MINNESOTA:
THE MISSISSIPPI UNMASKED, OR FAKE STREET, USA
by Tom Snee
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.