Out of Time

On those rare occasions when I drive east out of Walnut Grove —on my way to a 5k in Sleepy Eye or to tramp through cemeteries in Brown County or to catch a Twins game at Target Field — I take US 14. This monotonous two-lane blacktop stretches between seemingly endless fields of corn and soybeans for a hundred miles from the Dakota line to the Minnesota River. It rarely rolls and only occasionally bends for one of the small towns strung out every few miles like knots in a bracelet or for a bridge spanning an ankle-deep creek. Seven miles east of Walnut Grove, at one of the few conspicuous bends, the highway slides left, drops through a wooded bottomland, crosses Pell Creek, quickly rises, curves right, and then continues straight east again through another long, shallow canyon of corn walls.

On this drab flat landscape — so featureless as to be mostly nameless, so plain as to be called a plain — Pell Creek is one of the few natural landmarks prominent enough to have been named. But its original name suffered the same fate as the topsoil blown into road ditches in the winter or washed away in spring rains. According to the 1914 plat map of Lamberton Township, this narrow twisting waterway was originally called Pelt Creek, most likely for the beaver, mink, fox, and raccoon pelts trappers harvested from its waters and banks during the 1800s and early 1900s. However, in a matter of a few decades, wildlife in the creek bottom was so decimated by over-trapping, over-hunting, and farming, and locals’ memories being as short as they are, that within barely fifteen years the name of the creek — like the topsoil— had eroded. Because the final t had become inaudible and less relevant, the 1930 plat map and all subsequent plat maps published up to the present day, label that narrow, winding waterway — if they label it at all — Pell Creek, not Pelt Creek. As if for someone named Pell.

It’s this temporality that nags me, this frustration with the world’s impermanence and forgetfulness that often makes me feel like an anachronism. I’ve become even more aware of this after being gone for nearly thirty years — six years spent in Rochester, ten in Laredo, two in Wyoming, and eleven in Pennsylvania — before returning to southern Minnesota where I now live a dozen miles from the farm site in Lamberton Township where I grew up. During those years of absence, the places I knew and once occupied — like the memories I hoped to refresh by returning — have regrettably also eroded.

The red brick elementary schoolhouse and its long fire escape — a round gray metal cylinder through which fifth- and sixth-graders happily slid during fire drills from the third floor down to the gravel near the front corner of the building — are gone. The high school where Mr. Gorder, in his second-floor science classroom, lined potted geraniums on the window sill, outlined details of evolution and photosynthesis on the chalkboard in his precise printed script, and kept a six-legged piglet in a sealed jar of formaldehyde on a shelf overlooking our desks. Gone.

The once-thriving small businesses along Lamberton’s Main Street— Rue’s Super Value, the Berton Theater, Essig’s Garage, Kluegel’s Furniture, Meidl’s Music Mart, and Sanger’s Bakery. Gone. Pete’s Body Shop and The Legion Club where Ted Schultz kept a jar of pickled pig’s feet behind the bar next to bottles of McMaster’s and Seagram’s 7 are gone. And the farm site where we lived until I was ten years old —house, barn, granary, brooder house, milkhouse, outhouse, cattle shed, grove — bulldozed, buried, gone. The sprawling elm near the rolltop fence. The cottonwood next to the two-story farmhouse. Slough, nettles, boxelders, burdock. Stanchions, gutter, cistern, yard light. All gone.

And what’s left too often reminds me of all that’s been lost.

Machinery collapsed and rusting in ramshackle groves. Hip-roofed barns sagging into dense patches of thistles and ironweeds. Resurfaced blacktop roads, soon frost-boiled, potholed, pigeon-grassed, and riven with faults staggered sidewise. Crops planted in barren stubbled fields in April are gone by September, leaving nothing but husks, chaff, shattered stalks, and an unbroken view over section after mile-wide section across the mostly nameless landscape. Even fading friendships, the lapse of devotion, the failure of vows, and the mirage of ’til death do us part.

I suppose this might only be a symptom of age, the result of living enough years, that the longing for and the possibility of any kind of permanence is fading. Maybe I cling to the past because of my unwillingness to set youth loose. But even the wristwatch I wind daily cannot keep up. What once was home is now out of sight, misgiven memories slip out of place, and the past I knew, like meteorites through the dark, keeps barreling out of time.