(Posted May 9, 2010)
When I was at the Living Green Expo, the sister of one of the victims of the plane crash that killed Senator Paul Wellstone, stopped by and bought a copy of Mr. Environment: The Willard Munger Story. The question she asked, “Have you been to the memorial?” caught me unawares. A lump formed in my throat.
No, I thought, I haven’t. Though I’ve driven by the sign on Highway 53 a hundred or more times, I haven’t stopped in to pay my respects.
A near blizzard raged on Friday. Saturday morning, the pasture outside my writing room is a field of late season white. Where do bluebirds go when it snows? I ask myself as I drive north to Kaleva Hall in Virginia for the first ever Range Writer’s Symposium.
I don’t expect much given that this is the first year of the event and I haven’t seen a lot of publicity generated by the organizers to draw folks to the old Finnish temperance hall to buy books and hear a cadre of self-published and locally published scribes talk writing and publishing. But that’s OK. The principals of Books on Chestnut, a neat used book store in downtown Virginia are putting it on, along with the Ladies of Kaleva, and I owe those women something. So I make the drive to Virginia and hope for the best.
The event goes well. I draw a nice group of folks who listen to me read from Suomalaiset (what better place to read a Finnish story than a place called Kaleva Hall?), sell a few books, eat some open-faced sandwiches, chew the fat with legendary News Tribune columnist, Jim Heffernan, his wife, and a number of other authors and patrons, and then, it’s time to leave. I load the trusty Pacifica, call my wife to tell her I’m on the road, and head south on U.S. 53 with plenty of gas and no reason to lollygag.
But the conversation with Will McLaughlin’s sister haunts me. As I’ve written before, Senator Wellstone wasn’t a close personal friend. But I knew him. Knew he and his wife Sheila through various political connections, including my Uncle Willard, who was a mentor to Paul and saw in the young Senator a more polished, more articulate version of the ideals and beliefs my uncle stood for during sixty years of political activism. These thoughts churn away as I drive out of Eveleth. I know the sign is there. I know what I have to do.
There is no one at the memorial when I pull in and park my van. The sun is high in the sky. The snow, except for small clumps of frozen white lodged beneath towering evergreens, has melted. White pines. Red pines. Tamaracs. These are the sentinels that keep watch over the place of Paul Wellstone’s death.
I read the beautiful Littlewolf poem that marks the entrance to the memorial and then I walk a few steps through the forest to reach the overlook. A wooden platform, with two informational plaques about the six passengers and two crew who perished in the crash projects into the muskeg in the direction of the doomed plane’s final resting place. The swamp is utterly quiet. The occasional knock of a woodpecker on a hollow tree trunk is the only sound one hears while thinking, contemplating, the loss embodied in this place.
I retrace my footsteps and follow the “Legacy Circle”, a crude path cut through forest with informational stations and benches for reflection denoting each important point of the Wellstones’ careers. “Careers” is the operative word. The placards depict not only the life of the Senator: They give meaning and understanding to the work of his wife Sheila, who was tireless in her pursuit of redress and protection for victims of domestic violence; as well as the teaching career of Wellstone daughter Marcia, a well-beloved educator.
I finish my benediction at the memorial itself, a smaller circular path which remembers each of the fallen (except the crew) by way of stone monoliths etched with the names of the perished; Paul and Sheila Wellstone (together on one stone, giving credence to their 39 years of marriage); Marcia; Will McLaughlin; Tom Lapic; and Mary McEvoy (the last three were all staffers of the Wellstone campaign). The air remains warm. Tears well in my eyes as I place pebbles on the memorials, each stone precarious, each rock a delicate symbol of life’s fragility for all of us, even the great and the powerful.
As I step from forest canopy into sunlight, I take one last look back towards the scene of the crash and wipe lingering tears from my eyes.
Good people died here, I say to God. Why?
I hear no answer, no rumbling mighty voice echoes across the vast northeastern Minnesota swamp as I open the Pacifica, slide behind the wheel, close the door, turn the key, and head west, taking the long way home.
Rest in peace, my friends. Rest in peace.
Mark
