Freeport was a railroad town & the tracks ran along the south side of Main Street, & now the tracks are gone, & the one-sided Main Street remains, like an architects rendering. Nobody ever welcomed us to town when we came in 1970. No minister visited to encourage us to worship on Sunday, no neighbor dropped in with a plate of brownies. Several times, I stopped at neighboring farms to say hello & announce our presence, & was met by the farmer, & we spent an uncomfortable few minutes standing beside my car, making small talk about the weather, studying the ground, me waiting to be invited into the house, him waiting for me to go away, until finally I went away. In town, the shopkeepers & the man at the garage were cordial, of course, but if I said hello to someone on the street, he looked at the sidewalk & passed in silence. I lived south of Freeport for three years & never managed to have a conversation with anyone in the town. I didnt have long hair or a beard, didnt dress oddly or do wild things, & it troubled me. I felt like a criminal. This fear of outsiders was explained to me years later by a Stearns exile who said that the German population was so traumatized, first by the anti-Teutonic fevers of World War I that forbade the teaching of their language in schools, then by Prohibition that made outlaws of decent upstanding beer drinkers, that they never could trust auslanders again. A strange face is, to them, a cruel face. My German neighbors were a closed community & I wasnt in it. Proximity does not equal membership. -- In Search of Lake Wobegon, By Garrison Keillor / Published: 26 August 2001
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:20:46 +0000