Detroit Lakes

My honest reflection on a trip to Minnesota, and on meeting nearly all of my husband’s family.

This will not be a short piece. It’s not something to read in a hurry. I’m asking you to read it all the way through, because otherwise you’ll be left holding only a few pieces of a puzzle that only makes sense whole.

As many of you know, my husband is from Minnesota. What you probably don’t know is that he was born and spent the first years of his life in a town in the north of the state with a population of fifty people. Yes, you read that right: fifty. At eleven, he moved to Detroit Lakes with his mother, his sister, and his brother.

Dwayne comes from a big family. And I don’t mean his immediate circle, because he only has two siblings. I mean his thirteen aunts and uncles on his mother’s side, his four on his father’s side, and more than fifty cousins. Those cousins have children. And many of those children already have children of their own.

Dwayne and I married two years ago, in a small, short, and very intimate ceremony. Some members of his family were there, and I had met others before. But this trip to Detroit Lakes would finally be my chance to meet nearly everyone else.

Our journey began in Atlanta, our home. We chose to travel by land because the United States holds so much worth discovering that none of it can be appreciated from the air. And many of you already know this about me: I’m obsessed with getting to know this country as deeply as I can. Not only its language, but its history, and the places that never show up in Hollywood movies yet are just as much this nation. To me, that is real acculturation. We drove, too, because the car lets me bring what I refuse to travel without, like my own pillow and my own blanket. Because the hotel may have five stars, but my pillow and my blanket have ten. We packed clothes for two weeks and, of course, our coffee. Because when you’re an entrepreneur, every situation is a business opportunity.

Our first stop was Louisville, Kentucky. An interesting city, though its streets were quiet. We stayed one night and continued toward Chicago. And Chicago, I fell in love with. It was my first time there, and I loved its architecture, the warmth of its people, and those walks along the river. There we were welcomed by Julie, Dwayne’s cousin, who has lived in the city for nearly thirty years and showed us around. We walked, we ate, we laughed, and we talked about everything. Julie is a professional woman, from the business world, and talking with her was a pleasure. In fact, this piece was born from that conversation. Julie wanted to know my impression of Detroit Lakes, my read on a small town in northern Minnesota, how I moved through it among its people. She was curious. And so, of course, was I.

After two nights in Chicago, we headed to Minneapolis. There, Audra, Dwayne’s best friend, and her husband Jon were waiting for us. The three of them met in college, and ever since, that friendship has stayed intact through the years. And I’ll be honest: I love Audra. She is a brilliant woman, brave, with a wonderfully open mind. And Jon is a lovely man. That night the four of us had dinner, we had deep conversations, then we took a walk by the lake in downtown Wayzata, and afterward Dwayne and I returned to the hotel.

The next day we visited the University of St. Thomas, where Dwayne did his undergraduate degree. It is one of the memories I treasure most from the trip. As we walked the campus, he pointed out where his dorm had been, where the library was that he used to study in. I could see the light in his eyes as he returned to that time, and I fell for every one of his gestures. It was tenderness and admiration at once for this human being I now call my husband.

That evening we had dinner at Aunt Rosemary’s. And here I need to pause, because Rosemary is a very special aunt. Beyond being a visibly intelligent woman, she carries her love for Dwayne right there in her eyes. He lived in her home for a season while he studied, and she has come to visit us in Atlanta more than once. It is always a joy to have her. This time I met Bud, her husband, an incredible man, a great talker, with a kindness of spirit you feel the moment you greet him. I also met Uncle Jim, Aunt Sharon, and her husband Jack. A day full of people and full of life.

After two nights in Minneapolis, we set out for Detroit Lakes. It was the shortest leg of the whole adventure: barely three hours of highway, flat landscapes on either side, dozens of green miles, and almost no mountains. To me, a spectacle.

Detroit Lakes struck me as magical from the very first moment. A town wrapped around an enormous lake, with kind people and around ten thousand residents. There lives Jane, Dwayne’s mother, who welcomed us with shrimp fettuccine for dinner. And I love shrimp. We spent a warm while with her, as always, and then went back to the hotel.

And it was right there in Detroit Lakes that the most intense part of the trip began, because that is where Dwayne went to high school and where much of his family lives.

On our second day we drove to Flom, about forty minutes down straight roads with a flat horizon on both sides. There I saw the house where Dwayne lived until he was eleven, and we visited his father’s grave. In silence, in my prayer, I thanked him for giving me Dwayne.

And this was the second most beautiful moment of the trip. Because getting to know so much of my husband, up close, is simply magical. Watching him show it all to me with so much love, with that light so uniquely his in his eyes, only confirms that I have, right beside me, the ideal life partner. And not only for what I’ve just described, but for the road Dwayne has traveled. Out of that town of fifty people, and then out of Detroit Lakes, came a man who chose to study, to move to New York, and to earn his master’s at NYU, one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Later he came to Atlanta, and that’s where we met.

And there’s something I always tell Dwayne: I’ve come to see that Detroit Lakes is not a place you escape from, it’s one of those places you carry with you, in its values, in its warmth. Because in every aunt, every uncle, every cousin, every friend I met, I saw the very root that made Dwayne the man he is: kind people, warm, generous, with a genuine smile. His story is not that of someone who left a small town behind, but of someone that town made. A Colombian and a man born in northern Minnesota ended up finding each other in Atlanta. There, right there, is where my fascination with our own story is born, and my admiration for Dwayne, and also my affection for the place that raised him and gave me this wonderful man.

Back in Detroit Lakes, I hadn’t grasped how many people I would meet in so few days. Cousins, friends, former classmates, whole branches of family. A beautiful adventure, but also a constant demand on my energy that began to catch up with me by the third day. So much so that I had to tell Dwayne, in plain words: give me a break.

And here is something I want to explain. English is my second language. Even though I live immersed in it all the time, at the university, at home, every single day, meeting new people, new places, and new codes, all at once and all in my second language, was an information overload. Picture opening a thousand windows on your laptop at the same time, until the processor can’t take any more and has to be restarted. That, exactly, is what happened to me.

One of the reasons for the trip was the wedding of Ellie, Dwayne’s niece, and her husband Noah, a charming young couple. The night before, there was a dinner for the family closest to the couple, and we were invited. That day I asked Dwayne to go on his own. I needed space, to decompress all that information and arrive whole the next day, when I would meet even more people.

During those days we also shared our coffee with anyone who wanted to try our beans, brought straight from Colombia. It was one more reason to talk, to meet more of Dwayne’s family and friends. And I’m left with immense gratitude for the warmth with which everyone received our project.

The wedding day came. A beautiful ceremony that, thankfully, took place in the shade of the trees, because I, with my skin pigmentation issues, can’t be in the sun for a single moment. The food was delicious, the chocolate cake exquisite, the newlyweds radiant. Dwayne and I danced and talked with the people at our table. Several of his uncles came over to greet me, and I met many more people. I also took the chance to tell Jane, my mother-in-law, once more: thank you for Dwayne. I had done it before, but I wanted to say it again. And I’ll probably keep saying it every time I see her. I would have loved to spend a little more time with some of the wonderful cousins I’d met in the days before, like Tiffany, Scott, and Alicia. But by that point, in all honesty, my social bits were spent.

And in that exhaustion I confirmed, firsthand, something I had only ever read about. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar, in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, proposed that human beings can only sustain around one hundred and fifty stable relationships at a time. Today they call it Dunbar’s number. Yuval Noah Harari picks up that same figure in Sapiens to explain how our species learned to cooperate. And though the “flow” Mihály Csíkszentmihályi describes is something else, that state of total absorption in what you’re doing, what I lived was precisely its opposite. Not absorption, but saturation. I crossed my limit in just a few days.

But I left Detroit Lakes with one certainty. There are places that never appear in the movies and that, nonetheless, hold the best of this country. People who open their home, their table, and their story to a Colombian who arrived speaking his second language, carrying his own pillow, his own blanket, and his own coffee. Allergic to lactose and to the sun, no less. Ha.

To all of those people, and to that town around a lake, thank you. I hope that one day you’ll come to Atlanta and give me the chance to show you a little of the charm that lives inside the beautiful chaos of the American South.