Today’s post comes from Bill in MPLS

In the early 1970s, Robin and I and our friend Steve Carley drove to Calgary, Alberta for the Calgary Stampede. In truth, I was only vaguely interested in the rodeo. As it turned out, the rodeo wasn’t especially exciting; the problem was that the competitors were all excessively competent—every participant performed perfectly and the difference between them amounted to seconds or fractions of seconds.

The real reason I was in Calgary was because Wilf Carter was going to be in the pre-stampede parade. Wilf Carter, also known as Montana Slim, was one of the original singing cowboys. Carter was the first Canadian country music star. An unbelievable yodeler, Carter belonged to the ilk of Hank Snow, Jimmie Rodgers, and Gene Autry. Here’s a sample:

The Stampede was my chance to see him in person. He rode in the parade, in a convertible designed, I think, by the legendary Nudie Cohn. The header photo shows that car.

Nudie was a Ukrainian-born tailor who established himself making sequin-bedecked outfits for the likes of Elvis and Roy Rogers and later branched out to designing boots and even cars. Here’s what the interior of the car looked like:

I was going through my cowboy phase then. I was collecting and listening to a lot of early cowboy/country music. You couldn’t get a shirt in those days in the style of the classic movie cowboys, so I was making my own cowboy shirts, with fancy piped yokes and cuffs, curved slash pockets with arrowheads on the corners and pearl snaps. Sometimes the fabric was atypical— hawaiian prints, for instance.

I was never really interested in the actual business of ranching or horses.. What attracted me was the lore and milieu of the singing cowboys. The imagery of the likes of Tom Mix, Ken Maynard and William S. Hart. At the time I was working on a series of drawings I called my Patsy Montana drawings. They had nothing to do with the real Patsy Montana or her songs. She was my muse and the drawings were more along the line of “Even Cowgirls get the Blues”.

In downtown Minneapolis in the 70s and early 80s, on First Avenue, just north of Hennepin, on the second floor, there was a record shop called Pyramid Records. It was a big open space with waist-high benches around the perimeter, on top of which were boxes of records, many of them cutouts, all inexpensive, and chiefly old country recordings and vintage jazz. The proprietor sat in an overstuffed armchair in the center. He seldom made eye contact and never conversation. When you had made your selection, he would reluctantly accept your money. I’ve heard that he just disappeared one night, leaving his entire record stock behind. But he had some incredible, obscure records on offer, if you were in that market. There was a label out of West Germany, CMH, that had reissued classic early country music, including Wilf Carter, Hank Snow, the Carter Family and Goebel Reeves.

I bought them all.

Eventually I moved on from my cowboy phase, though I’ve never lost my interest in either the music or the imagery. I’ve overlaid them with newer fascinations but not many carry the pervasive richness that that long-ago cowboy fixation carried for me.

I can’t judge the extent to which I am deaf to the popular culture and the extent to which I am willfully contrarian. Some of both no doubt. But those are traits I also savor in others. What interests me, what I look for, are the obsessions people nurture that aren’t delivered to them as a readily consumable commodity— obsessions that call for research, diligence, craft and expertise. It could be an art, in the broadest sense, or it could be a collection. It scarcely matters how arcane, how peculiar the obsession might be. After all, the more elusive the interest, the more dedication it requires. And the more dedication it requires, the more it can be uniquely yours.

So, how do you entertain yourself?

Today’s post comes from  Barbara in Rivertown.

For several years after my dad died, I traveled almost monthly from Minneapolis to Marshalltown, IA, to visit my mom, before she moved up to Minnesota. It didn’t take me long to get tired of the straightforward I-35 à I-30 route; and besides, 35 veered east and took me slightly out of my way. I got out the maps and found a number of “back roads” which, although they didn’t necessarily save me time (since the speed limit is 55 instead or 70), took me more directly south and gave me some different scenery. I got in the habit of giving myself extra road time, because I liked to stop at whatever caught my eye – i.e., the photo at top is in tiny Austinville, IA, north of Marshalltown. There were parks in towns like Hampton that made nice rest stops, and I learned which towns had a decent coffee shop.

Minnesota has great back roads, too – for the numerous trips between Mpls and Winona that we’ve taken this year, we often use the alternate Hwy. 50 north of Red Wing to catch 52, instead of taking Hwy. 61 through Hastings, and this takes us right by a lovely old “garage” in New Trier. Heading south from Winona to catch 90, a short detour into Pickwick yields a view of the old Pickwick Mill.

On our recent trip to Marshalltown from Winona, we could have followed I-90 to I-35 to I-30, but we jumped off 90 at Austin, MN, and head south on 218. This was a little dicey because of the unusual amount of rain that the driftless area (NE Iowa, SE Minn, et al)  has seen this month. Indeed, we drove into Charles City and made it over the roiling Cedar River, but were lucky to be leaving 218 and turning west – the road east was under water and barricaded. Here’s a video of this same spot back in 2008, when there was even worse flooding.

On the way back to Winona we decided to try another route, through Nashua IA where resides the Little Brown Church in the Vale – my folks got married there 70 years ago.

We crossed the Cedar River again, still roiling but not flooding our path. The little church was open for visitors, and as I signed the guest book I was astonished to see that the name above mine was a college friend – I looked up and there she was waiting for me to realize we’d crossed paths!

When have you had a memorable experience while traveling the back roads?

Today’s post is from Renee in North Dakota

I have an old photograph of a German village street from the early 1900’s.  I was given the photograph by my maternal grandmother, who wrote on the back “The only street in Grandpa’s birthplace which is on Dead End under trees”.  The Grandpa she refers to is her husband, my Grandfather Ernst Bartels.  I wonder where she got her information, as she never stepped foot in the place.  I can hear her saying the words about the village with some derision in her voice. She was a city girl from Hamburg who met my grandfather after she immigrated to the US. She found him impossibly rustic and dull. She always felt somewhat superior to him and his family. She spoke formal German; the Bartels all spoke Plattdeutsch.

The photo always puzzled me because it seemed to be a photo of nothing. It shows a wide, muddy street with trees in the background, and behind the trees, barely discernible,  a large, half-timbered house. The photo is of poor quality and is a little blurry. I never really noticed the house behind the trees before our trip to Germany. Now that I have stood on the street in the photo and was lucky enough to go inside the house, the photo is completely understandable.

My grandfather and all his siblings were born in that house. I never heard anyone in the family speak the name of the village.  I had always heard that my grandfather was born in Bremen. My mother said she thought he was born in Bremerhaven. I know now that the name of the village is Neddenaverbergen. It is about 50 miles south of Bremen, and with the help of my mother’s cousin Elmer, I contacted family who still live there, and they invited us to visit them.

Neddenaverbergen is a small farming community of around 700 people. It is quiet and very tidy. There are lots of flower and vegetable gardens. Oma was wrong. There are several streets in the village. All the farmers live in the village. The farmland surrounds the village on all sides.  Almost all the farm buildings are in the village as well, except for the modern buildings that house large machinery or livestock. The houses are old, and are built in the style in which the barn was attached to the house. All the houses and outbuildings are very close together, so that one neighbor’s house/barn is right next to another neighbor’s house/barn. The houses are half-timbered and made of brick. There are far fewer farmers now, and many of the residents commute to jobs in Bremen or Verden.

My grandfather was one of eight children. He was the second oldest. My great-grandfather died when Grandpa was about 17.  In the old German tradition, Grandpa’s oldest brother, Johan, inherited the farm. The rest of the family, including my great-grandmother, got nothing. Several of my grandpa’s siblings were still quite young, so, in 1910, he and his brother, Otto, immigrated to southwest Minnesota where their mother had family. The boys got farms and earned enough money to bring their mother and siblings to the US before the First World War.

Johan and his family survived both World Wars. His grandson, Peter, still owns the family home. He had no interest in farming and rents the land. The house was built in 1673 by an ancestor, also named Johan . Peter converted the part that was the barn into a family room. We got a tour of the house. I loved seeing the place that my grandfather was born and where he undoubtedly milked cows. The beams that were visible in the barn/family room were thick and very solid. The inscription over the door in the blog photo says something to the effect “I Johan, have built this house for my family and I have done my best and I hope that it serves them well”.

I  look at the old photograph now and it all comes into focus. I see the house. I know how the street goes right past the house, and I recognize one of the trees, now much larger. In my mind I can imagine it in color. I think of Neddenaverbergen as my village.  I want to go back.

How has visiting a place changed the way you see it?

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

Husband and I have vastly different ways of processing information. I scan my environment accurately but hastily, taking in only what is pertinent and ignoring the rest. In Rorschach Inkblot terms, it means I have tendencies toward underincorporation, and I may fail to notice something important.

Husband, on the other hand, readily admits he is a super overincorporator. That means he tries to take in all the details he sees without regard to importance. It is as fraught with error as underincorporation, as a person can only process so much information before becoming overwhelmed.

We went to several museums on our recent vacation, including the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, London’s National Portrait Gallery, Westminster Abbey, the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, and Trinity College Library to see the Book of Kells. Westminster Abbey is a place of worship, but I think of it as a museum as well.

The practical implication of our differing information processing styles meant that by the time we finished with our first museum, I felt great sympathy and kinship with the woman I wrote about earlier who killed her husband with a blow to the head with an ornamental stone frog.

I flit through museum rooms, not concerned about seeing everything but zeroing in on what catches my eye, or what I had planned to see, then moving on. I always plan to come back another time, on another trip, to see what I may have missed, to take in more details of what I saw before, and maybe see something new. I want to relish what I see without cluttering my mind or my emotions. I find museums profoundly moving. Husband tries to see every exhibit, to read every placard, to not miss a thing.  He hates being rushed. This was really a problem in Westminster Abbey, as we had to stop and read every blessed memorial and grave stone in wall and floor. He even tried moving some of the folding chairs that had been placed in Poets’ Corner to make sure  he didn’t miss anybody. He certainly is thorough.

I am happy to say we made it through trip and museum without any bloodshed. In Husband’s defense, he had never been to any of the museums we visited, and maybe that overincorporation tendency thrives with the unknown. We started to plan our next trip that may take place in the next few years, and I will try to work on my impatience and maybe suggest to him a more selective approach to museum viewing.

We shall see.

When it comes to incorporation, do you over or under do it? 

Daughter and Husband planned the last half of our recent trip to Europe. Our trip ended in Dublin, where they  booked us into a really swanky hotel called The Merrion.  It is the sort of place where the Bell Captains wear top hats and the housekeepers lay out soft mats and bedroom slippers on either side of the bed when they do up the room. It was really grand.

We arrived in Dublin by ferry from Holyhead, Wales.  The streets were really crowded and it was hard to find a taxi. We strolled around Trinity College and down Grafton Street and it was wall to wall people.  We were told by the travel agent that we were lucky to find hotel rooms in Dublin the weekend we were there, as she was told by someone that there were lots of things going on in town. Those “things” turned out to be:

1. The Irish Open
2. Josh Groban in concert
3. A very important soccer match
4. Bruce Springsteen in concert Friday and Sunday evenings.

Everyone seemed to be talking about Bruce Springsteen. Nils Lofgren and Stevie Van Zandt were playing with him, and the newspapers had the whole play list for the concerts, which took place in a large outdoor arena that held 65,000 people.  One taxi driver told us that there were 100,000 extra people in Dublin just for those concerts.

As we were checking into our hotel, I heard a man asking after a female guest who was “a member of the Springsteen party”, and I realized that Bruce was staying at The Merrion, too. That explained all the people with cameras milling around outside the hotel.

We never saw Bruce, but we heard about him from some delightfully gossipy taxi drivers. They confirmed that he was indeed at The Merrion, and gave us a running itinerary for him, letting us know that on Saturday morning he worked out in the gym around the corner from the hotel, and that on Sunday morning he went bowling.

Bowling? Now, in all our time in Europe, I never saw a bowling alley. Did he go lawn bowling? Can you imagine Bruce Springsteen lawn bowling, upsetting the octogenarian bowlers in their white lawn bowling get ups? Why would he go bowling? Why not a short trip to the coast or to some castle, or a private view of the Book of Kells. Maybe he could have gone to church. If I were Bruce Springsteen, would I want to go bowling? I just don’t know.

W.W.Y.A.S.D?  (What Would You (as Springsteen) Do?

Today’s post comes from Verily Sherrilee

The safari experience in South Africa is amazing. At most camps there are two “runs” a day, one right at dawn and one as night falls. They pile you into large stadium seating jeeps and head off into the bush, complete with blankets and sometimes hot bricks for your feet. The drivers and guides know a tremendous amount about the animals in each of their reserves, including where the “cut line” is – the seemingly invisible boundary of each park.  They constantly radio back and forth with other jeep drivers about what animals they’ve seen and where they are.  It’s quite a ride.

On the last day of my trip back in 2007, the client wasn’t feeling well and decided she didn’t want to get up for the last run before we had to pack up and head back to Johannesburg. That left just me and the program Account Executive on the jeep. As we were heading out, our driver Million said that he had heard some chatter the day before from another reserve just to the north of our reserve that they had seen wild dogs.  Wild dogs hadn’t been seen for a couple of months on “our side” of the cut line but did we want to take a chance?  Million was very clear that #1, we’d have to hightail it up to the cut line in order to make it back in time for breakfast and #2, we absolutely could not cross the cut line so if the wild dogs were in the next park then we’d be out of luck. Account Exec and I both agreed we should go for it.

Luck was with us. We actually saw some animals on the way and then the whole pack of wild dogs was on our side of the cut line. As this wasn’t enough luck, the pack had quite a few pups. Million parked the jeep about 20 feet away and we sat still and quiet for over an hour, watching the dogs come and go from the clearing.  Some of the pups were very curious and advanced pretty closely on the jeep. All of my pictures were taken without a view finder as I’d dropped the camera the night before and damaged it; I just kept holding it out and clicking away.  My luck continued to hold as I managed to get several fairly decent shots that morning.

We practically flew back to the lodge and tried SO hard not to gloat to the client about our morning’s experience. I don’t know how successful we were.

When has luck been on your side?