A trip to Hibbing High School

“As I went out–” Those are the first words of “Ain’t Talkin’,” the last song on Bob Dylan’s Modern Times, released in the fall of 2006. It’s a great opening line for anything: a song, a tall tale, a fable, a novel, a soliloquy. The world opens at the feet of that line. How one gets there–to the point where those words can take on their true authority, raise suspense like a curtain, and make anyone want to know what happens next–is what I want to look for.

For me this road opened in the spring of 2005, upstairs in the once-famous, now-shut Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. I was giving a reading from a book about Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” Older guys, people my age, were talking about the shows they’d seen in 1965–Dylan had played Berkeley on his first tour with a band that December. People were asking questions–or making speeches. The old saw came up: “How does someone like Bob Dylan come out of a place like Hibbing, Minnesota, a worn-out mining town in the middle of nowhere?”

A woman stood up. She was about thirty-five, maybe forty, definitely younger than the people who’d been talking. Her face was dark with indignation. “Have any of you ever been to Hibbing?” she said. There was a general shaking of heads and murmuring of no’s–from me and everyone else. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” the woman said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’d been to Hibbing, you’d know why Bob Dylan came from there. There’s poetry on the walls. Everywhere you look. There are bars where arguments between socialists and the IWW, between Communists and Trotskyists, arguments that started a hundred years ago, are still going on. It’s there–and it was there when Bob Dylan was there.”

“I don’t remember the rest of what she said,” my wife said when I asked her about that night. “I was already planning our trip.”

Along with our younger daughter and her husband, who live in Minneapolis, we arrived in Hibbing a year later, coincidentally during Dylan Days, a now-annual weekend celebration of Bob Dylan’s birthday, in this case his sixty-fifth. There was a bus trip, the premiere of a new movie, and a sort-of Bob Dylan Idol contest at a restaurant called Zimmy’s. But we went straight to the high school. On the bus tour the next day, we went back. And that was the shock: Hibbing High.

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