Thursday,
August 27, 2015 Eau Claire,
Wisconsin trip odometer 6,720 miles
Minnesota lives up to expectations.
As I drove east on I-94, one of the first things I spotted after leaving the
urban sprawl of Moorhead was a small billboard: “Ole and Lars’ Pizzeria, next
exit.” This was in quaint Otter Tail County. I have had some strange ethnic
variations of pizza, some nearly inedible, and can’t help but think Norwegian
pizza has got to be better than most of them.
But I was on a mission. One hundred
sixty-seven miles away was St. Cloud. This is both ‘the city’ the denizens of
Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon go to when Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery Store
fails them, and the exit for the most direct route to Minnesota’s most bizarre
tourist attraction, the state’s largest twine ball.
At a rest stop about half-way there,
I decided to get in the spirit of things and popped a Weird Al Yankovic CD into
the player at random. Once again coincidence worked in my favor, for out of the
7 in my CD case, this was the one that had his hit, “The Biggest Ball of Twine
in Minnesota.” I sang along and watched the miles count down. At the next rest
stop, I turned on my Garmin; there is a geocache at the famous twine ball,
which makes navigating to it easier.
“If you could go
anywhere in this great big world, now where’d you like to go-ta: They said, “Dad, We want to see the
Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota.”
35 miles. 34.5 miles. Wait! What’s
that? The car swerved and my eyes bugged out. The exit sign had said “Lake
Wobegon!” I thought Keillor made all that stuff up! You mean it’s REAL? I
envisioned myself driving into Lake Wobegon, past the Whippets ball field, and
having coffee and pie at the Chatterbox Café. I saw myself buying a fishing
license and spending the afternoon casting flies for the hard-fighting sunfish
that the lake is famous for. I’d take off my hat to the Statue of the Unknown
Norwegian, then drive on.
These thoughts were crowded out as I
reached St. Cloud and took the turn for the twine ball. 24 miles to go. I
gassed up, and motored on past crop fields, the occasional crossroad, and two
tiny towns. 5.6 miles, to the right. I turned, and shortly entered Darwin,
Minnesota. This sleepy town is still right on an active railroad line, but that
doesn’t mean much anymore. US Route 12 runs right through it, but I-94 splits
off from Rt. 12 twenty miles east, and all the traffic now uses the Interstate.
Darwin could have withered away, except for two men.
Francis A. Johnson wound a spare
length of twine around his fingers in 1950 and just kept adding to the
resulting ball for the next 29 years. After a short while he had to move the
ball around using railroad jacks normally used to lift boxcars whenever he had
another length to add. At the time he finished, the 11-foot tall, 8.7 ton twine
ball was the world’s largest. It is still the heaviest, the largest wound by a
single person, and the largest made of old-fashioned natural-fiber twine. At
this point, he put it on public display in Darwin. The old railroad station
behind it was converted to a local history museum and gift shop, and Darwin had
a new tourist industry.
This was modest enough until the
1990’s when Weird Al Yankovic visited the place and fell in love with the
entire strange idea. He wrote a song about it which became a national hit.
Between the two of them, the Famous Minnesota Twine Ball is now a destination
attraction and there are two festivals held annually in Darwin which attract
flocks of visitors… and much-needed income for the town. The grateful residents
even have pictures of a twine ball on their street signs.
I actually drove past it at first,
half my attention on my GPS, seeing only the blue mailbox which is the geocache
out of the corner of my eye. I went around the block, and coming back up the
street I picked out a parking place, got out of the car, and… there it was.
“I parked
the car and walked with awe-filled reverence toward that glorious, huge,
majestic sphere.”
The makeshift pagoda of Weird Al’s
song was now a neat, sturdy, well-kept structure and the ropes had been
replaced by panes of glass. It was still an awesome sight, and the same
questions Weird Al asked were in the minds and on the lips of the tourists
gathered there. Why? How? What was he thinking? I was just so impressed I didn’t
even log the geocache until I’d stood agape for a while and taken some
pictures. Then, a saunter through Darwin’s museum (which included a picture of
Weird Al, privileged to HUG the ball), the obligatory purchase of souvenirs
(yes, they DO sell miniature balls of twine and postcards that say “Greetings
from the Twine Ball, Wish You Were Here”) to support the town, and I left this peculiar
attraction with a tinge of regret.
Later I found out that the town of
Holdingford, Minnesota is the place that comes closest to duplicating the (yes,
sadly, fictional) town of Lake Wobegon. They are apparently slowly converting
themselves over to resemble it even more, and generate their own tourist trade.
I was thinking as I drove on about
these two places: one many people think is fictional, although Weird Al has
often said that every tourist site in his song is real; one that is fictional,
but is becoming reality. Geniuses like Garrison Keillor and Weird Al Yankovic,
and Francis Johnson, too, have their own unique visions that reach out to
people, and ultimately benefit the folks of a rural area that would otherwise
never be a tourist magnet.
What is the message of the Twine
Ball? As I looked at it, I thought: “Americans are crazy. But, sometimes it’s a
good kind of crazy. The Twine Ball is a monument to this, a lesson in
benevolent craziness. This makes it worth preserving, and well worth seeing.”
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