The Mighty Red
Louise Erdrich
The Mighty Red. Louise Erdrich. New York: HarperCollins, 2024. 373 pp. $32, hardcover.
Louise Erdrich writes stunning novels about our region. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, a town where the Red River begins along the border with Minnesota. The Red flows north across the ancient bed of Lake Agassiz, into Manitoba, Canada, and eventually into Lake Winnipeg. The Mighty Red is a novel about the ordinary people who live in the Red River Valley. What makes the book so stunning is the juxtaposition between what modern humans have done to the Red River and its valley and the simmering turmoil humans cause in their own lives, a juxtaposition of which the humans are barely aware. We are always aware, though, that the action is taking place in the Red River Valley.
In a small paragraph describing the Red River before the novel begins, Erdrich notes that the river is relatively young, that it has been made toxic by runoff from fields, and that long ago the runoff into that ancient lake made its soil, the soil of the Red River Valley, black. About that soil, the narrator of the novel, about halfway through the book, comments further.
Here is some of the most fertile land upon the earth. The owners of this treasure were various farmers whose bill-paying cash crop was sugar beets. Many considered it a point of pride that their area was number one in the country for the production of sugar. But although sugar is a useless and even harmful substance, and although this nutritionless white killer is depleting the earth’s finest cropland, you forget that when you are eating blueberry crumble, thought Hugo. (p 144)
Most of the characters in The Mighty Red are involved in the sugar-beet industry in one way or another. The two central characters are Kismet, teen daughter of Crystal and Martin, and Gary, teen son of Diz and Winnie. Crystal drives a semi-truck that hauls beets from giant piles, stacked near the fields at harvest, to the sugar refinery, and her husband is a frustrated actor who teaches theater at various schools in the area. Diz farms a giant acreage planted mostly with sugar beets. Tension in the story begins early, because Gary is smitten with Kismet and wants to marry her, but Kismet is not very interested. This story of young love intertwines with other stories happening in the community, among their friends, and among their parents’ friends. Some things go awry, and others don’t. Erdrich narrates episodes vividly. In one scene, Kismet walks into a house where the owners have two small dogs.
The two dogs ping-ponged at Kismet in a frothing frenzy, nipping at her legs, but she was wearing jeans. She ignored them. They circled swift as squirrels, dashing at her ankles, hanging on to the denim by their teeth. She continued to ignore them. Soon they quit. Comforted by her indifference, they claimed her, trotting beside her on dainty legs, taking quick sniffs. They could smell her unconcern, and then maybe they could smell her astonishment. (p 181-182)
The stories of the characters are gripping, but the novel keeps putting their stories in the context of what humans are doing to the Red River and its valley as well as to our larger planet. One of Kismet’s friends, Hugo, sees no desirable future for himself in the local economy, so he leaves to make lots of money, as so many North Dakotans and other Americans have done, in the oil region of the Bakken formation around Williston, North Dakota, where fracking is making oil companies rich. That work environment is dehumanizing, but in a different way.
We get to see interactions among neighbors. One set of episodes features Bill Pavlecky, a farmer who, ten years ago, decided to take a no-till approach to growing soybeans. Diz, who is using seeds of Roundup-ready, GMO sugar beets in his own fields, notices that Bill’s soybeans are more mature than the soybeans in the fields of another neighbor, Spiral, because Bill’s approach of not plowing allows his fields to dry sooner in spring, and he can therefore plant his beans earlier. A discussion about this idea occurs in another scene, when Bill, Diz, and Spiral are talking over beers in the local tavern. Bill wants to demonstrate why he had shifted to not plowing his fields, so he brings three mason jars to the tavern, a jar filled with dirt from each of the three farmers’ fields. The dirt from Diz’s and Spiral’s fields is as fine as dust, but Bill’s is dark and clumpy. Bill opens the lids and pours in small amounts of beer, demonstrating that his dark soil absorbs the liquid, while the beer forms an impermeable layer on top of the dirt in other two jars, so it can’t soak down. Bill asserts that his little experiment demonstrates that his dirt is soil.
We learn a lot about the sometimes-mind-numbing work involved in endlessly driving trucks of beets to the refinery. The routine is accented toward the end of each Spring, though, when piles of beets, which have not yet been hauled to the refinery, start to age, and the bottoms of the piles turn to mush, producing a stink that fills the atmosphere of the entire region. The head of PR for the beet refinery says the “stink was the fragrance of money.” Our narrator puts it like this:
Yes, the rain smelled like rotten eggs because of the hydrogen sulfide produced by the deteriorating sugar beets. Yet, the air over the field and into town and along the river smelled like old-cooked broccoli that you have forgotten in the bowl in your refrigerator, or maybe like burnt coffee run through the wrong end of a dog. Yes, there’s a penetrating unpleasantness. The smell affected everybody’s outlook. Even for the good of the economy, it was something that some people could not easily get used to. But although you weren’t used to it, you had to accept it if you wanted to live along the mighty red. (pp 143-144)
The Mighty Red is a story, beautifully told, about the different strategies the characters devise to accommodate that penetrating unpleasantness, of what they’re doing to the Red River Valley, of what they’re doing to themselves, and what they’re doing to their families, friends, and neighbors. The novel ends with more struggles, with realizations, with some joy, and with the final sentence, “This was the world.”
Erdrich continues the struggles, realizations, and joys into her acknowledgments, ending with an acknowledgment to Clyde Johnson, who has driven a sugar beet truck for twenty-two years, during which time he has documented statistics of every trip: miles driven, tons of beets hauled (and by extension tons of sugar processed), gallons of diesel fuel consumed, as well as the number of bananas, oranges, and apples he has eaten. His favorite apples are Haralsons.
Fredric L. Quivik
Fredric L. Quivik
Care of Creation Work Group
St. Paul, MN
Saint Paul Area Synod
Fred Quivik is an environmental historian and historian of technology who works as an expert witness in environmental litigation. He is a member of Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in Saint Paul.