“Even though we don’t know where we’re going, we always end up somewhere.”

This is a quote I heard recently, not from some great philosopher or self-help guru, but from one of my best friends I had growing up. It wasn’t said about any particular life problem or situation, just about his trip back home from where he grew up to where he currently calls home. Given the context it really just seems like something someone may say when they’re headed out on a road trip with no particular destination, (which is exactly what he meant) but given our history and my uncanny ability to read way too much into things, the quote stuck and for reasons far greater than a simple road trip.

My friend’s journey is definitely one worth writing about, but as I have not asked for his permission to write about it, for now his journey will be his own, but just know that the somewhere he ended up is a long ways from where he began, or any of his closest friends would have imagined for him. A rough start in life does not guarantee a rough life, and his somewhere is something to be genuinely proud of today.

None of us truly know where we’re going in this life, we have ideas and plans and that’s generally where it all comes crashing down. As they say, “Life’s what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” So we plan to do this or that, and life has its own plan. It throws you this way or that, gives you opportunities where you never thought you’d have them and tears away the futures you had so neatly crafted for yourself, and that’s not always a bad thing.

When we’re young we believe we can do anything, we’re told we have the ability we just need the drive. But then reality sets in and we find that although we’ve always wanted to do something spectacular (such as write a world class blog), we find that our talents lie in other fields and even though we still partake in some of these other things, we see that our true talent lie elsewhere. For me, writing has always been a passion of mine. I’m not exactly world class at it by any means but it’s something I always enjoyed doing and if I could choose one thing to do for the rest of my life and actually make a living at it, it would most likely be telling stories and attempting to leave the world a little better off because of the life I lived and the stories I passed on. Big aspirations, but in reality my biggest accomplishment may end up being that I once got a report from The Washington Post to come visit my home town… It’s a huge deal for our community, but in my grand scheme of things…very far off from my life goals.

After attempting to find my passion in several different majors throughout my college experience, I finally found something I loved (Mass Communications) at the same point I lost the thing I loved the most (my mom to ovarian cancer in 2006). After she passed away I attempted to go back to school the following semester to continue my education but every time I sat in class and tried to concentrate on learning, I was filled with sadness about my loss and the whole concentration thing just didn’t seem to work.

I spent the following few month living, working, and dating in the town I hoped to eventually get back on track in and finish off my degree but after a bad break up I traveled down to spend some time with my brother and sister who convinced me that taking a road trip with my brother while we were still young enough to just go, was more important than what I had waiting for me back where I had come from…so we jumped in my mom’s old car, fueled by funds she had left to give us one last great Christmas (her favorite holiday) and traveled a huge portion of the U.S. We saw a ton of friends and family along our path, as well as some of the most beautiful country I have ever seen.

I’m not a religious person by any means, but I am a person of great faith…if that makes any sense to you. On this trip, I would get up every morning before sunrise and just walk around, sometimes with a good book, often with my camera, but more time than not, simply with my own thoughts. It was on one of these mornings while walking around the desert of Arizona that I got this overwhelming feeling that somewhere my mom was alright. I can’t quite explain the feeling, and this is the first time I’ve told anyone really about it, but for a brief moment there I was overjoyed with the fact that she, and everything else, was going to be alright. I had never had the feeling before then, and I haven’t had that feeling again, that’s how I knew it was something special.

Despite this moment of “awakening” I still remain unfazed by the fact that faith and going to church aren’t synonymous. I didn’t and don’t need a building to show me that there’s something bigger than myself, I just need good friends, a loving family, and the ability to see the good in all the individuals I meet along the way (a smile from a beautiful girl every now and again never hurts either!).

Faith, after all, can easily be summed up with the statement that began this post.

But the point of this post is that statement. We often find ourselves in anguish because this or that didn’t work out. I wanted to be a journalist one day, but instead I’m a business owner/landscaper/bus driver. None of these were really on my career aspirations list, but for the most part today they make me happy. I still get an opportunity to indulge my writer dream through a little blog post here and there, and even though not many people read it, it’s an outlet for me to keep those creative juices flowing. I may not be where I intended to be, but I’m certainly somewhere…and this somewhere currently works for me.

The remainder of my journey is as unknown as the beginning, but as usual I look forward to the ups and am better prepared than ever for the downs…life has a way of helping us with that. When I’ve reached my final somewhere, I hope that even though I never quite knew where I was going…I made the places I’ve been a little better with my presence, and that they’ve done the same for me. 

A Big Win for Small Town, USA

Recently an article was written based off of information collected by the USDA’s natural amenities index which lists the factors that are most desirable to people when they’re looking for a place to live. Through that information a reporter from the Washington Post was able to determine that Ventura County in sunny California was the number one place to live…and my county, Red Lake County in the frozen tundra of Northwest Minnesota, ranked dead last…3,111 out of 3,111 counties in the United States.

Having read the article, as well as the follow up (Thickcoats, thin skins), I decided that this was an ideal opportunity to shine some light on what I already knew was a beautiful county. My business being largely based on the natural beauty of our area, I get to spend my summers listening to people from all over the world (mainly U.S.) tell me how beautiful our area is. So, when the articles were published I felt like we could certainly use the publicity for our business, but also for our county.

The most logical way to go about this was to invite the writer of the article, Christopher Ingraham, to come visit our beautiful county for himself and then make his decision on whether or not it was a good or bad place. It must be noted that he wasn’t claiming that it was or wasn’t, he was just stating that based off of the data, we were the worst…so really, it’s the USDA we should all be upset with.

The day after I had sent an email to Mr. Ingraham, I received a response…the very next day! He had mentioned it to his editors and they seemed to think it was a good idea, so to strike while the iron was hot, I quickly put it out that I had contacted him and that he was possibly coming to come see the county for himself. Later Chris would tell me that even before they had fully committed to the trip he was getting calls from our regional paper asking if the rumors of him coming to the worst county were true, the ploy had worked!

Shortly after I received another email confirming that he would be coming our way the following week, which only gave me a few days to plan the best approach to show him the county.

I wanted to give him the whole picture of every part of our county and give residents from all of our towns a crack at showing him why they loved to live here. After putting out some information via Facebook, I quickly got in contact with different individuals from the various communities which friends had told me would be fantastic representatives as well as extremely upbeat individuals. We wanted Chris to judge for himself about our county, but we didn’t want him to receive any truly harsh, closed minded individuals, and every areas has those. We wanted to use it as an opportunity to show why people not only live in our area, but why they start and keep businesses here, and why they raise children here as well.

Visiting the Tri River Pioneer Museum in Plummer, MN

The plan was to get representatives from every town, as well as individuals that would represent some of the major factors as to why people live or move to a community (safety, good schools, employment) onto a tour bus and give them an opportunity to speak to Mr. Ingraham about what they love about living in our county while showing him all of the natural beauty of it as well.

Eric Mickelson greets Chris Ingraham in front of TJ's Tavern in Oklee, MN

The process of getting the individuals together exposed me to people from around the county that I had never had the pleasure of getting to meet, and planning where the tour was going to take us had me exploring areas of our little county that I had never seen, or had not made an effort to travel to in quite some time. The planning stage of this whole ordeal seemed to me like it was going to be the greatest part. I had opened myself up to all the great people in our area and was so happy to hear their stories of why they love our area, as well as several stories which people passed along to me from individuals who had grown up here and eventually continued their lives elsewhere.

The main take away from this part of the experience was that when someone backs one or all of us into a corner, we have each other’s backs. People who probably hadn’t had their cameras out in years were rediscovering the natural beauty of our area by shooting photos of everything, and ones who hadn’t given much thought to their childhood home or the place where they now call home, were rediscovering why Red Lake County was a great place to live. I don’t even want to get into all the tweets and Facebook comments that Mr. Ingraham received (I actually apologized for some of those in my email to him).

Touring Paradis, Inc. in Brooks, MN

I wasn’t able to get people from all of the different towns to join us on the bus, which was truly too bad because the purpose was not only to show Mr. Ingraham everything the county had to offer, but to also show the residents of the different towns everything each town had to offer, feeling like they, like me, might have been missing out on some of these great things. Some of the best examples of this for me were the Community Center in Brooks, the live music in Oklee, and the museum as well as the shooting range in Plummer. All of these things I knew existed but had never explored them and once I did, I wondered why it had taken me this long to do so, I wanted to share that experience with our whole county.

Even though representatives from every town weren’t on the bus, we were greeted at every stop by residents of the different areas we stopped at. The looks on the faces of these individuals, as well as how we were able to actually see their pride in their town as well as the county was one of the greatest things I’ve ever been a part of. The citizens were proud of these things that they had come together and built, as had been stated in Chris’s most recent article…we quite literally build our communities together, be it the Red Lake Falls Swimming Pool, the Brooks Community Center, the Oklee Veterans Memorial, or the Plummer Museum, these projects were built with funds and labor donated by the individuals of these towns and this county…no wonder we have so much pride in it.

The Schindler's (Joe - holding Isaac, Carl, and Brenda) showing
off all of their hard work on their Dairy Farm, just outside
Red Lake Falls, MN

So in two days (36 hours actually) we were able to show Christopher Ingraham a huge portion of the county, as well as explain to him why we love living here. After we finished out bus tour, Chris was pretty well exhausted. I had pretty much planned out every second of his time from when he arrived in Red Lake County to now and I could tell he probably couldn’t survive another mass onslaught of people, despite the fact that everyone had been unbelievably nice that he had encountered, at some point you just need a break. So for the last meal of his time in Red Lake County, we had one of the best fisherman around, Justin Carriere, prepare him a dish he had never tried…Walleye. If this blog ever gets any wide spread readers they probably won’t find this strange, but around here we eat walleye, and it’s a delicacy and a staple all in one, and for someone to come to our area to see why we love living here and never get an opportunity to try it would be a crying shame. Luckily Justin was able to scrape up enough to feed a small group of us and we had a bit of a fish fry to end Chris’s trip. We had a nice conversation about his entire trip, and I even filmed him telling me that Red Lake County truly was beautiful and that the USDA needed to reevaluate their standards…then I lost the video.

The county waited patiently for Ingraham’s follow up article, where he could have said anything. We felt like he had had a good time on his little trip, but you never know exactly just how you appear from another person’s perspective. He had said all the right things while he was here but we had met the man for all of 36 hours, and we had exposed ourselves so that whatever he had thought of us would once again put our little county into a national publication…good or bad.

I had been extremely busy the week following Chris’s trip with friends who came to visit from Arizona whom I hadn’t seen for over 8 years…so there may have been a late night or two in there which allowed me to be a little less worried about the outcome, plus…I truly felt like he had a great time, so I wasn’t worried.

Then I got a message from our little “Baking Prodigy,” wondering if I had read the article yet…next my notifications started buzzing with people tagging me on Facebook and Twitter with links to the article and much of this was to be expected as it was a huge deal in our area…but then messages started coming from all over the state and country, as well as from abroad…all people who had read Chris’s article and thought that it was amazing. They told me how it had been such a great thing for the whole state, and others how it made them long for their small town home or relish the fact that the little guys were getting some much deserved attention for once.

The end of the Kayak trip (Sportsmans Park, Red Lake Falls, MN)

I finally got an opportunity to read the article towards the end of the day that it came out. The majority of the day had been a pretty big build up for what I read, but at no point (not even the beat up Buick comment) was I disappointed. The article was extremely well written in my opinion, and three days later I received a message from Chris stating that in the past three days the article had gone toe-to-toe with the nationwide big issues and articles such as those dealing with Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton…and that the Red Lake County article was still the most read.

The messages I received from all over weren’t the only ones out there. Comments on Facebook posts, tweets, emails, and so many other forms of communication were all stating the same thing, people loved the article. They were cheering for the underdog, the one that was featured in the Washington Post, the one which they lived in, or had come from, for this brief moment we’re all from Red Lake County, Small Town, USA.

So in the end, I guess I’d like to thank the guy who called us the worst county in America. He reported on some old data from the USDA, which he himself didn’t truly believe, but when someone told him to get his butt out of the office and come check it out for himself, he did it, and made a lot of people remember their roots and start to be proud of the place they live once again. So thank you Chris Ingraham, you’ll always have a place to come home to, right here in Red Lake County!



Thank You Christopher Ingraham, for coming to see the beauty of
Red Lake County!