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  • Carp per Diem

    In his 1653 book The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton declared the carp the queen of the rivers, and the species is still highly regarded as an angling prize in Britain and the rest of Europe. Anglers on this side of the pond still reject the monarchy, and the carp is generally regarded as a trash fish. The Minnesota DNR used to encourage people who landed carp to leave them on the bank to rot—though you’d be ticketed for doing so today.

    It was not always this way. In the early days of the state, Minnesotans wrote to the fisheries department in Washington, D.C., to demand that the carp be introduced in the state. According to Karen Kobey, who is a naturalist with the Three Rivers Park District, the carp was introduced to Minnesota waters in 1883 from Germany. “Across the country, they thought this would be a fish that would be prolific and a great game fish—they’re big and they reproduce well,” she said.

    After a few false starts, the fish took off. With no natural predators and an ability to live in low-oxygen and even polluted waters, they soon filled the bottoms of rivers and lakes across Minnesota. The fish’s ubiquity, its appetite for other species’ roe, and its reputation for roiling up mud in previously clear lakes have meant that the carp’s standing among Minnesota anglers has gradually matched its bottom-of-the-river habitat. Even among carp fans, catch-and-release fishing is the norm, although immigrants from Southeast Asia and Russia often take carp for food, according to DNR conservation officer The-Phong Le.

    At the annual Carp Festival, held earlier this summer at Coon Rapids Dam Regional Park, 700 carp anglers took to the Mississippi to seize the carp. Children swarmed around a Plexiglas tank that contained some of the larger catches of the day, mostly to crinkle their noses at the big fishes’ barbell-lipped mugs and their dregs-o’-the-river reek.

    Paul Pezalla drove all the way from suburban Chicago to compete in the contest, after a friend here bragged that he and his family planned to win the contest. Pezalla’s 18.72-pound catch edged out the runner-up in the adult category by less than a tenth of a pound. Pezalla, a tall and lanky guy who, with his shock of unkempt white hair, could pass for Albert Einstein in a funhouse mirror, is a serious carp fisherman. He says he goes out at least twice a week for 12 hours at a time on Lake Michigan and Chicago-area rivers. He even owns a bait shop that specializes in European carp fishing gear and supplies. So what’s the attraction?

    “They’re about the smartest freshwater fish there is, and they grow to be extremely large; the world record fish is in the range of 80 pounds. They also fight as hard as anything,” Pezalla said. “Just about everyone in North America lives within an hour’s drive of trophy-sized fish—20- or 30-pounders. And you don’t need fancy equipment to catch them.”

    The Carp Festival’s results back this up. The biggest fish of the day was landed by the children’s category winner, scrappy 11-year-old Jimmy Roppo from Minneapolis, who took 10 minutes and a little bit of help from his fishing mentor, Josef Settele, to reel in a 19.31-pound carp on a line baited with canned corn. This was only his third time fishing.—Dan Gilchrist

  • 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.

  • The Real Pat Awada

    It’s late afternoon and State Auditor Pat Awada is negotiating southbound traffic on 35E in her white Jeep Cherokee, one hand on the wheel, the other occupied with a Marlboro Light that she ashes out her open window. She brushes a length of long blonde hair from her deep blue eyes and considers the impact that a fast rise through Republican politics has had on her family. “I haven’t tried to protect my kids from politics. I never tried.” She speaks with an even, calm tone. But her pitch drops noticeably when she describes the reception her children occasionally received during her tenure as mayor of Eagan. “They’ve suffered negative things because some parents don’t like me.”

    Pat Awada is 36 years old. She is the mother of four children. During the last four years she has become the most controversial woman in Minnesota political history (with the possible exception of Coya “Come Home” Knutson). Her epic battles with the Metropolitan Council over the development of low-income high-density housing in the suburbs earned her the everlasting enmity of suburb-hating urban liberals. Her activist approach to the state auditor’s office has positively unnerved Minnesota’s local government establishment. The Star Tribune’s editorial board has yet to find an Awada position with which it agrees, and when they are not busy attacking the policies themselves, they provide an astonishing amount of space to anti-Awada letters to the editor, many of which verge on the personal.

    Shrill. Aggressive. Inflexible. Tough. Awada smiles when presented with the list of adjectives opponents apply to her. “The bitch factor,” she summarizes, matter-of-factly. “I can’t worry about that. A lot of executive women get that. Maybe not from liberal Democrats, but they get it.” A moment later she smiles and softens, but her voice tightens defensively: “I’m certainly not shrill. Am I tough? Yes. Opinionated? Absolutely.” She pauses, thinks it over. “Maybe some women are less likely to be that way than men? I don’t know.”

    Despite its name and status as a state constitutional office, the Minnesota Office of the State Auditor has very little to do with the $26 billion that the state of Minnesota will spend during the 2002-2003 biennium. The job is actually much larger than that: Minnesota’s state auditor monitors the spending of 4,300 units of local government, including school districts, municipalities, counties, port authorities, redevelopment authorities, even police and fire relief associations. That’s $17 billion of oversight this year alone—a significantly larger amount of money than the state spends itself.

    The auditor supervises a staff of 150, including 90 auditors who perform approximately 250 audits each year. Most are housed in a diamond-shaped brick building a block from the Capitol. On the fourth floor, surveying the Capitol itself, is the chief auditor’s spacious corner office. When Pat Awada took her new job in January, she ceded that desk to one of her deputies and chose instead a small, first-floor room near a door and reception area used by rank-and-file staff. “That way I get a better sense of what’s going on,” she explains as she wheels back and forth in her office chair, sitting on one leg and rowing herself around with the other, a file folder tamping down her skirt. It’s a spartan space: There’s a desk, a small table, some bookcases. The few items that might hint at her personal or past professional life are either in unpacked boxes or scattered on the cluttered bookshelves. “If you really want to know about me, learn about my family,” she says with enthusiasm, as if recommending a good read. “They’re crazy.”

    Awada’s mother, Betty Anderson, is a self-described “adventurer” and former parks administrator. On family camping trips, “She was always the first one to jump off the bridge into the river,” Awada remembers. “That was our role model.” Awada’s father, Henry, is a trained forester who retired as a machinist at Northwest Airlines. Both parents enjoyed the outdoors, and it’s a passion they instilled in their children; with a shudder, Awada remembers childhood camping trips in the Boundary Waters—in the middle of the winter. Still, the outdoor adventures seem to have made an impression on the whole family. One of Awada’s three brothers runs the Iditarod, the world’s most famous dog-sled race, in Alaska. Another jumps out of airplanes for fun. Awada reflects that her mother’s adventurous streak instilled in her not only a confidence that she could handle challenges, but that she should seek them out.

  • Type-A All The Way

    On the first day Pat Awada met with The Rake, she mentioned a behavioral analysis test she had taken in 2001, prior to an Eagan City Council retreat. Our writer was amused to be told about the test, but did not expect much more than that. Then, three days later, she arrived at her weekly deputies’ meeting with the results. She handed them to a secretary and asked for four copies: one for each deputy, and one for The Rake. When she placed a copy in writer Adam Minter’s hands, he stared at it, looked up at her, and instinctively asked, “Are you sure you want to give this to me?” Tony Sutton, Awada’s deputy for communications, looked like he was going to pass out. “It’s kind of fun,” she said with a carefree and confident shrug. “It’s me.”

    “For me, this was one of the moments where I developed an understanding of Pat Awada’s character and confidence,” Minter says. “In the end, I think she comes down to this formidable confidence in herself. She really sees no reason why she should hide anything from someone trying to get to know her.”

    An excerpt:

    “Based on Pat’s responses, the report has generated behavioral statements to provide information on her natural behavior. That is, if left on her own, HOW WOULD SHE CHOOSE TO DO THE JOB. Use this information to gain a better understanding of Pat’s natural behavior.”

    “Pat tends to have a ‘short fuse’ and can display anger or displeasure when she feels that people are taking advantage of her. She is forward-looking, aggressive and competitive. Her vision for results is one of her positive strengths. She enjoys authority, independence and the freedom that goes with her aggressive approach to problem solving. Some would see Pat as an initiator. She is a dominant, forceful and direct person who wants to be seen as an individualist. Pat embraces visions not always seen by others. Pat’s creative mind allows her to see the ‘big picture.’…

    “Pat challenges people who volunteer their opinions. She tends to influence people by being direct, friendly and results-oriented. She likes people who give her options as compared to their opinions. The options may help her make decisions, and she values her own opinion over that of others! She likes people who present their case effectively…. She has the ability to ask the right questions and destroy a shallow idea. Some people may feel these questions are a personal attack upon their integrity; however, this is just her way of getting the appropriate facts.”