It’s been quite a week here in the True North. In fact, at exactly the same time that a new bon mot, “Find Your True North,” was being trotted out as Minnesota’s latest tourism marketing campaign slogan, some of us discovered a new sport that can only be played here in the True North, trash-bin skiing.
The Super Bowl Sunday warm-up, followed by rain that froze, created clear sheets of ice on driveways and sidewalks, not to mention the streets. I mean, hip-breaking, elbow crunching, head injuring clear ice. But we are responsible citizens and we know, for example, that an embedded radio chip in our official government recycling bins allows our caretakers to keep an eye on us, so we had best get that material to the curb. I did. By hanging onto it and letting it pull me down the driveway.
Our tourism officials should show that film to their lodge brothers and sisters at a tourism convention in, say, Miami.
“You mean you people can ski behind a non-motorized cart?”
“Why, yes we can.”
Same with the energy resource recycling materials, which, if you are not in the know, is your trash.
I have a big cart. She got up such a head of steam that I was able to jump the wake. For a couple of feet, I even hearkened back to the day and went on one foot, just to see if it could be done.
The new slogan, “Find Your True North,” intends to make the north less a direction and more of a calling. I have no idea what that means and I suspect our tourism officials don’t either, but they have to come up with something. Tourism is a $15.3 billion business in Minnesota, and it is astonishing to learn that we accommodate 73 million domestic and international travelers every year.
Well, we might accommodate that many visitors for at least another 10 years. After that, all bets are off because there is something being floated in Congress called the Green New Deal, which appears to have been written by fourth-graders. It enshrines, among its other childish fantasies, no airplanes in 10 years.
Making Minnesota a calling rather than a direction is to believe that maybe people from warmer states will want to come here and try trash-bin skiing. I doubt it. I love Minnesota as much as the next guy and I certainly don’t blame tourism officials for coming up with new slogans, but I think, deep down, that we have always been delusional. You might even say that we lie to ourselves, just to keep things interesting.
Oh, there is skiing and sledding and ice fishing and one or two people will still ride a fat-tired bike on even the coldest of days, but truth be told, we think winter is miserable and difficult. For God’s sake, some crackpot shot at a school bus the other day in road rage. We just aren’t honest about how we really feel. Instead, we come up with “Find Your True North.” We find it every day on icy sidewalks and frozen driveways and streets that don’t routinely enough get plowed. St. Paul did nothing about the post-Super Bowl snow and then let Thursday’s 5 inches, maybe more, fall on top of that before the plows finally came out.
And I had a first. I had a double-hump experience. The hump is what’s left at the end of your driveway after the plows come through. On Friday morning, I was surprised to see that only half the street was plowed, but we had to get out, so I cleared a hump that was twice the size of a normal hump. The fellows came back in another hour or so and finished the street, creating a second hump. I let the snowblower pull me down the driveway and I finished that one off.
It is probably our calling that Minnesota is the True North, but I don’t think we should necessarily inflict that on the rest of the world.
Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.
