In the fall of 2019, I visited the Crystal Creek Citizen Artist Residency for a week. I wrote this piece as part of the program’s reflection series, and Erin Dorbin also published it on their website. I’d encourage you to read all of the other artist reflections on the Crystal Creek website, also. This is a great residency program for anybody who wants support to pursue their open-ended community work in a really special place.
Above: my makeshift portrait studio on the side of the road in Houston county. I spent most of my residency making roadside portraits for folks in Houston county, setting up in a different county gathering place each day. I hooked my printer up to a deep-cycle marine battery and made prints on the spot for subjects to take home. Sometimes it worked, other times it didn’t; but the emphasis was on the conversations and serendipitous encounters that start to happen when word gets out that an itinerant photographer is printing portraits in the ditch.
In Gore Vidal’s novel, Duluth, he describes a town that bears only a passing and poetic resemblance to Duluth, Minnesota where I live. Vidal's Duluth is situated on the edge of a desert, not Lake Superior. Native flamingos wander amongst Spanish moss that hangs from the trees lining the city's grand boulevards. Simultaneously, the same Duluth landscape in the novel is covered by snow drifts and streets slicked with black ice that send cars skidding. Clearly, his Duluth is a psychedelic sister-city to the real place, with a jumbled mirror image that clearly isn’t meant to line up. Sometimes, the history of Vidal’s deranged Duluth does mirror actual events from the city in northern Minnesota, but it’s hard to tell where the history ends and the myth-making begins.
To top it off, Vidal also includes a few layered narratives; characters in Duluth will die and reappear in a popular television soap opera which characters in the book watch weekly. In one scene, a real estate agent from Duluth (the book) dies after crashing into a snow drift, only to reappear in a courtroom scene in Duluth (the TV program). She pauses the courtroom drama to speak to a bewildered former client of hers through the television, recommending a few new properties that just came on the market. At a certain point, you stop asking which narrative you’re in, and dipping between them becomes a cryptic pleasure. It suggests a parallel world, just on the other side of ours, similar but different, which you can sometimes pass back and forth between without knowing. Reading it was good preparation for spending time in the Driftless.
Mike’s dolls, Spring Grove, Minnesota. “Gotta do something with that high ceiling.”
The word driftless refers to glacial drift; when glaciers pass through a region, they often leave boulders and other debris on the landscape in their wake. Geologists call this drift; since the glaciers that shaped much of Minnesota's geography mysteriously skipped this region of the upper Mississippi, they left behind no glacial drift, hence the name driftless. Why the glaciers skipped this part, nobody knows for sure. Everything that has happened here since then owes a little bit to that early enigma.
Erin Dorbin, my host during the residency week, said that she felt like Houston County had a secret hiding around every hill. As we drove around, from historic societies to obscure roadside monuments to lovingly preserved little prairie churches, I began to sense the same thing. From atop a grassy bluff, looking around with her, I could physically see across the 569 square miles of Houston county, but if I squinted, I felt like I could be seeing the corresponding bluff country of Wisconsin, Iowa, or Illinois. Squinting harder, I could even see the fjords of Norway, the hollers of Appalachia, and the highlands of Laos.
Even the name of the place itself caused confusion with people back home. I had to clarify that I meant Houston, Minnesota, not Texas. The place is hard to describe--not because it lacks specificity, but because it embodies more specificities than I’m used to. It’s Houston County, sure, but it’s a lot of other places at the same time.
Above: Rushford, Minnesota’s grocery store deli, with portraits of Miss Rushford from over the years.
One day, I met and photographed a man named Wally operating a thrift store. He had two prosthetic legs. He had lost one leg to the bite of a brown recluse spider, and the other to diabetes. He moonlighted as a karaoke DJ, but he dreamed of becoming a motivational speaker. On that same day, I listened to another man hold forth on the roadside about the simple beauty of Andrew Wyeth‘s paintings. Later, a woman showed me how she could mimic the calls of every owl in North America.
Later still, I spent an evening in an underground house and listened to a couple reflect on escaping the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. As the light faded from the valley, I stood in the county fairgrounds as a man I met at the library considered the “tension between a historic document and the story that we tell to describe it”. The landscape felt like the biggest library, and I was just brushing my fingers across the spines as I walked down the stacks. High crests and low lands, deep dives and surface tensions.
Wally.
I spent one day photographing in Choice, an unincorporated little place, tucked in a valley that’s fed by a creek. While setting up my makeshift photo studio on the roadside, I met Ilene, who’s lived in Choice for a long time. In this picture, she’s holding a stack of photocopied newspaper articles, all about Choice, that she brought out to show me. In the pile was a framed copy of the 1870 farm census, which showed her homestead as being occupied by a single man named Ole Richardson, as well as “3 horses, 4 milk cows, 10 other cattle, 20 sheep, and 9 swine”. That year, Ole’s farm produced “750 bushels of spring wheat, 400 bushels of Indian corn, 250 bushels of oats, 50 bushels of Irish potatoes, 225 pounds of butter, and 25 tons of hay”. You coulda’ done worse, Ole.
Behind Ilene is the Choice bluff, which used to be decorated with lights every Christmas. People would drive from all over to see. The old Norwegian lady who hung the lights, since passed, used to bake cookies and give away a jar of them to every person who came to see her display. Ilene drove her golf cart back to her house and brought me a small Tupperware of the same cookies. “I got the recipe from her, and she had gotten it from another old Norwegian lady who had gotten it from another,” she said to me. “So Choice goes way back. What else do you wanna know?”
Choice: a town
that has no stores, no post office, no internet searchable census results.
A sign at the bottom of a lush valley
A spot in Minnesota
where aster, bluestem
bergamot, blazing star,
bloom straight
to highway’s shoulder.
-Rachael Button, 2018 citizen artist in residence
A while back, Ilene told me, the little creek that flows through Choice flooded. It was the subject of much local press at the time, and she showed me the yellowed and brittle proof in her stack of papers. For a brief moment, I could hear the rumble of a distant flood, of conspiring waterways, of the ghosts of glaciers twisting their way down a mighty and mysterious road.
Ilene, in Choice.