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Children of the slash pile • Minnesota Reformer [1]

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Date: 2024-07-25

Last March, they logged under the old railroad trestle where Itasca County’s Scenic Highway 7 meets State Highway 169. Anyone driving between Hibbing and Grand Rapids this summer saw the results.

This scene on the western Mesabi Range recalls historical photographs. Dried ruts criss-cross the mud. Bark everywhere. Limbs strewn. Bent and scrubby survivors stand like sentinels to bear witness.

Next year, the aspens will return. Years later, the balsam, spruce and pine. But, for now, we may only reflect on what was.

Sometimes I hear people say Finns and Scandinavians settled in northern Minnesota because the woods reminded them of home.

What woods?

When most immigrants arrived 120 years ago they rode a train from Duluth that crossed a wasteland of clear-cut hills, muskeg swamp, and logging slash. A millennial forest of white pines had just been felled and hauled away, leaving a complex system of undergrowth to scorch and rot in the blistering sun. Invasive whitetail deer foraged in the ruins, lucky heirs to the displaced elk, moose, bears and wolves.

Half those immigrants came from southern Europe, places like Italy and the Slavic regions of the Austrian Empire. Upon arrival, they experienced the coldest winters of their lives.

Settling in towns like Eveleth, Virginia, Chisholm and Hibbing, these immigrants went into the open pits and underground mines, probing their vocabularies for better words to describe desolation. At first, they were too broke to go home. Some did well and returned to the old country. Some did well and stayed. Many more stayed broke or died prematurely.

The first generation sacrificed itself for its children. Only by the second generation did people enjoy life in a way we might recognize today. Forests regenerated outside of town as better forestry practices were employed. Roads and automobiles allowed miners to escape the locations to hunt, fish and recreate in the new countryside. Eventually some did well enough to buy land in the woods … real woods, that now existed, again.

Balkan, Iron Range and Lawrence were called the “Bohunk Townships” because of the Slavic-American immigrants who settled there after making some money in the mines. “Bohunk,” though sometimes used affectionately, was and is an ethnic slur. By naming these places such, this land was identified as better than town, but not so good that higher class people should worry too much that these folks were moving in.

Working people came in like aspens, regenerating what was destroyed, with no memory of what came before. Today, some of us enjoy the privilege of thinking we’ve always lived here.

In realizing this, we might better understand the culture descended from those immigrants. The land was here for us to use, we got what we could, and — truth be told — there are a lot more trees here now than there were when great-great granddad arrived. So, why complain?

But the impact of humans on the environment doesn’t happen all at once, and can’t be repaired with a wave of the hand. The forest is a living, breathing organism, the survivor of a parasitic infection: us.

It’s hard to see recent slash piles, tinder dry before the rains came, or look at the forest looming over our home in Itasca County, without thinking about a new book I read this year.

“Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World” by John Vaillant (Knopf, 2024) is primarily an account of the Fort McMurray fire of 2016, when an unprecedented Canadian wildfire displaced 88,000 people and destroyed half a modern city. The story doesn’t start with the fire, but rather the origin of the conditions that made the fire.

Fort McMurray is a bitumen mining town, an oil town. Parked on the edge of the boreal forest in Alberta, it has no other reason to exist. Of course, this reminded me of both the rhetoric and reality of the iron mining towns on Minnesota’s Mesabi Range.

Vaillant argues that the original industry — colonial era beaver trapping — set a tone that carried through to timber and oil.

“The Company and its aggressive competitors turned the inhabitants of the boreal forest, human and animal alike, into a huge, surprisingly efficient profit-making machine — until they exhausted the resource,” writes Vaillant. “In so doing, the fur trade shaped Canada’s creation myth and set the tone for how extractive industries continue to operate there.

“…This colonial model, which systematically commodifies natural resources and binds local people to the trading post system with company store-style debt, has replicated itself in resource towns across the continent.”

Once we start, we can’t stop.

On a much smaller scale, once you start pouring your waste oil and old gas onto the godforsaken brown spot behind your garage, it’s almost unfathomable to stop. After all, the damage is done. The consequences — imperceptible if we want them to be — are already realized.

This is the mental blindspot we ignore every day when we use natural resources without thinking of the consequences. I like driving cars, too. My house features vinyl siding, treated lumber, steel rebar and boatloads of electronics. Most of the stuff in that house comes from mined goods and petrochemicals, including the stretchy pants that so kindly forgive my appetites.

My whole world is ready to burn. I certainly hope it won’t. But hope isn’t enough, is it? One must sacrifice to make change. We might not want to, but that just doesn’t matter in the end. The bill always comes due eventually.

As Vaillant writes, “There is a fine line between hope and denial and delusion.”

Note: Next week, I will revisit John Vaillant’s “Fire Weather,” especially the relationship between human beings and fire.

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