The Minnesota River Valley
2012–2013
I stumbled upon the Minnesota River Valley trail system during the freelance year, when my schedule was loose enough to disappear for an afternoon. I don’t remember how I found it — maybe a cycling map, maybe a wrong turn. But once I did, I couldn’t stop going back.
I would try to find a different trailhead each day. The valley ran parallel to the city but felt like another century. Along the river, barges would come through — huge, slow, industrial ghosts pushing upstream. There were factories on the banks. The airport flight paths crossed right overhead, enormous planes descending so low you could read the livery, their shadows sweeping the wetlands where great blue herons stood in the shallows like they’d been waiting since the Pleistocene.
The collision of all that — the industrial, the natural, the mechanical — made the valley feel like a place that hadn’t decided what it was yet. I liked that about it.
I walked barefoot most of the time. Something about feeling the ground — the grass, the mud, the gravel — made the place more real. One afternoon I stepped into what I thought was shallow muck near the riverbank and started sinking. Past my ankles. Past my calves. Up to my knees. I didn’t know how far I’d go. There was a moment of genuine panic — the mud gripping, the suction pulling, no one around. I crawled out on my hands and dragged myself to solid ground, covered in black river mud, laughing and terrified.
Another time I found a rope swing across a ravine and took it without thinking. Just grabbed it and swung. I felt like Tom Sawyer. Thirty-seven years old, covered in mud, swinging across a ravine on a fraying rope in the middle of a Tuesday. That’s freedom, or stupidity, or both.
I spent more time in the river valley than I should have. It kept me from billable hours. I knew that. But I also knew the end was coming — I had my next gig lined up, teaching at UWGB, and Minneapolis was almost over. The valley felt like the city’s parting gift. One last wild place to explore before I went back to the place I’d left.
Minneapolis had always been generous with nature. There was green space and bike paths everywhere, and the real wilderness was only a few hours out — state parks to the south, the North Shore to the northeast, Duluth and Grand Marais and the Gunflint Trail, the Boundary Waters. I’d spent weekends in all of those places. But the river valley was different because it was right there, hiding in plain sight, ten minutes from my apartment. You could stand on a bluff and see the skyline in one direction and undisturbed wetlands in the other.
I think the river valley taught me something I already knew but had forgotten: that the most interesting places are the ones between things. Not the city. Not the wilderness. The threshold. The margin. The place where the barges and the herons coexist.