If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now Read online

  Dedication

  To Briana

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  It’s cold. Not really cold, mind you—none of that minus-twenty-or-forty business we’ll get later in the season. But the mercury’s somewhere just south of zero, the winds are whipping like mad up and down the frozen river, and the twins are getting bored.

  “Daddy, when can we go?” Charles asks. A certain falling inflection on the “Dad-dy” suggests he’s about five minutes away from losing it completely, melting down right here on the snow. He’s in his jacket, snow pants, heavy boots, mittens, neck warmer drawn up above his nose, one-size-fits-all Northern Grain hat drooping over his five-year-old head, just the way he likes it. But we’ve been out here too long, cold’s creeping in between the layers, wind’s starting to bite.

  “Just a few minutes, kiddo, we’re next,” I tell him. I gesture over to the small playground where his twin, Jack, is gleefully whizzing down a metal slide, landing with a hard thud on the ice every single time but not minding it at all. “Why don’t you go play with your brother for a few more minutes?”

  “I don’t want to,” he says, same inflection. Despite being twins, Jack and Charles are about as different as two brothers can be. Among many other things, Jack doesn’t mind the cold at all; he’ll run around outside for hours until he’s soaked through from the snow on the outside of his jacket and the sweat within, big clouds of hot, happy exhaled kid breath following him wherever he goes. He’s a furnace. Charles, meanwhile, is hypersensitive to the cold. He’s taken to insisting on having his snow pants on for even the shortest excursion outdoors, even if it’s just a quick hop from the heated house to the heated car and back. He hates the feel of cold pants on his legs.

  “Well then, go over there with Mom and William,” I say. My wife’s helping the one-year-old, our Minnesota baby, chuck fifteen-pound frozen turkeys at an assortment of short PVC pipes standing on their ends. “Turkey bowling,” they call it up here. Yet another way the natives stare down the relentless winters with whimsy and good cheer. William’s mostly given up on trying to manhandle the frozen birds and is basically just flinging himself down the ice alley toward the pipes. His overstuffed winter gear gives him roughly the same proportions as a bowling ball, so it’s not a bad idea.

  “I don’t wanna,” Charles says. He’s about to go code red and I’ve exhausted all my other options so it’s time to go nuclear: I push him down into the snow.

  He’s too shocked to say anything at first but I can see the rage and the laughter duking it out across his face. “Daddy,” he says, trying to get back up, but I knock him down again. Got ’em—he’s laughing now. “DADD—” but I give him another shove before he can get it out and he’s rolling around in the snow giggling. Jack hears the commotion, comes tearing over to where we are, and jumps on my back. It’s on.

  The three of us tumble through the snow, down the slight slope to where the deep stuff is by the river shore, among the frozen cattails still standing from the fall. I briefly wonder if one of us is going to break through some thin ice to a layer of mud or worse below but I realize that’s stupid—the temperature hasn’t been above freezing in months, it’s barely even been above zero. The river’s been frozen solid for a month at least, probably longer than that.

  Soon Briana drops William on the pile and then we’re all there, tumbling around in the frigid snow, the kids whooping and hollering and not even caring when one of them lands face-first in it. Suddenly Jack sits bolt upright.

  “Do you hear it?” he says. We all stop and sit still. The sounds of distant baying and yipping grow louder and suddenly there they are—a team of eight lean, muscular dogs hitched to a pair of canvas sleds. It’s finally our turn to run the river.

  Back in the summer of 2015 I had no idea that I’d just stumbled across the dataset that would change my life, uproot me and my family from our cozy but constrained suburban D.C. life, and plop us down 1,400 miles away at the edge of the vast, open prairie. A place where it snows eight months out of the year, where winter starts in October and doesn’t end until May. A place where taking the kids out on a weekend dogsledding excursion is just one of those things people do.

  The dataset in question was an obscure late-1990s project of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, intended to quantify every single county in America on the physical characteristics that “enhance the location as a place to live.” It assigned a score to counties based on physical characteristics—hills, valleys, bodies of water, nice weather—that most people would agree make a place pleasant to live in.

  As a data reporter for the Washington Post, I thought I’d seen it all: numbers that explain everything from the economy to waffles to the zombie apocalypse. But here was something different—natural beauty, quantified. And with impeccable federal credentials.

  Even better, the project ranked the counties according to where they fell on the scale. Which of America’s more than three thousand counties are the “ugliest,” according to the federal government? And which the most scenic? And where, reader, does your own county fall into the mix?

  The story practically wrote itself, a perfect diversion for D.C.’s August recess doldrums. I mapped the numbers out, wrote a few hundred words to accompany them, slapped a headline on it all (“Every County in America, Ranked by Scenery and Climate”), and called it a day.

  Like countless other pieces of data-driven ephemera I’ve written, I forgot about it almost as soon as my editor hit “publish” the following Monday.

  Funny thing about ranking places—for every city or town or county that’s at the top of some list, there has to be one all the way down at the bottom. As a country we’re obsessed with superlatives—we want to raise our families in the best places, visit the most famous landmarks, climb the highest mountains, and swim the clearest, bluest seas.

  But what about all those other places that don’t make the cut?

  This is a story about one of those forgotten places—an obscure corner of the heartland that, from the vantage point of an Excel sheet on a coastal desktop, appeared to have nothing going for it. No distinguishing features whatsoever, save a last-place finish in a county beauty pageant run by federal statisticians in the late 1990s.

  Red Lake County (pop. 4,055) in northwestern Minnesota is a place so lacking in superlatives that proclaiming itself “the only landlocked county in the United States that is surrounded by just two neighboring counties” is the closest thing to a boast that you’ll find on the county’s website.

  As it turns out, Red Lake County doesn’t have any actual lakes. It doesn’t have any hills. The summers are hot, and the winters are brutally cold. You crunch all those numbers together on a spreadsheet, and it may not be a surprise that the place came in dead last.

  I tossed the county website’s border trivia into the story along with a joke about Red Lake County being “the absolute worst place to live in America,” and didn’t think twice about it.

  But now “the absolute worst place to live in America” is the place I and my family call home. This book is the story of how we got here, what we found w
hen we arrived, and everything we’ve experienced since then. How our lives changed when we moved from one of the nation’s wealthiest suburbs (median household income: $110,000) to a working-class farming community (median income: $50,000) hundreds of miles from anywhere.

  It’s a story about an education in the ways of small-town life. It’s about the people whom I’ve come to call friends and neighbors, who’ve taught us how to fry walleye, make corn shocks, and press apple cider by hand—and who also have gently mocked our big-city “eccentricities” like goat cheese and eggplant parmesan.

  But it’s also bigger than that. It’s a tale about two Americas—the coastal centers of power and money, like D.C., and the thousands of towns and villages in between them who feel like they’ve been left out of the national conversation. As the 2016 election came to a close it became clear that the gulf between those Americas is larger than it’s ever been—but is it really?

  It’s about a journey to the other side of what social scientists call the urban-rural happiness gradient—surveys consistently show that city dwellers are the least satisfied members of society, while those who live in the countryside and small towns are the happiest.

  This book is written specifically for people, like me, who are feeling increasingly stretched thin by the frenetic pace and ever-escalating cost of the big city and suburban lifestyle. People like me commuting fifteen hours a week and rarely seeing their kids because of the vast distance between where jobs are good and where housing is affordable.

  People who have driven through long-forgotten rural areas on the way from one big city to another and wondered, “Who actually lives here?” People who have fantasized about throwing their big city jobs away, moving out to the middle of nowhere, and living a simpler life. People who’ve always wanted to raise their kids in a small town like the one they grew up in, but couldn’t figure out a way to make it work.

  Data from the Pew Research Center shows that more than half of Americans—54 percent—say they’d prefer to live in a small town or rural area. But more than 80 percent of us live in the cities. That’s a huge disconnect—up to a third of all Americans, living in the cities but dreaming of the country.

  On that icy January afternoon the mushers who were running the event helped Briana and all three kids into the front sled. The guy who was guiding us, a grizzled old former sled dog racer, climbed in the back sled.

  “Wait, where am I going to go?” I asked.

  “You stand on the footboards back there,” he said, gesturing to the runners protruding from the sled’s rear. “Hold on tight, do what I tell you, and don’t fall off.”

  “Do you think that’s wise?” I tried to ask, but by then he had given a high-pitched whistle and the dogs were off, baying with the electric excitement of animals doing the one thing in life that they were born to do.

  The dogs pulled us away from shore and onto the icy expanse of the river, which meanders 193 miles from Minnesota’s massive Red Lake to the Red River of the North, along the North Dakota border. Our short journey that day looped us around just a few miles of that distance, under the bridges of the town of Thief River Falls and into the open country beyond.

  Once the dogs reached cruising speed they became silent, our motion along the river a frictionless glide, the only sounds the whisper of sled runners on the ice punctuated occasionally by an excited outburst from the kids in the front sled.

  There used to be sled dog races all over the northern part of the country, the musher said. But not anymore. Winters were getting warmer; the sport was retreating north. Places that still got enough cold and snow to put a team of dogs out on the ice? Those places were special.

  I reflected, for a moment, on the long path that had brought us here.

  Chapter 1

  What was it that stopped the train that day? “Signal problems”? Wet leaves? A body on the tracks?

  The specifics didn’t matter then and they sure don’t matter now. All that mattered, back on that damp August morning in the summer of 2015, was that the train was running late, again. Which meant I’d be an hour, maybe two, maybe three late to work, again. Which meant I’d be staying late and not getting home until well after the kids had gone to bed. Again.

  I was well into my second year writing for the Washington Post, a dream job by any measure. With a beat that amounted to “data, writ large” I had wide latitude in selecting topics that interested me. Bear attacks, for instance. The geography of jorts. Boats that can be parked inside other, larger boats.

  My professional life, in short, was grand, except for one teeny, tiny problem. The Washington Post is based in Washington, D.C. My wife, Briana, and I, along with our two-year-old twins, Jack and Charles, lived just outside of Baltimore. Between our home and the Post newsroom lay 90 to 120 minutes of commute by car, train, subway, and foot. On a good day.

  That damp August morning? Not shaping up to be a good day. When the train finally arrived we all grumbled on. I did my best to avoid even glancing at my fellow commuters—I was never much of a people person, and chatting it up with a chipper stranger on a train, before coffee, seemed like the absolute worst way to spend that time. Some mornings I absentmindedly scrolled through my phone, searching social media for grist for the day’s stories. Others I slept. Most of all, I tried not to think of how much of my life I was spending there, on the tracks, in cramped quarters surrounded by strangers.

  That morning the train limped down the tracks toward D.C. much slower than usual. Eventually the train stopped, for good, about halfway to D.C. at the Bowie State University platform. There was a slight drizzle. The conductor came over the loudspeaker to inform us that the train was unable to go any further and that they had no additional information at this time.

  I decided to bail, hopping off the train and calling an Uber. If I ever wanted to see my family, or my job, again, the best bet appeared to be to cut my losses, head back to Baltimore, and salvage whatever was left of the workday at home. Between the surge pricing and the distances involved, the ride cost a hundred dollars. Finally, four hours after the start of my commute, I pulled my car back into the parking space at my house. Right back where I had started.

  I’m far from the only person to live like this. According to census data, roughly four million American workers, representing about 3 percent of the total sixteen-and-over workforce, have one-way commutes of ninety minutes or more. It’s probably easiest for me to explain why I did: because my wife and I couldn’t afford to do anything else, at least not if we were going to have our own place. According to Zillow, the median home value in Washington, D.C., is now somewhere north of half a million dollars, which was well out of the realm of affordability for Briana, then a government worker, and me.

  Neither one of us came from money. I was born and raised in the village of Oneonta, an upstate New York college town of about 13,000 people situated in a kind of geographic no-man’s-land between the Catskills and the Adirondacks. The region was hilly but not mountainous; populated but not populous. To the extent the town had anything like a civic identity it was based on its adjacency to Cooperstown, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

  My upbringing was solidly middle class for the region. My dad was a veterinarian, not a particularly glamorous career but one that provided enough money to pay the bills—or would have, had his taste for expensive status-signaling gadgets like watches, computers, and cars not put the family tens of thousands of dollars in credit card and second-mortgage debt.

  My mom, a vet tech by trade, was the more pragmatic of the two. When my dad wrecked the household finances with fountain pen purchases, she did her best to restore balance by keeping the household running on generic store-brand food and thrift shop clothing. The contrast between the two provided no shortage of amusement for my high school friends, who couldn’t understand why my dad was driving around town flashing his Rolex while his family ate Grand Union–brand cereal for breakfast.

  My parents, in short, had a decent inco
me but no wealth to speak of when I was growing up. They divorced my senior year in high school, a mostly amicable affair because there were no assets to fight over. After graduating from high school I made it to Cornell University in part due to my good grades, and in part due to a legacy admissions preference stemming from my dad having gone there. I ended up taking on thousands of dollars in student loan debt by the time I graduated—bills I’m still paying off today, nearly twenty years later. Bills that, for the entirety of my twenties and thirties, set the parameters for what was financially possible in life, and what wasn’t.

  Briana and I weren’t really keen on renting a place in the city, even before we had kids. We had a dog and a couple of cats. We wanted a bit of yard, maybe someplace to put a grill. We didn’t want to be crammed in on top of millions of other people.

  So we looked farther afield. Even outside of the cities, however, the economics of home ownership were daunting. In the Baltimore suburbs, which we eventually settled on, a typical detached single-family home goes for somewhere around the same price as a cramped D.C. condo. In 2010, when we were looking, this seemed insane to us: where were people getting the money for these houses? Was everyone in Baltimore an investment banker?

  In the end we settled on a 952-square-foot row house on a lot totaling .0359 acres. At the time it was perfect: built of stone in the early 1800s in the mill town of Oella, originally it served as millworkers’ quarters. The village was charming and historic (most houses, including our own, didn’t receive indoor plumbing until the 1980s) and abutted a state park where the dog could roam.

  More important than any of this, however, was the price: $245,000, a relative bargain on account of its old age. Paying a quarter of a million dollars for 952 square feet felt obscene; it was obscene. But by Baltimore/D.C. standards it was a bargain, and in 2010 it was what we could afford.