Chris Ingraham:

Yeah. So eventually this local guy in Red Lake County. He's like, look, if you're going to say all this stuff about us, you should really come out here and take a look. And, you know, I kind of told my wife about this. I'm like, they want me to come out there. Do you think I should do it? And she was like, no, they're going to kill you. Do not go out there. But my editor was kind of like, yeah, go, let's go see what happens. And so I went and visited and I was expecting kind of, you know, we have these ideas about rural America, this kind of "Hillbilly Elegy" framework, where everybody is struggling, and everybody is poor, and everybody is on drugs, and things are really bad. And that's kind of what I was expecting going in there. But I show up in this town and it was more like Norman Rockwell. It was very, just, Americana. You know, I pulled up to the county courthouse to meet with this guy, Jason, who invited me. They had actually gathered the mayor, the county commissioners. They had a marching band there playing on the courthouse steps. It was just ridiculous. And it just kind of, that set the tone for the entire visit. I was just shocked by how much people just wanted to show me their community and the people they knew. Just the amount of civic pride in this place was unlike anything I've encountered anywhere else in my life.