North Country (2005)

directed by Niki Caro

Emma Riehle Bohmann

“Work a day in the pit—tell me you’re tough.”

Trains whistle outside my hotel room. There’s an unopened packet of ear plugs on the nightstand when I come in. A card attached to the cellophane packaging reads: “In an effort to provide our guests with a quality experience, we have attached a complimentary set of ear plugs to reduce disruption due to uncontrollable train traffic.”

They come every ten minutes throughout the afternoon: long freight trains traveling south through the town of Virginia, on Minnesota’s Iron Range. From the couch in my hotel room, I watch the cars pass. There’s something mesmerizing about them. My window is just three feet wide, revealing only a small chunk of the scene. I can’t tell when the train will end, can’t tell when there will be an empty flatbed, when there will be a large boxcar rushing past.

“Work hard, keep your mouth shut, and take it like a man.”

“They’re coming down from the mines.” Housekeeping has come to my room to give me pillowcases. The staff person is a young man, Latino, maybe in his early 20s, if that. He tells me it’s his first day on the job. He’s careful with the pillowcases, takes his time. “There’s one mine over there”—he waves northward—“another one back there”—south—“and one over there”—vaguely east.

“They’re all operational?” Me, the city slicker, three hours north of my home in Minneapolis, watching him tuck the ends of the pillowcases into themselves, nice and neat.

He nods. “There used to be five,” he says. “Now there are only three.” I want to ask him more—does he know anyone who works there? Has he ever worked there? What does he think of the mines? But I’m hesitant. I don’t know how my questions will be perceived, how I will be perceived. I’ve lived in this state most of my life, I pass through this town every summer as I travel up to my family’s cabin, but I am still very much an outsider.

“What are you doing up here anyway?” he asks me. “There’s nothing to do here. It’s boring.”

“She’s kinda girly to be a miner.”

A small sampling of the notes I took during my watch of North Country:

Snow

When did she pack up the truck bed?

Fuck this dude

Oh hell no

Everything is so upsetting

Serious assholes

So fucking patronizing & condescending

Fuck Bobby

What the fuck

What the fuck

Fuck you, Earl

Disgusting fucking creep

Oh this is so fucked up

“Women take everything too personally.”

North Country the movie is based on, or inspired by, or loosely related to, Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Company the court case. But a fictionalization of a true story is just that—fiction. In fiction, timelines are condensed, 14 years becoming one. In fiction, witnesses recant their testimony on the stand. In fiction, a woman stands alone until, in a powerful display of solidarity, she doesn’t. Loose ends tie up, the viewer feels good about the closing moments, the disgust and anger experienced in the first two hours somehow wiped away.

Fiction is simple, digestible, in a way that real life is not.

“Maybe I should charge you for every load of laundry.”

A small sampling of the billboards I saw on my drive up to the Iron Range from Minneapolis:

Mining + Environment = A Stronger Minnesota

What aren’t they telling you? www.miningtruth.org

American Steel = American Jobs. Thank you, President Trump!

Wonder how the Nazis started? Look in your mirror. (Handwritten on a two-by-four of plywood and placed on the edge of someone’s property.)

Giants Ridge Ski & Snowboard Recreation Area . . . Because why should summer have all the fun?

“Aren’t I allowed to be anyone I want?”

The Virginia High Bridge carries U.S. Highway 53 1,100 feet over the abandoned Rouchleau Pit, connecting the towns of Virginia and Eveleth, Minnesota. In the summer, the waters of the pit are a sparkling, clear blue, surrounded by jutting red cliffs. It takes about 15 seconds to cross the bridge by car, and the four-lane highway is so wide—and the guardrails so tall—that a driver can hardly tell they are 200 feet above the surface of the water.

I visit the bridge on foot. It’s February, so the blue water is frozen over and the red of the cliffs is buried beneath snow. The view is stunning: a 200-foot drop to the snow-covered ice, a vista of cliffs and trees and, in the distance, smoke blooming from the machinery of a nearby mine. The Mesabi bike trail runs across the bridge, parallel to the road, and it’s from here that I’m able to take in the view. It’s 10 degrees, but sunny. The trail is covered with packed snow, but the footing is uneven, and I’m soon sweating beneath my coat. Occasionally, I hit a soft patch, and sink in up to my knees. It may take a car 15 seconds, but it takes me at least 20 minutes to cross the bridge. I keep stopping to take pictures. It’s hard to remember that this isn’t a natural lake, but rather a pool that has formed in the pit of a now-abandoned mine. It’s hard to remember that this site of beauty is also a site of destruction.

“Everyone needs a purpose. Yours is those kids. Your father’s is that mine.”

United Taconite Mine sits on a hillside above Eveleth, Minnesota, population 3,622. The mine began its life as EVTAC Mining Company and was known for many years simply as Eveleth Taconite Company. It is this mining company against which Lois Jenson and her coworkers Patricia Kosmach and Kathleen Anderson filed their class-action sexual harassment suit in 1988. From the side of the road, where I’ve pulled over to snap a picture, I can see a row of three massive, yellow trucks—some kind of loader or hauler, I can only assume—parked outside the building. It’s Sunday morning, so they stand idle.

Eveleth, it seems, is known for two things: mining and hockey. The water tower is emblazoned with the words “Hockey Hall of Fame.” The U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame Museum towers over the highway. It’s filled with signed photographs and playing cards, jerseys and pucks, videos of Hall of Fame inductions. There’s a TV in one corner playing the entire broadcast of the “Miracle on Ice” medal-round hockey game between the U.S. and the Soviet Union at the 1980 Olympics. I get the sense that I would appreciate—possibly even enjoy—the museum more if I cared about hockey.

I drive through downtown Eveleth on my way back to the highway. Signage along the road directs me to the “Big Stick.” I’m pretty sure I know what this will be, but I’m still curious. Sure enough, the sign leads me to a corner lot that contains an enormous hockey stick and puck. At 110 feet long and 10,000 pounds, it’s the world’s largest free-standing hockey stick. There’s a couple sitting in their car across the street from me, their engine running, and they watch me as I take a picture. When I drive off, they’re still there.

“You’re taking jobs where there aren’t any to take.”

A complete list of the stores open along the main street in downtown Virginia at 11 a.m. on Sunday morning:

Domino’s

Subway

Rocket Liquor

“She was pretty emotional.”

The Virginia High Bridge opened in September of 2017. Prior to its construction, Highway 53 ran across land owned by U.S. Steel, a mining company. The state had obtained an easement from the company in order to build the roadway—but U.S. Steel still owned the land as well as its mineral rights. In 2010, the company—now called Cleveland Cliffs—informed the state that it was going to expand its United Taconite mine. The roadway would have to be moved.

It is no small undertaking to move an entire highway, though it’s happened before on the Iron Range. And not just roads—in 1919, the entire city of Hibbing, Minnesota, moved to accommodate yet another growing mine. Such undertakings aren’t cheap, but when the mines are the lifeblood of the area, the expense is worth it.

When you’re surrounded by mines, it can be difficult to find a new path for a highway. At one point, the state proposed rerouting 53 to travel around the towns of Virginia and Eveleth, but that plan was quickly vetoed. The economic cost to the cities—the money they would lose out on by not having 10,000 vehicles travel through them every day—was too great. And so instead, they settled on the bridge over the Rouchleau Pit. I’m told it’s an engineering marvel. As I look through the slats in the railing at the pit below, I can believe it.

“Right has nothing to do with the real world.”

I like to travel solo. I like to see the world at my own pace, do the things that I like to do without having to wait on someone else. It’s why I’ve taken this trip to the Iron Range by myself. I spend the first afternoon cross-country skiing. The trails are pristine, yet there’s no one else here. I’m alone in the woods, the only sounds those of my breathing, the slide of my skis across the snow, the thwack of my poles. I fly down hills, strain back up them, push and glide, push and glide. In places, the groomed corduroy of the trail is interrupted by deer tracks, though the animals themselves keep out of sight. It’s beautiful here, and I wonder why I haven’t done this before, but the truth is, watching North Country is the first time traveling to the Iron Range ever occurred to me.

“What was I sposed to do?”

As I’m making my way through the snow to the Virginia High Bridge, I encounter a man and woman, a couple in town from Baltimore. I ask them what brings them so far north, and they tell me their grandmother is turning 100. They’ve come for her birthday party.

“It’s pretty here,” the man says, “but this sure is a lot of snow.”

“Maybe we’ll see you out on the bridge,” the woman says, for I’m making better time than they are, but when I reach the bridge, they’re nowhere to be seen. They must have given up, turned around. Maybe they realized how tall it was and a fear of heights kicked in. Maybe the trek was taking longer than they had time for. Maybe it was just too much.

“Well for starters, you stand up.”

Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co. was the first class-action sexual harassment lawsuit in the United States. It proved to employers that their employees could successfully sue them for not preventing sexual harassment in the workplace. After its conclusion, thousands of business around the country began adopting sexual harassment policies. It’s considered a landmark case, one that broke new ground in advancing these policies.

When they made North Country, residents of the Iron Range worried about how they’d be portrayed. The case divided the Range at the time, and the movie stirred up those memories. And, according to a Minnesota Public Radio article, Lois Jenson wasn’t happy about it.

“She says she and the other women who worked at [EVTAC] were hurt first by the harassment in the mines,” wrote Stephanie Hemphill in 2005. “They were hurt again when they were asked humiliating personal questions in court. She says the book caused more pain. And now, she says, she expects the same from the movie.”

I don’t know what Jenson thought of the movie, or if she ever watched it in the end. I hope that, whatever she did, the result wasn’t as traumatic as she’d feared. I hope that she knows that generations of women who came after her are grateful for her actions, for the strength she showed, and the resolve she clung to. I hope that whatever the mine gave her in her settlement was enough for her to never have to return there.

And as for me—I maneuver my car back onto Highway 53 and drive south, away from Virginia, away from Eveleth, away from the Iron Range, and back to the city. But before I do, I take a last look at United Taconite Mine. I roll down my window to see if I can somehow smell it—the iron, the smelt, the dust, the exhaust and smoke, something. But there are only snowflakes in the air, and sunshine, and I roll the window back up and continue my drive.

Emma Riehle Bohmann reads, writes, and runs in Minneapolis. She is currently working on a novel.