Minnesota Prairie Roots

Boxcar graffiti

Boxcar graffiti intrigues me, always has, thanks to my Grandma Ida who once regaled me with tales of train-hopping transients.

Hoboes, she pegged them, almost with disdain. Men looking for work while riding the rails. Men occasionally hired as cheap labor on the farm she and grandpa worked in Redwood County.

Details and names have long been forgotten, gone with grandma. But the mystique of these hoboes, these homeless, remains.

I see their faces in graffiti-covered boxcars, lingering memories of men who once splashed their artwork upon the rolling canvas.

Today the traveling art venues mostly showcase the work of taggers and gang members and high school kids bent on raising a little, well you know what, on a Friday night after the football game. At least that’s what I think.

The problem lies in separating good from bad. Evil from innocent. Some would argue that all boxcar graffiti rates as vandalism. Maybe. But I see the artistic element in carefully shaped block letters and scrawls and images.

When I stopped recently to view several rail cars side-lined in Faribault, I tried to figure it all out. I couldn’t. The letters made no sense, formed nothing I could understand. Good words? Bad words? I simply could not tell.

So, even though I got some fantastic photos of the graffiti-covered boxcars, I can’t share all of them. You will get only snippets of what I photographed.

But above the graffiti, I discovered an unexpected memorable icon—Tropic-Ana, retired symbol for Tropicana orange juice. Refrigerated boxcars once transported the juice from Florida to northern states. It’s been years since I’ve seen Tropic-Ana, who’s been replaced by the more politically-correct straw-stuck-in-an-orange.

I circled the boxcars, studied the hitches and wheels and signs and warning words. And wondered about all of that graffiti. Who had spray painted it there? What did it say? And what did it mean?

Artwork on a traveling canvas

Tropic-Ana pushes orange juice.

Instructions for opening a boxcar

Side-lined rail car

Copyright 2009 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

“I’ll give you a daisy a day, dear.”

“I’ll give you a daisy a day.”

“I’ll love you until the rivers run still.”

“And the four winds we know blow away.”

(Lyrics by Jud Strunk)

Photo copyright 2009 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

The Paradise Center for the Arts theatre and setting for the musical, "South Pacific," performed in July.

Earlier this summer, I bopped into The Paradise Center for the Arts in downtown Faribault with my camera. I intended to shoot some photos and then be on my way.

Instead, I got a behind-the-scenes tour of this restored historic theatre and plenty of great photo opportunities.

You can read all about this visit and view some photos in my latest blog for Midwest Mix Magazine, a southern Minnesota arts publication.

Go to http://www.midwestmixmagazine.com/.

Editor Edell Fiedler also gave me a wonderful plug in her online “news” section. I’m humbled by her praise. Check out the entire Midwest Mix Magazine website.

And, if you haven’t been to Faribault for an event at The Paradise Center for the Arts, plan a trip soon. The Merlin Players open Anne of Green Gables tonight, with the production also showing next week.

Go to http://www.paradisecenterforthearts.org/

Sketch of "South Pacific" character Bloody Mary guides make-up artists.

The Paradise Center for the Arts theatre make-up area.

Details in The Paradise Center for the Arts lobby in downtown Faribault.

Copyright 2009 by Audrey Kletscher Helbling

Sometime between baking chocolate chip cookies and burning brownies, my perspective changed, slowly, over five years.

Let me explain.

My oldest daughter, Amber, drove down from the Cities last night to have supper with us. She also came to pick up some of her belongings. Now that she has moved from a cramped uptown apartment into a large south Minneapolis duplex, Amber has more space.

In the past, this packing of her stuff would have left me feeling blue. Not last night.

As I watched her rummage through totes and carry boxes and books downstairs from the bedroom she once shared with her sister, the expected melancholy never happened.

I was actually encouraging her to take more. And she listened.

Together we sorted through the stack of vintage tablecloths I collect. She took four.

Together we sorted through the box of extra wine glasses I had stored in the basement. She took six.

She asked about a blanket, not a fleece one, to take to soccer games. I refused to give up any of the bed-sized quilts my grandma had stitched. She took a lap-sized denim one instead.

Not that I minded Amber borrowing any of my stuff; that was OK with me. But this was supposed to be primarily about her stuff.

Only five years ago, she was packing her belongings for the first time, going off to college. Oh, how those years flew, those days when I would bake chocolate chip cookies to send back with her after a weekend at home.

Now I can’t remember the last time my eldest has slept overnight here.

But then I can’t recall the last time I baked cookies for her either. And when I baked brownies yesterday, I burned them. Yeah, I got distracted by a project and never heard the oven timer.

How life changes.

Grandmother Brownies

1 cup margarine, softened                     4 eggs

1 ¾ cup sugar                                       2 teaspoons vanilla

½ cup cocoa                                         1  1/2 cups flour

½ teaspoon salt                                1 cup chocolate chips (or nuts)

Grease a 9 x 13-inch cake pan. Cream margarine with sugar, cocoa, salt and eggs; mix well. Stir in vanilla and flour until well combined. Stir in chocolate chips. Pour into pan and bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes (less for chewier brownies).

Recipe by Barbara Schmidt from the Vesta Centennial Cookbook

Fresh potatoes and sweet corn, from the Faribault Farmers' Market , and a grilled pork chop.

I grew up on meat and potatoes.

Same thing every night for supper—meat, boiled potatoes, gravy and a side vegetable. Seldom a deviation, except maybe on the weekend with macaroni and cheese for dinner. Or a kettle of rice. Or hotdish. And in the summer, T-bone steaks on the grill on Sunday.

Ours was a farm family. Good solid food. Nothing fancy. Something to fill the stomach. Feed six kids with food from the land. Keep the meals simple, and cheap.

Potatoes, always the staple, centered nearly every meal along with corn-fed beef.

Not that spuds grew abundantly in the heavy, black soil of southwestern Minnesota. They didn’t. But one year I decided we should try planting potatoes and they became my project. I thought digging potatoes akin to digging for gold.

Nothing compared to that first potato dug from the soil, dirt clinging to skin. Firm and fleshy. Tasting of the earth.

Even today, so many years later, I anticipate new potatoes, small and round, sliced thin in their red jackets, dotted with butter, sprinkled with seasonings, wrapped tightly in foil and cooked over charcoal.

Served with Minnesota grown corn on the cob and a grilled pork chop, pork kabob, chicken or steak, I consider this the perfect summer supper.

Even without the gravy.

(In celebration of National Farmers Market Week August 2 – 8, shop a farmers’ market. You’ll find an abundance of just-picked produce from zucchini, tomatoes, green beans, onions, raspberries, cucumbers, potatoes, sweet corn and lots more. Home-grown, fresh from the garden. Nothing better.)

See that deer. Yeah, there, in the distance, under the canopy of trees.

Walking along the mown path that slices through the tall, waving prairie grasses and wildflowers, we spot the deer. First one. Then another. And finally, two maturing fawns. They have seen us too and are momentarily paralyzed, alert to danger.

Likewise, Randy and I freeze in place. Silently, I will them to move closer, although I know that won’t happen. But it is the only way they will look larger than blurs of brown in the photos I want to take.

Oh, for a telephoto lens.

So Randy devises a plan. We will continue walking the short distance remaining between us and the woods at the River Bend Nature Center in Faribault. Then I will take the trail through the trees. He will circle back and drive the deer my direction.

I am nervous. My mind flashes back to the farm and rounding up cattle that have trampled the electric fence. My dad is telling me to stand still, don’t move, no matter what. I am a skinny little girl with a massive Holstein charging directly toward me. I move. My dad yells.

Now I hear a gentle clap, clap, clap breaking the quiet of this August evening as Randy shoos the deer my direction.

I am stationed on the dirt pathway edged by brush and trees, fully expecting a deer to leap through the dense growth. Camera viewfinder pressed against my eye, I wonder, should I focus straight ahead, to the side, where?

A mosquito buzzes in my ear. Leaves rustle.

And there ahead of me, I nearly miss the first deer ambling across the trail. Then the two babies peek at me. Together. Even from this distance, I can sense their fear. I snap several images, wish that I was closer.

They wait in the woods now, thinking we can’t see them. We can. I take more pictures, hearing the slow click of the camera shutter. It is dark here and I will be lucky if any pictures are in focus. I simply can’t hold my camera steady enough to shoot at such slow shutter speeds.

Randy motions for me to move the other direction, toward the amphitheater, he whispers. I race that way as quickly as I can in my flip flops.

And there I pause, again. The first deer bursts through the bushes. And then the fawns follow, hesitate when they see me. My camera whirs, all too long, all too loudly. One baby crosses the path. But the other diverts to the rocky hillside amphitheater and flees in the opposite direction.

All the while, my camera clicks.

Now I am worrying, not about charging deer, but about the fawns I have separated. All because I wanted to take their pictures.

The best photo I got of a fawn, the one that fled to the amphitheater.

Just-picked domestic raspberries

“Why are raspberry freeze pops blue?” he asks.

“Maybe so you don’t confuse them with cherry,” I answer, not all that sure that I’ve given the correct response.

We are discussing this while washing and sorting through raspberries that Randy has picked earlier. He’s gathered an ice cream bucketful from a co-worker’s patch in Northfield, where he’d driven directly after work.

It is 8:00 now on a Friday evening and we have just finished a homemade pepperoni pizza and bottles of Brau Brothers Brewing Co. Strawberry Wheat beer. Before and after our meal I have snitched dozens of raspberries. And as I consume another handful, I wonder if the brewers from Lucan have ever considered crafting raspberry ale.

“Keep eating like that and we won’t have any left,” Randy laughs.

“You can eat them too,” I zing back.

So we work, side by side. He places the berries in a colander, sprays them with water, then dumps the berries onto layers of paper towels placed atop a brown paper grocery bag. I have worried already about red juice staining the counter.

I pat the berries, ever so gently, with another layer of paper towels.

And then we sort. Firm reddish berries placed in a single layer upon cookie sheets for freezing. Mushy, overripe, nearly purple berries into a bowl for eating.

“Raspberries are so delicate,” I say, understanding now why these sell for $3.50 to $4 a pint. We chat about the labor intensity of harvesting this fruit and then value our bucketful at $32.

We wash. Pat dry. Sort. Berry by berry.

Occasionally I plop a berry or three into my mouth and savor the flavor that tastes nothing, nothing at all, like a blue freeze pop.

Wild black raspberries in our backyard

Two years ago today, Garrett Ebling missed his turn onto Interstate 94 and ended up on the 35W bridge. Half way across the span, his red Ford Focus began shaking and then nosedived some 60 feet into the Mississippi River as the bridge collapsed.

He survived. Thirteen others did not.

August 1, 2007—a day that shook Minnesotans to the core, that forever changed lives, made us rethink how we thought, where we drove, how we lived our lives.

For me, the tragedy became more than an event involving unknown faces. I knew Garrett, not personally, but as the former editor of The Faribault Daily News. We had communicated several times after my son was struck by a hit-and-run driver. I remembered the compassion Garrett showed to me and my family then.

As I followed the bridge collapse stories, my attention remained on Garrett. I wanted to know how he was doing. And I wanted to write his story. So I emailed Garrett and asked if I could interview him for an article that would publish in the November/December 2007 issue of Minnesota Moments magazine.

I expected a “no.” I got a “yes.” Mine was one of only a few interviews Garrett granted and I was honored to share his story. I also talked to his rescuer, Rick Kraft of West St. Paul, and to his then fiancée Sonja Birkeland of White Bear Lake. Because Garrett’s jaw was wired shut, or the wires had just been removed (I can’t recall which), the interview was done via email.

His story of rescue, of being pulled from his submerged car, was a powerful one. His injuries countless—a ripped diaphragm, bruised and semi-collapsed lungs, broken ankles, a broken arm, severed colon and abdominal wall, severe facial trauma…

That Garrett survived was nothing less than a miracle.

What most impressed me was this survivor’s incredibly positive attitude and strong faith. “There definitely must be a reason why God decided to keep me alive,” Garrett wrote. “I want to live in a way that fulfills whatever mission has been laid out for me.”

Today Garrett still struggles. I checked his Caring Bridge website today and read about his ongoing problems with balance and ankle soreness and his lost sense of smell. He deals with emotional issues and memory loss.

But I also read words penned by a strong and determined Garrett—the guy who has overcome so much, the man who married the woman he loved on August 3, 2008, one year and two days after the bridge fell. He just recently bought his first house.

Garrett has shown us all what it means to be strong and trusting and patient and grateful and determined.