Dispatch XII

Traversing the Minnesota Breadbasket

November 10, 2021

St. Paul, Minnesota

We awoke in St. Paul on a brisk and cloudless fall morning. No frigid temperatures, no white outs or impending winter storms, though at this time of year you could be forgiven if you faced that sort of behavior in Minnesota. We departed our hotel next to the St. Paul train station, grabbed our rented SUV (in case snow eventually did find us) and headed in the general direction of California.

The morning traffic was thick, but we threaded our way through Minneapolis and across the big curve of the Mississippi River, and within an hour were on Highway 169, plunging into America’s breadbasket and it’s endless acres of plowed-under farmland rich with the sharp fragrance of manure. We bent southwest and passed Jim's Orchard, which claims to be home to the largest candy store in Minnesota. A giant dome of a lemon drop marked it, reminiscent of the enormous blueberry we saw outside of Machias, Maine. (Could it have been the same architect?)

We drove and drove through land so endless that I felt a new word needed to be invented for flat. But I couldn’t come up with any. Flaaaat? Levelosity? The breadth and immensity of the land makes distances so endless that even large objects grow vanishingly small. Now and then we'd run into a cluster of Brobdingnagian grain silos, silent giants standing by a house or barn, but on the prairie they all looked Lilliputian. Whole weather systems sailed by, mammoth cumulus ships dumping untold tons of water onto the planet, but they were so far away I could blot them out with my thumb.

Land this flat made me wonder if we were even living in a world of three dimensions. I thought of the 1884 novel by Edward A. (Abbott) Abbott, an English school teacher with a wicked sense of humor, called Flatland - A Romance of Many Dimensions. He wrote it (under the pseudonym “A Square”) as a satirical comment on Victorian England and its rigid caste system, but it's also a fascinating treatise on geometry and mathematics. In the book, everyone lives in a two dimensional world of sticks, polygons, squares and circles, but never three-dimensional spheres or cubes. Then in 1999 (115 years in Abbott’s future), on the eve of a new millennium, a sphere enters Flatland, but its two-dimensional creatures can’t imagine something so out of their experience as an extra dimension. They witness its entry, but only as a circle that grows larger and then smaller as it passes through their paper thin world.

Seeing things suddenly from a different point of view like the moments in Flatland feels like travel itself to me. Everything is new and startling, our points of view shift, and life becomes as startling and strange as a three dimensional globe unexpectedly descending into your two-dimensional world.

And so it has been for us on this journey.

Music Please

While I mused on this, Cyndy thought it might be a good idea to locate some country western music inside our SUV. Country has always had a plaintive or raucous or outright funny my-mama-got-runned-over-by-a-gosh-darn-train way of looking at the world. It’s heritage is rich, going back to Scottish/Irish/Cajun/Appalachian/Creole/Cowboy roots honed by powerful musical voices like southern gospel and Hank Williams’ strains of despair and redemption. Cyn tuned in and first up was Tracy Byrd’s “Drinkin’ Bone”, a perfect combination of all of Country’s tuneful threads.

“The drinkin' bone is connected to the party bone
The party bone's connected to the stayin' out all night long
And she won't think it's funny
And I'll wind up all alone
And the lonely bone's connected to the drinkin' bone.”

That final line says it all in a way that only country music can.

Next Trace we heard Adkins’ “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” — incredibly misogynistic, but impossible not to tap your feet to. We felt it best to just laugh at the lyrics.

“Shut my mouth, slap your grandma
There outta be a law
Get the Sheriff on the phone
Lord have mercy, how's she even get them britches on!”

But the perfect song as we inched toward the South Dakota state line was the unmistakable baritone of Johnny Cash and his version of the ultimate travel-America song: “I’ve Been Everywhere Man.” You simply cannot hit the open road in the United States without listening to it. (How did he manage to get all of those words out and not make mistake?!) Take a listen and put a smile on your face.

Runnin’ Against the Wind

At Mankato we had lost Route 169 and picked up state route 60. We passed north of Blue Lake and Guckeen and Imogene, and south of Granada and Winnebago City toward Worthington where it intercepted Interstate 90. I wondered if we’d ever make our way out of Minnesota. When fingering and gazing at maps, you can lose track of distance and think there isn’t much to it. Minnesota turned out to own more ground than my mind was prepared for, and we required the whole day to get across it.

In time we watched the sun descend on the knife-edge of that flat horizon, and after passing a billboard that read: “Que Passa Restaurant - Mexican food so good, Donald Trump would want to build a wall around it,” we decided to look for the next town that would have us, and pulled into a Best Western in Worthington, Minnesota, population 13,400.

November 11, 2021

Worthington, MN

After breakfast and a good night’s sleep at the local Comfort Inn, the road signs revealed that we were at last within striking distance of South Dakota. The wind had grown angry overnight with gusts topping 60 miles per hour. There aren’t many obstructions in this part of the world and when the wind gathers speed there’s little to stop it. Gusts knocked us sideways as we tossed our bags in the SUV, and once inside the wind slammed the doors shut with loud bangs as if to say, “Fine, go ahead. Fight me.” I felt like nature was developing a grudge.

Despite Boreas, the Greek God of the north wind, thumping and howling, and buffeting the car like a great, invisible hand while the air keened around the windows’ rubber grommets, we drove on. Every now and then we’d see revved up turbines clustered by the 100s transforming wind into electricity, their giant, rotating flanges spinning tiny as pinwheels on the prairie.

Visiting The Corn Palace

By late morning we finally crossed into South Dakota and zipped past Sioux City determined to span the state by the day’s end. But then we found Mitchell … and The Corn Palace.

The Corn Palace, as you might imagine, is unlike any other of the world’s corn palaces, mainly because there aren’t any others. It’s also Mitchell’s premier attraction, bringing 500,000 tourists a year from all around the nation, according to the brochures. And when we drove up to it, it was a sight to behold; an imposing Moorish style building that seemed both perfect and oddly out of sync with it’s impeccably designed murals of corn and stalks and grain rising from the flatland of America to the tops of its Byzantine turrets.

This is the second iteration of the city’s palace. The town fathers erected the first in 1905, 25 years after Mitchell’s founding, to “prove to the world that South Dakota had a healthy agricultural climate.” Late each August, the harvest itself is still celebrated here at the Corn Palace Festival with music and dancing and games, an American version, it seemed to me, of an ancient pagan fertility rite. Being well out of season, the building was closed the day we came by, and the town looked shuttered, but I stood in the wind and oogled its all-American creativity, wondering at the work needed to create such tapestries of grist. What will we humans come up with next?

Our Chicken is the Shit

The flat accents of the Midwest were slowly morphing into a cowboy twang as we headed deeper into South Dakota. There were more “y’alls and dern near flipped my truck” than we had heard back in St. Paul. We knew this because we had stopped by Big J’s Road House in Humbolt County and heard it with our own ears. Big J’s was about the only place that seemed to offer food along the flat ribbon of I-90. It was a trucker’s dream, and the parking lot, packed with 18 wheelers, proved it.

Big J’s doesn’t as a rule stand on ceremony. Park your self wherever you like, one waitress said, and then handed us menus that included meatloaf, brisket, hamburgers of all stripes and every kind of winged creature imaginable, including chicken, which, based on one t-shirt nailed to the wooden plank interior, was apparently famous. “Our chicken is the shit!” It said.

No one seemed to debate it.

The restaurant and bar was cavernous and mostly catered to men as far as Cyn and I could see. There were tables of them wearing bib overalls, or work clothes, cowboy hats and trucker-style baseball caps. They all looked so guff and rugged, I was pretty sure they had grown their full beards just that morning. Of the six women in the place, three of them were waitresses running from table to table with their platters like leaf-cutting ants. We didn’t see any dead animals hanging on the walls, but we did see another t-shirt that read, “Nice Rack!”

We reviewed the menu. The Monday special promised that if you bought one hamburger, you could get the second one free for half price. We passed on that, but had the meat loaf because, when in Rome …

Horsing Around

Sated by our Big J’s lunch, we paid our bill and fought our way back to our SUV. The wind was still whipping a good 60 mph, and the temperature was dropping like a lead zeppelin. Standing on the gravel parking lot we noticed two horses that had just been cut loose from their barn on the farm next door. The wind and sudden freedom had them in high spirits, and they gallivanted like puppies, rearing and cutting back and forth, fierce with joy. The more the wind whipped, the more they kicked and bucked and rolled and shook their big heads. I stopped while the gusts rocked our car, struggling to scribble these notes, snowflakes whipping, my hands brittle with cold. And then before getting in the car, I caught a video of them as they thundered around Big J’s and disappeared into the high prairie grass.

It was the kind of thing that made you want to yip and whinny and slap your chaps and make up some kind of fine country western song, but none came to me, so we fought our doors open and hopped into the car before they snapped shut and decapitated our legs. The car started. We cranked up Sirius XM Radio and the first song we heard was “On The Road Again.” Very good for slapping your chaps.

Soon we’d be amongst South Dakota’s unearthly Badlands, and, of course, the unique world of one of America’s most curious emporiums: Wall Drug. (Stay tuned.)

This is a series about a Vagabond Adventure - author and National Geographic Explorer Chip Walter and his wife Cyndy’s personal journey to explore all seven continents, all seven seas and 100+ countries, never traveling by jet. COVID has forced us to begin our journey in North America. Not a bad start, but now that the virus seems to be abating, we’ll be heading overseas in May 2022. 

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As of this Dispatch …

We have travelled four thousand miles, across four ferries, on five trains, visiting three World Heritage Sites, through 12 states and three Canadian provinces, in 23 different beds, and eaten more blueberry pie than we ever had a right to.