The Rake Magazine

Month: July 2003

  • Sodom & Gomorrah

    Despite the barely noticed building boom that’s spreading faster than scandal through residential sections of downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul—especially along the suddenly vogue Mississippi River—there are no serious office buildings in the works. Where are the new skyscrapers? The last major high-rise built here was U.S. Bank Place, finished in 1992.

    Perhaps a more salient question is why cities build skyscrapers in the first place. Manhattan, of course, has the excuse of being an island where the only direction to grow is up. But the rest of the nation (and the world) takes its cues from New York. Real cities have skyscrapers that act like lighthouses to the world: Behold, here is our city—visible from miles around—a safe harbor of culture and commerce. One should not simply make jokes about the phallic nature of skyscrapers—like rockets, they point in the direction of progress, and connote the beautiful violence of conception, creation, expansion, new frontiers.

    But the age of skyscrapers is probably finished, especially in a place like the Twin Cities, where culture and commerce have quietly packed their boxes and moved to the suburbs, where the cardinal direction of expansion is out and away, where the architectural idiom is long and flat and depopulated. This flight has many well-documented causes. Mostly, businesses and people argue that it just costs too much to live and work downtown. But we’ve come to suspect that fear plays an increasing role. What are people so afraid of? Same as it ever was: death and taxes.

    Because the city bears a disproportionate share of the poor and the needy, our taxes are higher and our schools aren’t as strong. The outer suburbs, which are still primarily bedroom communities, have virtually no social obligations beyond their lustrous public schools. More homes and fewer disadvantaged—these things make the suburbs richer and cleaner than the city. Then, of course, there is the widespread perception that the city is infested with violent criminals. Some of the most heinous violent tragedies have happened out in the exurbs in the past year, but one does not have to read between the lines to see that many thoughtful people automatically equate crime with inner city minorities and scofflaws simply expanding their turf. (Perhaps they make that equation because they know where to go to get their cocaine and companionship.)

    Worst of all, this conflicted view of the city has traditionally translated into an unjust burden of taxes, fees, and levies. The thinking is that visitors coming to the city should help foot a higher proportion of the bill because they are a captive audience enjoying the unique amenities of the city. More and more, though, people are repelled by the higher costs of the downtown district, which can be as much as 20 percent higher, thanks to various tarriffs. They will simply stay at home in the burbs, which are being choked to death by agreeable national restaurant chains and big-box shopping clubs that are as native to Minnesota as milfoil.

    Is life better out where there are no sidewalks? We can’t say. We’ll just continue keeping track of who precisely is itching to carry guns, and where all the road rage seems to be occurring. It’s not clear whether these angry, frightened people are heading into the Big Bad Cities or away from them.

  • Michael Sims

    Some authors have an impressive body of work; Michael Sims has an impressive work on the body. His Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form is both informative and entertainingly digressive. Taking stock of his subject literally from head to toe, Sims offers a remarkably thorough catalog of our body parts, and what our attitude toward them says about us. It’s armed to the teeth with anecdotes—something Sims perfected in his previous Darwin’s Orchestra, a 366-day almanac of science oddities. Like that book, Adam’s Navel is perhaps best read in short bursts rather than a single sitting, but given that restriction it’s a compelling read, more than just lip service. Sims seizes his subject in both hands and really says a mouthful. One thing, though—why no footnotes?

  • N.M. Kelby

    Even for an astrophysicist, Lucienne lives in a world overfilled with black holes. The heroine of N.M. Kelby’s second novel, Theater of the Stars, has just had the biggest success of her career, finding one of the mysterious, light-eating spatial anomalies. But the rest of her life is a case study in entropy. Her marriage is falling apart and, worse, her mother Helene has just tried to kill herself, threatening to take important secrets to her grave. Things like who Lucienne’s father is, and what happened during the three-year gap between Helene’s escape from Nazi-occupied Paris and her reappearance at Los Alamos, where she helped build the atomic bomb. Which is the sort of enigma that would tantalize just about anybody, really. Kelby’s meditation on war, grief, and family love is sometimes improbably plotted but poignant, and a worthy followup to the well-reviewed In the Company of Angels.

  • Tim Farrington

    Falling in love a second time is a trip through treacherous waters—you might be able to remember where the river’s most dangerous rocks are from the first time around, but that’s no guarantee you won’t hit them again. For the title character of Tim Farrington’s The Monk Downstairs, it’s only more complex for being on the rebound from God. Mike, based on ex-monk Farrington himself, is a shy, disillusioned refugee from the cloistered world who takes an apartment and a burger-flipping job after losing his faith. His landlady, Rebecca, is a lonely single mother made wary by divorce. The two share an immediate attraction, but the flowers of romance bloom slowly when both partners have been scratched by other thorns. Farrington handles this hesitant courtship with skill, spinning a tale of grownup romance and redemption that’s pleasantly reminiscent of The Accidental Tourist. Ruminator Books, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, http://www.ruminator.com

  • Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

    If Chuck Palahniuk seems fixated on violence and abandonment, he has good reason—his grandparents died in a murder-suicide, and his father was killed a few years ago by a jealous ex-husband. So the level of attention paid to confusion, loss, and anger in his books is totally understandable. There’s no denying the raw emotional turmoil—and Diary positively boils with it, more even than his infamous Fight Club. It begins with characteristic nihilism: Still reeling from her husband’s suicide attempt and subsequent coma, Misty discovers that he has also been abusing his job as a home remodeler by walling up rooms and leaving rude messages hidden inside. Crazed with grief, she begins painting obsessively—but even that act of frenzied creativity has secret roots in something very deep and nasty. As much as we admire Palahniuk’s craft, we can’t say we enjoyed Diary so much as read it with a growing sense of dread and disgust—which seems to be Palahniuk’s intention in the first place.

  • Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven

    Jon Krakauer’s stock in trade is human behavior in the most extreme of conditions, as seen in his harrowing bestseller Into Thin Air, a firsthand account of disaster on Mount Everest. His latest book takes readers into a world that will seem as remote and forbidding, and all the more alien for existing on American soil: the schismatic, highly isolated groups of Mormon fundamentalists scattered across North America, groups Krakauer likens to the Taliban—and which, it should be noted, have been condemned by the mainstream church. His entry point into the subject is a grisly 1984 double murder committed by two brothers who claimed that God commanded them to kill their sister-in-law and baby niece. By way of finding a root cause, Krakauer also looks back on the tumultuous history of Mormonism—the fastest-growing religion in the country—and finds strains of violence and zealotry that, he argues, are still all too prevalent. Controversial? Oh, you bet. With this audacious work of nonfiction, Krakauer’s climbed down the Himalayan mountains and straight up an active Utah volcano.

  • Burning Down the Firehouse

    To look at the tidy little house at 48th and York, you’d think the fire that killed Pearl Gallagher on June 14 didn’t really amount to much. Sheets of plywood cover the windows, but there are no flame-scarred walls, no singed rafters. The flower garden just beyond the front door blooms as if nothing happened. The perky impatiens nestled in a ceramic lamb at the bottom of the steps wait to be watered.

    This fire, like most of the 200-odd blazes the Minneapolis Fire Department puts out each year, was pretty routine. The dispatcher downtown got the call at 8:21 p.m., and by 8:24, Engine 28 was on the scene from the station six blocks away. Engine 25 arrived a minute later. The house was already engulfed in smoke, and Gallagher’s son was there telling firefighters that his mother was in the living room. Two firefighters went inside. A third engine, number 22, pulled up at 8:27, just as the first ladder truck showed up. Five minutes later, a heavy rescue crew arrived.

    Meanwhile, inside the house, firefighters couldn’t find Pearl Gallagher. She wasn’t in the living room at the front of the house as her son had thought. Fighting through thick smoke, they finally found her in the rear of the house, where she had collapsed from smoke inhalation. At 8:38, firefighters pulled the 70-year-old woman from the house and began efforts to revive her. Soon she was hustled off to the hospital.

    Four days later, Pearl Gallagher was dead.

    To a civilian reading through an official incident report, a tragedy like this is both instructive and provocative. Firefighting is romanticized all the time—never more than in the past two years—but it is a highly technical and tactical profession. Every second counts, and every firefighter has a specialized job to do. When you lose time or have the wrong equipment or not enough firefighters, the results can go from bad to worse in a hurry.

    An expert looking dispassionately at the circumstances surrounding Gallagher’s death would say that our fire department did its job. Four firefighters were at the scene in less than five minutes. That is within standards established by the National Fire Protection Association. Fifteen firefighters were there within eight minutes—another NFPA standard.

    It’s certainly true that people sometimes die in fires even when the department is firing on all cylinders. Still, in firehouses around the city, Gallagher’s death added fuel to a smoldering controversy. Budget cuts at the Minneapolis Fire Department have resulted in layoffs and ladder-company closings—including a ladder company at Station 27, less than three miles from Gallagher’s house. Ladder trucks and crews are key to ventilating a burning building—cutting holes in the roof to help clear the air inside. Could Pearl Gallagher have been saved if the ladder crew from Station 27 had answered the alarm, rather than the one at Station Eight at 28th and Blaisdell, a mile and a half farther away? Would it have made a difference if there had been four firefighters on those three engines, instead of three? Nobody will say for sure. But one firefighter told me, “Four minutes less in that atmosphere, would her chances be better? Yes.”

    Many people, some of them in positions of authority, have no idea what a Minneapolis firefighter actually does. They don’t know that firefighters are the city’s first responders, and that they make tens of thousands of runs to “medicals” all over the city, including shut-ins who have no contact with the outside world other than with whoever responds to a 911 call. People don’t know that it usually takes more than one firefighter to lay down “charged” hose, because one firefighter can’t pull hose past more than two 90-degree turns. And people don’t realize that one of the most important things firefighters do is knock holes in things, to provide lifesaving air.

    Contrary to conventional wisdom, fire stations are no bastions of card-playing, truck-washing layabouts, shuffling around the station until some opportunity for heroism beckons. At least once every half-hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, a crew is being dispatched somewhere in the city on an emergency medical call. They are the first to arrive when somebody’s suffering a heart attack or a gunshot wound. Crews also responded to more than 9,000 calls last year to handle various other “hazardous conditions.”

    There are fires, of course. The numbers have declined steadily over the past 30 years, especially as older commercial properties have either burned down or come up to code, with sprinklers and the like. There were 724 structural fires in 1970, compared to 261 last year. Still, the number of people needed to battle even a routine blaze hasn’t really changed.

    The crew of the first engine to arrive on the scene usually sends two people in—one with a charged hose—for search and rescue. With a four-person crew, one starts the pump and another provides support for the “attack line” (the first hose in)—helping to feed hose if it gets stuck rounding more than two corners or if it gets lodged beneath the wheel of a car. As a result of budget cuts, that fourth person now often comes from the crew in the second engine to arrive on the scene, which can cost the first crew valuable time in its search-and-rescue efforts.

    Equally vital is the arrival of the ladder company, which is called upon to ventilate the structure by chopping holes in the roof to let out the smoke. Inside a burning house, firefighters generally cannot see more than a few inches in front them; they navigate by feeling along the walls. Also, without proper ventilation, volatile gases can accumulate and explode.