Steve Fernlund and The Long Way Home

A friend recently recommended John Steinbeck’s "The Moon is Down," a short novel with a powerful parable about the resilience of the human spirit under military (or ICE) occupation. Written to support the Allied war effort during World War II, the story is set in a small, unnamed coastal mining town in Northern Europe, likely Norway. The town is suddenly invaded and occupied by an unnamed military force from a warring country led by a dictator. The story emphasizes that "free people" cannot be permanently broken because their leadership is always decentralized. If one leader is killed, another emerges — the power of democracy. One of the book's most famous lines describes the occupiers' plight: "The flies have conquered the flypaper." This suggests that while the invaders have "caught" the town, they are now stuck and slowly being destroyed by the very people they intended to control. Sounds familiar to an aged Minnesota man.  Steinbeck h...

As temperatures plunged the last few weeks, the snow didn’t stop. It just came in frequent, relatively small amounts, blown around by gusty winds. Due to my advanced years and easily frozen fingers, the only snow I moved during the lengthy cold snap was off the porch and around the car. Our driveway, better described as “park” way, is a couple of feet longer than our car and as wide as two cars side by side. While these inch-or-two snowfalls happened almost daily, I would sweep snow off the car and push it into a fast-growing snowbank where the second car, if we had one, would go. I left that growing snowbank until now, at the end of the month, when I shoveled it all. Temps were slightly above zero.  While shoveling, my thoughts went from avoiding my demise from a cardiac disaster to contemplating the birthdays of our direct descendants. There was a reason for those thoughts that went beyond the fact they’d get zippy-doo-dah from my “estate,” if my old ticker were to give up the gh...

After seeing a television report about Minneapolis the other day, the Bohunk and I coined what seemed to be a new word: horrification. My AI assistant noted that the word has actually been around a long time, used by writers to emphasize horror unfolding or being inflicted. It applies here: the horrification of our community began the moment the first chemical canister was deployed directly into the face of an unarmed citizen, pinned to the ground by three large ICE agents—an act of pure brutality. This column begins my fifth year as a freelance writer for the North Shore Journal. In the past four years, my humble efforts have resulted in over 300,000 words on the newsprint: enough “content” to fill two or three novels, and up to six business books. Not much of what I’ve written expresses the depth of my anger when the President, his appointees,  and Republican members of Congress describe our state as a hellhole of terrorists and criminals who hate America. They go on to revel in ...

Once upon a time, I was infatuated with cars. Not what I’d call a gearhead, I saw myself more as a car guy, a driver and admirer, not a tinkerer. At the tender age of five, I could already identify the make and model of almost every car. On road trips, I’d drive my parents up the wall, reeling off the make and model of every car I saw. I think my dad was impressed, and he’d often point out a vehicle for me to identify. His motive was likely to get my mom to stop driving from the back seat for a minute. Before I could legally drive, there was a slot car hobby. Different makes, models, and hot rods populated my stable, kept in a cigar box with the parts and pieces that made up my “road race” set. But getting behind the wheel, and not just sitting on my dad’s lap and turning the steering wheel, was a significant goal.  Finally, when I was 12 or 13, he let me drive the car from the highway on Fernlund Road to Grandpa’s farm. It was maybe a mile or two, but it seemed much longer. The ca...