Meeting Minnesota
Cherishing slices of hockey-tinged life
LITTLE FALLS, Minn. — We couldn’t catch a break.
As the clock struck eight, my bingo companions for the night grumbled under their breaths while the card collector approached us once again. A dozen rounds had passed, and our table remained empty-handed. The next game’s pattern, “net with puck,” flashed onto the projector screen. How Minnesotan, I thought.
Two nights a month, these ladies and several dozen of their neighbors put down a couple drinks and try their luck at winning modest jackpots between $70 and $100. I’d driven by this cavernous ballroom, one of the last remaining in Minnesota, and been lured inside by the digital marquee; the game was already an hour old when I pulled into the parking lot. With no time to waste, I sat down with Robin, Teri, and Bird (whose real name is Bridget, but everyone calls her Bird), a friend group catalyzed by offspring who played hockey together.
As our conversation settled into a leisurely rhythm, the ladies gossiping about recent Wordle performances and the trials and tribulations of their adult children (plus intermittently wondering whether the bingo caller was rigging games for his elderly mother), I had to remind myself how extraordinary this moment was. Like many scenes I’ve born witness to this trip, it was profoundly everyday: nothing suggested it wouldn’t be exactly replicated two Wednesdays later. Yet my stay in this sleepy central Minnesotan city was two hours old and I’d walked in off the street from an opposite part of the country. As a teenager, I’d have never imagined finding company in a place so different from home. Once I started talking to strangers, the appeal of doing so became clear, but crippling apprehension would certainly have prevailed had I tried this early in the project — I’d have languished, averted my eyes from the locals’ glances for a while before attempting to bashfully engage with someone. Now, though, I am energized by being the novelty, the traveler, the sponge imbibing as much culture as the evening will yield.
The former paper-mill city of Grand Rapids doesn’t offer guided tours, but I got one anyway thanks to a fortuitous coffee shop interaction. Downtown Grand Rapids is barely discernible; the city’s main arterials don’t narrow at all, making it easy to miss the few half-strips of shops planted near various industrial and government buildings. There’s one popular coffeehouse, and its metal stools and cafeteria-style tables aren’t exactly a recipe for loitering. The morning I went, activity was sparse aside from four men having an animated back-and-forth, hands propped behind their heads.
While plotting my entry into the conversation — four is a larger group than I typically approach — they threw me a meatball right down Broadway: Rob, sitting closest to me, mentioned his upcoming trip to the Berkshires, the region of Massachusetts where my mom grew up. Within a minute, I was invited to pull up a chair. The friend group contains two civically involved Toms: a former state senator who’s stayed active since losing re-election eight years ago, and the current city administrator, a civil engineer by trade who helped design the area’s lengthy bike trail. It’s the latter Tom who humbly offers to show me around as the group disassembles, as if there were any chance of me saying no.
Very quickly, I get a lesson in the seriousness with which Minnesotans take their hockey. Our first stop is the city’s arena, built in 1962 and currently being refurbished. Though used only for high school competition, many college teams would be more than happy to play there; the air inside is fresh, the concourses clean. To demonstrate how the rock-hard surface still needs to cool before it’s game-ready, Tom instructs me to bend down and touch my hand to it. He then leads us outdoors, where the city is putting $1 million to work developing a covered practice rink. Like any local worth their salt, Tom competed when he was younger, though he stands firmly in admiration of the modern game — in his eyes, it requires much more anticipation and creative usage of the boards. “When a baby is born in Grand Rapids,” he quips, “the first thing we do is check to see if they can skate.”1
In between stops at an iron mining pit rebirthed as a lake and industrial facilities originally developed by a local paper kingpin, Tom tells the story of a humble city whose soil was too hostile for most farming and whose largely Scandinavian population turned to work in the mills along the mighty Mississippi. In clear-eyed terms, he explains what the city needs to do now: diversify the local economy beyond paper and mitigate rising home prices caused by an influx of cabin-dwellers who never left after the pandemic (thanks, remote work!) Affable and completely at ease, he makes prototypical weekend gossip with the facilities managers at the arena and the municipal golf course. He navigates his entire on-the-spot tour course by heart.
Grand Rapids lies at the edge of the Mesabi Range, a long, narrow strip of far northeast Minnesota marked by intense iron mining for much of its history. Although the Range technically contains several cities, they are located amid unmistakably rural terrain. Thick forests hug the highways leading in and out of each settlement, rendering the drives between them virtually devoid of distractions. The violently whipping winds that greet me send a message: don’t be fooled by this sun! Winters here are brutal.
There’s certainly been some economic decline here — everything feels half full — but since the mines still operate, albeit with far fewer humans than before, the Range doesn’t bear the heavy wistfulness inescapable in the Rust Belt’s worst-hit areas. In Hibbing, a place so reliant on iron ore it literally moved when more deposits were discovered under a large chunk of the city, I chose to spend the evening at Sportsmen’s, where the main street’s only significant concentration of parked cars had assembled. Just before, I’d driven up to the observation area of the city’s mine, the largest of its kind on Earth, and stood mesmerized by the landscape’s alien-like orange divots as nearly deafening gusts deformed my face. Inside, the locals sport well-worn baseball caps and wrinkled work clothes; conversation fragments I overhear center on low steel prices and how a colleague drilled sixteen holes into something today (the befuddled tone of voice giving away that sixteen was clearly not the right amount). The bespectacled father who pulls up a stool next to me is, fittingly, regional manager for a mining equipment company.2 He oversees crushers that compress rocks from 60 inches to 12. While we chat, I have my first walleye — a staple Midwestern fish that hits the spot after a long day’s worth of driving.
Duluth asks the question: what if San Francisco were shrunk to a tenth of its size, placed on the world’s largest freshwater lake, and filled with hockey nuts? A drive through the city, the most populous I’ve visited this trip, is a study in contrasts. While the downtown core exhibits some signs of decay — abandoned parking garages with lingering debris, quiet sidewalks — the revitalized Lincoln Park neighborhood holds spaces that wouldn’t be out of place in Brooklyn: a modern-rustic coffee shop tucked into a plaza of boutiques at the base of an apartment building, a brewery with a spacious patio equipped with cornhole and string lights. A log cabin-themed coffeehouse overlooking Lake Superior draws a large undergraduate crowd; the observation tower a few miles away attracts mostly families.
To see the area’s gritty side, a local directs me to Anchor Bar in Superior, technically on Wisconsin soil but a nine-minute drive directly across the water. After polishing off my $1.50 order of hand-cut fries, I join three young men at a hightop in the back — they seem representative of the crowd tonight. They’re stoic and reserved, byproducts of being reared deep in the Wisconsin country, and seem a little shellshocked at my trip. One, a Papa John’s delivery driver, met the other two through casual skateboarding circles. They speak in terse snippets of sentences, but not out of shyness. In a completely genuine sense, they simply don’t have much to talk about. So instead of probing them with deep questions, I sit and vibe with them for a while, crack the occasional joke, and take in the scene.
I wrapped up my time in Minnesota by spending two nights largely as a fly on the wall. At Frosty’s in Pierz, I had a front-row seat to the reminiscences of two high school football coaches who every patron clearly knew well. Behind me, a group finished with their food watched with wry amusement as the Brewers imploded spectacularly. The bartender, initially more than a little confused by my presence, gives me an earnest “thanks for coming in!” on the way out. The next night, 60 miles southeast in Zimmerman, I enjoyed excellent barbeque flanked by a plumber decked out in full camouflage and a deeply inebriated auto body repairman, both having a good time you suspect they have at least once a week. Midway through his two-hour set, the thickly bearded acoustic musician interrupted himself to greet a friend who walked into the bar. I don’t think anyone left the building unhappy.
The Little Falls bingo crowd, already smaller than usual, filed out rapidly after the final round. As I made conversation with the bartender, a relative of the ballroom’s newest generation of owners and a teacher by day, Bird motioned for me. When I went to shake her hand goodbye, she pressed a $20 bill into my hand, covering the price of my games. I started to balk, but there was no turning back. “I’ll feel better if you take it,” she said with grandmotherly firmness. Now that’s Minnesota nice.
Best thing I ate: the North Shore Berry Crumb pie from the Rustic Inn Cafe in Two Harbors, which was not only my favorite food in Minnesota but the best pie I’ve ever eaten. It is rare that a cliche is the description that feels most appropriate for an experience. But the flavors — rhubarb, blueberry, apple, and strawberry — literally explode in a beautiful symphony of sweetness. On top of that, the crumble crust was positively addictive. I’ve been explaining to confused Midwesterners that I frequently throw out parts of pie crusts when I order them at home, because they are simply bland. That problem doesn’t exist here!
Honorable mention goes to the ribs from D’s in Zimmerman, which were super tender, just the right amount of smoky, and paired with a sneaky good homemade BBQ sauce.
Many locals speak of a mini-resurgence in the trades, and I buy it: every blue-collar worker I met is making a decent living.
The default pizza on offer is the typical Midwestern “tavern” style. If you haven’t seen this before, it’s an ultra-thin-crust pie cut into tiny squares.
I had no idea the viewing area for the Hull-Rust-Mahoning mine closes after September, it just so happened to be September 30th when I got into Hibbing. Fortunate!
It wasn’t just the plumber: I observed lots of camo clothes, likely no coincidence as we approach peak hunting season.
The northern part of Minnesota is broadly referred to as “the Northland” by news broadcasts, businesses, and advertisements.
Two people I met confirmed to me that ice fishing is no novelty; it’s a legitimately popular pastime.
Minnesotans take their pies seriously. At Sportsmen's, the bartender explained that normally they have a pie lady who makes them by hand, but she was absent, and thus she couldn’t recommend the pies in good conscience.
The same bartender lamented how police linger near the bar to instantly nab departing patrons for DUIs; she blames this tactic for depressing crowds.
I noticed that many breakfast shops serve “caramel rolls,” which are simply cinnamon rolls dipped in caramel and served in a warm pool of caramel, but couldn’t figure out if these are exclusively Minnesotan.
Non-skaters hit the basketball court.
I learn that the three major equipment companies are all owned by non-American conglomerates now.