Linsey McGoey in The Ideas Letter:
The front lawn of the small bungalow where Jessie lives with her wife and daughter is freshly mowed. Two vehicles are parked in the driveway: a pick-up truck and a small silver Pontiac. A few loose tools lie on the Pontiac’s trunk. Its back fender and the truck’s thin rocker panels are rusted, casualties of winters in northwest Wisconsin.
But it’s summer right now, and as Jessie and I talk swarms of gnats clog the air between us. They “get in everybody’s personal space,” she says nonchalantly. She’s 27, her wife is 32. They were married in 2018 under a large oak tree overlooking Memory Lake, within spitting distance of the bungalow.
Every July, Memory Lake is the site of a major championship in which snowmobiles are raced across the water. For one weekend a year it brings 100 participants and thousands of spectators to Grantsburg, Wisconsin, population: 1,350. This year’s event came on the heels of one of the wettest Junes in state history. When I visited Grantsburg the following weekend, it had the quiet look of a place swept clean by departed workers and volunteers. The blazing heat was back, bringing the clouds of gnats. Ever-present and in your face.
Politics felt that way, too, in the leadup to one of the most electrifying presidential elections in U.S. history.
Jessie was wearing a ball cap over a punk haircut, shaved on the sides and spikey on top. She had neon-orange tunnel earrings, circling dime-size lobe holes like the rings of an eclipse. After Jessie and her wife got married, they bought a pride flag and hung it outside their home. Nothing happened at first. Then it was torn down. For about a year they hesitated about doing anything that would make their home conspicuous again.
More here.
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