It’s cold. Not really cold, mind you—none of that minus-twenty-or-forty business we’ll get later in the season. But the mercury’s somewhere just south of zero, the winds are whipping like mad up and down the frozen river, and the twins are getting bored.
“Daddy, when can we go?” Charles asks. A certain falling inflection on the “Dad-dy” suggests he’s about five minutes away from losing it completely, melting down right here on the snow. He’s in his jacket, snow pants, heavy boots, mittens, neck warmer drawn up above his nose, one-size-fits-all Northern Grain hat drooping over his five-year-old head, just the way he likes it. But we’ve been out here too long, cold’s creeping in between the layers, wind’s starting to bite.
“Just a few minutes, kiddo, we’re next,” I tell him. I gesture over to the small playground where his twin, Jack, is gleefully whizzing down a metal slide, landing with a hard thud on the ice every single time but not minding it at all. “Why don’t you go play with your brother for a few more minutes?”
“I don’t want to,” he says, same inflection. Despite being twins, Jack and Charles are about as different as two brothers can be. Among many other things, Jack doesn’t mind the cold at all; he’ll run around outside for hours until he’s soaked through from the snow on the outside of his jacket and the sweat within, big clouds of hot, happy exhaled kid breath following him wherever he goes. He’s a furnace. Charles, meanwhile, is hypersensitive to the cold. He’s taken to insisting on having his snow pants on for even the shortest excursion outdoors, even if it’s just a quick hop from the heated house to the heated car and back. He hates the feel of cold pants on his legs.
“Well then, go over there with Mom and William,” I say. My wife’s helping the one-year-old, our Minnesota baby, chuck fifteen-pound frozen turkeys at an assortment of short PVC pipes standing on their ends. “Turkey bowling,” they call it up here. Yet another way the natives stare down the relentless winters with whimsy and good cheer. William’s mostly given up on trying to manhandle the frozen birds and is basically just flinging himself down the ice alley toward the pipes. His overstuffed winter gear gives him roughly the same proportions as a bowling ball, so it’s not a bad idea.
“I don’t wanna,” Charles says. He’s about to go code red and I’ve exhausted all my other options so it’s time to go nuclear: I push him down into the snow.
He’s too shocked to say anything at first but I can see the rage and the laughter duking it out across his face. “Daddy,” he says, trying to get back up, but I knock him down again. Got ’em—he’s laughing now. “DADD—” but I give him another shove before he can get it out and he’s rolling around in the snow giggling. Jack hears the commotion, comes tearing over to where we are, and jumps on my back. It’s on.
The three of us tumble through the snow, down the slight slope to where the deep stuff is by the river shore, among the frozen cattails still standing from the fall. I briefly wonder if one of us is going to break through some thin ice to a layer of mud or worse below but I realize that’s stupid—the temperature hasn’t been above freezing in months, it’s barely even been above zero. The river’s been frozen solid for a month at least, probably longer than that.
Soon Briana drops William on the pile and then we’re all there, tumbling around in the frigid snow, the kids whooping and hollering and not even caring when one of them lands face-first in it. Suddenly Jack sits bolt upright.
“Do you hear it?” he says. We all stop and sit still. The sounds of distant baying and yipping grow louder and suddenly there they are—a team of eight lean, muscular dogs hitched to a pair of canvas sleds. It’s finally our turn to run the river.
Back in the summer of 2015 I had no idea that I’d just stumbled across the dataset that would change my life, uproot me and my family from our cozy but constrained suburban D.C. life, and plop us down 1,400 miles away at the edge of the vast, open prairie. A place where it snows eight months out of the year, where winter starts in October and doesn’t end until May. A place where taking the kids out on a weekend dogsledding excursion is just one of those things people do.
The dataset in question was an obscure late-1990s project of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, intended to quantify every single county in America on the physical characteristics that “enhance the location as a place to live.” It assigned a score to counties based on physical characteristics—hills, valleys, bodies of water, nice weather—that most people would agree make a place pleasant to live in.
As a data reporter for the Washington Post, I thought I’d seen it all: numbers that explain everything from the economy to waffles to the zombie apocalypse. But here was something different—natural beauty, quantified. And with impeccable federal credentials.
Even better, the project ranked the counties according to where they fell on the scale. Which of America’s more than three thousand counties are the “ugliest,” according to the federal government? And which the most scenic? And where, reader, does your own county fall into the mix?
The story practically wrote itself, a perfect diversion for D.C.’s August recess doldrums. I mapped the numbers out, wrote a few hundred words to accompany them, slapped a headline on it all (“Every County in America, Ranked by Scenery and Climate”), and called it a day.
Like countless other pieces of data-driven ephemera I’ve written, I forgot about it almost as soon as my editor hit “publish” the following Monday.
Funny thing about ranking places—for every city or town or county that’s at the top of some list, there has to be one all the way down at the bottom. As a country we’re obsessed with superlatives—we want to raise our families in the best places, visit the most famous landmarks, climb the highest mountains, and swim the clearest, bluest seas.
But what about all those other places that don’t make the cut?
This is a story about one of those forgotten places—an obscure corner of the heartland that, from the vantage point of an Excel sheet on a coastal desktop, appeared to have nothing going for it. No distinguishing features whatsoever, save a last-place finish in a county beauty pageant run by federal statisticians in the late 1990s.
Red Lake County (pop. 4,055) in northwestern Minnesota is a place so lacking in superlatives that proclaiming itself “the only landlocked county in the United States that is surrounded by just two neighboring counties” is the closest thing to a boast that you’ll find on the county’s website.
As it turns out, Red Lake County doesn’t have any actual lakes. It doesn’t have any hills. The summers are hot, and the winters are brutally cold. You crunch all those numbers together on a spreadsheet, and it may not be a surprise that the place came in dead last.
I tossed the county website’s border trivia into the story along with a joke about Red Lake County being “the absolute worst place to live in America,” and didn’t think twice about it.
But now “the absolute worst place to live in America” is the place I and my family call home. This book is the story of how we got here, what we found when we arrived, and everything we’ve experienced since then. How our lives changed when we moved from one of the nation’s wealthiest suburbs (median household income: $110,000) to a working-class farming community (median income: $50,000) hundreds of miles from anywhere.
It’s a story about an education in the ways of small-town life. It’s about the people whom I’ve come to call friends and neighbors, who’ve taught us how to fry walleye, make corn shocks, and press apple cider by hand—and who also have gently mocked our big-city “eccentricities” like goat cheese and eggplant parmesan.
But it’s also bigger than that. It’s a tale about two Americas—the coastal centers of power and money, like D.C., and the thousands of towns and villages in between them who feel like they’ve been left out of the national conversation. As the 2016 election came to a close it became clear that the gulf between those Americas is larger than it’s ever been—but is it really?
It’s about a journey to the other side of what social scientists call the urban-rural happiness gradient—surveys consistently show that city dwellers are the least satisfied members of society, while those who live in the countryside and small towns are the happiest.
This book is written specifically for people, like me, who are feeling increasingly stretched thin by the frenetic pace and ever-escalating cost of the big city and suburban lifestyle. People like me commuting fifteen hours a week and rarely seeing their kids because of the vast distance between where jobs are good and where housing is affordable.
People who have driven through long-forgotten rural areas on the way from one big city to another and wondered, “Who actually lives here?” People who have fantasized about throwing their big city jobs away, moving out to the middle of nowhere, and living a simpler life. People who’ve always wanted to raise their kids in a small town like the one they grew up in, but couldn’t figure out a way to make it work.
Data from the Pew Research Center shows that more than half of Americans—54 percent—say they’d prefer to live in a small town or rural area. But more than 80 percent of us live in the cities. That’s a huge disconnect—up to a third of all Americans, living in the cities but dreaming of the country.
On that icy January afternoon the mushers who were running the event helped Briana and all three kids into the front sled. The guy who was guiding us, a grizzled old former sled dog racer, climbed in the back sled.
“Wait, where am I going to go?” I asked.
“You stand on the footboards back there,” he said, gesturing to the runners protruding from the sled’s rear. “Hold on tight, do what I tell you, and don’t fall off.”
“Do you think that’s wise?” I tried to ask, but by then he had given a high-pitched whistle and the dogs were off, baying with the electric excitement of animals doing the one thing in life that they were born to do.
The dogs pulled us away from shore and onto the icy expanse of the river, which meanders 193 miles from Minnesota’s massive Red Lake to the Red River of the North, along the North Dakota border. Our short journey that day looped us around just a few miles of that distance, under the bridges of the town of Thief River Falls and into the open country beyond.
Once the dogs reached cruising speed they became silent, our motion along the river a frictionless glide, the only sounds the whisper of sled runners on the ice punctuated occasionally by an excited outburst from the kids in the front sled.
There used to be sled dog races all over the northern part of the country, the musher said. But not anymore. Winters were getting warmer; the sport was retreating north. Places that still got enough cold and snow to put a team of dogs out on the ice? Those places were special.
I reflected, for a moment, on the long path that had brought us here.