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HOMEGRO W N For at least one kid who grew up in Duluth, it was the best town in America long before Outside magazine proclaimed it to be. WRITTEN BY STEPHANIE PEARSON | CHESTER BOWL SKIS PHOTOGRAPHY BY DEREK MONTGOMERY
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henever I feel nostalgia for my childhood, I ride my bike through the streets of Duluth, passing the former homes of my “Rellies,” the term my family used for my paternal grandparents and their collective 16 brothers and sisters, most of whom lived in Duluth. I’ll ride over to Lakeside, past a skinny, two-story house on Dodge Street where my great grandparents lived after they emigrated from Sweden. My great-grandfather Carl Carlson, a skilled stonemason, fortified it with a bluestone foundation in the 1880s. The house looks impossibly small for a family of 11, but he bought the lot next door to make room for a garden. Carl died of cancer at age 59, leaving my great-grandmother Ida to raise eight girls and one boy alone. “Widow Carlson,” as she was known, was a kind, pious lady who leaned on her faith and the Swedish community at Gloria Dei, the Lutheran church with luminescent stained-glass windows. I never knew my great-grandmother, but her daughter, my Grandma Flossie, was ever-present in my childhood. Flossie’s house was on Carver Avenue near the University. She and my Grandpa Bill had an enormous backyard with a garden that was heavy on green beans. When Dad was young, the family would ski the
rolling hills at Northland Country Club or, for a bigger thrill, Grandpa would drive Dad out to a snow-covered country road, tie a rope to the bumper, and pull Dad behind the car on his wooden alpine boards. Dad graduated to ski jumping when his buddy Frank dared him to jump off Chester Bowl’s Little Chester ski jump. Dad made it to the top, then promptly chickened out, the point at which Frank pushed him off. In the 1950s Dad left Duluth to go to college. After stints in southern California, southern Illinois, where he met and married my mom, followed by Chicago, Minneapolis, and a few smaller towns in between, they returned to Duluth in time for me to finish second grade. We lived on a dead-end street in Hunter’s Park that led to Hartley Field. Every weekend in the winter, Mom and Dad would bundle us up in our snowmobile suits and we’d ski around Hartley’s groomed 5k trail, racing like miniature Olympians. For alpine skiing, Dad would drive us to Chester Bowl and, in classic 1970s laissez-faire parenting style, pay the $1 per kid fee, warn us to keep our scarves tucked close so we wouldn’t be strangled on the rope tow, then drive off. This was the Duluth I knew in the 1970s and 80s. It was full of people and spaces I loved, from the backyard woods to the freshwater ocean that seemed to stretch on forever. The city felt a little rough around the edges, but I was blissfully unaware of how hard the recession had hit the region or that some people considered Duluth to be a deteriorating rust bucket of a city on a frigid inland sea.
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CULTURE
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF DEREK MONTGOMERY
My first job out of graduate school was as an editorial intern at Outside. The magazine was headquartered in Santa Fe, an adobe city at the foot of New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo mountains that was geographically and culturally as opposite to Duluth as an American city can be. When the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo hit theaters in 1996, an editor at Outside who graduated from Yale and went on to become a bestselling author, delighted in calling me Marge. It took a few decades, but Duluth eventually landed on the cover of Outside in 2014, when the city’s residents overwhelmingly crushed the competition in the March Madness-style “Best Towns” contest. I can’t take credit for the win, but I did make sure Duluth was listed in the Midwest bracket. By then, I had been working with Outside for almost two decades, reporting stories from Brazil to Bhutan and from the Falkland Islands to Mount Everest Base Camp. But the most surreal assignment of all was returning to my hometown to write about why Duluth is the best outdoor town in the U.S. The drama and mystique of New Mexico will enthrall me forever, but I missed home and moved back in 2016. It’s a thrill to see how much Duluth has changed and a relief to see how its spirit has remained the same. Duluthians have always been hearty and athletic. But today there’s a lot more outdoor infrastructure and programming to entice people
outside, like the 40-plus-mile-long Duluth Traverse, the mountain bike trail spearheaded by the Cyclists of Gitchee Gumee Shores (COGGS) that connects the five main ride centers across the city. There are also organizations like Duluth Devo, the mountain bike program whose mission is to “grow lifelong cyclists,” from second graders to seniors in high school. (Full disclosure: My partner Brian Hayden founded the program in 2013.) Last year more than 350 kids from all parts of the city participated. I’m happy to see Duluth receive well-deserved national kudos for being a quality place to live because a lot of Duluthians have worked hard to make the city what it is. But the genie is out of the bottle and some days I regret the role I played in letting the wider world know about the beauty of my hometown. As Duluth’s reputation for being a climate-change refuge continues to grow, I worry that it may go the way of so many desirable towns across the mountain west, where families like mine can’t afford to stay. Call it karmic payback, but it took Brian and me two years to buy a house. The one we finally landed (after six failed offers) is a 1962 rambler whose previous owners had lived in it for 59 years. It happens to be on the same street where my Great Aunt Huldah lived. We used to climb trees and have weenie roasts in her backyard. It’s been decades since I last ate one of Huldah’s famous hot dogs, but when I ride my bike past her old house, I feel suspended in a surreal time and space where nothing and everything has changed.
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