I thought I was a town kid

 

August 24, 1998  (I was 53)

 

While I grew up I thought I was a town kid

not a farm kid or lake kid

not a highway kid

A town kid, though the town

was less than two thousand

and the closest city was eighty miles

and that was Duluth

A town kid didn’t have to know cows

didn’t have to catch fish everyday

didn’t have to hope a friend would hitch-hike by

 

Town kids knew sports

and hung out at the fields the rink

the bowling alley the Itasca theater

Everybody went to school in town

and everybody learned something about iron mining

The open pits are in town at the edge of town

along the highway ranging between towns and lakes

The pits  You do not imagine them vast enough

nor deep enough  The tires on the Euclid dump trucks

are taller than you  Looking from the edge of the pit

those big trucks look small traversing in and out

 

Sometimes it takes fifteen years to shift gears

even when you’re running without a load

I never had to churn the Guernsey nor convert a pig

into pork  I fry the fish if you bring it cleaned and scaled

The trucks were too big for me to fight

Hitch-hiking with a friend can be an adventure

You thumb alone out of love and off to school in Duluth

where there were town kids farm kids lake kids highway kids

and city kids  Some from Helsinki didn’t know anything

about iron mining but quite a bit about geography