If it’s in the 30’s, then it must be time to walk across the Mississippi River. Yesterday afternoon, Mister Husband and I went down to the mill ruins at St. Anthony Park Main and walked from the old General Mills ruins on the Minneapolis side of the river over the stone arched bridge to the abandoned Pillsbury mills on the other side, and then beyond it to a tavern for burgers, coffee, and cider. Tunnels and traces run from the old buildings down to the water, and the ice and small waves lapping at the grates and bricked-over entrances look positively medieval, prisonlike. Beauty is locked somewhere behind those damp bars, and henchmen or trolls must guard her just out of sight. It’s more noir at night, when the Pillsbury sign is lit up hot pink, reflecting on the dark waters, and the smokestacks of the working plant billow exhaust against the sky. The roar of the dam is mesmerizing. It’s one of my favorite places in town.

It was a favorite of the Dakota Indians, too, back before any of the industrialization took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Histories of the area always note the former existance of a sacred island in the middle of the river, appropriately called Spirit Island. (It’s pictured in the link to the bridge.) The mill barons left it alone for awhile, and then quarried the top for limestone. Before-and-after pictures at the historical society show that it was pretty well demolished when they got done. Finally, the the Corps of Engineers decided to alter the shape of the falls by adding a lock and dam for efficiency, and what was left of Spirit Island was drowned.

Knowing about that, and the brutal union strikes at the mills in the early 20th century, gives the imagination license to run on a gray day. So does the little inlet below the Pillsbury A Mill (pictured above), which had hundreds of crows in its trees. More flew in from the southwest every minute, and they sat in the branches and talked amongst themselves. It all put me in mind of Steven’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, one of the first poems I read in my early literature courses. (There must be a law about including it on all American Lit syllabi.) Loren and my mother would be quick to point out that a crow is not a blackbird. Be that as it may. There is a reason some poems are well-worn. Besides, the thirteeneth stanza is entirely a Minnesota winter afternoon:

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.