recovering notes from the deep, part 14

my mom in her early sixties
finally decided to hop a greyhound
& visit her grandkids
in our northern minnesota homestead

it was a long but interesting journey

for her as she described some of the characters
she heard stories from along the way

and i think i had just finished plumbing in

the bathroom though the electric heat installation
was still another project to-do
it was already june
warming up fast
& at least we were finished burning wood
until september

mom wasn't especially geared for the wilderness

as she called it
but she brought books to read
stories to tell
and wouldn't you know
she even looked through
the local yellow pages
and found under "synagogues"
one in hibbing
she wanted to visit
so maybe it was on a saturday
that we piled into the truck
and drove the fifteen miles to hibbing
to an old building on a shady corner
where an old caretaker answered the door
and mom spoke some of her fluent yiddish
that the caretaker seemed to recognize
as she invited us in

and after a few minutes

it came out that
bobby zimmerman
before he ran away for the last time
from home
guitar strapped over his back
and thousands of songs and miles before him
came with his family to this very synagogue
in the wilderness as mom might say
where there used to be old streetcar tracks
running through the iron range in the 1930s
& people carrying live chickens
to the rabbi for friday night dinner

and in those very 30s

there was also the bitterness
in the body of the red rock ore
ravenous eastern banking interests
strike and strife
that brought together
jews and finns and norwegians and serbs and swedes
and yes the original
dispossessed & robbed
proud ojibwe people
whose hands and wild rice
created all life 
from this land
wilderness
long after
the last
expropriation
& my mother's last story

--- e b bortz