I grew up in the Chicago area, and went to a Concordia Language camp (Hei Skogfjorden!) in Bemidji when I was about 11. A girl named Tori was in my cabin. She was the coolest girl I had ever met. (She had a snake for a pet!) But I never saw Duluth. When I was an adult, the school I worked for took a group of students on a kayaking trip to the Apostle Islands every year, which was always my favorite time of the work-year. One time it was a particularly clear day, and the guide pointed across the water and said, "Over there is Duluth." For some reason, it felt like he was pointing to OZ.

Some years later, I met someone who cried when I asked her to move to Chicago. So I packed up and moved to Duluth, without thinking about it too deeply. We broke up soon after, but I didn't even think of leaving. It might have been how that first winter, which was the one of the coldest and snowiest on record, I depended completely upon wood heat and had to chop my wood out of a glacier in the backyard because I had neglected to pile it up like a responsible person. I read books all winter long about Justine Kerfoot and the Boundary Waters and all the ways winter can be, and I felt it so keenly, sitting there learning to heat my home, living in a magical house in the West End. 

I really think all it took was one winter and I was hooked. I met all kinds of cool and strange people, I worked in the weirdest bookstore on the planet, and learned to live on an income that was a tiny fraction of what I earned in Chicago. 

I have always been pulled northward--like my fantasy running away has always been to get in a car and drive north without a map, just going until the roads stop. Duluth isn't exactly where the roads stop, but sometimes feels like it. 

One year, I took a three week driving vacation around the Great Lakes to Maine and back. I remember coming around the top of Lake Superior, and catching a scent in the air, and thinking "I'm back in my home ecosystem" and giving a big happy sigh. 

It's a good place. I look forward to growing very old and decrepit here, shaking my cane over my head when there's a snowstorm and whooping it up.