Month: July 2005

LANDMARK: 24 Hours at the Stone Arch Bridge Sunrise August 27 to sunrise August 28, Stone Arch Bridge How do you say “I love you” to a 2,176-foot span of metal and stone? Six local artists decided the only way to pay proper tribute to the architecture, culture, and history of this 1883 landmark, as well as the geology and spirit of the place where it stands, was with a twenty-four-hour multimedia spectacular. During this meandering, seemingly nonsensical lineup of performance and installation events, brass musicians will float on the river and dancers will portray the bridge’s past as a major transitway (it was built by James J. Hill). Tour guides and tucked-away installations will tell historical narratives. Video projections will create the illusion of never-ending daylight. Even poetry will appear and disappear along the riverbanks, making a lovely valentine. Minneapolis riverfront; www.localstrategy.org

Marriage is a bit vague, isn’t it? Unless you have a lawyer write your vows, the actual terms of the agreement aren’t really spelled out beyond love and cherish. Who has to clean the bathroom? Whose last name does the dog take? In William Somerset Maugham’s witty, subversive 1920s comedy The Constant Wife, the spouse of a surgeon decides to redefine her marriage as a sex-free zone after her husband takes a mistress. When Constance plans to vacation with her own lover, however, her cheating husband raises a peevish British protest. Although the Guthrie has run its share of British drawing-room comedies, this is the first time it’s staged a Maugham play. 612-377-2224; www.guthrietheater.org

The other day, a shaggy-haired, bespectacled woman in overalls—we’ll call her Megan—welcomed a visitor into her south Minneapolis home, where she lives with ten unusual friends. They are mostly in their twenties, and they identify themselves as dumpster divers—anti-consumerist people who on principle do almost all of their shopping in garbage bins.

The interior of the house was a contemporary still life of bike parts, bolts, chrome wrenches, and the skeletons of five bikes. A transgendered man wearing camouflage fatigues and sparkly legwarmers said hello. He lives under the stairs and identifies himself, by choice, as homeless. Megan explained that homelessness is an “optional part of the lifestyle.”

There were two kitchens: one meatless (downstairs) and one meat-ful (upstairs). The meatless kitchen overflowed with dirty pots and pans. “Everyone expects this house to be really dirty, but it’s not dirty in the mold sense. If there’s dirt around, it’s dirt dirt, like soil dirt.” (It wasn’t immediately clear which kind of dirt was proliferating in the sink.)

The upstairs kitchen was crowded with longhaired, easygoing people. A child danced around holding a piece of bread that was slathered with something green. Her babysitter explained that it was split-pea soup.

Aaron (not his real name) is a curly-haired diver and punk rocker hoping to move into the communal house. He sat on the pavement in a parking lot outside his current digs. Friendly, thoughtful, and welcoming, he seemed like a person you might enjoy encountering in a dumpster.

He moved from South Dakota to Minneapolis a year ago and became a dumpster diver as an outgrowth of his enthusiasm for bicycling. Hardcore bike culture intersects with diving culture and punk culture because of shared environments, politics, and interests. “Part of the appeal for me is belonging to the scene, but not entirely.” Aaron crossed his legs, leaned back, and smiled. “For me, diving is about living off the land in an urban setting,” he said. “It’s a weird Robin Hood-type thing. Divers pick up the consumerist excess. We’re trying to reduce waste.”

What makes a good dive? “The finds. I’ve found bananas not even close to being ripe, coconuts, and packaged foods like rice and noodles. We’ve also found Naked Juice and yogurt-covered pretzels.” Dairy and meat products are fairly common. Nothing about the diving experience strikes Aaron as unsanitary. Skilled divers know the delivery and disposal schedules for each grocery store, especially during the summer, the better to guarantee quality finds and avoid odorous encounters with rotting goods. “Dumpsters are actually pretty clean,” said Aaron. While some divers wear rubber gloves, he doesn’t. “It’s just not that gross. To keep a low profile, it’s good to wear dark stuff,” he added, though the sartorial tastes of most divers run toward black anyway.

Experienced divers target co-ops and natural grocery stores because “the food is better and they’re easier to dive.” Many corporate grocery stores have replaced dumpsters with compactors, partly to frustrate people like Aaron. He said that most natural grocery stores and co-ops know what’s going on but choose to turn a blind eye. “Co-ops are an exercise in anarchy,” he said, “and so is diving. Anything that undermines consumerist culture is anarchistic, so it’s no surprise that co-ops don’t mind.”

“Don’t mind” may be a bit of an overstatement. A number of co-ops and natural grocery stores post signs with meek warnings like “Employees only” near their trash bins. As it turns out, the legal point of contention is trespassing, not robbery. This year marks the seventeenth anniversary of the legalization of dumpster diving. In 1988 the Supreme Court ruled that any item placed in a trash receptacle does not legally belong to anyone and is therefore up for grabs. It is also the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Food Not Bombs, an international group of activists who help eliminate hunger by recycling excess food, much of which is otherwise headed straight to the dumpster. While the group has fought with government officials about sanitation concerns, it does make an attempt to formally collect food from grocery stores rather than digging through their garbage. Its website features activist initiatives, legal advice on avoiding arrest, and recipes—though a quick scan did not reveal instructions for split-pea bread spread.—Shenandoah Sowash

There’s a certain cult of pastrami that takes people on a global search. For many, the journey begins at a New York deli, but from then on, it’s usually a sad undertaking, as each new pastrami sandwich moves further from the true form. Enter Louie’s Habit and–oh my–a new standard. Louie’s pastrami is cooked slowly and with concentration. Thick-cut slices come out peppery on the crust, moist and tender beneath, with a deep, rosy color shining through. Piled on a thin slice of rye, it rightfully overwhelms and embarrasses the bread. If you ask for a slice of Jarlsberg Swiss melted over the top to help bind your sandwich together, you won’t be kicked out of the club. 1179 E. Wayzata Blvd., Wayzata; 952-249-7700

There are basically three kinds of poets. There’s that guy at the coffee shop who’s in need of a personal hygiene care package from the International Library of Poetry. There’s that tortured woman in Iowa who’s won so many big-buck fellowships and grants that her very existence tortures fellow poets everywhere. And then there’s the practical poet, the bard who decides to get a decent day job and write a little on the side. Like the good doctor William Carlos Williams, local poet-lawyer Warren Woessner took the road less disheveled, writing his poetry after the bills got paid. Which isn’t to say he isn’t devoted to his art; in addition to publishing thirteen books, he co-founded the poetry journal Abraxas in 1968 (it’s still going strong) and hosted a poetry radio show (it’s not). His new book, Our Hawk, resurrects the Toothpaste Press imprint of Coffeehouse Press, and features a gorgeous handmade paper cover. The poems inside have their own beauty as well. Woessner, a devoted bird nerd, writes about a hawk summering in the city, as well as nerve-damaged fishermen, a comet in the southwestern sky, and a page from a law book, fluttering amid the rubble at Ground Zero. Sometimes that office job bleeds over a little. 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-822-4611; www.magersandquinn.com

While hockey and competitive figure skating can be brutal, they are rarely fatal. Naturally, civilians don’t normally think of ice arenas as potential morgues. But the topic came up the other day, during a minor crisis at the St. Louis Park Aquatic Park and Recreation Center. Paul Omodt, City Council member and president of the local youth hockey association, had rolled up his sleeves to help after storms had knocked out power to much of St. Louis Park. The rec center was swarming with parents of the class of 2005. They worked in the dim light supplied by a backup generator to decorate the halls, ceilings, and bathrooms for the senior party scheduled for that evening. But the pumps and filters for the water park were shut down and the two sheets of ice were melting, not slowly. The largest casualty here would likely be just a few days of summer hockey clinics. But in case of a genuine catastrophe, it might also impair an official but gruesome secondary function of the ice facility—the storage of large numbers of dead people.

The solution, Omodt explained, is a new one thousand kilowatt-hour diesel generator that will be able to power the entire facility when supply from Xcel Energy comes up short. The City Council had just approved $280,000 to get one designed and built. While reliable refrigeration of dead people and uninterrupted hockey might be enough of a win-win for any public facility, large power consumers with this kind of backup can also earn lower rates by staying off the grid during peak demand hours.

“Customers who have alternative sources they can switch to,” said Ed Legge, an Xcel Energy spokesman, “can become ‘interruptible.’ They have lower rates. It works pretty well.” In fact, rec center manager Craig Panning anticipates it will work so well that the discounts should pay for the new generator in about nine years.

During these nine years, it is unlikely that the arenas in St. Louis Park will be pressed into service as morgues. For your garden-variety disaster, says Kevin Smith, “The best things are refrigerated trucks.” Smith works for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, and when we spoke he praised the trucks for the kind of mobility and flexibility that are necessary for disaster response. “Ice arenas are part of the plan,” he said, but it would take a very high death toll to require their use. “When you go and watch a hockey game it’s not the kind of thing you think about. But somebody has to plan for these things.”

Oddly, the Department of Homeland Security is not providing direction or funding for “these things.” It’s up to the locals, and the one person in the state who has probably planned the most for such things is Lee Spangrud. Spangrud is manager of planning and maintenance for the Minneapolis Airports Commission, and he directs the maintenance of a fleet of twenty-five refrigerated trucks designated for backup morgue service to the area. “Anything over thirty-five casualties and we would be asked to set up a temporary morgue,” he said. “Obviously, it’s something you hope will never happen.” If it does, the trucks can be scrambled and specially equipped for the myriad agencies involved, including county medical examiners, the FBI, the National Transportation Safety Board, the Transportation Security Administration, and even embalmers and morticians.”

Shawn Wilson, an investigator for the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office and a deputy coroner for Chisago County, also spoke to me recently about the ways and means of caring for large numbers of dead. Designating ice arenas is nothing new.

“That goes back as long as this office has been in existence. The Met Center was slated as a perfect site,” said Wilson. Beyond the obvious benefits of mass refrigeration, he explained, skating rinks are very big and have no infrastructure in the way. Another consideration when designating a site for morgue use is conversion back to the original purpose. For this, said Wilson, rinks are also ideal. “The ice can be melted and cleaned up.” And, he added, there is “not much impact on the psyche” for future users compared to using, say, a school.

Like everyone else I spoke to on the topic, Wilson anticipates the use of rinks in morgue service only in “the most extreme circumstances, where you have five thousand dead.”

While this has not happened in Minnesota, ice rinks elsewhere have sheltered the dead from a number of disasters. In 1912, a curling rink in Nova Scotia was reportedly used for remains recovered from the Titanic sinking. After the 1999 earthquakes in Turkey, the Washington Post reported that remains of victims were placed in an ice rink in Izmit. Here in the U.S., a propane explosion in Indianapolis during a production of Holiday on Ice killed seventy-three people in 1963, and the sheet there was directly converted to a morgue. The rink in the World’s Fair New York City Building in Queens narrowly escaped similar notoriety. It was hastily prepared as a morgue on September 11, 2001, but never used.

The most conspicuously vacant sheet of ice in the Twin Cities is at the Xcel Energy Center, which suffered the death of last year’s NHL season. I asked Ed Legge if the Xcel Center is “interruptible” and therefore able to refrigerate the dead off the grid, should a mass-casualty disaster also disrupt the power supply. Legge explained that despite the large, illuminated Xcel sign on the front of the building, the arena is a customer, not a part of Xcel Energy proper, and he couldn’t speak for it. A spokesman for the Xcel Center was able to disclose their power arrangement when I contacted him. Xcel Center depends almost entirely on its namesake for current. At the moment, the arena isn’t ready to put skaters or disaster victims on the ice. “Right now it’s just a slab of concrete down there,” he said.—Joe Pastoor

There aren’t many stretches of road in Minnesota like Highway 1. Though it’s not officially designated a scenic byway, it should be. Narrow, with pine and birch trees crowding right up against the tarmac, Highway 1 winds through the Superior National Forest, connecting Lake Superior to Ely. The sun bursts in patches through the trees, dappling the road with light as you drive along. The stretch feels forgotten, even peaceful. It’s absurd, maybe, to suggest that a person can commune with nature from behind the wheel of a car. But driving Highway 1 brings you about as close as you’re going to get while still getting where you’re going.

Motorists are at the mercy of the landscape, slowing according to bends in the road, and always watching for the moose and deer that sometimes loiter directly on the dotted line. There, the forest rules, just as it did before Highway 1 was first paved in 1937.

Unfortunately, that is about to irrevocably change. Starting this summer, Minnesota Department of Transportation engineers will be doing what they do best: engineering. They’re undertaking an elaborate reconstruction of Highway 1, specifically of its most wild and winding section, a fifteen-mile stretch just south of Ely. The road will be significantly straightened and widened. Also, two charming old river bridges will be replaced with cast cement bridges airbrushed to look like stone.

When MnDOT proposed changing Highway 1, admirers of the road came out in droves. At public meetings, they conjured the spirit of Charles Kuralt, the former traveling correspondent for CBS, who once said, “On the map, Ely appears to be the end of the road. For people who love wilderness, beauty, and solitude, on the contrary, it’s the center of the world.”

Conscientious objectors expressed dismay at the state’s habit of jackhammering away all the rough edges. One wrote in a letter, “As our lives and our environment get more and more homogenized in the future, the special places will become fewer and fewer and our lives less enriched.” Another lodged an all out, on-the-knees plea: “Oh, please! Please, please, please! Don’t change the road. It is sooooooo pretty the way it is.”

Certainly, Highway 1 will not become a 35W, or even a 371. Engineers call the project a good example of “context sensitive design.” That’s a fancy way of saying that, across the country, highway departments are trying to be more ginger with the natural environment when plodding through with bulldozers and paving machines. According to MnDOT Project Manager Todd Campbell, “This job isn’t going to significantly alter the appearance or feel of the road. People had a problem with their perception of safety. The trees are so close to the road that there is very little buffer between a driver and a tree or a rock. But this is not going to look like an airstrip landing.”

Nor will Highway 1 remain the same old, unobtrusive Highway 1. The renovation, which will take place over the next five to seven years, includes a fairly dramatic widening of the road and its shoulders. What now amounts to two eleven-foot lanes with two-foot shoulders will become two twelve-foot lanes with six-foot shoulders, plus another four feet of clearance on either side. Thus a twenty-six-foot-wide highway becomes a forty-four-foot-wide highway. And in places where hills will be smoothed out, the footprint will be even larger, up to sixty-two feet.

Straight lines aren’t as interesting as curvy ones; wider lanes appear barren. In short, Highway 1 will become a more typical Minnesota highway: safe, tidy, and, compared to its former incarnation, boring. This despite the fact that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the road. There hasn’t been for seventy years. Yes, there are slightly more accidents than along similar two-lane byways—less than one crash more per million miles driven. But, because of the sixty-four curves along the targeted fifteen-mile stretch, people drive slower. That makes the accidents less severe. Speeding up traffic, by smoothing thirty-mile-per-hour curves into forty-mile-per-hour curves, will not only make Highway 1 less appealing, it could be bad news for those on both sides of the windshield.

The true beneficiaries of the reworking of Highway 1 will be enormous commercial vehicles, like logging trucks. It was the U.S. Forest Service, after all, that first proposed the project back in 1999. And federal Forest Highway Program dollars will pay eighty percent of the total $13.7 million bill. “We use the highway administratively for work,” said Roger Pekuri, an engineer for the Superior National Forest. “A lot of commodities, principally timber, are hauled down to Two Harbors. Logging trucks have a hard time navigating the highway now. And, besides, it’s hard to plow. It’s so narrow that the blades go into the other lane. There are a lot of places where ledge rock is right up to the shoulder.”

It seems that Highway 1 is being widened and straightened—and, arguably, degraded—primarily to make it easier to haul trees out of the forest, so the woods themselves can be more rapidly degraded. Now that’s progress.

—Jennifer Vogel