A new post by Ecumen Changing Aging contributor Jim Klobuchar:

It was not the prescribed atmosphere for a harmless reverie: drizzly Sunday morning at daybreak on a lonely highway, snags of cloud hanging low. Apart from my car, nothing else moved though the shapeless mist that lifted every few minutes. It revealed man-made buttes hundreds of feet high, dull red, formed by the abandoned tailings of the now-silent iron ore pits that are part of the landmarks of the northern Minnesota mining country.

When we were children they dominated the environment of our growing up, engineered by giant power shovels carving those vast canyons that produced 90 per cent of America’s steel.

Over the years the government and tourism agencies have invested sizable cash into removing or cleaning up the unlovely detritus. They have succeeded remarkably in some places by creating permanent blue lakes, camouflaging the old open pits, or by growing virtual arboretums in some of them.

But what I was thinking on this damp Sunday morning had nothing much to do with sprucing up old ore dumps, beautifying them–if you don’t mind– as a sensible salute to a heritage. I was thinking about the America I had lived; about gifts that had come into my life because there was iron ore, and there were miners. I remembered the muted thunder-claps thousands of feet beneath the surface that I could hear in my bed as a child, dynamite being a detonated by a night shift, possibly by my dad’s crew.

In my town the steel-building iron ore lay nearly a half mile beneath the earth’s surface and could not be reached with the huge steam shovels that created those vast open canyons. Where we lived the ore was extracted underground with dynamite and winches through a network of tunnels and then lifted nearly 2,000 feet in big elevator cages.

My father had labored in the underground since he was 15, leaving school to work after the eighth grade after both of his parents had died and he was the oldest boy in a family of eight. There were few safety nets then and even fewer when the Great Depression struck the country. The children wanted to stay together. So the oldest boy became their support.

It was his choice and the mining company pretended not to notice his age. And yet he lived a fruitful life, working, hunting and fishing, helping to raise two children. It’s what was done in those years. He and my mother were the children of immigrants, most of whom came to America in who like the others came in part because of their hunger to educate their children. This they did, with the security of work in the mines.

So that became the progression. The immigrants mined and built their homes and told their kids to study. Their children could go into adult life with a high school education and the chances that came with it to expand their lives; and their grandchildren could attend college if they studied and if it meant enough to them.

And so this happened in our household: my brother and I could attend the junior colleges that flourished in northern Minnesota, and advance those credits directly to the big university. And my dad’s grandchildren, the third generation, both have significant government positions today, one in Washington, the other in Iowa.

So driving through the north country the other day I felt no esthetic pain seeing those slag piles penetrating the fog, even the uglier ones that had eluded the beautification patrols. Like my brother, I had worked underground between college terms to help pay the tuition, which wasn’t all that onerous to begin with.

What was painful in that morning mist was the glimpses it revealed of a time when America was beginning to surge; when a quality education was coming available to almost all who wanted it. It was a time when America was beginning to discover the genuine power of democracy, building a society in which almost everybody had a chance to compete at some level. It was a time of an America that recognized the sins of its discriminations against people of color, against women and tried to meet the responsibilities of a truly open society.

America’s people hold so much potential, but we’re not fully mining it. Yes times change, but something that should never diminish is the conscience and promise of the country in opening the door to everyone for a chance at a quality education. It’s education that carries a person through life and empowers one to the very end.

Those silent slabs of ore might be reminding us of a better way. One in which we’re interconnected. And that’s a treasure worth preserving.

About Jim Klobuchar:

In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota’s senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.