The ghosts of history

The experts are telling us what we already know.

A group of well-meaning experts from the State of the Nation Project recently released a “national progress report” showing how the United States compares to similar countries in 37 different factors that influence quality of life.

I read it with interest, even as the results proved to be bleak and uninspiring. The upshot: We are good at money and productivity, but we are either average or terrible at everything else.

The most extreme example: We rank ahead of 98% of comparable countries in economic output. We rank ahead of either 0% or 1% of comparable countries in: youth depression, net greenhouse gas emissions, fatal overdoses and polarization.

It’s appalling, of course, but by the end my overriding sentiment was this:

We already knew all this.

Yes, it’s nice that the experts tied this all together with what they consider quantifiable data, but this is also obviously the lived American experience right now.

Why work so hard on a weather forecast when you can stick your head out the window?

In taking a swing at an interpretation of the numbers, The New York Times again tried to be well-meaning. But even the illuminating interviews and quotes seemed obvious.

“The strong economic performance has principally provided gains for the wealthiest 10 percent,” Joseph Romm of the University of Pennsylvania said.

There was a time when this was less so. I would never say “not the case,” but less so seems fair.

What I can’t figure out, and the question I keep asking myself, is this:

Where and when did we fall off the timeline?

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I wasn’t looking for an answer a couple days ago. I was just looking for someplace new to explore.

I had a rare 90 minutes to spare and I wanted to go for a walk — but not just anywhere. Specifically: Somewhere I had never been before (preferably within a 15-minute drive), a novel experience to engage my senses.

As one does in these situations, I typed “nature area near me” into Google Maps. The first few places were familiar, but then I noticed an option for “Pine Bend Bluffs.” It was 12 minutes from my house and I’d never been there, the only two requirements.

The drive there was, in a word, odd. Less than half a mile from the end of the directions, I was winding through roads that led to factories and industrial warehouses. But then there was a telltale brown sign. I was in the right place, even if it didn’t seem like it.

I parked my car, sure not only that I had never been there but positive I previously didn’t even know it existed. A map showed a long paved trail, and clearly the path caters to cyclists.

I set out walking south, and it wasn’t long before I came to an overlook and historical marker.

The first of three panels told the story of a young Dakota woman who became increasingly disenchanted with a Dakota man who was pursuing her for marriage. In the story, she thinks of him as a coward but he keeps following her until she finally throws herself off a cliff.

It concludes: “From then on, in English, the cliff and town nearby were known as ‘Maiden Rock’. But to the Dakota people, it is the site where a young woman refused the shame and disrespect of an obsessed man.”

I looked out into the distance, trying to figure out if this was, in fact, Maiden Rock. With no conclusive proof, I looked it up on my phone and found out that, no, Maiden Rock is actually an hour southeast of this spot.

The final panel seemed ready for my curiosity.

“Perhaps you’ll have noticed that this particular story is far from the location it’s told of: Maiden Rock. In part, this is due to the continued legacy of exile, removal, and dispossession enacted on Dakota people.”

Where and when did we fall off the timeline?

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It was allegedly 43 degrees that day, a February temperature that can’t help but excite a Minnesotan. But there was also a wind advisory and not a speck of sun in the sky.

The gusts were absolutely punishing in some spots, with the only relief coming in the lower spots.

I made a note for myself: The wind blows hardest at the top of the hill.

The landscape was consistent as I walked: on my left was a sheer drop into the “nature” part of the area, the distant grays and tans of late winter guarded in many spots by a fence to keep trail users safe.

On my right, often, was a different fence, typically with barbed wire, guarding the various factories and plants that dominated the corridor as well.

Downwind I catch an odor that reminds me of the spent leftovers from the brewing of beer, though I know that can’t be right.

Beyond the fence and inside the thick, tall concrete walls are the guts of the economy — where things are actually made and put in the trucks that take them to the places so we might click to buy them.

Not long after, as I keep walking, there is another historical marker. This one boasts of the St. Paul Southern Electric Railway, which apparently in 1914 started hourly service between St. Paul and Hastings, about 25 miles to the southeast.

“Connecting to other lines in St. Paul enabled passengers to travel by electric rail all the way from Hastings to Lake Minnetonka,” the sign read. “The St. Paul Southern ended service in 1928, after people and commerce began taking to the highways.”

We had all that a century ago? How do we differentiate between progress and the passage of time?

When and where did we fall off the timeline?

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I keep walking, head up, and I see in the middle distance what looks like a cemetery. I decide that will be my turnaround point before I make my way back.

Indeed, it is a graveyard in the oddest place: wedged between the paved path and Highway 52, across the road from the giant Pine Bend Refinery. A chain link fence surrounds it, while a large locked gate also helps keeps people out.

The cemetery also bears the name Pine Bend, and I come to find out after looking it up later that soldiers are buried there — several of them from the Civil War. The site is oddly out of place but relatively well-maintained, with fresh flowers near some of the stones.

As I’m walking near it on the paved path, I suddenly feel a strange sensation in my right arm. The best I can describe it is it felt like some sort of animal had landed on it and scuttled away, or alternately someone had brushed against it.

I quickly pulled my hand out of my pocket and looked around. It was just me.

“What was that?” I said to myself, over and over, as I started my walk back.

I was thinking about my 5-year-old son, who recently told me that aliens are real because he saw it on YouTube, and who always asks me this:

“Are ghosts real?”

My standard answer, a real go-to that every dad should have in his back pocket for tricky questions, is this: “I don’t know, buddy. Do you think ghosts are real?”

He says he doesn’t know, which is a shorter version of my honest and complicated double-negative answer.

I don’t not think ghosts are real.

It’s too big of a question for certainty.

I’m comfortable knowing what I don’t know.

I’m less comfortable knowing what I do know.

Were we ever even on the timeline?

History is full of ghosts, and we are all haunted.