I once
walked across the Mississippi River.
Before
you become too impressed with that, let me say that it is not the
Mississippi River of your imagination. It is not the romantic Mississippi
that flows past the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, or becomes a small
sea in New Orleans large enough to hold ocean-going vessels, or spills
over its banks every spring and turns millions of acres of bottomland
in the midwest and south into huge, dirty lakes. The image of the
Mississippi River for most people is a river with steamboats and sternwheelers
and rafts carrying little boys and runaway slaves, a huge, violent
river that can change its course if it really wants to and can tear
apart a riverboat with a snap of its wet, muddy finger.
But that's
not where I walked across the Mississippi River. I walked across it
at its source, at Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota. This is a great
point of pride for many of us Minnesotans, that our state squirts
out one of the most famous rivers in the world and sends it on its
way into American history and American folklore. Many of us have paid
homage to it by making a pilgrimage to its birthplace at least once
during our childhoods. It is an impressive place, the birthplace of
the Mississippi. Itasca is a beautiful lake, like so many of northern
Minnesota's lakes, a long, narrow gash scratched out of the soil epochs
ago by a glacier, then filled by the glacier's cold, melted remains.
The water is even bluer than the sky it reflects on a clear day, and
it somehow seems to stay blue even when the sky is cloudy. It's surrounded
by immense stands of pine trees that dot its shore, providing a secluded,
tucked-in feel.
The Mississippi
emerges from a bay on Itasca's north side. It's a dramatic process
as Lake Itasca chatters over a chain of rocks, each rock about the
size of a melon, then swirls around for a moment before crawling northward
through a twisting channel as the infant Mississippi River. Next to
the chain of rocks sits what looks like a vertical log with an engraved
message explaining to visitors that at this point, the river begins
its 2,000-some mile voyage to the Gulf of Mexico.
Standing
there in the river, you can't help but be in awe of that fact, that
you are now directly linked to the Gulf of Mexico, 2,000-some miles
away. You think of all the water molecules drifting past your ankles
at that second and how, at some point in the future, those molecules
will drift past Minneapolis and St. Louis and Memphis, carrying paddle-wheelers
and barges and oceangoing ships - if it's not first siphoned off by
a municipal water system, a crop irrigation system, or just plain
evaporates - until it finally roars through New Orleans and into the
Gulf of Mexico. And here it all starts, right in front of you, right
at that very spot on those rocks, at that very inch, at that very
centimeter, where the Mississippi River is born.
It wasn't
until years later that I found out the whole thing is a fraud, a tourist
attraction designed to be a pretty place for photo opps. The chain
of rocks that supposedly mark the boundary between Lake Itasca and
the Mississippi River was put there during a WPA project in the 1930s,
and the rocks are held in place with an epoxy cement. Those first
few hundred winding yards of river weren't dug out by the infant Mississippi
as it took its first steps toward New Orleans but by workers made
unemployed by the Great Depression and put to work by the state digging
a river channel to create a tourist attraction. In real life, the
Mississippi is not born by dramatically tumbling over a chain of rocks,
but by simply emerging nonchalantly, undramatically and non-touristy
from a mosquito-infested bog on the north side of the lake. In real
life, the waters of Lake Itasca do not boldly create the Mississippi,
they simply ooze into it, almost by accident.
The reason
for this natural reconstruction and historical revisionism is simple;
tourism. The state saw as early as the 1930s that tourism was becoming
an increasingly larger part of the American economy, as Americans
realized they could use the two recent inventions of the automobile
and the highway to drive themselves far from their homes and their
jobs and their bills and all the other problems inherent in life.
Since then, tourism has become such an important part of the economy
that it is now seen in many places as a sort of economic panacea that
all but guarantees new jobs, new business and economic growth. It's
been reaching new peaks since the 1980s, when Baby Boomers started
making huge wads of dough and showed they were more than willing to
spend it by going on long, expensive vacations. Ever since, city planners,
chamber of commerce organizers and economic development cheerleaders
have fallen over themselves trying to create "charming and unique"
places or "quiet, relaxing get-aways," or, in the family-friendly
'90s, "a place that's fun for the whole family."
In this
process of reinvention, though, in this rush to provide relaxing getaways
and family fun, one thing has been lost; reality. We have become so
superficial that we want to see empty but cheerful tourist facades,
and developers have become eager to provide them. Take Lake Itasca.
A river as majestic, as powerful, as spiritual, as life-giving as
the Mississippi deserves a grand entrance, a knock-em-dead first appearance.
The Mississippi River is the defining river in our nation's history,
a vital piece of our culture. It should be a tourist attraction because
Americans should want to see the birth of something so important to
our national pride. But do we want this vitally important icon of
ourselves to be nothing more than drainage from a muddy bog? Would
tourists flock by the thousands to a mosquito-infested swamp? Of course
not. So the state of Minnesota took it upon itself to dress it up
a little bit, provide the drama to the Mississippi that nature forgot,
creating something completely unreal and fake but very tourist-friendly
and sending thousands of visitors home happy every year.
The same
reinvention has occurred hundreds of times since then, in other places
across the country. Just look at Door County, Wisconsin, or Galena,
Illinois. Or any of a dozen other blue-collar towns and cities ripped
from their economic moorings by the wrenching changes of the global
economy and the information age, listing and taking on water while
other cities sail off to prosperity. Suddenly, in these blue-collar
industrial towns and fishing ports, old banks and butcher shops and
corner stores become up-scale, high-end boutiques selling overpriced
Nautica and Tommy Hilfiger shirts with the city's name on them, and
second-rate art galleries with names like The Aartvark selling third-rate
landscapes to soccer moms from Schaumburg, and bookstores trying to
be like little Barnes & Nobles, and tacky shop after tacky shop
selling fudge and ice cream and cheap Indian trinkets made in Asian
countries and t-shirts emblazoned with meaningless crests more elaborate
than those of the oldest British families. The restaurants feature
exposed brick walls and brass fixtures and Boomer-friendly menus selling
the same dishes, like honey-mustard grilled chicken and lemon-pepper
fish (the species of which is determined by whatever is most abundant
in local waters) and garlic-rubbed whatever, which I will not eat
because whenever I think of the word "rubbed" I can't help but picture
some fat cook named Guido who has toiled over his hot grill all day
and has finally decided to seek some relief by rubbing his hairy,
sweaty chest with my nice cool chicken breast before he plops it on
the grill and slathers it with honey-mustard sauce.
Of course,
none of the blue-collar natives in these old industrial towns know
who Tommy Hilfiger is, don't know a thing about art, never heard of
either Barnes or Noble and eat their grilled chicken with nothing
but barbecue sauce because only fags eat anything with honey-mustard
or lemon pepper. But those people are missing the point because all
these things are not for them, they're for the Tourists, the people
with the bucks who will visit from other places with lots of their
money and write big fat checks for overpriced crap. In return, the
unemployed people can work for minimum wage selling the middle and
upper-middle class people from other places their over-priced crap.
Main
Street, U.S.A., has become Fake Street, USA
A prime
example of this is my own hometown, Duluth, Minnesota. I admit I am
prejudiced about this because it is my hometown, but I can honestly
say that Duluth sits in one of the most beautiful natural settings
anywhere. Tree-lined, rugged hills loom over the city all along its
22-mile length, pushing it right up to the moody shores of Lake Superior,
whose waters spread before it all the way to the horizon and spill
into the sky. The scenery is simply breathtaking. I've taken friends
there for the first time and all they can do is gape in awe, never
knowing that such a place existed in the Midwest, never fully comprehending
what all that blue meant on a map until they actually saw it.
Historically,
though, Duluth never used this natural beauty to draw out-of-town
visitors. What little tourist economy it had came during summer hot
spells, when southern Minnesotans came north seeking relief from the
heat and humidity with Lake Superior breezes that range from cooling
to Absolute Zero and keep temperatures in the 60s, 50s, sometimes
even 40s, in the middle of July and August. Aside from that, the city's
tourist trade was limited to the "going-through" business of vacationers
headed to resorts and campgrounds in the northern reaches of the state
who stopped in Duluth on their way through to gas up and grab a bite
to eat.
The reason
Duluth didn't have much of a tourist trade was that Duluth was an
industrial town. Its gritty west end was filled with huge steel mills
and factories that belched smoke into the air and employed thousands.
Ships plied the waters of its perfect harbor carrying loads of cargo
to ports around the world. Vast rail-yards full of trains moved freight
to other parts of the United States and Canada. Fish were hauled out
of Lake Superior and lumber moved through from the vast north woods.
The airport was home to two U.S. Air Force units and one Royal Canadian
Air Force unit, defending the continent from Ruskie missile attack
and employing thousands more Duluthians.
Duluth
was a city that made things, then moved them around the world. Like
Chicago, it had its own big shoulders. Lake Superior was seen as simply
another industrial resource, its water a cheap and easy way to move
goods and natural resources, its shores a cheap and easy place to
dump garbage. Duluth also had that sulfury, gag-inducing smell of
paper mills and seemed to be covered with a layer of permanent grime
from the coal-fired steel mills. It was a tough and dirty place, not
the kind of city that draws many visitors. That didn't matter, though,
because Duluth was a prosperous, booming industrial town that didn't
need tourists.
Then
came the 1970s and the 1980s and Duluth's industrial gravy train went
off the rails and fell several thousand feet into a canyon. In a breathtakingly
short period of time, just about every part of Duluth's economy collapsed
into a stunning and majestic pile of Third Wave rubble. Both air forces
moved their units out of Duluth, the timber and fishing industries
dried up from overuse, grain shipping was torpedoed by Carter's embargo
on the Soviet Union. The steel mills and manufacturing plants were
shut down, victims of the high costs of shipping things to and from
a place as remote as Duluth, the high labor costs of a place as heavily
unionized as Duluth, and of the factories own aging inefficiency.
Population
fell from 120,000 in 1960 to about 85,000 when I graduated from East
High School in the Orwellian year of 1984. Unemployment jumped to
near 20 percent. Lonely factories decomposed, stores were boarded
up, schools closed. Mothballed Great Lakes freighters rusted quietly
while tied up in the harbor, unneeded because there was no freight
to ship. Houses across the city sat empty, their unemployed owners
finally giving up hope and fleeing like a refugee to find work in
the boomtown of Minneapolis. I don't know how many of my elementary
school classmates never made it to my high school graduation because
their families finally had no choice but to move out and start from
scratch somewhere else.
Duluth
wasn't a town that made much anymore. It collected unemployment checks
and welfare benefits.
To all
of this, we Duluthians took a rather fatalistic attitude. One of my
favorite t-shirt slogans of the time was "Duluth: So close to the
end of the world you can see it from here." My high school graduating
class had two unofficial class slogans; "Drugs, sex, we want more,
we're the Class of '84," (which really didn't have much to do with
the city's economic plight), and "Last one to leave Duluth, turn out
the lights" (which did). What had been a thriving, bustling little
industrial port had, in just a few years, become a desolate, post-industrial
wasteland. Duluth was the poster child of the Rust Belt.
So right
around the time I graduated from high school (and promptly left town
for college in the Twin Cities, joining the economic refugees in a
brighter place with better prospects) Duluth's grand high muckety-mucks
looked at their economic scorecard and decided that if they were to
keep their city from becoming a ghost town, they would have to change
its economy. Manufacturing, defense and shipping just didn't cut it
anymore. Duluth's economic future, they decided, lay in tourism.
Unfortunately,
Duluth was as unappealing to tourists then as it ever was; about the
only thing less scenic to out-of-towners than a steel mill in full-steam
operation was a steel mill sitting empty and boarded up. So in the
mid-1980s, the city completely reinvented itself. And we're not talking
about a little reinvention here, either, a few coats of paint and
a renovated building or two. We're talking about a complete and near-total
makeover, the Phyllis Diller of urban renovations. Dozens of old brick
warehouses, factories and breweries along the lakeshore and harbor
front were either renovated or leveled. The piles of industrial junk
that had accumulated along the lake for decades were hauled away.
Lakefront hotels and resorts were built, upscale restaurants and trendy
boutiques opened. The streets were paved with brick, replica Victorian
street lights installed and an Indian tribe opened a casino in the
old downtown Sear's store. Under all of this was dug a giant freeway
tunnel so tourists could get to their recreational splendor more quickly
and more easily.
And,
judging by the results, all the hard work has paid off because Duluth
is now a tourist boom town. Unemployment is almost non-existent, the
area's population actually went back up for a time. In the summer,
you can't get near the city's lakefront parks because of all the tourists
and their cars. Duluth has become a jewel on the lake, a beautiful
and charming old port town.
Problem
is, all of it is completely fake. Duluth never was a beautiful, charming
port town, it was a dirty, grungy, sweaty, swarthy, often smelly industrial
town. Canal Park, where today children frolic and families walk together
along the shore of Lake Superior amidst dancing fountains and kitschy
public art, was once filled with dive bars and brothels that catered
to sailors who had been cooped up at sea with 20 other men in a steel
tube for months at a time and who desperately needed some hooch and
pooch.
All of
that was changed as Duluth reinvented itself, and rewrote its history.
Tourists do not want to come to dirty industrial towns, they want
to come to charming port towns. Reality was jettisoned to create the
fake city the tourists expected. It had to be done. How else can a
place like Duluth compete with the idealized, untroubled, small-town
perfection of Disney's Main Street USA, without turning itself into
Old Port World?
Unfortunately,
tourists tend to believe the illusions. They actually think the Mississippi
River babbles happily over a chain of rocks and that Duluth was picked
up from the New England seaside and dropped into Minnesota. Fantasy
becomes reality, and illusion takes physical form.
Of course,
not every tourist attraction in America has thrown away its past to
create a more tourism-friendly present. Chicago and Kansas City, for
instance, are still as ruggedly tough and blue-collar as ever, and
San Francisco has managed to keep much of its authenticity. Many of
America's national parks have also managed to resist calls for increased
commercialization and development and remain palaces of natural realness.
But,
by and large, it's illusion that people want to see, and it's illusion
that's being given to them. Perhaps the best example of this is in
Iowa, at one of the country's more unusual tourist attractions. In
a strange case of life imitating art, the Dyersville farm field where
the movie "Field of Dreams" was filmed has become one of Iowa's top
(and few) tourist attractions (it was the state's number one tourist
attraction for a while, until it was passed recently by the bridges
of Madison County, which exploded in popularity after the publication
of Bob Waller's insipid romance novel, of which I've tried to read
twice but have been unable to get past page 20 without feeling queasy).
Each year, 100,000 people come to the field, which does possess a
strange kind of magic that makes people act wonderfully civil and
brotherly/sisterly toward each other. Complete strangers play catch
in the outfield, never worrying that one might try to run off with
the ball. A pitcher lobs easy-to-hit batting-practice pitches straight
into the wheelhouse of a kid at the plate who he's never met, and
behind that kid will run a line of kids 20 or 30 deep, snaking down
the third-base line, around the backstop to the bleachers, waiting
patiently to take their cuts at the plate without a single whine,
cry or "but I wanna hit now" to be heard. I've seen adults, full grown
adults who should know better, leave their expensive camcorders sitting
alone in the bleachers or behind the backstop, completely unattended,
and run off to play shortstop, never thinking someone might walk off
with the camcorder that was left just sitting there, alone, unprotected,
too juicy a target not to steal.
What's
even stranger is that nobody does steal it. Try doing that in New
York City, or even Des Moines.
The field
actually straddles the property line of the two farmers who own the
land. Al Ameskamp owns third base, deep short, leftfield, and most
of center, while Don Lansing (whose house, sitting behind a windbreak
of evergreens on a hill near right field, was Ray Kinsella's charming
Victorian farmhouse in the movie) owns most of the infield, right
field, and the rest of center. A high-tension power line running over
the field (which was removed during filming) marks the property line.
What
visitors (or are they pilgrims?) to the Field of Dreams see today
is not what the first visitors (pilgrims?) saw when they visited after
the film was released in 1989. By the time the film had made it to
theaters and become a national sensation, Ameskamp had returned his
side of the field to cropland while Lansing let his side go to the
weeds. Neither had any idea that their 10-acre chunk of land would
become a sort of mecca for movie fans and baseball fans, but as the
crowds grew larger (and more disappointed at the sorry condition of
the field of their dreams), the two farmers did something that goes
against the instincts of anyone who makes his living off the land;
they plowed it back under and uncovered the baseball field that lay
beneath.
It must
be noted that what Ameskamp and Lansing did was an extraordinary act.
They plowed under 10 acres of very valuable, abundantly fertile, highly
profitable Iowa farmland and built in its place a baseball field,
simply because people wanted to see a baseball field there. In short,
to paraphrase Ray Kinsella, they did something completely illogical.
Admission is free, so the only money they make is from concession
stand profits and a free-will donation box, which probably brings
in more money than ten acres of corn or soybeans, but certainly not
so much as to make them rich. Ameskamp even lets visitors take home
ears of corn off the stalks growing past the outfield, costing him
a few more bushels of crop, and a few more bushels of agribusiness
profit.
What
Ameskamp and Lansing did was the first kind and civil act at a place
that has seen many more such kind and civil acts since. I once met
a filmmaker at the field who was doing a documentary for a German
TV network (it seems that if it weren't for foreign TV networks, most
American filmmakers would never get work) and I asked him for his
well-researched conclusions as to why people suddenly act friendly
and decent there. His belief is that visitors admire the simplicity
of the place. It's a baseball diamond in a corn field. That's it.
No stadiums that cost millions of dollars in tax subsidies to build
(under threat of moving the team to another city that will spend millions
of dollars in tax subsidies), spoiled brat players who refuse to hustle
out grounders and throw tantrums because they want to make $4 million
a year instead of $3 million, no owners charging $500 for Personal
Seat Licenses, which merely give the holder the right to spend another
$50 per game to buy a ticket. No corporate sponsorships or advertisements
(except a small sign for Scott's lawn and turf products, which provides
free grass seed and fertilizer in exchange). The only commercialism
at all are two shabby souvenir stands, one run by Ameskamp, the other
by Lansing, that sell cheap T-shirts, post cards and other kitschy
trinkets. The field, it seems, taps into that American yearning to
return to our mythic past when things were better and simpler and
easier and baseball was just baseball.
"This
place is just so real, there's nothing fake about it," I heard a man
say once while visiting the field, and for a long time, I agreed with
him. Even a hardened cynic has to admit the Field of Dreams reminds
you how good people can act and how simple life can be lived. Just
before the 1994 baseball strike, when the players and owners had kicked
their mudslinging and invective-spewing machines into high gear, a
visit to the Field of Dreams restored my faith in the game itself,
if not in the people who played it and ran it at the major league
level. Something about it reminded me of the innocence of the game,
and showed me just how much fun it is to pick up a baseball and throw
it around, players and owners be damned.
But,
of course, the Field of Dreams is not real, it's totally, completely
fake. Absolutely, 100 percent artificial. The Field of Dreams was
built by Hollywood, the ultimate purveyor of the UnReal in America
today. Lansing's old Victorian farmhouse, where Kevin Costner kicked
up his feet and watched the ghost White Sox play baseball, is fake.
Before Hollywood arrived it was nothing more than a shabby old farmhouse
covered with dirty clapboard siding that would not have captured anyone's
fancy.
The Field
of Dreams is about as real as that Old West town in the California
desert that movie producers built so they could shoot exteriors of
Old West towns. It's filled with Old West hotels and saloons and apothecaries,
but when you walk through the doors of these buildings, inside you'll
find nothing but empty space.
The memories
that the Field of Dreams spurs in our collective subconscious and
the good feelings it brings to our attitudes are not brought out by
the field itself but by our memories of the movie and its disarming
charms. But the Field of Dreams is not a baseball field, it's a movie
set.
After
all, the whole idea of a baseball field in a cornfield is not really
that unusual in the Midwest. Just visit any small town high school
and you'll find their football fields and baseball fields are usually
surrounded by cropland on at least two sides. But these fields don't
have the mythic quality of the Field of Dreams (and thus are not tourist
sites) because they were not used as filming locations for beloved
movies. They are simply real football fields and real baseball fields
with little meaning behind them, and since they are real, they are
not tourist attractions.
Besides,
the Field of Dreams recently took a great big step back to reality
when Ameskamp and Lansing violated the first rule of the Field of
Dreams, which is to Play Nice. They had a falling-out a few years
ago over how aggressively the field should be marketed and barely
speak to each other anymore. Lansing wanted to maintain the purity
and integrity of the field and keep commercialism to a minimum. Ameskamp,
though, wanted to do more marketing and turn the field into a more
commercially viable tourist attraction, which Lansing felt - without
irony - was merely making it fake. When the two couldn't find a compromise,
they argued testily for awhile before Ameskamp went off on his own
and leased his part of the field to a professional management company
called Left and Center Field of Dreams (named for the parts of the
field he owns).The rift between the two continues today. A
disturbing and unfortunate reminder that no matter how hard we may
try to build a fantasy, its walls will never be strong enough to keep
out reality. Which only leads me to my own reluctant conclusion that
I have never really walked across the Mississippi River.