(author C. P. Lee contemplates the world’s largest man-made hole
— all photos by The Celestial Monochord)
See also Part One
The Minneapolis leg of the exhibit “Bob Dylan’s American Journey” — and only that leg, if I understand right — begins with plenty of vivid stories and poignant artifacts about Dylan’s early life in Hibbing and Minneapolis.
But even after studying that material at the Weisman Art Museum for a couple of hours, I still somehow didn’t “get” Dylan’s home town of Hibbing. I had to travel there physically to understand that it’s a stunning place that really MATTERS if you’re to understand Bob Dylan. It was not the anonymous little speed-zone I had imagined — if you grew up in Hibbing, you grew up in an absolutely singular place of brutal extremes and mind-bending ironies. You grew up in Dylan Country.
(the pit of the Hull-Rust-Mahoning Iron Mine)
Consider the world’s largest man-made hole. This open pit, the result of iron strip-mining, is not an attraction near Hibbing so much as it is a boundary at the ever-shifting town limits. It’s part of Hibbing. Nearly four miles long, two miles wide, and 180 yards deep, it supplied a quarter of the iron mined in the 1940’s for WWII.
Every Wednesday at 11 a.m., the mine conducts dynamite blasting — colossal explosions that bow the windows along the town’s main street and rattle Abraham Lincoln’s photo hanging on the wall in the high school classrooms. When Dylan was living here, the blasts were a much more frequent than that — it’s reasonable to imagine Dylan’s first reading of Walt Whitman interrupted by a bone-rattling dynamite explosion that was literally an act of war.
(North Country Blues: streets going nowhere, doorsteps without doors)
Before Dylan was born, the pit grew so big that the whole town had to be lifted off its foundations and physically moved a couple miles down the road to a brand-new Hibbing. The Hibbing that Bob’s mother knew was known to Bob as a wasteland — a grid of streets that went nowhere, front porch stairs that led to no porch and no home, foundations with no buildings on top of them. The place looked like Yucca Flats after the blast.
(on a glass table, the mine’s main product — taconite pellets)
Understandably, the politics and culture that led to these events — and to possibly the most spectacular public school in the United States (the subject of my previous entry) — were themselves singular and extreme. They’re unlikely to be central to any tour you’ll receive if you visit Hibbing, but be sure to ask about the political culture of the region.
If there is a more leftist rural population anywhere in the United States, I would like to know about it. When Greil Marcus was told, a few years ago, that there are communists and socialists in the working-class bars along Hibbing’s main street having arguments that’ve gone on for 100 years, he immediately planned his first trip to the Iron Range. It is no more a coincidence that the region produced Bob Dylan than Gus Hall, or that it was the epicenter of support for Paul Wellstone.
(the main drag of Hibbing, Minnesota)
Besides the iron mine and Hibbing’s high school — both jaw-dropping sights — there’s plenty more in Hibbing for a Dylan fan to see. There’s the home of Echo Helstrom, who Dylan says brought out the poetry in him. There’s the auditorium where Dylan played his first paying gig. There’s the Moose Lodge where Dylan used to practice on their piano. There’s the hotel where Dylan had his bar mitzvah. There’s the synagogue he attended. And, of course, there’s his boyhood home. After all this, you’ll want to drink and think. The natural place would be Zimmy’s, a Bob Dylan-themed bar and restaurant.
I’m embarrassed to say that I lived in Minneapolis for 19 years without very much questioning the prevailing impression that Dylan grew up in some forgettable little town — it hardly mattered which. (In fact, I’m embarrassed by thinking ANYBODY grew up in such a place.) I’m thankful to the organizers of the Dylan Symposium (particularly Colleen Sheehy) for providing the incentive to go to Hibbing personally. In my experience, that’s the only way its importance can “sink in.”
Until you can get there, look for a great article by Greil Marcus about Hibbing High School to appear soon (I think in the spring issue of Daedalus).
Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of entries about the Bob Dylan symposium held in Minneapolis from March 25 to 27, 2007. An authoritative book based on the conference is planned for early 2008, so I won’t even try to do much justice to the conference or the papers delivered there.
Instead, I’ll try to explain the most interesting stuff that wound up in my notepad, with little of The Celestial Monochord’s customary contemplative ruminations. The writing on the symposium will be a little more like “covering” an event, citizen-journalist style.
A few years ago my wife and I drove through the outskirts of Hibbing on our way to somewhere else. Not much of a Hibbing experience, true. Still, Hibbing has been a sort of presence in my life.
I was raised in a small southwestern Minnesota town where — interrupted by 25 years elsewhere, mostly Chicago, where I worked as a magazine editor by day and prowled folk and blues clubs by night — I now live again (actually, 17 years this month). In the mid-1960s my younger brother Tom befriended his English teacher and his wife, Hibbing natives Dick and Mona Ostroot (who are long since divorced). Tom was engaged to Mona’s younger sister Becky for a time, though they were never to marry. The family’s last name is Vincent.
I didn’t know the Ostroots well — I was out of high school by then — but I did engage them in one serious, memorable conversation. I had fallen under the spell of Dylan a couple of years earlier, and as a Minnesotan acutely aware of Dylan’s roots, I inquired if they happened to be acquainted with him. Dick and Mona responded — entirely matter of factly; these are good, modest people — that they were his closest friends in high school. Mona went on to say that the two couples, meaning herself and Dick and Bob and Echo, hung out together in those days. She added casually that Dylan had once written a song about her.
(“To Ramona” is on Another Side of Bob Dylan. She is also mentioned in a verse of “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” on Blonde on Blonde. It’s the one that begins “Mona tried to tell me to stay away from the train line,” then goes on to allude — via quote from a traditional song — to her father’s drinking, something I knew about from my brother.)
It happens that I serve on the board of a local organization dedicated to preserving the history of our community, and specifically of its railroading experience. We meet in the (restored) depot where my father — who shared an occupation with Mona’s father — was employed as a telegrapher for many years, practically up to his death.
At a board meeting last year, the director of our little group reported that she’d invited a woman to speak at our annual summer open house to discuss a book she’d put together of her (deceased) father’s railroad recollections.
When I learned that the woman had grown up in Hibbing and was once married to Dick Ostroot, I gripped my chair to keep from falling out of it and landing on my head.
Naturally, I went to see Mona (who now lives in another small town in northern Minnesota) at the gathering. I was surprised that she recognized me instantly, though later my mother (resident in our town’s nursing home) related that Mona had called on her the previous day. (I’ve since been informed that she visits our town regularly in a private capacity, out of friendship with a local woman with whom I am slightly acquainted.) In any event, Mona is still a strikingly beautiful woman, and still soft-spoken, quiet, and unassuming.
Possessed of at least some minimal manners, I didn’t erupt into Dylan talk immediately, but in due course managed — not to her surprise, I’m sure — to get around to it. She said she is in nearly daily e-mail contact with Echo, now a Californian and in declining health. Dylan remains a part of Mona’s life. He phones every few months to chat, and they get together when he’s touring Minnesota, usually for a cup of coffee backstage before a concert. Sometimes he will mention her name from the stage.
Presently, while fully appreciating that I was laying aside any pretense to coolness, I donned my dork’s hat and burst forth with the appallingly inevitable, “What is Dylan like?” “Shy” was the totality of her response.
In his annotation to songs on the box set Biograph, Dylan remarks that “To Ramona” was written about someone he knew when he was growing up. Her eyes, by the way, are still “watery.”
Just wanted to pipe in at how comforting it is to hear the Hibbing stories — excepting of course the sad news of Echo — suppose a few prayers sent her way wouldn’t hurt?
And thanks too for posting more of the striking photos of Hibbing, (I really like the one of the taconite pellets!) and also Jerome so kindly sharing news of Mona!
Just boggles the mind… this Dylan thing. And I don’t know why — maybe that’s the best part of it, right? Your friend in Bob — JC
I know Echo Helstom and she told me that the Bob Dylan/Zimmerman she knew wasn’t that into poltics…certainly not a communist…he just wanted to sing….