Home on The Range

I grew up in a mean town.

One of our neighbors stuck her kids' fingers in boiling water when they misbehaved. Another poisoned my cat with strychnine. The boy who lived two doors down walked into my house one afternoon and punched me as hard as he could in the stomach. I fell over with the wind knocked out of me, while he picked my Bolo Bouncer up off the floor and stuck it in his pocket and walked out.

When I was still in gradeschool, a gang of women attacked my mother's cousin in her front yard. They held her down and shaved her head bald because they said she was too pretty.

A girl I knew got a doll for Christmas and took it out into the backyard and shot arrows at it. Another girl took her little brother out into the backyard and threw rocks at him. In Second Grade my sister was chased home from school every day by a pack of kids wielding hatpins. The family across the street found a dead animal on their doorstep at least once a year. They were Jewish.

Dead animals were everywhere. Hanging from clothesline poles, draped across fenders, staring from living room walls, stuffed and posed in public places. Along with bowling and bushwhacking* and doing donuts in your car on a frozen lake, many teenagers' idea of the perfect date was to shoot rats at the dump.

Someone I knew much later, after I'd grown up and emigrated to The City, told me the only time he'd ever looked down the barrel of a gun was the time up on the Iron Range when he ran out of gas. He walked to a nearby house to ask for help and some guy opened the door and pointed a rifle at him.

Parts of my body still have the muscle memory of being shot with a rubber gun. I'm not talking dimestore rubber bands, here, Bubba. I'm talking strips of black inner tubing knotted in a loop, stretched along a length of two-by-four and fastened taut with a hinged clothespin positioned to release like a trigger.

Think about that for a minute.

In an earlier era, when my mother was growing up in this same town, coal in her pockets and cardboard in her shoes, kids would go flying out of their desks on blasting days at The Mine. Eventually the entire town was moved south, away from the edge of The Pit. By the time I entered the picture, The Mine had consumed all available space. Ore trains were getting longer and longer, their whistles sounding later and later. Houses were still moving down the streets like mastodons. Kids still knew when it was blasting day, only the schools had been re-situated, so we managed to remain in our seats.

This instability in the environment, this violence against the very ground we walked on (is this why lapsed Rangers seem to feel so at home in California?), contributed to a feeling of...unease. Exacerbated by the residue of ore dust which settled everywhere, staining the nooks and crannies of the known world...roads, sidewalks, foundations, fences, car tires, gardens...like so much blood.

As a kid, my awareness of The Mine went something like this: I believed the ore dumps were a mountain range. I believed sunsets were red on account of the sun reflecting off the ore dumps. I believed a war was going on somewhere beyond the ore dumps, because I could hear the bombs. I also believed I could escape these bombs by hiding out in Our Savior's Lutheran Church. Nothing could harm me there. Not Hitler nor Nuclear Fallout nor Khruschev nor The Devil Himself.

Speaking of which.

Now, I don't mean to paint merely a bleak and bloody backdrop for my childhood, which, in all fairness, had its share of sun-washed...is idyllicism a word? This was, after all, God's Country. A land of many and varied guises, with its Big Woods and Sky-Blue Waters and All The Starry Universe Above. A land of many and varied ethnicities, each with its particular idiosyncratic charm and culinary specialty and alcoholic preference.

But running through this Eden was a noticeable undercurrent. Something at odds with the surrounding beauty. Something...off. Something...mean.

Go ask Bobby, I think he'll know.

Or go ask my husband, who'll tell you that pretty much all of the Range women he's ever met are tough, smart and interesting (hey, I'm just the messenger, here), whereas their male counterparts are pretty much...is antonymical a word?

Or go see that movie, the one about the women miners.

Awhile ago, my cousin and I were having a "phone cocktail," she asked me if that movie was for real. I told her, Yeah, it really WAS like that, why do you think I got the hell outta Dodge? She thought about that for a minute.

We had another cocktail.

My cousin grew up in the wilds of New Jersey. Her memories of The Range are of summer vacations when, as kids, we'd frolic like tadpoles in the pristine lakes, and when we were older, wander stonily along some dappled backroad, picking wildflowers and singing. She once brought along a friend from Jersey, who, when he saw the Northern Lights for the first time, thought Armageddon! and started freaking out.

But that's a whole other story.



The Aurora Borealis. One of the perks of growing up in the Deep North.

And who knows, Vinnie might've been right. It's not hard to imagine The Range fitting such a description, i.e., The scene of a great battle between the forces of Good and Evil, to occur at the end of the world. Though rest assured, Yours Truly will be watching said battle from a safe and steady distance, far far from The Pit, my ass planted solidly on terra firma, alcoholic preference in hand.


(*Sneaking up on couples in parked cars and scaring the shit out of them.)