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Welcome It was one of those bright winter days when the blue sky is more dazzling, and more deeply appreciated, than at any other time of the year. Our first stop was the Historical Museum in the hamlet of Cokato, which is located a block off the highway in a few back-rooms of the town hall. It's small enough that you almost get the feeling you're exploring your grandma's attic, though the homespun fabrics are finer and the photographs are more diverse. Swedish and German and Norwegian pioneers came out this way, and their rugged lives certainly have appeal, though what impressed me most were the two stuffed bobwhites in the diorama devoted to a prehistoric dugout canoe. They were shrunken and covered with dust, but bobwhites just the same. Long gone from this region, I'm afraid. Also impressive was the exhibit devoted to the local corn-canning factory, which used to produce corn under twenty or thirty different labels, most of which were on display. It reminded me how much I like canned corn. (Yet I haven't bought a can of it in years.) A half-hour further out into the desolate farm fields of rural Minnesota, half-covered with drifted snow, we arrived in the town of Darwin, famous as the home of the World's Largest Ball of Twine (made by one person.) There are several large, crudely painted signs informing the passer-by that the ball of twine exists, right here in Darwin, but none of them tell you where it is. So, after passing out into the fields again and watching the water tower of the next town rise up from on horizon for a while, we concluded that we'd missed it and did a U-turn on the deserted highway. Turning south on Darwin's major cross-street on a hunch, we immediately spotted the ball of twine. It was sitting beside the road under an eight-sided pagoda with a Plexiglas sheath. It really is a very fine ball of twine, perhaps twelve feet in diameter, though it's difficult to see it through the protective walls of the shelter. Evidently the man who made it, Francis Johnson, used a fork-lift to roll the ball back and forth as he gathered the twine.
The twine itself is thicker than you might imagine, but it has a nice brown luster, rather unlike the twine I'm used to, which looks cheap and hairy, as if its going to unravel entirely at any moment. There is certainly something silly about a twelve-foot ball of twine—but also something intriguing and grandiose, if not genuinely great. We might be tempted to think of it as a Dadaist monument to the irrational, but the effort involved is too dogged and single-minded for that. And there is an element of purity and Aristotelian perfection in the ball's uniformity of materials and vaguely spherical shape. (It does sag a little, after all.) There it sits, by the side of the highway, in a region largely devoted to agriculture—another pursuit that requires dogged persistence, though the end in view is usually more lucrative. The ball of twine does have beauty. It does have existential import. And we may be thankful that its owners declined a very generous offer to move it to a Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum in Branson, Missouri, or some such God-awful place. It belongs on the side of the highway in the town of the man who made it, surrounded by endless cornfields spreading to the horizon in every direction. One thing I particularly love about the ball is the tag at the end of its title, as if spoken in an undertone or an aside—“made by one person.” This caveat sets one to wondering whether there is other, bigger, ball of twine somewhere, that was made by more than one person. Of course there is, and if you go to Cawker City, Kansas, you can see it. But that ball has little luster, and less inspiration. It was made for the single purpose of outstripping the original remarkable ball of twine we're looking at now—“made by one person.” How derivative. How senseless! Its creator, a man named Frank Stroeber, as if struck down by the Gods, died when his ball had reached 11 feet in diameter—a foot shy of his rival's. Stroeber should have set out for entirely new territory--maybe a ball of tinfoil? The only attractive part of the story is that the townspeople of Cawker City took it upon themselves to complete Stroeber's mission. At their annual Twine-a-Thon in August, locals and visitors alike can add to the now-more-than 17,00-pound ball. How sweet! We had a distinctly mediocre lunch in the cafe in downtown Litchfield. The bacon in the BLT was stringy and undercooked, and the slab of meatloaf in the meatloaf sandwich looked to have been cut from the felt insole of a Sorel boot. The coffee was of that diluted and faintly soapy variety that one meets up with so often in the hinterlands. The restaurant's one saving grace was that the sound on the TV above the cash register—tuned to the Weather Channel—had been turned off. The lone man sitting at the counter, whom all the waitresses seemed to know, was wearing a cowboy hat and a Green Bay Packers hero-jacket. Memorizing the weather in Cleveland and San Diego. The landscape between Minneapolis and Willmar is pretty flat, and every so often you come upon a long row of long white windowless buildings. Eggs? Turkeys? The only signs say “Disease Control Area: Keep Out,” and you suspect whatever is going on inside has something to do with food you eat every day, and perhaps you don't really want to know much more about it. The land got hilly as we approached Willmar, and lakes began to appear here and there. We passed one billboard referring to the Little Crow Lakes system, a phrase that was new to me.
Little Crow was the Dakota Chief who led his men to defeat in the famous Dakota War of 1862, later fled to Canada, and had alienated many even of his Mdewakanton countrymen by the end of his career. At the very least he'd made an enormous blunder imagining that he and his followers could wipe out the encroaching European population entirely, and when the war began to turn sour Little Crow is recorded as saying that all he wanted to do was “go up to Green Lake and kill white people.” This beautiful area had once been a part of the vast Dakota's hunting ground, and we noticed on our atlas a historical marker for “Dakota camp” on the north shore of Green Lake, though we couldn't find the site itself. The terrain in Sibley State Park is hilly and dotted with small pothole lakes. (Sibley, incidentally, was the fellow leading the troops that chased Little Crow's band up to Canada.) The park lies on the western margin of the Big Woods, and also on the southeastern tip of the Alexandria Moraine, a large pile of rocks that were scraped up and deposited off the side of advancing glaciers some 14,00 years ago as they crept south to the region that later became Iowa. We had a fine ski through the woods and around the little lakes, passing the field-stone foundations of several long-vanished farm buildings along the way. On our way back to Willmar we stopped at a grocery store in the village of New London to pick up some spice drops, and happened to park on the street in front of a Scandinavia import shop. We went inside and found the place to be remarkably well-stocked with sweaters, carved wooden trolls, pine-scented soap imported from Sweden, raspberry-rhubarb preserves, and other similarly charming artifacts and souvenirs. I expressed my surprise that such a small town would have such a big shop, and was reminded by the woman behind the counter that during the summer months there are a lot more people around. From New London we circumnavigated Green Lake looking for the elusive Dakota Village and glanced in at the famous Spicer Castle on the south shore. From a distance the “castle” appeared to be little more than a good-sized house of the type you see everywhere in Kenwood or on Summit Avenue. The parking lot was crowded with BMWs and we were glad to be staying at the Day's Inn back in Willmar.
Not that there was anything special about that prefab establishment located on the intersection of Highways 12 and 23 east of town. (Though come to think of it, the location itself marks a powerful vortex in the US Highway system.) The motel doesn't have a pool, which probably explains why none of the teen hockey teams that were in town for a tournament were staying there. In fact, we seemed to have the entire building to ourselves. We asked the receptionist, a pleasant young woman in her late teens with glasses well down on her nose, if she could recommend some places to eat in town, and she gave us the traditional reply. “Depends what you like.” She proceeded to mention the Applebees, the KFC, the Culvers. “I hear there's a good Mexican place in town,” I said. “I wouldn't know. I don't like Mexican,” she replied matter-of-factly. Our second-floor room had a nice view to the west out across a freight yard. Lots of sun and sky in that direction, and a very nice pile of pallets sitting in the parking lot across the street amid the pole barns—one of those piles that is not quite straight-up-and-down but leans out by degrees. We paid a quick visit to the luke-warm hot tub located in a small room off the lobby (from which point you can peer back into the laundry room), and then drove in to see the city. Though its population exceeds 18,000, at first glance downtown Willmar looks a little dismal. Perhaps it was the waning afternoon light. Abandoned buildings, tattoo parlors, an auto supply store, a thrift shop. The only life to be seen on this Saturday night was in front of the Taceria and a block further on in front of the Somali restaurant. The rail yard that stretches across the north side of town is impressive—Willmar is a hub for the Burlington and Santa Fe railroad. And on the west end of town we passed a Jennie O turkey factory nestled up against the railroad tracks. The action, we later discovered, lies on a strip running south along Highway 23, where you'll pass Target, Cub, Best Buy, Pizza Hut, Dairy Queen, Dunn Brothers, Herbergers, the Kandi Mall, the multiplex cinema, etc. etc. We drove out past all this fooforah and across a highway overpass, and the bright lights abruptly gave way to snow-covered fields and windbreaks so mature they no longer served their function. The sun had just reappeared below a bank of thin winter clouds, and the slanting red light on the moist earth, the fields, and the grasses in the swamps alongside the road was magnificent. On our way back to the motel we stopped at Cub and picked up some dinner—blue corn chips, salsa, pre-made guacamole, and fresh green grapes. I usually make a few trips to the free pot of coffee in the lobby very early in the morning. It's a challenge to hold two Styrofoam cups of hot liquid in your hand while sliding the credit-card key up and down the slot fast enough to unlock the door, and the difficulty is compounded if you've added a few mini-muffins to your load. The juice is usually the best part of these bargain-motel breakfasts, though I am eternally fascinated by the clear plastic cereal-bins that dispense Raison Bran at the turn of a knob. Our morning mission was to locate the Endresen Cabin Historic Site, marked with a black triangle on our outdated but very detailed map. It appeared to be at the end of a country road on the north shore of Solomon Lake, a few miles north of Willmar, but after combing the countryside (and scattering roadside flocks of horned larks every mile or two), we finally concluded that no such road existed, and backtracked to read a historical marker we'd seen in front of the Vikor Lutheran Church. To our glee, the marker identified the nearby grave of Guri Endresen, and also told her story.
During the Dakota War, a band of Indians attacked the Endresen cabin, killing Guri's husband and son. She hid in the cellar with her daughter, and later, traveling under cover of darkness, she made her way in a farm wagon pulled by an ox to Forest City, a town thirty miles to the north. Along the way she stopped at the homes of other settlers and attended to their wounds as well as she could, and brought a couple of the really serious cases along with her into town. These efforts were later recognized by some national association of women. (The sign was a little vague about that award.) A few years later Guri returned to the area and rebuilt her cabin. The last few lines of the plaque direct the reader to a two-mile walk along the lakeshore to the cabin. But there were several trails leading off through the snowdrifts, and we decided to retrace our path by car. The cabin couldn't be that far away. Returning to the gravel road we'd been on before, we proceeded west along the north shore of the lake at a slower pace, and it wasn't long before I spotted a rather weathered building beyond the trees off in the distance. We parked by the side of the road and trudged out through a snowy field past some power-lines and the back of a horse barn. We may have been trespassing, and I kept a keen lookout for grumpy-looking men with shotguns.
There was no signage near the cabin, but it was definitely old. It seemed to have been restored recently. The window-frames were a bright turquoise—attractive but not, perhaps, authentic. The rough-hewn logs had been re-chinked with a substance resembling concrete and then daubed with brown paint. The fieldstones in the chimney actually looked new, though the stones themselves were probably deposited by the glaciers long before either the Endresens or the Dakota had arrived in the vicinity. The view down the hill and out over Solomon Lake is still lovely and surprisingly pristine, and the absence of interpretive material made it all the easier to call to mind those early days of European settlement. And earlier. A blanket of clouds had settled in during the night, and even though we were charting a new route back to Minneapolis via Paynesville and Cold Spring, with a stop at Lake Maria State Park for one final ski through a remnant of the Big Woods, the countryside was beginning to look decidedly ratty and forlorn, if not abjectly God-forsaken. Annandale, Maple Lake, Buffalo? Though we passed through them, they're still just names on a map to me, I'm afraid. But Willmar has become a reality, a bundle of vivid impressions that adds yet one more piece to the puzzle of who we are, where we came from—and where we're going. |
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