Home on the Iron Range

Friendly neighbors at the Embarrass guest house

Eventually we decided to depart from the Superior coast for a night. Minnesota had other regions to explore. It wasn't hard to turn inland. The high ground arrives immediately and stays high throughout the state’s iron ranges (not actual mountains but large deposits of ore).

The distance between the coast and the interior seemed short. The time was a different matter. We dropped off MN Route 1, which ran straight to Ely, and onto unpaved national and state forest road.

Never exceeding 40 mph, we didn’t need to – not another car crossed our path, just a few random deer and more pristine rivers, creeks and lakes than we could count.

One night was not nearly enough.

We were deep in the Mesabi Iron Range, the deposits of ore that turned Minnesota into a mining center. Along the route we crossed into St. Louis County, the largest county east of the Mississippi. One can drive from Duluth, the county seat which is not technically in the Iron Range, to Kabetogama Lake in Voyageurs National Park and never leave St. Louis County, a journey of 140 miles.

Despite its beauty, this region had a long industrial history. This country produced Bob Dylan – that guy again, I know - he grew up in Hibbing, further south but also in St. Louis County - who told the story of an Iron Range mining town in his 1963 cut North Country Blues (told from a woman’s perspective, Joan Baez later sang an even more harrowing version).

Remember that gauge.

The rain picked up as we reached Embarrass, an unincorporated town named for a nearby river (Voyageurs named the river using their term for debris and water obstacles). Passing through several blips of towns, usually a municipal building and a liquor store the only structures, the labyrinthine directions finally spun us onto newly repaved county road and finally the guest house that we knew immediately from online photos.

The guest house was the best kind of Airbnb, an uncommon but immediately comfortable place. So isolated from everything else, I almost felt like we happened upon a deserted house in a storm and settled for a night. We unloaded the car in a light rain, my eyes drawn to a ceramic frog on the deck, its front limbs wrapped around a rain gauge.

Instantly we fell hard for the guest house – huge, modern kitchen and living room, deck out back and a second-floor balcony on the side. The owners moved to house to this site with a handful of old trees and a dense row of wildflowers along the backyard. Nearby horses grazed, uninterested in us for now.

We took a brief grocery and gas run to Tower, which sits on Lake Vermilion, a spot where we considered chartering a fishing boat. I could imagine Tower on a sunny or even overcast day, its streets livened by pedestrians. But no one was about on this dreary afternoon.

We didn’t have time or inclination Sven and Ole’s Pizza in Grand Marais, we found their frozen pizzas at Zup’s, a local grocery chain that makes its own sausage and has operated for more than century.

The skies unloaded on Tower, and I had no stomach for anything but the guest house. There were many decent restaurants, from the Benchwarmer Grille (which included a liquor store) and The Good Ol’ Days Bar & Grill – the name of the latter felt akin to a gut-punch. I regret not stopping, even if I was tired from the miles of rough roads and the relentless that seemed to strengthen by the minute. But I could have sucked it up and made the day better.

With the rain reduced to a mist as we returned to the guest house, we opened all the windows on the first floor, enabling a cross-breeze to fill to cool us down. You could count the number of cars that passed, and just a single poncho-clad pedestrian braved the stormy evening. It felt like we had the whole county to ourselves, if only for a single night.

Will the horses visit?

Mostly we spent any available time with the horses. After the storm died down, we walked to the fence and both of us waved at them. With a little coaxing and more waving, the first of the five emerged. Soon the rest followed. They didn’t gallop, but some trotting indicated interest in us.

We had additional enticement, a little peace offering. Across the electric fence, where the horses could not reach, stood a thatch of three-foot-tall grasses and wildflowers. It stood in stark contrast to the guest house’s mowed lawn and the irregular spots of stumpy grass in the horse pasture. Did the horses deduce they might receive some of those grasses if they visited us?

If you offer tall grasses, they will come.

After they sniffed our hands, we petted their snouts. The experiment with handfuls of grass succeeded. All five leaned over the electric fence for bunches of grass, although never at the same time. They came in pairs, as if out of respect. They got grass, we gently rubbed their heads.

Horses inspire peaceful thoughts. That might seem trite, but having not spent a lot of time around them, these horses radiated tranquility. This quintet rarely uttered more than snorts, a group of wise animals in Minnesota’s high ground. This terrain and rural spot also inspired the frantic mind to slow down a bit, to inhale and absorb everything from the vernal landscape.

So much for subtlety.

Before Embarrass, I never took the time to watch horses eat. Their teeth were scissors, neatly chopping off the clumps of grass. While I had no interest in getting close to a horse’s mouth, the harsh bites people suffered from wild horses were suddenly dropped into context.

This bunch did not bite, but neither of us relaxed our hands anywhere close to those chompers. Eventually they tired of the grasses and roamed onto the pasture as the rain picked up. They retreated to graze by their stall. After retreating inside, we monitoring from back door until we lost all light for glimpses of the little herd. Mostly they stayed sheltered.

Over cocktails and dessert, we played many games of Fact or Crap. The guest houses had a cabinet filled with board games, one of our vacation staples for a quiet and/or rainy night. As we wound down, walking upstairs to the bedroom never occurred us and we let sleep win out while we reclined beneath blankets on the comfortable couches.

Night did not slacken the rain – the water poured down more furiously the next day, flooding patches of ground around the guest house. Every bag loaded into the car trunk was a race against a downpour. As we packed, the horse stuck to their pavilion, one of them stepping outside occasionally for a fresh bite of grass. The ground flooded around guest house, the rain gauge ran high.

We couldn’t escape the rain or the 10 a.m. checkout on the guest house. Water falling on the interior urged us back to the coast. We shut down, took a last glance at our new Iron Range friends huddled in a row below their roof, and swung out of the country. Were the rain not torrential, we would have offered more bunches of hard-to-reach grasses.

See you again someday.