said, as he hung up. “Yeah no, there was no meth lab there,” he told us. “They had some calls about possible drug use on the property, but they never heard anything about manufacturing on premises.”

So there you had it. A question that could have derailed a home transaction for weeks in Baltimore County was resolved in Red Lake County with little more than a neighborly five-minute phone call on a Saturday night.

Early the next morning, paperwork in hand, we drove back over to the house to make an offer to the Kleins. John was a farmer and a trucker, gruff and a little intimidating with a horseshoe mustache, while Sandy was chipper and full of sunshine. We stood around the kitchen counter and hashed it out—within about five minutes we were all shaking hands over a deal. Dick and Jason were there, too, and though the topic hadn’t even come up, Dick announced he’d put down the five-hundred-dollar honest money deposit. We objected, but we hadn’t even thought to bring our checkbook. He had nothing of it. “Just send me a check whenever you get a chance,” he said.

So that was it—later that day we were on our way back down to Minneapolis, purchase agreement in hand. We were going to be Minnesota home owners. It was starting to get real.

Over the next couple of months we packed up our life in Baltimore and prepared for the move as the Brumwells oversaw the home inspection and other technicalities in Red Lake Falls.

As May rolled up we finalized our packing and said our good-byes, and on the fourth we closed the door on our old house for the last time. We were going to Minnesota.