Lost is on the Way

Originally published in the New York Mills Herald on October 17, 2007 and credited to my alternate identity, Elisa Korentayer.

This summer, my parents gave me a hand-me-down GPS system that my father had won, used, and found cumbersome. It’s a small black plastic box with a tiny screen the size and shape of a wedge of cheese, a miniature toy-television set that’s always playing the “map channel.” Suction-cupped to my windshield, it presides over my view of the road ahead, jutting out over the rearview mirror and getting caught up in the fold-down visor. It is rather cagey about its plans. It will only tell me what the next step is, and not what the turn after that will be. I can also see exactly why my father found it cumbersome. Before—or, occasionally, during—each trip, the GPS requires that I spend a good few minutes tediously spelling out the destination address by selecting one letter at a time with one input button. When that’s complete, the box proceeds to tell me what to do in a melodious female voice. “In 500 feet, turn left.” Pause. “Turn left.” Pause. “Drive 64 miles.”

The experience of driving with a GPS is a strange combination of relaxing and distressing. It has successfully directed me to some rather far-flung places over the last few weeks, yet I am rarely able to let go of the suspicion that, this time, it will lead me astray. Maybe this time it really is mistaken about where I am, what road I’m on, and which is the fastest route to my destination. In the midst of endless farmland over miles of unfamiliar county roads, I wonder where it’s taking me and just how far away from my original destination I could end up. In my rarer moments of faith in its omniscient directional powers, I can relax. I can free my mind from thoughts of maps and directions, how many more miles to the next turn and whether I’ve already missed it or not. This weekend, on a creative research trip that coincided with a visit to an old college friend, I noticed that, strangely, my faith in the GPS contraption is a lot like my faith in myself. Variable, periodic, and tending towards doubt. I also noticed how valuable it is to have direction of any kind.

I drove down to Southern Minnesota on Thursday to do songwriting research. I am working on a project to write songs about members of the fringe, oddballs, or otherwise fascinating characters in Minnesotan history. I am now at the stage where I need to find Minnesotan characters and events to be the subjects of new songs, and I figured that the best way to find those characters would be to travel to new areas of state and talk to people. I decided to give people a brief description of who I am and what I’m trying to do, and then ask them to tell me about local figures who have become the stuff of local legend.

I began by visiting the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Walnut Grove, MN, one of seven such museums in the upper midwest. I had no plans for what would happen after Walnut Grove. Generally, when I’m doing creative research, I start by figuring out a destination that appeals to me on some level, and then I practice my “Follow My Nose” philosophy, in which I posit that the next best thing to do is always the most appealing thing that arises from the last thing you did. At the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, I told the staff about my project, and the head of the museum came out to find me and tell me a few places within a short drive where I could find information on other characters. Aha! My next destination! From Little-House-on-the-Prairie-land, I drove to Windom in Cottonwood County, MN, where I learned about Jake Van Dyke, bootlegger and pride of Edgerton township. When Van Dyke was arrested in 1923 the community of Edgerton was thrilled; not because they wanted him off the streets, but rather because they were so proud to have such a large boot-legging operation in their town. From Windom, I drove to Slayton, MN, where a trio of local historical society volunteers told me about the local characters that are featured in their cemetery tours. From Slayton, I navigated my way to New Ulm, where I made it to the Brown County historical society, learned about some of their local murderers, and then treated myself to German food at the prestigious Kaiserhoff Restaurant.

Friday was the highlight of my research trip: the Spam Museum in Austin, MN. I know, I know, it doesn’t seem like a museum dedicated to Hormel’s canned spiced ham product would be likely to produce stories about Minnesotan characters. But, then I got there and realized, hey, spam is a Minnesotan character! The entire museum is decorated in the blue and yellow of the spam can label, and every exhibit is clever, appealing and engaging. They even broadcast the original Flying Circus skit that features Monte Python’s now infamous “Spam Song.” The hostess in the lobby directed me to my favorite exhibit: a film about the Hormel girls, whom some of you old-timers may remember as an all-girl orchestra with dancers that would perform a weekly radio show in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. I was smitten with the idea of these women who were Hormel sales-ladies by day and dancers, singers, and violin- or trumpet-players by night. On their way to the next day’s performance, the women would stop at grocery stores to ask the owners how well the Dinty Moore chili was moving off the shelves.

Since I was already in Southern Minnesota, I figured I’d drop on down to Iowa City for the weekend to visit an old college friend and his family. My college buddy—I’ll call him Tom—was a year ahead of me at Yale and was my introduction to the northern midwest. Unlike most of my predominately northeastern or west coast blueblood classmates, Tom was a good Lutheran boy from Appleton, Wisconsin. I met Tom when I auditioned for his singing group, and over my undergraduate years at Yale we maintained a unique friendship through a diligent determination to spend time together, as we had few friends in common and no overlapping activities. Tom was my introduction to the Midwestern mindset. Though he was Pre-Med, Tom was always more relaxed than most of my other classmates, and always far more willing to take a moment to sit down and talk. Competing about just how much busier you’ve made your life than the person you were talking to had made his/her life was an Olympic sport at Yale. But Tom was far less concerned with informing his peers about just how busy he was, and far more dedicated to the art of concerning himself with people. He was so unique in my experience at Yale, and so calming to me, that I nicknamed him “V8,” after the famous vegetable-juice drink and its commercials that showed how V8 straightened out people who otherwise lived their life at a crooked diagonal. These days, Tom is completing his second-to-last year of the 14 years of training required for him to become a Laryngologist, a specialist in vocal medicine. He lives with his Wisconsin-born-and-bred wife and two young sons in Iowa City, and spends up to 80 hours a week working in the Otolaryngology department of a research hospital. Spending time with Tom after a somewhat spontaneous and undirected research trip among historical societies and museums in Minnesota farmland, I began to yearn for a career where one has a clear map of how to get from here to there.

Despite the difference in the two parts of my trip, one clear theme emerged from both: my desire for direction. Though no life comes with an instruction manual, Tom’s career gives him a lot more direction than mine gives me, and I crave the direction he has. With no clear signposts along the road towards my songwriting project, I often find it very difficult to figure out what comes next. I wish I could buy my inner life a GPS system that maps out my desires and goals, that charts the best route to get from where I am now to where I want to be. As an artist, I don’t have a 14-year training period that tells me exactly which road comes next and which direction I’m supposed to be heading in. My direction has to come from the inside.

Thankfully, there was also a surprising moral lesson from my weekend trip: I already have an internal GPS; it’s called my gut. I’d love it if my GPS was a bit more direct and louder than a whisper. I’d love it if a melodious female voice sounded in my head to announce, “In 500 feet, turn left.” I’d love it even more if it always showed me the entire list of directions that will get me to where I want to go. The GPS in my gut may not be a top-of-the-line model. I may have to input my destination in lengthy strings of keystrokes, one letter at a time. I may not know what happens after this next turn, but at least, when I listen to it, I know what to do next. Amazingly, neither the GPS in my car nor the GPS in my gut has failed me yet. Maybe it’s about time to have a bit more faith in both of them.

Originally published in the New York Mills Herald on October 3, 2007 and credited to my alternate identity, Elisa Korentayer.

Since mid-September, each morning I eagerly rush to my post office box with a new sense of urgency, wondering whether an oversized red envelope with a new DVD will be waiting for me. I recently subscribed to Netflix, the mail-order DVD-rental company, to have access to titles that our fine local video-rental establishments don’t carry. The Netflix rental process starts online, where I create a long list of films and television shows that I would like to see—generally documentaries, independent films, and quality cable television series. I place them in priority order, and then I receive up to three movies at a time by mail. Each time I return a DVD in their postage-paid envelopes, they send me the next title in my queue. One can spend hours a day—I know this from experience—browsing their site looking for new titles to add to one’s queue and then re-ordering one’s ever-lengthening queue to make sure that the movie you most want to see next will arrive next. It’s the Internet mail-order process—and online procrastination—at its best.

Having been out of town Saturday, Sunday morning I knew I had missed my weekend window to collect the two DVD’s that most certainly were waiting for me in my little postal cubbyhole. The depth of my disappointment got me thinking about the role of film—and television—in my life.

I’ve seen a lot of movies, and that’s because film is one of the few diversions in my life where I can actually shift my overactive brain to neutral. Films, and good television, are an exquisite escape. They are occasions for me to try out new personas and experiment with exotic lifestyles that I may never have the chance to live. All artistic mediums have their place, but film at its best gives me image and emotion, word and sound. Like books, but with some of the imaginative work done for me, movies encompass me in a way that no other genre can match. In Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay, internationally-respected author E. Annie Proulx described her experience at seeing her short story “Brokeback Mountain” on the big screen, “Here it was, the point that writers do not like to admit; film can be more powerful than the written word.”

More power means more responsibility. I love film, but I have a problem when film, especially in its most popular blockbuster form, corrupts how we engage with our world. Film is a tool, and like all tools can be used to construct strong foundations or destroy them. The dark side of film is that it can distort what it means to be in the world and especially what it is to relate to people.

It took me years to understand that romantic relationships do not—and should not!—follow the trajectory of Hollywood romance. On film, it’s much easier to depict the stormy highs and lows of a relationship than the gentle, long-term subtleties that make up a life together. Hollywood—in both its film and television incarnations—has given us a shorthand notion of how to be in love. Thanks to the entertainment industry, as a teenager I thought that getting put down flirtatiously was the beginning of true love. It’s been a long painful process for me to learn that being “in love” is not defined by a romantic apology over an elegant dinner after a string of disrespectful and vicious explosions. Hollywood’s shorthand can make us yearn for a glossy, but false, experience. It’s easy to forget that a two-hour, plot-focused timeframe is not conducive to depicting the true nature of love, let alone life.

At its best, the effort filmmakers put into their craft leads to works of art, collections of moments that celebrate and reflect on what it is to be human. More often, films are simply escapes with disorienting ideas of what it means to engage in society. At its worst—often seen in the more popular film genres—movies and TV distort our ability to live in the world. When film and its inaccuracy become models for how life should be rather than reflections of it, we are no longer able to live in our world authentically.

My most horrifying experience of film-influenced confusion between fantasy and reality occurred on 9/11 and the days following. I was living in Brooklyn, a short distance across the East River from the World Trade Center. Once I understood what had happened, I ran out to see the huge plumes of billowing smoke that rose like two ghost towers into the pristine blue sky. The only parallels my brain had for comprehending it were the special effects in action movies. I thought to myself, “Those special effects are cool, but not nearly realistic enough. The sky is too blue. The smoke is too thin. Where are the explosive fireworks?” It took me until I could walk amongst the rubble to conceive that it was real. My memories of film allowed me to think of it as fantasy as I waited for the inevitable savior to give me the happy ending I expected. “As soon as I leave the theater,” I thought, “everything will be back to normal.”

Film, its special effects, its quick transformations, its comfortable, happy-ending-oriented structure, helps us to forget that the best things in life take a very long time to build. Perhaps it would be better if we had to follow the film-makers over the years it took them to create a film before we got to see the glossy end product. Creation and development take time—a long, effortful time. A movie is not created in two hours. A song is not. A book is not. A life is not. We take time to create ourselves, our surroundings, our futures, our relationships. And this time does not render the results less valuable just because they extend past the lives of our short attention spans. In fact, it is the time it takes to make real relationships with people and places that make them matter so much.

There is a place for diversion and entertainment in our lives. There is also a place for difficult works of art that make us face our darker selves and the shadow aspects of our societies. And there is a time for getting whisked away into fantasy land. But, as I begin my relationship with Netflix and its seemingly endless collection of movies, it is important to remind myself that lives take time and don’t evolve at the speed of film. It took me six years to be able to understand and accept the events of 9/11 enough to go see the exhibit at Ground Zero. In movie time, that’s millennia. But in human time, that’s just right.

So, I promise I’ll try to remember that film is not reality, and that it’s important to take life slowly and not expect too much. But now I got to get to the post office. It’s almost time for them to open, and I think Season Two of Deadwood has arrived!

Originally published in two parts in the New York Mills Herald on September 12, 2007 and September 19, 2007 and credited to my other identity, Elisa Korentayer.

I never thought there was much between the northeast and California. Southeastern Pennsylvania, where I spent my formative teen years, was at the very edge of acceptable addresses. My hometown Yardley maintained its claim to Yankee distinction because of the historical significance of the area. For example, only a few miles up the river is a town called “Washington Crossing”—so named because it was there that General George Washington crossed the Delaware River to victory on Christmas night in 1776.

I knew that there was a city called Chicago somewhere in the center of the country. In fact, I had once had a layover at O’Hare airport when there were no nonstop flights available from New York to San Francisco. But I could never understand why people would choose to live in a city so far from the coasts. Minnesota wasn’t even on my mental map. In fact, when I learned that I was coming here to be a resident artist, I couldn’t locate it on a map. (A brief statement in my defense: I spent fourth and fifth grades in New Zealand where instead of learning the geography of the United States I learned about Captain Cook and his discoveries in the South Pacific. This blip in my education has haunted me my whole life; to this day I still can’t tell you any of the state capitals.)

This is all to say that I could have never imagined—not in a million years—that I would make this part of the country my home. So, you can imagine how surprised I was when, during a visit back to New York City in August, I discovered that I no longer feel at home there.

In my experience traveling internationally, I’ve noticed that it’s the reverse culture shock, or the unexpected experience of culture shock upon your return home, that is the most overwhelming. Perhaps this is because you are generally blindsided by it. With a lifetime of travel behind me, I should have been prepared for it that weekend…but I wasn’t.

The weekend before Labor Day I returned New York City for the wedding of a dear friend. I was one of three bridesmaids. I had already purchased my dress and accessories, including a triumph of a pair of perfectly-sized gold sandals that I found at the Detroit Lakes Boys and Girls Club thrift store for $1.50. My rolling suitcase was packed with outfits for a variety of wedding events along with clothing to cover extracurricular visits with old friends. Under any normal circumstance, my four days worth of clothing would have been enough for two weeks. I had even gotten the wedding present—a wood vase by Moorhead-based wood-turning artist David Hagen—and wrapped it up fit for a wedding. I thought I was ready for the weekend. But I was not prepared for the fast pace and city sacrifices of the life I used to lead.

Admittedly, the problems started with the trip out. Northwest Airlines emailed me the night before the trip to say that the flight my fiancé and I were scheduled to take was canceled. We were rerouted to leave from Fargo at a ghastly hour of the morning, and then, once we were on the plane after waking up two hours too early, that flight was delayed two hours. We missed our connection in Minneapolis, waited three hours for a new flight, and then that flight was delayed two hours. Considering the travel frustrations, I admit I was not necessarily in the best mood once I arrived, but the New York City-specific experiences of the weekend speak for themselves.

We got to Newark airport at 6pm. In most normal cities, that should mean that we would arrive at our hotel by 7, or 8 at the latest. In New York City, all bets are off. We took a tram, waited 20 minutes, and then dragged ourselves onto the $15-per-passenger Airtrain to Penn Station in Manhattan. We still had to get to Brooklyn where I had found the least expensive hotel in the city—at $130 for one night’s stay. We chose to take the subway, rather than coughing up another $30+ which is what it would have cost to take a taxi from midtown Manhattan. Lugging our wedding-full luggage up four flights of stairs across five blocks and then down another four flights of stairs, we arrived at the platform of the R—AKA “Rarely”—train. (The N&R train line is nicknamed the “Never and the Rarely” because of how infrequently trains come.) A good wait on the platform and 20 stops later, we arrived at the Union Street stop in Brooklyn. From there, it was another two flights of stairs up to street level, where we lugged baggage six blocks north and three very sketchy looking avenues east to the hotel. Finally, at 10pm, we arrived at our lodging for the night.

The Comfort Inn was one month old and, coincidentally, about ten blocks away from my old apartment building. Such is the growth of my old Brooklyn neighborhood that the wealthy investors had decided to develop property in a no-man’s-land of project housing and old lumberyards. Suffice it to say that walking those three avenues at night—our suitcases virtually screaming “Tourist! Tourist!”—was not something I would have chosen to do when my mailing address was still in Brooklyn. But, at this point in our expedition, we didn’t have much choice.

The hotel room was surprisingly large for New York City. This means that there was enough room to squeeze between the bed and the dresser to get to the bathroom. After dropping our bags and soothing our whining leg and shoulder muscles, we walked the three dodgy avenues back to the gentrified retail strip of 5th avenue in Brooklyn. There we got ourselves a 10pm dinner of gourmet Japanese sushi and an 11pm dessert of gourmet key-lime Greek frozen yogurt with fresh mango. This was, perhaps, the highlight of the trip.

We managed to get 6 hours of exhausted sleep before we had to wake up in a hurry to meet my old friends in their swank Park Slope apartment. My friends—a feature writer for the New York Times, a CEO of a Dow Jones Internet startup, and their two year old daughter—live the ideal life in New York City. They have a great apartment, exciting jobs, and the ability to enjoy all that the city has to offer. They had generously offered us the opportunity to stay in their sensational apartment for two nights while they headed upstate to the mountains. We grabbed a short breakfast with them at the corner diner before they ran off to work, rushed back to the apartment to meet their nanny, said a hurried goodbye, and then gathered our stuff to get out of the nanny’s way.

We had six hours before we had to be at the wedding rehearsal in Greenwich Village. We had to figure in three legs of a 45-minute-each-way commute between Park Slope, Brooklyn and Manhattan: (1) to Manhattan for a morning adventure, (2) back to Brooklyn to change into formal attire, and (3) back to Manhattan for the wedding rehearsal in Greenwich Village. We also had to consider the time it would take me to get ready. I like to think that I don’t take too long in the beautification and preening department, but when it comes to weddings, I feel that a little extra time is called for. We estimated that we had about 3 and a half hours to play in the city. We decided to go to Chinatown to eat dim sum—small dishes that are wheeled around the restaurant on steamer carts that you flag down when you are ready for your next dish. We took the F train into Manhattan and wandered through the winding streets full of fishmongers and Asian boutiques. We stopped in the tourist stores where Chinese-made imports pack every crevice and spill out onto the sidewalk outside. Then we found a dim sum restaurant and tucked in to pork dumplings, shrimp shumai, sautéed eggplant and sesame balls.

By lunchtime I was so exhausted from the amount we had done in the last 36 hours that I called our tourist excursion short. We returned to Brooklyn an hour and a half early, and I managed to grab a nap. Nap done, I put on my Rehearsal Dinner togs, and we hightailed it back to Manhattan. The wedding rehearsal was held at the Jefferson Market Garden—a postage stamp-sized triangle of lush greenery in the midst of city bustle. The Rehearsal Dinner was across the street at a local Italian trattoria. We had antipasto, gazpacho, breadsticks, lamb, panecotta and tiramisu. Mmmmm… Dinner and its associated conversation finished fashionably late, and I returned to Park Slope to recover enough to be ready for the next day’s early start. At 7:30 the next morning, I was up and into my bridesmaids dress in time to meet the other bridesmaids and the bride back in Greenwich Village. We spent three hours in a mad rush preparing the bride for the nuptials, one hour in the lovely ceremony, and three hours in the well-appointed old West Village town house where the reception took place. Then ensued the appropriate amount of drinks, conversation, delicious food, and slightly embarrassing wedding toasts.

At 4:00, Chris and I had to run across town to catch the final showing of the play Antarctia, an original play featured in the New York City Fringe Festival. Written and directed by one friend and starring another one of my oldest friends, Antarctica also featured a theme song that I had written and recorded for it. As one of its performances coincided so well with my trip to New York City, I committed myself to seeing it. We thoroughly enjoyed hearing my song highlighted in the show. Then we went out to drinks with the cast and crew in an old dive bar in one of the wealthiest parts of Manhattan. After that, my friend asked if we’d like to catch another show that she was obligated to see. Looking at our watches, we hopped in a taxi and rushed across the tip of Manhattan to the East Village, where a new original musical was being shown on the New York University campus. We arrived 10 minutes after curtain-up and managed to sneak past the “No Late Admittance” signs into the large theater. Two hours later, it was 10pm, but we still hadn’t had time to catch up with my old friend alone, so we hiked over to west village again where we knew we could find some good gelato. The line for the gelato was a half a block long. We waited in it—and I breathed deeply to calm my nerves as the loud bridge-and-tunnel visitors from New Jersey and Long Island pushed and shoved to get into the air conditioning. With gelato in hand, we hiked back through the throngs of people who crowd Bleecker street on a Saturday night and found a surprisingly half-empty bench on a street corner where we talked. By midnight, it was past time for us to get back to Brooklyn. We said our goodbyes and got back into the subway.

A note on New York City subways in August: Subway cars are air-conditioned. This may sound like good news, but the heat dispelled by the air conditioning units is released into the subway tunnels, where it remains trapped. The subway stations are where air-conditioned subway cars, and the associated heat vents, linger for extended periods. Outside, the typical August temperature was in the 90’s at 90% humidity. On the subway platform, it was probably over 100 degrees with humidity nearing the dew point. This means that you can enter the subway feeling hot and sweaty, but by the time you get onto the subway, you’ll be wilting and soaked. I tried to pretend I was in a New York Mills sauna, but the noise and the crowds made it difficult. The air conditioning usually feels pretty good for the first few moments after you enter the subway car, but then you start feeling clammy and, soon after that, chilled. Summer subway rides are an exercise in temperature extremes. Even on the hottest days of summer, I never ventured out of my apartment without a warm cardigan. Some of my coldest experiences have been wearing short sleeves in August on the New York City subway.

With subway construction happening on the F line, our trip Saturday night took longer than we hoped. But that was nothing compared to the next day’s rush. Sunday morning, we learned that the bride and groom wanted to have brunch with us to squeeze in a bit of private time before they headed off on their honeymoon that evening. We had a flight out that afternoon, but it was their wedding, so we trucked into Manhattan. What should have taken us forty-five minutes by train, started out badly when the subway didn’t come for twenty minutes. It got worse when the subway paused for 10 minutes at a signal. Then we gave up, jumped out at Canal street, and grabbed a taxi to take us to meet the bride and groom on 29th street in Manhattan. We were only 15 minutes late after one hour of travel by subway, taxi and foot, and we had a lovely hour-long brunch. After brunch, we walked 30 minutes to the nearest F-train station. We had a good hour before the car was supposed to pick us up from the airport (after our lengthy and expensive trip on public transport from the airport, we decided to splurge on a car back to it). The car was scheduled to arrive at 3pm. We got on the subway at 2pm. By 2:30pm, there was still no train in sight. We were in trouble. From that part of the city, a taxi wouldn’t be much faster than the subway. The subway finally arrived. It was slow. We got back to Park Slope at 3pm to find our taxi waiting for us. We explained our predicament—we needed fifteen minutes to pack our stuff, finish the laundry, make their bed, and clean the mess we’d left. We sprinted through our preparations, jumped in the car, paid the $10 toll on the Verrazano bridge, got stuck in Staten Island traffic, and arrived at the airport just in time to earn two $300 travel vouchers for giving up our seats on the overcrowded flight. We were on the next flight out and were back in Fargo in the wee hours of Monday morning. Once back in good old Minnesota driving along the moon-soaked stretches of Highway 10, I felt an unmistakable sense of relief.

I don’t know if I’m a Minnesotan yet, but I do know that I was glad to get back to New York Mills.

I also know that we won’t be using our travel vouchers to fly back to New York City.

New York Mills Herald, Introductory Column
Originally published on August 22, 2007
Credited to my other identity, Elisa Korentayer

From Big New York City to Little New York Mills

Hello, New York Mills. I’m a new columnist for the New York Mills Herald—you’ll see my byline in these pages periodically. For those of you who don’t me, I’d like to use this first column to introduce myself. I am a singer-songwriter, writer, and composer who lived in New York City until this past spring. Now, I call New York Mills home. And how I got here is the stuff stories are made of.

In September 2005, I decided to apply for artist residencies and fellowships. While researching, I uncovered an unusual solo arts retreat hosted by the New York Mills Regional Cultural Center (NYMRCC) and sponsored by the Jerome Foundation. At the last minute before the NYMRCC application was due, I decided I didn’t have time to complete my application. But in the end, I figured that the more opportunities I applied to, the more likely it was I’d get into one, and so I stayed up late to complete my application.

Four months later, I found an envelope from the New York Mills Cultural Center in my tiny apartment mailbox. Inside the envelope was my very first acceptance to an artist residency program. The New York Mills Cultural Center invited me to spend May 2006 in their artist’s cottage and they offered me a stipend to cover my travel and living expenses. I jumped up and down in a frenzy of excitement that I had been accepted to an arts residency in a county called Ottertail. Ottertail… a name that hinted at wildlife, farmland and trees upon trees—a far cry from my daily routine of subway tunnels, honking traffic, and concrete horizons.

To plan for my trip to the Minnesota countryside, I did what any overachieving and under-funded New York City artist might do. I borrowed every guidebook on Minnesota in the entire New York City library system. From the pile of ten Minnesota guidebooks on my desk, I learned that in a state that is synonymous with lakes, the one thing one must do in Minnesota is go canoeing. Okay, I thought. Canoeing in Minnesota it is. The only question that remained was how to make it happen with no canoe and minimal paddling experience. I researched every canoe outfitter in the Boundary Waters, and learned that May is still too early in the season to join an existing group tour. After an ill-advised attempt to find co-canoers by advertising on the Minneapolis Craig’s List online bulletin board, I finally contacted Lynn Kasma, the resident artist coordinator at the NYMRCC, to see what she might suggest.

“I know the perfect guy for you,” she said. Little did I know that she actually meant “the perfect guy for me.” But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Lynn described Chris Klein as a Board member of the NYMRCC, an experienced outdoorsman, a triathlete, a financial planner, and an all-around good guy. “He’ll be happy to take you out canoeing,” she told me.

I contacted Chris by phone, and after some awkward getting-to-know-you moments, we agreed that Chris would take me on a three-day, two-night canoe trip on the Crow Wing river during my first weekend in Minnesota. To placate any of my concerns about being out in the woods with some guy I’d never met, Chris offered to find some other folks to come along with us.

As it turned out, Pam and Gary Robinson agreed to join us for the middle day of canoeing, a Saturday, but Friday, Friday night, and Saturday night, it would just be Chris and me. As a solo woman planning to spend time in a community I didn’t know, I considered my options carefully. What if Chris was an unsavory fellow? What if Chris was an axe murderer? I reasoned, finally, that if Chris was a Board member, then it would behoove him and the organization not to harm me. An unseemly incident with a visiting artist would likely make it difficult for the organization to get funding in the future. I decided to go ahead with the trip.

When I described my daring plans to friends, they responded with something between shock, concern, and awe. A close friend summed it up for me perfectly: “Either this is a really bad idea, or the best blind date ever.” Well, as my new address attests, it turned out pretty well.

The three-day canoe trip was a blast. Chris and I got along like old friends. Then we spent time together almost everyday of my month-long residency. For public record, let me state that we only started dating during the last week of my stay.

I was sure there was no way a relationship between a country boy and this city girl was going to have legs. One year of long distance dating later, I’m happy to say that things seemed to have worked themselves out.

I am now a fully-fledged resident of New York Mills, Minnesota. I have a Minnesota drivers’ license, Minnesota license plates, and a tendency to say “Ya.” I’m learning to love the fact that traffic in this part of the country means waiting at the stop sign for people to wave cars ahead of them. I have been elected to the Board of the NYMRCC, and I’m already concocting ideas for projects I can do with the Cultural Center and other local organizations.

I have yet to try hot dish, and I’m trying to stay away from the Minnesota version of salad. (I’m not yet ready to believe that the term “salad” can include jello as a main ingredient.) But, all in all, I’m happy to be here, and I’m looking forward to getting to know my new community.

See you all again soon in print, and around town.

Hello Blogworld! I have eschewed blogging responsibilities for about a year and a half, and I'm pleased to be back. Much has changed in my world. I moved from New York City to rural west central Minnesota. I'm engaged. And I'm learning to live a new kind of life in a town of 1100 people. I have started writing a column for the local newspaper, The New York Mills Herald, and I'd like to share my columns in this space. I'm glad to be back. My three-column backlog to follow.