I never did find it, or discover who took it, but I’m pretty sure it was blatant sabotage. I loved these guys like my brothers. They could all be such little shits.
As I walked back to the pastry kitchen and packed up my tools—bundling into my knife roll my sharp Japanese knives, offset spatulas, needle-thin cake-testers, the precious espresso plating spoons I’d stolen so long ago from Danube—the move home began to feel distressingly real. I was struck with the uneasy feeling that, as always, my idea of Minnesota-home was double-sided. It was not just one place but two: our home in the woods in Two Inlets, and its nearest town, the Park Rapids of my youth. Through the door cracked open by my memories of those natural flavors—the domineering wild raspberries, the sweet, grassy chives, the searing horseradish—other flavors rushed in, and as they came at me they grew progressively older and more troubling. The oily-bellied smoked lake trout I loved was there, along with the deep sweetness of my mom’s beef braised with onion soup mix, but they were followed by a march of powdered apple cider, canned black olives, mucky cream-of-mushroom-soup casseroles—the cheap, industrial, stereotypically Midwestern flavors that, as much as I wanted to deny it, were folded up into my taste memory and my history as well. Specifically, the American cheese—sitting in a lurid pool like a melted sun, the cheese sauce that at one time so efficiently glued my mom’s pork roast, broccoli, and spaetzle together on the plate—and my family together at the table, had come due for a proper reckoning. I’d spent years trying to erase those homely flavors from my past, but when I gave my nostalgia an inch, it ran down the road a mile. Like an archaeologist picking in the hard-packed clay, I felt a need to return home to excavate the old flavors and all the feelings I’d ever tied to them.
It occurred to me briefly that anyone with more sense would have just let the past stay flapping back behind her and moved on—like every other reasonable small-town girl who had moved to New York to find her people.
7
THE SWEET SMELL OF HOME FRIES
Park Rapids, my hometown, is marooned way up in northern Minnesota, hours away from any big cities, but its location is fairly epic if you’re into American geography. Our town sits just a few miles from the headwaters of the Mississippi River, right on top of the Laurentian Divide, the invisible landmark named “The Height of Land” by the local Ojibwe people. On a map, the dotted line of the divide is what stakes the direction of water to flow in two directions, either north to Canada or south to the gulf, so the river veers sharply upward before heading back down all the way to the gulf in the shape of a shepherd’s hook—basically turning the country’s great waterway into one long, drawn-out, ever-thickening question mark. Park Rapids is positioned right in the crook, in the spot where the river hesitates before figuring out which way to go, at what might be called the river’s most dubious juncture.
Even though the prevailing spirit in this community of three thousand inhabitants is overwhelmingly rural, I didn’t grow up in the country. I grew up in our town’s most aspirationally suburban neighborhood, within biking distance of Main Street, wearing side blinders to the wilderness. Believe it or not, given my childhood isolation, four hours from Minneapolis–St. Paul, I thought of myself as almost urban, because I was not a country kid; I was a townie.
My relationship to the place has always fluctuated dramatically between love and loathing, often with the seasons. During the six months of winter, snow covers everything like a silvery wash of old paint. Gray ruffs of plowed snirt (what they call snow-dirt) decorate the roads, and the sky is opaque white—light in color but heavy. The bears hibernate and so do most of the humans, although even the most homebound of us must surface to go to the grocery store. Tiny houses, some just two rooms wide, crowd the neighborhoods, making for a whole street-string of contented, fat-bellied houses exhaling round puffs from their chimneys. The smoke of local scrub pine—common jack pine and tamarack—smells cheap and perfumey, like pipe tobacco.
The town doesn’t have that haunted, ghostly feeling of so many eastern small towns, no glint of former grandeur or long-lost wealth. It was never rich. Its industry is freshly aluminum-sided. Prosperity here feels self-sufficient—proud, but not extravagant. And come winter, when the lakes freeze over and the tourists leave, the town’s world seems to contract.
The blanket of winter snow highlights all the landmarks. Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statues loom tall in neighboring towns, graphic monuments to a real, still-happening logging era. Present-day loggers and sawyers clomp around town in beige coveralls and loose boots. I remember standing behind one of them in line at the Farm & Fleet store when I was around ten years old, close enough to catch some of his foreign scent, a strangely intoxicating mix of pine juice, musky chain saw fumes, and sweet sawdust.
Then suddenly the snow mountains thaw, marking the end of winter. And during the three-month flash of summer, when the ditches light up with spring-green voltage, when the blue surfaces of the lakes shiver in the wind and the sun beats down onto your arm hanging out the car window, and when the tourists flip-flop around Main Street in swim tops under summer dresses, Park Rapids transforms. The people brighten like flowers in the sun, and the whole town feels quite nice, real Americana. Not ritzy, but resort-town fancy in an old-fashioned way—almost posh.