The Rake Magazine

Year: 2002

  • The Love Apple

    We are a deserving people. We bear down under the barrage of cold and wetness for some eight months, to emerge into the light for the remaining four. We understand our lot in life, we choose it. We have stronger character for the winters we suffer, and we have a deeper love and appreciation for the summers that thaw us. Looking forward to the gifts of the sun, we revel on our bike paths, enjoy our many outdoor dining options, and throw fests at every turn for every reason. If there is one icon to give form to our passions about summer, to illustrate the brief hedonistic streak in an otherwise puritan life, it is the food that is all about joy—the tomato.

    Round, red, and luscious, the tomato is the picture of pleasure. It has no rough outer shell to peel, no artichoke-like defenses. It is soft and fleshy to the touch. You need not worry about stems, cores, or nasty pits; the seeds simply slide down your chin with the first ravenous bite.

    Indigenous to Central and South America, the tomato was cultivated by the Incas and Aztecs as early as 700 C.E. The conquistadors took the Nahuatl name tamatl along with the fruit and introduced it to Europe in the 1500s. At first the tomato found its most loyal following among the hot-blooded Mediterranean countries of Spain, Portugal, and Italy. The Italians, so enamored of this succulent fruit dubbed it pomo d’oro or apple of gold. You have to wonder—Who were the Italians before the tomato?

    As the tomato moved north, its legend grew. The French renamed it pomo d’amore, or the love apple. The Germans called it the apple of paradise, believing it to be the actual “apple” offered to Adam by Eve. But many, like the British, shunned the red beauty as a poisonous berry. Perhaps because it’s in the nightshade family, they had a right to be nervous. In fact the foliage of a tomato plant is poisonous. During the 18th century the Linnaean name of the plant was coferred—Lycopersicon esculentum, but it was known as “wolf’s peach.”

    Unfortunately the fear of tomatoes traveled with the colonists as they set out for the New World. It wasn’t until the 1800s when the Creoles in New Orleans unleashed the tomato in this country with their fiery gumbos and jambalayas. By the 1850s the tomato was in produce carts and home gardens in every city in America. In fact some of the varieties begun in gardens at that time are considered priceless gems today.

    The “heirloom” tomato has been bandied about on chic menus for a few summers already. With names like Green Zebra, Blondkopfchen, Mr. Stripey, and Eva Purple Ball, these are definitely the showgirls of your vegetable garden. Some of these varieties have been around since the 200 years passing from family to family, and some have been created in the past decade through cross pollination. Regardless of their lineage, the heirloom market has boomed and thereby created more colorful, complex, tasty fruits.

    And yes, the tomato is a fruit. If you want to get into a heated, passionate discussion, gather a botanist and a chef to discuss the intractable fruit-or-vegetable controversy. The botanist will have logic and science on his side. He will point out that generally, a fruit is the edible part of the plant that contains the seeds, while a vegetable is the edible stems, leaves, and roots of the plant. Fruits are apples, oranges, papayas. Vegetables are cauliflower, carrots, and rhubarb. At this point the chef will throw down her tongs and scoff. Papayas and tomatoes in the same camp?! If not by science, then by common law, she will say, the tomato lives with vegetables, making a much more palatable existence among the garlic, onions, and savory foods of the world. Leave the syrupy sweet stuff to the trees. The tomato will dwell with the ground vegetables.

    It hardly matters, when you contemplate that first beautiful vine-ripened tomato from your garden. One that in the throes of spring planting was only a vision in your head as you patiently waited for the sun to work its mojo. The rubbery tomatoes in the grocery aisle that are hydroponically grown are meant to give you a December fix, to reawaken the frozen part of the tongue where summer lives; that’s all. Beware any restaurant that offers a tomato bruschetta or caprese in November or March. They should be held accountable for their light pink/whitish affront to the senses.

    The true and pure way to enjoy summer is to take pleasure in a tomato straight from the plant. Carry a small dish of kosher salt out to the garden, pluck and sprinkle. Stand there with the warm August sun beating on your neck, the juice running down your arm. Heady from the buzz of the garden around you, savor that moment—like only a sunburned Minnesotan can.

    The Second Best Way to Eat Your Garden Tomatoes

    A Mess of Caprese

    Traditional mozzarella caprese is usually sliced and laid out in layers. I think this way is more fun and gives a bigger bang in each mouthful.

    Coarsely chop three or four big fat tomatoes. Throw them in a big bowl. Tear a ball of fresh mozzarella into little chunks. Throw them in the bowl. Grab a handful of fresh basil, chop it how you like, throw it in the bowl. Roughly chop or mince three cloves of garlic, in it goes. Get some good extra virgin olive oil and douse the mess in the bowl. Don’t be afraid to jump in with your hands and toss it around a bit. Try not to make it too soupy.

    Cracked pepper and salt it to your liking. Maybe some red pepper flakes?

    All you need now is a big crusty loaf of bread as your fork. And a hammock.

    Stephanie March is a Minneapolis writer.

  • Beer Commercial from Hell

    The Fringe Festival arrives again, this year with more corporate sponsors than ever, and I’m feeling the same sense of anticipation and obligation. So many options, so much creativity, so many challenging theatrical experiences to seek out. As always, it’s the seeking that intimidates. Must I really drag my sporadically employed butt out of the house in all this heat and humidity to sit in some barely ventilated venue fanning myself with the program like a fat woman at a gospel meeting on the out chance that I will see something that’ll change my life? The answer’s yes, of course. But the question’s “why?” Why, just because something calls itself the Fringe should I believe it’s any more fresh and original than all the dazzling assertions of individuality I can find on the Internet? A whole world of original thought can be mine—from skate-chick rants to entire web rings devoted to a single poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. All I have to do is get out my credit card and pay Qwest (A WorldCom Subsidiary) $52.95 a month. Certainly, those pop-up adverts for car insurance and software security that litter my screen with all the graphic subtlety of fast-food wrappers are suspiciously slow to click off, but it’s a small price to pay for the world at my fingertips. Besides, there’s no real Fringe anymore, no alternative, just a bunch of various phenomena waiting to be absorbed and distributed at a reasonable price.

    I use cynicism to disguise my laziness. The truth is that the Fringe is worth leaving the house for. In the first place, it’s live theater, and live theater, almost by definition, resists repackaging. Once it’s on video, DVD, CD-ROM, or cable TV, it’s no longer live. More important, however, is the question of whether there is still a fringe at all, and if so, will I find it at the Fringe Festival?

    Of course the first Fringe Festival wasn’t called that. It happened in Scotland 56 years ago and might just as easily have been called “Eight Disgruntled Theatre Groups Get Turned Away From The Edinburgh Theatre Festival and Decide To Put on Their Own Damn Show.” By the next year the practice of staging dramas in unofficial venues began to attract attention and the term Fringe was coined by (who else?) a cultural critic. It’s no surprise that half a century later the phenomenon has grown up and solidified into a world-wide theatrical happening, taking place in cities all over the western hemisphere. Coca-Cola and Target banners flutter gaily in the press releases, and on all these flags, it’s the artists and performers who are the fringe.

    Lest you think I’m one of those bitter, unsuccessful artistes who cry sell-out at any event not staged behind a grain silo at 2 a.m. in February, let me assure you I am an entirely different type of bitter, unsuccessful artiste. I think creativity should sell. I happen to think it should be fetching a much better price. If we artists are not going to get paid in dollars and sense, then we should be collecting the wages of fear. Being alternative, avant-garde, or simply on the Fringe, should carry with it the license to disturb and even enrage, not just the “mainstream” but your very own peer group. Alternative art of any kind ought to be scary, like rejection or death, especially when it’s funny. It should be something no one would dare turn into a beer commercial.

    But speaking more broadly, what is Fringe anymore? I’m not sure, but I know it looks something like a guy I’ll call Capricorn the Poet. In 1982, when slamming was just something poets did with shots of whiskey, the open mike scene in the East Village was already churning it’s rusty gears into action. This was years before MTV showed up, before the phrase “spoken word” was coined, and before the poets themselves got suspiciously good-looking. Like verbal karaoke, everybody, lousy or excellent, got famous for exactly three and a half minutes before the proprietor’s egg-timer started buzzing and you were out of there. Naturally this democratic forum attracted a lot of furloughed mental patients of whom Capricorn the Poet was the most notable. For one thing he actually wrote metered verse. With his furious black-socketed eyes, a mop of dreaded-out unruly hair, and a precise Eastern European accent, he seemed to come from another century when poets thought they had the right to demand respect. He bellowed out his poems, giving each line the biblical weight he knew it deserved, his English antiquated and ornate, as if learned solely from books. His words themselves are unprintable in a non-fanzine context, consisting of violent, graphic smut that would make William Burroughs squeamish. His oratorical brio made it impossible to tune out. Feminists would leave the room in confusion, since you couldn’t really take a lunatic to task for commodifying women’s bodies. Even the young guys would get uncomfortable, all their bohemian posturing diminished before this literal onslaught. Capricorn, oblivious to audience response, would simply continue his philippic diatribe against aristocratic women who dared to tell their Lord and Master, Capricorn, that they were too good to have sex with donkeys for the purpose of increasing his onanistic delight, and I’m really giving you the lite version here. Finally some people wanted to 86 Capricorn from the open mike, but there were no grounds—he would always dismount the stage in a fit of verbal abuse when his time was called. “Sycophant, may you choke on a hemorrhoid!” was one of his tamer exclamations—but he would dismount. Capricorn stayed.

    There are still open mikes in the East Village, though now everyone takes the subway, since the rents are too high for anyone who can even pronounce the word poetry. Miraculously, Capricorn is still there, arrogant, pompous, obscene, and insane as ever. Twenty years of what had to be hard times have not affected his confidence in the least, even though Russell Simmons is never going to put him on HBO.

    It’s incredibly foolish to romanticize mental illness, which is no more an alternative to homogeny than pancreatic cancer. But when I think Fringe, when I think Alternative, I think of Capricorn’s enviable inability, or refusal, to understand his position. I am the choice, he seems to shout. It is you who are the Alternative! I am the flag, it’s you who are my fringe!

    The Minnesota Fringe Festival takes place August 2-11 at various locations. See www.fringefestival.org.

    Emily Carter is a Minneapolis author. Her collection of short stories, Glory Goes and Gets Some, was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award in 2000.

  • Mystery Meat Revealed!

    With the grand opening of Hormel’s $8 million Spam Museum, there’s not much mystery left in the story of the world’s strangest can of food. The Rake dives in—only to learn the “Spam Gelatin Jump” has been canceled.

    Now it’s just a savory memory. Marion Ross, Barb Billingsley, Tom Brokaw, and other dubious TV superstars were there. Southern Minnesotans bit into free Spamburgers. Teenie boppers bounced to the sounds of former Gear Daddy Martin Zellar, Austin’s hippest native son. Kids scrambled around a pork-themed amusement park. Tourists hauled around bags loaded down with cans of Spam extracted from a stack that spelled “SPAM” in six-foot high letters. “A lot of people come to stock up on it for the whole year, since it only costs a buck a can,” said a salesman who had already bagged his own year’s supply. Meanwhile, the line grew longer to buy Spam boxer shorts, Spam key chains, Spam license plate holders, and anything else that could conceivably be emblazoned with this four-letter word.

    This was Spam Jam 2002 in Austin, Minnesota, and an occasion to celebrate the long-awaited inauguration of the $8 million Spam Museum and a new era of nostalgia. Even this all-American Spam (short for “spiced ham,” you know) suffered from the attacks of the pork-abstaining terrorists; the museum’s opening was postponed from mid-September 2001 until this summer.

    The museum represents Hormel’s struggle to keep Spam a relevant pop cultural icon—like Coca-Cola, say, or Hershey bars—as opposed to shelved as a kitchsy reminder of a bygone era, outdated and mediocre American cuisine synonymous with unwanted email.

    To clean up Spam’s image for the annual festival, some long-standing games have been nixed. There was a time when Spam Jam featured such events as the ever-unpopular Spam Gelatin Jump. “It’s basically all the white stuff around Spam in a big vat. You stick your arms in and pull out a golf ball for a prize,” said an attendant a few years ago when I last visited.

    Even the beautiful blue and yellow Spambelle has been warehoused. The mini paddleboat, dating from 1956, used to give little rides to big eaters on Austin’s East Side Lake. But then the little steamboat sunk in 1999—on live TV. “They had to pull it out with a crane,” one eyewitness explained to me. “I guess the captain ate too much Spam!”

  • Home Is Where You Hang Yer Hat

    Having moved back from Seattle 18 months ago, I completely relate to Jennifer Vogel’s struggle with homesickness [“Weed Whacked,” July 2002]. I enjoyed revisiting the old haunts mentioned in her article. Newfound friends drinking caffeine uppers and smoking Vancouver downers are charming but lack a certain something Minnesota brims over with. Is it the smell of 37 different varieties of hot dish or the Finnish accent from an aunt who asks over and over the questions of your life’s existence, “Oh yeah? Yor back in school, huh? Well, donchaknow? Say, when are yoo gonna bring home a nice boy with you, huh?” We might be accused of “Minnesota
    N-ice” but, I genuinely feel our work ethic and family values beat anything the West Coast can produce. Seattle is beautiful but my heart can’t beat freely anywhere other than home.

    Jenifer Morgenstern
    Brooklyn Center

  • Iron Will

    I have great admiration for Ann Bancroft; she is an amazing woman and a good friend. I was taken aback, however, by your reference to Will Steger and the idea that Ann has eclipsed Will by creating an educational program and meeting and greeting her followers [“If the Breakers Don’t Get You…,” July 2002]. In 1988, I moved to Minnesota and worked for Will Steger for 3 years, coordinating the publicity and educational program for the Trans-Antarctica Expedition. The main focus of the expedition, involving six men from six different countries, was to bring worldwide attention to the pristine nature of the Antarctic continent and, in turn, the Antarctic Treaty that was up for review in 1990. As a result, we coordinated a massive educational program which reached an estimated 3 billion people worldwide. Since the Internet was not yet available to the masses, we put together a series of online networks—Minitel in France, Keylink in England and Australia, etc. In fact, Will pioneered the concept of adventure learning. The Expedition created an incredible following of educators and students worldwide. At the end of the expedition, the team visited with the heads of state of each country represented. They asked for ratification of the Treaty to protect the continent from oil and mineral exploration. The team members were greeted by crowds of followers in each country. While touring central China, we were feted in every town we visited. The students were intimately knowledgeable about the expedition, having followed it daily through the China Youth Daily newspaper, which carried our reports. We received letters from aboriginal children in Australia who had followed the expedition via Keylink. The success of the educational program for the expedition led to my founding a graduate school program at Hamline University, the Center for Global Environmental Education. CGEE has developed educational programs for many other expeditions, working with Ann, bicyclist Dan Buettner, Alaskan Norman Vaughan, and the Earthwinds Balloon project. Will Steger is nearly 60, and has accomplished many amazing feats. I know Ann has great admiration for Will, as do all the world’s leading explorers. Will has set a standard which is hard to surpass. Whenever he has not been exploring, or raising money for expeditions, he has spent his days in the woods of Ely, designing his future while building stonewalls and root cellars, planting gardens, writing, and reading. He thrives on the combination of public time and private time. He is by no means a solitary recluse who shuns people.

    Jennifer Gasperini
    St. Paul

  • From India: High Roller

    At 17,582 feet above sea level, the Taglang La is the world’s second highest motorable pass. It’s the highest point on the 300-mile “highway” that connects the northern cities of Leh and Manali. On a bicycle, getting to the top of the pass from the southern side requires a 3-hour, 12-mile climb that takes you up 2,000 feet. Without the zig-zagging switchbacks typical of other Himalayan passes, the road is visible all the way up the pass—an ash ribbon snaking up and around the canyon wall.

    Given Minnesota’s flatland topography, training for the ride up the Taglang La required some creative adaptation. In the months before the trip, I sweated up and down the High Bridge and Ohio Street in St. Paul hundreds of times. That helped with general fitness, but nothing in my neighborhood could prepare me for the long, gradual, and oxygen-deprived slog up northern India’s mountain passes. Mostly the Taglang La was an artless and obstinate ascent characterized more by a sore rear-end than any of the profound spiritual truths that mountains supposedly provide.

    When we reached the top of the pass, the sky turned darker and big snowflakes began to fall. It wasn’t snowing hard, and the bragging value of riding through snow (“and then it snowed on us!”) far outweighed the discomfort. The pass marker was emblazoned with the curious but grammatically correct English of India’s military sign painters: “You are passing over second highest pass of the world. Unbelievable, is not it?”

    Unbelievable it was. The worn and beaten Buddhist prayer flags that decorate all mountain passes in this part of the world were flapping in the breeze. To the south, glaciers were melting under broad patches of direct sunlight. I was euphoric, and the trip was all downhill from there.

    But there were more adventures below. Descending down the road on the northern side, the road led us into the valley of the Indus River. We soon encountered a road crew kicking up dust clouds as they cleared a landslide, and beyond that, the fiery and smoky world of the Bihari road builders. Citizens of one of India’s poorest states, these road builders work for $2 a day in what look like post-apocalyptic conditions. Entire families are bivouacked by the side of the road. The cold and rocky landscape is punctuated with burning barrels of pitch, the smoke from which blackens the Biharis’ faces and their clothing. Dazed by sand and soot and spattered by paving oil, seven riders stopped to catch our breath at a rural dhaba—a tea shack playing solar-powered disco music.

    Back on the bikes, we descended gradually through the magic land of Ladakh, a semi-autonomous region inhabited by people of Tibetan ancestry, who cultivate and irrigate terraced fields the way they have for centuries. In the late afternoon, the shadows were getting long, but the scenery was still stunning: a high desert of striated hills and strange rock formations with splashes of red, gray, and green reminiscent of the American Southwest. To the children of the roadside villages, we were hilarious spandex-clad astronauts, and we laughed with them as they chased after us, yelling for chocolates.

    Dan Gilchrist

  • Air Show

    In some hip nightclubs on the East and West Coasts, customers line up to pay $12 for a shot of flavored, 99.9 percent-pure oxygen. If the designer-air fad ever catches on here, Ed Berger might be the hippest guy in town. Berger brings his own air supply. Tucked under his chair on the Artist’s Quarter bandstand is a Puritan Bennett portable liquid oxygen unit. It’s small enough to fit in a saxophone case. Clear plastic tubes carry the supplementary oxygen to his nostrils. Berger relies on it 24 hours a day. There’s a six-hour supply in the tank, more than enough to carry him through a night’s gig.

    Over the course of his five-decade career as a musician, Berger has sparred with and survived two of the trade’s occupational hazards—booze (he got sober back in the late 70s) and tobacco (he quit smoking about 15 years ago, but not before some damage had been done). He survived colon cancer in 1991. After a heart attack about four years ago, he underwent triple coronary bypass surgery and was fitted with a cardiac pacemaker. Doctors also discovered he was suffering from bronchitis and emphysema. Hence his current reliance on oxygen. There’s no cure for emphysema, but the stamina Berger developed blowing sax helps him cope.

    The long, flowing phrases that marked Berger as a master improviser don’t come as easily, or as often as they used to. He still has a ready flow of musical ideas, but putting them through the horn is another matter. He’d play out more often except for the hassles of getting to the gig and back. “I can only walk about 15 steps and I’m out of breath,” he said the other day. “And the mental preparation it takes to put on a show for the people, with all this other stuff happening, makes it five times as hard to play a concert.”

    A recent Artist’s Quarter gig marked Berger’s first time out in months. It also happened to be his 70th birthday. Helping him celebrate was a quintet led by Minneapolis trombonist Brad Bellows, and a roomful of friends and fans. The AQ is a stereotypical jazz club—a dark and cozy basement space as seen in a zillion clichéd movies and TV shows. Except one thing was missing: the smoky haze. Berger’s gig was a non-smoking event in honor of the birthday guy. Plus, lighting up around pure oxygen isn’t generally advised.

    For several decades, Berger has been acknowledged as the dean of Twin Cities beboppers. In the late 40s, when Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell ruled 52nd Street, Berger was a kid playing society gigs in his native Philadelphia, where he heard talk of the new music in New York City. Berger first saw the Midwest at 18, playing ballrooms with an obscure polka band, Fats Carlson and His Cats. When that job fizzled after 70 stands, Berger took a detour into radio announcing classes at Brown Institute, and spent a fish-out-of-water year as a DJ in rural Hutchinson. Then he heard about steady playing jobs in Hennepin Avenue strip clubs.

    From the 40s well into the 60s, some of the best jazzmen in town could be heard nightly on the strip, backing the dancers in clubs like Augies and the Roaring 20s. The players knew that if you wanted to work on your chops, the strip clubs weren’t a bad place to do it. After all, nobody was going to walk out if the solos got too long or complicated. While the customers were focusing on undulating flesh, Berger was thinking about Charlie Parker, Johnny Hodges, and the 2-5-1 change—most of the time.

    Today, there’s a decent scene in reputable joints like the AQ, the Dakota, and Arnellia’s. Berger has survived to what look like pretty good times, but is there enough of him left to enjoy it? At his birthday show, he didn’t waste much time before taking the audience on a wild ride through the hairpin turns of Charlie Parker’s bop burner “Steeplechase.” The question that had been hanging in the air was answered. Yes, Berger still has his familiar, well-rounded alto tone, betraying no sign of physical debility. Smiles of recognition replaced his band-mates’ usual poker faces. Eddie can still play. Next, Berger eased into the ballad “I Can’t Get Started.” He’s always been a masterful ballad player, and his recent travails seem to have added a certain bluesy gravitas. Berger said he’s playing better than ever—“more defined, more musical”—than in his speed-burner days. After three sets at the Artist’s Quarter, and the better part of a portable bottle of oxygen, the audience enthusiastically agreed.

  • The Wily Water Weed

    Coming down the water, with a wide-open mouth of vibrating teeth, the milfoil harvester is a light blue paddle-wheeled contraption worthy of a Dr. Seuss rhyme. Or maybe it’s something Jules Verne would have moored at his lake cabin.

    The combine-like machine is a common sight on Twin Cities lakes, ever since the early 1990s when the Eurasian water milfoil infestation really took off. The weed crowds out native plants, which in turn hurts the fish populations that feed on those plants. Mostly, though, it was the outcry from a repelled public that spurred local anti-milfoil efforts. Milfoil is a nuisance to boaters and anglers, and a possible hazard to swimmers, who get tangled up in its creepy tendrils. And it grows like crazy—up to a foot a week. This year seems particularly bad, and there are several theories why. For example, the lack of snow last winter may have allowed more light to reach the plants beneath the lake ice, extending the growing season.

    In Minneapolis, between Memorial Day and Labor Day a crew with two harvesters and two trucks rotate between city lakes. They remove 20 tons of weeds each day, focusing on priority sites like swimming areas. Where does it all end up? At a compost site at Fort Snelling State Park. The machines, which are made in Wisconsin, are on the lakes for 6-10 hours each day, six days a week. They make multiple passes over the same areas because the paddle wheels blow down the weeds as the harvester approaches, but then the weeds straighten back up. “It’s like trying to mow your lawn blindfolded,” one driver told me.

    On a sunny morning a few days later, crewmember Tom Tollefson took The Rake for a ride on Cedar Lake. Tom allowed me to sit briefly at the controls, and I couldn’t resist gunning it. The harvesters are surprisingly fast. Tollefson took over and dropped the front shovel into the water. The blades on the business end of the shovel are like a giant hair clipper, and they cut the weeds off 3 to 4 feet below the surface. Then a series of conveyor belts ratchet the weeds up the shovel and to the back of the boat. The milfoil comes out of the water in tangled mats, and it smells faintly of fish and chlorine. No one has found a good use for harvested milfoil. Several years ago, a curious park employee tried to get a neighbor—a farmer—to feed the weed to his cows. But the man showed him a watering pond that had already been infested with milfoil. Even with their wide-ranging herbivorous appetite and two stomachs, the cows fastidiously avoided it.

  • Marco! Polo!

    Fill a public swimming pool with kids on any of the scorching days to come, and sooner or later someone’s going to shout, “Marco!” Several others will shout, “Polo!” and in the summer heat, this vexing water game is reborn.

    The person shouting “Marco” is “it,” and must tag one of the “Polos.” It’s tricky because the “Marco” has to perform this task in water, without the benefit of eyesight. While they are usually trusted to keep their eyes shut, “Marcos” have been known to cheat.

    Like building meth labs and bonsai gardening, instructions for this simple activity have proliferated online. Since the game consists mostly of delivering misleading information over a distance to the uninformed, it can easily be taken for a grim parable of the world wide web. Like everything else on the net, it now spreads unchecked across the heartland. At the St. Louis Park Aquatic Park some of the game’s admitted participants are also pool employees.

    “I liked that game,” admitted ticket-taker Katie Johnson one recent afternoon. She stressed the past tense. Her companion, Jessie Lee, added that at their age (around 15) priorities have shifted too far guyward to get into the spirit. Even so, kids old enough to drive have owned up to The Rake that they still get a kick out of blind water tag.

    Lifeguards have also taken notice of the game, though they say it is easier to hear it than to see it. While none would consent to playing the game while on duty—indeed, they preferred not even to talk about it while working—they have one thing in common with those who do: They have no idea what the game has to do with the 13th century explorer from Venice for whom the game is named. Venice is, of course, full of water. And Marco Polo sought the unknown. But to a number, both players and observers of the game find no connection to the father of the Eurasian spice trade. “I have no idea,” is the mantra on this topic, though a few are willing to ruminate on the matter.

    “He was a guy who went to China,” said Jessie Lee, betting on historical fact. During the five o’clock safety break during which the pool is emptied of swimmers and checked for victims, one lifeguard warmed to the topic. “Maybe,” she said, “he was blind.”

  • Learning to Fly

    We battled it out for 17 hours at a teardrop-shaped table in a dimly lit conference room in Eagan. The three day seminar was called “Wings,” the hosts were employees of Northwest Airlines, the goal was to help students overcome their fear of flying. They came from all over—Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and a few coastal states. Every one of the 10 participants had flown before, and some flew all the time. One woman had even boarded a plane in Tacoma, Washington, to come to the class. Yet each of the six women and four men (standard for this bimonthly class, whose female-to-male ratio is usually about 60:40, facilitator and retired captain Tom Roberts informed me) experiences panic attacks, stress, and anxiety prior to air travel and often throughout the flight.

    This is not an uncommon fear, according to resident psychologist Ruth Markowitz. At the Friday evening meet-and-greet, Markowitz said that 1 in 6 people feels anxious when flying. These are bright, creative people who let their imaginations get the better of them and thus spend their time at 35,000 feet expecting the worst, hands clenched to the armrests instead of cocking their heads into the aisle hoping to get a glimpse of the meal cart.

    Of course, it’s an irrational fear, since flying is—statistically speaking—safer than driving, dancing outside in a thunderstorm, and eating fast food. Yet on Saturday afternoon, after Roberts’ two hour presentation detailing the meticulous safety measures, flight techniques, and crew training airlines use to ensure the utmost quality, and after inspecting both the cockpit and the exterior of a DC-9 grounded in the airline’s hangar, the class was still collectively showing the tight face of stress. Even my usually composed mind was beginning to wonder if, ridiculous as it seems, these people know something I don’t.

    By the time Sunday morning arrived, the class had been through hours of deep breathing, visualization, and the safety briefing. We’d sat on an airplane and in a flight simulator. It was now time to face the fear.

    Our flight to Chicago’s O’Hare airport left at 9 a.m. One man, a quiet Iowan who hadn’t flown in 15 years and was hoping to take his wife on the honeymoon she’d never had, called it quits before the security check. He promised to return in September and take advantage of the second-time free policy (a nice option on a $495 tuition). We met the captain at the gate and pre-boarded. Normally, of course, pre-boarding is for those challenged by infirmity or infant, but in our case it was to get everyone on the plane with plenty of time to get comfortable. Ours was a regularly scheduled flight, but it was empty—a 110-passenger DC-9 with 45 seats booked. Half the seats were reserved for the class. No general announcements were made, so the dignity of the students was spared in case there were any jaded, professional travelers present on the flight. While Markowitz calmed one man, an airline mechanic who begged to disembark, Roberts talked the tense but outwardly calm group through the pre-flight noises and offered reassurances and kind words. Seated a row ahead, smiling what I hoped was a compassionate smile, I couldn’t help thinking about that absolutely miniscule, not-gonna-happen risk and the horrible ironic potential of this flight. Fifty minutes and one beverage service later, when NWA Flight 126 touched down smoothly and safely and nine fearful flyers celebrated, I too was relieved.

    In the terminal, the flyers checked in with each other. Not everyone thought it had gone as well as they hoped, but everyone had successfully utilized some or all of the half-dozen techniques Markowitz had recommended for a more relaxed experience. The flight back to the Twin Cities, with the same plane and its familiar noises, was relatively uneventful. Victory, in this case a broad and sweeping term, was declared.