It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part VI

It was the final week of my getting ready to move to the Twin Cities, after my rash promise a little over a week earlier.

I got up every morning to go to my job, which was...

...well, not the worst roofing and siding job ever; the weather was gorgeous, and it didn't involve hot tar or metal shingles.

I drove with my boss (and contractor, and only other guy on the site) out to a garage in Cleveland, North Dakota, about 20 miles from Jamestown, every morning around 7, roofed and sided and did other miscellaneous carpentry work until about fivish. Then we drove home.

It was a September and early October a lot like this one, actually; it started out very, very hot in mid-late September, blazingly warm and, by North Dakota prairie standards, humid. By early October, a little nip crept into the air, and by the near-eve of my move, mornings were downright cold, and mid-days were a little chilly. And it was North Dakota, so always, always, the wind.

The garage belonged to a woman who was the ex-wife of one of Jamestown's great guitar players, and (I learned while taking a break in her living room) mother of one of my best friend's girlfriends, although I didn't know it at the time. See, I told you it was a small town...

As I worked, I plotted and planned. And when I say "plan", it was less a matter of making plans I could use to actually make life easier when I got to Minneapolis. No, it was more like "Xtreem Daydreaming. The thoughts centered around a couple of things: the job I'd get, the place I'd live in, the life I'd have.

The job was the hard part. The 10-12 days since I'd told everyone in the world I was moving to Minneapolis hadn't brought me any revelations. My daily trawls through the Star/Tribune at the bookstore found me a few intrigueing leads, to which I promptly dispatched my groaningly florid resume - but nothing really jumped out at me, because at 22 I really had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I had a degree in English, with minors in History and German, and enough credits for minors in Music and Theatre (but they were almost all performance, so it didn't count) and one course shy of a minor in Computer Science. This last had been a long journey in college; I'd actually double-majored in English and Computer Science until the end of my junior year, when I realized with impeccable timing that I hated Computer Science. I dropped, knowing full well that I was never going to pass "Operating Systems", much less figure out a Senior Project that would interest me, much less anyone else. But I figured - more a vague sense than a plan - that with my background in journalism and the added computer experience, I could get a job as a technical writer. To the extent that I thought at all, that was my "plan".

One thing I knew; my career would not be radio. At 22, I'd worked at three stations since I was 16. I hated spinning records, and knew I'd never get a news gig in a big market. I kissed my radio "career" goodbye.

The place I'd live? That was easier. A cool place. I figured once I got a job, I'd get a cool, funky apartment over some store somewhere (although not in Saint Paul. I only got the vaguest sense of Saint Paul from the maps I daily pored over. The city was an inscrutable enigma to me until long after I moved). Everyone had told me those were the coolest apartments. I'd get a two-bedroom; one for me, one for a home-made "quiet" recording studio that I planned to build, with (I had it all sketched out in my head) an Ensoniq Mirage sampler board, a Yamaha D-9 synth, a Mesa Boogie (that I'd only play at gigs) and a couple of Scholz Rockman and Bassman boxes to run into the four-track cassette deck (and eventually eight-track tape deck) on which I was going to record all the music I was writing.

But my life? That, I had figured out. I knew that once I landed a place, I was going to crank into full song-writing mode - and once I got a job, I was going to start a band, and embark on the real reason for the move; becoming the next Paul Westerberg-via-Joe Grushecky. I didn't know Phillips from the Near North Side, but I knew that the big three bars were the First Avenue, the Uptown and the Cabooze - and exactly who to talk to to get bookings at each. I had no idea what I was going to do for a living, but I knew exactly what I was going to do for a life.

(And the girlfriend I was gonna meet, too; I had her figured out down to a T. Not tall, not blond, not the kind of girl you find in North Dakota. A mixed grab-bag of brunette and auburn hair, brown eyes, darker-veering-toward-olive skin and a bunch of other non-Scandinavian traits danced through my head as I hammered shingles into that cold roof in Cleveland, ND.

I got a lot of daydreaming done that week.

Cleveland was a little town of about 100 or so people in 1985; it's probably not that big now, although I'm sure its cheap property has made it a desirable exurb for people who want to work in Jamestown, so who knows. One thing it had was a gorgeous view of the prairie, since nothing really separated it from the land; it was really an island of little wooden houses and eighty-year-old, mostly-deserted brick storefronts in the middle of a sea of cut stalks and dirt.

My "boss" and I worked late that last Thursday, October 10, 1985, so that Friday - my last day on the gig - wouldn't hold any surprises for us. It was getting late when we packed up; the first purple tinges of the autumn sunset were starting to leak out over the prairie as I gathered the last of my tools and craps from the roof. I sat back for a moment as my "boss" jawboned with the owner of the house (as he seemed to do a lot), and looked into the infinite sky to my west, and felt the wind - 15 gusting to 25, as usual on the prairie - in my face. It was those moments when I felt the place tug on me; sitting in the rawish open air, the wind in my face, the smell of loam and diesel and manure and sawdust on the air, that I forgot my plans for a moment and felt some connection with my anscestors, the Norwegians who climbed off trains in northeastern North Dakota and went on to raise (so the family legends tell me) bumper crops of rocks, decade in, decade out, looking at the same sunset in October, smelling the same smells, feeling the same eternal wind. It's a feeling I still occasionally get when I'm up there, this time of year, that kind of night.

We drove home. The tang of fall was in the evening air; a tang that had told me, the four previous years, "Somewhere, in some dorm, there's gonna be a party going on!"

I think I went to bed early that night.

Posted by Mitch at October 10, 2005 06:24 PM | TrackBack