The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Kurt K. Kersten here (if there is a family tie, the records have been sealed somehwere in Miississippi, like at the bottom of it, ha, ha, no, you're kiling me, stop...)

Seriously, that is my name and I have been asked by the Road Rake to guest blog for the week.

Of course I am honored.

John Herou isn’t your typical electric-car ideologue. The founder of e-ride Industries possesses a bright strain of idealism to be sure, but fundamentally he’s a practical man, an inventor and classic car buff, more entrepreneur than tree hugger. The cars he builds, called neighborhood electric vehicles because by law they can go only twenty-five miles per hour and drive on streets with commensurate speed limits, are distinctly Minnesotan.

If Minnesota hockey were a religion (and many, of course, would contend it is), Steve Mars would be a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher whose sermons carry an apocalyptic message: Something must be done to save the faith, because the temple is melting.

Warm winters of late have cut the outdoor-skating season nearly in half, and as outdoor ice goes, Mars says, so goes the status of our state as a puck mecca.

1944
Will Steger born and raised in Richfield, the second of eight children


1959
Steger, a freshman at Benilde, buys a motorboat and, with his brother, drives it down the Missippippi–and back


1963
Steger devises a kayak trek to the headwaters of the Yukon River. It involves a long portage—over the Rocky Mountains


1967
Steger graduates from St. Thomas with a degree in geology


1970

Mille Porsild agrees that the life of an explorer can seem awfully selfish. “You think about it all the time, leaving your loved ones behind,” she says. Most of Porsild’s immediate family is halfway around the world in her native Denmark. But some of them are right here: Her husband Paul Pregont and, arguably the most important part of the team, their thirty sled dogs. Like most modern explorers, Porsild and Pregont wrestle all the time with balancing a spiritual love of wide open (empty) spaces with a professional calling to educate and interact.

You’re the greatest living explorer, standing shoulder to shoulder with Jacques Cousteau, Robert Peary, and Amelia Earhardt. Now you’re heading back to the Arctic.


I see dead deer everywhere, their yawning red abdomens, stiffening legs, their black eyes. It’s one of the hazards of driving around Ely on opening weekend. I went literally to the end of the road in northern Minnesota, to the homestead of Will Steger, and I found hundreds of men already there, in the woods, in blaze orange. With high-powered rifles.

Illustration by Christopher Henderson



I’m going to miss Minnesota—not because I’m going away, but because Minnesota is. The north woods? There’s a fairly good chance I will outlive them. A walk through the spruce, the cry of a loon—a lot of experiences we think of as quintessential Minnesota may disappear. Or emigrate to Canada.