Turning the corner

About four weeks before the election, Paul Henry Polzin, a 27-year-old mechanic in Blue Earth County, MN, came down with the flu. His parents, Herman and Josephine, had come from Germany, but Paul was born in Minnesota and found his calling when he realized that he understood cars better than people. However, the flu was followed by pneumonia, and despite his youth he died on October 12^th. In this mostly rural county, he was the first to succumb to the sickness he’d been warned about, but he wasn’t the last.

Four days later, a thirty-year-old maid who came down with the flu developed double pneumonia and died on October 16^th. Then, a housewife weakened by a miscarriage got the flu and then pneumonia and—though only twenty—died on the 18^th. The following day Victor Anderson, a thirty-year-old laborer, succumbed to influenza followed by bronchopneumonia. In the next two-and-a-half weeks leading up to the election, fifteen more people ranging in age from six months to eighty-five years died in Blue Earth County as a result of contracting influenza that developed into pneumonia.

People distrustful of doctors, science, and reports in the news suspected that the seriousness of the pandemic was overstated and that people actually died of pneumonia, not the flu, and that reports of death and the necessity of wearing masks would quickly pass. However, in the week after the polls closed, ten more Blue Earth County residents died, including a forty-year-old stonemason, a 71-year-old retired farmer, a sixteen-year-old student, a forty-year-old butcher, and a hospital nurse who was only twenty-three. And the flu continued to ravage families in the county for the next few months.

Unfortunately, many people today seem to have learned little from those events in 1918, when the Spanish flu killed dozens in Blue Earth County, MN, over 600,000 in the U.S., and millions around the world.

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On the west side of County Road 5 running through Walnut Grove, MN, stands a house with a Trump sign stuck in the snow-covered front yard and a flagpole next to the sidewalk leading to the front door. Instead of the Stars-and-Stripes, however, the black flag flopping in the north wind resembles the standard raised by pirates on the attack. While a pirate flag has a skull and crossbones, this one unfurls a more aggressive and ignorant threat: “God, Guns, and Trump.” Not only does it preposterously associate guns with God, who even in the Old Testament says, “Thou shalt not kill,” but it ignores the absurdity of connecting the Almighty with that covetous, draft-dodging, dissembling, misogynistic huckster whose only use for the Bible is as a prop in a photo op.

I’m both puzzled and worried that people can be so blind to the ravages of today’s Republican Party that they can’t see their own bellicose sacrilege in this kind of politicking. Of course, the attitude implied in this display makes it easy to understand why someone has stolen two Biden/Harris signs that my brother put up along U.S. Hwy. 14, where he owns a large machine shed, and another sign from his lawn along County Road 5. But what exactly the thieves expect to accomplish is tough to figure — though force and fear rather than “figuring” likely play a greater part in their calculus. If anything, this all just confirms what we’ve known for the last four years.

* * *

Late last Saturday afternoon I went for a run. In the broad flat fields on either side of the west-bound asphalt road south of town, bent and broken cornstalks protruded from the snow at unruly angles like Czech hedgehogs at Normandy. As the road swung left and then descended to the bridge across Plum Creek, a dozen robins rose out of the ditch and into the bare cottonwoods above the shallow stream of water. I plodded out of the creek bottom and up the hill. I gasped for breath near the top and startled three whitetail deer off the asphalt, across an open field, and into the trees beyond. By the time I reached the spot where they’d stood, they’d disappeared.

At the corner I turned north and leaned into the wind. The sun broke through the clouds in the afternoon sky, its warmth soaking through the back of my black jacket. I trudged on, past the sumac that only a few weeks before swelled with blood-red leaves, the remnants of a huge garden that had been tended all summer by a Hmong woman under a round wide-brimmed straw hat, and the Walnut Grove Cemetery, where the grave of Frederick Krueger gives local kids chills on moonless October nights. I pushed up the last hill and passed Jeff Harnack’s big house on the left; in the mid-seventies when we both played high school football on opposing teams in the Red Rock Conference, he was a force for the Walnut Grove Loggers.

As I approached the intersection with County Road 20 that goes east back into town, I looked both ways and then crossed to the left side. Stones littered the shoulder, so I watched each step, but as I glanced ahead, I noticed or felt something in the ditch behind me on my left. I looked back. A doe, dead, lay on its side, its black nose cold and still in the pigeon grass, its right eye glassy, skyward. Likely hit by a pickup. Deer-hunting season starts in a week. Maybe the lesser of two evils.

* * *

Eventually, after having escaped reminders of illness and politics in the solitude of the countryside, I trudged back into town. But as I turned the corner onto County Road 5, I realized that I had to pass that idiotic black flag and that the rest of the way home was still all uphill —as it likely is for all of us.