The House on the Rock, Section 3: Willy Wonka’s Brewery, The Million-Piece Circus Playset, and More Dolls Than a Man Can Stand

At some point during our walk through the third and final section of The House on the Rock last weekend, I thought, if Willy Wonka had brewed beer instead of made candy, it would look like this place.

As a tourist attraction, The House provokes strong responses. For fun, I looked at TripAdvisor’s reviews after visiting the place. Currently there are 761 reviews, with the preponderance of them rating it “excellent” or “very good” — 563 reviews. A sizable minority, however, rate it “terrible” or “poor”: 96 reviews. Those are the ones to look at (all sic).

“The displays are a collection of crap found at a flea market circus or the back of and old man’s shed that never thows a thing away. After 30 minutes my small family was looking desperately for a door for some fresh outside air.”

“there is so much junk in this place i can only imagine the dust, dirt, pollen, etc. dripping from bits and pieces of old lamps, caliopes, industrial waste metals, mannequins, fabric, wooden broken instruments – fakery of all kinds. it is impossible to clean and has been around for 50 years – horrible. and this is called a man’s ‘collection’. it is hoarding on an unimaginable scale. the lighting is low, the whole ‘decor’ garish and tasteless. what have you really seen at the end of 3 hours?: junk; junk on a big scale.”

“My parents and I thought we were coming to see an architectural delight. Wrong-o. This haphazard maze of low-ceilings, moldy carpet, dank rooms, and low lighting brings back images of ‘inappropriate parties from the seventies’ said one local.”

“This place was like a slow death.”

That’s enough of that. Neat freaks and people who hate clutter — which I see as the normal condition of the Western world after the Industrial Revolution — aren’t going to like The House on the Rock. But I will say that by the third section, I was getting a little testy myself. Not because I objected in some fundamental sense to the agglomeration of stuff, or the irregular lighting, or the bizarre randomness of it all, but because I was feeling the overload. I often feel the same way at large museums during the third or even fourth hours of a visit.

Still, there were things to see. In the third section, The House reaches its peak of lunatic accumulation; or maybe it seemed that way because I was tired.

The House on the Rock, May 30, 2015That’s the centerpiece lighting of an enormous room full of enormous stuff: The Organ Room. The pathway snakes along past huge brewing vats, big bells, a large ship’s propeller, spiral staircases to nowhere, large machines of unknown import, and what The House calls a “perpetual motion clock,” all of 45 feet high, which I didn’t notice was moving. Also according to The House, this room includes “three of the greatest organ consoles ever built, one with 15 manuals and hundreds of stops.” I don’t remember seeing those. But I was missing a lot by this point.

My overall impression of the room was of an industrial nightmare, a little like being trapped in Metropolis, with you as the little human surrounded by huge metal contrivances. Or it could have been a factory set designed for a Batman movie. Add artificial fog, and you’d have a steampunk acid-trip factory floor in which Batman could fight his enemies. Or it could have been the set for a Willie Wonka reboot in which Mr. Wonka is a brewer and drunkards get their comeuppance with the assistance of DT-inspired Oompah-Loompahs.

So the place had a sinister edge. Even so, the mass of metal wowed sometimes. Then near the end of the Organ Room were some cannons. And a machine gun. Don’t ask why, it’s a futile exercise.

Suddenly, you come to Inspiration Point, a restaurant (not in operation) with large windows and temporary access to the outside world. This was a considerable relief. It also offered a view of the Infinity Room, behind some trees, but more importantly, a respite from the sensory overload.

House on the Rock, May 30, 2015The last leg of the third section was essentially a walk-through. Which is too bad, since it had its interests, though I wouldn’t have spent that much time in the Doll House Building — which came after Inspiration Point — even if I’d had more energy. Just a matter of personal preference.

Alex Jordan, on the other hand, clearly loved him some dolls. The room might as well have been called Dolls, More Dolls, and Even More Dolls. Should a grown man enjoy such a fascination with dolls? Sure, why not, most people would say, but not really believe it, since the prevailing attitude is that boys and certainly men aren’t supposed to be interested in dolls. I feel that way myself, though I know it’s arbitrary.

House on the Rock, May 30, 2015The dolls then gave way to room after room of circus miniatures — a lot of miniatures. Circus figures under the big top, certainly, but also figures doing just about everything imaginable and behind-the-scenes associated with a mobile circus, such as feeding the animals (pictured; each figure is about three inches tall) and performers changing costumes. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a depiction of men cleaning up elephant dung. There were model circus trains and (something I’d never heard of) models of circus boats, as might have plied the Mississippi or the Ohio. Famed three-ring circuses and long-forgotten one-ring affairs were both represented.

Old or recreations? I don’t think it matters. A great deal of artisan effort went into these. That alone ought to demonstrate that The House, whatever its flaws, is no mere repository of junk. You don’t have to be all that keen on circuses to be impressed by a million artfully done circus figures (the number The House claims) or even many thousands. All you have to do is pay attention.

More! More! MORE!Alas, I didn’t have much energy for paying as much attention as the circus figures deserved, and on we went, now wanting the experience to be over. After the little circus figures were big circus figures: a sizable circus wagon hanging from the ceiling, populated by a 40-piece mechanical band. Below them was an 80-piece mechanical orchestra (pictured; those are life-sized figures). The House claims that 37 miles of electrical wiring and 2,300 pneumatic motors make them play. I used a token and made them play. I was still interested enough for that.

But that’s not all. Maybe hallucinations were creeping in by this point, or more likely experiences with hallucination-like qualities. But I have photographic evidence I saw a small display called The Barnyard Serenaders (behind glass, a few inches tall).

Howdoyoulikeit?Howdoyoulikeit?After the Circus Building: Asian art, armor, and more weapons, including an artificial leg with a place to conceal a derringer (talk about concealed carry). The fake crowns of the crowned heads of Europe were unimpressively fake. Finally — well, almost — we passed by the doll carousels. “So many [dolls] to display that if one were to display them on a towering, 6-tier lighted, revolving carousel, there would still be hundreds of dolls left over,” a post card from The House says. “Solution? Build a second doll carousel.”

I’ll hand it to Alex Jordan: a doll carousel, much less a six-tiered one, is something I’d never seen, or encountered as an idea or even a wisp of a notion. I didn’t look at them much, however. I wanted out. Enough’s enough, especially a place who’s motto could be, Too Much is Never Enough.

At the exit you find a Japanese garden.

The House on the RockA pretty little one, too, but we didn’t linger.

There’s a fine arts dissertation waiting to be written about The Rock on the House — a massive, kinetic entity that questions the importance of authenticity and blurs the lines between art and artless, and probably smashes a few paradigms along the way. But I doubt that any academic is going to  take it up as a subject. They say they want to smash paradigms, but they don’t really.

House on the Rock, May 30, 2015It is what it is: sprawling, cluttered, dingy in places. Sometimes fake, sometimes authentic, often hard to tell which. Does it contradict itself? Very well, then, it contradicts itself. It’s large and contains multitudes.

The House on the Rock, Section 2: Monsters of the Deep, Automatic Orchestras & The Congress of Animals Carousel

The House on the Rock is popular. A lot of people were there on Saturday, but since it’s so large, it seldom seemed crowded. One thing I noticed was a distinct lack of spoken  German, Japanese, French and other popular non-English tourist languages, though we did cross paths with a Russian-language tour group (very likely from Chicago, not Russia) and I thought I heard a German couple.

Go to the Art Institute of Chicago or a Frank Lloyd Wright structure or even some popular site on Route 66 and you’re going to hear those languages. The House on the Rock is missing a marketing opportunity to international travelers. All it needs to do is persuade German guidebook editors to include it; JTB to offer guided tours that visit the attraction; and maybe trickiest of all, some prominent French public intellectual (I hear there are such) to pronounce it the most authentic American thing since Jerry Lewis. Then tourists with their euros and yen would show up in quantity.

The first rooms of the second section start off modestly enough, by The House on the Rock standards: paperweights, stuffed birds, antique guns and coin banks. One of the smaller animatronics of this section — labeled only, “The Dying Drunkard, British RR Station 1870” — featured an old man lying in a bed. It’s perhaps two feet high.

The Dying DrunkardInsert a token and his arms move up and down, and various apparitions emerge from under his bed, inside the grandfather clock, and out of the closet. A ghost, a demon, and a skeleton, I think. Or maybe Death himself. That was all it did. If it really does date from 1870, it probably took a penny or a ha’penny to operate originally. Entertainment for Victorians.

At this point, I noticed that even the bathrooms include displays of stuff. The first men’s room in the second section includes model trains. I understand that the women’s room includes glassware and small statues. Other bathrooms were similarly adorned, and the small cafeteria near end of the second sector sports large advertising banners for Carter the Great. I had to look him up later.

Next is the Streets of Yesterday. It’s probably the most conventional display, and assortment of artifacts, at The House on the Rock. It’s a display-oriented re-creation of a 19th-century street, complete with various businesses and their equipment: doctor, dry goods merchant, livery stable, apothecary, and so on. I’ve seen the approach in a number of other places, including the Museum of Science and Industry and the Henry Ford Museum. It’s nicely done in The House — especially amusing are the signs that promise opium and worm cakes and the like for sale — but it isn’t the kind of eccentricity the place does so well.

Not to worry: at the end of the street is a two-story calliope. The “Colossal Gigantic Calliope GLADIATOR” by name.

The House on the Rock May 2015Don’t be fooled. Those figures are life-sized, and they move when the thing plays.
The House on the Rock May 2015Soon afterward you come to the Heritage of the Sea. It’s no museum with nautical equipment or displays about brave ocean voyagers along the lines (say) of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. It’s an enormous room that’s home to an enormous diorama of a sea monster — a whale-like creature — posed in a mid-fight with a partly submerged squid, though its creepy squid eyes are visible. Neither of the figures are particularly well illuminated, and there’s no sense of rhyme or reason about the damned things. Alex Jordan wanted giant monsters of the deep, and so it was done. The whale’s about three stories high, and as The House web site points out, “longer than the Statue of Liberty is tall.”

Pictures were hard to take because of the dark, and simply because the diorama was so big. But I tried. The mouth of the Leviathan reaches above the second level of the building.

Ahhhhhh!I was so flabbergasted by the thing at first that I forgot to read the sign describing it, which might have told me what the figures were made of and who actually built it. Or maybe I wouldn’t have learned those things. No matter. I’d started to notice by this time that, except for the Alex Jordan Center, The House on the Rock isn’t particular keen on exposition. Some things are labeled, some not. Some labels only have the name of the object, a few provide more information. Curated, the place isn’t.

That was especially the case for the model ships in the room. Along the walls of fighting-sea-monsters room are walkways that slowly spiral upward and around the monsters, so that you can view them from many angles, and eventually look down on them. Also on display along with walkways are numerous model ships and nautical gear and other items in glass cases.

Many famed ships are represented, and so labeled: Bounty, Victory, Constitution, Mayflower, Santa Maria, Golden Hind, both the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, and the Titanic, helpfully complete with an iceberg at its side. The USS Wisconsin is depicted, and it occurred to me that if Harry Truman had been from Wisconsin, that’s where the formal surrender might have taken place on September 2, 1945, instead of the USS Missouri (both are museum ships these days). Some ship models I had to guess at: I think I saw Bismarck and Yamato, to name two Axis vessels. Other ships are unlabeled and it’s hard to guess their identity.

But wait, there’s more. Of course there is. After the nautical display, I seem to remember a display of cars and model cars and a “Rube Goldberg machine” and other things leading up to a small cafeteria decorated by re-created Burma Shave ad signs and the aforementioned Carter the Great.

Beyond that are a series of music rooms. Amazing contraptions, these. For the cost of a token, most of them spring to life for a few minutes and play mostly late 19th-century tunes. Unless the music is piped in — which one source I’ve read asserts. That wouldn’t be out of character with the maybe-fake maybe-real dynamic of The House on the Rock, but on the other hand, it doesn’t matter much. The effect is remarkable anyway.

The Blue Room, whose walls are dark blue, but which looks mostly gold-colored, features an automatic orchestra.

The Blue Room OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThe Blue Danube, at two stories, fittingly enough plays “The Blue Danube”

The Blue DanubeOther automatic music rooms include the Red Room, which (besides instruments that play “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies”) includes a canopied sleigh drawn by a flying lion and a tiger; Miss Kitty Dubois’ Boudoir, a New Orleans fantasia room that plays Boots Randolph’s “Yakety Sax”; and the Franz Joseph, a mechanical orchestra nearly 30 feet tall.

My favorite room-sized automatic music device is The Mikado. The MikadoTo quote from the postcard featuring it: “At the heart of this astounding music machine pulses a Mortier pipe organ with 118 keys. The Mikado features two imposing and life-like Japanese figures, playing kettle drum and flute.”

The Mikado“They are accompanied by crashing cymbals, rattling snares, jingling temple bells and tambourines. The installation is lit by a constellation of red, hooded hanging lanterns.” Yes, indeed.

The MikadoThe MikadoBy this time, you’d think second section would be over. No! There’s more! Such as The Spirit of Aviation, with model aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling, plus an impressive collection of Seven-Up memorabilia in the same room. Why? Just because.

Finally, section two does end, at The Carousel. It’s another behemoth machine that Jordan and his staff built over the course of a decade. Is it a real carousel? According to the Chicago Tribune, it “actually turns on rollers because, as built, it was too heavy to turn on a central axle, the way true carousels do.” Ah, but again, who cares? If not a carousel, it’s a monster of a lighted whirligig.

The CarouselThe House on the Rock asserts that it has over 20,000 lights, 182 chandeliers and 269 handcrafted carousel animals (none of which are horses), along with other figures here and there, including naked or near-naked women (if you look closely enough, you begin to see a fair number of those at The House). The carousel is 35 tall, 30 feet wide, and weighs 36 tons. The dark figures you see hovering over it are winged figures — angels? Fallen angels? Mythical winged people? Weird scenes inside the gold mine.

The thing isn’t for riding. It’s for watching it go round and round. Somehow that emphasizes how tired you are by that point.

The House on the Rock, Section 1: Alex Jordan’s Odd Man Cave

The Alex Jordan Center is the first building of The House on the Rock you encounter after the ticketing building. Reached by a walkway through an “Asian garden” (an odd mix of Chinese and Japanese elements), the center is essentially a museum devoted to The House creator, Alex Jordan Jr. (1914-1989), with information about him and his lifelong obsession with building the complex, and filling it with stuff.

Ann, May 30, 2015There’s more information on the walls of the Alex Jordan Center than is easily available elsewhere, especially online (as Wiki puts it, “published information on Jordan’s life is scarce”). Much of what’s written about the place follows the Roadside America school of reportage: Wow, what a wacky place! Look how wacky it is! Can you believe how wacky this place is?

The House on the Rock is wacky. Ah, but so much more. My impression is that Alex Jordan was something of a ne’er-do-well whose parents supported him until he lucked into a way to support his obsessions: charging people admission to see his stuff (that, and maybe farm subsidies). Once it got up and going, the place grow’d like Topsy. Except not quite: Jordan spurred the growth. Whatever the character of his obsessions, he also clearly wasn’t stupid. I was astonished to learn that he oversaw the design and construction of some of the automatic music machines, which look as fantastically complex as any of the Disney animatronics.

Here’s a smaller example of a kind of animatronics I’d never heard of before, one of which, with information, is in the Alex Jordan Center: “In the early 1980s, Alex traded with California collector John Daniel for a collection of Baranger motions…

The House on the Rock May 2015Baranger motions are mechanical animations manufactured by the Baranger Company of South Pasadena, California between 1925 and 1959. The animations were rented to jewelry stores as window displays; they were shipped to the stores periodically on a rotating basis so that there was always something of interest in the store window… The House on the Rock has the world’s largest collection of Barangers on display and in storage.” (The Pollack Advertising Museum in Mesa, Ariz., reportedly has more.) The pictured eggman, a Humpty Dumpty Baranger, is only one of 14 in existence, according to one source.

Jordan must have also had a dash of P.T. Barnum in him. Why else would you have a three-story sea monster built for the world to see? On the other hand, I was happy to learn that The House on the Rock doesn’t particularly gouge its visitors. Admission for three adults and one child, bought at a discount on line, was less than $90, and certainly worth it. The gift shop was tourist-priced, but not excessive. One small example: postcards were a quarter each. I seem to remember that cards of Taliesin were more, maybe a dollar. The place doesn’t charge Buc-ee’s prices, in other words.

The House on the Rock is formally divided into three parts. The first part begins after leaving the Alex Jordan Center, and includes the original structure: a dimly lit collection of rooms snaking around the side of the hill. At least, that’s what it felt like. Without a map, or an aerial view of the complex, it’s hard for a casual visitor to tell how it’s all put together. Not that that matters. Once you’re into the groove of the place, passing through twisting corridors and crossing pedestrian bridges and climbing staircases and wandering along footpaths through mildly claustrophobic tunnels, and even taking in an occasional view of the outside, it’s just one thing after another. Quite literally.

The first section was also the only part of the complex that remotely resembles living quarters, featuring (among other things) a simple kitchen looking about 40 years old. Other rooms included pieces of furniture, such as couches and tables, and one has a large fireplace: elements of an elaborate man cave, to use a term more recent than The House. With some stress on cave. Rock formed the basis of most of the walls, the ceilings were low, and much of the color scheme involved brown.

The House on the Rock, May 2015Most of the rooms weren’t so ordinary. Jordan’s fascination with collecting dolls, especially Japanese dolls, and Tiffany lamps, or Tiffany-like lamps, is apparent in many places.

The House on the Rock, May 2015The House on the Rock, May 2015The first section also included a handful of the automatic music machines that would show up in such quantity later in the complex. This looks like a painting of such a device — in fact, an homage to a famous painting I can’t quite place — but actually the device is behind a hole in the wall made to look like a frame. Insert a token and it makes music.

The House on the Rock, May 2015At one point the tour trail takes you outside to enjoy the view. Even though last Saturday was overcast and rainy, I saw the appeal of the vista, off into the rolling green hills of southern Wisconsin.

The House on the Rock May 2015The signature room of the first section is the Infinity Room. In its terse way, The House on the Rock web site says, “The 14th room of the House, completed in 1985, this engineering marvel extends 218 feet out over the scenic valley and 156 feet above the forests [sic] floor. The Infinity Room has 3,264 windows for walls that treat guests to a truly spectacular view.”

I wasn’t able to take a picture of the Infinity Room exterior that wasn’t obscured by trees, but there are some images on line.

Looking toward to end of the room, you see this.

The Infinity RoomAs far as you can go into the room, you see this.

The Infinity RoomDead ahead from there is a window in the floor that allows you to look down toward the tops of the trees. I can only hope that Jordan hired competent engineers to cantilever the thing safely, and that inspectors from Iowa County periodically take a look at it. The room’s been up for 30 years, so presumably it’s fairly sound. Still, Yuriko was unnerved by entering the room, and didn’t stay long, and she wasn’t the only one. Another woman visitor voiced her disquiet and turned around mid-way to the end point. Her young daughter went on (as did mine). The lure of infinity wasn’t to be missed.

The House on the Rock

Here’s a list of some of the things we saw at The House on the Rock on Saturday. It’s only a partial list, and most of the categories represent a large number of individual items: books, Tiffany-style lamps, dolls, Japanese dolls, Japanese lanterns, musical instruments, self-playing musical instruments, stained-glass windows, stained-glass panels, paperweights, stuffed birds, antique guns, dueling pistol sets, rifles, coin banks, model trains, suits of armor, swords, faux crowns, Fabergé-like eggs, 19th-century doctor, barber, and pharmacy equipment, scrimshaw, model ships, nautical equipment and ephemera, cash registers, model airplanes, bottles, mounted newspapers, brewery equipment, cheese vats, bells, doll houses, cannons, and circus miniatures.

The House on the Rock is also home to an enormous calliope; what’s asserted to be the largest carousel in the world (and it could well be); and a 200-foot-long model of a sea monster, about three stories high, poised in mid-fight with an enormous squid.

HouseontheRockObvThe self-playing musical instruments were many, some small and maybe from the golden age of such devices, the late 19th century (it’s always a maybe at The House when it comes to authenticity), and others were room-sized and created for The House. Most were operated by nicely designed gold-colored tokens that were available for four for a dollar. I kept one as a souvenir, and used a handful of others to play the automatic tunes.

All of these items are housed in a complex of buildings built on hill in rural Wisconsin. It’s a successful tourist trap, quasi-museum, psuedo-antique gallery with some possibly valuable items mixed in, a remarkable piece of outsider architecture, a monument to a highly energized eccentric collector named Alex Jordan Jr. who might have his own cable show were he living in our time, and most of all a mass agglomeration of stuff acquired according to the idiosyncratic lights of Mr. Jordan, dead now more than 25 years, but maintained as all of these things (and a viable business) by a successor he picked. I’ve never been any place like it before.

Actually, I have. Once or twice a year, I have a phantasmagoria dream, usually involving my passage through a street or a cityscape or a tunnel among a constantly shifting complex succession of images and things. Usually these are good dreams, but sometimes there’s an edge of anxiety, such as the time I passed through the phantasmagoria trying to remember where I’d parked my car (I woke relieved to realize my car was in my driveway). The House was no dream, but as you walk through, it’s for sure a complex succession of images and things.

Back on August 4, 2007, when we visited Taliesin, which is a few miles away, we talked about a return trip to The House on the Rock someday. That day turned out to be May 30, 2015. Yuriko, Yuika, Ann and I set out by car for Madison on the afternoon of the day before. We spent the night in a motel there, and the next morning drove the 50 or so miles to Spring Green, Wis., and then the few more miles to The House.

On the 29th, we arrived in Madison in time for dinner. I picked La Taguara on Washington Ave., a Venezuelan restaurant I discovered via online search. I’ve been to many kinds of restaurants, but this was a first for me, and everyone else. I can report that it satisfied our need for a good dinner, as well as my periodic urge for food novelty. I had the Pabellon a caballo, which the menu called the Venezuelan “national dish”: black beans, white cheese, shredded beef, rice, deep-fried sweet plantain pieces, and an arepa — flatbread made of ground maize dough — along with a fried egg. We had fried yucca for an appetizer, and I had passion fruit juice to drink.

Since it was still light after dinner, we made our way to downtown Madison by car, and eventually on foot to Monona Terrace, a meeting and convention facility that happens to have a rooftop terrace with a fine view of Lake Monona. The last time I was there, ice covered part of the lake. A late May view is a lot more pleasant. The opposite direction from the lake included an equally fine view of the capitol catching the day’s dying light.

After leaving The House on the Rock in mid-afternoon on the 30th, I drove a slightly out-of-the-way route back home, by way of Mount Horeb, New Glarus, Monroe, and Beloit (everyone else was napping). I did a driveby look at New Glarus, a town founded by Swiss settlers, and which includes the Swiss Historical Village, an open-air museum and something else in Wisconsin to see someday.

But on this trip, everything besides The House on the Rock was just a bonus. That was the focus of the 27-hour, 400-mile trip. It didn’t disappoint.

The Dickeyville Grotto

Writing for PBS, cultural anthropologist Anne Pryor says that, “In Dickeyville [Wis.], one of the area’s small towns, is Holy Ghost parish, the home of a remarkable piece of folk architecture. Situated between the rectory, church, and cemetery is the Dickeyville Grotto, a structure so amazing that I have seen unsuspecting drivers come to a full halt in the middle of the road to gape. What stops them short is a 15-foot-tall false cave, decoratively covered with colored stone and glass, dedicated to Mary the mother of Jesus, to God and country.

“Although the name implies a singular structure, the Dickeyville Grotto is actually a series of grottos and shrines. It includes the grotto dedicated to the Blessed Mother, the structure seen from Highway 61; a shrine dedicated to Christ the King; a shrine to the Sacred Heart of Jesus; and a Eucharistic Altar in the parish cemetery, formerly used for annual outdoor Corpus Christi processions. The large Patriotic Shrine depicts the history and love of country represented by Columbus, Washington, and Lincoln.

“All of these creations display decorative embellished cement ornamentation achieved by placing patterns of colorful materials in the concrete when it is still damp: shells, stones, tiles, glass, petrified moss or wood, geodes and gems. Iron railings with the same distinctive decorations border the walkways between the different shrines and grottos, unifying these separate structures.”

We arrived at the Dickeyville Grotto late in the morning on Sunday, when it was already sunny and very warm. The Blessed Mother grotto is striking indeed, and in case there’s any doubt, the site proclaims itself to be about RELIGION and PATRIOTISM. (And another sign mentions the gift shop.)Dickeyville Grotto, June 2014Dickeyville Grotto, June 22, 2014Here’s the back of the Marian grotto. Virtues are literally written in stone.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAMost of the surfaces are as colorful as can be. Under strong sunlight’s a good way to see it.

Dickeyville Grotto, June 2014Father Mathius Wernerus, priest at Dickeyville’s Holy Ghost Parish, and his parishioners built the grotto during the late 1920s. It was renovated in the late 1990s. The timing of its origin must account for the aforementioned and odd (to us) Patriotism Shrine, with Columbus, Washington, and Lincoln. The patriotism of U.S. Catholics was widely and openly questioned at the time, so it makes sense.

Dickeyville Grotto, June 2014Dickeyville Grotto, June 2014Also worth seeing at Holy Ghost Parish is the cemetery, which fulfilled my informal requirement of at least one cemetery visit per trip. While my family poked around the gift shop, I strolled through the cemetery. Not a lot of fancy funerary art, but still a handsome array of gravestones in a bright Midwestern setting. The most interesting stone I saw was a large one depicting a large farm, which presumably the deceased had owned and operated.Holy Ghost Parish, Dickeyville, Wisc., June 2014Also worth seeing, and not just for the air conditioning, was the church building. Its stained glass is nice, and tucked away in the landing of the stairway that connects the basement and the nave are a couple of statues with themes you don’t see that often (at least I don’t), such as St. Sebastian, whom I’ve seen depicted more often in paintings.

Holy Ghost Parish, Dickeyville, Wisc., June 2014 And this pietà. Maybe I’m not up on my Christian symbolism, though I have heard of broken vessels standing in for us sinners. But I’ve never seen a statue quite like this.

Holy Ghost Parish, Dickeyville, Wisc., June 2014I didn’t see anything to identify the work or the artist, so I’ll have to leave it at that. Enough to say that Holy Ghost Parish and its vernacular grotto were well worth detouring a few miles into extreme southwestern Wisconsin to see.

Driftless Views

The area we visited last weekend included places in three states, but that’s just political geography, invented by men and as transient as a firefly light in the grand scheme of the Earth. A more geographically apt way to think of our destination is the Driftless Area. That too is transient – everything is, over millions of years – but not quite as much.

The concept is well enough known that a part of Wisconsin markets itself as Driftless Wisconsin, no doubt to compete with the better-known wooded areas up north and the cities in the southeast part of the state. The organizations web site tells us that “the Driftless Area includes 24,103 square miles, covering all or part of 57 counties in southwest Wisconsin, southeast Minnesota, northeast Iowa, and a small part of northwest Illinois.

“The region’s distinctive terrain is due to its having been bypassed by the last continental glacier. The term ‘driftless’ indicates a lack of glacial drift, the deposits of silt, gravel, and rock that retreating glaciers leave behind.

“The Driftless Area is characterized by its steep, rugged landscape, and by the largest concentration of cold water streams in the world. The absence of glaciers gave the rivers time to cut deeply into the ancient bedrock and create the distinctive landforms. Karst topography is found throughout the area, characterized by shallow limestone bedrock, caves, sinkholes, springs, and cold streams.”

That is, this part of the Midwest actually has some pleasing topography, unlike most everywhere else. A 1989 visit to Galena, which is in that “small part of northwest Illinois,” introduced me to the pleasures of the land, even though visiting Galena is mostly about the pleasures of a late 19th-century streetscape put to modern uses.

Sometimes I miss hills. The modest hills of San Antonio, the more robust ones of the nearby Hill Country, the rolling hills of Middle Tennessee. So it’s good to visit the hills and take a look off in the distance.

A few miles east of Galena, in rural Jo Daviess County, Ill., along US 20, there’s an overlook worth stopping at.

Jo Daviess County, June 2014Jo Daviess County, June 2014Further south at Mississippi Palisades State Park, there are views from the palisades. They’re not quite as lofty as the more famous Hudson River features, it seems, but offer fine views of the Mississippi all the same. Mississippi Palisades State Park, June 2014Mississippi Palisades State Park, June 2014The hilly topography shapes human settlement as well. A large bluff rises west of the Mississippi in the city of Dubuque. The older parts of the city spread out below the bluff, down to the banks of the river. Dubuque, June 2014Dubuque, June 2014Naturally, the visit only whets my appetite to take a look at more of the Driftless Area, especially up around Prairie du Chien in Wisconsin and Effigy Mound Nat’l Monument in Iowa. It’s a mild affliction I suffer.

Tri-State Summer Solstice Weekend ’14

Late on Friday morning we drove west for a few hours – and enjoyed a remarkably long in-car conversation among ourselves, no radio or other electronics playing – and by mid-afternoon arrived at Mississippi Palisades State Park, which overlooks the Mississippi River just north of Savanna, Ill. The plan included bits of three states in three days. My plan, really, since my family humors me in such matters, and lets me think up the details of little trips like these.

Friday was Illinois. We camped at Mississippi Palisades, which is an Illinois State park and incredibly lush this year, and we spent time in Savanna, a little river town on the Great River Road, mostly to find a late lunch. Toward the end of the day, we made our way to Mount Carroll, Ill., which is the county seat of Carroll County and home to a good many handsome historic structures.

On Saturday, we ventured into Iowa – it really isn’t far – and first saw Crystal Lake Cave, just south of Dubuque. In Dubuque, lunch was our next priority, followed by a visit to the Fenelon Place Elevator. Which is a funicular. When you have a chance to ride a funicular, do it. The last time we were in Dubuque, I remember the Fenelon Place Elevator being closed for the season (uncharacteristically, I don’t remember when that was — the late ’90s?). Anyway, this time I was determined to ride it.

Afterward, we headed west a short distance to the town of Dyersville, Iowa, home to the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier, but better known for The Field of Dreams movie set, which still draws visitors. We saw both.

Today was mostly about getting home at a reasonable hour, but I had to add a slice of Wisconsin by navigating a number of small roads until we came to Dickeyville. It would be just another rural Wisconsin burg but for one thing: the Dickeyville Grotto, which actually includes a main grotto, smaller grottos, shrines, a church and a cemetery (and a gift shop, for that matter). Like funiculars, grottos demand our attention, especially such as striking bit of folk architecture as the Dickeyville Grotto.

The Curious Statues of Fontana, Wisconsin

Around this time two years ago, during a strangely warm interlude that greened the grass and budded the trees and bushes in March, we spent part of a day at Williams Bay and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Lake Geneva is town’s name; Geneva Lake is the lake’s name, supposedly, but I’ve never heard anyone call it that. That was the day we saw this oddity in Lake Geneva.

One of my ambitions that day was to drive all the way around the lake, which we did before returning home (one of these days, I  might walk around the lake, since there’s a trail all the way around; but maybe not all at the same time). On the western edge of the lake is the town of Fontana, whose full name is Fontana-on-Geneva Lake.

We stopped at a little lakeside park in Fontana and found this statue near the beach. PhotoBatch4.10.12 028The plaque says: Dedicated to the memory of ARTHUR B. JENSEN whose generosity and foresight made this beach possible. I assume that’s the same Arthur B. Jensen who wrote Shawneeawkee, friendly Fontana: A history, which can be yours for $100.

Not far away is this memorial.

PhotoBatch4.10.12 027FONTANA WEEPS September 11, 2001. An admirable sentiment, but I have a sneaking feeling that if that plaque happens to survive until 2101, say, people will wander by without the faintest idea what it’s about, even when they notice it, which they won’t. But that’s not a reason to not erect memorials. To paraphrase Mother Teresa, “Memorialize anyway.”

Finally, there was this.

PhotoBatch4.10.12 030Never Say Can’t seems to be the title. Shirley Brost, at least according to one source, seems to be alive and well in Fontana, but I’m not going to track anything else down about her. The oddity about this work isn’t even the frog — but why a frog? — but the not-so-admirable sentiment. I suppose it’s supposed to laud determination, which can be laudable sometimes. But it’s just as important — more important, I’d say — to have a clear idea of what you can, and can’t, do.

Here’s a better idea for a title: Never Say Cant. Except people would think it’s a typo.

Desk Debris

The other day, an old friend mentioned a paperweight she has on her desk, one that she acquired when we worked together in Nashville in the mid-80s. I didn’t remember the item, but it did inspire me to take a look at some of the debris on my desk even now.

Desk Debris

The largest item is a plastic durian. A contributing editor at a magazine I once worked for, a woman who lived in Singapore for a while, gave it to me. I think because it came up in conversation that I knew what a durian was. The dog chewed on the stem not long ago, but I got it away from her.

The medallion is a Vanderbilt souvenir. Not sure when I got it, but it wasn’t when I attended school there. It’s a sturdy bronze object, weighing 9 oz., with Cornelius Vanderbilt on the obverse. Made by Medallic Art Co. of New York, according to the rim of the medallion. Maybe the company was once HQ’d in New York, but according to the web site, it’s now a division of Northwest Territorial Mint, which is headquartered in Federal Way, Washington, and has no facilities in New York.

I got the Maple Leaf bouncy ball at a store in Canmore, Alberta, in 2006. It was just after Canada Day, and Canada-themed items were at a discount.

The green item is a glass egg I bought at the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum in Neenah, Wisconsin, last year. A pretty piece of glass, but also inexpensive and hard to break.

Wisconsin Eats

On our second evening in Wisconsin, I went out to pick up our evening meal. Everyone else knew what they wanted, and so I went to those places, but I didn’t have anything in mind for myself. By chance I came across My Lee’s Egg Roll House at the corner of Franklin and Richmond in Appleton. I followed an impulse to go there, and bought a takeout meal of two large egg rolls with fried rice. I also picked up a roll – mini-loaf? piece? of “longcheng” bread with strawberry filling for snacking on the way back to the motel.

I was the only customer, so I asked the woman behind the counter if she were My Lee. She was, she said in a heavy accent, and hoped that I would enjoy my egg rolls. I learned from an article posted on the wall that she and her husband had opened up the store only last year in a former Batteries Plus location. They are Hmong, originally from Laos (I think). Whatever their back story, I’m happy to report that in Appleton, Wisconsin, in our time they make some fine egg rolls and filled bread.

Harmony Cafe is on College Blvd in Appleton’s business district, created from the joining of two narrow spaces in brick-facade buildings old enough to sport punched tin ceilings. Apparently it’s one of two locations, with the other in Green Bay. Goodwill Industries of North Central Wisconsin runs the place, and benefits from it. That by itself wouldn’t have persuaded me to visit, or even its composting of coffee and food waste or use of fair-trade coffee beans. But I happened to know from my visit last August that the joint has a tasty Cuban pork sandwich, one just about as good as the one I had in Tampa’s Ybor City. It’s still on the menu. Good eats.

On the way home, we stopped at Mars Cheese Castle on I-94 near Kenosha, purveyor of cheese, meat, baked goods, sweets and more. The place has been enlarged since I was last there, and actually looks like the kind of castle a kid would draw.

The place is a roadside institution. Sure enough, it’s in Roadside America, which says: “This mainstay of Cheesehead gastronomy has reopened in a new, more castle-like building only a few feet from its original location, which was bulldozed for an I-94 interchange (the classic sign was saved). Now with real battlements! A real drawbridge! The Castle still has its cocktail lounge, and still sells ‘cow pies’ and udder-shaped coffee mugs — and its iconic roof-mounted cheese-chomping overcaffinated-eyed giant mouse sculpture has been repainted and moved indoors so that people can now pose next to it.”

We got some cheese curds. Made in Wisconsin, of course.