AUGUST 30, 2020 – Last Thursday I drove home from the Red Cabin to host on our back porch, my five-member, monthly book club gathering. Soon after pulling into the driveway, however, I had to cancel—curfews had been ordered to prevent another night of looting.
I stayed for two days to catch up on things. On Friday I ran an errand on the far side of downtown Minneapolis—normally a 15-minute drive, now 90-minutes thanks to road construction projects. A detour took me past the Byerly/Lund’s grocery store that’d been a “Wholesale Target” of Wednesday night’s looters—all too close to our town six miles away, where looters had struck after the killing of George Floyd in May. After the errand, I repaired to our back porch to address some (virtual) office matters. Within minutes I remembered: the barking dog two doors down and the neighbor obsessed with a leaf-blower. After two weeks at the Red Cabin, I was feeling jarred by urbanity.
On the plus side, however, I spent good time with our granddaughter, including a walk down the block to inspect more “gnome villages” along the boulevards. Some sported gnome-sized versions of full-sized yard signs—“We’re in this Together” and “All Are Welcome Here.”
But yesterday morning on the back porch, while I hacked out my daily post and my wife perused The Times, we slipped into despairing conversation about the latest news. (In what previous era did we can get so stirred up talking politics and current events with people who are in complete agreement with us?) When sirens sounded in the background, our conversation stopped. My wife said, “It’s as though we’re all experiencing PTS. Before George Floyd, I never paid much attention to sirens. Since then, when I hear sirens I wonder—what’s happening now?”
After addressing a few more business matters, I loaded up the car and said “Good-bye; see you soon!” to my wife, who in a few days will follow me to the Red Cabin.
Soon I was beyond urban traffic and into bucolic countryside—bucolic but unsettling. Since only Thursday a new crop of conspicuous “TRUMP/PENCE” signs had sprouted along the roadside. Above one was attached a sheet of plywood shouting, “DRAIN THE SWAMP!” The sign stood atop a berm beside an actual swamp.
Just then, as if devised by a film director, a vehicle bearing a bumper sticker, “YE SHALL BE BORN AGAIN. John [x:yy]” roared past me as I entered “Trump Alley”—a mile-stretch of roadway lined with multiple Trump-Pence signs. The southern end of the “Alley” was marked by an extra tall flagpole boasting an American flag, a Confederate flag, and a “Trump 2020” flag. Northern Wisconsin is way north of Mason-Dixon. In the profane vernacular of our day, “WTF?”
The Red Cabin was as before. From the white pine, cones were dropping like coconuts. One struck me on the head and made me laugh. Nature was telling me something: lighten up!
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
