The Remnant

Finalist
Terrain.org 15th Annual Nonfiction Contest
  

“Thank you for calling the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Please select from the following five options…”

From the driver’s seat of my car, in the afternoon sun, my phone on speaker, I wait for my daughter to dawdle out from middle school.

“If you need information about Minnesota drivers’ licenses or identification cards, driver compliance, or exams, press one.”

Outside it’s a conflicting spring temperature. Just yesterday, I worshiped the warm wind. Today, with a couple more degrees, I turned on the air and rolled up the windows. Maybe also to muffle my ensuing awkward phone call from an eavesdropping passerby.

“If you need information about vehicle registration, ownership transfers, titles, liens, or plates, press two.”

 I’d gone through iterations of what to call this weird piece of property; a green space, an urban wild, greenway, empty parcel, urban green space, pocket park. I had settled on green pocket, but Anika told me she struggled picturing the size of something called a green pocket. She suggested vacant lot.

“If your call is about commercial vehicles, press three.”

The word vacant implies potential past or future occupation, which gives this plot too much credit. It’s a neglected embankment wedged between a bridge, a residential street, and a highway. Nothing substantial was, or will ever be built.

“For information about road conditions and construction, press four.”

Currently, heavy concrete barriers sit scattered across the face of this lot. Each tattooed with a black stencil MNDOT. So, I’ve gone to the source.

“For all other Department of Transportation issues, press five and an operator will assist you.”

I tap 5 and prepare for the bumbling question to spill from my mouth.

“Transportation, how can I help you?”

“Hi! My name is Dan Ibarra, and I’m a resident of Minneapolis.” God, I sound conceited. Calling myself a resident of Minneapolis, as if I have an actual pressing question of some citizenry value. “I’m calling to find out a definitive term… used for a certain unused plot of land… within the city limits?”

“I’ll connect you with Land Management.” They didn’t have to even think about it. “Okay, thank you!” I respond, apologetic.

The line clicks over and two female voices pick up.

SORRY…

“Minnesota Department of Transportation, Office of Land Management reception desk.”

IS NOT AVAILABLE. YOU CANNOT RECORD A MESSAGE FOR…

“Minnesota Department of Transportation, Office of Land Management reception desk.”

THIS MAILBOX IS FULL.

A man’s voice cuts in to provide directions on using the State of Minnesota voicemail system. I hang up on him. A few quick taps and I’m at MNDOT’s Land Management page and explore the “Contacts” tab. These job titles provide me no insight into what these people do, or who would be the right person to try. Office Director, Real Estate and Policy Development, Surveying and Mapping sounds like a good bet, Photogrammetry & Remote Sensing, Geodetics—what the fuck is Geodetics, it’s like some L. Ron Hubbard shit—Descriptions & Commissioners Orders, maybe? I understand my definition of description is not their definition of description, but I try my luck.

A very nice man with a very thick accent picks up. The white noise and distance in his voice relay he is taking this call from inside a moving vehicle. I start in on my spiel again and continue to poorly explain my request.

“So, you say you want to build on a boulevard?” I’m so sorry for what I’m putting you through, you kind, first-generation, overworked government employee. I thank him for trying to help me, and attempt to better explain myself. My daughter has finally appeared and, seeing me on the phone, quietly swings herself and her heavy school bag into the front seat. “I think maybe it is a remnant lot? Sorry, I am no working today but you can email me. You see email? You can email me this location and I can find out for you. Okay?” I agree and thank him a second time, but I’ve already stopped listening. I’m not going to email him. He’s answered my question. I hang up and try to explain the call to my daughter as we drive home.

Remnant land is defined as, “a parcel of land, after a partial taking by eminent domain, so small or poorly shaped as to have practically no value.” This is exactly how to describe the wedge of property I walk through every day. It’s a sloped spread of space, a 100-square-foot triangular swatch of rocky ground, low grass, pigweed, and foxtail, set along the outer rim of the Seward neighborhood in Minneapolis. Its gentle slope is a pastoral contrast to the surrounding city, an overgrown buttress from the arterial highway, against a dead-end intersection. Bordering the southeastern perimeter of the remnant, a useless 30-foot stretch of warped and rusted steel road barrier hangs on decaying square wooden posts. Two yellow diamond signs stand where the two perpendicular roads meet and end. Emblazoned with black arrows, both point in opposite directions, recommending any other way but forward across the face of this remnant.

A desire path (a category of trampled pedestrian trail cutting through grass where the landscape designer had decided a sidewalk wouldn’t go, but the people had a different idea) cuts diagonal across the remnant from the dead-end corner of South 9th Street and 20th Avenue South and reconnects along the upper ridge where a new stretch of 20th Avenue bridges across the highway. This means, like a boring Bermuda Triangle, the stretch of southernmost sidewalk briefly connects 20th Avenue South and 20th Avenue South. Purposeless, our remnant is an urban sedimentary bank at the confluence of sidewalks, bike lanes, apartment buildings, parking lots, bridges, and highways.

The surrounding geography wasn’t always city, and this sliver of property wasn’t always a remnant. Ten-thousand years ago, as the Earth thawed out from the last ice age, this plot of land was an organic sedimentary bank along a wide shallow river of glacial melt, housing a stand of white, red, and jack pines. Giant beavers and mammoths utilized these new forests as a precious shelter from new invasive predators to the area, the Homo sapiens, an animal who has miraculously begun to use fire and stone tools to hunt and devour their prey. As glacial melt ceased and the river receded a couple thousand feet, the water cut a more distinct shape. Future generations of these early humans will refer to the flowing water as Hah Wakpa or Misi-ziibi. Later, a new invasive species called “French Explorers” will come to call it the Mississippi River.

Explorers begat missionaries, and Norwegians, and Swedes, and Germans, and loggers, logger barons and flour mills, laborers and labor protests, major social growth and industrial growth, and Chinese immigrants escaping racism in the West, and increased populations, and streets and homes, and municipalities stretched far out from the economic powerhouse of that river. At this time our proto-remnant lot was transformed from jack pine and prairie into the modest intersection of Taylor and Walnut Street—renamed respectively to 9th Street and 20^th Avenue in 1873 when the conglomerate municipalities-turned-city realized they were going to have an absolute bloodbath on their hands with six different Oak Streets all over the map.

Roads became rails, and in 1900 the immigrant working class population working and living near intersecting rail lines built themselves a house of worship on this corner and named it Trinity Lutheran Church. It was a solid and modest building. A tall, majestic, dark-brick cornerstone for Norwegian immigrants in search of belonging. Embedded in this church was the story of this new Norwegian congregation, their obstinate American assimilation, a pinch of 20th-century adultery via some controversial international love letters, and the origin story of a university—then Augsburg Seminary. In 1966, along with numerous lower-income communities across the United States, the church was slated for demolition as the federal government plowed and steamrolled an eight-lane interstate highway through the city, and through the building’s back door. As the religious epicenter for Augsburg, now a full-fledged college just two blocks north, the literal dismantling of Trinity Lutheran Church introduced an identity conflict for the school. Physically untethered from their church, facing the broad challenges of thriving in an urban center in the late 1960s, the school scrutinized whether to move the college, or commit to their newly-deconstructed community.

They chose the latter, and in Augsburg’s 1964 Annual Report the school championed their new expanding urban campus: “Rolling hills, stretches of greenwood, elm-shaded walks and ivy-covered buildings, so often attached to the popular image of a college, will not be true of Augsburg. This is a city where concrete, curbs, cars, and congestion are more typical.” Both earnest and true, the statement is almost prophetic considering the field of large concrete blocks I now traverse as I climb up and over the grassy wound of Trinity Lutheran’s final resting place enroute to my current place of employment, Augsburg University. Although the school’s vision focuses far beyond its early seminary goals, the university still commits itself deeply to nurturing their community, and still makes space for the Trinity Lutheran congregation to observe services on campus.

The highway tore through, it toppled Trinity Lutheran, it severed the intersection at 9th street and 20th Avenue, splitting and warping 20th into a bridge. It birthed, then left orphaned, our small slice of remnant lot. For the following decades the remnant sat fairly placid and quiet. Countless pedestrians, day after day, cut along the desire path across her face without a second thought. In Minneapolis, whose strict building codes make it often cheaper to tear down and build anew than to retrofit, it’s a small brevity to walk across a space so generationally disregarded. Early on in my relationship with the remnant I took a photograph of it, mounted by two bright-orange dumpsters. I don’t remember what was being dumped, but the containers were set on either side of the desire path as if to invite a curious pedestrian to wander between and through the blaze-orange gateway of this forgotten place. This may have been the most action our remnant had seen in years.

Recently, community members began to find practical value and refuge in the poor neglected shape. One day, I don’t remember when, a single camping tent appeared in the weeds up against the tall highway wall. Sometimes it would be there for only a day or two, or over a weekend. One time a single ragged blue tent stayed for a week. I never met its occupants but given the gathering trash bags, salvaged plywood, and stolen shopping cart, I presumed homelessness. Slender orange plastic caps and stray syringes outside the tent flap conveyed what might be the root of their struggle.

Growing up in the 1980s, the homeless housing stereotype was a smoky alley, inside a large refrigerator box, with newspapers for blankets. I never personally witnessed a person sheltering in a cardboard box, but I have to assume the stereotype grew from some kind of urban reality. Then arrived a camping tent. The use of camping tents by the unhoused seems obvious, like it should have sprung up in numerous locations, long ago. But the reuse of the camping tent didn’t broadly show up until the 1990s. Which means somewhere out there is (or was) the equivalent of a homeless Frank Lloyd Wright who, taking a piss behind some sporting goods store late one summer evening, spied a crumpled nylon tent in the garbage and had a revelation.

Many of us experienced a slow return to normalcy after the 2020 pandemic. Others seemed not so lucky. And more tents sprung up. There were about two to three dozen tents, bright blue tarps, plywood, tied down with multicolored nylon rope, huddled together along the remnant and the neighboring block-long sliver of weedy boulevard near the highway wall. I didn’t try to talk to them. They didn’t bug me. We all collectively probably wished the other would keep away. That’s the interesting way a crowded city is ironically aligned with obstinate, western American individualism:

• A M E R I C A •
Stay Out of My Fucking Business.

Contemporary American homelessness actually originates as a result of joblessness, and begins with the lovable hobo. That guy—with his fingerless gloves, five o’clock shadow, crumpled top hat, and red-and-white polka dot handkerchief cantilevered on a stick over his shoulder—would’ve settled down permanently if he wanted to, or if there was work to be had. The original hobo was more akin to a migrant laborer or a crust punk than someone with actual housing troubles.

My tone here may be pissing you off. I’m writing it light. I realize homelessness is really fucking complicated. I’m not going to solve homelessness here, and these aren’t free-wheeling hobos shooting the breeze. These are folks in financial ruin from one too many American medical bills, vulnerable addicts ripping their lives out through their veins, and folks no longer welcome (or required) to stay in mental health clinics. They’re people with real, serious problems, forgotten, overlooked, and left behind. Folks for whom the Venn diagram of capitalism and their personal existence do not overlap.

And because of this, I’m impressed by encampments. I don’t want these folks to be homeless, but I’m grateful they have more than a cardboard box or polka dot bandana to protect them. The use of a camping tent is a work of brutal societal genius; these discarded artifacts from privileged novel outdoor recreational activities, wherein people spent the long weekend pretending to own nothing, are now ingenious reappropriations by those most in need. That durable weather-protective polyester and those heavy-duty galvanized stakes produced for fun get togethers, now hold lives together.

I don’t think encampments are great. I’m confident they’re filled with actual hardship and danger. Although it does seem that the media of a camping tent maybe produces an idea of greater communal unity rather than folks deserted and on their own. I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe there was equal camaraderie when everyone was lined up in sagging cardboard boxes. But the mere use of the word “encampment” implies a community identity where there may not have been before. Who ever heard of an enboxment?

Atop the gently sloped burial place of a church, the landscape now explicitly communicates, “Don’t you fucking dare.”

The encampment persevered as home in this same location for much of the spring and summer, until one day it was gone. I had seen something like this happen before. Other folks were camped on a shallow grass peninsula next to the on-ramp from Cedar Avenue to Hiawatha Avenue south (two intersecting roads deemed important enough to preserve their original monikers in the great numerical street name replacement of 1873.) There was room for maybe 15 crowded tents on that lot. The encampment was soon evicted, and in its place the city erected a perimeter of tall, angry, black fence, hooked outward at the top like a regimental line of black snakes, ready to strike, promising pain and death to any who attempted to reenter their hallowed ground of sacred on-ramp. I wonder if any of those occupants ended up on the remnant.

I don’t know when, why, or how the encampment on the remnant was toppled. One summer morning I drove down the street to park in my usual spot, and it was gone. It was eerily clean and sanitary compared to what one might expect. All that was left was trampled grass, dirt, and debris. Not “we just evicted people who were living here” debris, more like “the morning after the last night of the State Fair” kind of debris. I felt a slight pang of empathy for the flushed-out folks. I wondered where they all landed as I trudged up and past the desolation.

But the area wasn’t desolate for long. I could have predicted it, seeing what had been constructed at “The Holy Triangle of the Black Snake Temple and On-Ramp.” Two days later I drove up, parked in my usual spot, and I saw them. At first, I didn’t understand what it was I was looking at. They resembled a herd of concrete cattle, penned inside the remnant, grazing on the grass and empty Gatorade bottles. I scanned the street and, where previously existed a camp, there were dozens and dozens of lethargic obelisks nested in the patch of space.

Technically they’re called Jersey Barriers, or K-Rails. And even if you live under a rock, you’ve still seen one, because they’re made of rock, gravel, and water. They’re stout, medium-length, waist-high concrete walls with wide, sloping bases. They are mostly observed as plinth-sized pachyderms walking nose to tail, snaking along American highway construction, or lined up shoulder-to-shoulder defending a new building site like broad, dim, bouncers.

Originally conceived in California as permanent concrete walls to reduce the risk of cars and trucks careening off mountain passes, it was the state of New Jersey who conceived the idea of molding the blocks into mobile enough lengths to be hoisted by forklifts and cranes. Thus, the Jersey Barrier namesake. The whole concept, design, and application of the Jersey Barrier isn’t sexy, but it’s smart, and kind of caring. If a car collides with a Jersey Barrier, the goal is for the car’s tires to ride up onto the slight angled base, pivoting and redirecting the vehicle back into its original direction instead of into oncoming traffic or off the side of the mountain. The design also reduces damage to the car body as the tires lift the vehicle up and away from the wall.

The project description was, “make a wall to keep cars from flying off the road.” But Jersey Barriers are an evolved species compared to an earlier predecessor, that length of rusted barrier along the remnant. With Jersey Barriers some engineer took a little extra time to consider the driver, the car, the physics, the material, and designed something more. It’s a barrier, but it’s also a caring means of protection, a concrete car cushion, a crash cradle.

These crash cradles on the remnant are each stenciled with the heavy black initials of their owner and the true caretaker of this property: “MNDOT,” the Minnesota Department of Transportation. The way MNDOT repurposed their crash cradles, strewn across our poor, sweet plot, utilized to extinguish living, doesn’t feel caring. It’s brutal, hostile architecture. Atop the gently sloped burial place of a church, the landscape now explicitly communicates, “Don’t you fucking dare.” It echoes an earlier concrete design project also designed to keep people out, commissioned by another government department.

That story begins in 1970, when the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (now the Department of Energy) was faced with the problem of what to do with the waste from their research and production of nuclear weapons. They decided their best option was to deposit it all inside a 2,000-foot-deep underground salt basin in southeast New Mexico. Besides the fundamental complications of throwing piles of nuclear waste down a very deep hole, the engineers also faced the issue of how to effectively communicate this subterranean danger for the next 10,000 years, until at that time the waste would no longer be a radioactive threat to life.

For some perspective, 10,000 years ago is where we began, with giant beavers sheltering among the jack pines along the bank of wide glacial runoff. Looking forward 10,000 more, there’s no assuming any category of shared human culture, language, or lexicon. How do we communicate danger to an unknown future? In the 1990s the DOE commissioned a collection of artists, philosophers, and architects to conceive the most universal means of threat communication for this dangerous, desolate region of New Mexico. What the DOE decided to install is a 16-mile concrete perimeter punctuated with 32-foot-tall granite pillars engraved with written warnings, along with weather-resistant depictions of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The project will be finalized and constructed beginning in 2033. It’s an uninspired compromise compared to my favorite design idea: the “landscape of thorns” suggested by environmental architect Mike Brill.

The idea is just as the name implies; a horrific, unnavigable field of brutal towering stone spikes, hopefully intimidating any future living creature who dares wander too close. The design was passed over—I assume on account of its audacity. Something designed to warn of the most evil and villainous underground lairs should kindle fear into the heart of any hapless being. But if someone told you there was a freaking field of 20-foot stone thorns bursting out of the desert, you’d want to see it, wouldn’t you? I would. Then you’ve got yourself a tourist attraction whose sole purpose was to keep folks away. Anyway, what government agency wants to build a stunning sculptural monument to commemorate, “Here lies some dangerous evidence of how we really screwed up. Stay out of our fucking business”?

Does MNDOT recognize the visual message they echo with their own pasture of barriers? Similarly, the barriers discourage long stays on the remnant plot, but they also spark curiosity and creativity. We curious humans are going to do exactly what our ancestors did 400 generations back when we came across strange new landscapes. We’re going to explore it. We’re going to mark it. Which is what happened next.

Some think of graffiti as lawlessness, breaching fences, property damage, cops catching delinquent kids wearing balaclavas in the shadowy bowels of trainyards. But the first form of visual art by humans was graffiti. Sixty-thousand years ago, across cave walls, we spat and sprayed ground charcoal and red ochre clay over our outstretched prehistoric hands, and left an indelible symbol of our five-fingered existence. My god, someone’s mom must’ve been pissed! Who was going to clean that mess up? But, if we can agree that the first form an idea takes is arguably the most authentic form of that idea, then graffiti is the only authentic form of visual art, and everything after is imitation.

Graffiti goes back farther in human history than that field of thorns is meant to project forward, but like repurposed camping tents, and repurposed Jersey Barriers meant to eliminate the tents, contemporary creative humans repurposed the portable permanence of spray paint for use in modern art. Darryl “Cornbread” McCray is credited with the original idea of using spray paint to tag his name all over Philadelphia in the late 1960s. Like our mystical homeless Frank Lloyd Wright first conceiving of a camping tent as a means of practical shelter, Cornbread saw this new innovation of permanent portable paint in an easy-to-use can, and had a brilliant idea.

Atop the remnant, street artists discovered and began painting upon the current anti-human inhabitants. Last fall, on my way home trudging back over and down the remnant to my car, I caught one new piece, or more specifically a set of pieces. They portrayed a pair of lounging rectangular robots. They were rendered like 1930s cartoon characters, with puffy white gloves and toaster-shaped oxford shoes attached to tube-like arms and legs. Painted next to the first robot were the words, “The days are getting shorter.” The other robot, on a second barrier, stationed slightly lower into the embankment, read “The nights are getting longer.” The pieces presented like a diptych. Walking down off the sidewalk and through the herd, one could see the first image, then partway through the barriers, the second image.

It was a means of graffiti I hadn’t seen before. The artist used the arbitrary faces of the barriers like cells in a comic book, or scenes in a movie. A time-based street art installation. The piece also worked as a kind of robotic Cheshire Cat, appearing as we pass through the uninviting landscape, and again to tease us as we continue. Checking in, glibly reminding us there’s no escape from the dark impending Minnesota winter, or maybe the looming winter of our humanity. I looked forward to other artists taking the hint to create more space-based graffiti on the barriers. Then in the early spring I found the barriers in a state which still confuses me. Save for their black MNDOT brands, they were once again blank. They had been buffed.

It seems not everyone found the graffiti beautiful or innovative. Someone from the Department of Transportation took it upon themselves to rid their hostile crash cradles of these and other graffiti and painted over them. I’m impressed at how well they color-matched the warm 20 percent gray of the concrete. At first, I couldn’t tell they’d been buffed, they just looked clean.

I understand why someone might remove graffiti from their property. The logic goes: graffiti can scare away customers, and reduce property values. Graffiti can sometimes signify an increase in criminal activity, and removing it may help reduce crime. Spray paint can also weaken exterior paint. Lastly, simply removing graffiti reflects a kind of pride and care for an investment which others may follow.

Yes, yes, all well and good. But I can’t figure out what any of that has to do with buffing out the graffiti on the barriers in our remnant. There aren’t customers to scare away, no property to devalue, no worries over weakening exterior paint. Is MNDOT trying to communicate their pride and care for their investment in 200 brutalist barriers? Admittedly the crash cradles are MNDOT’s property to take care of. But MNDOT has intentionally created an uninhabitable landscape, yet somehow still desires to show pride and care in the attention they have given to this investment. I have questions. And as soon as I figure out which number to call at the Minnesota Department of Transportation, I’m going to ask some.

The remnant currently still exists as a sea of Jersey Barriers. I still weave through them every day. They continue to gather debris from the people rushing past them. Paper, sweatpants, a plastic bag with a crumpled Raising Cane’s logo, syringes, bottles of orange juice, pints of liquor, and stolen rifled backpacks gather in the weeds daily. The growing refuse communicates more than any graffiti might. It says that nobody cares about this place. But that’s not completely true. I still care about it. Her face looks dramatically different compared to her church days, or even compared to a few years back when she was less pockmarked, more pastoral. But the remnant still deserves love, utility, beauty.

Spring is here and although the stands of pines are long gone, the heartiest of weeds have begun to sprout up from the gravel and around the barriers. Less grows than did before, but it’s not desolated. I step up over the curb, through the two opposing yellow diamond arrows, past the rusted street barrier, and up into the Jersey Barriers. I reach into my yellow hoodie and pull out two well-packed Ziploc bags. On the back of one a black-and-white, laser-printed label reads, “Twin City Seed Company – Bee & Butterfly Native Seed Mixture.” A folded paper label stapled to the second bag reads, “Drought-tolerant Wildflower Mix.”  I unzip both the bags and wind leisurely through the embankment, intermittently dipping my hand into either bag, broadcasting the specks of seed across the face of the remnant.

It’s too late for the previous inhabitants of this remnant plot of land, or maybe it’s just too early for the new ones. This fall, and next year, or maybe five years from now when I walk alongside my daughter to her first day of college, or maybe another 10,000 years from now, when the cars are gone, and the highway fills in, when the skyscrapers are covered in vegetation either by design or decay, and the mammals have grown giant or miniature depending on what climate dictates, and the richest of the post-humans have blasted themselves off to Mars, this may still be just a remnant plot. These barriers may still be here. No longer barring anything anymore, I imagine future inhabitants will step over the concrete nubs and rubble, relics they can ponder as they cut a well-worn path across the shallow embankment, through a perennial yellow future of black-eyed susan, partridge pea, orange coneflower, and golden Alexander.