BOOKS: If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now

There’s a small irony in my using my daily commute time to listen to Christopher Ingraham’s If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now, a charming memoir of a young family, overwhelmed by the expense and commuting toll of living in metro-DC, who gave up everything they knew and moved to a remote community in northwest Minnesota. There’s a large irony just in the story of how they got there. Ingraham is a data analyst journalist for the Washington Post, and several years back, looking for a light summer click bait story, he found a data set that had been produced by the Dept of Agriculture ranking US counties by “attractiveness”, which was quantified by weather data (mild temps, days of sunshine being good) and a survey of geographic features (more mountains, valleys, and shorelines are better). At the top was Ventura County, California. At the bottom, Red Lake County, Minnesota. Needless to say, the 4000 good people who inhabit Red Lake County were hurt to read of their home being declared the “ugliest county in the US”. Ingraham got an earful in his inbox and Twitter feed. But Minnesotans earn their reputation of being scrupulously nice, and rather than invective-filled hate mail, he got photos from beautiful back porch views ironically captioned “view from the ugliest county”, and he even got an invitation to visit. This improbable start lead to Ingraham, his wife, an executive in the Social Security Administration, and their twin toddlers moving to Red Lake Falls. This book tells the story of their decision to give it a try, and why they’re now all in. Much of the book are the engaging foibles of big city folk learning the intricacies of small town life, and the colorful characters they meet there. If you’re imagining A Year in Provence as it might have been written by Garrison Keillor, you’re not far off. There are the expected amusing stories of first time deer hunting and ice fishing, and an assessment of Minnesota cuisine. And while it’s said that eskimos have over a hundred different words for snow, now so too does Ingraham. Being a data analyst, the author peppers his book with interesting statistics to illuminate or bolster many of his observations. But he ends with the lesson that begins the story, that data can’t always tell the whole story, and he offers some thoughtful observations about the value and forms of social fabric, about small town politics and why “dispatches from the red states” are often misleading, and ultimately why his family has found unexpected reward in trading urban life for prairie life.