Ditch Gifts

We live on the edge of town, below the last shoulder of hill that climbs out of the valley where the Rock River and Chanarambie Creek court before they join their waters forever and ever a mile south of town. There’s a scant half-mile between the two creeks where Edgerton is built, a ridge of land that falls off at the end of Edgerton’s mile or so length and climbs up toward regular Buffalo Ridge height directly to the north of our house.

Our position leaves us quite sheltered from a direct north wind, but the typical Northwester funnels down a black top that leaves us vulnerable to its whimsy. Thus, every year I find tumbleweeds rolled down from the wild Northwest Territories and trapped in the various nooks and crannies around the house, a real Wild West existence.

Perhaps it’s this wind that brought some more welcome guests to our road too. Our neighbors to the north moved to their house when the original tenant, their mother, moved to the rest home, Edgebrook, a couple of years ago. They moved from the farm and brought a farm mentality with them: in the fall they overpower unwanted trees with John Deere tractors; in winter, they pile up snow into epic and haphazard mountains; in spring, the dandelions take over. And they don’t care. Truth be told, I really don’t either, ex-farm boy that I am, but others do. One day last summer the dandelion family’s next door neighbor confided to me in the coffee shop, “I think they were camping and I had just sprayed my lawn, so I filled up another tank of spray and let ‘er have it.”

To little avail. This spring the dandelions were back unabated.

But so were other guests. After the dandelion boom—bloom—two large bushes of yellow sweet clover grew out of one side of the railroad tie retaining wall that keeps the hill on their side of the road. In hindsight, I blame what happened on the sweet clover. Sweet clover comes in a bush. It’s big and impossible to miss. Yes, at this time in the summer it gets wispy yellow flowers on the ends of its leaves, little fingers of gold that are nice but not gaudy. What’s coming in the fall is less nice. Sweet clover gets tangly and brown. Perhaps it even turns tumbleweed and spreads its seeds around that way—I’m not quite sure. Whatever the case, sweet clover suggests a wilder heritage than we want in an Edgerton striving for a suburban look. So it was perhaps inevitable that something would be done about it.

However, on the other side of the retaining wall another visitor sprang up, a more welcome visitor. It’s a repeat visitor, too, which is one reason why I caught it early. Our road is like a frontage road. It runs alongside the larger black top that mounts the hill to Fey Industries, but then our road bends along the hill—“Terrace View Avenue” it’s called—to the line of houses along our street. Rounding the corner after some random pee wee baseball game, the visitor’s yellow witness first caught my eye, but, alas, in the busyness that is children’s activities, even in the summer, I had no time to verify whether it truly was or not.

Returning home one evening, though, the yellow witness had grown and was caught momentarily in the headlights; it was only too apparent that our friend was back and that it was time to check it out. “Is that butter and eggs?” I asked my children.

And just like that, we had to know.

We first learned about butter-and-eggs at Pipestone. Up the road from Edgerton, in Pipestone, lies the only National Monument that I know of within an eight hour drive. Pipestone National Monument is not really a monument at all, not like the Washington Monument, a phallic symbol pointing to the sky, symbolizing I’m not sure what even though I have my suspicions. No, Pipestone National Monument is simply an outcropping of rock, a very unique kind of rock, in the midst of the wide sea of prairie. The red rock outcropping that bursts the sea of prairie here as well as down the Buffalo Ridge at Luverne and east near Jeffers—where Natives took advantage of the sheer, flat sheets of red rock to write some of the history and culture of their people on what we’ve come to call petroglyphs—is not jasper, as they dubbed it in the town that’s misnamed for the rock, but Sioux Quartzite, a rock that can be quarried and turned into official looking buildings like county courthouses that are centerpieces of Luverne and Pipestone, but not easily. However, at Pipestone, a special kind of Sioux Quartzite, a layer that’s much softer than the hard yet brittle rock, is laid bare. This band of rock is softer, with a soapy feel to it. It’s much more malleable and therefore more desirable for shaping into pipes, the central unifying instrument in Native cosmology, and other small trinkets and talismans, like the humble and therefore supremely important turtle. The outcropping of pipestone, then, became a quarry, but more importantly became sacred ground to which the Lakota and tribes from all across the continent came to quarry the stone and fashion the artifacts so important to their world. The stone, the natives say, is the flesh of the ancestors; it’s their gift, a means of making peace.

At Pipestone, somewhat miraculously, the government—no doubt prompted by gentle and wise souls both native and white, or, more cynically, perhaps in order to pacify natives—saw fit to preserve this outcropping of rock and call it a monument. Oh, there is a short cliff where Pipestone Creek dumps its waterfall until it becomes a trickle in the dryness of late summer, and there’s a small interpretive center complete with workshops for native craftsmen, but Pipestone National Monument by in large allows the landscape—the prairie landscape with a small outcropping of rock—to be the monument.

We go to Pipestone National Monument maybe twice a year. When my wife works and I’m tired of the kids asking if they can play the computer, we find a guidebook to wildflowers or two and head down the road for a short hike through the monument. Although a host of burr oaks have taken root and obscure the cliff line that once was visible at Pipestone, the park has a native prairie plant going, complete with seasonal burns to insure the prairie’s health, and a trail leads through the prairie and to the different mining sites along the rock ledge. As the prairie flowers bloom throughout the year, park employees mark the different blooms with simple labels.

For me, Pipestone preserves something else sacred to natives. It preserves—or resurrects—the prairie. Walking monument trails was precisely how we discovered prairie wildflowers and tall grass prairie grasses. The easiest for me and my children to name and remember, because of its soft yellow and gold complexion, and its wealth of blooms surrounding a long stem, was called butter and eggs.

Therefore, back at home, as we round the corner in our road, when I ask, “Is that butter-and-eggs?” I’ve created all the stir I need. “Let’s go check,” my daughter urges. She’s a notorious fan of evening and late night excursions like this, whether to check on a plague of slugs on our hostas or a midnight meteor shower of blessing. I grab the flashlight and we cross the street, a total of no more than thirty yards.

Somehow, under the bright rays of the flashlight in the growing darkness, the flower is even more brilliant, a torch in the gloom if you will. The plant is about two-thirds bloomed, the blossoms opening around the stem in the manner of a holly hock, but on an eighteen-inch scale. The blossoms themselves remind me of the snap dragon, the gauzy outside of soft buttery yellow leading to the bright gold yolk center. At least a half dozen blossoms are poised to open in succeeding days, a rich blessing to a neighborhood aspiring to controlled grass and shrubs. (http://www.minnesotawildflowers.info/flower/butter-and-eggs)

The beauty of butter-and-eggs is innocent. That’s why I say that without the daring bushiness of the sweet clover, the butter-and-eggs may have avoided notice. However, the sweet clover was too daring a flagship for the prairie, and doomed these advance guards too.

I was working outside when I subconsciously heard a grinding sort of noise, lawn mower-esque but a little too grindy even for a lawn mower. Because one is accustomed to hearing several different pitches of lawn mowers, weed wackers, leaf blowers, and edgers, as well as a dozen kinds of saws in any given neighborhood, I paid little attention to the noise.

Until I realized it was crawling across the road in slow motion, right next to the railroad tie retaining wall. My neighbor, astride a red Farmall reconditioned for lawn service, was pulling a tank of spray and letting a 10-inch swath of lawn edge have it with whatever death-chemical she held in the tank.

I didn’t grow up knowing environmental or political action. The butter and eggs mean something to me and do little harm or pose little threat to a lawn that is at best an afterthought to my neighbors anyway. However, it never occurred to me at the time to run across the road and stand in front of the butter-and-eggs, to finally catch my neighbor’s eye amidst the grinding of the machine and to yell at the top of my voice so she’d hear me, “Hey, don’t spray these—they’re my kids’ favorite.” Rather, I chalked it up to a lost cause and hoped that the innocent flowers would somehow avoid her death-swath.

Two nights later, at our neighborhood float meeting, too little too late, I asked her, lightheartedly, “Hey, did you spray my butter-and-eggs?” An uncomprehending stare. So I explain. “I saw you out spraying yesterday along the road. I noticed those big sweet clover bushes were gone. Did you spray some yellow flowers on the other side?”

“I chopped down those bushes,” she tells me. “And if there were flowers on the other side, they’re dead now!” she crows.

Three more days, and her swath is completely brown, the length of the road. It is, in two words, absolutely ugly. Will the butter and eggs return next season? Considering the amount and apparent power of the chemical sprayed on them, I doubt it.

***

“And for all of this, nature is never spent.”

As I said, our road first acts as a frontage road to a larger blacktop. In the space between the roads where they run parallel, there’s a small strip of land that the homeowners on the other side of the road are expected by the city council to keep looking sharp—that is, they’re supposed to mow it. It’s July and two of my neighbors have been away or busy as the weather turns sweltering. After three days of not mowing, certain grasses are shooting skyward like a rash of fireworks. It took me twenty-five years of living on the tall grass prairie, but I’ve learned about what grasses show up when the weather gets hot and withers the imports. Then the native grasses, with their immense root systems fit for just such weather, are resurrected: the puffed out heads of switch grass, the arrowheads of Indian grass, and the purple-stained crow’s feet of big bluestem, the prince of the prairie.

One evening, at dusk, I walk through this swath of grass to confirm my hopes. Indeed, big bluestem predominates, another tall grass prairie advance guard seeking to regain its dominion, but mixed in is another surprise, another treasure: a lesser known grass, sideoats grama grass is in full bloom, with its feathery seed heads hanging down, combed to one side, the yellow specks of pollen still visible between them, like a girl whose hair is strewn with flowers.

And so one gift replaces another. In the roadside ditches, the tall grass prairie still lurks, biding its time, waiting patiently to unwrap its riches.

U2 @ TCF III: The Aftermath

And then it was over. The lights came on and people poured into the streets. The new horns of our dilemma were these: should we eat first in a pub, restaurant, or hole-in-the-wall that would be packed, or should we mire ourselves in traffic and eat somewhere away from campus?

With my wife’s alumnus-knowledge, we went with the first option, headed toward Sally’s, a bar and grill we had seen in the afternoon. We crossed the street to escape the press of humanity and then realized why this side of the street was empty: “sidewalk closed ahead.” We pushed it as far as we could and then, sure enough, ended up backtracking. Up ahead, Sally’s was packed to overflowing.

“Should we just go home? My feet are killing me.”

Okay. Over to the parking garage we went, where cars are not moving. At all.

“Let’s go to Dinkytown,” the Gopher says. “It’s a few blocks walk.”

We walk up University Ave, down fraternity row. True to form, several of the large Victorian structures have music pumping and youth congregating on the sidewalks and front lawns.

“Hey, U2 fans. Wooo! U2 fans!”

A guy leans against the brick façade marking the house property, a girl straddles one of his legs. When something so exactly meets your facile expectations of it, is that cliché or stereotype? I mean, is it cliché to live up to the stereotype so exactly? Does that qualify as stereotype building? Or is that just living up to the definition?

“Let’s cross over one block,” my wife says.

After a few more blocks on 4^th Avenue where traffic is at a standstill, we begin to reach the businesses that make up the Dinkytown area. There’s Qdoba, but it’s set up as fast food and there’s a line. There’s a Chinese place but we had Chinese earlier. There’s a pasta bar that was recommended in a write up about where to get food before the U2 concert, but it looks closed. Down a side street, we see Wally’s, a hole in the wall kind of deli place. We walk over and my wife says, “But we had gyros today.”

“Let’s go to Blarneys,” I say. After all, it’s a Blarneys kind of night, right? Blarneys has to be Irish, there’s an outdoor seating area down the side of the building, and the sign says pub and grill. But I’m not reading the other signs very well. At the door, a big dude is checking IDs. Probably standard fare around the U of M, I think. There’s also music pumping. I’m sure we can get away from it, I think. Inside, everyone looks like they’re 19, slim, tight shirts, low necklines, beer in hand. We seek shelter from the eardrum swelling beats downstairs, going under a sign that says, “It’s a beautiful day,” but there it’s more of the same. The only food in sight is a plate of deep fried wings on the bar. This isn’t our crowd.

We cross the street and return to Wally’s. Inside, however, we realize that Wally’s is not just a gyro place. This is Wally’s Falafel and Hummus, and it’s Middle Easter cuisine. I have no idea what to order. I’ll probably try that waffle thing, I think to myself.

Too soon, it’s our turn. “We’ll have a sampler plate,” I say impetuously.

“I’ll have a shawarma plate,” my sister-in-law says.

When in doubt, imitate. “I’ll have a shawarma plate too,” I say.

Before I can wonder, what’s a shawarma, the lady asks me, “Chicken or Beef and Lamb?” That’s a no brainer. When in doubt, get what you’re less used to. “Lamb,” I say. Hold the beef, I think.

Only after we sit down and look more closely at the menu do we realize what we’re getting. The sampler plate includes hummus, baba ghanoush, falafel—looks like I’ll get my waffles after all—tabouli salad and bread. “Shawarma” is, quite simply, the meat you get in a gyro—shaved, barbecued beef and lamb. The plates include hummus—that’s hummus all around, I think, which has to be overkill—as well as salad and our choice of rice or fries.

When the food comes, only a few things don’t match up. The shawarma plates both have fries instead of rice. It turns out the pre-concert U2 crowd went crazy on the rice. There’s no tabouli salad on the sampler but we didn’t really know what we were looking for when it came so we never missed it. Also, it turns out Wally’s usually doesn’t serve food after eleven, so they’ve stayed open just to service the post-concert crowd. Finally, everything includes tahini sauce, which looks like ranch dressing but is much more flavorful—creamy, minty, garlicky.

The hummus looks like it’s just been whipped up. According to Wally’s menu, hummus is “a spread made of chickpeas, tahini (which is sesame paste and not to be confused with tahini sauce) lemon juice and garlic, topped with spiced chickpeas, paprika, olive oil, and served with bread.” It’s fresh, creamy, garlicky again and I can imagine nothing better after standing for four hours straight and wandering around frat parties and beer gardens. The baba ghanoush is also a spread or dip that goes on the flat bread. It’s mintier, tangier, and runnier than the hummus. The falafel look like hush puppies but inside it’s green with a mealy texture, again made from chickpeas and fava beans.

We stuff ourselves. It’s delicious to stumble off the street into another world of taste, to be filled with tastes you’re not altogether familiar with, to point at a menu and eat what you’re given and be filled. I’m dying to know from what country this food extends itself. I don’t ask, still don’t know how to ask. Later, my wife will see Lebanese mentioned somewhere on line. Love from Lebanon in the form of a shawarma plate. This is the wonder of the city, the reason my wife loved the U of M: diversity. No, difference.

Toward the end of the Vertigo Tour, Bono put on a bandana that said “coexist,” where the C was a symbol from Islam, the X was a Star of David and the T was a cross. Bono sang a line from “Father Abraham,” improvising a line that said “all sons of Abraham.” We went to see the concert film U23D in the theaters with some friends of ours, and during that section the staunch Republican friend I was with shook his head and muttered something under his breath. For some reason, coexistence seems a political threat to my friend.

Increasingly, however, I see the kingdom of God as a place of coexistence, a place where difference is preserved. For too long, the gospel itself has been a stamp upon cultures, a steam roller, a cookie cutter. I no longer think that a healthy vision of the kingdom is when “all the colors will bleed into one”; rather, in the kingdom, difference will be preserved—it will be the very crowns of the nations.

The lack of difference is also what makes me uncomfortable about the frat party and Blarneys. I’m not sure what’s distinctive there, what’s different. Rather, I get the sense that the stamp at both places was uniform and ubiquitous. If the future really does belong to crowds, as Don Delillo says, and if that means the stamp of sameness reigns in crowds, then I pray for more places like Wally’s Falafel and Hummus to coexist with an assortment of other places to eat that preserve difference.

By the time we head back to our car it’s past midnight. The buses are still packed with concert goers just now getting on. We’ll read that some concert goers had to wait up to two hours just to get on a bus. We’re headed back to Edgerton, will roll in at about 5 a.m., will pick up the kids at 8:30 and be at church by 9:30. It’s been a little crazy, but worth it: I can easily draw the lines from U2 to Wally’s Falafel and Hummus to the kingdom of God.

U2 @ TCF II: Fulfillment

Once down inside the arena, the chariot race to find the best spot was on. Our concert veteran acquaintance had counseled us that, at numbers 978-980, we could still find ourselves about three rows deep on Adam’s side, the lesser desirable of the guitarists. Edge’s side would fill up quicker.

“Last tour I was three rows deep on Adam’s side,” I mention, “and he and I had a connection.” No one’s buying it. “He’ll probably remember me.”

But there are other alternatives. As usual, there’s a walkway out away from the stage, creating an inner circle and an outer circle. One option, the concert veteran insists, is to stand with your back to the walkway so that when Bono and the Edge come out on the catwalk you’ll be able to turn around and have a tremendous view of their nostrils.

The way to the inner circle proves to be a maze. No, come to think of it, I’ve seen passageways like this before—it was rather like the stockyards: steel bars along the sides creating an alleyway, steel ramps beneath to prevent you from tripping, workers in special uniforms with assorted paraphernalia in their hands to keep you moving and orderly. Beneath our feet, in fact, there was no grass to be found anywhere. Interlocking aluminum paneling, grooved to insure we won’t lose our footing should the forecast prove true, covers every inch of TCF Bank turf. This will be no Woodstock mud fest.

After we’ve wound our way around the maze, we find the inner circle to be disappointingly full. We’re half a dozen rows from the stage, even on loser Adam’s side, and the back walkway is already three deep. People are sitting down, claiming spots. We make camp, sitting Indian style in a triangle to maximize space on the aluminum grooves. This is the non-turf we’ll be defending for the next two hours.

Before things get really crazy, I’m out to get a t-shirt. The selection has dwindled by this time in the tour, but the price has remained the same from 2005: $30 for a t-shirt; $40 for a fancier t-shirt. I get a safe, gray, $30 version and one glance at the collar reveals something about the price: Made in Tanzania of 100% African cotton. Good academic that I am, I’ve read Pietra Rivoli’s The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, so I know intellectually how hard it is to get around the corners that America has on the cotton market, that China has on the textile market. This t-shirt, if I can believe the tag, is consistent with the band’s ethos, a minor but important detail.

African cotton T-shirt in tow, I find things a bit tighter back at the stage. When my wife disappears to the bathroom for twenty minutes, I start to get antsy, convinced that the gentleman who’s wormed his way in front of me will soon fall backwards over my head. However, when she returns with a Dino’s gyro, I’m calmed a bit. We strike up a conversation with some early twenties near us. “How’d you get into U2?” I ask

“I found my dad’s album, the Joshua Tree—and I mean real album, vinyl. That and— ” I’ve forgotten who else, some 70s band, Led Zepellin perhaps—“and I was hooked.” Just as I suspected. This is a family inculcation thing.

And we wait. And it fills up more. There are people all up in my space and I don’t like people all up in my space. A mother and daughter creep in behind us. More family inculcation. I try to make myself bigger. No way am I letting some snot-nosed brat cute her way up in front of me. My wife talks to her, she’s 11. “This is her fifth U2 concert,” my wife tells me later. “She said, ‘I’ve been listening to U2 since I was born.’”

“Well, I’ve been listening since I was 12 and I’m much more discriminating,” I think.

We’re six rows deep. I look up to my right, and there’s Jason Lief, fellow professor, wearing a Twins hat. He’s at least three rows closer than I am. “When did you get here?” he yells over to me.

“2:15,” I say. “When’d you get here?”

“5:30,” he says.

Oh, he’s one of those, I think. “Oh, you’re one of those,” I say. A worm. The last three hours are looking like a lot of wasted time.

The first band, Interpol, is good. They’re dressed in semi-formal black that says, “we could be preppy but we’re rockers so we’ve turned up the sleeves on our button-down shirts and have grown our hair long/mussed it up”; the bassist and keyboard player look disinterested to me. I cheer, nod my head as if, “yeah, I get this music,” but I don’t. I stopped trying to catch lyrics to songs I didn’t know only about two concerts ago. My wife points out a woman going nuts about 25 rows up on the side. Weed—actually, speed. I cheer when they’re done. Unfortunately, the chunk of people in front of me weren’t here to see Interpol, and they don’t split once Interpol’s done like I had hoped.

It’s at least another hour wait after Interpol, with roadies swarming the stage, dissembling and assembling, plugging and checking. Finally, there’s only two left, both blond and oldish, and they won’t leave. After the end of every background song, the crowd roars in anticipation. Then another background song begins.

“What will they open with?” I ask my sister-in-law. She has no idea. She doesn’t know the new album. No one knows the new album. Early this morning, I read an MPR story that says U2 was best in the War album when they were a small-venue band. But with Joshua Tree, said the writer, they packaged their sound for something big and that was bad, the downfall of U2. Then with Achtung Baby, said the writer, they remade themselves. Then trended down. Then trended up with All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Then down. Now still down, said the writer, with No Line on the Horizon. But this is said to be a whirlwind tour, said the write, so he as going to splurge and go to the show.

Basically, if I can read between the lines, when U2 were just upstarts, on the make, when the writer and his snobby friends could be in a small selective group of fans that did not include people like Nicole Retzer, Anne-Marie Lee, and me, they were okay. Since then, not so much.

Reading around a bit more, I found someone in the Minneapolis Star Tribune celebrating the Zoo TV tour, when Bono played the playful, crazy rocker and pulled the camera up to his crotch and other rocker-appropriate stunts. I was there and 16 and it shocked me. But that’s two votes for Achtung Baby, zero for No Line on the Horizon.

But now I’m thinking of opening song possibilities. On the Elevation Tour, U2 opened with “Elevation,” a song I couldn’t stand—“A mole, digging in a hole, digging at my soul now going down—” but that they thought had the pop to be a single and an opener. On the Vertigo Tour they opened with “City of Blinding Lights,” followed immediately by “Vertigo.” They also closed with “Vertigo,” their most singley single since “Beautiful Day,” the song that made the decade for the band.

I think of songs that would fit the mold for opening acts from this album. I like the grinding intensity of the song “No Line on the Horizon,” while “Get on Your Boots” was their single of note from the album, but “Magnificent” has some of the most energy on the album, the one I would like to hear them open with. But “Magnificent” is no crotch-to-the-camera song. “I was born to sing for you,” the song says in verse 2. “I didn’t have a choice but to lift you up/ And sing whatever song you wanted me to/ I give you back my voice/ From the womb, my first cry, it was a joyful noise.” And the final cry of the chorus: “Justified till we die, you and I will magnify/ The Magnificent.”

But no one knows this album.

Dr. Brian Walsh, visiting my poetry class to expound on the music of Bruce Cockburn, also said something interesting about U2 relating to this album, No Line on the Horizon. Walsh is convinced that the Christian impulse of U2 is kept artistically in check by their unbelieving manager, Paul McGuinness, that McGuinness pulls the plug on anything that loses its cutting edge pop-artsiness and keeps U2 relevant. Walsh insists U2 can’t afford another No Line on the Horizon, it’s too Christian, too much of a popular failure.

When the background music finally fades midsong, it’s time. We see them approach first on the video board above. They’re in the building. There they are, larger than life. Where are they? Where are they?

Finally, they come on stage and apparently Bono has read the MPR article too: the opening song is “Even Better Than the Real Thing” from Achtung Baby. In fact, the first four songs are from that album, and I think I’ve flashed back to 1992.

But then the elements kick in. On “Mysterious Ways”—a song that seems to be about the mysteries of the female species but sneaks in the line “the spirit moves in mysterious ways” near the end—while Bono is out on the catwalk, it begins to rain lightly, a seeming rain of blessing.

About two songs later, it really starts to rain. We’ve brought ponchos, but everyone seems to agree that we’re going to weather this thing, Woodstockesque. When it starts to pour, I say screw it, and pull out the ponchos. One of them rips after five minutes so I’m the one left to soak.

Oh no, I think. This Minnesota crowd is going to bail. The last two indoor arena crowds, except for the people in the front of the stage, the real diehards, have been, at least in my opinion, lackluster. Primarily white, well-insured, Scandinavian Lutherans like their U2, but they like it sitting down. I keep scanning the arena throughout the show and almost no one leaves. Perhaps it’s due to the influx of New Mexicans like Doris, perhaps it’s due to the elements themselves, perhaps it’s the financial investment, but the crowd is piqued up to the top row.

Bono is piqued too. The elements and crowd response makes him improvisational. He splices in clips of the show tune “Singing in the rain,” and even digs up “Purple Rain” by Minnesota-product Prince. He introduces the lads as forces of nature/supernature: Larry is thunder and lightning, Adam is an earthquake, Edge is angels wearing beanies. Who’s left? “And then I heard the voice of God…” Bono says. We get the joke and we like the joke, like that he’ll acknowledge his own reputation and primary shortcoming.

Throughout the night, Bono is aware. He pulls the apparently up-and-coming rapper K’naan on stage, a man of Somali heritage who once called Minneapolis home, and they do a rendition of “Stand By Me” which Bono dominates. Still, Bono has done what Bono does best: share the stage in a way that makes U2 benefactors in a positive way, using music to point us to a world event that Bono wants us to pay attention to, the hunger crisis in the horn of Africa, which Bono addresses later in the show.

Later, Bono and the Edge perform an acoustic version of “Stuck in a Moment,” a song originally dedicated to INXS front man Michael Hutchence after his suicide; tonight it’s dedicated to the troubled but talented Amy Winehouse, found dead at 27. U2 are all over fifty now, past, it would seem, the traps of fame and popularity. Yet when it comes to artists in the arena of pop music, U2 is still able to say, “This is our crowd, this is the community we are a part of,” and for that reason, I think, they are still able to bear tremendous witness in that community. The performance comes off tremendously empathetic.

It’s pouring. And the show continues. At one point, Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese opposition politician who was under house arrest for years, addresses us on the video screen. She’s been freed but thousands like her have not. Won’t we continue to raise our voices, she implores, to speak for freedom? After this, U2 plays the song written for her, “Walk On.” It’s a song that makes you believe, the last song before encore.

As the night winds down, the band seem genuinely impressed at the crowd. At times, during the first part of the rain, I could swear it was otherwise. Edge looked like he was asking himself, “What am I doing at 50 in the rain? I could get pneumonia.” Larry’s tour around the catwalk—he’s supposed to come out and play the bongo for one song—was at best a hurried walk before he repositioned himself under his umbrella. Still, by the end, they all seem loathe to leave. They look around as if to say, “Wow.”

Personally, I’m good with it. I’m soaked to the boxers and I know this can’t go on forever. Bono has been as authentic as I’ve seen him. The last two concerts I thought he was faking it a good portion of the time. This crowd has performed equally well. I’m only disappointed by the set list, which has included only three songs from the new album. On the Vertigo Tour, they played eight songs from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and even Lief agrees—and he’s a theologian—that this album is better. That is to say, it’s more meaningful, less pop-py. It also, apparently, was a total flop.

This would also explain why, after hearing over a year ago that the band was set to release another album close on the heels of this one, that album is nowhere in sight. The album was to be called “Songs of Ascent,” a direct reference to the psalms, an album I can only believe was to be even more, well, spiritual than No Line on the Horizon.

As I left the stadium, soaked, my fingers pruned, I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. The show was a great show for the masses, unforgettable to many, a spiritual experience for some, but personally, I felt the band rub up against forces greater than themselves—namely market forces and age—that reminded me just how human U2 is, how human I am.

But perhaps that’s exactly what I love about them. No matter how big and grandiose—and, I might add, filthy rich—they’ve managed to remain four lads from Dublin, still on a journey, still looking for something but spreading a very human message of hope along the way. I expect they’ll try to remake themselves next album, and I won’t like it. But I still believe in what they’re trying to do, a very human endeavor.

Walk on, lads, walk on.

U2 @ TCF I: The Anticipation

I can sum up being at the U2 concert at TCF Bank Stadium in Minneapolis in one line: It was like being inside a Don Delillo novel. But so you don’t have to run out and read his twelve or so novels, gentle reader, let me narrow it down: it was like being in Delillo’s novel Underworld. Now all you have to read is 800 or so pages.

“The future belongs to crowds,” Delillo famously wrote in another of his novels, Mao II. That theme, the group magnetism and indelible imprint of crowds upon individuals, shows up again in the opening scene of Underworld: the one game playoff for the National League pennant between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers at Polo Grounds in 1951, the game in which Bobby Thomson hit a ninth inning home run off Ralph Branca to win the game for the Giants, a hit that would come to be known as “the shot heard ‘round the world.” Delillo masterfully points his lens around the stadium at this event, showing us the lives of both celebrities and nobodies, but he paints the identity of the crowd that day as something impassioned, desperate, supplicating. In Delillo’s portrayal of the stadium event, of the arena, individuals become both strong and vulnerable, they get swept up in timelessness and are at the mercy of history, they become the targets of both genius and terror.

We arrived at the stadium at 2:15 for the 7:00 show, earlier than my wife wanted, but later than my sister-in-law, an avid concert goer, would have liked. The plan was to grab something to eat at a semi-trendy restaurant in the area, the heart of the University of Minnesota, then stand in line for maybe an hour until the gates opened to general admission fans at 4:30.

In the car on the way up, we began to hear rumors of what we were in for: people who had camped out overnight in order to be the first ones into the arena. Upon arrival, then, we went to check out the length of the line. It extended for perhaps a quarter-mile. Event workers were handing out purple adhesive bracelets upon which they were writing numbers in black Sharpie. Once we realized this, the plan was out the window. I became number 980.

“The future belongs to crowds.”

The CSC Event worker told us that they planned to “move us up” at 2:30. We didn’t really know what “move us up” meant, but we knew it had to be important, so the new plan was to wait until “they moved us up,” then to leave my sister-in-law in line while my wife and I went to get food and brought it back to her.

While we waited, we oriented ourselves to our place in line. Ahead of us were two younger couples, in their early twenties by the looks of it: heavy makeup on one of the young women that said high school was not too far behind her; a buff, young athlete-look to one of the males; rings on one couple but not the other. They were already decked out in U2 garb; one of the young women wore a One t-shirt, the aid organization founded by Bono whose goal it is to wipe out extreme poverty, mainly through marshaling international government aid.

Behind us were two women of an ethnicity not Caucasian, then a Caucasian man; they were not together. However, they were comparing notes about whom had been to what concert, and it turns out the guy was a rock star of U2 concerts—132 shows total in his life, concerts hit on this leg of the tour having included Chicago, two shows in Montreal, Toronto, Denver, Utah, now Minneapolis, and he would be boarding a plane the next morning for the upcoming show in Pittsburgh. I looked over this fan of fans: a somewhat disheveled man in his late forties, graying, sitting in a camping chair with a cooler full of liquid at his feet. I figured he was single until he confessed—lied?—that his wife packed the cooler for him. “You’re gonna just leave the chair?” someone asked him once we were told we couldn’t bring any big items with us.

“It’s like two-fifty at the dollar store, man” he responded.

Moving up happened a little later than promised, about 2:45. We moved about 100 yards, then stopped, recamped, my sister-in-law setting herself up under a small avenue tree to hide from a sun that occasionally peaked through heavy if unfocused clouds and sent the temperatures into the upper eighties. The forecast was for serious storms so I kept searching the sky to the southwest, though that view was blocked by the faux brick of TCF Bank Stadium, the corporate title hierarchically printed above the names of each individual county where tax dollars grow on green stalks of a variety of thicknesses and make their way here—only symbolically, of course—to the crown jewel of the state university: a stadium for a perennially losing football team. (By this time in the afternoon, I’ve already thought and said “TCF Bank Stadium” so much that I’ve begun to subconsciously transfer my funds to said bank, agog at the benefits of their “free checking” program.)

My wife and I marched back around the building to the far side where we had parked, and as we did so we heard the sound checks for the evening, including significant riffs from a number of songs that I assumed would be on the set list that night. To the southwest the stadium is open and we stopped momentarily to get our first look at “the claw,” a huge, arched tripod that is the show. The lights and sound for the show hang primarily from this claw with the stage propped in the middle above which hangs a round video screen that projects what’s happening on stage, creating a 360 degree viewing venue and maximizing arena performances. Thus the tour is called the 360 Tour. It’s supposed to be state of the art and looks space age. Rumor has it that it takes three days to set up. No doubt it’s patented and all that. They also want to sell them now for other tours. Go figure.

Two streets over where we want to get lunch, Washington Avenue, is completely torn up. This information was also what prompted our 2:15 arrival. Multiple media outlets were warning about congestion due to lack of parking and road construction. Get prepaid parking, arrive early, and use public transportation were the three mantras, in descending order, that concert goers were encouraged to consume and regurgitate in order to avoid mass chaos. We opted for the second choice and had our pick of parking at the first lot we tried.

We conquered Washington Avenue on foot and brought back pork lo mein, moo shoo pork, and spring rolls to share with my sister-in-law on the curbside by 3:15. By 4:00, the anticipated “second move,” everyone stood up without prompting.

For nothing. We didn’t move again until 4:30, the official time for the gates to open. In the meantime, though, no one sat. This was time for more people watching. Up ahead, a man in his fifties, balding but with long blond hair hanging down his back, kept up a ruckus about being from Canada. A woman with short blond hair and a U2 tattoo on her upper arm also walked by a couple of times.

My sister-in-law had acquainted herself with one of the women directly behind us. Doris was from New Mexico, had been to shows primarily out west, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Denver, and now Minneapolis because she had relatives here. “Where are you from originally?” I asked.

“I’m Santa Fe,” she says, answering questions of place origin and ethnic origin all in one. Doris is a small business owner and a flamenco dancer and was once photographed for a book about the people and places of New Mexico and the picture ended up in the governor’s office where she also ended up lobbying for small business owners—to no avail. She’s also religious. “I grew up Baptist,” she says, but has also volunteered to help the Carmelite Nuns in New Mexico who recommended a Chinese acupuncturist after her father had a stroke. The acupuncturist helped the father immensely. “It was a miracle,” she says, “Praise Jesus.”

I’m from a small town. We have our own colorful people though we’re primarily the same color. But we have no Doris. I am swept away by her narrative, enthralled. Later, I overhear that she’ll be having her fortieth class reunion soon. Doris is ballpark 58.

Doris also characterizes a U2 concert as “a spiritual experience.” She’s not the first to do so; nor will she be the last. In fact, I myself have held onto a quote from a 1987 Time Magazine article in which someone said, “U2 is what church should be.” I flash the quote now for Doris, who’s appreciative.

Later, I’ll watch a piece from KARE 11 news that is full of wonderful, over the top sound bites from my fellow fans who are ahead of me in the line. Several of them react to a set of storms that passed through in the morning. Ann-Marie Lee of Milwaukee, whose name, complexion, and accent suggest that she’s probably Hmong says for the camera, “This is a spiritual pilgrimage and we’ll be here no matter how bad the weather gets” (Tessman). The tattoo lady, though, is Nicole Retzer, a home grown fanatic from St. Paul. “Bono signed my arm and then the Edge signed my arm,” Ratzer says of her run-in with the band at the 2005 concert, “and then the next morning I went and had [the signatures] tattooed over.”

The future belongs to crowds—and to cameras videotaping crowds, or to cameras videotaping individuals trying to stand out from or ride the wave of crowds. Ms. Retzer isn’t done. The next question that reporter Renee Tessman asks must have been something like, “Are you worried about getting rained out tonight?” To which Retzer replies, “Bono has, I think, direct communication with, or is some kind of higher power. So I’m not worried about it.”

Another thing that passes the time is the volunteers coming around signing people up for Bono’s causes. The One people leave us alone, but I’m already a member anyway and so is my sister-in-law, who, she recalls, signed up to free Burma during the last tour. Is Burma free now? We don’t ask. But a young woman wearing an Amnesty International t-shirt does stop and ask if she can talk to us. She prefaces her comments with the typical “I’m-not-here-to-pressure-you, just-give-you-some-information” spiel, but U2 fans are notably supple toward anything that smacks of Bono, and this has Bono written all over it.

I’m wondering what international cause it will be this time. Political prisoners in Sudan? Justice for the Khmer Rouge? Free Mongolia? Surprisingly, this time the cause is maternal health during pregnancy and childbirth in the U.S., especially among poor and minority populations where, we’re told, the U.S. ranks fiftieth in the number of maternal deaths or something. They’re aiming for healthcare, I say to myself, and more pointedly, for white suburban guilt, which I’ve got, even though it’s white small town guilt in my case, but okay, we do sign up which just means giving our names and email accounts. The young lady is a student at St. Olaf College in Northfield, studying such a long list of improbably serious topics that I catch my breath and can’t reproduce it in its entirety for you here, but know it includes sociology and women’s studies and something about race relations.

I also see some people walking around in t-shirts proclaiming “U2 green team” and now, I think to myself, this is getting entirely too predictable. I hear from some former high school students of mine ahead of me in line—who admit to being U2 fans for about a month—that the team goes around explaining how green their semi-trucks are. The tour trucks are parked behind us on this closed off street: shiny red ones with pure white trailers. One of the students, now an engineering student at SDSU, says under his breath, “I don’t care how green they are, they still get eight miles to the gallon.”

About this time, after standing for the last forty-five minutes in anticipation of the (false) promised move at 4:00, we do begin to move, and the line cheers. We move through the desolation in front of us: empty water bottles, newspapers, pizza boxes, chairs, Styrofoam coolers, umbrellas, blankets, pool floaties, and a tent, all momentary comforts now abandoned like this is the rapture. As we walk by the green team, one of them has the gall to say, “U2 recycles, so should you.”

We’re slowly funneled down toward TCF Bank Stadium (“free checking”) and the mouth marked Gate C. Through the gauntlet of semidarkness, I can see the light of the field ahead. If this is a pilgrimage, that’s the goal, the shrine. But perhaps, as in Canterbury Tales, the real reward has been the stories of my fellow pilgrims. And, I must admit, as in Flannery O’Connor’s, “Revelation,” as I walk toward the goal, I’m firmly one of this crowd: we’re all bearing equal baggage, all caught up in the mass impulse, in the danger of being a collective, in the search for something emotive and human and technologically enhanced, for something momentary yet lasting.

If the future belongs to crowds, the future is upon me as I’m swept by a river of humanity and desire down a tunnel but toward some distant light.

Tessman, Renee. “U2 fans weather the storm waiting for outdoor concert.” Kare 11 News. Online. 23 July 2011.