The biggest disappointment of living in Morris

I have a busy weekend ahead of me, and I got an early start this morning. Up early, graded an exam, got the results posted, and then I decided to reward myself by taking a nice walk downtown to the coffee shop.

It was closed.

There are three coffeeshops in Morris. One is in the middle of the grocery store, which gets enough of my money as it is, and doesn’t exactly have the desired coffeeshop ambience. The other two are owned by local churches. They have limited hours on Saturday, and are closed on Sundays. A college town where the coffeeshops are closed on Sundays! At least the bars are open, so you can drink a different beverage.

None of them cater to students anyway. I see a few faculty now and then, and rarely an occasional student at the coffeeshop I frequent, but more generally they’re marketing to old people.

An outpost of reason in a county of conservatives

That’s my town!

Unfortunately, they cropped out the university, which would be to the left of the top of the photo. I say unfortunately, because it comes from an article that’s all about how the University of Minnesota Morris’s Green Initiative has benefited the entire region.

The farm town of the future is visible long before you reach the city limits, thanks to a pair of wind turbines rising as high as the Statue of Liberty above the flat terrain. They pump cheap electricity into the local grid, providing the energy to make carbon-neutral fertilizer. Closer in, cows graze next to solar panels that provide them with shade. A county-wide compost operation disposes of food and agricultural waste, electric buses take kids to school, the public library relies on geothermal heating and even a city-owned liquor store has rooftop solar panels. (The shop motto: “We chill your beer with the sun.”)

Where is this environmental Nirvana that’s checking off so many boxes on the climate warrior’s wish list? Denmark? Germany? Northern California? No, it’s Morris, Minn., population 5,206, a conservative prairie community in a conservative rural county that favored Donald Trump by 22 points in the 2020 presidential election.

It’s fair to say that environmental and climate concerns have never been front of mind when it comes to votes and policies in Morris. But residents will talk all day long about rural self-sufficiency, high energy and fuel costs, saving tax dollars and eliminating costly inefficiency and waste. When Troy Goodnough, the director of sustainability at the local campus of the University of Minnesota, arrived more than 15 years ago and asked how he could help address those economic concerns, a partnership emerged that has made Morris one of the most sustainable farm towns in America—even though that was never the town’s goal.

They know that Trump hates wind turbines, but it’s all about the money.

Goodnough’s bet was that the common-sense, cost-saving goals the farmers prized could lead them to choices that also happened to be good for the environment. But could it really be as simple as changing the terms of that conversation? Yes, says Blaine Hill, the recently retired city manager who helped make it happen. “We never made it about climate. We just did it because it makes sense. And the more we did, the more we wanted to do.”

The result has been dubbed “the Morris Model” by its participants: the town, the school district, Stevens County and the campus of 1,500 students. They are making their data and blueprints available to other communities interested in trying something similar. Thirteen other towns in Minnesota are at various stages of adapting Morris Model projects. The one furthest along is spearheaded by the city of Fergus Falls, with the help of a regional planning nonprofit. They are organizing 10 other rural towns into a “solar cohort” to increase purchasing power and simplify the complex grant process to get state and federal aid for these efforts.
…
Goodnough sensed an opening. The Morris city government had a tight budget, and its high electric bills were a sore spot. The university, meanwhile, had just realized substantial savings by converting old lighting on campus to modern LEDs. Goodnough offered to help the city do the same, including help with tapping into Department of Energy funds to offset the upfront costs. The conversion ended up saving the city $80,000 a year—a significant windfall for a small town. Soon, the Morris town elders came to the university to ask, “What’s next?”

The larger community might be conservative, but it’s the liberals and progressives of the university that got it all started. You’re welcome, Republicans.

Winter is overcompensating

It’s been a dud of a winter, but now the weather service is predicting 25-35 cm (10-14 in) of heavy, wet snow tomorrow, turning to rain in the afternoon, and then freezing and turning back to snow on Monday. It’s maximal yuck.

I’ve already sent an announcement out to all my students that class will be held over Zoom on Monday. The weather forecasts are usually a bit overblown, but let’s play it safe.

This is not February

According to the official date, it is. This is not what February in Minnesota should look like, though.

That’s what late March might look like, or better yet, April. Fog and naked trees and patches of dirty snow are not at all appropriate for this time of year.

Have I been dislocated to Kansas?

Local pseudo-archaeology

Here’s a fascinating old photo.

Farmer Olof Öhman (center), who reported the artifact’s discovery in 1898, at a carnival held to raise funds to buy a park for the Kensington Runestone, 1927.

I’ve seen the Kensington Runestone, it’s in a local museum just north of here. I’ve been to that park several times — it’s nicely maintained, it has a large, mostly empty building used for presentations (it’s always been locked when I visited), and it’s a bit out of the way, several miles away from a town of any size. It’s notable only because a fair amount of money and time has been invested to enshrine this fraud in local culture. It was probably an even bigger deal in 1927, when that photo was taken, and when the old farmer who ‘found’ it was the center of attention.

What I just learned is that there were other runestones all over the country. There’s the Yarmouth Stone and the Narragansett Runestone in Nova Scotia and Rhode Island. The Heavener Runestone in Oklahoma. The Poteau stone, and Shawnee stone, also in Oklahoma. The Braxton Runestone and Grave Creek Stone, in West Virginia. They even found a second runestone in 2001 near Öhmon’s original ‘discovery’ to ‘corroborate’ it. You’d think there were armies of Vikings tromping all over the eastern half of the US in the 14th century, all busily chiseling rocks and scattering them about to entertain tourists in the 20th and 21st.

The article gives a couple of explanations for this curious phenomenon. One is that the Viking sagas were popular at the time. I don’t find that convincing — you’d expect every literary fad to generate a pile of phony artifacts if that were the case. The second is that the wave of Scandinavian immigrants were trying to build validation. I can sympathize with that a little more. If Italian immigrants could take pride in Christopher Columbus, well, Swedes and Norwegians would hold up Leif Ericson as their hero.

I’m inclined to favor their third explanation.

The third factor was the urge to assert European prior claim to land, which predated the Columbus expedition of 1492, and furthermore, gave it a northern European character. At times, this involved the expropriation of Native American monuments as part of a process which sought to belittle Native American cultural and monumental achievements by claiming Viking ancestry for them—and at times, claimed that those responsible were just about anybody, so long as they were not Native Americans.

The Mormons did it. The Mississippi valley settlers who denied that indigenous peoples could have been the Mound Builders did it. All those batty von Dänikenites who claim aliens built every bit of non-European architecture do it. Why couldn’t my Scandinavian ancestors have done it?

The Runestone park is a pleasant little spot, but fundamentally it’s an embarrassment.

IOKIYAR

I fell for another tease. Remember Matt Grossell, the Minnesota state representative who was a sullen drunk picking fights in hotels and bars and hospitals when he got arrested for being falling down snockered? Here’s a non-update.

There was talk at the time about taking him off his committee assignments. Surprise: they did not. The Democrat in charge of that sort of thing is sill waffling. Worse yet, this bozo has a history of this sort of behavior.

Grossell had previously been arrested in 2019 on charges of disorderly conduct and trespassing after a drunken incident at a hotel bar in St. Paul.

The House Democratic leadership stripped Grossell of his committee assignments following his 2019 arrest. Part of the reason was that after he got out of jail he walked into St. Paul police headquarters and announced to officers that he was a state representative and that there would be “hell to pay.”

His committee assignments have since been reinstated. Grossell is a member of the public safety, judiciary and capital investment committees.

He’s done this before? He got a little temporary slap and was then reinstated? I think we can guess how this is going to go.

I did learn something in this non-update.

Alcohol is a factor in more than a quarter of Minnesota traffic deaths each year, according to state data, and drunk driving costs the state more than a quarter billion dollars annually. But neither the lawmakers getting arrested on alcohol-related charges, nor the voters who keep sending them back, seem to care a whole lot.

Yeah, you learn fast that going for a drive on these remote rural roads late on a Friday or Saturday night isn’t a great idea.

Whatever shall we do without a few cops around?

The city of Morris, my little town, has disbanded its police force. Yay!

Local leaders in one western Minnesota city have voted to disband the police department, which has dwindled to just two officers, including the chief.

The City of Morris, like other communities across the country, is dealing with changing attitudes about policing and challenges in recruiting and retaining officers.

Morris, with a population of about 5,200 residents, has budgeted for eight full-time officers and an administrative specialist.

The Morris City Council plans to sign a contract for law enforcement services with the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office and shut down a police department that has been around for more than 140 years.

Aww. I don’t think anyone will miss that relic. And yes, the county sheriffs will now take over any necessary peace-keeping duties, or more likely, ticketing traffic violators, which is mainly what they do.

“It’s a sad day. Nobody wants to see that happen,” said Blaine Hill, city manager. “People ask, ‘How in the world could a town the size of Morris not have a police department?’ We live in a different world now.”

Nobody? I wanted to see it happen, so Mr Hill is wrong. Also, again, the police don’t do all that much around here.

Commenters on the Fox News story are predicting dire consequences.

There are several banks in town. I don’t see what the police would do anyway; lounge around outside the buildings waiting for the bad guys to go away? We don’t have much of a crime problem here — there’s some drug trafficking, like everywhere, and occasional vandalism and theft, like everywhere. The police don’t play much of a role in preventing any of it. They’re more likely to take reports after the fact. Or maybe shoot a few bystanders. This isn’t the Roaring Twenties of a century ago, and we don’t have Bonnies and Clydes shooting up banks with tommy guns. It’s so much more profitable and safe to be a Republican and loot towns at your desk, and the police do nothing about that.

Policing is being turned over to the county sheriff’s department, who will serve multiple small towns in the area. I don’t think it will make much difference, except in maybe being more economical.

Then there’s this bizarre comment…

Errm…”Minnesota Nice” is not a good thing — it refers to a flavor of passive-aggressive superficiality. Please, let it die that slow and ugly death. Also, this is not a “large city”, and it wasn’t “spoiled kids” behind this change — it was a decision by the bean counters and our city council, which is packed with old tiring conservatives.

But it’s a Fox News comment section, what else can you expect?

It’s the wind, you know

Yesterday, some of you jeered at the small amount of snow we were getting. It’s a fair cop; here in Western Minnesota, we’re a little dryer than the eastern part of the state, and we get measurably less snow. Where we make up for that is that we’re also colder and much, much windier. We get a small amount of powdery snow and then the wind keeps picking it up and blowing it around. Yesterday, our driveway was completely clear. This is how it looks this morning.

There is a car under the snow on the left side of the top picture.

We don’t go anywhere anymore, but there have been a few occasions when we were unable to travel on Highway 28, the main connecting route from Morris to I94, because drifting snow has completely covered the road to a depth of 8′-10′ in some spots.

I do find the swooping curves of our snow dunes quite pretty, though.

Hey, how about some local good news for a change?

Incremental progress exists, and I should acknowledge that now and then.

  • Morris is implementing organics pick-up! The county is collecting food waste from local grocery stores and restaurants for composting. It’s a drop in the bucket, but a good step.
  • This is impressive: Alexandria (a city about 45 minutes north of me) is partnering the police with mental health professionals to put the right people in charge of handling citizens having mental health crises. Imagine: someone having a breakdown and the city response is not to send an unqualified thug with a gun charging in to do battle.

We’re taking baby steps in the right direction, let’s keep it up.

The view from my office window

I don’t think we got a lot of snow last night, but I can’t tell, because these fierce winter winds scour everything bare. Most of the snow that might have fallen in my front yard is probably in the next county.

It might still be snowing, or the wind could just be pushing it around in the air, I don’t know. I’ve been entertained by watching the birds pumping their wings frantically to try and reach this birdfeeder and essentially hovering in place until they tire and the wind whisks them away. Poor birds.