It is 80 miles as the crow flies, or Google maps, from my home in Austin to Winona on the banks of the Mississippi. Customarily, I travel by freeway to an exit on the ridges eight miles from Winona and, then, drive down a long wooded ravine to the town. This road passes a quarry that is renowned for its agate-bearing gravel. The quarry is a rose-colored cleft in the hills, barred by chain and lock, with some hulking machinery and draglines under the cliffs. But, to my surprise, Google recommended a shorter, more rural, route and so that was highway that I followed.
The first 58 miles was freeway, passing over prairie and the Dexter Ridge with its army of colossal wind turbines waving and blinking in the morning sunlight, then, beyond the exits to Rochester, hidden in green valleys some miles to the north, and, at last, to St. Charles. At that place, the exit drops down a shallow valley overgrown with trees to the town’s Main Street, lined at this time of year, with American flags on each light post. At the Kwik-Trip on the two-lane State Highway to Winona, people were buying fuel for their Saturday adventures at each of the pumps and the place was busy. I hadn’t eaten breakfast and, so, I bought a hot dog, a bottle of water, and some chips. As I was approaching the check-out, a voice called to me: “Hello, Mr. Beckmann.” Then, I recalled that this Kwik Trip was managed by a woman who was a friend of a friend, a big, bawdy blonde who sometimes attended ‘Happy Hour’ at the home of Susan, my secretary. I recognized her immediately and said: “I didn’t remember this was your place” (the company had transferred her to St. Charles from Austin). “Oh, yes,” she said, “it is my place.” The woman was brusque and business-like and, after greeting me, vanished among the aisles of wares.
Before I used the rest room, I watched an Amish man with a chin-beard and soft-looking black hat buying milk at the counter. At his side were two small children, dressed like miniature adults, the little boy wearing jeans with suspenders and a tiny hat shaped the same as his father’s; the little girl was wearing an ankle-length dress and a white, fringed bonnet. When I came out of the toilet, the Amish were gone, but I came upon them, perhaps, a half mile out of town, bouncing along on the gravel shoulder to the road in their black buggy. The mother sat next to her husband wearing a bonnet that was identical to her daughter. They looked clean and crisp, like people in costume for a play.
When I was a young man, I tried a case in Winona, a dispute involving a leaking mobile home set on a cement foundation, also defective, in a valley hidden in the bluffs to the west in Fillmore County. The valley was lined with fluted grey cliffs, towers of withered-looking limestone that shadowed a green and blue trout stream. The man who owned the mobile home, where he lived with his dying wife (she was in the final paralyzed stages of MS), was a World War Two veteran and, in fact, had been a Prisoner of War after being captured in the Battle of the Bulge. (During the protracted litigation, my client’s wife died of pneumonia thought to be caused by her exposure to water penetrating the cheaply built trailer home, although, of course, there was no way of proving that she would not have died any way.) Like most small-stakes litigation involving homes and defective construction, the lawsuit was very bitter and, after a four-day jury trial, my client lost the case. I appealed, was successful, and a new trial was ordered. The lawsuit was settled, if I rightly recall, after we picked the jury but before opening statements. The case involved many procedural disputes and, so, I had to travel to the county courthouse in Winona about a dozen times, including for the two trials and the post-trial motions after my loss. In those days, about 36 years ago, I drove the route to Winona now recommended by Google, that is, along the two-lane highway connecting Rochester to Winona on the Mississippi River, therefore, passing through St. Charles, Utica, Lewiston, Stockton, and, then, up and down a roller coaster of high hills and deep valleys into Winona. The highway stays above the maze of green hollows and ridges contour-plowed with narrow ribbons of beans and corn to Lewiston, where there is a small, but prosperous Chevy dealership and several bleak-looking factories taking advantage of the depressed wages in the country to manufacture plastic widgets and die-cut metal parts. After Lewiston, the road dips into the valleys: Stockton scarcely warrants a speed-trap; except for a tiny corner bar, the village seems a ghost town although someone, it seems, is attending to a its brick church with a truncated steeple and its adjacent cemetery. Then, there are upgrades and downslopes to Winona, with a final long descent through a gloomy valley down to the river and all of this familiar to me from the long-ago proceedings venued in the courthouse in town.
Winona is about twenty blocks wide but four or five miles long, laid-out from east to west between the main channel of the Mississippi River and a lagoon extending parallel to the river. Heavy sheer bluffs wall off the city rising above a strip of grocery stores and restaurants. An iron bridge sits like a waterfowl with folded wings over the Mississippi. At the eastern edge of the town, where the valley narrows above a sluice of tributary streams and wetlands, the town’s distinctive feature, the Sugar Loaf, rises like a broken tooth atop a round-backed bluff. The rock formation looks unnatural because it is: the hilltop was once an outcropping of stone suitable as building materials and, so, bricks were quarried atop the ridge, leaving, at last, the bare stump of rock brooding over the city. Extraction of stone on this bluff occurred early in Winona’s history. Postcards made in the 1890's show the naked pier of rock as it looks today.
The Minnesota Marine Art Museum is on the other end of the town from the Sugar Loaf, it’s west side, although directions are confusing in Winona – the river which orients the town runs east - west here, although this conflicts with the traveler’s mental geography that posits the river as flowing, more or less, always north and south. The Museum, built by Bob Kierlin, the founder of the bolt and screw Fastenal Company (and later a State legislator) occupies a handsome nautical-looking structure set in a fragrant garden overlooking the river’s channel – the place looks a little like an over-sized Red Lobster restaurant. Enormous rust-colored barges are idled in the river, hulking iron structures carrying sand or salt or some other commodity, incongruously pillowed on the soft-looking brown water. Across the channel, trees entangled in underbrush and leaking vines from the edge of the forest, shadow the water.
Inside the museum, it’s bright and airy, a couple of carved wood figureheads installed over the information and ticket desk, and spacious galleries extend across the width of the building. Everything is in good order, but the museum, it seems, is doomed. Kierlin has withdrawn his masterpieces from the collection that formerly occupied three of the museum’s six exhibition spaces. About a year ago, visitors to the museum would have seen paintings by Monet, Picasso, Renoir, and Chagall, among others, but, now, no more. (The museum’s most famous work was a smaller scale, but still large, copy by Emmanuel Leutze himself, of his painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” – Kierlin deaccessioned the picture for about 15 million dollars.) These pictures no longer are on display and have been moved to some other place for storage or to await sale. For inexplicable reasons, the Kierlin family has decided to build a grandiose performance venue in downtown Winona (ground has been broken), the so-called “Masterpiece Hall,” where some of the pictures will be displayed – the docent at the Marine Art Museum told me that this project was budgeted for 28 million dollars and that the concert hall would boast over 680 seats. The Minnesota Marine Art Museum always seemed quixotic to me, located in small city too remote from other cultural venues, in a hard-to-reach corner of the State – there is no direct freeway access to Winona. The “Masterpiece Hall” project seems, if anything, even more impractical and will be, I suspect, a monument to its founder’s megalomania, a sort of imperial tomb most;y sealed and empty. As it stands presently, the Marine Art museum is pleasant but not, on its own, worth a trip to Winona. The pretensions of the old collection, now missing from the museum, are demonstrated by the vast time-lock metal doors, huge iron and steel assemblies reminiscent of the barges on the river and, once, used to seal the Kierlin family treasures into the galleries the way money is locked away in a bank vault. When I toured the museum, the enormous vault doors built into the structure between galleries seemed an odd encumbrance to the rooms with rather nondescript maritime paintings lining the walls: ships under sale, nautical battles, and canvases made for insurance purposes before the invention of the camera.
I found a McDonald’s and ate a hamburger for lunch and, then, went to the campus of Winona State to see A Winter’s Tale. The toilets in the performing arts venue are still too small and, when you see a line waiting for access to the Men’s Room, you know that the amenities are inadequate in certain ways. (Of course, women are much more seriously inconvenienced.) I presume that Masterpiece Hall will have sumptuous toilets with a stall for every five visitors and luxurious lounges and powder rooms. The performance was impressive and the company well-spoken. A highlight in the play was the speech by the insanely jealous Leontes, King of Sicilia, who says that a man who drinks a potion from a chalice that has been steeped in spider venom may be immune from the effects of that poison unless he is aware that the spider is in the drink. Rearing back and with maddened eyes, Leontes’ screams “And I have seen the spider.” What you don’t know, as it is said, doesn’t hurt you. If you don’t know that your wife is an adulterer, then, how have you been harmed? But, as in A Winter’s Tale, what if you see the spider or the trace of spider when it really isn’t present at all?
The day was radiant with fresh, cool winds and a limitless blue sky. Outside the theater, there’s a bower where a concrete bench is shaded by overarching trees, a little nook pressed against the side of the auditorium building flanked by flower beds. At intermission, I sat on the bench and wrote some notes on the play in my Moleskin. (My readers will observe that I have written elsewhere on my Blog about the Marine Art Museum and the Shakespeare plays.) The bench is inscribed “LOVE – PEACE – HARMONY. After the play, I walked across the green sparkling lawns to the parking lot. A long, heavy freight train was jangling over a crossing a couple hundred yards away, at the edge of the Winona State campus, and I heard a bell sounding like a piccolo above the sound of the cars thudding over the crossties.
My eight-dollar ticket to the Marine Art museum was still valid and, so, I drove across town to the galleries and walked through them again. Outside on the terrace overlooking the elephantine barges, I met an ancient mariner. His beard was white and his grey hair long and bedraggled and he transfixed with his glittering eye. I had seen him earlier, sitting at a computer terminal in one of the galleries, apparently providing some form of indistinct, and lackadaisical security. I asked him about the fact that the museum’s main collection had been ransacked.
“Nothing we could do,” he said. He lit a cigarette and morosely surveyed the barges and brown still water in the channel. There was no trace of any current.
The ancient mariner told me that before the Kierlin family pulled the plug, the museum was failing. It’s revenues were down. “We have only one-third of the income of the International Eagle Center up at Wabasha,” he sadly told me.
I drove on a side road along the channel where dead trees were reflected as graceful-looking white columns, the fragments of a Greek temple, in the still water. I found a picnic area. The place was empty except for a man and woman parked at the other end of the parking lot, both of them drunk and belligerent, it seemed, darkening the late afternoon with a prolonged and pointless quarrel. (Other people’s quarrels always seem pointless to you; of course, your own intimate squabbles are fulcrums upon which the earth and the moon and the sun turn.) I read a chapter in Jenny Erpenbeck’s book Heimsuchung (“Visitation”). The chapter was about a Jewish girl named Doris who hides in a closet in an empty building in the Warsaw ghetto. The child urinates and a rivulet flows across the floor, alerting some German soldiers to her presence. Doris is dragged out of her hiding place, shot, and her corpse thrown into a pit with a hundred other bodies. Erpenbeck is an artful stylist and she composes her prose musically, with reoccurring phrases and sentences; she has directed operas and musical theater. But the text irritated me – it seemed vaguely opportunistic, as if the author were, somehow, rejoicing in her ability to convert horror into music. What would this smug and earnest German novelist do if she didn’t have the subject of the war and the holocaust? How would she express her good will, her dismay, her world-weariness, her seriousness if she didn’t have this topic at her disposal? When Guenter Grass wrote about these horrors, usually with a sardonic tint of black comedy, he had earned the right to discourse on these subjects – he had been in the War, was, even, an SS man, half-starved to death himself after the Niederlage, and, therefore, was writing about calamities that he had experienced; Jenny Erpenbeck was born in the DDR in 1967, more than 22 years after the War and, although she is authoritative on the experience of living under Communism (and, in fact, writes very well in Grass’ vein about that subject), I detect just the faintest sense of bad taste, even vulgarity, about her approach to the Holocaust. Whereof we can not speak, we should remain silent.
I found a HyVee under the bluff and ate sushi, a tuna roll. I went to the hot food counter and bought a cup of fried zucchini – it cost 66 cents. The deli counter was closing and the café next to it was empty. A girl employed by HyVee was drinking coffee and talking to young man. After her break, she sullenly pushed a mop around, bumping it loudly up against the walls and the sides of the booths. When I tried to bus my plate and the sushi tray, I discovered that the girl had pulled the plastic liners out of the garbage cans and already removed the detritus from the restaurant. She put aside the broom and, with an annoyed shrug, took the litter from my hand.
In the bandshell in the downtown park, the Minnesota Orchestra, in town for the Beethoven Festival (this was its final night) was setting up for a Pops Concert. The streets and sidewalks were cool with swaying green shadows where the breeze moved in the trees.
Great River Shakespeare Festival made a confusing mess of As You Like It. Shakespeare’s gender-scrambling plot with battling siblings doesn’t make much sense as written. With race-blind casting and numerous women’s parts cast as men (and vice-versa), the production was so scrambled that I wasn’t able to follow it very well – in this case, the fact that I had read the play a couple days earlier and was familiar with it just added to my confusion. Shakespeare’s women (played by boys it is worth noting) espouse different values and speak in ways that are notably distinct from his male characters. You can’t really tamper much with the gendered aspect of Shakespeare’s dialogue without falsifying his plays and this was the case, I thought, with As You Like It. The production’s virtue-signaling approached being insufferable and it’s not clear to whom these trendy transpositions in gender (and, to a lesser extent, race) were intended: the audience was elderly, white, more than half female and, probably, not much interested in urban, contemporary fashion with respect to “pronouns” and gender. There was, in other words, a pretty clear disjunction between the ideology evident on stage and the inclinations of the audience. For instance, during the so-called “Land Declaration” before As You Like It, in which an actor earnestly acknowledges that the stage is located on land stolen from native people, the old man behind me loudly exclaimed “Bullshit!”
Nonetheless, Shakespeare’s verse is well-spoken at this festival whatever the accent adopted and Jacques’ famous claim that “all the world’s a stage” was a “show-stopper” – people watching the play almost ceased to breathe when the speech was delivered. As You Like It involves women cross-dressing to act as men, a gaudy wrestling match, and much histrionic self-dramatization by the young lovers and, for that matter, the melancholy Jacques and, therefore, the viewer’s initial impression of the claim that all the world is a stage is that society and convention require us to perform various roles, none of which may be true to us. But, in fact, Jacques’ claim is different and more disturbing: life is organized into seven stages according to one’s age and these roles are not performances at all – they are integral aspects of a person’s progression from an infant “mewling and puking” through a school-boy loitering on his way to his lessons through manly vigor, pompous middle age, and, then, to a dying man “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” In other words, the stage metaphor, so far as it suggests “acting” or “performance,” is radically inapposite – infants and dying men aren’t acting and the other, intervening roles aren’t performances either. So the speech stands for an aspect of human existence that is inexorable and essential to what it means to be alive. Perhaps, this is the final frontier: we have eliminated biological gender as essential to human being, but the inevitable toil of the years, aging and death are a fate to which we must succumb without any appeal possible. Gender may not be destiny, but death and dying is.
At the intermission, I escaped out the side door and sat on the inscribed bench (LOVE-PEACE-HARMONY) and made some notes. The night had become a little bit warm and humid and the mosquitos were biting.
After the play, as I walked to where my car was parked, the campus sidewalks and plazas were still. A train rumbled over the tracks nearby, a thousand iron doors being loudly shut on Shakespeare’s verse.
The river bluffs overlooking the city seemed theatrically high and close and the valley was claustrophobic. The hills were entirely black, darker than the night’s ambient darkness, big, hunchbacked shadows showing no trace of light, nothing specular among the trees to reflect the beam from a passing car and the terrain too steep for building, so that the Winona seemed overhung by dismal gloom that was like a judgement on the town and its people and their aspirations.
I followed taillights up the winding gorge to the hilltop than down again, curving into Stockton. One by one, the villages appeared as scattered lights below the dark sky. At St. Charles, the ridge was lit by the Pilot Truck Stop on the freeway and I could see a yellowish glow from lamps rising up to silhouette the town’s water tower hanging overhead like a partly eclipsed moon. I stopped at the Kwik Trip where I had seen the Amish man and his children and the lady manager whom I knew – all playing their parts, I suppose, on the world stage. Some kids were parked by the brightly lit station, using the toilet, and buying ice cream bars for their dates.
On the interstate, I dialed the radio to KMSQ, the “Maverick Station” at Mankato State. KSMQ has good late night music. A strange song was playing, some sort of Electronica or Techno-Pop – a drum beat time and there was repetitive bass (or synthesizer) riff that sounded familiar to me but that I couldn’t place. Sometimes, a vocalist sighed or yelped. The music was hypnotic and it continued without interruption for 60 miles, the drum like a heart beat and the bass riff and the voices, sometimes near or sometimes far away, sounding at intervals, now and then, guitars and keyboards doodling around over the insistent rhythm. As I saw the lights of Austin, a falsetto voice entered over the beat and, then, I recognized the song’s rhythmic core: “She Drives Me Crazy” by the Fine Young Cannibals, an unforgettable pop tune from 1989 (that I had forgotten). What was this mix? – about an hour of the drum thudding like a heartbeat under an indistinct aureola of synthesizer and guitar and, then, the focus sharpening and the man singing in his rarefied countertenor and, at last, the chorus: “She drives me crazy.” I felt liberated and the music continued as the exit slid me into Austin for a long, soft landing.
Later, I looked up the song on the internet and watched the official video. Memories from my own life flooded me. You play many parts in your life and, at last, it ends in darkness. The black bluff over the town swallows you up. Taillights vanish in the gloom.
A string of many hundred comments appeared on screen below the video, all of them praising the song in various languages. One of them said: “Released in the summer of 1989 when I got married. Great song that takes me right back to my honeymoon in Turkey. Now, 32 years later, I am nursing my sick husband to celebrate our last Christmas together. What a blast. Gone so fast.”
And since my eyes are blurry with tears, I can’t type anymore.
July 15, 2023
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