Year: 2005

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

The world’s tallest structure is not the Sears Tower, the Space Needle, or those strange conjoined skyscrapers in Kuala Lumpur. The acme of human achievement isn’t even in a city. It stands a few miles outside the hamlet of Blanchard, in rural northeast North Dakota. Two million feet of one-foot-thick steel guy-wire stretch upward in graceful arcs to support a tower that reaches more than a third of a mile into the air.

It is a TV antenna. Viewed from the ground, its top is nearly lost in space and its shadow extends out of sight to the horizon. It may not be in the running as the tallest actual “building” (that is, something with a roof and walls that people inhabit every day, answering telephones and writing memos—the Petronas Towers in Malaysia get that prize), but the North Dakotan marvel really is the tallest man-made thing.

KTHI-TV and KVLY 11 raised this 2,063-foot tower in 1963 to send their signal to homes across “an area larger than the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut with one thousand square miles to spare,” as noted in promotional literature about the colossus. The television stations also tout their tower as “taller than the combined height of the Great Pyramid Khufu at Giza, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the Washington Monument.”

The Blanchard television tower is in the heart of the Red River “Valley,” the same valley that floods so dramatically because the only rise in the perfectly level landscape is the occasional roadbed raised five feet above the fields (to allow easy escape during flood season). This green pancake topography presents no barriers for the tower to connect the prairie to the world. Like most things in North Dakota, the tower does not get a lot of publicity. If there are Homeland Security agents about, they are hiding, because this little-known monument does not appear to be protected by anything other than “No Trespassing” signs and the dirty looks of locals. In fact, I can’t see anyone within about thirty miles across the flat prairie.

Still, what visitor wouldn’t want to take a thrill ride up the mini elevator inside that takes workers part-way up the tower? Actively trying to dissuade nosey Minnesotans, KTHI warns that the top will sway ten feet on a windy day and “the signals atop the tower are so strong they can hurt the fillings in a person’s teeth.”

The television station’s cautionary brochure brags, “If a twenty-second commercial started at the same moment a baseball was dropped from the top of the KVLY tower, it would end nearly four seconds before the ball hit the ground and it would be traveling 250 mph.” Whew, talk about excitement!—Eric Dregni

What started twelve years ago as a modest performing arts festival has swelled into an eleven-day extravaganza, a tribute to the seamy, steamy, and sometimes hilarious underbelly of the local theater community. This year’s lineup features visual arts, kids’ events, podcasts, “site-specific” performances (such as a frilly production of The Virgin Diaries at Via’s Vintage Wear in Minneapolis), and, of course, an endless stream of kitschy, questionable, and downright freaky performances. With 168 events, simply deciding what to see is a central part of the Fringe experience. The festival guide creatively groups performances into categories like “puppetry” and “nudity,” but if nothing grabs you there, try a “solo” show (see Over the Coals, page 69) or something from the “cartoonish violence” lineup. 651-209-6799; www.fringefestival.org

The duende, a mysterious spirit behind all Spanish arts, has both a dark side and an irresistible appeal. With flamenco, it’s the devil that lights a fire under the feet of dancers, and the handsome stranger who keeps turning up in all the right places. Practitioners of these sultry moves, which began as a gypsy dance in the fifteenth century, say flamenco is more than just choreography–it’s a passionate art. We’ll buy that, especially when the dancer is Manolete, the legend from Granada who’ll give his first-ever performance here. Earlier in his career, Manolete’s moves were considered scandalous; nowadays audiences are more shock-resistant, of course–but go ahead, try us. 612-340-1725; www.southerntheater.org

Give her your dog turds, your dead bugs, your snotty noses yearning to breathe free. Sylvia Branzei has a passion for all things really gross, and has made it her mission to share them with people across the land. And the people are eating it up! Her first book, Grossology, spent thirty weeks on Publisher’s Weekly‘s bestseller list, and exhibits based on her studies of creepy creatures and unappetizing bodily functions are hot tickets at places like the Minnesota Science Museum, which is now presenting Animal Grossology, which celebrates tapeworms, blood-suckers, and the bovine digestive process. Branzei, a former science teacher, could tell us things that would keep us up at night, but we’d rather she didn’t.

Was there a specific moment of inspiration that led to your becoming a grossologist?
One afternoon about twelve years ago, I was cutting my toenails and said to myself, Wow, what’s this stuff under my toenails? It’s really icky. I realized that since I had majored in microbiology, I could actually figure out what it was. Then I thought, Hey, kids like gross stuff, and I want to teach them science. I will invent a whole new science and call it Grossology. Later, over spaghetti dinner with my husband and stepkids, we came up with a list of ideas for the book.

Are you the only one?
There is a performer who calls herself the premier grossologist of Australia. I still need to hunt her down.

Has anyone vomited during one of your presentations?
Some kids just couldn’t take it and had to leave. One kid told me that he threw up after visiting the exhibit. However, his mother said that it turned out he had the flu. There is one demonstration I do worry about. It is on DALs–defect action levels in foods. While feeding a volunteer peanut butter and jam on wheat crackers, I present information on the allowable numbers of bug parts in those foods: peanut butter (in one pound, 150 insect fragments, five rodent hairs), raspberry preserves (in twenty-four ounces, ten whole insects), wheat flour (in three and a half cups, 125 insect fragments, three rodent hairs). So far, I have been lucky. No one has hurled on stage.

Why are we so fascinated with grossness?
Humans are the only animals to experience the emotion of disgust. (And maybe rats.) It is believed that this emotion helps us to protect ourselves from things that may be harmful. In society, we have made many of those disgusting things taboo, such as eating poo or rotten food.

It seems like kids are naturally excited about grossness. Why do we outgrow it? Or do you think adults just suppress it?
Kids enjoy playing with emotions. They like to get a rise out of adults. So gross stuff works. As we grow older, we learn to control our emotions. Also, in some cases, with more information and experience, things that were once gross don’t seem as bad anymore. Ask any parent who has changed diapers.

What is your favorite gross substance?
I think slime is hecka cool. But my favorite substance to play with is a concoction of cornstarch and water. If mixed correctly, you get a substance that is solid if you apply pressure and liquid if you just let it sit. So if you pat it like a snowball, it stays solid, but if you just stop it will run out between your fingers. It really isn’t gross, just cool.

What truly grosses you out?
Loogies and scorpions. And war, starvation, and cruelty.

Tell us about a gross creature we’ve never heard of.
The bombardier beetle shoots a boiling, toxic liquid out of its butt if attacked–with such force that a blast of smoke appears. Now that is more than a fart.

How do you find out about all this stuff? Do other scientists share their favorite gross finds with you?
My information comes from all over. I use the library, the Internet, and scientific magazines. I also get a lot of information from other people. Recently, a lady from Minnesota sent me a recipe for fake poo that is made with evaporated milk, peanut butter, and honey. Colleagues from museums send me articles, like the one I got from Science World on the first recorded observation of whale farts. When people see disgusting scientific articles, they think of me!

You live with a dog, a cat, and your husband. Which one is the grossest?
Hmm. It is a tie between Jaeger dog and husband Byron. Jaeger eats his vomit and can get very stinky. Byron doesn’t eat his vomit, but on a hot day, he can get very, very stinky.

Sure, we’re all on the lookout for self-flagellating nekkid artists rolling in paint or chocolate–but isn’t it nice, sometimes, to be able to take your grandmother to an art show? Botanical art has been used for centuries to illustrate field guides to foreign lands, medicinal and herbal guides, and provide decoration on tombs, buildings, and clothing. Exacting and informational, these paintings and drawings take an unromantic inventory of our natural world. But there’s plenty of romance in the subject matter. Vascular systems, reproductive organs, ripe fruit, and gorgeous blooms, all rendered in stunning detail, are vivid reminders that the kingdom of flora is more complex and mysterious than we’ll ever know. 333 East River Rd., Minneapolis; 612-625-9494; www.weisman.umn.edu

Our artist friends went on vacation, and all we got was this roomful of beautiful art. An inspired selection of more than seventy works from forty-four artists revels in road trips, insects, and the meaty kind of sunburn that comes from spending long days near water. Paintings, photochromes, etchings, photos, and drawings that chronicle vacation spots both sublime (Yellowstone National Park) and surreal (claptrap tourist traps) make us glad for the fact that artists are at work even when on vacation. 50 W. Kellogg Boulevard, St. Paul; 651-266-1030; www.mmaa.org