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Heritage? We don’t take heritage too seriously. For some of our Scandinavian ancestors it would be sinful to take ourselves too seriously (but some of us did, devil-may-care). For the Celtic and Teutonic ancestors, it’s probably better off for everyone that we don’t take it none too seriously. There was a mass-market hardcover bestseller back in the 90s, “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” and I thought, cripes, I ain’t met one yet that could save a pint for the next morning. Or save the soft peat from under his feet. Let alone save civilization.
You might come from native peoples. You might come from lumber families, -jacks or -barons. Or from mining folk. Or maritime peoples. If you are a transplant or a visitor, you possibly came from farming peoples – from the dairyland or the prairie. I can make an irreverent joke about my coming from drunk people or my coming from pig-headed people, but those jokes are cheap and easy and mostly undeserved.
We come from railroad people (no barons). When I lay out the roots of both sides of my family, the railroads were important on each. Centered on the east and north side of a small city in this, the great Northwest, as it used to be called.
Railroad people, some of whom were also mink trappers down around Pig’s Eye. Others were also buck hunters along the Flute Reed and partridge hunters up on Camp 20, and even brown trout fisherman on the Flute Reed, when there were brown trout in the Flute Reed.
One old branch even left farming on the prairie for the railroad jobs in said city. The reach of the railroads on who we became is such that my little generation of cousins and brother and second cousins are the first generation in our families not to be represented on the railroads.
None of which should be relevant to a column called “Outdoors.”
Except when we were drifting the colorful, October Balsam Branch run of the Apple, myself in the bow with the shotgun and Curt in the stern with his paddle as the rudder, slowing us as we turned tight around the oak bends or around the canebrake bends to jump wood ducks, and through the cattail slough we approached the dike made by the old Soo Line and drifted under the dark, loud concrete culvert, us inside like Jonah or Pinocchio or Geppetto.
Or the Soo Line that crossed over, I think, two corrugated culverts of the first trout creek I ever knew, where I never caught a trout but by which I was so possessed I don’t think I’ll ever stop trying.
That’s a heritage, I guess. The railroads that crisscross the Midwest, as it is called now. I wish we had railways up where we live still. It was just a way for me to hump a healthy distance into good terrain away from cars and trucks and bicycles, and step off onto the shale bank, down, into the woods to get lost. To leave all the past behind and find and re-find old country and new.
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