One short week ago, I made a semi-impromptu weekend trip to Sioux Falls, S.D., and came across a massive stainless-steel sculpture spanning the length of a football field.
Now that five years have passed since the COVID lockdown, it's interesting to note which memories from quarantine have stuck with me and which ones have faded away with time.
It鈥檚 been quite the honor to spend the majority of the last decade as an onlooker to some of the examples I will give, but community to me is also in the small interactions.
When I first arrived in Bemidji to work at the Pioneer, I set a goal, vowing to leave something good behind. Now, as I head into my final few weeks at the Pioneer, I sincerely hope I leave behind something as good as the impression the Northwoods and its people have left on me.
Next month marks two years for me as editor at the Bemidji Pioneer. While it may not seem like a lot of time, considering the two years we鈥檝e been through, it sort of feels like it鈥檚 been an eternity.
We want to share stories of people more than those of final scores. In recent weeks, we鈥檝e written about a volleyball team rallying around a player who lost her mother to cancer, a BSU superfan with Down syndrome who joined the team in practice and an Alaskan backup goalie who got to play in front of her visiting family. These are stories worth telling.
On Wednesday, Enbridge announced the completion of its Line 3 replacement project. Now that oil will be flowing through, it's time to consider the future of that fossil fuel and its impact on our planet.
Our news team led by Editor Kelly Boldan also included Opinion page editor Brad Swenson, reporters Molly Miron, Devlyn Brooks and Robby Robinson, and photographer Monte Draper. They spent the next few days covering local angles to the 9/11 attack.
I came to Bemidji right before the world turned upside down and I had a front-row seat to the resilience of this community. Though I didn鈥檛 meet many of my regular sources face-to-face until months after I began, the people I spoke to in Bemidji for work or otherwise, always greeted me with a hefty dose of 鈥淢innesota Nice.鈥�
