Author: Jennifer Vogel

If there is a single structure in Northeast Minneapolis that captures the neighborhood’s long history and rotating cast of immigrants, it’s the flesh-colored ARCANA building at the corner of Lowry and Central. Home to several chapters of the mysterious Masonic Lodge, including the “Order of DeMolay,” the “Order of Eastern Star,” and the “Cryptic Masons,” the building also houses the eclectic and friendly Aardvark Records, the ancient Lowry Central Bowlers Supply, and Two Amigos Bazar, a hole in the wall that sells Spanish music CDs and heavy metal T-shirts.

Throw in Moler Barber School of Hairstyling across the street—home of the seven dollar haircut, a place that has a constant throng of young black guys smoking and talking out on the sidewalk—and you’ve got a genuine culture jam. Cities can’t plan this sort of serendipity, where, among people waiting for a red light to change, you’ll see canvas bowling bags and track suits, Masonic top hats and sideways baseball caps. It only occurs organically.

Northeast is Minneapolis’s oldest neighborhood, and, in fact, was a separate city until 1872, when it merged with the newer settlement across the Mississippi. Originally named St. Anthony, Northeast was home to Polish, Ukrainian, German, Lebanese, and Russian immigrants who worked in the grain and saw mills along the river. The area’s streets were named after the U.S. presidents, in the order in which they served, to help newcomers study for their citizenship exams. Nowadays, a more recent wave of immigration includes Somalis, East Indians, Hispanics, and Asians, along with plenty of white refugees escaping the high cost of housing elsewhere in Minneapolis.

These new demographics are quite evident on Central Avenue, which is not only Northeast’s main commercial corridor, but also, with its abundance of colorful, hand-painted signs and wide, tree-lined sidewalks, one of the city’s best old-fashioned shopping streets. You can get an African hair weave, try on a pair of Indian shalwar, stock up at Pakistani, Indian, and Asian groceries, as well as the newer Eastside Food Co-op, enjoy a Swedish massage, or buy a statue of the Virgin de Guadalupe. As far as restaurants go, the variety of ethnic eateries is mind bending. Aside from the venerable Holy Land Bakery, Grocery, and Deli, offerings include Caribbean dishes from the Palm Court, the “Best Afghani pizza and kabob on earth” from the Crescent Moon Bakery, and authentic Mexican pasole, barbecued goat, or tacos al pastor from the charming La Tortuga.

Of course, if you’re looking for something more solidly American, stop in for a burger at Sully’s Pub and Restaurant, which is full of old-timers and down-and-outers watching television, yanking pull tabs, and hashing over the good old days.

—Jennifer Vogel

The century-old Enstrom photo studio is located on an out-of-the-way street in the tiny Iron Range town of Bovey. An otherwise modest wooden building with a flat front and a new addition jutting out from one side, the studio’s most distinguishing feature stretches across its second story: an enormous hand-painted black and white mural of a bearded man at a table, his head bowed in prayer. Before him rests a book, a loaf of bread, a bowl of gruel, and a pair of wire eyeglasses. The painting is a little rough, the angles aren’t quite right, the loaf is too big and the book too small. But none of that matters. The image is unmistakable, iconic, a familiar fixture in the kitchens and living rooms of grandparents everywhere. Underneath the mural are the words, in careful cursive, “Home of the Picture Grace.”

For a town of around six hundred people, Bovey has drawn more than its share of publicity over the years. Its former police chief, Terry Wilkey, who died in 1998, wrote a column for the local weekly called “Streets of Bovey,” in which he recounted the goings on of the town. There were entries like, “Found an unlocked door at a business. We locked it.” The column was cheeky, funny, and widely circulated. For a while in 1994, it was broadcast as a regular series on MPR.

But, by far, Bovey’s greatest fame has come from its affiliation with the Picture Grace, a painting that began as a photograph. In 1918, an elderly man named Charles Wilden came by the studio of Eric Enstrom, a dapper photographer who favored a bowler hat, in hopes of selling a foot-scraper or two. The salesman intrigued Enstrom. As he later explained in an interview, “There was something about the old gentleman’s face that immediately impressed me. I saw that he had a kind face … there weren’t any harsh lines in it.” Enstrom, it turned out, was preparing a collection of work for a state photographers’ convention. “I wanted to take a picture that would show people that even though they had to do without many things because of the war, they still had much to be thankful for.”

Enstrom’s was an old-fashioned brand of Christianity, rooted in humility, a far cry from what often passes for the religion today, especially among right-wing evangelicals—a Darwinian incarnation that says the rich are rich because they are favored by the big man upstairs. Enstrom intentionally posed Wilden before a meager offering. The bow to prayer came easily. “The man doesn’t have much of earthly goods,” Enstrom explained later, “but he has more than most people because he has a thankful heart.” The photograph spoke elegantly and powerfully, first to the citizens of Bovey, a community of loggers and iron workers.

“I grew up in this area,” said Mark Hanson, the current co-owner of Enstrom Studio. “My mother was from Bovey. The Picture Grace has been a big part of my life.” That’s not simply due to its celebrity, Hanson said. “It captured the feeling of the area, this town’s Christian background. Bovey is a very blue-collar community, and what Enstrom captured was someone being thankful for a very humble meal.” Being grateful, he added, “resonates with the people here.”

Admirers from all over the country began buying the photograph. Demand grew for a color version, so Enstrom’s daughter Rhoda made an oil painting based on the portrait. Today, that’s the image most people recognize. “I have seen the photograph,” said Hanson, who supposes the originals to be quite valuable. “People in Bovey have them, old people in this area.” Hanson said that, color aside, the photo and the painting look almost exactly alike. “You have to understand that she had Enstrom there to talk to. She could ask him what color the guy was wearing. Both of them convey the exact same message. She did a great job on the painting.”

By the 1940s, the picture had become so popular that Enstrom Studio could no longer satisfy demand. In 1945, it sold the copyright to Augsburg Publishing House, though people still stop by the studio, especially during summers, to admire the mural and purchase the print, which hangs among photos of high school graduates posed on logs and wielding electric guitars. Because the picture was taken so long ago, the copyright has since lapsed and ownership has moved into the realm of public domain. There is no telling how many prints exist out there. The Picture Grace, appropriately, now belongs to everyone.—Jennifer Vogel

Sometime this winter, once the tourist season winds down, the owners of Morell’s Chippewa Trading Post in Bemidji will remove a giant taxidermied wolf from the glass case out front, say a few solemn words, and send it off to be destroyed. It’s likely the end will come by fire, though the store’s assistant manager, Julie Petersen, doesn’t know for sure and, frankly, doesn’t even seem to want to think about it. You see, this animal—which has been on display in one location or another for more than sixty years—wasn’t just any ordinary wolf. The dusty, cracking pelt with the broken leg and refashioned nose is all that remains of Lobo, perhaps the most notorious and bloodthirsty creature ever to cast its dark shadow over the northwoods.

Legend has it that in the winter of 1926, hunters in and around Itasca State Park began noticing wolf tracks larger than any they’d previously encountered. Alarmingly, they also noticed that wherever this wolf traveled, he left a gruesome and bloody trail. Locals took to calling the predator Lobo, which means wolf in Spanish and also sounded pretty bad-ass to hunters back then.

The wolf seemed to possess an insatiable hunger; it was estimated that he killed a deer every three days. He also apparently never returned for a second feeding, preferring fresh meat to that which had been sitting around. The average pack of wolves, according to Andrea Lorek Strauss, information and education director at the International Wolf Center in Ely, kills approximately eighteen deer in an entire year. Clearly, it was determined, Lobo had to be stopped or there would be no deer left for hunters to shoot. The authorities called in professional game wardens, with all their expertise and experience, to find and kill the marauding wolf.

Ah, but it would not be so easy! Lobo, people said, was crafty, seldom traveled on trails, and hunted exclusively at night. It was almost as though he knew where the traps were and tiptoed around them. Also, it’s alleged that Lobo never had a mate, more evidence of, and possibly even a contributor to, his ornery disposition. For years, the wardens tried to catch Lobo, but finally conceded defeat. A reward was eventually put on the wolf’s head, and every fool with a gun, a snare, or a bottle of poison could be found skulking around in the woods at all hours. One of these entrepreneurs was Algot Wicken, who was clearly no fool. Wicken closely studied Lobo’s tracks for weeks and discovered that he favored a particular clump of spruce trees. Wicken set a snare between two of the trees and Lobo walked right into it.

Yet still, the mighty wolf was not to be stopped. Lobo broke free and roamed the forest for two more years with a snare around his neck, barely able to swallow and surviving solely on blood and soft tissue.

In 1938, Wicken finally caught Lobo in a steel trap. He approached the wolf, shot him dead, and that was that. People came from all over the area to view the vanquished Lobo, who was said to weigh 140 pounds, an unheard of size for a wolf in Minnesota. In fact, Lorek Strauss sounded rather doubtful about the figure. “My God,” she said, and pointed out that the largest wolf ever documented in the state weighed 112 pounds, while the average wolf weighs closer to ninety. She did allow that perhaps Lobo had been killed in the winter, when his fur was at its thickest, making him look as though he weighed 140 pounds. But then, of course, she wasn’t around in 1938.

Gid Graham wrote of Lobo in his 1939 book, Animal Outlaws. He explained what hunters of the era could not, or chose not to, understand. “The career of this renowned animal hero cannot be measured alone by man’s standard and viewpoint,” Graham wrote. “Man condemned him because he killed deer and wild creatures. According to the standard of the wolf, he did no wrong.” Lorek Strauss agrees with that assessment. And so does Julie Petersen. “The poor thing,” Petersen said. “He was so misunderstood. He did what he had to do to survive. We have little tear sessions for him every once in a while.” That’s why, after Lobo’s pelt is destroyed, a new one will take its place, so his legend might live on and future generations will have the honor of admiring him (or at least his understudy).

Roxi Mann, Julie Petersen’s sister, who recently bought Morell’s from their parents, had to send all the way to Alaska for a wolf pelt large enough to do justice to the original. Lobo’s skull will be set inside the case with the new Lobo, in dedication. And this time, the taxidermied wolf will be kept inside the store, safe from the cold, the sun, and those mice and bats, which Petersen said manage to “sneak in” to the outdoor case. Sounding a bit morose, she added, “This is very sentimental for us. The first summer I worked here, I painted his cage, so we became good friends. I call him ‘Bobo’ sometimes. It’s sad to see him go.”

—Jennifer Vogel

Back in the 1920s, William T. Middlebrook, then a vice president at the University of Minnesota, had a bright idea. In order to attract and retain the most talented professors, the U would build them a truly unique neighborhood. Thus was born University Grove: eight blocks on which more than one hundred homes, each custom built, represent a half-century’s worth of architectural history.

The streets of the Grove are a living study in strict adherence to various schools of design—Colonial, French Provincial, English Tudor, Prairie, and various strains of Modern—as well as experimentation with those styles. The original concept dictated that professors hire architects to design their homes on university-owned land, with university-subsidized mortgages. (The spending cap rose from ten thousand dollars in 1929, when the first house was built, to almost fifty thousand dollars in the seventies, when construction tapered off.) Middlebrook himself commissioned a Tudor that looks pretty much as it did in the beginning, stately and old-fashioned. In fact, Grove residents act as de facto preservationists. They must consult an architect if they wish to undertake major changes.

Most visitors will be drawn to the quirky Modern-style houses of the forties, fifties, and sixties. For instance, those who know only Ralph Rapson’s prominent public buildings, such as Riverside Plaza and the soon-to-be-demolished Guthrie Theater, can get an excellent view of the noted Modernist’s residential work at the Grove—he designed eight homes here during the fifties and sixties. Most of them follow the boxy white dictates of “high” Modernism, but they also have playful yet studied flourishes: a giant yellow dot on a garage door, various colored panels, and fences like billboards, placed to create particular visual effects rather than to keep anything in or out.

Architects Winston and Elizabeth Close left their stamp on the neighborhood as well. The celebrated couple built fourteen houses here, the first in 1939. Most feature natural elements, like cedar or redwood siding, and enormous windows that take advantage of the backdrop of the neighborhood, which stands lush and alive with greenery.

In the Grove, nature is nearly as important as artful design. As per Middlebrook’s vision, common areas full of large trees and gardens connect the backyards of most homes. Because the neighborhood was once an oak savanna, architectural looky-loos and dog-walkers alike crunch acorns underfoot in the fall. Folwell Avenue abuts a former trolley line that has been transformed into a rustic walking path leading to the U’s St. Paul campus. About a year ago, there was a move to update and widen the path, but it was voted down by residents. A reluctance to change is part of the charm of University Grove. It remains a time capsule, a place where modern conveniences such as vinyl siding are out of the question. Thank goodness for the quixotic notions of eggheaded professors.

—Jennifer Vogel

There aren’t many stretches of road in Minnesota like Highway 1. Though it’s not officially designated a scenic byway, it should be. Narrow, with pine and birch trees crowding right up against the tarmac, Highway 1 winds through the Superior National Forest, connecting Lake Superior to Ely. The sun bursts in patches through the trees, dappling the road with light as you drive along. The stretch feels forgotten, even peaceful. It’s absurd, maybe, to suggest that a person can commune with nature from behind the wheel of a car. But driving Highway 1 brings you about as close as you’re going to get while still getting where you’re going.

Motorists are at the mercy of the landscape, slowing according to bends in the road, and always watching for the moose and deer that sometimes loiter directly on the dotted line. There, the forest rules, just as it did before Highway 1 was first paved in 1937.

Unfortunately, that is about to irrevocably change. Starting this summer, Minnesota Department of Transportation engineers will be doing what they do best: engineering. They’re undertaking an elaborate reconstruction of Highway 1, specifically of its most wild and winding section, a fifteen-mile stretch just south of Ely. The road will be significantly straightened and widened. Also, two charming old river bridges will be replaced with cast cement bridges airbrushed to look like stone.

When MnDOT proposed changing Highway 1, admirers of the road came out in droves. At public meetings, they conjured the spirit of Charles Kuralt, the former traveling correspondent for CBS, who once said, “On the map, Ely appears to be the end of the road. For people who love wilderness, beauty, and solitude, on the contrary, it’s the center of the world.”

Conscientious objectors expressed dismay at the state’s habit of jackhammering away all the rough edges. One wrote in a letter, “As our lives and our environment get more and more homogenized in the future, the special places will become fewer and fewer and our lives less enriched.” Another lodged an all out, on-the-knees plea: “Oh, please! Please, please, please! Don’t change the road. It is sooooooo pretty the way it is.”

Certainly, Highway 1 will not become a 35W, or even a 371. Engineers call the project a good example of “context sensitive design.” That’s a fancy way of saying that, across the country, highway departments are trying to be more ginger with the natural environment when plodding through with bulldozers and paving machines. According to MnDOT Project Manager Todd Campbell, “This job isn’t going to significantly alter the appearance or feel of the road. People had a problem with their perception of safety. The trees are so close to the road that there is very little buffer between a driver and a tree or a rock. But this is not going to look like an airstrip landing.”

Nor will Highway 1 remain the same old, unobtrusive Highway 1. The renovation, which will take place over the next five to seven years, includes a fairly dramatic widening of the road and its shoulders. What now amounts to two eleven-foot lanes with two-foot shoulders will become two twelve-foot lanes with six-foot shoulders, plus another four feet of clearance on either side. Thus a twenty-six-foot-wide highway becomes a forty-four-foot-wide highway. And in places where hills will be smoothed out, the footprint will be even larger, up to sixty-two feet.

Straight lines aren’t as interesting as curvy ones; wider lanes appear barren. In short, Highway 1 will become a more typical Minnesota highway: safe, tidy, and, compared to its former incarnation, boring. This despite the fact that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the road. There hasn’t been for seventy years. Yes, there are slightly more accidents than along similar two-lane byways—less than one crash more per million miles driven. But, because of the sixty-four curves along the targeted fifteen-mile stretch, people drive slower. That makes the accidents less severe. Speeding up traffic, by smoothing thirty-mile-per-hour curves into forty-mile-per-hour curves, will not only make Highway 1 less appealing, it could be bad news for those on both sides of the windshield.

The true beneficiaries of the reworking of Highway 1 will be enormous commercial vehicles, like logging trucks. It was the U.S. Forest Service, after all, that first proposed the project back in 1999. And federal Forest Highway Program dollars will pay eighty percent of the total $13.7 million bill. “We use the highway administratively for work,” said Roger Pekuri, an engineer for the Superior National Forest. “A lot of commodities, principally timber, are hauled down to Two Harbors. Logging trucks have a hard time navigating the highway now. And, besides, it’s hard to plow. It’s so narrow that the blades go into the other lane. There are a lot of places where ledge rock is right up to the shoulder.”

It seems that Highway 1 is being widened and straightened—and, arguably, degraded—primarily to make it easier to haul trees out of the forest, so the woods themselves can be more rapidly degraded. Now that’s progress.

—Jennifer Vogel

A picture of Broadway Street in Gilbert from 1910 looks surprisingly similar to one taken yesterday. Sure, there are now streetlights and pavement and tall trees, but the strip is still lined with old-fashioned, flat-roofed buildings, none more than a couple of stories high. While nearby Ely, in catering to canoeists and nostalgia seekers, has come to resemble the “Minnesot-ah!” store at the Mall of America, tiny Gilbert stubbornly remains the real deal.

Founded as a village in 1896, Gilbert was originally and optimistically named Sparta. It was also located on another spot. But when iron ore was discovered there, the townspeople had to move, buildings and all. With the new location came the new name. In the early 1900s, it was thought that Gilbert would become huge, bigger than Hibbing, even—thus its early nickname, the “Village of Destiny.” The town built a wide, wooden main street, now Broadway, which was part of a twenty-eight-mile boardwalk connecting a string of Mesabi Range towns. Gilbert was also the eastern terminus of the Mesabi Electric Railway, a streetcar line that went to Hibbing.

Gilbert never did become the jewel of the Range, but its streets continue to be lively and well-kept, its storefronts occupied. At one end of Broadway sits the Iron Range Historical Society, a low brick building that used to be the city hall/police station/jail. There, the curious can view artifacts from Will Steger’s North Pole expedition, jail cells straight out of Mayberry R.F.D., and an impressive mining exhibit. Food options include Koshar’s Sausage Kitchen, specializing in wild game dressing and hand-crafted ethnic sausages (including potato and blood versions), and the Memory Lane Café, which serves hearty breakfasts and homemade soups and pies, the blueberry being especially scrumptious. Gilbert’s best restaurant is also its most unlikely, a Jamaican joint called the Whistling Bird. It draws so many customers from nearby towns that a person is lucky to get a table on a Saturday night.

When Gilbert incorporated, the first act of its village council was to grant a liquor license. Today, the town still has just two churches but nine bars, all on Broadway. Nick’s is one of the best. Owner Nick Vukelich is an old-timer with a lazy eye, a fever for sailing ships, and a deep love of polka. Representative of his cheeky sense of humor, the sign in the front window reads, “Sorry, we’re open.” About the only thing missing in Gilbert is a place to stay. For that, travelers must drive four miles to Eveleth, where the tidy Koke’s Motel awaits. It gets enthusiastic recommendations from the patrons at Nick’s. That’s the neighborly way things work on the Range. —Jennifer Vogel

In the photo, he’s twenty-five or so. Quite obviously, the picture was taken in the early 1970s. He is wearing loud plaid pants, a shiny pink shirt with ruffles down the front and at the cuffs, and a huge bowtie and vest. His afro is cropped, but not too close, and he’s smiling, one of those big, open-mouthed smiles that shows the gap in his front teeth. But there’s something off in the man’s expression, too. It’s in the eyes. They look hollow and sad, as though deep down the man is missing something. Something he’s never had and will never get.

The picture is a little wrinkled and stained, as if it had gotten wet, and set crookedly in a frame that’s much too large. It dangles haphazardly from a nail on a basement wall in a suburban Minneapolis rambler. It’s one of thousands of things left behind by this man with the smile—piles and boxes and suitcases full of stuff, which are being pawed through by a crowd of bargain hunters. Whatever goes unsold will wind up in an enormous black trash bin that stands out front, menacingly, under the picture window.

This sale was different from a typical estate sale, which is different from a typical garage sale. While a garage sale represents a thinning out, the happy prospect of making room for a den or a sauna or a new season of dresses, an estate sale represents obliteration—the end of a life, or at least a life in a particular home. Usually, the endless array of items, which range from lamps to pantyhose, are neatly tagged and arranged throughout the house by a relative, or by a company that takes a cut. Everybody wants a cut. But this particular sale was chaotic, the fallout from some ongoing disaster.
Because the arrangements are normally so logical, with their displays and tidy categorizations, it’s easy for browsers to trace the arc of a person’s existence. You can see that when they were young they traveled, went to Mexico a couple of times or Greece. There may even be Spanish language textbooks, or books on reading Latin. Reading habits are generally more ambitious in youth; there’s often a focus on modern literature and classics (which may themselves have been modern when purchased) like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, or even Rimbaud. Or there is evidence of curiosity in science or nature or philosophy. But as life progresses, ambitions dissipate or are sacrificed and the books get more modest and practical: mysteries, romance novels, true crime, and exercise guides like Stretching for Seniors. Often the newest books describe how to go on without a spouse, cook for one, cope with diabetes, or beat lung cancer. Books on diseases present significant clues. So do stacks of old TV Guides and matchbooks from Treasure Island casino. At some point, it seems, living becomes simply a matter of passing time.

Clothing choices evolve, too, of course. Sizes generally increase as the wearer ages; the fabrics become more uniformly polyester and rayon. Wash and wear. And there are more cardigans with wadded tissue in the pockets. With shoes, women’s heels get lower and the styles wider, to accommodate foot problems that result from a life of moving around.

In all, visiting an estate sale is like going on an archeological expedition through the ruins of somebody’s life; you, the explorer, make guesses and assumptions based on the evidence at hand. An abundance of holiday decorations usually means grandchildren. Lots of hammers and tools mean a handyman—someone who had no children to inherit them or had children who went to law school. And if, when you go into the bathroom, you see bars of soap and cans of half-used shaving cream and hairspray, all for fifty cents each, well then you have to face facts. The people who lived in the house are dead.

At those moments, you feel like a vulture picking at a sun-dried carcass by the side of the highway. But, hey, this stuff has to go somewhere, you think. Maybe it’ll help pay for the funeral. And you reassure yourself that at least you’re not part of the network of hardcore collectors who stand outside a house at seven for an eight o’clock sale. Those are the true vampires, hoping to snap up the dishes, records, antique bureaus, nineteenth-century silver spoons, and anything else that might objectively be worth something. That might be sold on eBay for a profit. These shoppers rush from table to table with poker faces and pockets full of cash, laughing to themselves—these people don’t know what they have. Me, I go late, on the last day of a sale usually, which is often bag day. That means you can have as much junk as you can stuff into a paper sack for one or two dollars. What I look for are the sentimental items, which some might say makes me the worst type of vampire of all. I want those things that, while worth next to nothing monetarily, were special to whomever owned them. A homemade painting of a frowning poodle. A crocheted pillow that reads, “World’s Greatest Postman.” Photographs from birthday parties and Thanksgivings. Men smiling in shiny pink shirts.

It’s an attempt, I suppose, to gather sentimentality all in one place. I’m a glutton for meaning, even somebody else’s meaning. And so my own collection of stuff is largely made up of items that once made somebody else laugh or cry, trinkets and keepsakes that were stowed in drawers and albums and chests, propped on kitchen windowsills. They are idyllic farm scenes embroidered quite obviously without patterns and little houses fashioned from matchsticks, examined and perfected as much as the builder’s talents allowed. Part of the appeal is that that these items, sitting on the “bargain” table on the last day of a sale, seem orphaned. I’m consistently surprised that nobody wants them, for they, more so than the Tiffany lamp or the ruby pendant, carry on the spirit of their former owner. Perhaps that’s why people don’t want them—nobody likes to think about the past, it seems, only tomorrow. Except for people like me. My house is full of ghosts.

Our things speak for us, especially when we are gone. They do this both by their specificity and their context. I think about my own home: What will somebody, someday, make of my collection of other people’s poorly executed art projects, photos of unrelated relatives, and a video library that includes Ikiru and Road House? Will someone get excited about the dress in which I was married, the one my husband bought at a garage sale, and will she wear it proudly to a cocktail party in the twenty-second century? Or will it be cut up and made into sofa pillows? Or, worse, will it go directly into the big black trash bin that will be waiting under my picture window? It’s a disconcerting notion, that the fate of my possessions is out of my hands. I might choose to bequeath some things, but, really, I don’t have much that’s worth bequeathing. I won’t be around to tell the stories, funny and sad, that make my things meaningful—to describe the spot where I found the rock that looks like Abe Lincoln’s head, or relate how a napkin comes from a bar where I was served free drinks by an eighty-five-year-old birthday boy. I won’t be able to define my own history. It will be defined by estate-sale shoppers, just as I attempt to define the history of the smiling, gap-toothed man.

***

The man’s suburban home was stuffed with clues, but they were muddled, confusing—they didn’t add up. Items weren’t organized or labeled. They sat in slowly rotting piles, abandoned, perhaps suddenly, reminding me of those Robert Polidori shots of Chernobyl where dingy stuffing spills from forgotten teddy bears and paint peels from walls in blisters. The man’s cupboards still contained cans of food and jars of pickles. The paper towel holder held paper towels. There were albums full of photos—the man next to a gravestone, him with a circle of kids completing some sort of craft project, him on a sofa with his arm around a pretty woman in a red dress—and a selection of African artifacts: drums, masks, and carvings, all a
little beat up. But they’d certainly taken effort to collect. These were not the kinds of things you leave behind unless you have to.

The most striking thing about this estate sale, however, was the sheer, surreal volume of what the man had accumulated. One room was floor-to-ceiling electronics. There were maybe thirty telephones, some working, some not; fifty or more radios of various types and sizes; an impressive collection of small televisions; and a couple of electric organs. Two children were banging on the organs. Nobody told them to stop. What difference did it make? Desperation breeds disrespect. And, besides, it was bag day. Everything had to go. Everywhere in the house, there was clothing—piled up along the walls, flowing out of half-crushed boxes, covering floors like torn wrapping paper on Christmas morning. Aside from what was plainly visible, in room after room there stood towering piles of suitcases stuffed tight with clothing—men’s, women’s, children’s, from all eras. Some rooms you simply couldn’t go into, as there was nowhere to begin. People threw up their hands. Flicked off the lights. Walked away.

Sales like this one are always rife with gossip. Pickers wondered aloud what had happened, and stories were circulating. Those running the sale, white people, not too friendly, seemed to be disgusted with the gap-toothed man. He’d been evicted, they explained. Couldn’t say why. But what about all the radios, the suitcases, the institutional cans of refried beans? Were these the remains of a garbage house or what? A paunchy man in a white Vikings sweatshirt carrying a receipt pad said he wasn’t sure. He scratched his head. He thought the man had been African and that he had been gathering materials and goods for a relief effort. So the man, at least in his own mind, had intended one day to send all this stuff to wherever in Africa he came from. This was evidence of best laid plans not just gone awry, but exploded.

I walked into a side room, where there was a small book collection on a shelf. I picked out two dictionaries and placed them in my paper sack, next to a carved, cracked wooden statue of a man with his head in his hands, and the photos. Browsing the rest, I spotted a book about living with schizophrenia. So there was that.

The picture of the man in the shiny pink shirt haunted me. I put it away when I got home. Then I took it out again. And then I pinned it above my desk. What had happened to him? I opened his dictionaries and found a name inscribed meticulously inside, along with dates and origins: “November 10, 1997—Diggers.” It was an African name. I started searching. First, I drove back by the house, which had gone up for sale. I called the listing real estate agent, who was abrasive about the inquiry, probably because he, for whatever reason, had been the one who evicted the man. No doubt, he must have been a handful, but the one-man-relief-effort also couldn’t have been all bad. Regarding the motive behind the many mounds of stuff, the agent said, “I believe he was going to ship it off, but he wasn’t very good with follow-through.” Most of what remained at the end of bag day wound up in the big black trash bin. Now it was officially garbage. The agent verified the man’s name, said he was around fifty years old. He wouldn’t put me in touch with the owner of the house, couldn’t tell me how long the man had lived there, didn’t know where he had gone. “As far as I’m concerned,” the agent said via cell phone, busy, on his way to a showing, “he fell off the face of the earth.”

Google came next. There were a couple of people in the Midwest with the man’s last name, a doctor in Wisconsin and a yoga instructor who had just moved from Minnesota to California. I left messages for them both, and for the property owner, whom I found through Hennepin County tax records. No one returned my calls. My curiosity growing, I phoned people at local homeless shelters, but they aren’t allowed to say who stays where, for privacy reasons. I even performed one of those online background searches that cost fifty dollars, which turned up a couple of scrapes with the law, a drug possession charge, another for domestic abuse. Some nonpayment of taxes.

Finally, a phone message came from the doctor in Wisconsin. He spoke with a heavy accent. “Yes, he is my older brother,” he said. “If you have any questions you can call me at my office. He is still in Minneapolis.” I, of course, did call his office. Several times. But I didn’t hear another word from the doctor in Wisconsin. I only know that his brother is alive somewhere in the city. Who he is, what happened, why things fell apart, remains a mystery. And maybe, in the end, the details of his life are none of my business anyway. I will simply enjoy the items that were once his—the wooden statue, a bowl, a pickax with a loose head. I will imbue these items with my own meanings, create a truth for them based on the thinnest of clues, just as somebody, someday, will do again after I am dead or gone.

The entire apartment, which can’t be more than fifteen feet by fifteen, is visible from the front door: the makeshift sofa, the kitchen, the workshop, the “bedroom.” In fact, Dick Donovan’s apartment, where he’s lived since August, more closely resembles a fort. “On the second morning I lived here,” he recalls, “I fried eggs from bed and ate them in bed. And I thought either I am in heaven or I am in danger.” Indeed, the bed abuts a tiny gas stove. He’s mounted a tall window screen between the two, which acts as a grease shield and also keeps his blankets from catching fire.

There’s a genuine artfulness to Donovan’s space. Not only is he a charcoal artist, a master Etch-A-Sketcher, and a collector of found art, but he built nearly every structure in the apartment by hand, including his platform bed, the clothes rail above it, and a swivel counter in the kitchen. He did this without making a single cut to the wood he retrieved from alleys and trash bins. All of his work is unique, some might even say Seussian. “I always deviate from my plans,” he explains. When not running deliveries for Leaning Tower of Pizza, he’s taking classes in carpentry. Donovan recently acquired a fixer-upper houseboat that’s anchored on the Mississippi. “It’s all I can think about now,” he says. “I’ve been building forts since I was a kid, starting with cushions and evolving into elaborate snow forts. That’s my fort on the river.”

The aspects of the apartment Donovan didn’t build, he modified. The small refrigerator is mod-podged with old sewing patterns, as are patches above the door and fireplace. Yes, this tiny nook has a fireplace, in which he has placed a plug-in pile of fake logs. Some of the walls are framed with wooden yardsticks; all are painted, at least partly, ochre yellow, Donovan’s favorite color for walls. Sticking with the warm palette, his curtains are orange. His sofa is covered with a red blanket. “I like sunset colors,” he says. “Mellow tones. I find them relaxing.”

A computer used to hang over the bed from chains, but as winter dragged on and his “life force drained,” he had to take it down. “The thought that it might fall on me was giving me insomnia,” says Donovan, who holds a psychology degree from the University of Minnesota. “Maybe this summer, I’ll put it back up.” Most of his other electronics are old and formerly discarded. They include a four-track recorder that “may work,” a turntable from a grade-school AV department, and a microwave that he says weighs as much as two air conditioners. “It’s so preposterous—it must have come from the Chernobyl cafeteria.” His most prized appliance by far is a screw gun. “If I was stuck on a desert island and could have only one thing, it would be a screw gun.” After a pause, he adds, “and a lot of batteries.”—Jennifer Vogel