Writing on the Walls of History

Oh, my god! I just totally saw the president's decoy helicopter leaving Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport. I rolled out of bed around 11:00 this morning and turned on the TV to the sounds of a reporter on the second-to-worst local news apologizing for causing confusion as to whether or not Marine One had just landed at the airport after the president's visit to Minneapolis. "No, this one. It's this one. Here it comes. Yeah, this one is definitely Marine One." I got the feeling her in-studio counterparts had reason to doubt her assertions. "No, the other ones didn't have the white top, but this one does. Yeah, this is the president's helicopter."

The airport is just south of my apartment, and I could hear helicopter blades whirring ;) outside. So, keen for a chance to shake my fist at something presidential, I hurried to my front windows and caught sight of a single black helicopter in the distance. I aimed my fist pump in the direction of the airport and shouted, "Yeah, you better leave!" And then I watched George Bush oblige on TV.

I view my fist-shaking from St. Paul as a continuation of the traditions upon which this city was founded. Like a baby who narrowly escapes being named after crazy Uncle No Nose, St. Paul is lucky to have such a respectable, even holy, moniker, considering it was basically founded by a one-eyed fur trader turned moonshiner known for his "intemperate and licentious" behavior. Pierre "Pig's Eye" Parrant set up his still in what is now downtown St. Paul only after being kicked out of the area around Fort Snelling. Seems the respectable military types in charge of bringing civilization to the upper Midwest didn't approve of the squatters' camp around the fort, and especially of Pierre and his whiskey.

So Pierre packed up his still, popped in his false eye, and moved up the river to a place called Fountain Cave. But it apparently wasn't far enough away from the outpost. The officers perched up in their fort on the cliffs of the Mississippi didn't want the blemish of Pig's Eye within their sight. Pierre was forced even farther upriver, and St. Paul's skyline now rises from the place where some ragtag squatters blindly followed a one-eyed coot and his whiskey still. And for a long time, the area was named for crazy Uncle Pig's Eye.

Curious about the origins of this city, I visited historic Fort Snelling on Memorial Day this year. There was to be a flag raising ceremony and historical reenactments throughout the day. As I mentioned earlier, I am a vegetarian who loves The Deadliest Catch. Well, I'm also a pacifist who likes war stories. And although Fort Snelling never saw any kind of action, it's chock full of military history, and the promise of reenactors tromping around, using words like "musket" and "nigh on" in conversation was irresistible to me. I made my little brother go with me, you know, for his historical edification. Really, I needed a young boy to point to if I was called upon to say, "No, I'm not here alone. You know boys and guns. He just loves this stuff."

We arrived just as they were raising the new flag on its recently relocated pole, now in its original 19th-century position. A man dressed in a uniform and holding a spear welcomed us through the sally port gate. I turned to my little brother. "Here's your gate, Sally."

Already resentful at being dragged here, he didn't look at me. "Shut up," he said, his eyes on the sidewalk leading to the fort.

The uniformed man began, "They're about to fire a"-- BOOM! Cannon fire split the still May morning, my heart jumped, and my arms flailed. I looked down at my little brother, who regarded my expression with the look of a prisoner suddenly resigned to his sentence of death by boredom.

So this was the outpost of civilization on the upper Mississippi? It's an impressive collection of neatly ordered brick buildings high above the river. The area surrounding it, where the squatters once sang their drunken songs up to the disapproving fort, is now a state park with bike paths and hiking trails. Airplanes fly low and loud on their approach to the airport, which is about three miles away.

My brother and I made our way from building to building, watching demonstrations by washerwomen and blacksmiths. A man who said he was Josiah Snelling and produced as proof a bicorn hat gave a demonstration of 19th-century manners for a roomful of children and their nerdy parents. His house was the most well-appointed building in the fort, and I imagined the other soldiers in their barracks casting the occasional jealous eye at their colonel's fancy window panes and personal waste buckets.

Colonel Snelling had all sorts of rules regarding interaction between men and women: how to address one's wife, how to lead one's wife by the arm, how to walk up and down stairs in a manner most likely to avoid impaling one's wife on one's sword.

The signs on the walls of historic Fort Snelling are also telling of a period in history governed by a strict adherence to social rules, even in the remotest areas of untamed Minnesota. One framed sheet of paper in the hospital building bears a warning in Old English: "No person fhall fpit on the floor or walls of the hofpital, but fhall endeavor to keep the ward as clean as poffible." I was imagining the self-hating lisper who wrote this message when my little brother's voice came through the centuries.

"Can we go now?"

We made our way back to the sally port gate and arrived in time to hear the guard chastising a bicyclist. "No bikes on the sidewalk!" he shouted. The bicyclist eyed the man's spear and decided it wasn't worth the fight. He slung his bike over his shoulder and walked down the gravel path toward the state park's bike trails.

I like to think he continued down the trail that runs along the river, all the way past Fountain Cave and to Lowertown St. Paul. He stops in the shadow of Galtier Plaza, in the city once known as Pig's Eye, spots the planes circling the airport, and shakes his fist in the direction of Fort Snelling.