Karen Babine
a waterfall named Minnehaha, which translates to falling water, not laughing water. Half of the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, is a lovely linguistic hybrid of Ojibwe and Greek-city of water. Minne, meaning water, and polis, meaning city. Up north, Camp Minne-Wa-Kan, one of my favorite places on Earth, translates to spirited water. But because that doesn't seem to be too appropriate for a Bible camp, we choose to translate the name as spirit over the water. Water is, for Minnesotans, at its root, a language. Water is the way by which we can understand ourselves, each other, and the surrounding world. It is how we communicate. Water is how we connect with the land under our feet, the land under our plows, under our combines. It's the way we know where we are geographically, who we are personally, and who we are as a community. Humanity may be able to con nect more clearly with the more physically-consistent land, but Minnesotans, residents of the Land of 10,000 Lakes, must also reconcile their relationship to water because the native ground of a Minnesotan is water, not land. Water is what Minnesotans do for fun, it is what we build dikes and levies to protect against. We want to be surrounded by all the forms water can take, because humanity isn't predictable and constant either. We want the ice, we want the snow, we want the rain, the hail, the flood-even when the presence of water is destructive, it still reminds us that water is a give and take and we can't always have it good. And it reminds us that things can always be worse. The water gets into a Minnesotan's personality and that's permanent. And the path to that ecological reconciliation is linguistic. 3. Winter In high school, I learned that water is one of two elements that expand when frozen. And because frozen water is less dense than liquid water, it freezes from the top down, making life possible in the lakes even when the air temperature is well below zero. Water is sticky, which enables its surface tension to support floating objects. Water's unusual physical properties correspond to the weather, where water presents another paradox: forty-below winter temperatures are not exactly cancelled out by hundred-degree summer days when the air is liquid with humidity, sending the heat index fu rther up into the triple digits. Minnesota smiles at knowing that both water and winter share the same word root. She laughs at her people, who find no irony in fishing on the surface of the water in summer as well as in winter. This spectrum of temperatures finds particular irony in the winter. Sometimes it's just too cold to snow. When I was little, I couldn't understand why it would be too cold to snow. But cold air cannot hold water and if there's no water, there's no snow. Meteorologists also point out that because Antarctica is so cold, the snowfall in certain areas is so minimal that it's actually classified as desert. -lO 路 F is about the cutoff point for snow. 78
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