Finding the Pulse of My Hometown

Downtown Brainerd, MN. (Source: Google Maps.)

In the countless times I’ve rolled into my hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota, as an adult, I’ve been keenly aware of changes along the main drag. A little repaving here, a new turn lane there, and untold comings and goings through the commercial spaces. The former-donut-shop-turned-bait-and-tackle-shop that became an insurance agency a few years ago will eventually become a real estate office if I’ve gauged the trends correctly.  

Businesses that haven’t been abandoned have been rebranded or repurposed. Convenience stores become 24-hour fitness places, laundromats become pizza places, ice cream turns to frozen yogurt, and everything else becomes a vape shop. 

I’ve watched the corridors of a once-thriving shopping mall empty out to the point that they feel reminiscent of the beginning of an 80s horror movie, or the zombie apocalypse. On a recent visit to Rafferty’s Pizza, a favorite local staple and one of the last viable businesses in the mall, I noted that, in front of what used to be K-mart, there were two rows of recliners that a person can plug a credit card into for a ten-minute massage which—not that I tried it—amounts to ten minutes of mechanical jiggling. I thought about putting warning signs up to dissuade the mall walkers from wasting their money. 

On visits to Brainerd throughout the years, I’ve bemoaned the clear-cutting of towering pines for wider highways and bigger box stores, shed tears over the destruction of my elementary school, and mourned the conspicuous absence of a 27-foot-high Paul Bunyan statue. But none of these visits carried as much gravity as a recent trip back in October to attend my father’s memorial service. Somehow, the loss of a parent provides a lens that can make an ordinary, disappointing change look like a grim, final ending. 

I’d read Charles Marohn’s article back in September about Lou’s Dairy Way in Brainerd being torn down and replaced with an ice vending machine, but for some reason, until I saw it with my own two eyes, it seemed more like science fiction, or an April Fool’s prank. But when I pulled up alongside the shiny, white ice machine placed in the center of an expanse of fresh blacktop, I imagined my father’s classic response, the slow shaking of his head and the words, “What a joke. What an absolute joke.” 

I imagined the discourse my dad and I would have, and could just hear his voice, brimming with sarcasm. “If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been driving through town needing 20 pounds of ice thinking, Wouldn’t it be great if I could get the ice without actually having to actually go into a store?”  I could picture us laughing, then driving on to Culver’s to get turtle sundaes with a buy-one-get-one-free coupon.

But in real life, there wasn’t much I could find funny about it. In contrast to the former neighborhood drive-in with its orange booths (or maybe they were yellow) filled with Lou’s regular lunch crowd, the starkness of the ice machine produced an effect that was so chilling that I didn’t even have the presence of mind to take a photo of it, otherwise there would be one here.

There are two things I’d like to interject with right now if you don’t mind a little digression: 

1. Even though we grew up in the same small town, until I read his article, I never knew Charles Marohn’s grandparents owned Lou’s Dairy Way, which effectively elevates him to celebrity status in my book.  

2. Chuck and I were both in the 9th-grade production at Franklin Jr. High of You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown, once upon a time. He played percussion with the cool kids in the orchestra pit while I played Snoopy, singing from the roof of the doghouse. I’ve been waiting to share that gem with you ever since I became the Neighborhood Storyteller, and since we’re nearing the end of our year together, I decided it was time. Plus, unlike the ice machine, I do have a photo of myself as Snoopy and the playbill to prove it.

(Source: Author.)

I spent a minute or two with the ghost of Lou’s Dairy Way back on that October day, wandering through memories of fish baskets, patty melts, and corn dogs served in red plastic oval-shaped baskets with a sheet of white paper in the bottom. I swore I caught a whiff of fried chicken, and could taste those ice cream cones that combine the flavor of Keebler sugar wafers and popcorn. You know the ones I’m  talking about; the cones with those square holes at the bottom that  you try to  stick your tongue into to get the melted ice cream before biting into the whole thing with a satisfying crunch.  

Through the haze of nostalgia, I became aware of hunger clawing at my insides, and wished I could order a shrimp burger, the most exotic item on Lou’s menu, one that I’d dreamed of but never tried. 

Sadly, the ice vending machine didn’t produce shrimp burgers, or even soft serve; just plain old ice. And unlike automats, those fabled, real-food vending machines from the 1960s I find fascinating but have only read about in books, you couldn’t drop in a mitt full of change and pull a lever to get a sandwich or a bowl of soup. 

I continued down the street to get lunch at a relatively new restaurant—Sage on Laurel—in the former location of an infamous bar that was once called The Blue Ox, the storefront of which was painted bright blue, in case anyone would otherwise have trouble finding it. And just in case you needed one more clue, the inside air of the place was also blue, thanks to thick clouds of cigarette smoke, because, as some of us remember, there was a time when people actually smoked indoors.

I’d dared only once to go into The Blue Ox, and once was enough. It was on a summer trip home in my early twenties, and I’d  met a few high school friends there to drink beer legally together for the first time, which, for the record, was decidedly less fun than secretly doing the same thing underage in someone’s basement. 

Sage on Laurel bore no resemblance, either in the visual or olfactory sense, to that mythologized bar that had occupied the space for decades before. I couldn’t imagine the undertaking the restaurant owners faced when removing not only the cigarette smell, but also the years of spilled beer layered up on the floorboards like shellac. I remember from my one visit there that I’d stepped right out of one of my flip flops, the flimsy sole of which had become adhered to the sticky floor. 

(Source: Google Maps.)

The scene inside Sage on Laurel was the antidote to the dispiritng visit with the ice vending machine. Embraced by the conviviality of people squeezed into booths, the air redolent with the smell of home cooking, and the bustle of servers with plates of pan-fried walleye, lefse rolls, and cheese curds fried to golden perfection was like the end of a movie where things finally turn around for the dying small town you’ve been rooting for all along. It reminded me of a scene from one of the sexy hospital dramas on TV (that are nothing at all like real life, says I, an actual nurse), where the team in the ER is getting ready to “call it” on a lifeless patient, and then one of the residents in a white lab coat—maybe the nerdy one who ticked off the chief of surgery earlier in the episode—places two fingers to the patient’s carotid artery and shouts triumphantly, “I’ve got a pulse!”

I know there are probably people in Brainerd who see trading The Blue Ox bar for a restaurant that serves locally sourced foods and actual vegetarian options feels unfair, and not unlike a school being torn down in favor of a parking lot, or Lou’s Dairy Way being razed to make room for an ice vending machine. Maybe to them it feels like flatlining rather than resuscitation, but it takes all kinds, I guess. 

But since all kinds gotta eat, I’m just happy that a town with a drive-up ice vending machine can also support a place for my kind: the kind that loves good food and community. And in case you’re wondering, the walleyewich with the orange cranberry aioli on the wild rice bun was out of this world, and Sage on Laurel opens at 11. 

Read more of our weekly Neighborhood Storyteller columns here!

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