My first friend in Minneapolis was a transplant just like myself.
We connected over a shared passion for photography and a week later were sneaking into the Guthrie Theater after a Friday night show, making our way to the open-air rooftop. Overlooking the Mississippi River and the Stone Arch Bridge, we began chatting about the city itself. My new friend was curious to know my first impressions of the city, being an outsider and freshly arrived. Ironically, I’d been encouraged to make friends here and yet the first person I connected with was someone who wanted to leave Minneapolis. Someone who perhaps saw the city a little like I did, who still felt like an outsider even after he had spent two decades in Minnesota.
“It’s hard to make friends here,” my new friend said without hesitation. Funny enough, my mother had said the exact same thing to me years ago. She had described Minnesota as this backwards, unfriendly, frozen place where you could lose fingers and toes in the winter just to experience two humid brief weeks of summer. She always told me that wild horses couldn’t drag her back. And in fact, this was true. Over the past 30 years, my mother only returned to Minnesota for my grandfather’s funeral. When she left, she was gone. No looking back.
“Why would you come here to Minnesota?” my photography companion asked in a very direct, almost confused way. I suppose I don’t have an answer for that. Not really. I suppose part of me has always wanted to explore this unfamiliar land described to me as a child. Long hours spent with my mother meant a countless retelling of stories about driving on frozen lakes and riding snowmobiles to school. Unfriendly Scandinavians. Car wrecks, people drowning in lakes, temperatures at 40 below. Tales from the northern Iron Range famed in films like North Country or Fargo.
In my vivid childhood imagination, it sounded terrible but it also sounded wild and reckless and well, mythical. I’ve been on a journey for some years to understand my mother. That may be an impossible task. To try to understand an ever-evolving, constantly changing human. But as I grow older, I have wanted to know more and more what created the woman who introduced me to my first few years of life. My conduit to the rest of the world. Her perspective was my first glimpse into reality, for better or worse. And I’ve always wanted to know where that hard, cynical, even fearful side of her was created.
Sitting on the Guthrie Theater rooftop, I took a cold (literally), hard, contemplative look at the city itself. The historic Stone Arch Bridge and the electric blue I-35W Bridge angled across the river in opposing directions exposing the rushing water below. The lights of apartment buildings parallel to the Guthrie illuminated the night with little patches of dim kitchens and the faint glow of bedroom lamps. There wasn’t much going on this side of town. In fact, the lights on the bridges were burned out in places which gave the landscape a half-finished, undone look. For a city, it all seemed very dark. Almost too dark, a little too quiet.
What was very noticeable to me right from my first visit to the Twin Cities was the unshakable, sports team style devotion that people who have chosen to live in Minnesota have for their state. There are little Minnesota shaped icons on the backs of coffee cups at local restaurants and retailers all have their own version of “MPLS love” or “I heart MN” t-shirts prominently displayed for sale. It’s obvious that the people who have chosen to live in Minnesota are here to stay. They love this state and have created a heritage and a history here that they are proud of.
Part of me admires a community of people who are so enthusiastic about where they live. But it also feels a little closed off. Not as a stranger entering a close-knit world of friends and neighbors. But closed off in an “us” centric type of way. As in: “Why would you ever need anything else? We have it all right here.” I heard on the radio yesterday that a girl from Minnesota traveled the globe for a year and only listened to her local Minneapolis radio station. She dedicatedly streamed this station wherever she could find a wifi connection while she was abroad because she felt that the music they played was better than anywhere else. This was stated with some serious local pride and no doubt highlighted to show listeners why their station should be rated as number one. However, it also appears to show a lack of cultural awareness in a glaring way. If you traveled the world, wouldn’t you want to experience other cultures and listen to some local music while you were abroad? This fan-girl devotion to a hometown radio station almost seems closed off and unaware to an outsider like myself.
When I am traveling, I like to dig a little deeper. Ask more questions. Find out more to the story. Get another layer below the surface. Find out the why. Here in Minnesota, that has felt nearly impossible. The “Minnesota nice” that this region is famous for is very apparent. People are cordial and friendly right away. They make eye contact. They are polite. But they don’t want to open up. And if I try to share my own story as a way of making others feel comfortable to share their own, I’ve realized right away that the locals here don’t care. They aren’t interested in where you’re from or why you’re here or what you’re doing. It’s all very nice and polite. But there’s no need to connect and there’s certainly no curiosity to find out anything about a newcomer.
I’m not sure what I expected, but so far the Twin Cities has been a strange experience. A town imitating a city and succeeding in some areas. But with an air of wildness, the legacy of pioneering a frozen frontier running through the veins of the inhabitants of this constantly shifting landscape. People take risks here. But they take risks with their own and they support each other in their joys and failures. I’ve never met so many people who live within 5 miles of their birthplace and within 10 miles of their entire family. But maybe that’s why the community here is so tight-knit. Perhaps this closeness has fostered a type of support and a helping hand that those of us on the west coast only imagine we have.
Minnesota isn’t terrible. This much I have been able to discover and confirm in the last three weeks. I’ll tell my mother this. On my way back to the west coast. Like her, I won’t be staying.
What about you? Have you ever visited the Twin Cities? What were your impressions?