There’s another Bill Ostrem out there. He’s Bill Ostrem of California, a successful developer, and vastly more wealthy than I, I expect. Among his projects are the very large planned communities, EastLake, near San Diego, and Yokohl Ranch, near Visalia. I’d like to visit and learn more some time.

Reading about his projects and having lived in California myself from 2002 to 2004, I know that development in the Golden State makes developoment in the Midwest look like child’s play. They build big and fast out west. I remember when Elk Grove, a suburb of Sacramento, added something like four elementary schools in one year, probably around 2003.

I believe Mr. Ostrem may be descended from some Ostrems who settled in Illinois, most likely Norwegians like my Ostrem ancestors. I’ll try to find out more.

I was listening to the radio while cleaning up the house this morning and heard an interview with poets Galway Kinnell and Josephine Dickinson. Hearing them speak brought back memories of the important place poetry once took in my life. When I was in academia, I read and taught a great deal of poetry, and I wrote quite a bit as well. When I left academia, I continued to read and write poetry, but for a number of years now it’s been a much smaller part of my life. The choice was a conscious one, and I don’t want to sound morose or whining about it. Simply put, I chose to focus on other things.

However, hearing Josephine Dickinson, a British poet, talk and read made me think I’ve let poetry recede too far into the background of my life. She caught my attention when she mentioned that she had lived for some time near Alston, England. Alston is a place I became familiar with through the work of the poet W.H. Auden, who loved and wrote about the area around that remote village in the northern Pennines. I also visited the town and surrounding countryside for several days about 10 years ago and greatly enjoyed its natural beauty and its connections to Auden and his work.

Dickinson, who became deaf at the age of six, spoke of her new book of poems, Silence Fell. The word “fell” here has a double meaning; besides its meaning as a verb, in Britain it also means, according to my dictionary, “a high barren hill or moor.” (I wouldn’t say “barren,” however; “treeless” would be better. The word fell comes from the Old Norse word for mountain; the Norwegian word for mountain is fjell.) Thus the title is also a place-name.

I hope to read the book and walk the fells again in my mind. Until then, I’ll dip into Auden. “Alston Moor” is a piece of romantic juvenilia by the teenaged Auden, but its opening lines are worth quoting, particularly given the time of year:

April, fair maid, is come with laughter in her eyes
And everywhere she weaves her lovely spells
On plain and hill; I know that now the South Wind cries
Her name upon the long slow curvings of the fells.

(Juvenilia: Poems, 1922-1928, p. 32)

Christopher Tassava, who creates the impressive Northfield blog “Blowing and Drifting,” directed me to this interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times, “The City that Never Walks,” by Robert Sullivan. Sullivan is disappointed that New York City is becoming more dependent on autos for transportation, a trend that is counter to what is happening in many cities.

Here are some choice excerpts: Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend I saw some old friends I hadn’t seen in a long time.

One was a friend from my freshman year of college, when I attended the University of Chicago (I subsequently transferred to the University of Minnesota). He was in town for a job interview and earlier had located me via the Internet and this blog. We hadn’t talked in more than 20 years! My family and I went up to St. Paul and met with him on Saturday. It was wonderful to catch up and find that we had more in common than ever, including marriage and children within the last five years. Read the rest of this entry »

This being the fifth anniversary of September 11, I thought I would add my words to the many already written or voiced. Of course I do remember vividly what I was doing when I heard about the attacks on that day.

I was living in the Princeton, New Jersey, area on September 11, 2001, and was at work. I had just come back from a meeting when people started to talk about planes hitting the two World Trade Center towers - the Twin Towers, the landmarks that first marked Manhattan on the horizon when taking the northeast corridor train in from New Jersey. Read the rest of this entry »

My family and I are back from an enjoyable two-week trip to North Carolina and Washington, D.C. It involved some work as well as some vacation.

We spent the first week in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the second in the Outer Banks (along North Carolina’s coast), Virginia, and Washington. Raleigh, along with the cities of Chapel Hill and Durham, is in the “research triangle.” The name comes from the research universities in those cities: North Carolina State University in Raleigh, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and Duke University in Durham. Few metropolitan areas in the country have a comparable concentration of research universities - certainly none in the Upper Midwest - and this is sure to become an even more important area in the future. Read the rest of this entry »

As I contemplate the rockets and bombs raining down on people in Israel and Lebanon, it occurs to me that I experience modern technology in a very different way than do the people in those regions. Here, deep inside the most heavily militarized nation-state on the planet, the mighty fortress of the United States, it’s highly unlikely a rocket will rain down on my family and my house. Instead, I experience modern technology mainly as a benefit, as a sharp-edged knife that is in my own hands. For example, planes ferry us around for business and pleasure; they don’t direct bombs at my neighborhood. The one exception to that is September 11, when planes were directed as deadly missiles. Thus our obsessive focus on that dark day.

The vicious, serrated edge of modern techonology, the one used in warfare, will strike this nation again one day. But for now, it is mainly directed at others far away, including Lebanon, and to a lesser degree at Israel.

Since Israel’s military capacity is so much greater than its immediate neighbors, that country is also causing the most destruction in the current conflict. Israel, look at the blade in your own hand. Look where you are directing it, whose throats you are cutting.

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.

Your intrepid correspondent is now writing to you from outside the region. I’m in the Princeton, New Jersey, area, where I’m working for my old employer, Educational Testing Service, for a couple of weeks. I’ll be going home soon and am eager to see my wife and daughter again.

My return to Princeton has given me an occasion to remember my first move out of the Midwest. It was the summer of 1988 and there was a severe drought all across the country, with very hot weather to boot. Only a few months before I had received one of the most important letters of my life–an acceptance into the graduate program in English at Princeton University.

I can still remember that acceptance letter: the heft of the thick envelope, the official look of the cover letter, and the carbon-paper smell and crinkle of the forms. Princeton had offered me a four-year fellowship that would pay for tuition and a $6000 stipend per year–not all that much even back then, but enough to get by. I would have to teach in my third and fourth years, but for the first two years, I would have no responsibilities other than my classes. I would be paid to learn! It was my first experience of Princeton’s great wealth, my first look into its atmosphere of privilege.

I was sorry to be leaving my one-bedroom apartment in Dinkytown, the Minneapolis neighborhood near the University of Minnesota. I had gotten used to the space and privacy of my own apartment, which I had earned by working as an apartment caretaker and taking summer jobs. Now I would have to give it up for a soulless room in a modern Princeton dorm.

I packed up my belongings and put a dorm-room-size load of books and other stuff into the smallest U-Haul trailer available, which was hitched to my 1976 Dodge Aspen station wagon (inherited from my Grandpa Jack) and headed east on Interstate 94.

I’d driven to Chicago before, though perhaps only with my family, so the trip through Wisconsin and northern Illinois was familiar. I passed through beautiful, rolling Wisconsin countryside, through the strange, flat, piney landscape of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, with its unusual rock outcroppings; through the Madison area, a college radio island; then into the corn-field prairie of southern Wisconsin. As I drove south out of Wisconsin, I left the Upper Midwest and its quieter roads behind. Free highway travel was now behind me. It would be tolls all the way from Chicago to the New Jersey border as I made my way across the nation’s busy midsection.

I stayed with my aunt and uncle in Chicago the first night. If I remember right, the next day I opted for the route that took me near downtown Chicago. I’ve always marveled at that city’s size and thrilled to see its lakeside skyline. For me Chicago is a metaphor of the larger world beyond home. But on this trip there was no stopping in downtown Chicago. It was onto northern Indiana, at which point I popped a tape of John Cougar Mellencamp into the tape deck and enjoyed the pretty, rolling scenery. I also had Bruce Springsteen music with me on the trip, as preparation for New Jersey and fitting accompaniment for the road.

Most of the drama of this trip was internal, though on I-80 outside of Toledo I had a flat tire and had to fix it on the side of the freeway. That entailed unhitching the trailer and emptying the back of the station wagon. Fortunately, the damaged tire was not on the traffic side. Then, it was on through more parched landscape to Pennsylvania, where I took I-76 towards the southern part of the state.

I spent an anxious night in a cheap, somewhat rundown motel in Somerset, Pennsylvania–after having decided not to stay at the name-brand motels. I felt troubled by the unfamiliar, seedy surroundings. I woke up early and hit the road again, and the scenery restored me. I passed through Pennsylvania mountains then into densely peopled New Jersey, finally entering leafy Princeton.

Here I was at the next stage of my life, eager for what it would bring, both welcoming and fearing new things.

I made a trip to our neighbor to the north last weekend. Tom, a friend from college, got married to Nicole, a tall, beautiful medical doctor. A native of Montreal who is now prospering in the financial world of Toronto, Tom has been my guide to Canada over the years. I’ve visited him once before in Montreal and at least twice in Toronto. We’ve been skiing in the eastern townships of Quebec, near Vermont, where Tom’s family has a country home in a beautiful valley with views of the Vermont mountains in the distance. The wedding was held there at Tom’s family’s place.

Going to Tom and Nicole’s wedding provides me an occasion to write a few brief thoughts about Canada and the Upper Midwest. If Mexico gives a certain atmosphere to the states bordering it–the tastes of salsa and cilantro, the sounds of Spanish and mariachi music, the bright colors of Mexican blankets, and, of course, millions of immigrants–the same is not true for Canada. Our modern cultures have a similar source, the British empire (for the most part), so the differences are not as great. Our livings standards are similar as well, so there is no rush across the border by immigrants.

I once heard the comedian Mike Myers, a Canadian, make a perceptive comment about his native country: “Canada is the essence of not being. Not English, not American, it is the mathematic of not being. And a subtle flavor - we’re more like celery as a flavor.”

Here in the Upper Midwest Canada’s influence is subtle, not strong, but wholesome nonetheless–a celery influence rather than a salsa influence. For people here, Canada is thought of most often as a wilderness destination, a place to catch large fish in abundance–a feat that is difficult in our more heavily fished lakes. But perhaps more importantly, Canada is also there as a quiet counter-example to some of the individualistic, violent, bellicose, nationalistic tendencies of our nation.

I first think of Canada’s system of national health insurance for all citizens as one of its most significant differences from our own culture. Most Americans know this difference exists, and it creates a slight gravitational pull in that direction for our own society. Our own regional newspaper, the Star Tribune, published several opinion pieces on June 12 calling for universal, single-payer health insurance similar to Canada’s.

There is also the much-advertised difference in prices for prescription drugs, which has caught the attention of Americans. Same-sex marriage is allowed in eight of Canada’s thirteen provinces and is likely to become legal nationally soon. And Canada’s rates for violent crime are several times lower than those in the United State.

Some might argue that on some measures the comparisons between our countries are not fair. The United States has ten times the population of Canada. One might argue that the U.S. has become the sole world superpower, and, with its military preeminence, has responsibilities to the world that are different not just in degree but in kind from the Canada.

Even if those arguments are true, I would argue that we should compare ourselves with Canada. We share the same continent, have many common aspects in our history and heritage, are both open to immigrants, and if one of us is suffering in some measure when compared to the other, then surely some correction is due.

Oh Canada, you present a picture of a quietly decent society, and only time will tell if you are our future or we are yours.