The longest commute

MORA, MINN. - Two alarm clocks jolt Dawn Davis out of slumber in the countryside south of Mora at 4:15 a.m. One she winds by hand, just in case an overnight storm snuffs out her power.

For an hour, padding about in a fraying robe, sipping coffee from a bucket-sized mug, she forces herself awake. Then, in thick country darkness, she climbs into her miniature red Ford and heads south, racing 70 miles to her job in downtown Minneapolis.

By the time she returns home in the evening, she has about an hour of leisure before she hits the sack. An hour?

"That," winces the 58-year-old, "is what my friends say."

Davis is part of a rising tide of Minnesota commuters leaving home long before sunrise -- a group whose ranks are swelling by 10,000 people each year, new census figures show. More than 300,000 are out the door by 6 a.m., nearly twice as many as in 1990. It's a national trend, but one that's hitting Minnesota harder than most.

Although Minnesota is only a middling-sized state, it ranks in the top 15 nationally both for the growth in sheer numbers of pre-dawn commuters and the rate of that growth -- and close to the top among northern states.

"It really tells us something about the American character: that we will trade almost everything to get what we want," said Curtis Johnson, a former chairman of the Metropolitan Council who now leads, from Edina, a national consulting firm devoted to metropolitan issues.

"Long drives before sunrise, the cost, the inconvenience, the loss of family time," he said. "If we want something bad enough -- the bigger home, the feeling of safety, whatever it might be -- we'll trade almost anything to get it."

Predawn commutes are causing ripple effects that rise from the personal and intimate to the vast and societal. They're changing family lives. They're forcing businesses to change their hours and their ways. They're forcing many others to wake up early to serve them. They're raising concern about overcrowding of once-quiet rural roads -- and the cost to everyone of fixing that.

"Out here in the country, we now have a 'rush hour,' and it's increasing every year. It all heads south from 5:30 to 7:30 and it's all headin' north in the late afternoon," said Mora Mayor Greg Ardner. "There are some concerns that people here can't get on the highway. And what are you going to do? You can't put a traffic light on a highway, it's 55 miles per hour all the way to Cambridge."

Trickle-down effects

The Dunn Brothers coffee chain has "belts" in terms of when its stores open, said company President Chris Eilers.

"Urban stores open about 6:30. First- and second-ring suburbs, 6. And in the outskirts -- Elk River, Monticello -- it's 5:30," he said. "Typically, what sparks it is the number of people who show up before you open, pounding on the door and wanting their coffee."

Many of those enduring this life admit they sometimes question their own sanity.

"There are times when I think, 'Why are we doing this?'" said Karen Duhn, who stares straight into the sun both morning and evening as she commutes to downtown Minneapolis from a lake near Dassel, in Meeker County, west of the Twin Cities. "But it's becoming the norm. I have people at work who come in from Foley."

For her, the long commute means missing out entirely, for most of the week, on the sweet sleepy morning moments with kids that many others treasure.

"I don't see anyone in the morning but the dog," she said. "The kids don't need to get to school til 9:10, and I'm at work by 8:30. No one's interested in getting up with me. Some days it's really hard."

Kristin Eager, a buyer for Macy's in downtown Minneapolis, comes in from a different direction -- from Isanti. Where Duhn copes because her husband switched careers to stay home and get the kids off to school, Eager needs to help pry her fiancé's kids out of bed by shortly after 6 -- "a struggle," she concedes -- so the two of them can get the kids to day care.

That side trip alone can add a half-hour to an already epic daily trek. And it means a staff member from the day care needs to walk the first-grader to school later in the morning, when it opens. Eager would love to arrange to work from home. And she says it "makes me want to cry" to have to crawl into town alongside so many freeway-clogging single-driver cars, when more carpooling and bus rides would speed the trip for all.

Multiply them by tens of thousands, though, and it creates a market to which the rest of society begins to react.

"We now have an overnight shift in our news department," said Wendy Paulson, program director at WCCO Radio, "and that hasn't happened at 'CCO in decades. We have a news person who works until 4:45, and another who starts at 4:30 -- but only on weekdays," when commuters are a factor.

Others media outlets are responding as well. Two years ago, sports talk radio station KFAN took steps to punch up its programming before 6 a.m. And 18 months ago, the Star Tribune began a major shift in operations aimed at giving delivery trucks an earlier start, partly so that papers could reach exurban doorsteps before commuters left for the day.

What's gained early, though, is often lost late: Many long-haul commuters say they never see the evening news, much less "Letterman" or "Leno," and rely on desktop Internet to keep up with events.

The lure of rural living

If family time is a victim of the extended commute, however, many of those who do it say they're doing it for the kids. In fact, some return to the small towns they themselves grew up in, hoping to give the kids the same experience they had.

Anne Karl drives to her job at the St. Paul Heart Clinic from her home in Arlington, in Sibley County. The single mom wanted a smaller -- and to her mind, safer -- high school for her kids than they'd find in Richfield, but she couldn't afford closer cities such as Lakeville.

"I chose Arlington," she said, "for the fact that I actually grew up there. It was a great town to grow up in."

There are lots of folks who think the same way.

Although the Metropolitan Council strives to concentrate as much growth as possible in the older, built-up areas of the Twin Cities, its own surveys consistently prove that even metro Minnesotans have a profound hankering for rural and small-town life. If folks could live where they'd ideally chose to, council analysts conceded in their most recent report, "the result would be a large exodus from the suburbs, a smaller shift out of the central cities, and a doubling of the region's rural population."

To some extent, that's happening. Douglas Stokes, media research director at the Campbell Mithun ad agency in Minneapolis, deserted Edina for the countryside between Northfield and Faribault. The product of a small-town upbringing, he and his wife adopted two girls from China and wanted to bring them up in small-town America.

His 6 a.m. commute, aimed at beating peak rush hour, is long by local standards, he said, but normal in larger cities.

"We're getting more big-city," he said. "It's very doable. We like it here. No, we love it."

The price to be paid

But Ardner, the mayor of Mora, sees the stresses that creates. "Truth is, we'd love to have a four-lane road up here," he said. "If you know anyone whose arm we can twist, we'd love to hear about it."

But that's just it, said Johnson. What people do in their own lives to save money, finding a cheaper home farther out, creates costs for society.

"The public massively subsidizes all of this," he said. The cost of adding lanes in Mora, for instance, would be averaged out across all users, even those driving a lot less. "Just imagine what would happen if we charged people what it costs to live this far away. That's sort of behind a growing inclination, in Minnesota and elsewhere, to think about taxing mileage rather than fuel, to really calibrate how much you're using the roads."

Gov. Tim Pawlenty has talked of moving toward what he calls a "fuel-neutral mileage charge," partly because new technologies such as electric cars will make it harder to collect revenue from road users. Six states are taking part over the next two years in a major study aimed at experimenting with using onboard computers to gauge roadway use and charge drivers accordingly.

Many megacommuters, partly in response to the cost of gas, are making big adjustments. Toni Roy, coming in from Claremont, in Dodge County, to Bloomington, often stays with her folks overnight. Davis, the Mora commuter who gets but an hour at home at night before turning in, works 10-hour shifts four days a week so she doesn't have to drive in on Wednesdays, and sometimes trades homes with her city-based sister. She hops an express bus in Blaine many mornings, letting the driver deal with the stress of the trip's most-congested stretch.

"I will tell you," she said, "the hardest time is morning -- getting up and awake."

Working the phones in a back-office job all day, she skips the makeup and is practical with clothes.

"That's about it," she announces at 5:10 a.m., having dressed in what seems like seconds. "I can't be a 'fashionista' here; I just have to be a 'get-up-and-go-to-work' type person."

David Peterson • 612-673-4440

David Peterson • dapeterson@startribune.comPhotos by RENEE JONES SCHNEIDER