It’s been a rough week in my hometown. It’s been a great week in my hometown. Thank you to the 800 plus firefighters who have been working hard in the unprecedented heat. Thank you to God for some cooler weather and for some rain and for protecting us and them. Thank you to my neighbors, friends, relatives and local businesses for being all-in on Ely, for standing together through tough times, for showing up to purchase locally even when your business is going through it too. Thanks to all of you for being friendly and defining the day to day meaning of “a good neighbor.”
Thanks for blue skies and clean air. Thanks to the people whom I’ve stopped and talked to about positive thinking and positive talking and positive acting and how great it feels to just reach out and help someone who needs something that you can provide, give counsel to or just to listen.
I helped a couple who was stranded with a rental car from the Twin Cities and had lost their keys between our canoe and kayak sales boathouse and Northern Grounds coffee shop. They looked for their keys all day, couldn’t get a replacement from the rental company, thought they had a big enough tow truck coming that could get them back to the cities but that fell through. Later in the afternoon, they searched for me at my work. The lady was close to a breakdown, understandably. She was visibly shaken. By that time all the hotels were booked up and any shuttle service wasn’t really available. No taxi’s here. I tried to get them to Hibbing Airport but that wasn’t working out in Ely on the day the Fernberg Trail was evacuated. I couldn’t find anyone available to take them to the cities for cash. Juliet and I called around for a room. I found a room for them overnight with one of my friends and co-workers and hauled their gear on my back a few blocks to her house. The next morning, she volunteered to drive them to Cloquet where a relative came to pick them up. Before they left, they had returned to the coffee shop and saw me through the windows and ran out to tell me the good news about their new exit plan. They were so happy. None of that would have happened if I hadn’t originally just stopped on the street to ask if they needed help with anything. I did it we were all having a very bad day and because they looked like they could use a friend. Now they’ve said they’re going to return to Ely in 2028. We’ll have some coffee together!
Countless people have shared with me that “we’re going to be alright!” Man, have I said yet how much I love having firefighters and scooper aircraft here?! How much I enjoy the morning and evening updates where they show us on the maps what they’ve been working on. Can I tell you again how much I enjoy smelling wildfire smoke on a yellow uniform on a hardworking woman or man standing in line in front of me at Zups?
This is one of those things that’s a big deal in life. For real. It’s also a wakeup call on many fronts. We can do better. We can do better with a lot of things and none of them involve pointing fingers at other people with three of our own pointed back at us. God knows that I love this place so much. I love the people who live here with us. The visitors. It feels incredible to wake up and know that you worked as hard as you can to get through yesterday and today is going to be full of challenges but you are going to have the privilege of doing it all over again. To realize that someone’s got your back and you’ve got theirs. To understand that tomorrow isn’t a guarantee. I know these things, but sometimes we forget.
We focus on ourselves and we forget about others. We decide to ignore the needs of everyone around us. Helping others really is a simple thing. Ask and Act.
The simple things in life that I value and write about so much, these things come with a cost. Just as anything great always does. They are worth it.
Ready. Set. Go. Many of us will never think of those three small words in the same way again. When I was a kid, every race, every contest, every party game began that way. I bobbed for apples with a loose tooth, I tried to be the first to finish a donut hanging from the ceiling on a string, I shot down the street on my banana seat bike, I raced to hide in the dusk of a hide-and-seek game and I sprinted as fast as I could through childhood and the finish lines of high school and college so that I could make all of my own decisions and fulfill my dreams -- many of which turned out to become a kid again.
It’s been a wonderful week in my hometown. Tell me I’m wrong.
