In addition to the pine trees and the clear lakes, we’re known for potatoes. Notorious nitrogen hogs, potatoes take a lot and give little, and they enjoy the sandy glacial soil that surrounds my hometown immensely. One of the largest French-fry producers in America, our town’s largest employer, welcomes all visitors driving up from the big city, its series of white buildings at the south end of town stacked tight like a bread pan of rolls. Each fall, they fry hundreds of thousands of pounds of fries a day over there, and I remember that seasonal stench, smelling like the belch of the great agricultural machine, stretching out like a tarp overhead as my brothers and I played kickball in the yard. All the neighbor kids insisted that the fries we ordered at the local Hardee’s, given their initial fry just down the road, tasted better than Hardee’s fries everywhere else. French fries were revered and considered a local food.
Even then, long before I made food my world, and though my fondness for Main Street was strong, I turned up my nose at the deep-fry emissions. There’s something about realizing as a teenager that you’re launching your life from the middle of nowhere that lends itself to grandiosity and tightens the collar of your nostalgia, a tautness that turns every pop song coming through the radio into a possibility for rising up. I grew up knowing that not only was nothing extraordinary expected of me, but that it was, in fact, gently discouraged. There was a proud monasticism in those clomping boots and resolute faces, and it had something to do with the harshness of the landscape. The people were tough. The “norm” was good enough. The weather, along with some leftover prairie practicality from the homesteading era, colluded to place bets against the dreamers. I harbored this feeling alone until I met friends who felt the same thing. My parents, having grown up in an even smaller town themselves, were oblivious to this notion; they did nothing to either support or dispel it.
With private rebellion, I fantasized about my adult self who left my hometown long ago and was now triumphantly coming back with new eyes. I imagined surprising everyone with my swooping return—just a brief stopover, a holiday homecoming like in the movies—revealing the depths of my fondness for my little town. These histrionics were supported by the 1980s playlist booming from the car radio, from John Cougar Mellencamp’s “I was born in a small town,” to Journey’s “Just a small town girl/Livin’ in a lonely world…” Coming and going could contain so much precious drama. I made myself cycle through departures and returns until the daydream became a sort of simulated homecoming bulimia, a future I put myself through over and over. That was just how inevitable my leaving felt.
Not unlike the swinging temperatures here, the disposition of the place sways theatrically. It’s moody. Malleable. Dependent on perspective. Like many American small rural towns in the middle of nowhere, Park Rapids’s character is formed daily, in the imaginations of those who walk its streets. I discovered later that it can be anything you want it to be.
—
The idea that home could be split, or double-sided, came to me early. In a sense, I was born with it, because from a young age, when I thought about my hometown there were always two: Park Rapids and Pierz, an even smaller town a two-hour drive south, where both of my parents came from. Because they had moved to Park Rapids as adults, my parents thought of themselves as “imports” and their children, like anchor babies, true Park Rapidians. Pierz, still home to most of the family, was their hometown; Park Rapids was ours. In my mind, the two towns were as subtly indivisible as the pith from the peel, the flesh from the juice.
There are three kids in my family—me, Bob, and Marc—and I am the oldest. My dad, Ted Thielen, was an only child, and subsequently the influence of his family took a backseat to my mother’s more assertive, matriarchal side. My mom’s family was thick with women, and none of them were shy. My grandma Dion, the eldest of seven sisters, had three daughters: Joan, Renee, and my mom, Karen. My aunt Joan, who never married or had children, lived in an urban part of St. Paul. Aunt Renee stayed in Pierz, married Keith Thielen (my dad’s first cousin, once removed), and had three kids, all boys, in such tight alternation with my mother’s output that it almost seemed competitive. Regardless of our double dose of Thielen genetics—think of it like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers—the women alone would have laced the family tight. For much of my childhood, I identified as a cousin, as one of six as opposed to just three, and the only girl among them.
In my memory these women are all crowded into the kitchen arguing over the contents of the pot on the stove, their voices joining to scale an imaginary mountain peak of volume. They’re evangelical about everything but religion. We’re believers, of course, good Catholics, people who observe the minor church holidays like All Saints’ Day and keep fans of palms on the wall year-round. But there was no proselytizing, no reference to the great mystery. That sort of talk was reserved for household details, and manners, but mostly for food.
Their belief system could be summed up in three ingredients: butter, fermented pickles, and bacon. We really believed in bacon. Meat in general, actually. My uncle made the bacon and smoked all manner of pork at the family meat market in Pierz; he was the third-generation Thielen to run it (and later, his three sons, my cousins, the fourth). The place is so infused with years of pent-up woodsmoke that everyone who works there exits smelling like a smoky treat; dogs go bonkers around my uncle, yipping and chawing at his fingers. Every member of my family has consumed at least twice the normal lifetime supply of double-smoked ham, country sausage, Polish sausage, smoked wieners, and bacon, so much so that my forty-something living body might just be proof that the fear of nitrates is a contemporary myth. Homemade hot dogs, even if ingested in ridiculous quantity, will not hurt you. Pink smoked pork is holy.
All the women in my family cook bacon slowly, reverently, as if performing a devotion. They cut each piece in half and lay it in a latticed pattern in a warm cast-iron pan, then stand watch over it, jockeying the pieces until the edges all turn crisp and the middles turn tawny but remain pliable. “You don’t really fry it,” my mother instructed. “You want it to sweat a little first, then you flip it. Keep it moving. Take it out when it’s still soft.” Bacon cooked crisp enough to crumble is considered a sacrilege.
Bacon had nonedible uses, too. Say, for example, that you got a sliver in your finger while gathering kindling for a summer campfire, my grandma would have a solution: She’d cut a two-inch length of bacon from the fatty swelled end, salt it heavily, lay the meat over the foreign body, and wrap the finger tightly with gauze.
“Now go to sleep with this,” she whispered. “And when you wake up…” She paused and twisted her lips into a wry pout, foretelling something supernatural. “The sliver will be lying on the bacon.”
I was doubtful but slept in a log position, my mummified finger propped on a pillow, smelling like breakfast all night long. Sure enough, the next day, before I even got out of bed, I unwrapped the layers of gauze, flopped the bacon over, and there it was: a tiny wooden shard lying on a sweaty slab of smoked pork.