Not Quite a Blizzard, But 'Tis Enough, 'Twill Serve

Friday might have been a good day to go downtown and see Christkindlmarket Chicago, but Sunday was for staying home (Saturday was for visiting stores for provisions). Snow fell overnight between Saturday and Sunday, and we woke up to wind and more snow in the morning. Not exactly a blizzard around here, as in certain parts of the country, but a fairly strong snowstorm. Arctic Blast! as one excited weather site put it.

Nothing as dramatic as in Minneapolis, though, which saw the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome roof collapse under the weight of snow. I quote Ballparks.com again: "The roof requires 250,000 cubic feet of air pressure per minute to remain inflated, and on at least three occasions slight tears caused by heavy snows have caused the roof to deflate." Make that four occasions.

It was an odd place to watch a baseball game, the HHH Metrodome. I remember seeing more than one fly ball disappear temporarily into the dirty white backdrop color of the inflatable roof. I'll bet the players don't like that feature of the roof at all.

Deep Time & Space-Alien Barbecue

After taking in the view of Moraine Lake and the Valley of the Ten Peaks in Banff NP (see July 20), I walked down the feature known as the Rockpile on its other side, away from the vista. The view from that side was nice enough, two forested mountain ranges right and left forming a broad valley, but it isn’t the kind of view that winds up on many postcards.

A sign part way down pointed out that during the most recent Ice Age, the entire valley was full of ice. An illustration of the mountains showed no valley, only ice up to near to peaks. It gave me pause, because however imperfectly, I could look out from there and imagine the valley full of ice. Where I stood was once thousands of feet under ice.

Geologically speaking, that glaciation wasn’t very long ago -- ending 10,000 years ago, maybe. But it made me think about Deep Time, a concept analogous in some ways to Deep Space, and one that’s fascinated me for years. The Rockies themselves inspired that kind of musing even better, since their age in the low 100s of millions of years represents some serious time, though I understand that they’re mostly a youthful range compared to the Appalachians.

Which made me speculate, again, that we’ve never been visited by intelligent creatures from other worlds, nor are we likely to be. It isn’t just a matter of the vastness of space, though that’s surely a barrier. Maybe more important, we’ve missed each other in the deepness of time.

Of course, there’s no way to know for sure, and the idea of space aliens sure can be fun. Ask the proprietors of Space Aliens, a theme restaurant concept we first spotted in Bismarck, ND.

Space Aliens Grill & Bar, a sign said above a small billboard of a space-alien face. You know the sort, an anthropomorphic mug with two bug eyes, a nose and mouth, all bulbous and rounded and hairless. Under that was a smaller sign that said “Earthlings Welcome.” The signs pointed to a space-alien decorated restaurant building just off I-94. We’d already eaten lunch, and we had some driving to do that afternoon, but I liked the idea and made note of it.

Hey, if something as fatuous as the Rain Forest Café can be a hit, so can Space Aliens. We saw another advertised near Fargo, and when we got in to St. Cloud, Minn., that night at about 8:30, after checking into our motel we went looking for somewhere to eat and there it was: Space Aliens. Earthlings Welcome.

I’m not one to sneer at serendipity, so we went. The décor was a little amateurish, with bulbous space aliens on the walls here and there, doing things like flying cartoon space ships, and looking like they might have been painted by the founders’ art student cousin to save money. More fun were the Weekly World News articles, all with space-alien subjects, framed and hanging on the walls. From the one in the men’s room, I learned that George W. Bush had had strong space alien support in his bid for re-election in 2004. (Gives new meaning to "resident alien.")

There were also collections of space alien bric-a-brac, most of it behind glass, and SF TV and movie tie-in junk, mostly from very famous confections like the original Star Trek, Lost in Space and E.T. Guess they couldn’t find anything from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Elsewhere there was a game room and bar, which also sported smatterings of space-alien doodads.

I’m happy to say that the food, which tended toward heavy meat and had goofball alien-sounding menu names, was really good. We had a selection of barbecued items: beef ribs, pulled pork, chicken, sausage. Not the very best I’ve ever had, but very tasty all the same, with fine sides. I asked the waitress about the chain, and she said there were four, the three I’d seen, plus one elsewhere in Minnesota. So maybe Space Aliens will expand nationwide. You heard about it here first. I can see the ads. SPACE ALIENS! COMING TO YOUR TOWN! “We come in peace. Maybe.”

No More About the Trip After This, I Promise

This will be an unusual entry, about places we did not see. Considering the blog’s title, I usually write about things I’ve actually seen. But you can’t see everything, no matter how much time you spend at it. Such is the inexhaustible nature of the world, or maybe the exhaustible nature of any small group of people.

• La Crosse, Wis. By all reports, it has a pretty downtown. Didn’t find out. We drove through it without stopping on our first day out, when we wanted to get as far as possible, to make the second and third days of driving easier.

• Minnesota 16. For the same reason, we skipped this road through the Richard J. Dorer Memorial Hardwood State Forest in southeastern Minnesota. It parallels I-90, mostly, but such roads are always slower.

• Sioux Falls, SD. Among other things, there’s a park in that town with the outline of the USS South Dakota in concrete. The Interstate takes you north of town, without much indication that it’s there, aside from the signs.

• Stratosphere Balloon Landing Site (1935). What’s the story here? I’d rather not look it up. Let it stay a mysterious point of interest on my maps (both Rand McNally and Michelin) a few miles south of I-90 in Aurora County, SD.

• The historic forts along the Missouri in South Dakota: Kiowa, Hale and Defiance, not to mention Pierre Choteau, and a place called the Triple U Buffalo Ranch. We also bypassed the Akta Lakota Museum.

• Wall Drug and the Badlands NP had their charms, but what about Minuteman Missile National Historic Site nearby? Cool, ICBMs. But I understand that you have to make reservations to get in the silos a long time in advance, which I only found out about just before we left.

• Rapid City & Sites, including Dinosaur Park. Something my brothers (then eight and five years old) remember from a family vacation to South Dakota in 1960, a year before my birth. Too bad, we deprived Lilly of that opportunity for recollection in 2050.

• Took a look around Deadwood, SD, but not Sturgis—which was already beginning to choke with bikers coming to the Sturgis Rally, which was to begin the week after we passed through. Also buzzed by Lead and Spearfish, SD, two towns with fine names.

• Bought supplies in Belle Fourche, SD, just before entering Wyoming and Montana. Up the road on US 85 is “the Geographic Center of the US.” My, oh my. Couldn’t justify the extra miles to see some kind of obscure marker. This time.

• Saw the very spot where fate caught up with George Armstrong Custer and his men, but not the Custer and Reno Museums. Poor Reno, he got the blame, though not officially.

• Plenty of Yellowstone, but really only a fraction. Too tired to consider the Grand Tetons after Yellowstone.

• Driving home, the goal was to get home. So we stopped for very little. A whole other trip could have been stitched together from such bypassed places as; Cody, Wyo.; the hot springs of Themopolis, Wyo.; Hell’s Half Acre, Natrona County, Wyo.; Casper; Fort Laramie NHS, Goshen County, Wyo.; Scotts Bluff National Monument, Scottsbluff, Neb.; Chimney Rock NHS, Morrill County, Neb.; various sites and towns along the Platte; the SAC Museum between Lincoln and Omaha; and even places in Iowa, especially Winterset, the birthplace of Marion Morrison, better known as John Wayne.

Lovely Spam, Wonderful Spam

Enough about the glories of Yellowstone (see last week). What I really need to write about is the Spam Museum. It may be one of the few things that Lilly really remembers about this trip.

The first leg of our trip took us west and north along I-80, exiting Illinois north of Rockford, and then toward La Crosse, Wisconsin, a town on the Mississippi. Amid the flatlands of Wisconsin and Minnesota, the drive through the sloping and wooded terrain around La Crosse offered a welcome break — a fine little stretch of Interstate, for those who imagine there are none anywhere. In mid-afternoon, we reached Austin, Minnesota, hometown of Hormel Foods, and, since 2002, of the Spam Museum.

It’s a museum for our time, devoted to a commercial operation, full of light and color and sound and things to touch, fairly informative if you want to know about Spam, occasionally funny, and with an exit that directs you into the heart of the gift shop. I went in wondering if I’d see: (1) Monty Python’s Spam skit; (2) any mention of the bitter strike at Hormel in the 1980s; (3) or any discussion of the term as it’s used on the Internet. I got two of out of three. Not bad.

I didn’t see quite as much I wanted to, since Ann was determined to play with an exhibit that included an early 20th-century telephone switchboard, which had a lot of switches within her reach. She stayed there, or went back to it, for quite a while. It was part of a simulated “Hormel Provisions Market,” a pre-Spam business run by patriarch George Hormel, complete with fake hanging sausages and other old-time grocery doodads.

Hormel and his son (and successor) Jay, the museum assures us, were “great men.” I can’t say that I really know anything about the Hormels, but to judge by the sizable photos of the men in their natty old-time business garb, I’d say they were steely-eyed bastards of the sort who kept their business as tightly controlled as Spam is tightly packed. It’s the main way to build a multimillion-dollar business, after all.

Elsewhere were cans of Spam through the years with changing labels, a puppet show illustrating the coining of “Spam,” a video about the singing Hormel Girls, an amazing collection of Spam print and video ads, a radio studio in which you can hear Spam jingles, a map showing where all the Spam factories are, a moving conveyor belt near ceiling carrying about 800 cans of Spam, and that isn’t the half of it.

There was also a Spam timeline, and the ’80s strike got a brief mention there. Just when I thought that Hormel was going to ignore Monty Python out of embarrassment, I turned a corner to find that the last exhibit before the gift shop was devoted to the skit. There was a video screen, of course, and you could play the skit on demand. I did, since I hadn’t seen it in about 30 years.

I’d forgotten pretty much everything about it, except the endless selections of Spam on the menu, and the chorus, which is all too easy to remember: Spam Spam Spam Spam… Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam! Spam Spam Spam Spam… I’d completely forgotten, for instance, that it was Vikings who expressed their love for Spam, but now that I think about it, that fits a Minnesota company, eh? (Though I suspect the Python men were just being absurd.)

No mention of spam as an Internet noun (and verb). Maybe I just missed it, but certainly Hormel couldn’t be happy about that.