Fifty Miles Of Familiar Road

I'm from there. "Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes..." Chisholm and Hibbing. I remember husbands getting drunk and wives getting beat bad. The wives had to take it because there was no place to go. The suicides. The gays getting beat bloody. Kids exploding homemade firecrackers in school. The alcoholism and the filthy and broken homes. The Masabi Iron Range. Hibbing, then a small town, being pulled up by the stakes and moved several miles away all because of the discovery of the life giving iron ore under it. Looking down at the huge iron ore open pit where train cars looked like toys and feeling the sense of nostalgia about Hibbing's relocation which was, incidently, expressed by Hibbing's native son, Bob Dylan (Zimmerman). I had a gay aunt who took it to her grave. I also had parents and a sister who sexually molested me when I was young. Minnesota is nothing but a slice of life as it is anywhere in the world. There is both good and bad in Minnesota. North Country was about both.