life in a northern town

if i could do it again, i'm not sure i would

My alarm goes off at 6:30 am and somehow the cold has seeped in through the window frame. I make a pot of coffee still half asleep and pull on clothes. I try and lay my winter clothes out the night before, because it makes it easier. A lot of the time I don’t. A lot of the time I snooze the alarm six or so times and finally crawl out of bed to the bright winter light with half the day gone.

I start my car then go back inside and drink my coffee. It’s that in between time where it’s neither night nor day. This sky is a lavender blue. The branches of bare tress cast long shadows in the snow, lit by the bright quarter moon.

The purpose of watching a winter sunrise is to make the most of the scarce light. I don’t bother on the cloudy days. Here the sun is up before eight, and gone before five most of the winter. If you work, that means the sun is gone by the time you get home. Up here you either work two or three jobs, or have two or three homes. I’ve had a lot of jobs up here. I’ve worked in schools, as a wilderness guide, in saunas, in outdoor retail, in cafes. I’m lucky in that I now work part time online. On a sunny day I can go hike or ski and enjoy the weather and work an evening instead. Most people don’t have that luxury.

The purpose of watching the winter sunrise is to let the first light of the day hit your face, to feel the cold and breathe it into your lungs, singeing the back of your throat. While sky fades from blue to purple, to pink, then orange, then dusty yellow, and then finally bleeds to day, I am there in that moment only. The oppressive winter dark is gone. The small town gossip is unimportant, the feeling of everyone knows of you but no one knows you. I feel anonymous, a speck on in the cosmic sea watching a star’s light change our cold earth into something spectacular. We have dinner plans with friends tonight, knowing it’s one of our last before they move back south— the rent was too high, the jobs weren’t great, everyone’s short staffed, everyone’s working too hard. It’s hard to make a life here where nothing grows. Life’s just easier anywhere but here. The dread of losing friends again is gone for a moment while the sun rises.

It takes fifteen minutes for the frost on my windshield to melt enough to drive. I drive to the lake. I feel stiff in my layers— two pairs of leggings, fleece pants, shell pants, two wool base layers, a fleece, a down jacket, a wool sweater. A neck gaiter, mittens, two hats. Mukluk winter boots. Maybe I’ll put ice spikes on. Probably not. I’ll just walk slow.

I drive to the lake and watch the sunrise. It’s cold, but I keep moving. I stash an extra camera battery on my inside coat pocket. It’s -20 F; that kills a camera battery in about a half hour. I try and walk for an hour in the morning. The twenty minutes before the sunrises are the prettiest. It’s purple. The inbetween time. The day hasn’t started yet, but the night has ended. You can see the stars and your breath. The snow crunches under your feet. There’s soft sounds of wildlife. The coo of the eagles. Sound of rabbits scurrying across the snow. A twig snaps and you think maybe there’s something bigger in the woods behind you. You’re not scared though; you’re so warm in all of your clothes and the soft dawn light is comforting. Trees creak in the cold. Have you ever heard the sound of ice forming? It’s a static rumble. Both a crackle and groan.

The inside of your nose freezes stiff. Your breath catches in your hair and turns to ice. The sun crosses the horizon and for a moment the snow and ice glows pink. I wish I could live in that moment. But it’s cold, and the moment ends.

I head back to my car. I’ll spend the rest of my day in front of my computer, working. I’ll head in for an evening shift around three, then work until nine. I stop at the local coffee shop. It’s quiet today, because it’s early and it’s winter. I know everyone inside.

One day in the early summer I had stopped in on a lunch break to bring back coffee for all my coworkers. The line wasn’t super long, but sometimes it stretches out the door. There are only two girls behind the counter working. The woman in front of me had scoffed loudly. The girls behind the counter were laughing and chatting while they made drinks.

The woman made eye contact with me and smiled knowingly, like I was in on a secret. “It’s like the service in this godforsaken town couldn’t be slower.”

My lip curled. “We’re all super short staffed here,” I could’ve spat the words. “These girls are students. They’re working really hard.”

The woman’s eyes widened. “Hm." She smiled politely and turned away.

Later that week while I was working a mother with kids asked me where she could take he family to eat in town with less than an hour’s wait time.

“It’s just so crazy busy. You’d think they’d hire more people,” she commented.

“There’s no one else to hire,” I tried to explain. “Pretty much everyone works two jobs here. I work in the school, and here, and freelance write. She’s an EMT,” I said, gesturing to a friend. “Most of the teacher’s I know wait tables in the evening. Rent’s expensive, even for an off-grid cabin with no water or electricity. You can’t buy a house, because most of them get bought for Airbnb’s before you’d get a chance.”

I could’ve gone on. When everyone’s short-staffed and overworked, things start to slip through cracks. Every job becomes a hard place to work. I’ve gotten lucky and found a few comfortable jobs with attentive bosses and owners. By no fault of anyone though, many other workplaces take a hit when staffing is this short.

“Your best best is either the Co-op for sandwiches or to hit the grocery store. Or go out to eat at like 3 pm, that might do it,” I told the woman. “There’s a couple of places, like Angry Trout, where you can put your name in and go for a walk by the water? You just gotta plan ahead a little is all.”

The woman shook her head, disappointed.

The winter’s are hard because of the darkness and the cold, because of how hard it is to get out the door, because everyone is feeling all of that in their own separate world, and it’s even harder to connect with each other. The summer’s are hard because you thought you’d have time to get out and enjoy the sun— all of the beautiful hiking and paddling and camping that brought you up here in the first place but you can’t. You’re working two jobs.

We joke about it at dinner with friends in the winter, how when you tell people where you live they say “oh I just loveeee Grand Marais”. We all laugh, because it’s nearly universal; of course you love the place you vacation to. When you live in a place you aren’t on vacation. Wherever you go, there you are. And to be in Grand Marais means working to afford rent, and the price of groceries. It means being asked to work on your day off because there’s no one else to do it, and you go in because if you don’t, your coworkers will suffer the consequences of being short-staffed in a tourist town. It means making friends knowing they might only last a season or two. It means your door won’t close and the heats out but you can’t find another place to live or anyone to fix it, even though it’s -10 F outside.

We all want a beautiful place to vacation but a vacation town comes often at the expense of a local community. The gap in the standard of living between the people staying in the posh Airbnbs and the people behind the counter working two jobs is a chasm; in that chasm animosity roils.

It’s in words and off hand comments about “citdiots” (idiots from the city) who park off the road when the trailhead parking lot is full, or leave toilet paper on the side of the trail, or cut down trees for the view, or complain loudly that the fire ban has ruined their vacation. It’s in the assumption that everyone with a perfectly clean Patagonia coat and expensive but unused gear will be like this, and subsequent treatment of those people and their questions as if they are indeed ignorant, crushing any space to ask or answer questions that might actually help remedy some of those problems. It’s in the phrase “don’t bite the hand that feeds you”, in the expectation that you can pay enough money deserve a perfect vacation, as if enough money entitles you to freedom from thinking about consequence.

Most people aren’t like this. Not everyone in town is either a jaded local or an irreverent tourist. You aren’t like this, probably. It’s just that those people are the loudest. You know?

But it’s the winter now, and I go about my day quietly. I sit and type at my laptop. A few hours slip by without me noticing. There are still impatient tourists, the people in some inexplicable rush who balk at a five minute wait for a latte.

Generally, things are quiet. I get up for the sunrise in the morning, pull on thick layer after layer until it’s hard to move. I let the sun hit my face and watch my breath curl. I sit and work. I feel like I get nothing done. Twice a week I hike or ski. I sweep, and cook, and wipe down the counters. I light a candle. I knit by the TV. There’s nothing good on. It’s almost February. The winter is starting to feel long. I have to remember to love the season. But some days I do.

Today, sitting by the window in the light writing this, I definitely do.

some photos from lately & little stories behind them: