Steve Fernlund and The Long Way Home

It’s been a year since the Bohunk and I left the wilderness compound on the Ridge alongside Lake Superior and returned to our roots in what is euphemistically called a manufactured home community. After spending a year in two different apartment buildings following our nuptials half a century ago, we bought a trailer house (they didn’t even call them mobile homes) in 1974. That community was alongside the soon-to-be-created Minnesota Zoo. As 20-somethings, newly parents, we decided that we didn’t mind starting life on society’s ladder as trailer trash. What goes around, comes around. After five decades of wedded bliss, and both of us sliding home to the average lifespan, our days follow a certain relaxed pattern. We may have had bucket lists, although they weren’t a thing until the movie Bucket List debuted in 2007; I don’t recall where they might be. It’s possible that if we had them, they’ve been lost about five houses ago. We’ve seen and done a fair amount over the years. These days...

Remember when the best comeback to a bully in school was, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Of course, that statement is bullshit. The rhyme was meant to be a feel-good way for kids to fight back. The line first appeared in print in the mid-19th century in The Christian Recorder in March 1862, where it was introduced as an "old adage" taught to children. No adult, except a psychopath perhaps, can say they never hear hurtful words flung at them. Nor can they say they haven’t hurled hurtful words at others. I’ve heard and hurled my fair share of words with the power to hurt, sometimes accidentally. Putting words in their proper place does help you to keep your sanity, though.  I’ve been thinking a lot about another trope from school days that seems timeless: "The pen is mightier than the sword." The sentiment in this seven-word pronouncement is that persuasion, communication, and intellect are more effective means of changing the wo...

One of the promised benefits of old age is that life gets easier. The calendar and the clock would have far less impact on daily life. Social Security keeps groceries on the table. Medicare and an apple a day keep the doctor away. In reality, those promises are no different than the one a delinquent customer makes when he says, “The check is in the mail.” Since moving to metro Duluth a year ago, we have needed to find primary care doctors because we both rely on medication to keep the grim reaper at bay. Or so we’ve been told. Last March, the Bohunk had an appointment with the clinic on the other side of US 2 to get her prescription regimen renewed. She also had scheduled her “free” annual Medicare wellness visit.  Even though we’ve been insured under Medicare for eight years, and even though our clinic in Grand Marais included the “annual wellness visit (AWV)” in our annual physical/drug renewal visits, we really didn’t understand what it was all about. In April, after the big-nam...

If I had a quarter for all the times I heard this when I was struggling to become an adult, I’d be Musk-like rich. “Don’t get too big for your britches, young man.” Whenever the sin of pride reared its ugly head, Mom, Dad, or one of the other parent figures in my life would knock me down a peg or two. They’d tell me that the seams eventually rip, and the fall from grace isn't graceful when a person gets too big for their britches.  I have vivid memories of pitching in an East Richfield Little League baseball game in the 60s. Our fields were fenced all round with real dugouts for coaches and gear. Home plate and the bases were real, not soaked paper plates held down with large stones. Our uniforms were made of real wool, with stirrup socks and fitted caps. And I was king of the mound. At some critical moment, I was pitching to the opposing team's best hitter. My nerves were running high, and after what seemed then to be a historic duel, I threw a third strike for the third out. ...

With all that’s going on in our world today, one crisis that gets too little attention is the demise of cursive handwriting. More on that later, but the dying of cursive was preceded by the end of shorthand. Perhaps for sexist reasons, it was the late 60s after all, I did not take a shorthand class in high school. In my liberal self-defense, however, I did take typing, at which I became proficient. Typing turned out to be a skill I needed in my work life. My first shirt-and-tie job, barely past 20, I was the Traffic Coordinator for a manufacturing firm in the Halloween Capital of the world, Anoka, MN. My boss was the Traffic Manager, barely into what we call middle management these days. He was high enough in management to have a secretary, Judy.  These were the days when Secretary Day was just getting underway, and no one held the title "Administrative Assistant". Despite my vaunted title, Judy and I were basically at the same level of the corporate hierarchy. We worked in a...

Over a lifetime, many of us have the urge to collect objects that connect to a happy memory of an event or special person. We don’t recognize a financial value, but the sentimental value is high. Sometimes we have a shoebox or two of sentimental trinkets, or we become hoarders, filling storage units, garages, and basements with accumulated memories.  Some collectors treat objects with the cold calculation of a high-tech day trader. To them, a rare coin, a vintage comic book, or a piece of fine art is a financial investment that has consistently beaten inflation, even outperforming a 401 (k).  Before using fax machines to send shipping information to the railroads, we actually talked to the billing clerks. At the Burlington Northern, our assigned clerk was old Red, a cantankerous but lovable and thorough professional. We became friends, and he was a valued source of competitive intelligence for me. He was also a coin collector. He told me that one closet in his St. Paul apartme...

Frequent readers of this column could easily infer that my favorite stories to cover are those involving bungling bureaucrats and struggling elected officials. And they’d be right about my Long Way Home efforts.  But for community news stories, I truly love talking with small business owners along the shore and telling their stories with my keyboard. Despite my self-deprecating comments about being a corporate stooge, every company I’ve been employed in is considered a small business by bungling bureaucrats in the US Chamber of Commerce and the Small Business Administration. For purposes such as the “equitable” distribution of government contracts, the federal government considers a contractor with 500 or fewer workers to be a small business. My definition considers a small business as one where the owner(s) are employed in the business, know their employees by name, and contribute in one way or another to a local service organization or two. They have local and regional competitor...

A Father Is Biology. A Dad Is Something More Sitting down to write this column, I waded through some potential topics that readers might appreciate. I considered a dive into how so-called Private Equity was tearing apart businesses built by real entrepreneurs. Or maybe a look at how all the glowing praise for private/public partnerships covers up the fact that the private benefits far more than the public. I’ve previously written about the warning signs of rising personal credit card debt, so not yet ripe to revisit that. Maybe I could do some self-reflection about how my Minnesota Lutheran guilt has me in turmoil every time I hear Smokey the Bear say, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” Despite my best efforts for decades, there are still forest fires. It’s depressing. Thumbing through my scrapbook of columns I’d written in 1996, my first year as a newspaper publisher/editor, I came across one with the headline “Checking in with dad.” Of course, Father’s Day is this weekend. So let...

"Whadda Ya mean 'cut the adverbs?'' For an old chronicler like me, deadline days sneak up. I try hard to get ahead of the game, but end up working under pressure to produce something readable. Sitting in silence, staring at a blank screen, considering a subject that commands more of my own heart than it might yours, I aim to examine the erosion of the English language in modern media. It has been many years since I first found that my doctors and dentists were all younger than me. Then the television newsreaders went the same way. Today, I look at the television journalists on local Duluth television and think, “Why are they hiring teenagers now?”  I recall barely scraping by in the high school English classes. I knew a tile layer in Las Vegas who swore his high school geometry classes were a total waste of time—even though he used angles and geometry every single day on the job. I felt the same way about English classes, not knowing that words would play a significant...

The outrage factory has been working overtime this year to keep Minnesota reeling. Vice President J.D. Vance recently wrote a referral letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, urging a criminal investigation into Minnesota’s Governor and Attorney General for failing to act on widespread fraud in Minnesota social-service programs. The outrage filtered to the bureaucrats and is now making life miserable for eligible Medicaid patients and the people providing health services. When Minnesota’s Department of Human Services (DHS) launched its “Revalidate 2026’ anti-fraud initiative, officials said they were protecting taxpayers. But in places like Two Harbors, MN, the crackdown has left healthcare providers unable to serve patients, unable to collect payments, and wondering whether they will survive. Intended to identify Medicaid fraud, DHS’s Revalidate 2026, a highly aggressive regulatory mandate launched at the beginning of the year, forced every Medicaid contractor to “revalidate” by Jun...

My good friend Paul always has wisdom to share with me. Today, he said that in interacting with people, he keeps his opinions about current events to himself. Unless he’s asked a question directly, at which point he doesn’t pull any punches. Writing a weekly column like this, I don’t have the luxury of keeping my thoughts to myself. So, here we go." Predicting the future isn’t a strong suit. If a major league baseball player bats 400 in a season, he’s a star. My prognosticating success average would make me a utility outfielder in the minor leagues.  Old age matters, though, because the more things change, the more they stay the same. “History may not repeat itself, but it echoes.” Over the past half-century, major financial crises have hit close to home and shaken the world. So maybe my opinions are relevant, if overly pessimistic. Recently, I saw that companies that are Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven are responsible for up to 80% of the growth in the S&P 500 over the la...

Before the last remnants of snowbanks melted, I started to see dandelions popping out in the neighborhood. Walking the dog on one of the rare sunny days, I wondered aloud, “How resilient are those yellow-flowered things?” We’ve just wrapped up a long, relatively brutal winter--at least to my mind and the aging body that houses it. Maybe we are the resilient ones of our species, the dandelions of the human race. Like my brown eyes, dandelions seem to have been with me forever. One of the joys of my young life, when school ended, was my solo visits to Crosslake and the time I spent with Clair and Mabel, my mom’s parents.  They lived in a small house that Grandpa built after they sold their resort on Rush Lake, which they named Everglades, without irony. The DIY house was situated behind the schoolhouse, just off the parking area for the Catholic Church, an imposing brick structure that I was never allowed to enter. The driveway encircled a small yard filled with oak trees, a picnic t...

My dissatisfaction with politics and politicians usually simmers in a stewpot of cynicism. But sometimes the pot boils over as it did when the US Court of Supremes ruled on April 29 in the case Louisiana v. Callais. The decision virtually ends racial gerrymandering, the practice of drawing legislative district lines to deliberately increase or decrease the political power of a specific racial or ethnic group. On the other hand, the court said that partisan gerrymandering, drawing boundaries to increase the power of entrenched partisan officeholders, is just ducky. And that’s why I’m boiling.  The Constitution never mentions "redistricting" or "districts" at all. It requires the Census every ten years to, among countless other things, determine how many Representatives each state gets based on population. The number of members in the U.S. House of Representatives was capped at 435 by Congress in 1929, and that is where it stands today. Apparently, the grand poobahs i...

Do you ever notice how podcasters, cable news commentators, politicians, and other agitators make some absurd, illogical, or false statement, followed by, “I’m just asking questions?” What a cop out. For losers like me who pay attention to those scoundrels, we consider them to be “JAQing off” (Just Asking Questions). Trouble is, their loyal followers simply assert the same BS and engage in their own JAQing off.  To gain clicks and followers and get the rest of us pissed off, they avoid the burden of proof and hide from facing accusations of spreading misinformation. By ending with "I’m just asking the question," a podcaster, talking head, or politician thinks they can sidestep a challenging backlash. If you get the chance to question or correct them, they can pivot to, "Why are you so defensive? I didn't say it was true, I just asked if it was possible!" We, the people, have probably practiced this diversion since the beginning of time. It worked to an extent wh...

Apparently, this thing called the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is the feeling that others are having more fun than I am. Now that I’m at the “stay off my lawn” stage of life, FOMO doesn’t exist. I’ve moved firmly into JOMO, the Joy of Missing Out. I’m perfectly content to spend my days at home on the Proctor, MN frontier, walking the dogs, puttering in the yard, and going to bed early. I don’t care that I’m missing out. A recent shift from my daily JOMO routine was prompted when our daughter Jess gifted her mom four tickets to 'Music Man' for a one-night show in Duluth last week. I agreed to go, knowing that the Bohunk, who has watched The Music Man movie countless times and attended more stage productions than I have toes, would enjoy it.  Although JOMO is my preferred style, I made an exception for this play. The guy playing Professor Hill was no Robert Preston, but the production was great, and I earned brownie points with 'she who must be obeyed.' I refrained from pos...

From an early age, I hoped to be accepted and admired by everyone, despite that niggling feeling that I didn’t deserve to be. What if it turns out that most people actually don’t care about me at all?  Most people, I think, haven’t quite come to terms with that question. The reality is that, with all the crap going on in this world, people don’t have the bandwidth to pay much attention to you or me. If they don't care, we might as well say what we actually think when we get the chance. There’s actually a name for this kind of self-torture. Psychologists call it the ‘Spotlight Effect’, which is the feeling that everyone is watching and judging us, even though most people aren’t paying attention. I realized this half a lifetime ago and adjusted. My worry about fitting in was a massive waste of emotional real estate. There are lots of reasons for thinking that growing up in the 50s and 60s was blissful, and most of them are BS. The reality for me was hand-me-down clothes that older co...

“It’s complicated.” Whether hearing that two-word phrase from a friend or relative trying to avoid talking about a toxic relationship or a paid consultant hired by the county board to solve the housing crisis, it always offends my senses. “It’s complicated” is just an easy way to avoid the pain of accountability for whatever situation the speaker means to obscure. Whatever the problem, uttering “it’s complicated” is a way to demean others and avoid real solutions. Because real solutions are hard--not because solutions are complicated, but because real solutions upset someone’s apple cart. Bringing real solutions to our communities’ problems isn’t complicated—it’s just hard. For example, clearing snow requires shoveling; it’s basic and clear, but it takes effort. The difficulty lies not in the complexity, but in the hard work we must do to reach solutions.  Of course, no one is offended by your hard work with the snow shovel. Usually, you can bet that someone will be impacted and of...