Sadly, summer is coming to an end. Labor Day will be here soon, and the weather has already gotten cooler–unseasonably cool and glorious, with highs in the 70s and 80s and lows in the 50s. Northern Minnesota has had lows in the 40s for a while now and has even had a frost. We even had a low of 49 here in southern Minnesota a few nights ago. We can only hope that frost will delay its arrival in our part of the region.

It turned out to be a busy summer. I worked a lot of hours on a project for Educational Testing Service, including two weeks at their headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey. It was one of three trips I took to the East Coast, including one to Vermont and Quebec and two to Princeton–much more travel than usual in my current life.

Following my trips, it seems an opportune time to consider some regional differences between the East Coast and the Upper Midwest. Although I’ve lived most of my life in Minnesota, I spent about nine years on the East Coast in graduate school and working at ETS, so I draw on that experience as well.

Density: No question, they pack ‘em in out East. New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the nation. I came to accept Saturday traffic jams as part of life there, but the traffic getting to the Jersey Shore in the summer was downright depressing and is surely worse now. Having all those people in a small area means that rail transit is more important, and the Northeast rail corridor is used heavily. Minneapolis-St. Paul is still maturing in terms of rail transit. You can take the newly opened light rail from the Mall of America to the airport to downtown Minneapolis, and there’s Amtrak for long trips, but it’s nothing like the railway systems of the Northeast.

Ethnicity: The Northeast is a melting pot with different flavors than the Upper Midwest. Where I lived, in New Jersey, the two ethnic groups that made the greatest difference between the regions, in my mind, were Jews and Italians, among whom I count many friends. While both groups are important in the Upper Midwest, they have nowhere near the numbers and total impact that they do in the Northeast. There are more African Americans in the Northeast as well, and if you go to New York City, the diversity is amazing, particularly outside of expensive Manhattan. A few years ago an African American friend led us on a walk down 125th Street in Harlem, a place I would not have dared to go when I first went out East in 1988. The scene there a dozen years later was remarkable, as we walked among a sea of Africans dressed in colorful robes and speaking French and other languages.

Today the number of Indian Americans in New Jersey is remarkable. On this most recent trip I went to a grocery store near Kendall Park, New Jersey, and more than half the faces seemed to be Indian. Visitors to New Jersey should check out Oak Tree Road in Edison, where you’ll find a Little India.

Here in the Upper Midwest, immigration was traditionally more northern European–besides Yankees from out east, lots of Germans and Scandinavians. Today immigrants come more from Mexico, Laos, and Somalia. But outside of Minneapolis and St. Paul, we’re still mainly white. Here in Northfield, there are times when my daughter and I are at a playground and find that we are a minority among Hispanics. But for the most part, you don’t see too many other non-white faces around town. I’m happy to say, however, that Northfield has two Indian restaurants now–twice as many as it had before the summer started.

Roads: Very old and windy out east, more “organic”–not fit to a surveyor’s right-angled grid like in the Upper Midwest. Roads in New Jersey often have helpful old names such as Princeton-Hightstown Road or Lawrenceville-Pennington Road, which tell you the two towns connected by the road. There are often no shoulders on eastern roads. The dense foliage pushes up right against the road and forms canopies over head more often than in the Upper Midwest. (Chicago has similar differences to the Upper Midwest in this respect also.)

Houses: You can’t beat the stone houses of the Delaware River Valley, which have no equal here, and New Jersey really does have those split-level suburban homes with twisty shrubs, just like you see on TV and in the movies. Both regions have their boxy McMansions, but the east has many more densely packed row houses. The neighborhoods of Minneapolis-St. Paul that pre-date World War II have great character, with lots of beautiful bungalows, Arts and Crafts homes, and two-story brick apartments. Nothing out east quite is quite like it.

European influence: Europe seems palpably closer in the Northeast. Northeasterners seem more likely to go to Europe on vacation, to drive European cars, and to emulate its ways. Upper Midwesterners are a more provincial bunch who are more likely to brag about a trip to Banff or Branson than to Berlin.

Customer service: When I go out East, I lower my expectations for customer service. Not many friendly remarks or pleasantries exchanged in transactions there. Just pay and get out. Inane as those pleasantries can be in the Upper Midwest, I’ll take them any day over sullen faces and silence.

Wealth: When I was a student at the University of Minnesota way back in the 1980’s, I paid ten cents a page to print out papers on university dot-matrix printers. When I got to grad school at Princeton University, I found that printing was free, and it was done on laser printers. That was my first taste of Princeton’s wealth and just one small example of the wealth out East. I saw it also in New York City, where the extravagant display of affluence–everything from fur coats to limousines–is still more a part of life than in the Upper Midwest, though here we have our luxury boats and vacation homes as well.

History: The Northeast, which I consider to be everything from Washington, D.C. to Maine, has been the scene of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. The Upper Midwest has seen only frontier wars between Europeans and the Native Americans. Are there deep regional differences that result from this contrast? Perhaps, but that’s a deep topic that I’m not prepared to address. It may be that Upper Midwesterners have more na?ve assumptions about history and the potential for conflict. On the other hand, we all read and watch the same news. We should all realize that no order is permanent–not even our own.

The Upper Midwest is a young region of a young country, at least as far as recorded history of the western variety is concerned. This summer has seen the celebration of a couple of sesquicentennials in my current hometown of Northfield. It’s the 150th anniversary of both the town itself and the church that my family belongs to, Northfield United Methodist. Thus, it was roughly six generations ago that people of European descent began to form the institutions that would help them thrive on the frontier of the United States.

On Sunday, July 24, our church celebrated its sesquicentennial. Pastor Clay Oglesbee led a meaningful worship service at the Eleanor Salisbury farm about three miles south of town, the site in 1855 of the first Methodist service in Rice County, which evolved into our current congregation. The 1855 service was held in Edmund Larkin’s home, which according to one account was a “log house on the edge of the big woods.” (Those woods, I believe, were part of the forest of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. Laura was born in Pepin, Wisconsin, a town on the Mississippi River, not too far east of here. A remnant of the Big Woods still exists in the form of Nerstrand-Big Woods State Park, just a few miles from Northfield.)

For the anniversary the church distributed a color brochure that relates more history. In it I read that the Methodists went on to build their first church building in 1859, the only one in Northfield at the time. It was located on a site that today is around 310 East 6th Street, between College and Union Streets. A later account says that first church was “the plainest of the plain,” “homely” and “unpretentious.” The brochure also contains a list of all the pastors who have served the congregation, and its names communicate something of the British ethnicity of Methodism–names such as Scofield, McKinley, Kirkpatrick, Day, Tucker, Stogdill, Richardson, Cowgill. Only a few German names–Weiss, Klaus, Horst–break up this pattern; they begin to appear in the 1920’s.

The special service on July 24 was a meaningful one for me, as Pastor Clay invited us to sense a connection with the early pioneers. It was a hot day, but there on the old Larkin farm, the wind was cool. To the east I could see a beautiful vista of gently rolling hills. Pastor Clay pointed to a grizzled oak tree in that direction. Under the tree, he told us, is a stone that is said to be the grave marker for the first white child buried in the county.

I did feel a connection to the past there during that service. I grieved for the unknown child buried nearby. I looked around at the windswept congregation and was grateful to be there, alive and part of the next step in history.