“Under Construction”

Jennie and I took a 2,500-mile road trip northwest through Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin to Duluth, MN, then up the northern shore of Lake Superior to the Canadian border. We then turned around and drove south through the Twin Cities, traversing Iowa to Columbia, MO before heading home. In addition to reunions with friends and family and vistas of America’s heartland – Hoosier hills, Wisconsin cranberry bogs, Minnesota boundary waters, Iowa farms, the mighty Mississippi – what stands out from our trip was…construction.

Everywhere we went, things were under construction. Roads, of course. From the multiple snarls on usually scenic, snarl-free SR 46 in Brown County, IN on Day One to the  not scenic, perpetually snarled highways of Chicagoland and I-70 from Columbia to St. Louis – Drivers, take your medicine. Place your two hands at 10 and 2, grip, grimace, and crawl along. We even got detoured in southeast Iowa onto backroads for an hour (and you thought all of southeastern Iowa was backroads).

The places we visited were also under construction. The Lake Superior Maritime Visitor Center in Duluth is worth getting to if only for a close up of the ginormous ships departing the burly Port of Duluth and the museum’s haunting tribute to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (the lyrics of the late Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 ballad have taken on new meaning for me). But getting there required navigating unruly waves of streets, parking lots, and sidewalks under construction. Same for the infrastructure surrounding the nearby Lake Superior Railroad Museum. Worth seeing for yours truly who had an electric train as a kid and still romances the rails (Bucket list trip: taking the train across Canada), but a hassle to get there and a bummer once there to find several exhibits are…you guessed it: under construction. Get this: one of the closed exhibits had a sign posted that read “See you in the Spring.” We were there on May 4! And get this: we woke up the next two mornings with our car dusted with snow. In northern Minnesota, spring is still under construction in May.

On the day we drove up the northern shore of Superior, we stopped at historic Split Rock Lighthouse. Yep - under construction. Wrapped in scaffolding from bottom to top.      

When we arrived at our night’s lodging, the building our room was in was teeming with workers – roofers hammering down shingles, framers adding insulation and siding, guys doing the grunt work of tossing construction waste into three huge orange dumpsters smack dab in the middle of the parking lot. 

I asked the woman at the front desk what options I had.

“Is the construction going to be a problem?” she asked.

I bit my tongue before answering courteously, my capacity to maintain a semblance of politeness and levelheadedness under construction. “Yes, Ma’am. Please move us to another building away from the construction area.”

She excused herself, disappeared behind a closed door, and came back with the offer of a room in another building several hundred yards down the cove of the lake, still and serene: fireplace, hot tub, lake view, king bed, wet bar, and a complimentary bottle of wine to boot. 

“Thank you, Ma’am.”

To top things off, our friends in Minneapolis/St. Paul took us to the Walker Sculpture Garden. From their website:

The largest urban sculpture garden in the United States and one of the Midwest’s most visited sites. Anchored by the beloved Spoonbridge and Cherry, the 11-acre garden features more than 60 works… Part outdoor gallery, part public park, it’s an ideal gateway to the Walker—and a perfect spot for a date, picnic, or quiet moment. 

Perfect, indeed, until our date/picnic/quiet moment was interrupted by our spotting the iconic 50’ long x 30’ wide x 14’ high Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture (pictured below) under construction. Under spring cleaning maintenance to be exact. Positioned next to Spoonbridge and Cherry was a cherry picker with a yellow-vested, hardhat-wearing worker in its elevated basket who was waxing the cherry by hand.

Everything on this trip is under construction!, I barked. Roads, exhibits, hotels, lighthouses, sculptures. A full-throated rant was under construction in my mind and mouth when I spotted just above the sculpture on the Minneapolis skyline the towering dome of the Basilica of St. Mary. At that moment – this is how my crazy mind (or is it the Holy Spirit) sometimes works – I heard an inaudible whisper in my head (interpret that as you will) that asked, “Are you under construction, David? For the better? For future good?”

That inquiry reminded me of a dream I had years ago. Precisely thirty years ago to be exact. In the dream, I was driving along a four-lane stretch of highway. I came to a series of orange signs along the shoulder of the road that announced: Construction Ahead.  A little later, signs with blinking arrows appeared, followed by orange- and white-striped barrels that funneled us into a single lane. Then appeared the telltale signs of a construction zone: men in hard hats, t-shirts, and blue jeans milling about in the swirl of dust created by their work. 

I continued to slow down until the car went from a crawl to a dead stop next to a construction worker holding a red flag in his hand. I rolled down the window and asked, “What are you working on?”

“Take a look for yourself,” he replied, pointing his flag ahead a hundred feet or so where the heavy machinery and construction crew were hard at work. 

As I inched forward, I peered out my window, straining to catch a glimpse of the project. Finally, I saw what was at the locus of the construction: it was me they were working on! There I was flattened out on the highway looking for all the world like a cartoon character who had just been steamrolled. It was as if a photograph of me had been printed on a twenty-foot piece of wallpaper and stretched out on the road. I was under construction. Men in hardhats were using shovels, rakes, and jackhammers on me. A big brute on a steamroller was waiting to make another pass over me. All the while, I sat in my car watching.

I asked a construction worker, “What’s this going to be when you’re done?”

“We’re not sure yet,” he said.  

That’s when I woke up.              

I hadn’t thought about that dream for years until my rant over the cherry picker astride Spoonbridge and Cherry was interrupted by the sight of the dome of the basilica and the “Are you under construction?” query.  

One of the bedrock beliefs of the Christian faith is that God, working through the power of the Holy Spirit, can and does transform lives. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, the word for this transformation, this heaven-sent makeover, is morphoo. It is cousin to the word metamorphosis. In sum, the same God who turns caterpillars into butterflies determines to work wonders in us, too. We’re all under construction.   

But we don’t buy it. We think the die has been cast. Consider all the clichés we use: "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." "She's always been that way.” “You're not gonna change him." "It's just the way she is." "He's set in his ways." "I'm too old to change."

Here’s to the hope that you and I and this world are under construction, that our broken parts and rough edges as well as the current wearisome detours around decency, civility, and democracy are temporary, that the One who created all things is still at it and will stay at it until, as the majestic Easter hymn sings it, “Love’s redeeming work is done.”

I’m hopeful. To wit: before our very eyes that day in the sculpture park, the worker finished polishing the cherry, lowered the bucket of the cherry picker, loaded up the orange construction cones, and drove the mechanical contraption off the premises and out of sight. All that remained was spoon and cherry gleaming brightly in the noonday sun, the dome of the basilica grinning with luster at a distance on high.