Who Are You Today?

I walked to Sandy’s Place for the second time this morning. Though the air is twenty-two degrees, I feel warmer then when it was thirty-two, and feel good for having adapted. Ice crystals grow on the brown grass in places where the sun never shines. Katrina greets me by name, and I recognize four of the men at the counter—in their places since my visit on Wednesday, it seems. Already I feel almost like a regular who knows everyone.





Katrina has a gap in her duties, and says to a man wearing bright orange:
“Been huntin’?” —yeah
“See anything?” —no
“Dad was out all day. Didn’t see anything either.” —shrug
“Last weekend of hunting season.” —right
Katrina knows how to pull the thoughts out of a man.

From his stool next to mine at the counter, Dave sidles up to me, and says, “Did you know that Giovani’s has dinners at half price from 6:30 to 7:30” I took it almost as an invitation. Then he said, “But not on weekends.”

“Border Patrol is up to sixty agents now. Used to be two, and they didn’t have anything to do.” “Why the increase?” I ask. “Don’t know, especially in winter when this place shuts down.”

I had imagined the illegals in their cars traveling south on Third Avenue past my place: a Moroccan with a flat nose and eyebrows like warning flares, a Frenchman with long wide sideburns and swollen lips, an old Algerian with almond eyes and a creased mouth in a face finely boned as a child’s. But on crossing the border yesterday, I saw only an occasional car enter the checkpoint from Canada—about six during the hour that I watched water approach the dam, smoke drift leisurely from papermill smokestacks, and imagined how many woodchips were passing between countries on a huge conveyor. If those sixty agents were looking for drugs or illegals, they were not looking here.

A sign inside Sandy’s says “Thou shalt not whine.” Back in the summer as I pedaled across Canada’s great prairie, I knew that winter on that windswept flatland was hard. I hoped to get impressions about it from the locals, to get them going on stories. I wanted to feel how winter works on that harsh farming plain, because I don’t know how people stand it in the winter. International Falls is hard country too, cold and windy. But they know it’s hard and get ready for it. If someone complains, I suppose he just makes it harder for the others. These people must have stamina, they must know how to keep going. But today everyone says how nice the weather is. Nobody whines.

I saw Sandy of Sandy’s Place today—a slight woman with a long braid and Harley Davidson sweatshirt. She moves fast and smiles strong and sincere. It’s easy to see why Katrina chose her; she could have had any boss she wanted.


If any of my readers are beginning to feel that you are reading a novel, not a blog or travelogue, then you are changing in a likeminded way as I am. I intended to write my impressions of a cold snowy winter in a remote non-tourist location. I wanted to convey both the nature of the place and my personal change as result of being here—a self-discovery, recording of an adventure. But after four days, these missives seem to unfold more like opening pages of a novel. I read them as you do, not knowing the characters fully, but having hints of their personalities—and no ideas whatsoever about the ending.

I did not want to be perceived by these people as a writer, come here to study them. I thought I could get around those kinds of questions. Of course they ask where I am from and why I came. Katrina was the first to figure it out. Now she knows where I am staying, a few of my reasons for coming, and my initial reactions, all of which I wished to withhold.

I brought books and envisioned lone days in the woods. Thoreau had almost convinced me of solitude with only occasional human contact. Now, I fear I am changing the thing I wanted to observe. I am becoming part of these people, and we are adjusting our lives to each others. I have talked at length with my landlords, Jerald and Sandy (not the same Sandy who runs the café) and already love them. I still like Thoreau’s friendship with “every little pine needle, expanded and swelled with sympathy.” They environ me as much as the lake and the sky do, and perhaps as much as snow and ice will. But the nature of coming here is changing.

It is not a little interesting to me that I and these people are subjects of an unintended experiment. There is a part of me which, in a sense, is not a part of me, but spectator, one who does not share the lives of the characters of which I am one. This person observes and notes, but is not a part. When the play, it may be a tragedy, of this life is over, and the spectator goes her way, a kind of fiction, a work of imagination, will remain.

This doubleness came upon me today like a flood, and I cannot escape it. I am writing a novel where I know no more than the reader. It is impossible for me to foreshadow anything or to develop those scenes which are important later in the story. It will unfold however it does, and we will all be surprised, unless some of you predict more than I do.


frozen apples in the sun
once hidden by leaves
now in season