Lake and River Cities

Minneapolis rises above the trees like a city forgotten in farmland. It doesn't belong there, straddling a lazy river, no longer paying much attention to it, treating it like a summer road for barge traffic bound for St. Louis and New Orleans.

Minneapolis is a lake town, not a river town. Where the creeks filled marshes, Minneapolis made lakes. Only the odd want a river house in Minnesota. Minnesotans rim every water-filled glacial depression with summer homes, leaving the rivers to barges and big shots with big boats. It is farmland yet, even when the fields have gone and left behind tall buildings at the side of the tamed river.

St. Paul, where the big tow boats from New Orleans and St. Louis come and turn back with grain and coal, is a river town, a commerce town when commerce came on trains and barges, before money became commerce and big money built banks and big government above lock and dam #1, by the Ford Plant, in the incongruous city straddling the river where it is small.

People sit on benches in Minneapolis, something Swedish and solitary; altogether more lake than river. When it is quiet, in midwinter, and you can hear the ice, sometimes the stiff wind carries fragments of lies and laughter coming from the crooked streets in St. Paul, tumbling together; something Irish and riverfront.

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