Chapter 3

Cross-country moves are generally a horrible affair and ours was no exception. I had the easy job, driving the rental truck stuffed with our belongings. Briana followed in our little Honda CRV, stuffed with Jack, Charles, Tiber (our seventy-pound beagle-basset mix), and Ivy (our twelve-year-old cat).

The CRV crew could only tolerate a few hours cooped up in the car before everyone started having meltdowns, so we stretched out the twenty-two-hour drive over five exhausting days. Technically, at this point, we still didn’t even have a home to roll up to. We’d be getting in on a Sunday but the closing wasn’t scheduled until the following day. But the Kleins told us they’d leave the door open and put the keys on the kitchen counter, letting us move in a day early. Not typically the way a real estate transaction would happen in Baltimore.

Eventually we pulled up to our new home in Red Lake Falls. The boys knew it by then only as the Purple House. We hadn’t even gotten the kids out of their car seats before we were enthusiastically greeted by a sweaty, half-naked man. Rob Conwell, his name was, our new neighbor who lived across the street.

He was shirtless and sweaty because he’d been mowing his lawn, he explained. In about five minutes we’d heard half his life story—he was from Oregon, met a Minnesota girl who’d grown up in the area, they ended up moving back here to start a family two decades ago.

He and his wife, Alice, were active in music and theater in the area—did we play any instruments? There was a great little community band the next town over and they were always looking for new players; the conductor was fantastic and rehearsals were on Monday and Wednesday nights at 7 p.m. and—

“That sounds amazing,” I cut him off, hopefully less rudely than it felt. “Maybe we can talk it over once we’re all moved in?”

Of course, Rob said, of course. Welcome to the neighborhood!

We experienced a lot of this in the coming days and weeks—invitations to get involved. The Civic and Commerce Committee needed volunteers. The Northwest Minnesota Arts Council needed board members. The school needed a guest to come read to the kids. Churches needed folks to staff their basement dinners. Rural areas may not have a lot of people but they still needed to get stuff done. In the cities, economies of scale mean either these tasks are professionalized—people get paid to do them—or competition for the most desirable activities, like music and theater groups, is stiff. Here, by contrast, getting involved is easy. If you want to join a band or help with kids or put out fires, just show up. There’s plenty of work that needs to get done.

As soon as we got the kids out of their car seats, Jack tore ass up the garage stairs and into the house. Charlie, however, was transfixed for the moment by the garage. “Dad!” he screamed. “The Purple House has a garage door!”

The first order for the kids in the new place was to run around, opening and shutting all the doors and then flipping all the light switches they could reach. For the first several days you could always tell where in the house Charlie was by the “boi-oi-oi-oi-oing” of the spring door stops he was compelled to flick every time he entered a room.

“There’s three bathrooms?” Jack said. “That’s crazy.” Indeed, compared to our old row house, where there was just one bathroom for all four of us, it was downright extravagant.

That first day the Brumwells and the Kleins came over to help us get all our stuff out of the van. Northern Minnesota boys don’t fuck around when it comes to lifting and moving heavy things, and with their help we wrapped up the job in just a couple of hours—even though Ryan, Jason’s brother, was deathly hungover from a wedding the night before. A few neighbors wandered over to pitch in as well, perhaps more out of curiosity than anything else. One of them, an old guy with a gray ponytail, brought over a six-pack and introduced himself as Larry Eukel.

Larry told us he had actually grown up on the property we now lived on, had swung on a tire swing from the very same oak tree that now overlooked the yard. “It’s a great place to grow up,” he said, “and boy is it nice to see a young family in that yard again.”

We subsequently came to learn that the property had something of a checkered past in more recent years. Neighbors told us of how, one summer, the electric company had shut off power to the place because the people living there hadn’t been paying their electric bill. Well, the Presbyterian church sits right across the alley from the Purple House, and one morning staff arrived to find an extension cord running from one of their external outlets over to the garage. A handwritten note said it was connected to the freezer and could they please not unplug it? In the spirit of charity, they didn’t. There were mean dogs in the yard, neighbors said. At one point somebody had parked an RV on the lot and appeared to be living out of it. Just a lot of weird stuff going on, and in a quiet, tiny midwestern neighborhood like this one, weird is bad.

The house is in an area of town known as the Hollow, a little quarter circle of the Clearwater River floodplain that’s protected to the south and east by the modest hill leading up to the main level of the county. It bears the distinction of being the coldest neighborhood in town. One winter several years back, the Kleins told us, the water main under the street froze up and they were left without water until spring. The town told them to run a hose from a neighbor’s house and they’d prorate both the bills. What else could they do? You can’t unfreeze a northern Minnesota water main in February. I was glad Briana didn’t learn about this until well after we had moved. And sure enough, our second winter here it happened again. The Kleins’ water went dry, and they again had to run a hose to the other neighbor’s place. Our water appeared to be fine but the folks at city hall instructed us to keep a tap running at all times, until the spring thaws came. They told us they’d just bill us our usual amount on our water bill so we didn’t have to pay extra for the privilege of helping the town keep its infrastructure working.

Red Lake Falls feels like the kind of town your grandparents lived in, and I mean that in the best possible way. The town’s 1,400 residents keep tidy homes on tidy lawns with sprawling vegetable gardens out back. To an adult living here for the first time, it feels like the kind of place you remember visiting during summers in childhood, where memories are built on lazy afternoons spent on broad, sunny lawns while the adults relax on a screened-in porch, cocktails in hand.

The town is home to a weekly newspaper, the Red Lake Falls Gazette, which publishes mostly high school sports news. In the summer when things get slow a new lawn gnome in someone’s yard is enough to merit a front-page spread. While it’s nice to see a small-town print newspaper alive, nobody would mistake the paper for a bastion of hard-hitting journalism. The contents are mostly taken up by photos of goings-on at the schools in town. Coverage of genuine local events, like city council meetings and the like, is virtually nonexistent. There was no coverage of local political races in 2016 and 2018, even though a dazzling array of candidates were on the ballot for everything from school board seats to county water commissioners. At one point the paper ran what appeared to be a story about a local college professor who gave his students a clever lesson illustrating the dangers of socialism. The story was fake, and had been cut-and-pasted from an email forward.

The town has two gas stations that double as social hubs—in the mornings different crews of cantankerous old-timers shuffle off to their favorite tables to discuss the day’s news. There are two bars serving nearly identical foods and drinks at opposite ends of town, the kinds of laid-back midwestern places where little kids can be found running around in the back until late at night when their parents finally go home.

There’s an independent grocery store, Brent’s, that offers roughly the same variety of goods as the Grand Union in Oneonta, New York, did thirty years ago. Avocadoes are the most exotic produce they stock. For cheeses they have Swiss, cheddar, and something called “farmer’s cheese,” which is sort of like a milder version of Monterey Jack, if such a thing were possible. Transplants to the area inquiring about delicacies such as “goat cheese” or “cilantro” are met with quizzical stares. The meat section offers Norwegian delicacies like pickled herring in a jar and slabs of lutefisk around the holidays. There are large sections of the store devoted to pickling, canning, and sausage-making, with an underlying assumption that many locals grow or shoot much of their own food. Pet owners can purchase dried cat food at Brent’s but not canned—the cats of Red Lake Falls are evidently expected to do their own foraging as well.

There’s a town library, which keeps a surprisingly liberal section of children’s books in stock, including Jacob’s New Dress, about a young boy who decides to wear a dress to school. Some controversy attended the addition of this book to the library in nearby Thief River Falls, where it was nearly banned, but parents in Red Lake Falls either didn’t care or didn’t notice.

There’s a post office, of course, where you never have to offer your name or ID to pick up your mail because the employees already know who you are. There’s the town pool, the one that residents fund-raised and built themselves, where Alice, the head lifeguard and our neighbor, will encourage your children to strap on a life preserver and take a plunge off the diving board even if they haven’t fully mastered how to swim yet.

The town’s four houses of worship encompass its religious diversity: one Catholic, one Presbyterian, and two flavors of Lutheranism. The pastor at Bethany Lutheran, Gary Graff, made a point to stop by our house, welcome us to town, and invite us to attend worship there if we were so inclined. There are two small doctor’s offices offering limited standard services like checkups and X-rays several days a week.

There’s a small pharmacy, open nine to five Monday through Friday, where the staffers inquire about your ailments with genuine concern, and will gladly tell you all about theirs if you’ve got a minute to stop and chat.

There is industry in town—Homark, a manufacturer of modular homes, and Wood Master, a maker of outdoor wood furnaces. A paved trail runs from the golf course at one end of town to the farmland at the other, following the length of the old railroad bed and traversing the Clearwater and Red Lake Rivers via sturdy steel trestle bridges.

Those first few days were a whirlwind of new faces—smiling ones, much to my relief. People from all over town dropped off welcome baskets—baked goods, fresh produce from gardens, a surprising variety of pickled vegetable products. Beth Solheim, an older woman with roots in the town who now lived several hours away, stopped by to drop off a watercolor portrait of Tiber that she had painted, based on a photo she’d seen of him on Facebook.

After a decade in the city it’s a shock to move to a place and realize that everybody already knows who you are. People we’d never met would stop us on the street and ask how we were liking it so far, diving into deep personal conversations as if we were familiar friends who’d just had lunch together a few days ago.

One day not long after we moved in we got a call on our new landline phone, which we had to put in since the cell reception was spotty to nonexistent. Briana answered; it was a receptionist at one of the doctor’s offices. This was odd because we hadn’t been to the doctor’s yet.

“Hey, are you guys home?” the receptionist asked, casually.

“Umm, yeah, why?” Bri asked.

“Well, the UPS guy is here and he says he tried to drop off a package at your place but nobody was home, but I told him I was pretty sure you were there today. Do you want me to send him back down there?”

“Uhh, sure, thanks?” Bri replied.

After a while we started to get used to our notoriety. Part of it was due to the publicity that had attended our decision to move, sure. But eventually we realized that this was simply the kind of place where everybody knows everyone—and they even know whether or not you’re home.

A few weeks after the move we attended the wedding of Heather Wallace, Jason’s sister. The reception and dinner were held at the American Legion on Main Street, which we thought was weird—did we have to be veterans to get in? But no, out here the Legion posts were basically just public bars, where anyone could walk in and grab a drink. Inside, dusty old photographs of previous Legion luminaries with strange Scandinavian names lined the wood-paneled walls. The wedding was closed-bar, but the Legion beer was cheap. For dinner there was an enormous vat of pulled pork, a staple at large gatherings in the area. Jack and Charles mingled with a crowd of kids of all ages at the back of the hall, where the door was propped open and children ran freely in and out well into the wee hours of the warm early summer night.

The sense of community contrasted sharply with what we had previously experienced in places like Vermont and Maryland. One of our neighbors in our old row house, we’ll call him James, kept mostly to himself, for instance. He was a strange guy, a little older than me, and didn’t work because he was on disability due to an ankle problem, or so he told us.

Since he didn’t have a job he was always around, and he could be prickly toward his neighbors. Shortly after we moved into our home there he blew his top because, in mowing our tiny patch of a lawn, we had mowed a little bit over onto his portion of the grassy hillside. Weird guy, in short, and we generally tried to avoid him (bad neighbors connected by a common wall: another drawback of high-density living).

One day early in the summer before the twins were born we noticed that James’s car had been parked outside his place for several days but nobody had heard or seen him around. This was strange because we’d usually see him coming or going, or hear him or his TV through the walls, often at late hours of the night. But for several days now, silence.

After a week went by we spoke to some of the other neighbors on our row of six houses. No, they hadn’t seen him, either. It was odd, of course, but none of us were what you’d call his friends, and nobody wanted to try to dig deeper and risk getting involved with whatever weirdness he was surely involved with.

As we learned later, James’s mother, who lived across town, had been trying to get in touch with him, too. No luck. Roughly two weeks after we had noticed him missing, she came by his house with flowers. It was his birthday.

She knocked on the door; no answer. She tried the handle; it was locked. Windows were locked, too. The house was all sealed up. Not knowing what else to do she called a locksmith and the police. They forced their way in and followed the smell to where his body lay alone in the basement, dead by his own hand. He had killed himself two weeks ago and nobody had any inkling.

We felt a little bit of guilt—was there anything we could have done? But of course, there wasn’t. We didn’t know the guy, our interactions with him tended to go poorly, and if we were being honest, life became a little easier knowing we wouldn’t have to hear him banging on the walls at 3 a.m. or screaming at us because of a lawn-mowing impropriety. James’s tale became a macabre story we told acquaintances and friends. Bri was about six months pregnant with twins around this time; one of our close friends remarked that during the two weeks his body lay in the basement, James’s ghost had traversed the wall between our units and taken residence within one of the twins. We all laughed. But that’s life in a lot of cities—surrounded by humanity, you can still die alone.

Needless to say, when I tell this story to folks in Red Lake Falls they gasp in shock and disbelief.

The thing I remember most from those first few weeks is the collective sense of wonder at having a home—a real, honest-to-goodness single-family home. I had grown up in one of these, after all, so it represented something of my default expectation for what a family should live in. But after a decade on the pricey east coast it had seemed like the expectations of childhood were being trampled by the cold fiscal realities of metro life in the twenty-first century. Out here, though, it was different.

Perhaps our greatest sense of having “made it” as adults came one evening shortly after our move. The kids were in bed and we were watching TV on the couch. At the show’s end I got up to go to the bathroom, prompting Briana to leap off the couch and run into the room ahead of me, a trick we often played on each other in Maryland.

“Come on, you’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said. “I really have to go!”

“You realize we have two other bathrooms now, right?” she asked before shutting the door in my face. I was thunderstruck. It was a revelation—no more fighting over the one cramped little commode of our Maryland house. If we both had to take a dump at the same time we could do so, in private and at our own pace, like civilized people. It seemed extravagant. According to the U.S. Census’s Survey of Construction, in 2016 just 3.7 percent of new homes were built with one bathroom or less, while about 35 percent had at least three or more. Moving from Maryland to Minnesota vaulted us from the bottom 4 percent of the American toilet distribution almost all the way to the top third.

The house seemed huge to us. After we’d lugged all our belongings in—everything that had our old place bursting at the seams—there was still empty space everywhere. We turned some of the leftover space downstairs into a play area for the twins. In the coming weeks Briana filled it with maps and educational posters, as well as the twins’ collection of toys brought from Maryland. It was like having a preschool classroom right in the house. The twins were thrilled to have a space of their own to ransack and make a mess of, as they saw fit, provided they cleaned it up somewhat before bedtime.

The house isn’t huge by any stretch of the imagination—maybe 2,000 square feet, roughly 25 percent smaller than the typically newly constructed home, according to census figures—but to us it may as well have been a palace.

We started to understand the profound effect of living space one evening after dinner, when Jack and Charles linked arms and announced they were headed off to the playroom together to play. They were typically fractious; they often quarreled and squabbled over toys and attention and countless perceived slights, real and imagined. But after years of constant policing and keeping a watchful eye on their every move, suddenly here, in Red Lake Falls, in a house with space they could truly call their own, for the first time they were ready to go off and be themselves by themselves, with no need for parental intervention. They finally had the space to become themselves without constantly chafing against each other. If tall fences make good neighbors, large playrooms make good siblings.

People with an affinity for dense urban spaces—many who happen to be employed at the universities and media outlets that shape so much of contemporary public opinion—tend to take a dim view of the classic single-family home. They take up too much space. They foster car culture. They’re unsustainable from an environmental standpoint. High-density housing—condos and apartments—is far preferable to suburban sprawl, or so they tell us. It’s better for everyone.

But a lot of the writing on this topic doesn’t really grapple with the draw of the single-family home to begin with, the huge place it occupies in the American psyche and culture. For a body of thought that deals with the proper role and uses of physical space in society, it’s remarkably blind to the importance of space to individuals. It doesn’t wrestle with what it can really mean to a person to not have to share walls and floors with noisy neighbors. It doesn’t fully appreciate the difference between living out one’s life in a cramped space versus an expansive one. To have ample outdoor space to run, to breathe in, to call your own. The market urbanists in the nation’s media centers acknowledge, on some level, that people tend to desire these things. But many of the people who write about the topic don’t seem to truly understand these desires themselves. That’s a big blind spot, especially considering that so many of these people are responsible for creating the culture consumed by the entire country.

Beyond that, the market urbanists seem to view the choice of living spaces as a binary one: either you’re in the cities (high density, good) or the suburbs (low density, bad). Given that roughly 80 percent of the country lives in the cities or their suburbs this is an understandable place to start the discussion, but it overlooks the completely different modes of living available in small towns and rural areas.

Then there was our new lawn. Given the sheer size of it—approaching three-fourths of an acre—it was clear we’d have to get a proper lawn mower to take care of it, something I’d never had to do before—we’d relied on a small human-powered reel mower to deal with our tiny patch of Maryland greenery.

I picked up a proper gas-powered push mower from Wal-Mart that spring and was excited to give it a spin for the first time. But the instruction book said I needed to add some oil to the engine before I fired it up, and damned if I couldn’t figure out how to get the oil cap off. The cap was an odd-looking yellow thing. I twisted it, pulled at it, tugged it this way and that. It didn’t budge. I referred to the instructions. I pulled up YouTube videos on my phone. Nothing.

Miraculously, after I’d been puzzling over the mower for about an hour a pickup truck pulled into the driveway. It was Michael Baker, the fire chief in the nearby town of Plummer and an engine mechanic at Arctic Cat in Thief River. He’d been one of the local voices gently chiding me on Twitter after my first story ran, sending me photos of the view of the Red Lake River from his back porch.

“Gonna do some mowin’, eh?” he asked.

“Only if I can figure out this oil cap,” I said. He walked over, crouched down, and popped the cap off with a flick of his wrist.

“Here you go,” he said. I thanked him and finally got to mowing. As of this writing, more than two years after that day, I still haven’t changed the oil on that mower. The truth is I still can’t figure out how to get that cap off.

At the Post I’d penned a number of columns railing against lawns. “Lawns are a soul-crushing timesuck and most of us would be better off without them,” I wrote on August 4, 2015, less than two weeks before I saw the words “Red Lake County” for the first time. They soak up water—nine billion gallons a day nationwide, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—they kill native biodiversity, and according to the American Time Use Survey the average American spends more than seventy hours a year on lawn and garden care. What a waste!

I still believe all this on some level. And yet that summer, when I stopped to consider my own lawn—my own patch of land, an environment for me to shape and cultivate as I pleased, a place for my children to play, grow, explore, and run free—I couldn’t wait to get out there and start mowing for myself. One of the foundational principles of statistics is that what’s true at the population level is often not true at the individual level. The average American can expect to live 78.6 years—but that doesn’t mean that you, the individual reading this book, will live that long. Maybe you’ll live to be a hundred. Maybe you’ll get hit by a bus tomorrow. Who knows? The point is, things can be true for populations that aren’t true at all for individuals. Do I still believe the median American lawn is a waste of space? I do. Would I defend my own to the death, weed whacker in hand? Absolutely. The numbers often make hypocrites of us all.

Lawn care in northern Minnesota is a highly fraught topic, filled with land mines for unsuspecting newcomers. People here trim their grass down to about the length you’d find on a putting green. If your grass is much higher than that you’re expected to apologize for it to everyone you meet, especially if someone catches you outside doing something other than mowing it. You’re responsible for upkeep of the sidewalk in front of your house, too, which includes keeping weeds from growing in the cracks. One day that summer I was outside with the boys and Rob, the half-naked neighbor, came by. He gestured toward a couple of dandelions springing from a gap in the sidewalk. “Growing a hedge, eh?” he said. He didn’t need to say anything else. After the boys were down for a nap I slunk back out to the sidewalk with the weed whacker.

One of the first things we wanted to do after moving in was to start a garden. There was already space on the property set aside for that, a partially fenced-in corner of the yard that had been used as a garden in years past but which was now just a tangle of weeds and long grass.

We spent several weekends cleaning out the light brush and mending the fence all around the garden plot—we’d see regular patrols of deer in the neighborhood in the evenings, and rabbits were everywhere. Plus, Dick Brumwell showed us a picture of a black bear that he’d been watching rummage through his bird feeder that spring. We didn’t know what bears do to gardens and didn’t want to find out.

Finally, it was time to work the soil. The garden area was too large to till by hand, but the Kleins had a large, gas-powered roto-tiller from the farm they let us borrow. One thing we came to understand was that pretty much everyone up here owns “equipment.”

One mild Saturday afternoon I finally took the tiller to the garden. It was satisfying work, guiding the machine along a gridded path, turning dead grass and compacted dirt into rich, fluffy black soil. At one point when I was nearly finished I took a break and turned the tiller off, and that’s when I heard the sounds.

They were tiny, almost imperceptible squeaks. Kind of like little birds, but the pitch was a little off. I searched for the source and found it coming from the ground, one of the patches I had just finished tilling. I shoved some dirt aside, and realized with shock and horror that I had roto-tilled a nest full of baby rabbits.

They were tiny, with their eyes barely open. They had been grievously wounded by the blades of the tiller, but unfortunately none of them was quite dead.

Shit.

When I was a kid, about eleven years old, a group of my friends and I came upon a baby bird on a sidewalk that had fallen out of its nest. It had no feathers yet and its eyes weren’t open. It was very badly injured and appeared to be gasping for air. We knew we’d have to put it out of its misery, and after a few minutes of hushed discussion it was decided that one of us would ride over its head with our bike tire, which was the most humane option for ending its suffering among the limited tools we had at our disposal. As the son of a veterinarian I was elected to carry out the mercy killing. I rolled my tire forward and there was a quick crunch and then it was over. To this today I have occasional agonizing dreams involving small, delicate creatures past the point of mending and in horrible pain.

The rabbits were the bird all over again. It was obvious that they were beyond repair—taking them to the local veterinarian was out of the question. But I couldn’t simply leave them there to suffer in the dirt until they expired. Instead I opted for the humane choice—I walked into the shed and grabbed a metal shovel. I used it to decapitate each of the wounded rabbits as swiftly as I could. The work was excruciating, but mercifully short. I placed the tiny bodies in a bag for the garbage and worked the blood-soaked dirt back into the bed of soil with my boot. Thus was the Ingraham family’s Minnesota garden consecrated.

I had kind of a queasy, uneasy feeling afterward, like a nightmare had come to life. But part of me was strangely invigorated. After all, wasn’t this part of what we came out here for? To get out of the city and closer to the land, to live a life where the stakes were real and messy, where we’d be exposed to nature’s teeth and nails and learn whether we had any of our own?

Granted, killing five baby rabbits with a shovel didn’t exactly make me Grizzly Adams. But it made me a little different than the person I’d been back in Maryland. When I told coworkers and friends from the east coast about the rabbits, they recoiled in shock and horror: “Oh, the poor bunnies!” they’d say. When I told folks in Red Lake Falls about the mishap, on the other hand, it barely merited a reaction. “Eh. Gotta do that sometimes,” John Klein told me.

Several weeks later another baby rabbit appeared in our garage one morning. It was older than the ones I’d killed in the garden, old enough to be out hopping about on its own but not smart enough to avoid getting stuck in the garage. I saw an opportunity for redemption.

“We talked about getting a pet rabbit when we came out here, right?” I said to Bri, holding forth the baby rabbit in a cardboard box. “Maybe this is a sign. This is how we atone for the dead bunnies in the garden.”

“You realize wild rabbits die pretty much immediately when you try to bring them into a house, right?” she said. “They freak out. They literally die of fright. Their hearts basically explode.”

“Not this rabbit,” I said. “You watch. This rabbit is here for a reason. It has a purpose. This rabbit will live.”

It was dead by the next morning. Another tiny corpse wrapped in a grocery bag and set in the trash.

After that we decided the only thing to do was to purchase some proper domesticated rabbits. We picked a pair up at a nearby county fair later that summer. We bought them off a kid who was charging ten bucks apiece, cash, for them. We gave him a twenty and he handed us a box with two rabbits inside. Easy-peasy. The kids christened them Mubba and Bubba, since “mubba” had been Charlie’s word for rabbit when he was still learning how to talk.

Among our other animal adventures that first summer was a memorable trip with the kids to Carl Schindler’s dairy farm. This was the same place I visited during my reporting trip, where I proved my regular guyness by letting a calf suck on my hand. Now it was the twins’ turn.

Carl took us all to the main barn so the boys could feed the cows some hay. He showed us how to pick out the tightly packed leafy bits of the hay that the cows really liked. The boys were a little put off by being surrounded by a herd of thousand-pound beasts with big wet noses and long, rough tongues, but they took to it surprisingly well.

As we petted the cows, I saw out of the corner of my eye the mangy old yellow farm dog from my prior visit trotting up to us. His tail was wagging and his head was high. He had something in his mouth. When he got a little closer I realized it was a dead kitten.

Charles turned and examined the gruesome spectacle. “Kitty sleeping!” he said.

“Ha-ha, yeah, kitty . . . sleeping,” I said.

“Oh geez, sorry,” Carl said. He shooed the dog out of the barn. “Been a while since he did that,” he said nonchalantly.

“Kids, we’re not in Baltimore anymore,” I said.

“Kitty sleeping,” Jack said.

That first summer we spent many of our evenings and days down at Voyageur’s View, the Brumwells’ campground and tubing business. The place had kind of a perpetual spring break vibe—on the weekends in particular big groups of college-age kids would rent out campgrounds and spend the days drinking on the river and the nights drinking by the fire. Large groups would often come down from Canada—the border was only ninety minutes away. Those groups had a particular reputation for rowdiness. Canadian kids evidently treated Red Lake Falls the same way American kids treated, say, Tijuana—a place to drink and go wild south of the border.

But as many people in town explained, when the Brumwell siblings took over the business from their dad, Dick, they actually cleaned things up a lot—requiring advance reservations to camp and cutting down on after-dark partying, among other things—in an effort to put a more family-friendly face on the business. It seemed that everyone in town under a certain age had worked at the campground as a teen one summer or another, and they all had hair-raising stories to tell—drunken brawls, knife fights, late-night debauchery of all sorts. Ryan and Jason had spent nearly all their childhood summers at the campground and partook in the madness from a young age, drinking and partying with friends and campers starting in their early teens.

Those days were over, however. They had spent enough beer-soaked nights at the campground for many lifetimes and now, as adults taking over the business, they wanted to dial things back. Folks in town generally gave them credit for their efforts, even if there was still work to be done.

One of the twins’ favorite things to do at the campground was ride around in the short red bus the Brumwells used to deliver firewood to the various campsites. They’d clamber into the back, where the seats were stripped out and replaced with a wobbly pile of firewood rising up to the ceiling, and then hold on for dear life as Ryan or Jason or whoever tore ass around the property, stopping to drop off wood and shoot the shit with their often drunk clientele.

Briana and I were mortified the first time they did this—is there anything more dangerous than letting a two-year-old bang around on top of an unsecured wood pile in the back of a bus rattling down a bumpy dirt road? But the Brumwells seemed unfazed by it, as if it were something they did every day. Eventually their ease became ours.

The campground was an education for all of us that summer. The boys got to ride around the place on all manner of recreational vehicles the Brumwells had lying about—golf carts and ATVs and beat-up old buses. Going fast, off-road, atop a vehicle powered by a combustion engine was simply part of the fabric of childhood out here. For the boys’ third birthdays Briana and I had got them tricycles. I had dreams of teaching them the simple pleasures of being outdoors on a bicycle. But the Brumwells one-upped us by getting them Power Wheels, the little battery-operated vehicles that kids sit on and operate with the push of a button. I was trying to teach them the joys of human-powered transit, but the Brumwells were giving them an education in how kids in rural Minnesota got around.

The nights at the campground tended to go late. One of the most disorienting things we experienced after the move was the length of the late spring and early summer days in northern Minnesota, on account of how far north we were. Red Lake Falls is farther north than the northernmost tip of Maine. It’s farther north than Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City in Canada. In fact, it’s farther north than more than half the entire population of Canada, owing to how much of the Canadian population is packed into the southernmost section of the country that dips down into the Great Lakes. Demographically speaking, it’s accurate to say that Red Lake Falls is farther north than Canada.

The extreme latitude means that summer days run long. On the solstice the sun doesn’t set until 9:30 p.m., a full hour later than in D.C. But the sky remains light far longer than that, owing to the tilt of the planet. True darkness doesn’t arrive until well after midnight, and the sky begins to lighten again less than ninety minutes later. D.C., on the other hand, gets more than five hours of total darkness on the summer solstice.

The long evenings mean that the neighborhood kids are often out late on summer nights. The playground at the park down the road didn’t really start to get hopping until about eight o’clock at night. One evening one of Melissa Benoit’s sons, four-year-old Henry, rang the doorbell to see if Jack and Charles wanted to play. It was quarter after nine.

That playground was something else to get used to. It was made of wood and steel and dated back at least to the time the Brumwell boys were small children, and maybe even earlier. It was huge, towering at least three times the height of the more safety-oriented play structures the twins knew from Maryland. The slides were fast and the modern safety features, like rubberized surfaces and rounded corners, were virtually nonexistent. It was the kind of place where a kid could really break a femur. Naturally, the twins loved it.

One thing we couldn’t get over about the neighborhood kids was how nice they were. Even the older kids would welcome Jack and Charlie into their games that summer. Without any prompting they’d help the little ones clamber up a difficult playground ladder, or loosen the rules of whatever games they were playing to accommodate the clumsy toddlers.

Briana and I had never seen anything quite like it. When I was a kid, for instance, if a younger child attempted to horn in on whatever game we were playing we’d tell them to fuck off, in exactly those words. Here, however, the kids were kind, warm, welcoming to little strangers. You could tell that they enjoyed it, too—they weren’t taking Jack and Charlie under their wings simply because adults expected them to.

One day we saw a group of older kids, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, hanging out by one section of the playground. One of them was holding what appeared to be a packet of cigarettes, and they were all discussing it heatedly. They had clearly found it in the park and were trying to decide what to do with it. In upstate New York in the early 1990s there would have been no question: we’d take those cigarettes off to a secluded corner of the woods and then we’d smoke them.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the kid holding the smokes eventually broke off from the group and walked over to the garbage can near Briana and me and tossed them in. “We found these in the park,” the kid said. “And we didn’t want the little kids to pick them up so we’re throwing them out.”

“That . . . is absolutely the correct thing to do?” I said, dumbfounded. Was this some kind of weird trick they were playing? Like some kind of knockout game variant where they were gonna crack me over the head with a rock and then put it up on Snapchat? But no, they tossed the cigarettes away and then went back to whatever it was they had been doing before.

“Did that really just happen?” I asked Briana.

“That really just happened.” Rates of teen smoking have fallen by roughly 75 percent since the two of us were in high school, so perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised.

These Minnesota kids are okay, I thought. We might actually make it here.