NEW HEROES

DUSTIN LANCE BLACK

[Thanks to a list of people] for taking on the challenge of telling this lifesaving story. When I was 13 years old, my beautiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas, to California, and I heard the story of Harvey Milk. And it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life, it gave me the hope to, one day I could live my life openly as who I am and that maybe even I could fall in love and one day get married.

I want to thank my mom who has always loved me for who I am, even when there was pressure not to. But most of all, if Harvey had not been taken from us thirty years ago, I think he’d want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told that they are less than by their churches, or by the government, or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures who have value. And that no matter what anybody tells you, God does love you and that very soon you will have equal rights federally across this great nation of ours.

Thank you. Thank you God for giving us Harvey Milk.

SEAN PENN

You commie, homo-loving sons of guns!

I did not expect this, and I want it to be very clear how hard I make it to appreciate me, often. But I am touched by the appreciation and I thought enough that I did want to scribble down so I have the names in case you are commie, homo-loving sons of guns. [Thanks a bunch of people, ending with] there is no finer hands to be in than Gus Van Sant.

Finally, for those--two last finallys--for those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight, I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue in that way of support.

We've got to have equal rights for everyone.

[Then shoutouts for electing "an elegant man President" and Mickey Rourke: "he is my brother."]

I remember something Sarah Dougher said onstage at the PDX Pop Fest in 2004, in the heat of Oregon's Measure 36 fight: "Gay people cannot get equal rights without the help of straight people."

Thanks for stepping up, Penn. And thanks, DLB, for the shout-out to your good mom (moms everywhere, listen up!) and that stellar parting line. Usually award winners thank God for their own success, as if he personally cast the overriding vote; I wish more people thought to thank him for Harvey Milk.

And guess what? You can behold the real deal himself in the superb 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk in its entirety, all 88 minutes, right here. It's stunning and moving. A must-see.

ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS

Snowshoeing with my brothers and a friend in the woods that surround the house, I spy red flecks in the snow. We tromp off the trail toward it and find a deer bed spotted with bright red blood. But here is the mystery: it snowed all night, but not since morning; the deer bed has only very recently been vacated, as evident in the freshness of the imprint and the surface-level of the bloodspotting; and yet there is no sign of the deer nor any tracks, human or animal, leading to or from the bed.

Despite our best clomping-around detective work, aided by Emmett's avid snowplowing nose, we can't figure it out. There is no explanation for what injured the deer or how it left or if it lived. Despite the evidence of warm, pulsing life--red blood and a bed just slept in--the thing itself is gone, and it's not for us to know.

Emmett chews on some bloodsicles. We shake the snow off our mittens and cut back to the trail to head down the hill.

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A young deer--just past fawn, not yet recognizably buck or doe--appears in the driveway and stands in the pool of light from the garage light, which gleams extra-bright on the white snow. You can tell the deer is young because it walks right into the spotlight and gazes directly our way, no hesitation or trepidation. I've seen this before with baby skunks, baby woodchucks, baby mice--young animals will just sit there and look right back at you, stupidly, adorably bold.

The deer nonchalantly scratches its ear and looks around, and then it wanders casually back down the driveway. We are just a pack of humans standing out in the cold, bald bipeds, woefully underequipped, peering into the dark where it disappeared.

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Horses impassively watch us cross-country ski by as snow gathers thickly on their backs. My feelings about horses are changing. I was obsessed with them as a girl: wrote novels about them, drew them obsessively, wore red cowboy boots, read Black Beauty over and over, even tended for a year a rotund black lazy mare who was the equine equivalent of my cat Seven. (For real.) Now I look at them and they seem less like my youthful fantasy of a long-lashed thousand-pound soulmate and more like very different souls altogether, which we saddle and ride with metal bits in their mouths. I wonder, what makes you happy? Do you like being ridden? You are approximately the tenth smartest animal--what do you think about? What do you think of us? Do you like us?

When I was ten or so, a crafty four-year-old Appaloosa mare pulled the inflating-belly trick, puffing up while we buckled on a riding pad, then exhaling so the strap was comfortably loose. I gave her a heel-kick, she broke into a trot, and the pad began to slip sideways with every bumpy step. I was quickly shaken loose like the pesky burr I must have been to her, deposited on the ground uninjured but stunned. In retrospect I can't really blame her.

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A group of wild turkeys are wandering across the road on the outskirts of my small Ohio town, from woods side to farmhouse side. I slow to a stop and watch them cross the road, leisurely yet purposeful. They are so big, sturdy and pragmatic, modest dark feathers and discreetly rouged faces.

I think that in these times of belt-tightening and nuts-and-bolts, it would be appropriate to switch from the imperious bald eagle--that high-flying loner with a head as white as the founding fathers' wigs--to the modest wild turkey, a ground-dweller who prefers company and knows how to live on what it can find beneath its feet.

JUST KEEP TALKING AT THE SOUND OF THE TONE

Listening to "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" yesterday morning--a show I have actually attended live--I thought of how much I did indeed want Carl Kassel's mellifluous voice on my home answering machine.

Then watching the performance of "Homeland" in Cleveland later that evening, I upgraded to the absolutely unbeatable fantasy of having Laurie Anderson's voice on my home answering machine.

IF YOU SHOULD GO DRIVING ON THE THIN ICE OF LIFE

Well. I fell into a January torpor, fingers numbed by deep subzero temperatures, brain numbed by too much free time, and pleasantly distracted by books and travel and a very hot log-fired sauna.

Many posts in the hopper, coming soon.

In the meantime, here is a tip, in case you decide to drive on a lake.

Make sure you drive with your door slightly ajar. That way, if your car falls through the ice, you can hop out right away.

You won't necessarily have time to roll down the window and swim out. True story, per my Dad: Someone drove over a place where the ice had cracked and the crack had then branched. When his car hit this spot, a third crack connected the previous two to form a triangle, which broke and sank beneath the weight of the vehicle. This guy, whose door was prudently ajar, jumped out just in time to see
his car plunge through the hole;
and rapidly sink;
and the thick triangle of ice bob back up and snap right back into place like nothing had happened.

This made my breath come short. The thought of looking up at that impenetrable ice ceiling, and the light illuminating it where the snow was washed off.

You can bet that if I ever drive on a lake--I have walked, snowshoed, skied, and dogsledded upon them, but never motored--I will be that annoying person who insists on holding the door open despite the -46 windchill. And I will not budge.

DISPOSABLE LIVING

Suburb followup. I think where the suburbs get interesting is where they diverge from what they're intended to be. My colleague Julia Christensen embarked on a fascinating project exploring how abandoned big-box stores get repurposed.

America is becoming a container landscape of big boxes connected by highways. When a big box store upsizes to an even bigger box "supercenter" down the road, it leaves behind more than the vacant shell of a retail operation; it leaves behind a changed landscape that can't be changed back. Acres of land have been paved around it. Highway traffic comes to it; local roads end at it. With thousands of empty big box stores spread across America, these vistas have become a dominant feature of the American landscape.

Basically, she explained at a recent reading I attended, it's cheaper for Wal-Mart to build an entirely new building, so they can turn the lights off at the first and on at the second simultaneously, than to simply add on or renovate. But the abandoned Wal-Mart is sold under a strict covenant that it cannot house anything that remotely resembles the original tenant--not so much as a potato chip may be sold there, or anything that would compete with Wal-Mart, which sells pretty much everything. So people have gotten creative and turned old big-boxes into churches, go-kart tracks, charter schools, museums... you name it.

See some examples, or better, peruse the big beautifully-designed book.

Today the New York Times mentions her project as well as the general problem of abandoned half-built suburbs and exurbs. ("What Will Save the Suburbs?") Mere raze-and-salvage isn't going to do it; the building materials often aren't even good enough to be worth saving. A commenter makes an astute point that the soil beneath the tracts is more valuable than the buildings will ever be--I've seen houses sprout up like weeds all over the rich fields surrounding Fargo, ND and Iowa City and Beaverton, OR. Farmland is too easy to develop--already flat and cleared, and the only farmers who can make money from growing food are the ones hooked into the agribusiness mega-naut.

I've got to finally read The Geography of Nowhere, which my brother gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago and I've put off reading because I was worried it would depress me.

KNOWING YOUR PLACE

My childhood home, which you can't even see for the trees.

I am not a great driver. I just don't like it much. I had a two-car accident in 1995, exploding airbags and all, that has forever made me conscious every time I get behind the wheel that I am steering a multi-ton metal death machine. I have no fear of flying, but every time I sneeze on the freeway I'm convinced that single shut-eyed second is the one where I'll crash into my death. I keep my hands at ten and two on the wheel.

Yet there is one area in which I am a better driver than most people I now know: on snowy and icy roads. This is no innate talent, but a necessary skill, like swimming and knowledge of hypothermia, that you need to survive in northern Minnesota. I realized it as I came to the end of my three-day drive homeward a couple of weeks ago, turning off the highway for the final mile of road that leads to my childhood home. Though it's twisting, hilly, and uniformly white with thick-packed snow, a road that visitors tend to creep along hunched over the wheel, I sail right down it like a rollercoaster, confident and steady.

I simply know it so well.

There have been times when I ached with envy at the opportunities my friends and college classmates who went to posh suburban high schools or private academies enjoyed. (AP classes? A black-box little theater? A glass-blowing wing? Cutting class to lounge in a coffeehouse or go shopping?) There were times when Park Rapids felt like the smallest, most boring, most disconnected place in the world. No music venue, no coffeshop (then), no bookstore (then, except in the corner of the Radio Shack), no gays, no underground culture, not even a mall for sixty miles, and of course no internet back then, just a three-block Main Street lined with pickup trucks and keggers at remote gravel pits and long drives through the country to get to each other's houses. My friends and I spent a lot of time hanging out in each other's basements and garages and the parking lot of Subway. Some of the boys formed cover bands that would play at the bowling alley or the building that housed the hockey rink when it was thawed for the summer. Sometimes for fun we would just go to one of the 24-hour grocery stores late at night, make up a list of weird things to find, and roam the aisles, pushing each other in shopping carts.

But now I feel lucky that I grew up in a place that that is so much itself. Fewer and fewer Americans live in rural places, only 21 percent now, and I am glad that chance and parental choice landed me among that shrinking number. In fact I think my upbringing outside the city limits plants me in the 16.4% who the census says lived "not in place." No place at all. Yet nearly every story I write emerges from a setting in northern Minnesota. The place is as much a part of the story as the characters.

The problem with the suburbs as story settings is that although they provide ample social commentary fodder, there is a certain uniformity to all of them, no matter where they are. I know some suburbs have become increasingly diverse in recent years, but though their human contents have changed, their layouts and physical presence largely have not. I generalize a bit here, but so do suburbs, so let's call it even. Unlike the cities they face and the countryside at their backs, which tend to have distinct personalities and eclectic structures and the possibility of surprise, most suburbs are designed for homogeneity and comfort, built on proven patterns and templates and plans. This placelessness tends to translate into fiction, too. I feel like when I read a suburban story, I am likely to encounter similar themes of ennui and tedium and social sniping and class aspirations and anxious parenting and stifled marriages. But it doesn't matter a whole lot if it's suburban New Jersey or suburban Minneapolis or suburban Phoenix. The foliage may be different but the suburb's character is pretty similar.

Of course there is infinite mystery in the human mind and heart no matter where you are or where you live. And being from a small town or from a big city does not automatically make you more interesting or a better artist. As Wallace Stegner said, Anyone who has lived through childhood has more than ample writing material to work with. I just feel more deeply connected to writing that has a strong sense of place, more wildness and uncertainty in the surroundings, where you can turn a corner and come upon something never expected.

Related reading: the fantastic article "No Place Like Home" by David Guterson in Harper's Magazine, originally published in 1992. The then-brand-new gated community he describes is so stunningly controlled and rigid that it swings far enough to qualify as great fodder for fiction--something fabulist and terrifying.

I AM SO IN MINNESOTA

HOW IN THE WORLD DID YOU END UP HERE

I hit the thrift stores of Park Rapids today with Amy and my brother Nate. My favorite store in the world is Rich's Antiques, which consists of two neighboring white houses joined by a connecting addition, all of it stacked floor to ceiling with weird and awesome junk/treasures. It is miscellaneous heaven.

I found some great midcentury dinner plates, a hefty, crusty Griswold cast-iron skillet ("Buy it!" Amy commanded, and I listened, she is the chef), a small snowy painting, and a pair of handmade birchbark lampshades.

But the real find of the day was at Bearly Used, the thrift store a block away on Main, where I uncovered not only a quilted flannel for two bucks and a Pendleton shirt for four, but a T-shirt jammed into a crowded upper rack. Grabbing the soft brown edge of it and tugging it into view, I glanced at it indifferently before I realized what I was looking at.

It was a Swan Island T-shirt.

The late great Swan Island was my friends' band. They were based in Portland. Who in Park Rapids had a Swan Island shirt? They played only one national tour, and it was a couple of years ago. They never came anywhere near here--the closest they got was probably the Twin Cities, 200 miles away. The band didn't print a whole lot of those shirts. And, strangest of all: I designed that shirt.

Funny to stumble upon this artifact from my life that was relatively recent--the summer of 2006--but seems so distant now, in both time and place. That was a time when it seemed I saw Swan Island play every week--Mississippi Pizza, Holocene, the Wonder, basements, wherever. I drew that volcano design in black ink on white paper in my unfinished, cluttered garage (which Melissa dubbed my "man-shack"), during a hot week in August, with the garage door rolled up to open a wall of outdoor light, the pear tree in back heavy-limbed with fruit. I did not even have Emmett yet to curl up on the couch behind me. I was living on the last money left from my Norway job.

After making a good go of it, and a couple of great videos, Swan Island played their farewell show last January. The garage is now finished, transformed into a luminous pine-walled studio, and I am thousands of miles away from it. My life in Portland semi-exists still, but tenanted, tenuous.

And stranger still to be faced with my own design, lines drawn by my hand, staring back at me, somehow transported from my adopted hometown to my original one. The nostalgic pang surprises me; it's a shock to realize that something so recent is already gone. The shirt has been worn and washed many times, it's soft and a little shrunken and fading around the seams, but the gold ink still glitters.

THE WEASEL UNDER THE COCKTAIL CABINET

R.I.P. Harold Pinter, master of mundane menace and domestic dread, one of the most singularly distinctive writers of the last century.

The playwright Tom Stoppard said that before Mr. Pinter, “One thing plays had in common: you were supposed to believe what people said up there. If somebody comes in and says, ‘Tea or coffee?’ and the answer is ‘Tea,’ you are entitled to assume that somebody is offered a choice of two drinks, and the second person has stated a preference.” With Mr. Pinter there are alternatives, “such as the man preferred coffee but the other person wished him to have tea,” Mr. Stoppard said, “or that he preferred the stuff you make from coffee beans under the impression that it was called tea.”

I have read and admired a number of his plays, but equally significant to me is his influence on some of my favorite writers. Sure, Pinter can be easily parodied--like Raymond Carver, like anyone with a singular and instantly recognizable style--but I can't imagine DFW's pause-laden stories "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" or the disturbing, ominous "Far Away" by Caryl Churchill existing without him.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

A few weeks back my friend and childhood neighbor Tresa Undem wrote a column in the Enterprise, the newspaper that once employed her dad (reporter and cantankerous columnist) and me (hotheaded teen overachiever.) I wish I could link it here but the editorial page is print-only. It was funny and moving and it made me miss her dad, and it incited me to finally articulate some long-brewing thoughts--about Al, of course, but also about small towns and politics.

So I wrote a letter to the editor, and they printed it, and this is what it said.

I knew Al Undem from the time I was in kindergarten, spent summers in the cabin next door, and eventually worked with him at the Enterprise when I was in my late teens. My ideological opposite in many ways, Al loved to give me a hard time. He challenged me, teased me, and he taught me a lot about writing. But most importantly, despite his vehement disagreement with my core political views (I was a diehard liberal; he declared Reagan the greatest president in history), he took my thinking and my writing seriously. He read it and he gave me feedback, he showed me the ropes, he challenged me, and he supported me. He was my neighbor and my mentor and my friend.

One thing that bothers me about the kind of rhetoric that many politicians, most recently but not exclusively Sarah Palin, deploy in their campaigns is the idea that small towns harbor a single kind of people—that small towns represent one particular kind of politics and values. If there's anything I learned growing up in Park Rapids, and working at the Enterprise, it's that small towns have all kinds of people. Democrats, Republicans, libertarians, moderates, wingnuts, hippies, hunters, vegans, religious people, non-religious people, town people and country people, pro-WalMart and anti-WalMart. Our small-town politics will never be uniform, but what we do learn from growing up in these close quarters--which apparently many politicians have not--is how to live with and learn from and even love the people who are think differently from you.

Forget us vs. them. In small towns, we can't help but be both. And we're better for it. Al Undem--always next door to me, it seemed, whether at the lake or the desk across from me--reminds me of that. I miss him and I always will.