On Maine (and Fargo)

Jokes

In New Hampshire, people tell jokes about the those who live in Maine:

How is a hurricane in Florida and a Maine divorce similar?  You just know that someone’s gonna lose a mobile home.

(This joke depends upon being told in a Maine accent.  You should imagine the accent as sounding like a curmudgeonly old lobster fisher sitting half-drunk in a harbor tavern.)  Just after I moved into my trailer house up in Maine, my next door neighbor came over to welcome me.  He said that he was having a party in my honor.  “We’ll start with lots of drinkin’,” my next door neighbor said, “then, there’ll be dancin’ and I guess it’ll turn in to fightin’.  But after the fightin’, you can be sure there’ll be fuckin’.”  “Sounds interesting,” I said.  “How many people are invited?” I asked.  “Just you,” the Maine neighbor said.

Maine Township

Maine Township is a place in northwestern Minnesota, organized by election on September 5, 1871.  The township vote took place in the home of a pioneer named R. F. Adley.  Adley had immigrated to Minnesota from the State of Maine.  And, so, the township in Ottertail County was named after his old home state

The most famous person from Maine Township is William O. Douglas, famous as a liberal Supreme Court justice.  Douglas was born there in October 1898 – his father was an itinerant Scottish preacher from Nova Scotia who happened to be living in Otter Tail County at the time.  Douglas has no significant relationship with Minnesota.  He was raised in Oregon and, then, spent most of his life around Washington D.C.  Appointed to the Bench to replace Louis Brandeis in 1939, Douglas had been working at the SEC.  He was a reliably liberal vote on the High Court and served until 1976.  Douglas invented the “right of privacy” in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965 – holding that the State lacked authority to prohibit contraceptive use among married adults).  In formulating the “right of privacy”, Douglas relied upon “penumbras, emanating from” the Bill of Rights.  This farcical ratio decidiendi has long been mocked by conservative Judges.  For instance, Clarence Thomas is said to have plaque on his wall reading “Please don’t emanate in the penumbras.”  Douglas held that trees have legal standing to sue in Sierra Club v. Morrison (1972).  He tried to stop the Vietnam war by judicial fiat in 1970.

William O. Douglas was a nasty character, irascible, self-absorbed, vindictive, and curmudgeonly.  His law clerks routinely called him “shit-head” behind his back.  When he was disabled by a series of strokes in 1974, he clung to his judicial power notwithstanding the fact that he had lost the ability to reason.  Finally, Justice Warren Burger, also a problematic figure, issued an order preventing Supreme Court staff from assisting Douglas in his judicial endeavors.  This resulted in his forced retirement in 1976.  He died in 1980.  

At the Phelps Mill in Maine Township, there is a Minnesota State Historical Society sign noting that Justice William O. Douglas was born near the this site.  Given Douglas politics, it is probably best that local folks don’t know much about him and that he never had any real contact with the rolling and wooded dairy farm country where he was born.  

The Missing Mound

Three or four years ago, Minnesota highway maps were marked with a location called Tipsinah Mounds.  The site is a west of I94 on the road to Fargo, about 20 miles south of the exits to Fergus Falls.  Assuming that place was notable for Indian mounds I exited the freeway, taking the highway to a side road to the north, a lane a half-mile or so through woods encroaching on both sides of the asphalt, a steamy tract of dense, overgrown timber in the late July mid-afternoon heat.  

A lake sprawled beyond a large parking lot in the middle of the forest.  Girls in tiny bikinis were gingerly picking their way across the hot grill of the asphalt where pickups and SUVs were crowded together, all of them radiating intense sunlight from chrome and metal surfaces.  Through the fringe of trees, I could see campers lined up along the shore.  The lake seemed to have an irregular shape with long narrow inlets like the tentacles of a squid pushed here and there into the flabby brush all hissing and buzzing with insect life.  

At the end of the peninsula beyond the parking lot, I saw more grey and green and beige caravan-style camping rigs, people smitten by the heat sitting almost naked on folding beach chairs.  In the general store and office, I saw one room empty except for a couple of derelict-looking card-tables.  Some newspaper were strewn around.  In the other room, a heavy set woman was sitting at a counter, an air conditioner rattling and coughing behind her bare shoulders.  I asked her about the Indian mounds.  She was friendly but seemed baffled: why would anyone care about old piles of dirt?  She showed a map on the wall showing the peninsula all sliced into little campsite rectangles – presumably, the map’s main utility was to point people to where their site was reserved for them.  Her directions made no sense: she pointed me the way between a stranded ice-fishing house, sitting at the edge of the parking lot and a strange concrete bunker.  “It’s back in there,” she said.  She stabbed at the map – two parallel trails were drawn running between bushes stylized as green ovals on the chart.  “Some say there are supposed to be Indian mounds up there,” she said.  She went on to tell me that I would see a “tiny” brown sign and that it would point to the path that I should take.  

The light was blinding.  I went into a humid concrete block building and saw that it housed some showers drooling a little water down into drains in the floor.  The concrete was wet and there was a toilet stall at the end of the narrow corridor passing the cells where the showers were built.  Next to the wood fish house, I found another concrete bunker, a long trapezoidal heap of cement blocks marked with a storm shelter sign.  Beyond the bunker squatting next to the parking lot, I came upon a gravel road that led past some big, conical heaps of gravel with slits between them.  Some snow-plows were resting on boulders, waiting, I supposed, for cold weather and other iron debris was rusting in the clumps of poisonous-looking brush.  It was too hot to go along this path for more than three-hundred yards and the environs were uninviting, semi-industrial shacks and ruins among the trees and shrubbery that seemed to be half dissolving in the heat.

I retraced my steps and climbed a slope to a hillside overlooking another lobe of the lake.  Pomme de Terre Lake, the name for the body of water, sounds much better than “Potato” Lake, but, of course, the meaning is the same.  The shore of the lake was crowded with campers parked between fire-pits and metal grates for barbecuing.  Every spot seemed taken and, because of the heat, people were sitting next to their rigs, wearing bathing suits and idly flicking flies and mosquitos away from their bare skin.

A man and woman were near my path, sitting beside their camper, eyes invisible behind dark sunglasses.  The woman had folded a brochure of some kind into a fan and was waving it over her cleavage.  In the distance, there was a sound like a chainsaw – apparently, an outboard motor on a boat dragging a skier through the soupy, green water.  

“I’m looking for some Indian mounds,” I said to the couple.

They looked at me, confused, it seemed, and half-dazed by the oppressive heat that was weighing everything down, making leaves and branches droop, dragging birds, even, down into scalding shadows.  

“Never heard of Indian mounds,” the man said.  He had a reddish moustache.

“Nope,” the woman said.

“Do you know where they might be?” I asked.

“In the woods,” the woman said, gesturing toward the impenetrable walls of vegetation clogging the landscape.

I didn’t point out that the name of the park, managed by the City of Elbow Lake, the county seat for Grant County where we were located, referred to mounds in the very title of the place.  Maybe, they knew a different name for the park, a local expression that didn’t mention mounds.

I thanked them and walked back along the little steamy path to the parking lot.  The heat made me dizzy.

Pomme de Terre lake is 27 feet deep and about 1800 acres, a mess of finger-shaped lagoons with channels between them.  The lake is too sick with run-off to support fish, but the State stocks it from time to time with walleyes.  There’s a local legend that James J. Hill, the railroad robber baron, had a chateau on the lake and, even, a train-track siding that ran out to the tip of the peninsula where his hunting chalet was built.  But the story is vague and not documented so far as I can tell and so I am skeptical.  

Records suggest that there were Indian mounds dated to about a thousand years before the present located on the east side of the access road into Tipsinah Mounds Municipal Park.  But there’s a rudimentary golf course on that land today and I surmise that the mounds were carved away to make the fairways and greens of that scorched-looking par-three links.  

A Singular Formation in the Sky

As I crossed the Red River of the North on the freeway cutting through Moorhead in Minnesota and Fargo in North Dakota, I saw something rotating overhead, a dull grey assembly of wings and pointed cockpits.  From certain angles, airborne objects, even if traveling very swiftly, seem to simply hover and my perspective was such that the thing in the air seemed motionless, grey with a dull glint as if pasted above the trees in that canopy of sky blurred and chalky with the smoke from great fires in the northern woods.  There were six-lanes of traffic, all pretty crowded, and so it was perilous to look for more than a second at the tangle of swept-back wings and fuselages in the air.  To my eye, the object looked like some kind of strange aluminum sculpture held aloft like a balloon, slowly turning in the ashy white sky.  

From a different vantage, I saw that the artifact was, in fact, four planes flying so closely together that they seemed fused into a solid mass – it looked to me that only four or five feet separated the jets which were locked together like puzzle parts and sailing slowly over the cities, perhaps about 800 feet overhead.  An air show was scheduled for the weekend and, apparently, the jets were rehearsing for their fly-over, wings perilously interlocked, it seemed, to make a sort of aerial swastika hovering overhead.  

The news reported that the apparition puzzled many motorists and that they gawked at the four jet array and this led to crashes on the right-of-way, fender benders and, even, collisions of more serious import. 

Arcadia  

It’s six hours more or less to drive from Austin to Fargo.  The freeway skirts the Twin Cities and runs through the heavily populated suburban strip that now sutures Minneapolis to St. Cloud.  Traffic generally runs in spurts, stopping and going fitfully in the densely inhabited corridor between the cities.  On the hot highway, I encountered jams, inexplicable delays where the traffic ground to a stop, turning the freeway into a perverse parking lot.  On public radio, voices spoke about climate change in the national parks.  A woman was co-author of a study promulgated throughout the park system as to effects of climate change.  The question is whether to “resist or adapt.”  

One of the speakers was the park ranger in Arcadia National Park in Maine.  The man’s voice was effeminate and he seemed to be apologizing all of the time for things that he said for which he owed no apology.  The scientist and park ranger said that the temperature in the Gulf of Maine was now three degrees Fahrenheit warmer than fifty years ago.  The air temperature in the seaside mountains and forests is now 3.7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer that it was in 1970.  The park’s forests are changing.  All of the red pine trees have died, the victim of an invasive species typical of warmer weather woods.  The scientist said that the trees were covered in creamy pale substance, a bit like scaly cottage cheese.  This substance, which chokes the life out of the trees, is the exudate of a tiny mite, the Japanese scale beetle that attacks the red pine and, in the course, of only six years has killed them all.  

“It’s not a major loss,” the park ranger said.  “But the composition of the forest is changing due to the increased temperatures.”  He didn’t point out that the red pine itself is an invasive species, introduced in the last century to the forests as a replacement for other trees cut down by lumbermen.  Before an after photographs of Mount Cadillac show the accretion of scabby blotches of dead trees clinging to the hillsides.

In einer kleinen Stadt

The German journalist, Claas Relotius would have admired my metaphor associating the Blue Devils practicing above Fargo with the shape of a Hakenkreuz – that is a swastika.  The affliction that had destroyed Germany two generations before his birth in 1985 was rampant in the United States and it was his objective to chronicle this political development.  

On assignment with Der Spiegel, the jewel in the crown of German journalism, Claas traveled by bus from Minneapolis to Fergus Falls in early February 2017.  The days were gloomy and the ground snow-covered and frozen.  The approach to the little town was not propitious: the road ran through an endless black forest, a place where “dragons might live.”  Over 70% of the residents of Fergus Falls had voted for Donald Trump in the previous election and Claas was determined to investigate this phenomenon.  At the edge of town, he saw a sign stating that Fergus Falls was the home to 14,000 “damned good” people.  Next to the formal sign, someone had posted another hand-written marker: Mexicans Stay Out!, words scrawled on a big piece of cardboard stabbed into the frozen earth.

Claas rented a small apartment on the edge of town and spent his days interviewing people.  The City Administrator was eager to talk with the German writer, renowned as the 2014 CNN international journalist of the year.  The Administrator wore Beretta semi-automatic pistol in a holster, carrying the gun to work.  He was a peculiar fellow as far as Claas was concerned, but characteristic of the town folks.  The man was forty-year old virgin, uncomfortable with women, insular and parochial – “I have never seen the sea,” the administrator proudly told Claas.  He blushed as he described trying to chat with a woman on the bus that he rode everyday to work.  In the evening, Claas went to the local movie theater, a two-screen affair that was showing the musical La-La Land and American Sniper.  Both movies had been playing for weeks, even, possibly months.  The auditorium where American Sniper was showing was always packed full of movie-goers who wore Trump buttons and cheered whenever the hero killed an enemy.  No one was in the theater where the musical was playing.  And it had been this way for a long time – after all, American Sniper was released in 2015, two years earlier.  Claas met a man who seemed to have stepped right out of a Kafka story – this fellow labored shoveling coal into the furnaces at the town’s big coal-fired power plant.  The power plant had five huge smokestacks and they gushed coal ash into the grey skies.  The man had never really left town.  He didn’t like most TV shows and just watched old reruns of The X Files on his television.  If there were a larger world outside of Fergus Falls, this man didn’t know anything about it.  Claas interviewed him in The Viking Café on Main Street where the man sat drinking coffee morosely and watching the five smokestacks disgorge five black pillars of coal smoke into the cold air.

At the library, seniors gathered for a course called “I-Pads for Beginners.”  The elderly people seemed ignorant and bitter.  A local bar hosted “Western Night” – at that event, whole sides of beef were grilled rotisserie-style over open barbecue pits and cowboy hats and boots were mandatory.  A country-western band played patriotic hillbilly music and the floors were covered in hay and straw.  When the local High School kids took a bus-trip to New York City, they didn’t go to any museums and, even, avoided the harbor and the Statue of Liberty.  However, they were rewarded for the town’s loyalty to the President with a guided tour of Trump Tower.  A teacher assigned the students a drawing project: sketch a person whom you admire.  Most of the students drew Trump, although one pictured Obama, and the rest all chose John D. Rockefeller as their hero.  At night, wolves howled in the dark forests encroaching upon the town.  In Town Hall, the stuffed head of a wild boar presided over City Council meetings.  

Claas Relotius produced a 7300 word article about Fergus Falls published in Der Spiegel in March 2017.  The article was called In einer kleinen Stadt (“In a small city”) and subtitled with the words “where the people pray each Sunday for Donald Trump.”  The article was hailed as a penetrating analysis of the pathology of American small towns and a scathing vivisection of the rural Trump voters who had brought the man to power.  Relotius, who was 32, won several additional awards for his work.  The people in Fergus Falls whom he had interviewed obtained a copy of the article.  No one knew German well enough to interpret the text, although the couple who ran The Viking Café used a Google translation app to put the writing into English.  They were puzzled – the article read like some kind of satire.  Nothing about their town was recognizable in the essay, although they assumed that this was an error in the Google translation program.  And, if the article had been meant as satire – that is, if it was supposed to be funny, well, we all know that humor in a foreign language never really translates accurately.

Relotius went on from journalistic triumph to triumph.  He covered Colin Kaepernick, the football player who famously took a knee to protest police brutality and, indeed, spoke with the athlete’s parents (a real scoop!) on the eve of the Super Bowl.  He traveled with a woman in Alabama who was an “execution witness”, a person hired to witness executions on behalf of the State.  He rode with her on the Greyhound Bus that took her from penitentiary to penitentiary where trembling convicts were killed by lethal injection.  In Syria, he reported the story of a little boy who had scribbled some anti-government graffiti on a wall in his village and, now, believed that he had caused the calamitous civil war in his country.  In the early Spring of 2018, he was on the Mexican border with a group of vigilantes who patrolled the desert harassing and detaining illegal immigrants.  For this job, Relotius had a partner, Juan Moreno, a Mexican journalist whose role was to cover the story from south of the border.  Moreno had trouble coordinating his work with Relotius.  Some of the events that Relotius had reported seemed not to have occurred or occurred in a way different from what Moreno understood to be the facts.  Moreno emailed Der Spiegel and suggested that the magazine fact-check Relotius reporting from the southern border.  After all, the motto of Der Spiegel, in the words of its legendary first editor was Sagen was ist (“Tell it like it is”).  Der Spiegel acknowledged that it had been a bit lax in fact-checking Claas Relotius’ articles.  However, its editorial staff reviewed Relotius article about vigilantes on the Mexican border, Jaeger’s Border, and discovered without much effort that most of the story was fabricated.  Relotius was suspended and fact-checkers turned to other articles that its star reporter had written.  As it turned out, Relotius had never spoken with Colin Kaepernick’s parents, the phone call on Super Bowl eve, was fictional.  The little Syrian boy who thought himself responsible for the great catastrophe of the Civil War didn’t exist; nor did the Alabama woman hired to attend executions.  (The tip-off should have been the woman taking Greyhound Bus to the executions – in car-crazy America what public official has ever done this?)

Inevitably, attention turned to story about Fergus Falls.  Der Spiegel sent another reporter, Christoph Scheuermann, to visit the town and interview Relotius’ sources.  The allegedly virgin City Administrator had been living with a woman for three years when he met Relotius.  He owned some guns but, of course, didn’t wear a Beretta to work – weapons in the fireplace were prohibited. Far from having never seen the ocean, the Administrator had vacationed repeatedly on both coasts. Wolves didn’t howl in the dark woods around Fergus Falls and there was no wild boar stuffed and mounted in the City Council chambers.  The town’s duplex cinema wasn’t playing American Sniper (or La La Land for that matter) when Relotius was in town.  The unfortunate coal shoveller at the City Power Plant, the Heizer as it were from Kafka’s novel Amerika (Der Verschollene) ran marathons as a hobby and had traveled to fifteen or twenty foreign countries to participate in those races.  The City Power Plant had one stack not five and that single stack was not visible from The Viking Café.  No one could recall a sign reading “Mexicans Stay Out” at the edge of town.  The city library had never offered a course called “I-Pads for Beginners”.  Of course, no teacher had assigned students at JFK High School the task of drawing people that they admired. And the class had not taken a field trip to New York City at any time that anyone could remember.  The townspeople denied that there had been “Western Night” involving roasting sides of beef over fires in any of the local bars.  However, some of the people interviewed thought that this would be a good idea and there were some plans afoot to sponsor a Western Night” some time soon.  

Of course, Relotius’ fraud became a cause celebre although not really in Fergus Falls where people took things, as they say, “with a grain of salt.’‘ Trump’s ambassador to Germany lodged a protest on behalf of Fergus Falls, claiming that the article was evidence of pervasive anti-Americanism in the German media, no doubt spawned by the wicked Angela Merkel.  Der Spiegel had to apologize again, although it stopped short of conceding “anti-Americanism” – in fact, the editors at Der Spiegel said that criticizing Trump was not tantamount to expressing anti-American sentiment.  Trump’s people replied that the “mainstream media” was corrupt from top to bottom and the Relotius affair proved this point.  

Der Spiegel produced another article about Fergus Falls called “In a Fantastic Small Town”.  In that article Christoph Scheuermann wrote that “Fergus Falls appears to be he most forgiving city in the Western Hemisphere.”  

Claas Relotius was supposed to be prosecuted for fraud and his various prizes, some the German equivalent of the Pulitzer, were canceled.  He was ordered to repay prize money awarded to him.  In July 2021, the Swiss journal on the media, Reportagen, published a 27 page interview with the writer.  Relotius said that he was suffering from something like Bipolar Disorder and that he had written his articles in a kind of creative mania.  He had emailed his editors at Der Spiegel that the story in Fergus Falls wasn’t going well and that he was “stuck” – but was encouraged to stay the course in the hope that something would develop.  Relotius denied any political motive or confirmation bias in his reporting.  He had written, he said, in der unverrueckbaren Ueberzeugung, Reportagen seien ohnehin nie Tatsachenberichte, sondern verdichtete Erzaehlungen – “in the unalterable conviction that journalism is never simply reporting facts, but rather heightened storytelling.”  Some Der Spiegel editors praised Relotius imagination – others felt his work was kitsch.  When describing a place, Relotius often invented precise details – for instance, the number of stair steps to a place might be precisely identified as 12 or 15.  Often, Relotius would imagine a sort of soundtrack to his pieces – that is, having CDs playing music that heightened the effect of his narration; when Relotius adverts to  children’s songs or jukeboxes, playing Bruce Springsteen, he is always fabricating.  (I’ve noticed that his curious references to public transportation that is scarce in the rural United States generally signifies confabulation – what bus did Fergus Falls’ city administrator ride to work?)

One claim as to Relotius’ fraud may be disputable.  My son, Martin, who spent many nights in Fergus Falls when he was a teenager, told me that the City is, in fact, enclosed by forests, particularly when approached from the east and north.  The City Administrator at Fergus Falls said that the town sits on the open prairie with rolling grassy hills around it.  Indeed, he describes the place as something like Sinclair Lewis’ “Gopher Prairie” in Main Street.  But this is untrue to what I saw.  Fergus Falls is the county seat of Ottertail County, a part of Minnesota in which there are more than 1000 lakes within twenty miles of the Courthouse.  These lakes (and streams as well) are all surrounded by dense swaths of green, sinister-looking forest and, so, it may well be that when Relotius came into town, he might have thought that he was traversing a vast, dragon-haunted wilderness of swamp and trees.   

A Thai Place

A little west of downtown Fargo, near the nondescript building housing the radio station from which my son, Martin, broadcasts, there’s a Thai restaurant.  The joint occupies a corner of a tiny strip mall adjacent to the station.  People are anxious to eat at restaurants now that Covid seems to be (temporarily perhaps) in remission and all the more elaborate restaurants in town were booked full, people standing with heat-stunned resignation in the lobbies waiting to be called to their tables by sweaty-looking hostesses.  The Thai place was guarded by a couple of beggars staggering around in the parking lot and demanding a toll to enter the café.  I paid the first beggar that I encountered, a Hispanic guy wearing a soiled janitor’s shirt and trousers, handing him two dollars.  Immediately, a second African American beggar emerged from where he had been lurking behind a parked car.  I didn’t have any small bills except for a single dollar which I handed him.  (I suppose that one might could interpret the disparity in the donations as racist.  But that wasn’t my intent.)  

The restaurant smelled of sesame oil, chilis, and garlic, a pleasant scent if only it weren’t so infernally hot.  The air-conditioner couldn’t keep pace with the heat and, of course, there was fire in the kitchen behind the open counter, big soft puffs of flame and wandering columns of steam and so the air was tropical in the restaurant.  A few half-dressed elderly men and women were loitering on a sort of picnic table near the flames.  We sat against the wall in the spray of early evening sun coming through the window.  

I thought the food overpriced at first, but the portions were ridiculously huge, North Dakota-sized with far too much rice and noodles to eat at one sitting.  Outside, the sun was setting but it was absurdly hot, the whole world a drooping, dripping wax candle.

Martin told me that the drunks gathered in a bus-shelter across the street from the radio station.  Some grim-looking apartments, featureless prison blocks stood around the intersection.  The drunks had a big jug of Eagle-brand vodka, really vile stuff, and, at 8:15 in the morning, they fought over it. After everyone’s nose was bloody and their lips split, they chugged the vodka straight from the bottle, weeping over their sins and, then, hugging one another to atone for the fist fight.  The rim of the bottle was smeared with gore.  After an hour, the jug was empty and the drunks wandered off to sleep under a bush in the corner of a city park, slumbering there until the mosquitos bit them awake.  A mother and daughter waiting in the bus shelter noticed a discolored tooth on the street’s curb.  

Josie

In the Thai restaurant, music was playing: a recording of “Josie” by Steely Dan.  That song features one of the best lines in all of music: “She prays like a Roman with her eyes on fire.”

At 10:00 pm, the temperature was still 90 degrees with high humidity.

Phelps Mill

The next morning, the morning air seems more dry and cool, at least briefly, with a gentle breeze sweeping through the trees.

We drove to Fergus Falls and, then, another dozen miles into Otter Tail County to the Phelps Mill.  This place is located in Maine Township, the birthplace of Mr. Justice William O. Douglas.  Here hills are crumpled around pothole lakes rimmed with marsh.  Lakes have a history – they eutrophy; this is their destiny in time, that is, to become clogged with vegetation and, in this part of Minnesota, you can see lakes in all phases of this process: some are open, water reflecting the sky rippling in the light breeze or billowing white with the wakes of motorboats, only a thin ribbon of cattails and reeds at their edge; other lakes are half-covered with drifting bogs of algae, clotted with green-brown, tangled reed, islands of matted vegetation with canals of blue among them; some lakes are entirely bog, now, an old tonsure of tall reeds encircling a dull green cistern full of weeds; and a few have ceased to be lakes entirely – they are just soggy depressions now, treeless clearings in the encroaching forest.  Densely wooded hillsides slope down to the streams and ponds and the big lakes have islands in them with trees all knotted together.  Little stands of corn and row-crop soy beans ride bulges of former prairie, a voluptuous, rounded landscape.

The mill stands sentinel above a low dam over which river water glides in a white veil of cascade.  There’s a millpond above the dam, oval-shaped with bucolic shores where trees stand in park-like array.  Downstream, below the apron of the dam, the river bulges over its shores, a sort of aneurysm of water spreading in shallows over low, rocky terraces.  People are picnicking in a shelter downstream of the mill and a few motorcycles are parked along the side of the road that parallels the stream.

The mill is a large structure, three lofty stories with a high peaked attic.  The old machinery is mostly intact and, so, the inside of the structure is a labyrinth of wooden bins and rotors and wooden tube millwork proliferating into dozens of enclosed sluices and chutes.  The wood has ripened to a rich dusky color, something like the paint on a Rembrandt canvas, and light streams into the dusty brown interior of the mill through big vertical windows.  Some of the equipment have handsome 19th century labels on them, old print scrolls the color of mahogany, lacquered onto the lathed wood surfaces.  All of the machinery looks pretty much alike: big wooden barrels, metal gears and wheels that look like cast-iron laundry mangles, and, everywhere, the branching ubiquitous grain pathways of the millwork, wooden tubes suspended over hoppers and bins.  Apparently, a water-powered auger dragged the harvested crop up to the top of the mill where gravity dragged it back down to ground level, sluicing the different grades of flour through different grinding and sorting mechanisms.  The whole elaborate assemblage ran on water-power, not an exorbitant force – a sign says the turbines generated 12 horse-power – but it was a continuous energy that didn’t need to be stabled or fed and sufficient to macerate the wheat, separate out the chaff in rotating bins, and, then, dump the flour in three grades (fine for baking, medium, and coarse for bread) into burlap sacks.  The entire place is a testimony to the ingenuity of Victorian engineers, their ability to conceptualize grids of moving machinery all acting in concert to achieve a useful purpose.  Probably, the mill represents a microcosm of our great-great-grandfather’s views as to the polity, their sense of order, their idea of economics, even, their metaphysics: a great Newtonian universe rotating under the influence of benign knowable forces.  The mill seems, now, in its benign neglect a kind of paradise, but, I suppose, that when it was operating the place was also a sort of Hell, dusty, dangerous with moving parts that could dismember a man in a careless instant, prone to dust-explosions, hot and deadly in the Summer and cold and lethal in the Winter.  But all human endeavor, I suppose has this double aspect.  

The miller’s house with Queen Anne filigree-work encircling the porch stands on a hill overlooking the industrial site.  A dormitory for farmers up the road, a place to sleep-over while your grain was milled, burned down a hundred years ago.  There’s a general store, also with wood wrap-around porches on another hillside overlooking the dam and mill.  A bridge crosses the stream above the millrace and dam.  It’s iron marked with name of its forge and the date that the steel was poured – Pennsylvania,1907.  In the old mill-race, now a crumbling concrete box next to the dam, we can see the two big cast-iron turbines, sinister, finned beings from another age and world.

Some motorcycles zoom along the asphalt road curving up to the mill.  We drive a few miles into the country, a pleasant arcadia this morning, with old farm sites on knolls, ponds and lakes perforating the glacial hills, heights of land heavily wooded and adorning all horizons, old Lutheran and Catholic churches at crossroads with German and Norwegian names poking their porcupine steeples up in the air.

The Fergus Falls State Hospital

Along a moraine on the north edge of Fergus Falls, a vast building rides a tidal swell of heights, brick with no fewer than five mighty towers, far larger than any church steeple in this part of the country.  This is the Fergus Falls State Hospital, an asylum for the insane, built in 1890 when the State’s other institutions for the mad had reached capacity and, indeed, were overcrowded.  Within a few years of its erection, this enormous asylum was, also, overcrowded, an example of the maxim that “if you build it, they will come” – by 1900, over 5000 poor souls were confined in this place.  It was abandoned, at last, in the mid-1990's and has stood, mostly empty, in its green park on the hill for 25 years, an edifice too majestic to tear down and, yet, too vast too properly maintain.

The Hospital is noteworthy for being one of the last of the so-called Kirkbride-plan asylums erected in the United States.  The city park at the foot of the massif of the building commemorates this fact – the wooded acreage with benches and a gazebo and, even, a kind of raised dais for speakers is named Kirkbride Park.  On the day that we visited, a family reunion was underway and a group of men and women were posing together on the platform dais.  Pictures were being taken of the group, happy-looking middle-aged men with beards and handsome older women in sun skirts, the angle of the photograph devised to not show in the background the colossal building with its sinister turrets and morbid facade, all made from bricks painted a pale mustard color.  Who knows what a photograph taken in the direction of the asylum would show: perhaps, pale faces deformed with rage and lust dimly visible behind the dark glass windows embedded in the facade, people peering out of the abandoned building as if from the bottom of a dark tarn?   

Kirkbride

The asylum at Fergus Falls stands within a landscape organized around it.  In fact, the ensemble of grounds, buildings, and central structure comprise what may be called a “cultural landscape” – that is, an entire topography created and maintained for a specific utilitarian and ideological purpose.  Simply put, the buildings, fields, and lawns were erected to implement a specific method for treating the insane (or those outcasts defined in those terms).  The inventor of this system was Thomas Kirkbride.  The huge halls and park-like grounds of the asylum are, in effect, a machine to treat the mentally ill.

Kirkbride was a Quaker born in rural Pennsylvania in 1809.  He studied medicine and worked as a physician at the Friends Asylum near Philadelphia.  Kirkbride, like many 19th century Quakers, was a humanitarian and reformer.  In the middle of the 19th century, many states had no asylums for the insane and the mentally ill were housed in prisons or on county poor farms where they languished, untreated at best and tortured at worst.  Kirkbride developed a plan for the humane treatment of what we could today psychiatric patients.  In keeping with the taxonomic ambitions of 19th century science, the Kirkbride plan involved regimentation of the ill into ranks and hierarchies.  The mentally ill became a sort of army supervised by Kirkbride and other physicians trained in his method – this army of the insane was housed according to strict protocols as to rank expressed in the ground plan of the asylums built according to his plan.  Kirkbride was a controversial figure, reviled by some and worshiped by others.  Some thought his system rigid and autocratic; others felt that his work was a humane alternative to most other methods for treating the mentally ill.  Kirkbride never doubted the humanity of his patients and organized them into a rational corporate body, the quasi-mathematical rationality of his plan intended as anodyne to the irrationality of the insane.  After his first wife died, Kirkbride married one of his patients and remained committed to his rigorous system of treatment until his death in 1883.  He died of pneumonia in the superintendent’s house where he lived at the Pennsylvania Home for the Insane.  Kirkbride’s plan outlived its inventor – the Fergus Falls asylum that embodies his scheme of treatment was built in 1890, seven years after his death.  Indeed, Kirkbride plan asylums continued to be built until around the turn of the 20th century when a new generation of alienists criticized the central tenets of this theories.  Nonetheless, Kirkbride institutions continued to house huge cohorts of the mentally ill until the period after World War II when electro-convulsive therapy and pharmaceutical treatments ameliorated the systems of psychosis in many patients and allowed them to function outside of the asylum.  With decreasing populations, the enormous Kirkbride plan institutions become white elephants and, most of them, have now been torn down.  The Fergus Falls buildings are important because they preserve in almost completely intact for a classically designed Kirkbride plan asylum.

Kirkbride published his plans for psychiatric treatment of the insane in 1854.  The centerpiece of his system was a majestic asylum, a sort of palace for the insane.  To avoid unjustly stigmatizing the mentally ill, the central administrative wing of the asylum was built on a grandiose scale, equipped with a high, ornate tower, an elaborate entry foyer, and beautiful mosaic-tiled floors.  This structure was the hinge for two huge wings, extending on an angle back and away from the impressive central tower.  These wings, in turn, had wings of their own, more sharply angled toward the rear of the array of buildings.  Viewed from above, the asylum lay-out appears as a sort massive wedge, bent back from the central building with adjacent wings more sharply tilted into the landscape behind the structure.  The two opposing back wings are each also surmounted by gothic-looking towers.  In fact, the whole ensemble resembles in floor-plan a mighty wing, something like the feathered span of a condor sweeping back from beak-like central tower to create a vast half-enclosed space behind the building.  The wings attached to the administrative core of the building house less excitable and agitated patients.  The building system is strictly symmetrical – men occupy one flank of the complex of buildings, female patients on other side.  The structure is relatively narrow, intending that each ward have views of the landscape outside the asylum through their windows.  The two opposing wings at the rear of the complex, connected to the rest of the asylum a narrower and curving tower of walkways, are for the more intractable, dangerous, and seriously ill patients.  The system of interconnected buildings is four stories tall, with high ceilings inside the structure and a massive gabled roof with a heavy cornice running along the edges of the wings.  Kirkbride’s concept was that the mentally ill in an acute phase of their illness would first be housed in the wings more remote from the central core of the facility.  As treatment progressed and the patients’ symptoms subsided, they would then be moved into wings adjacent to the great heap of the square steeple, a tower soaring over this secular cathedral.  

Behind the structure, barns and stables were built on a farm where inmates worked to produce food for the inhabitants of this city of the insane.  The landscape around the asylum was planted with trees in pleasant colonnades surrounding open grassy lawns – the concept was that patients would look from their window and behold a salubrious park, not wild but constructed according to rational plan.  The superintendent and his family lived in a separate structure with noble proportions and a coach-house.  Dormitories were built nearby for nurses and other staff and a colony of little homes shingled with red tiles were erected for doctors who chose to avail themselves of this amenity.  Near the structure there was a dairy barn equipped according to the most modern agrarian principles and, of course, there was a cemetery somewhere, although, perhaps, the less said about that place the better.

The first two patients entered the colossal echoing chambers of the asylum in the fall of 1890, ordered there on commitment by the Probate Judge for Otter Tail County.  The asylum was built because the St. Peter State Hospital and the Rochester Asylum for the insane were overcrowded and, in fact, had been accused of gross negligence and inhumanity with respect to those confined there.  Mentally ill patients lived at Fergus Falls through 1971.  At that time, the farm was closed and, later, the name of the place was changed to the Fergus Falls Treatment Center.  This name change reflected the fact that most of those committed to the asylum were now inebriates or victims of drug abuse, many of them Native American.  After 1971, the facility was, also, opened to the severely developmentally delayed and geriatric patients as well.  In the 1980's, paradigms for treatment changed: most of the mentally ill and developmentally disabled were now dispersed into group homes.  The place was shut down after 105 years of operation in 1995.    

No one knows what to do with the structure today.  The entire complex of buildings is now protected under the National Registry of Historic Places, but this doesn’t guaranty protection against demolition.  The State sold the asylum to the City of Fergus Falls in 2007 and municipal offices occupy a new building to the north of the huge phalanx of the asylum, city hall there apparently constructed on the site of the nurses’s dormitory torn down in the late ‘80's.  From time to time, the City has attempted to convert some of the structure to apartments but this has never been successful in the long term.  Periodically, measures are passed by the City Council to demolish the asylum but many people in Fergus Falls regard the facility as unique and oppose its destruction.  So the place now occupies a kind a civic limbo, the embodied memory of something that no one really knows how to assimilate.  

Circuit-tour

Except for the heat and glare, nothing prevents visitors from walking along the asylum walls.  The heat isn’t yet appalling and, so, we stroll the length of the building from the central tower to the west escarpment.  A chain-link fence encloses some lawn along the wing extending to the north.  So far as I can see, parts of the heavy stucco cornice have dropped down from the top of the wall and some bricks are scattered at the base of the building, also projectiles fallen from above.  The fence, I think, is intended to keep visitors out of the zone of danger where the icy winds from North Dakota are gradually unraveling the western escarpment.  Behind the building, great lawns stretch out to a big administrative structure with a hip roof standing apart from the Kirkbride phalanx of linked buildings.  It takes a half-hour to stroll the length of the back walls to the east wing.  Then, we turn south, follow the flanking building back to the elongated front facade, looping back to where we began the tour.

Martin with Hannah and Lucas inspect the base of the walls where there are a hundred windows at ground level, most of them stuffed with planks of plywood or metal shields to prevent access.  Forty numbered doors open into the structure, all of them bolted shut.  A peculiar little tent stands in the middle of the huge park-like lawn to the north of the structure – the breeze toys with the light canvas awning.  In a couple of places, Martin finds that kids have levered their way into the building, knocking out the plywood or metal shuttering the basement windows.  If you were bold enough, you could crawl through the window well and enter the dank cellar.   But, of course, you would have to scale a wall to escape from the building and that would be perilous, probably requiring a ladder or rope harness of some kind.  The dark sockets at the base of the yellow ramparts open into a dim chambers, empty except for paint chips scaled off the wet walls suppurating with black and grey mold.  Windows higher on the wall are mostly intact, although some have been smashed.  Behind the windows, the inside of the structure is dark, filled with ponderous shadow.  Beyond the sills, some of the windows have white curtains dangling decorously from invisible rods, graceful white forms lurking inside the building. Several enormous smokestacks rise high over the towering four story building.  The smokestacks are corroded the color of old burning barrels, and, when you rap on their sides, rust shakes loose and sifts down onto the lawn and, inside the great reddish column, creatures stir, either rats or bats, rustling inside the metal pillar.  

We make our way along the east wing, then, hike south to the front of the building.  The towers overhead are shadowy, big knuckles of brick capped with pointed gables.  At the front of the building, the central tower has a peculiar feature – there are no entry doors visible under the ornate campanile spire.  Eyes to the glass, cupped by our hands, we can see elaborate mosaic floors with geometric patterns inside.  The big central tower is the focal point of the entire ensemble of buildings and seems designed as an impressive entrance into the facilty.  But where we expect to see a grand door surmounting a flight of steps, there are neither stairs nor any kind of door at all, merely a sort of brick scupper extending out from the facade, a curved stone wall shaped like the cowcatcher on an old locomotive.  How did people even enter this place?  Presumably, there were once doors along the side of the campanile, but they aren’t obvious.  Perhaps, it’s all a trick of the sun which is now directly overhead so that the vast building has no skirt of shadow.  

We started our circuit at one of the numbered doors a little to the west of the dark, looming tower.  The door is a sheet of metal, bolted in place, but with a hinge so that it can be opened.  Someone has scratched letters into the door, words above a pentagram crudely inscribed on the corroded metal: Pazuzu’s House.  A number is stenciled on the brick next to the door.

Pazuzu is an Assyrian demon, associated with locusts, floods, and famines.  With his snake penis and horned head, he protected women in childbirth and warded off another, even more wicked demon, Lamashtu (too terrible to be represented) who murdered new born babies.  A bronze statuette of this demon figures in the opening scenes in The Exorcist.  Later, a madman in North Carolina named himself Pazuzu Algarad, filed down his teeth, drank blood, and murdered a couple of men.  Pazuzu Algarad boasted that he had killed and eaten two prostitutes but his adoring girlfriends said that he was really a gentle sort notwithstanding his sinister bluster, kind to his friends, and a good listener.  He was arrested and detained for murder but committed suicide in his cell.  Some disturbing videos showing the abysmal filth in his home in Clemmons, North Carolina (a suburb to Winston-Salem) can be seen on the Internet and, among people interested in the occult, he is fairly well-known. 

Before embarking on our tour, we pounded at Pazuzu’s door and demanded that he open and let us into his realm.  The metal echoed, the impact of our fists sounding across the dry lawns and old oak and maple trees growing over the pale sidewalks in the park.  Pazuzu didn’t deign to open the sealed door for us.  Returning to where we had started our walk, about an hour later, we tried the door again, kicking it and knocking once more.  “Come out!” we shouted.  Pazuzu kept his own counsel and did not appear.  We leaned against the door, now warm with the volcanic heat of the day – I thought I heard the brief, leathery flutter of his wings, but, perhaps, it was only my own breath or the pounding of my heart.

Palace of the Winds

In storied Jaipur, an emperor built a towering pink wall, only a few yards thick, bulging out over the marketplace like a sort of filigree shield.  This is the Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, still standing in the Indian city.  The sun is hot in Jaipur and enclosed spaces are like ovens.  The emperor’s structure consists of a hundred small cell-like balconies protected from the sun (and from the eyes of passersby) by intricate brick lattice-work.  The whole rampart is a refuge for the women cloistered in the court, a vantage from which they could see, but not be seen, behind this tapestry of pierced masonry.  The structure is made from rose-colored sandstone and it is very beautiful.

At the corner of the front wing of the asylum in Fergus Falls, a similar structure rises over the placid lawn.  Climbing the side of the building, there is an annex made from metal that is pierced with innumerable cavities opening into a stacked terrace of day-rooms.  Peering through the slits cut into the fluted metal, you can see an interior where light falls in checkerboard patterns through the dim, tiled ward, tables and sinister-looking furniture.  Pulled up close to the slits in the facade are wheel chairs and gurneys.  Apparently, the patients sat behind these perforated metal walls and peered out across the lawn, down the hill over homes grouped in neighborhoods around small, oval lakes, across the roads shaded by old trees, to the brick and stone slab downtown crouched above a place where a river skids over a dam, white water flickering there like the tongue of a serpent.  The wall-penetrations admitted not only sunlight but fresh air, breezes and gusts of wind into the ward where the inmates sat close to the slits in the walls meditating on the landscape outside.  They could see but not be seen because, I suppose, that to some people their aspect would have been terrible.     

Martin’s Birthday 

My son, Martin, will celebrate his birthday in the coming week.  I brought him a picture postcard purchased years ago at the Chicago Art Institute.  The card shows Franz Marc’s “Bewitched Mill,” a painting that I have always admired.  In the picture, a floral scroll of white representing water spools down between prismatic cubes of red and green and dark blue.  On the right, a red waterwheel hangs in the plume of falling water.  A scarlet beast, either a panther or a doe, drinks from a tendril of the watery cascade and four birds, arrayed in vertical column, play in the mist, partly obscured by white veins.  The upper most bird is red with spread wings. 

“Is there a more mysterious idea,” Marc said, “than to imagine how nature is reflected in the eyes of animals?”  

Marc saw the original of the mill in Merano, Italy in 1913.  In his canvas, he attempts to depict the harmony that he intuited at the mill, an enchanted place where the works of man embrace nature and the great wheel turns and small birds sing as enigmatic beasts come to slake their thirst.  At the top of the toppling flood, a flower with petals of many colors protrude through the veil of falling waters – or, maybe, the form represents another bird.  It is a version of the Peaceable Kingdom.

Marc was drafted into the German cavalry in 1914.  At first, he was ordered to paint tarpaulins with abstract vegetal patterns so that the fabric could be used to camouflage gun emplacements – work that he enjoyed. Presumably, Marc was pleased to be a cavalryman – he loved horses and many of his most famous paintings show these animals.  Cultural authorities thought that Marc was too important a cultural asset to be wasted in the futile combat on the Western Front.  He was at the head of list of soldiers to be assigned non-combat duty.  But the message came to his commander too late:  Marc was killed by a shell splinter through the head at Verdun in 1916.

On the back of one of his canvases, he wrote: Und alles Sein ist flammend Leid.  (“And all being is flaming suffering”).  The picture is called “The Fate of the Animals” and shows beasts cowering in a jagged storm of fiery colors.  

After Hitler came to power, Marc’s paintings were deemed “degenerate” and removed from museum walls.

Cemeteries 

From the highway, we can see a flag marking a knoll on which the asylum cemetery is located.  But there seems to be no access roads.  The cemetery is landlocked between green, tassel-topped corn fields and low carpets of soybeans.  On the north side of the asylum wings, an inconspicuous lane leads along a shelter-belt, just two ruts cut into the edge of the corn.  The lane shifts direction in a grove of trees, then, runs up to a fence that encloses a bare lot of sun-scorched sod, probably about 100 yards long.  In a wooden shelter, a white diagram maps the graves – there are hundreds are densely packed and filling the entire field.  The graves are numbered, presumably indexed to a ledger that identifies the burials.  The first grave was dug in 1893, before the asylum was complete; the last marked grave was filled in 1940. 

We walk out across the bare pitch of land.  It’s featureless except for thirty of so stone markers, each bearing a name and year-dates.  The markers are inset in the sod so that a mower can ride over them and they are all identical and, apparently, freshly carved.  In the middle of the fields, there are bunches of granite slabs bearing year numbers and names, but they haven’t yet been placed.  The granite stones are heaped up in piles bound together by metal straps.  It seems as if work at the cemetery was commenced and, then, suddenly stopped. Near the north side of the plot, the gravestones embedded in the grass suddenly end mid-sequence.  Near the last granite slab inserted in the grass, a pile of about twenty markers rises as a rectangular cairn above the cemetery.  We hike back to the middle of the field where there is an old weathered tombstone marking the grave of a soldier who fought with the Grand Army of the Republic.  

Adjacent to the asylum cemetery, a smaller graveyard enclosed in a wire fence runs along the flank of old wooden posts marking the edge of lunatic graves.  To reach the smaller cemetery, you have to drive over the edge of the lunatic cemetery and, then, bounce over some ruts to reach the other graves.  This is a Potter’s Field, the graveyard for those who died while wards of the State at the County Poor Farm.  In a wooden hutch another diagram charts the place, again a hundred numbered rectangles jammed together.  Another cache of granite slabs, identical to those in the asylum graveyard, are stacked at the edge of the field.  Here a flag flutters disconsolately overhead and a couple of larger, limestone graves from the 19th century mark what was, apparently, once a family plot or, perhaps, a cemetery standing next to a long-gone church.  The heat is scalding now and there’s no shade.  Grasshoppers startle and flash through the air.  A breeze makes the tassels in the corn tremble.

Later, Martin tells me that something called the “Dignity Project” raised money to mark the graves of paupers and lunatics across the country.  Grave markers were commissioned and marked with the names of the deceased and the years of birth and death.  Volunteer crews were in the process of planting the stones in these desolate graveyards but, then, Covid intervened and, it’s obvious, that the work has now been deferred.  

These two cemeteries, almost impossible to access, are on the north side of the asylum but beyond what was once the hospital’s farmlands.  They aren’t so much derelict or abandoned as simply invisible.  The sloping fields were once entirely bare except for a few tombstones that preceded the use of the lots as cemeteries operated by the State.  The lunatics and paupers were not so much forgotten as simply treated as non-existent.  They went from their sick beds in the State hospital and County poor farm straight into unmarked graves.  The empty fields were mowed and maintained for as long as they were needed and, then, perhaps kept up sporadically by a kind of custom or reflex.  But the idea seems to have been to leave the dead alone and, perhaps, bury them a second time under fields of soybean and corn.  This approach to these graves was briefly reconsidered – I suppose this is the meaning of the “Dignity Project” but, now, dignity is on hold, indefinitely deferred and, perhaps, funds have run out to mark the remaining graves on the site.  And, if only some graves are marked, and the rest left unidentified and nameless, then, it might be legitimately asked: What was the point of marking some but not the others?  

The wind whispers and the heat bears down and the bare knolls of grass with only one or two scattered trees bake in the bright sunlight.  The flag shakes on its fetters, chain clicking against the metal pole.

Car seat calamity

We drive back to Fargo, distance of fifty miles, and I drop off Martin and the children at their grandmother’s apartment.  The kids are going to the air show tomorrow, the program for which the jets tooling around overhead in tight formation have been rehearsing. 

About five miles from Alexandria, Martin calls to tell me that I have the car seats for the kids still strapped in my back if my car.  I’ve gone too far, about 110 miles, and it wouldn’t make any sense for me to turn around now.  I tell Martin that I’ll send some money for replacements.  

The heat and the sun is obviously affecting me.  In order to get Lucas out of my car, I had to bend over him in the backseat and release the belt holding him.  But it never occurred to me to yank the car-seats out of my vehicle.  

On Freakonomics Radio, I listen to a show about how car-seats act as a form of contraception.  Most passenger cars will accommodate two infant car seats in the rear.  This means that a third child required to travel buckled into a such a contraption will compel the parents to acquire a new larger car.  For this reason, statistics show that about 150,000 children have not been conceived because their parents didn’t want to buy a bigger, more bourgeois SUV.  I wonder if this can be true.  

Sauk Centre

My plan was to spend the evening in Sauk Centre, but all the motels along the freeway are no vacancy tonight.  Some event is underway or, perhaps, people are just getting out for the weekend, stir-crazy from the long period of Covid confinement.  In any event, I’ve got a room booked another 12 miles down the highway at a place called Melrose. 

I still have a lot of light left in the day – it won’t get dark until 9:15 – and, so, I exit at Sauk Centre.  There’s an enigmatic stone somewhere near town that is reputed to be a Viking Altar, whatever that might be, and I would like to see it. 

The novelist, Sinclair Lewis, was born in Sauk Centre.  Apparently, there are some monuments to the writer in town.  Far from the Main Street exit, on the freeway north of town, an exit signals Sinclair Lewis Avenue.  No buildings are in sight, just fields of row-crop and low wooded hills drooping down to ellipse-shaped swamps.  I presume the exit is a scam, an invitation to leave the freeway and, then, tour the commercial outskirts of the village where, probably, there are gas stations and propane delivery services interspersed with used car lots.  I continue south to Main Street and, then, drive into town on that more direct route. 

Shadows are lengthening.  A sign reminds me that I am on “America’s Main Street” – that is, the place described in Lewis’ novel of that same name.  It’s been many years since I read Sinclair Lewis’ books – I recall that my father urged me to read Arrowsmith in junior high school and I admired the novel.  (Probably, my father was hoping I would acquire an interest in medicine and microbiology as a result of reading the book – I recall reading Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters at the same time.)  Lewis’ satirical novels about small town life in the Midwest, of course, didn’t endear him to Sauk Centre and, for many years, the fact that Main Street was ostensibly about that place, although disguised as the fictional Gopher Prairie, made the novelist a persona non grata in his hometown.  The old slights are now forgiven and there is a life-size bronze statue of Lewis standing companionably in front of the local Chamber of Commerce.  The village has about 4500 souls and it’s Main Street is a broad thoroughfare with old red brick buildings ranked along opposing sidewalks.  The town’s movie theater has a big old-style marquee that reads M A I N in black block letters, vaguely Bauhaus in form, posing dramatically against a white angular background.  

The Viking Altar Rock is supposed to the northwest of town, beyond the river, on the shores of Sauk Lake.  I cross the bridge over the river.  In the soggy, often flooded, trough next to the bore of water, some people are playing volley ball and a few fisherman are angling in the brown river, pickups parked next to the picnic ground.  The town ends abruptly beyond the river-crossing.  Fields lap up around a long, narrow lake, big enough to entertain speed boats.  I drive for a couple miles but see nothing like a park harboring the so-called Altar Rock and return to town.

Sinclair Lewis Visitor Center

After traversing Main, I turn south on Sinclair Lewis Avenue.  At the edge of town, overlooking a slough where white herons are feeding, a large modern building looms.  This is the Visitor Center, also a sort of luxury hotel and restaurant.  A couple of sleek touring bus are pulled up to the front door, waiting for guests to return from inside the facility.  

There’s no charge to enter and I walk past the exhibit on the author toward a sunken atrium where people are dining.  A fountain whispers, water splashing in a turquoise basin.  Apparently, Sinclair Lewis is very popular in Dubai.  The tourists in the Visitor Center all seem to be sheiks of Araby wearing white cotton gowns and white linen turbans.  They are finishing their meals.  Beyond a gallery spiraling around the atrium, some corridors drop down to a second atrium.  Here several of the sheiks are sitting across from local girls and receiving manicures.  The corn-fed Midwestern girls have done up their hair in styles supposed to impress the sheiks – they have corkscrew curls in ringlets of hair alongside their plump apple-cheeks.  The girls are giggling and the sheiks mutter in low-pitched voices, accented English that I am unable to understand.  Of course, if a girl can win a sheik as a companion, she has hit the jackpot and there is an atmosphere of rushed, exhilarating sexuality in the atrium.  Someone enters from an upper gallery, leaning over the brushed zinc balustrade, to summon the sheiks back to the dining room and, thence, to the waiting tour buses.  I think that the summons applies to me also and so I retrace my steps toward the dining area.  But Security has now intervened and the passageway is blocked.  I have to exit the building into the soggy heat and walk along the curving side of the structure.  A retaining wall of big boulders slumps down to the marsh where the white herons are clumped together like snowballs of petals floating on the pond.  A number of the boulders have slipped from their proper place and slid down to rest, half-sunk in the water.  

In front of the Sinclair Lewis Visitor Center, the sheiks are boarding their buses.  The local girls with the elaborate hairdos are waving goodbye to them.  All good things must come to an end. 

Maine Street

Back in my car, I drive back up Sinclair Lewis Avenue, crossing Main that I now imagine as Maine Street.  Three blocks to the north, a little house stands on the east side of the avenue, nondescript but marked with a Minnesota State Historical Society plaque.  I park up the block and walk back to the house.  The sign says that Sinclair Lewis was born in this small bungalow in 1885.  There’s nothing noteworthy about the home’s appearance and it seems modest for a physician – Lewis’ father was the local doctor.  Lewis had a bad complexion, a skeletal physique, and bulging eyes.  He was noteworthy for his ugliness.  His first novel, Main Street (1920), was one of most remarkable publishing events in the 20th century.  The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies and made Lewis into a wealthy man.  He wrote many other novels including Babbitt and It Can’t Happen Here, the latter book about a Fascist coup in the USA becoming a modest bestseller recently when revived after the election of Donald Trump.  

I always confuse Sinclair Lewis with Upton Sinclair.  Adding to this confusion is the fact that Sinclair Lewis resided briefly at Upton Sinclair’s commune, Helicon House, a quasi-socialist “intentional” community in Englewood, New Jersey.  (The Helicon House commune collapsed after being ravaged by a small pox infection and, after a fire, destroyed the community’s central building.)  Upton Sinclair was more political in his interests and not as ugly as Lewis.  Upton Sinclair was a vegetarian and teetotaler; Lewis ultimately died in Rome of alcoholism.  

The Lewis family home in Sauk Centre is closed.  The windows are dark.  The porch creaks underfoot and there’s a cat crossing an alley behind the building.  Something is faint and blurry about the cottage.  It seems to be vanishing before my eyes, erasing itself in the long shadows of the late afternoon.

I take the backroads 12 miles to Melrose where I have reserved a room at a Super 8 Motel.  I’m alert to signs pointing the way to the Viking altar rock, but I don’t see any markers of this kind.    

The Viking Altar Rock

There is a family resemblance between the advertising history of the Viking Altar Rock, supposedly near Sauk Centre, and the sad tale of Floyd Collin’s lonely death in Sand Cave.  In 1917, Collins had discovered a beautiful cavern that could be converted into a “show cave” for tourists.  This was Great Crystal Cave, a grotto on the Flint Ridge Road that led to Mammoth Cave.  The problem was the Great Crystal Cave was near the end of the access highway leading to the National Park and travelers driving on that road encountered a half-dozen other show caves before reaching the cavern on the Collins’ property.  So the cave explorer set out to find another richly decorated cave, but this one closer to the beginning of Flint Ridge Road and, therefore, more likely to attract tourists before their interest in the local grottos was satiated.  Collins was scrambling around deep in a nasty little wormhole called Sand Cave when he became trapped and, after weeks of rescue efforts, died in the cold hole where he was pinned by a 27 pound rock fallen wedged onto his ankle.  

The Kensington Rune Stone was found on a hilltop near the village of that name, the rock wrapped in the old roots of a tree standing over the inscribed slab.  The rune stone was removed from its knoll in the country and brought to Alexandria where it is displayed in a small for-profit museum.  Many people have an interest in the rune-stone, although, of course, it is a hoax, likely carved around 1898 when a man named Olaf Ohman claimed to have found the rock.  A big glacial erratic in Todd County, probably about seventy miles from Alexandria where the rune-stone now is exhibited was vigorously promoted as another Viking artifact.  The idea was to persuade travelers on the way north to the lake district around Alexandria to stop first at the Viking Altar Rock.  In the annals of publicity, the Viking Altar Rock might be an attraction exploiting tourist’s interests in the runestone.  And the Altar Rock had the benefit of being closer to St. Cloud and, therefore, closer to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul from which most visitors would like originate.  Although the scant literature on the Altar Rock doesn’t mention this motivation directly, it seems that the City Fathers in Sauk Centre conceived the notion of diverting travelers aimed at Alexandria (or, perhaps, interested in Sinclair Lewis) through town to the stony hillside about four miles distant where the Altar Rock rested, half-buried in a copse of little poplars above Big Sauk Lake.  Indeed, people plotted a so-called Viking Trail beginning (or ending depending upon direction of travel) at the Altar Rock, winding among the little towns to the east of the freeway and ending with the Runestone Museum in Alexandria.  A route was identified and a number of signs were even erected on the right-of-way marking the Viking Trail.  But the project foundered, likely because the route wasn’t sufficiently interesting and the connection to the charismatic ancient Vikings was a bit too tenuous.  (Later, parts of the route were rejiggered as the Lake Wobegon Trail, a loop of roads linking small hamlets claimed as inspiration for the humorist Garrison Keillor’s books and short stories about that mythical village featured in monologues each Saturday night on the popular Prairie Home Companion Show on Minnesota Public Radio.  Unfortunately for highway loop, Keillor was accused of sexual harassment, and approaching 80, an implausible Lothario, was fired from his show which was promptly withdrawn from circulation. Indeed, Keillor was so thoroughly “canceled” that he has basically vanished from public view, and, with him. his fictional creations underwriting the Lake Wobegon motor-car trail.) 

The Viking Altar Rock has a disconcerting history of being found and, then, lost again, sometimes for decades.  It is now, more or less, lost once more and, of course, my attempts to find the place were unavailing. I know generally where the rock is located and can, even, give directions, more or less, to that place.  But the boulder, now, is apparently inaccessible – the gate to the lane leading to the hillside in which it is embedded is padlocked.  Visits are by appointment made with the owner of the land only.

The rock is variously described as four or five miles from Sauk Centre on the slope of a hill that descends to Big Sauk Lake, said to be 200 yards distant.  The location of the hill is Section 26, Birchdale Township, Todd County.  Elderly men living around Sauk Centre attested to fact that the boulder was first encountered in thick undergrowth around 1883.  (Memories may be inexact – accounts of the boulder’s discovery were first transcribed in the early 1940's).  Early accounts describe the huge rock as shaped like a horseshoe, 27 feet long and 17 feet wide.  In 1883, the boulder was unbroken, a single granite mass.  (Today, the rock has cracked and is divided into two adjacent boulders separated by a pencil-thin fissure; however, the general shape of the boulder remains the same as described in the earliest accounts.)  Viewed from some angles, the big rock looks like a giant dog or wolf curled up against the cold and sleeping under a couple of straight and slender trees. The boulder is noteworthy on account of four holes that seemed to have been bored or chiseled into the granite.  Two of the holes are on the side of the erratic, about 40 inches above grade and located several inches apart although not on the exact same level.  Across from these two holes, there are another two circular indentations on the top shoulder of the boulder.  The holes range in depth from six to 16 inches and are a little larger than one inch in diameter.  Photographs show the holes are almost perfectly circular and they certainly seem to be artificial or man-made. (Some accounts describe the holes as triangular – I’m not sure whether this description applies to the shape of the hole or the contour of its indentation.)  In fact, the shape of the holes suggests that someone bored into the stone, probably to plant dynamite or another explosive in the rock to blow the boulder up.  But this hypothesis doesn’t make any sense.  The boulder is too large to be simply exploded and it rests embedded in a fairly steep hillside that is probably not tillable.  Furthermore, there are no marks of burning or explosive blast on the surface of the granite which seems relatively smooth and regular.  Finally, the location of the holes, two closely spaced on the rock’s side and two on the upper surface about eight feet away seem inconsistent with an effort to shatter the boulder by detonation.   In any event, the first settlers to stumble onto the stone, hidden initially in wooded undergrowth, noticed the holes chiseled into the boulder.  In 1883, the old man recalling the boulder’s discovery, said that the strange rock was surrounded by timber and “two rods” uphill from a “good spring.”  The land was cleared and by 1888, the spring had dried-up.  

No one thought much about the boulder and it was forgotten.  The Kensington Rune Stone was unearthed in 1898 and, slowly thereafter, local antiquarians, mostly, it seems, Catholic priests, developed a cottage industry of looking for Viking artifacts in northwestern Minnesota.  Several moor-stones were discovered – these were big rocks with holes bored in them so Viking longboats could be anchored near shore.  Most of these moor-stones were located in places remote from any navigable water and so their discoverers also indulged in speculation as to the location of lost river beds or eutrophied lakes now wholly vanished, but, apparently, once comprising a system of streams and lakes over which dragon boats could be rowed.  The Rune Stone, itself, was located on a hilltop remote from any navigable river, but advocates of pseudo-archaeological theories as to Viking presence in this part of Minnesota theorized the existence of water-routes that had, in effect, dried-up.  People hunted for bronze and iron swords and Viking belt buckles and, of course, a few items of this sort turned-up, although skeptics usually pointed-out that the corroded chunks of metal were indistinguishable from harrow points or gear used with horses and oxen.  

The Rune Stone bore a date, 1362, and, in fact, can’t be characterized as a Viking artifact – the era of the Vikings ended before 1100 AD.  Theorists posited that King Magnus in Norway learned in 1356 that one of the colonies in Greenland had vanished.  The houses and barns were empty and the little stone church fallen into ruin.  It was speculated that the pioneers in medieval Greenland had reverted to paganism and embarked westward to Vinland the Good.  King Magnus is supposed to have sent several expeditions to Greenland to confirm that the colony had, in fact, abandoned their village en masse and set sail for America.  These expeditions penetrated the continent to the Great Lakes sailing up the Saint Lawrence Seaway and reaching the head of Lake Superior where parties may have advanced inland on foot.  At the same time, explorers found their way around the Labrador into Hudson Bay and by devious means reached Lake Winnipeg, the head waters of the Red River of the North.  Rowing upstream, the Norseman in search of the lost colony moored their vessels along the Red River and, then, forged into the interior of what is now Minnesota, ultimately encountering Indians, Skaelings (or “wretches”) as they are called on the Rune Stone.  The Skraelings attacked the intrepid explorers, and, after taking the time to inscribe the stone, the Norsemen were probably rubbed-out by Indian attack.  At least, this is the legend associated with the Alexandria Rune Stone, as articulated by the chief defender of that artifact’s authenticity, Hjalmar Holand, a man who had discovered many mooring rocks and other artifacts in the area.  

Holand learned that there was a rock with four holes bored into it somewhere near Sauk Centre.  By this time, people had, more or less, completely forgotten the whereabouts of the Altar Rock.  Holand inquired of local priests who had heard about the big boulder but didn’t know where it was.  Someone said that the rock was on the west side of Big Sauk Lake and, so, a systematic search was undertaken in that terrain.  But nothing was found.  Then, a middle-aged lady who had been raised in the area recalled having seen the rock when she was a little girl – it was on the east side of Big Sauk Lake as far as she remembered.  Her memories were reasonably accurate and the boulder was re-discovered around 1940.  Holand wrote a chapter about the altar rock in his book defending the Alexandria (Kensington) Rune Stone against skeptics.  A photograph said to be taken in 1940 shows a man in a suit wearing a black tie and a pork-pie hat standing next to the boulder.  The granite hasn’t split yet and the black boreholes in the side of the granite show as two deep, dark eye-sockets – it’s as if the freshly rediscovered boulder is staring back at the camera.  

Holund had theorized that the boulder was an altar.  However, he had trouble explaining the location of the four holes in the rock.  At first, it was argued that a now defunct inlet in Big Sauk Lake reached up to the edge of the big stone on the hillside.  This would make the rock a moor-stone.  But no one accepted that premise – there was no evidence of inlet.  Holund argued that the two holes forty inches above grade were cut into the rock so that poles could be inserted to support a small, partly tilted shelf protruding from the boulder.  This theorized shelf could be used to support vessels containing the elements of the Eucharist, the body and blood, during Mass.  The two holes on the top of the rock were insertion points for halberds to which fabric was attached to shield the table seven or so feet away on the other side of the boulder.  This drapery kept the wind from disrupting the solemn celebration of the Mass.  Holund was an imaginative fellow – from the evidence of the Rune Stone and cryptic notations in chronicles of the life and times of King Magnus, he surmised Catholic monks exploring the interior of North America and, then, even settled on a date for the celebration of Mass at the rock: it was the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin on August 15. 1362.  

A local priest, Father Retzla was impressed with Holund’s reconstruction of the altar.  (Holund’s book contains an elegant engraving showing the wooden table and the drapery creating a sacral space around the boulder.)  He regarded the Altar Rock as a monument to the faith and advocated that the State (or, at least, the County) create a park around the boulder.  By this time, in the mid-1950's, a couple named John and Darlene Dols owned the premises.  They were persuaded to sell the tract of land where the boulder is located to a local chapter of the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternal organization.  The Todd County Knights of Columbus advocated for recognition of the Altar Rock.  The climax of this advocacy was a so-called “ecumenical” Mass celebrated at the boulder on the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin on August 10, 1973.  The rock was tricked-out in the furnishing imagined by Holund – the little shelf and canopy – and no fewer than six Catholic priests were in attendance at the ceremony.  (The rite doesn’t seem to me to have been very “ecumenical” although it was reported in that fashion in all the local papers – many of whom sent photographers to show people gathered around the hillside boulder.)  An honor guard of Fourth Degree Knights of Columbus provided security for the Mass.  It seems odd that the Knights of Columbus, a fraternal lodge that reveres Christopher Columbus as the father of the Catholic religion in the Americas, would be so devoted to the Altar Rock.  But these were German Catholics upholding the honor of their kinsman, the medieval Norseman who supposedly rambled around this part of the world in the 14th century.  The local Lutherans were invited to the Mass on the theory that the Norse had explored the area before the lamentable schism in the Faith and that there were neither Catholics nor Protestants in 1362, merely Christians.  It’s not clear how many Protestants were in attendance at the Mass, probably, I think, few if any.  The Knights of Columbus planned to develop the area into a historical park and, even, paid for the construction of road from the highway to the hillside.  But interest waned and, ultimately, the Knights found themselves with a “white elephant” on their hands.  The Knights sold the vestigial park of Kaj Swenson, a World War Two veteran.  Swenson conducted some amateur excavations around the rock and turned-up 17 crushed and corroded beer cans as well as lots and lots of shattered glass.  Local kids apparently came to the Altar Rock, got drunk, and smashed beer bottles on the granite stone.

Swenson sold the Altar Rock premises to Bob and Pat Voyles who own the site today.  The Voyles live in Minnetonka and have a web-address where you can contact them by email and arrange for a visit to the altar rock.  Tours to the rock are by appointment only.     

Massacre

Read the sagas.  This is my advice to anyone interested in literature.  In the Icelandic sagas, the reader encounters Vikings.  Of course, these raiders are viewed from the perspective of Christianity and the stories of feuding families in the sagas rely on memories and traditions 200 years old when the accounts were written down.  Generally, modern archaeologists agree that they would not want to meet a Viking – they were too unpredictable, impulsive and violent.  If you go about day and night carrying a big iron ax, you are likely to use it.  There is a darkness in the sagas that, sometimes, threatens to overwhelm the light.

A man named Paul Crawford moved from Waite Park near St. Cloud to a house on a lake three miles from Sauk Centre.  This was in late 1995.  Crawford was divorced and a military veteran, although he had been retired for several years – he was 72 years old.

After moving to his modest lakeside cottage, Crawford discovered that the neighbor’s dock in Big Sauk Lake was encroaching on his land.  For some reason, lots with waterfront were platted in pie-shaped wedges, narrower on lakeshore than at the highway looping around Big Sauk.  Crawford’s next door neighbor was a man named Warren Schloegel.  Although this wasn’t obvious at first, Schloegel’s property was surveyed five feet narrower on its lake access than at the road.  As a result, the wooden dock extending from the shore on Schloegel’s land was mostly on Crawford’s lakefront.  When Crawford discovered the problem, he demanded that Schloegel move the dock so that it didn’t encroach on his strip of lakeshore.  Schloegel, who was married with three children, reluctantly dragged the wooden pier over the boundary line and put the dock within his property.  But he was accustomed to tether his boat to the dock on Crawford’s side so that it intruded onto the neighbor’s lot.  

Crawford tried to make friends with other neighbors.  He visited Frank Hittle who was his neighbor on the side of his lot opposite Schloegel’s property.  Hittle recalled that Crawford asked him if the crappies were biting and wondered whether he needed a fishing partner.  

Crawford obsessed over the property line at the Schloegel land.  He hired a surveyor to establish the true boundary and had markers placed as monuments.  Spring advanced; the ice was off the lake.  When Schloegel’s kids played in the lake, they flopped around on Crawford’s side of the property line and the fishing boat bobbed up and down in his water.  Crawford went to the County Attorney’s office and demanded that Schloegel be prosecuted for trespass.  One of the survey monuments had gone missing and Crawford suspected that one of Schloegel’s children had moved the marker.  Of course, the county attorney couldn’t be bothered to intervene, an errand that would have led to nothing but trouble in any event.  On a couple of occasions, Crawford called deputies of the Todd County sheriff’s department to the lake to complain about Schloegel and his children.  It wasn’t clear that Schloegel had committed any crimes.  

By all accounts, Schloegel was aggressive and hot-tempered.  He worked maintaining machines at a local meat processing plant.  Crawford told his son that Schloegel had fired a shot over his head when he was standing on the dock.  But this wasn’t reported to authorities until after the massacre.  By that time, public officials touched by the feud were in a serious ass-covering mode.

During the early evening on June 21, 1996, the longest day of the year, Crawford called the sheriff’s department to complain that another survey monument had gone missing.  He said that it cost him $400 to have the property lines established and that, without the markers, another survey would be required. A deputy appeared at the lake and talked to the two men.  Apparently, things quieted down and the deputy drove back into Sauk Centre.

Crawford went into his house and got his loaded pistol.  He walked over to the next-door neighbor and shot Warren Schloegel in the back of his head.  Then, he shot Schloegel’s twelve-year old daughter Jodi three times in the chest.  He left the bodies where they lay and went to Schloegel’s house.  When Marcella Schloegel (39) appeared at the door, he shot her in the face.  His pistol had run out of bullets and, so, he hurried back to his cottage to get another weapon.

Frank Hittle watched with disbelief as Crawford emerged from his house with a long gun.  At Schloegel’s place, eleven-year old Eric had called 911.  Crawford shot him with his rifle while the boy was on the phone.  Then, he killed the family dog that had trotted up to investigate.  Crawford wasn’t sure that Warren and the others were dead and so he systematically visited each corpse and pumped additional rounds into the bodies.  Crawford went home and called his ex-wife, telling her to come as quickly as possible to the lakefront property.  Then, he used the rifle to blow off his own head.  Only one Schloegel family-member survived – this was Nicola, a sixteen-year old girl, who had driven into town to sleep over at a friend’s house.

The Todd County sheriff, Todd Kircher, was embarrassed by the killings.  After all, his staff had been at the lake only twenty minutes before the massacre.  Kircher underplayed the horror of the massacre.  He told the press: “It’s really a shame that disputes get settled this way.”

Minnesota media and the national press looked for a meaning in the blood bath.  But there was none to be found. Across the lake, on a lonely hillside, two eye-shaped sockets peered down over the fields and the lake’s stagnant water, draped in mats of algae.  The lights atop police cars rotated in the twilight on the long, warm day.  

Bombay Motel

Behind the desk at the Super 8, there is a small dark man, saturnine, with a suspicious expression on his face.  This is the manager and owner of the motel.  Over his shoulder, on a sort of altar, I see a fat Buddha made from pristine white porcelain.  Slung over the Buddha are “show-me-your tits” New Orleans Mardi gras beads.  When the clerk greets me, I can’t understand a word that he says.

The Indian manager puts me in a room right next to his post, within a few feet of the exuberant and merry Buddha.  The room is dim, spells of disinfectant, and has an exhaust fan in the toilet that rattles loudly as if it is about to tear itself apart.  Every Super 8 in the country is equipped with toilet exhaust fans that rattle violently when they are engaged.  

It’s a gloomy place, the sort of room where someone might commit suicide.  Everything here feels as if it’s reached the end of its tether.  

Melrose

The middle of Melrose has been gutted.  Five years ago, a fire burned down the old Catholic Church that was at the center of the village and it hasn’t been rebuilt.  There’s a Burger King near the freeway mounted on a greasy concrete slab that shows an alarming fissure under its edges.  The crack runs the length of the slab on one side of the building, opening into an dark, impenetrable crevasse.  Perhaps, the Burger King rests atop a sinkhole that is gnawing away the structure.  Somewhere out in the country,  a turkey processing plant employs five-hundred immigrant workers.  The remaining brick storefronts downtown have Spanish-language signs in their windows.

Mexican Restaurant

A family-run Mexican restaurant is across the parking lot from the motel.  In the twilight, some workers are restoring a storm-damaged gutter over the cafe’s sign.  A plaster burro and a Mexican campesino wearing a big sombrero stand next to a small cactus, also made of plaster.  The figures are knee-deep in bright red and blue flowers.

I’m on the west side of I94, although this direction is notional – here the freeway may run diagonally or, even, more or less, west to east itself.  Ranged along the frontage road, I see a farm supply business, advertising “Dairy and Animal Supplies” – Leedston: “Keeping Family Farmers on their Farms”.  Some semi-tractor-trailers marked Leedston are parked in the lot to the warehouse.  Across the street, a lumber company sells gates and prefabricated panels piled up along a cyclone fence.  At the place where the frontage road crosses the highway out of town, a red Casey’s General Store and Gas Station stands.  Cars and trucks hurry by on the road out of town.  Some of them show headlights.  

In the Mexican restaurant, I pick up a brochure printed by the “Melrose Area Chamber of Commerce, the Melrose Beacon, and local participating businesses.”  On the cover, a picture shows the town’s water tower rising over a lakefront green with trees and lawns.  Below, in a vignette, a beauty queen has just been crowned and she opens her mouth in joy that seems indistinguishable from horror and despair.  Her open mouth is a deep, cavernous hole in her head, a bit like the cavity burrowing under the Burger King or the bore-holes on the Viking Altar Rock.  

The brochure advertises Porta-Potties, a hair salon, competing insurance agencies, a grocery store, a veterinary hospital, and a company that drills wells.  There is a section on the history of the town.  The town was originally settled by two families, the Wheelers and the Adleys.  At first, the village was called the “Maine-ite Settlement” because these families had come to the frontier from Maine.  I am surprised to see that the first pioneer in these parts, R. F. Adley, is the same man who settled Maine Township near Fergus Falls ten years later, the place where William O. Douglas was born, and the location of the Phelps Mill.  

West Union

In the middle of the night, I hear voices in the dark.  The manager of the motel is talking to someone on the telephone.  He’s angry and upset.  Perhaps, it is bad news from India.  When I drowse off again, I have strange dreams about Sinclair Lewis.    

Ultimately, I can’t sleep and am on the road early in the morning.  Unwilling to take the freeway through the West Suburbs of Minneapolis, I make my way along two-lane highways at the very edge of the gravitational force exerted by the City.  Empty hamlets, with vacant streets, are lined with charming restaurants, specialty charcuteries, flower shops, wine bars and funky taverns with upscale imported beers.  The tiny towns out on the prairie have been spruced-up and the river fronts cleansed and rationalized, sidewalks leading along the grassy banks where streams slip through town, park benches scattered along the paths.  In hollows in the wooded country, suburban houses are crowded together and intersections are hung with traffic semaphores.  But, after a while, the city’s influence fades and the small villages become derelict again, half-wrecked ghost towns. 

On a hilltop on the road to New Prague, a church rears up its steeple in the hot sky. This is West Union. The spike of the steeple is like one of crude, cruel nails used to crucify Christ.  Pickups are gathered around the church on the hill.  If I roll down the window, perhaps, I will hear voices singing a hymn.  The day promises to be very hot.  

August 11, 2021