If you’ll let me go meta-textual for a moment, I generally get my ideas for posts during runs*, and when I headed out to come up with today’s topic, I decided to write about the first thing I saw: the city of Edina. After all, I’ve written a post about every other place I’ve lived, and it seemed like the perfect time to write one about Edina, since I’m back for a couple of weeks between the end of my junior year and the start of my summer work with Americorps. But, while I’ve talked about the true beauty of every other place I’ve lived, the post that formed in my mind during the first few miles was bitter, almost vengeful against the entire suburb. If I were to expand that abandoned first idea into a full post, it would look a lot like a submission that I got for Inklette once, which was just an extended rant about how Salt Lake City sucks, encrusted throughout with pretentious literary allusions. Even with its deft prose, I couldn’t understand why this guy would complain about a city that, judging by the one time I’ve been there, seemed pretty nice. If I couldn’t vote to publish an essay like that, I shouldn’t write one, and it’s disturbing to think that I’d get so worked up about a place where my family has been very happy for the past couple years. Still, just sight of the name, the school colors, or the mascot make me angry on the same instinctive level that it makes most loyal Edina high School alumni teary-eyed for their home town.
All this might be because I’m experiencing low-grade Stockholm Syndrome after my stay at Grinnell. Most students are either from the twin cities themselves and know Edina’s bad reputation, or they know about it from hearing Edina jokes. For those who don’t know about suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul stereotypes, Edina is thought of as the home of spoiled kids coming from family money. At first I fought back against that description and pointed out at every opportunity that Eden Prairie is just as bad. Then, sometime in sophomore year, I just laughed along to Edina jokes. By junior year, I took it as a compliment when a friend told me, “You’re the only person I know from Edina, and you’re one of the least Edina people I know.”
If I had to debate for or against that stereotype, I could definitely cite more evidence in its favor. As far as opulence and waste go, the town has been on a “teardown” kick lately, a trend towards demolishing perfectly good one-story homes and building generic mansions in their place. Politically it’s nowhere to be proud of, given the high school’s alt-right movement and push to strike books written by non-white authors from the reading lists. Maybe the best encapsulation of all of this is the fate of Arden Park, a cute little patch of woodland and lawn on the banks of Minnehaha creek. The woods were one of my favorite places in Edina for how they provided a scrap of wilderness in the suburbs; overgrown and filled with elementary schoolrs making huts out of sticks, middle schoolers shooting each other with illegal airsoft guns, and high schoolers lighting up joints on the bank of the creek. There were secret parts you could discover by stumbling through the brush, islands in the stream you could swim to in the summer or walk to over the frozen ice in the winter. Now the woods are mostly cleared away, just stumps and mud and rubble, in the city’s quest for a more photogenic park. The river, which used to be wide and unmanaged, now curves gently and precisely in a way that could only have been engineered. When I first came up with this essay, the river was the key example that led into my thesis: that Edina is a simulation of life rather than the real thing, a place where authenticity is replaced with some idealized fake.
Other than my English-major instincts making me immediately suspicious of talk about “real” or “fake,” I worried about this definition because it probably says more about me than it does about the town of Edina itself. As much as I loved Waco, I always wanted to live in a town that looked like towns I saw on TV and read about in books, where kids ride bikes on their own and it snows in the winter and schools have more than seven kids per class and don’t feature morning chapel. I’d told myself so many stories about what my new life in Edina would look like that it’s no surprise I was disappointed with the real thing. Calling it a simulation is just displacement: my real problem is that it was never the simulation I wanted.
Because, no matter what crap they pull with the river, Edina is a very real place, so, like any real place, it can’t be summed up in any thesis statement. That’s part of the reason why I always had so much trouble pledging allegiance to the flag; what even is it that we’re saying is under God? A piece of fabric? A government? A landmass? A population? There are parts that are beautiful, but you can never reduce that to the whole. The same with Edina. Sometimes I think that all the time I spent unable to break into the closed circuits of Minnesota social life are what define Edina, but so are the precious times I did, like when I camped out with friends in the middle of a thunderstorm on some lunatic notion that we’d be able to see a meteor shower through the clouds. The new generation of asshole conservatives represent Edina, but only as much as the student group who preformed a slam poetry rewrite of the Pledge of Allegiance to protest racism at the Multicultural Assembly are Edina too. The wasteland that Arden Park has become is Edina, and so is the weird haven of underaged outlaws that it was.
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* On the off-chance that anyone actually cares, I generally dedicate five miles out of any run to come up with an idea. Any less and I don’t have a fully-formed idea by the end, but any more and I let the idea spiral into so many different areas that I’ll never be able to whittle it down to one post.
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