Wherein I talk about boobs and Bob Dylan

I spent the weekend on the edge of the Iron Range in northwest Minnesota, searching for Bob Dylan.

Since my parents moved to the area five years ago, I’ve known it was the red iron ore soil that birthed Dylan – and the same place from which he turned his back and tried to cut his tangled ties.

I'm an overthinker, especially when it comes to issues of home and memory and shared history and song lyrics, so my brain hurts a little from taking it all in. But here are a few highlights:

First of all, my sister and I went to the Dylan Days music fest together and saw some awesome and gritty old folkies, and we made these awesomely gritty t-shirts:

In case you can't read them, they say, "ROCK ON/IRON ON," which we figured was an Iron Range pun. Somehow. We surprisingly got beaucoup compliments on the shirts in Hibbing, Bob's hometown and site of the show, but I got the feeling nobody really got it but us. A lot of things are like that with our family.

A side note: My sister did the actual ironing on, which commenced by really effing my shirt up. The "r" and the "c" in "ROCK" are both backward, which at first I was a little pissed about but later decided made it more authentically "Range." Also, on the ride to Hibbing my sister kept staring at my boob, and I said, "Why are you staring at my boob?" and she said sorta glumly, "Your 'R' is peeling off." So I said, "Oh, I'm sorry my boob is disappointing you," and she said, "I'm probably the first one who's ever been disappointed by that boob." And I laughed, really hard.

A secondary side note: Before the folk concert, in front of Hibbing High School, we asked a guy to take the above picture of us in our shirts. I said, "Be sure to include the full majesty of our homemade shirts," and some big local guy walking by said, "Huh. That won't be hard."

THIS JUST IN: I'm hearing from my sister via text that the entire word "IRON" came off her shirt in the wash, and it now says, "ROCK ON... ON." Now that's a disappointment.

We found the house where Dylan grew up, appropriately on this street:



...and saw the current owners' garage door mural "honoring" him:

The next day we visited -- I'm not making this up -- a museum called "Ironworld," situated on the rim of the world's largest open mine pit.

Pretty, but also pretty messed up. Nearly 2 billion tons of earth were dug out over the past 100 years to make this "scenery."

Ironworld did have a good exhibit about Dylan, and his complicated relationship with his hometown. Good stuff if you're headed toward the Range.

An original (not revisited) sign from Highway 61:

I probably should have saved some of these for another post. We might be getting some more pictures of my foliage tomorrow.