Even among my nearest and dearest chums, my nerdiness has tolerance limits. For whatever reason, I really do feel compelled to do ‘local’ things wherever it is I happen to go, no matter how slight. Usually that just means looking up the local food and making a beeline for the last one or two places that have been making that dish since “ought 2” or whatever.
It really is nothing other than being a nerd. Even so, I find it pays the funky dividends almost every single time. As I type this, I am sitting in the Minneapolis-St. Paul train station listening to a little Husker Du while (coincidentally actually) wearing a flannel shirt (I suppose I could be sitting here in a thong listening to Prince, but those of you who know me should be able to picture the obvious problems with that – you should feel grateful that I see the problematic nature of that as well, amigos...)
In my defense I can only say that it has made traveling around infinitely more interesting. If you work at it, there is still lots of cool stuff going on in this country. I can say that almost to a one, it is those places where there isn’t anything terribly local going on that truly doth suck the most. If you were to just visit Minneapolis for a day and not look into anything cool ahead of time, you really would miss quite a bit.
For openers, there is the famed record store Oarfolkjokeopus. One of the great little fixture-record stores that was always loaded down with incredible finds. If my mind for trivia serves me correctly, Bob Mould himself even worked there. Even if he didn’t I have to imagine that they were the place one could have gone and bought all the great early Replacements and Husker Du records when they were just bands on the circuit. I have always known Eddie Vedder to be a poseur, but any photo from that era will show that Minnehaha was flannel before flannel was cool.
Minneapolis is too cold and too full of ghosts for me to ever spend a ton of time in, but if you think about it, this is where Bob Dylan discovered Woody Guthrie. Highway 61 itself runs straight down from Bob’s home of Hibbing into Minneapolis, and from there to Clarksdale Mississippi is a straight shot (this is something I will revisit later...) This is where Prince had sex with his first Lady Cab Driver. This is where Morris Day was forced to ask the immortal musical question, “When ya wanna get some, what do you do?” To which Jerome was forced to answer “You do the bird”. Lisa asked Wendy if the water here was warm enough. She also asked if they shall begin. Wendy replied in the affirmative to both. That can’t be underestimated.
I proposed to the girl I nearly married here. Perhaps I was under the spell of Mary Tyler Moore that day; perhaps Love Was All Around fer real. The Mississippi River starts here. Paisley Park studios is still here. First Avenue Club is still here. There is a place here called Rudy’s Barbecue with an entirely respectable sauce. They have White Castle. St. Paul was the home of a professional wrestler turned governor – our nation’s first. Mama Celeste of Celeste Frozen Pizza fame is from here. The Schmidt’s beer can series honoring our nation’s outdoor sportsmen was birthed and reared here. Grain Belt – perhaps one of the top 10 worst beers ever conceived – was not only conceived here, but was also conceived as a STRONG beer, making it the choice of lumberjack and teen burnout alike.
And for the train nerd, buried deep in the bowels of the downtown freight yards resides one of the Holy Grails of train watching…the Minnesota Commercial Railway collection of old Alco locomotives. I don’t know how many decades ago they stopped making Alco locomotives, but there are very few places that still use them, and not only does this little railroad – less than 10 miles long I think – use them, they use ONLY Alcos. I was able to snag this lame shot of one as we passed their yard headin’ out of town.
Your humble traveler slept like a rock last night and is ready for the last leg. Lacrosse Wisconsin, Red Wing and Winona Minnesota, The Wisconsin Dells, Milwaukee, and then a straight shot to the Windy City. There is a stuffed pizza at the end of this ribbon of steel with my name on it, and I intend to consume it like doughy Midwesterner cooped up with institutional food for 3 days would.
When I went to bed last night, the land was still exotic…North Dakota’s badlands, Montana’s mountains. This morning, the land is as familiar to me as any ever will be to me. We are barely 10 minutes out of Minneapolis and the farms are startin’ up. Corn and beans baby. Corn and beans. Buds are bustin’ out of bushes and the rompin’ river pushes every little wheel that wheels beside a mill. I still have a good 8 hours of ridin’ ahead but it looks like the Midwest in earnest, so I feel like I am already there. This is a commuter train from here on out as far as I am concerned.
I know it is a cliché to say so, but every single stop we have made on this train – even the damn Glacier Park 4 miles from Canada, was warmer than Minneapolis. Maybe that is just a quirk of today’s weather, but I doubt it. I suspect it is gonna be frigid like this until July, then it will be tropical (have ya heard the old joke about the mosquito being the Minnesota state bird?) for 2 months, then it will be an icebox again. Prince was fond of saying he liked Minneapolis because the cold kept all the bad people out. Maybe it makes me a bad people or something because I am content to now see it out the back window.
That said, I wouldn’t change a stroke, cause baby I’m the most.
Posted by rudayday at May 16, 2005 08:58 AM