True blue lines
Paris Review deputy editor Matt Weiland opens a Slate piece today with a lyrical paean to Minnesota place names that damn near made my eyes water:
On frozen winter nights in Minneapolis, I used to lie in the dark and listen to the high-school hockey scores. They were read out on the radio—hockey is always news in Minnesota—but I didn’t much care who won. I was 10 or 11 years old, a little bit lonely and a little bit bored, and for some reason I found comfort and distraction listening to the names of towns and cities around the state. Hibbing, Cloquet, Eveleth: the pinch and chap of the Iron Range, with traces of the Finns and French who settled there. Crookston, Warroad, Thief River Falls: the dark romance of the forested northwest. Moorhead, Brainerd, Saint Cloud: the dull thud of the flat and unlovely middle and its Norwegian bachelor farmers. Pipestone, Owatonna, Blue Earth: the dreamy vowels of the riverine south. Did I want to go to these places? No more than I wanted to go to Narnia or Middle-Earth. But I found in their names a kind of secular liturgy, beautiful and full of promise.
I was once at a reception here in Philadelphia chatting with a strapping blond chunk of a man decked out in a tuxedo. He was, I discovered, a former high school hockey player from Minnesota. We reminisced about people’s reverence for the state tournament, and agreed that the phrase “ice hockey” was anathema to sensible sports fans everywhere.
“There’s no room for bullshit, that’s why I love the game,” he said fondly. “There’s a bunch of guys with knives on their feet and clubs in their hands, moving with the speed of cars. If you mess with someone for no good reason, you’re toast, plain and simple. People will see to it.”
Roseau, Bemidji, Lake of the Woods.
Did you grow up in the Twin Cities (I know the author of the essay did)? Because that’s the sort of essay that could only have been written by someone who grew up in the Cities. It’s on the verge of patronizing people who live and grew up in those places.
Now I grew up on the Iron Range/”flat and unlovely middle” border, and those place-names are simply that to me - place-names. North, northwest, west, and south. That’s what they say to me, from the vantage point of my hometown. They say to me: Bob Dylan, suburb of Duluth, hockey sticks and Christian Brothers and my godmother’s home, my orthodontist, the closest “city” to home, my neighbor’s grandma’s home, where half the kids I grew up with who went to college went to college, Katie’s cabin… not Narnia or Middle-Earth…
Funny how these things strike us differently.
Also - it’s hockey. NEVER ice hockey. We’re in total agreement on that.
[…] I had a similar reaction to Jen on reading this blurb on Minnesota place names. Especially, as we were, out in frontier land, the names themselves are interesting and quite different from what you find in New England. You know you’re from Minnesota when you do not hesitate at the pronunciations of “Mahtomedi” or you know the difference between Monticello MN and Jefferson’s estate is not just location. […]