The Rake Magazine

Author: Dan Gilchrist

  • Gagging on the Patriot Act

    If the title of patron saint of journalists were not already held by the seventeenth-century French priest Francis de Sales, many American reporters would be ready to canonize Professor Jane E. Kirtley of the University of Minnesota for her steadfast support and defense of their work. Through a serendipitous career as a reporter, attorney, advocate, and academic, Kirtley has built a reputation as the nation’s leading expert on the First Amendment and its practical application to the media. She has also emerged as a major critic of increased government secrecy since September 11.

    In journalism circles, Kirtley gained renown for leading the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) from 1985 to 1999, helping to shape the Washington, D.C., organization into a substantive, respected resource on First Amendment issues for reporters across the country. As director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law, she still serves as a source for scores of media inquiries each year, while teaching media law classes that are in great demand and continuing her crusade for press freedom issues, both at home and abroad.

    Slight of build, with green eyes and a thin, regal nose, the amiable Kirtley seems an unlikely champion for America’s often boisterous fourth estate. When on a soapbox for freedom of the press, she is more beatific than belligerent, a joyful missionary for the First Amendment. She once told her law school alumni magazine, “I suspect that if you asked some of my professors, they never would have believed it was possible that shy little Jane Kirtley could actually be taking on Jerry Falwell or Pat Buchanan on Crossfire.”

    Since coming to Minnesota four years ago, Kirtley has maintained a busy schedule that combines public engagement and scholarly research. She has given 115 lectures, presentations and speeches outside her own classrooms; written or co-written thirty-seven publications; served on seventy-seven panels or seminars; consulted on freedom of information and the press in ten countries; and been interviewed by the media nearly three hundred times.

    When The Rake caught up with her in January, Professor Kirtley was preparing to leave town for a semester as a visiting professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. Kirtley, an admitted Anglophile who quotes the fictional Rumpole of the Bailey in law review articles, was also nursing a cold that she had picked up on vacation in London with her husband, law professor and playwright Steve Cribari. Despite the sniffles and the peripatetic schedule, she was true to her reputation as an accessible and “above and beyond” resource for journalists.

    Even after three decades in the news business, Kirtley still gets choked up over what most Americans take for granted. “It’s really hard for me to talk about the First Amendment without getting extremely emotional,” she declares a little bashfully. “It’s such an article of faith with me. It’s what makes our country different from any other democracy in the world.” Kirtley sees one of her roles at the University of Minnesota as “passing the torch” to budding journalists. “We have a new generation that needs to understand the importance of the First Amendment,” she says.

    Los Angeles Times media writer Tim Rutten says it’s clear that principle, rather than a love of publicity, drives Kirtley’s work. “Some people believe in free expression because they think it’s a bedrock value of a free society,” he says. “Then there are those who adore malicious license. Jane is in the first camp—that sets her apart from many lawyers interested in media.” Adam Liptak of the New York Times, a libel attorney turned reporter, lauds Kirtley for her comprehensive knowledge of the law and her “authentic commitment to First Amendment values.”

    Even those who disagree with her views hold Kirtley in high esteem. “I enjoy sparring with Jane a tremendous amount,” declares Minneapolis attorney and former federal prosecutor William Michael, Jr., who has debated her on the USA PATRIOT Act and other Bush-administration security initiatives. “It’s good for the country that she continues to speak on her views. It leads to a better-informed public and better-informed decision-making authority.”

    Kirtley grew up in Indianapolis, the daughter of a research physician who subscribed to the city’s three daily papers. “Eugene Pulliam, who published two of those papers, was—bless his heart—slightly to the right of Attila the Hun, but he really believed in freedom of the press,” Kirtley says. Bitten by the journalism bug early on, Kirtley says she regarded the profession as a way to do interesting things without overspecializing. Arts reporting was a particular interest, and today Kirtley remains an avid opera fan with a soft spot for Verdi. (One can only wonder how Verdi’s tales of skullduggery and betrayal amongst the rich and powerful might turn out differently, were a gaggle of reporters suddenly to horn in on the storyline, exposing key secrets for benefit of the public.)

    Her career took an unexpected turn while studying at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. As part of her master’s program, she was assigned to cover nuclear energy and nuclear-weapons policy in Washington, D.C., for the Oak Ridger, the newspaper serving Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home of a major nuclear-weapons and energy facility. “At that time, Oak Ridge had one of the highest concentration of Ph.D.’s anywhere in the U.S., so I had to get everything right. You couldn’t fudge it because you were writing for an audience who knew this stuff inside and out.”

    That assignment led her to a critical realization. “What really struck me was the fact that if I couldn’t get the information, then I couldn’t really write. Over the years, working in emerging democracies and so forth, I’ve come to the conclusion that the right to say or report anything you want is only half of the idea of freedom of the press. You also need to have the right to get information. Otherwise you have nothing to say, or what you do say is nothing but hot air.”

    In these days of zealous government secrecy, Kirtley is fond of quoting federal Judge Damon Keith, who wrote that “democracies die behind closed doors.” She adds that “Democracy is not self-executing. Just because we declare a democracy doesn’t mean it really exists. If we want to preserve it and have it be what it’s really supposed to be—that only happens if we have access to information.”

    In a recent article, she makes the claim that “democracies can’t accomplish much of anything without the free flow of information—including waging the war on terrorism.” She notes that a congressional investigation into the events of September 11 showed that relevant CIA and National Security Agency reports were so highly classified that FBI agents in the field—the actual law enforcement officials who might have been able to pre-empt the attacks—did not have access to these reports. Her point was underscored by Tom Kean, co-chair of the federal September 11 commission and former Republican governor of New Jersey, who observed in a December interview with CBS: “I’ve been reading these highly, highly classified documents. In most cases, I finish with them, I look up and say, ‘Why is this classified?’ Maybe out of our work, a lot of these documents that are classified will be unclassified.”

  • F. Scott’s Shame

    Remember the good old days of mom-and-pop bookstores? Back when Ruminator had healthy operations in both Minneapolis and St. Paul, we might have walked in the door, charged right up to the counter, and asked a real person: Can you tell which city readers are from by the books they buy? With the recent unpleasantness, though, we got lazy and threw in with the enemy. Amazon keeps track of sales by region and by city, a swell feature they call “Purchase Circles.” A random peek at the bestsellers the other day revealed some interesting differences. Though both Minneapolis and St. Paul are dominated by the latest Harry Potter doorstop, John Grisham’s The King of Torts was at No. 3 in St. Paul and No. 13 in Minneapolis. This probably doesn’t flatter either city, but might also reflect the fact that you can’t swing a dead cat in downtown St. Paul without hitting a real-life lawyer.

    Perhaps not coincidentally, St. Paul seems to be suffering from low self-esteem, judging by the number of self-help titles on its Top 20, including The Power of Now (9), The Purpose-Driven Life (12), Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (14) and What Should I Do With My Life? (15). The more self-confident city, Minneapolis was interested only in The Power of Full Engagement (15). Then again, it could be that Minneapolitans are too distracted or vain for introspection, because they are busy searching out beef sources for Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution (8).

    According to someone we spoke with at Amazon, St. Paul is actually buying more books than its more populous twin—enough to get its own list of books selling uniquely well there. Some books unique to St. Paul are no surprise: Jim Brandenburg’s Chased by the Light is selling well (9), presumably among capital citizens with big coffee tables and “critical habitat” license plates. With the holidays upon us, The Great Scandinavian Baking Book (12) is also a natural local favorite. The media edges out the message near the top of St. Paul’s unique list, where KARE-11 political reporter Kerri Miller’s novel Dead Air (2) clocks in ahead of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone’s The Conscience of a Liberal (3). One title stands out, however, in summarizing St. Paul’s identity issues: The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World (20).—Dan Gilchrist

  • Aqua Vita

    Minneapolis’s Lake Harriet is known for many things—its bandshell and summer concerts, multitudes of strollers, kamikaze inline skaters talking on cell phones, and cyclists shamelessly riding the latest goofy recumbent bike. As an urban lake collecting runoff from treated lawns and storm sewers, it’s not the first place I’d go for drinking water. On any given day, though, there’s a steady stream of pilgrims lining up to fill bottles and jugs at a green pump on the northwest side of the lake, just below the trolley tracks.

    Many appear to be in or close to their golden years, so you’d be forgiven for wondering if this is some kind of fountain of youth about sixteen hundred miles north of where Ponce de León was last seen. According to devotees, the water tastes great and is chock-a-block with iron. It is drawn from a deep well separate from the lake’s water supply. Bob, who drives up in a silver Mustang, says he has been getting water at the pump for more than thirty years. “It just tastes good, you know?” At least it’s better than the tap water at his home in St. Louis Park. “If you let it sit long enough, the sediments settle at the bottom of the bottle!” he says with enthusiasm. This doesn’t strike me as a particularly persuasive endorsement.

    Pho, a Vietnamese transplant in his sixties wearing a Bahamas sweatshirt, reckons he has been visiting the pump weekly for at least seven years. “It has a very natural taste and it’s very good for coffee,” he says.

    For Jane, a dignified, blue-eyed bifocaler from Edina, the well is more than a source of water. “It’s a very interesting place to come because of the people,” she says. “It’s almost symbolic—how deep it is and how people come together around it.”

    As the sun is going down, Paul pulls up on a well-worn road bike with a big empty jug tethered to it. He is forty-seven years old, a stay-at-home dad who describes himself as a “refugee from the world of advertising.” He has sideburns that would look good on Crosby, Stills, Nash, or Young. Paul says the water from the pump reminds him of childhood camping trips in Canada where he could dip his hands in the lake and just take a drink. “I keep coming back to this water. Somehow my body knows the difference when I’m drinking other water,” he says. He relates some pump lore to me: Supposedly, it takes so long for water to drain into the deep aquifer that the water presently flowing from the pump may never have been exposed to manmade pollution. That strikes me as unlikely, but we end up discussing a variety of political outrages until it’s dark.

    According to Jim Fagrelius, director of operations for the Park and Recreation Board, the pump was installed in 1910 and it pierces 262 feet down to a level of sedimentary rock called the Shakopee Formation. His agency maintains the pump year-round, clearing snow away and chipping ice off in winter. The Minneapolis Department of Health checks the well’s bacteria levels every two to four weeks, and—this may come as a shock to some of the pump’s regulars—the Park Board occasionally treats the water with chlorine when those levels pass a certain threshold.

    After all the hype I’ve exposed myself to, the water is a little disappointing on the palate. Although it lacks the chemical or floral overtones of city water in midsummer, it has a distinctive metallic tang that makes my lips pucker and my tastebuds shrink. Still, it is pleasantly cold, and it may be worth getting used to—if not for its rejuvenating properties, then for its social possibilities.
    —Dan Gilchrist

  • A Blue Boat on Brown Water

    If you peer off the north side of the Lake Street Bridge this time of year, you’ll often spot a dark blue, double-masted sailboat anchored on the Mississippi. For most of the past seventeen years, Captain John V. Caola has sailed from points south—Key West, Miami, and the Bahamas—to beat the heat and visit his family (which now includes eight grandchildren) in the Twin Cities.

    He is turning into a seasonal sight himself. Sporting a blue Hawaiian shirt, Panama hat, and a salt-and-pepper beard, Caola resembles a slimmed-down Hemingway, a guy who at first strikes you as just the kind of carefree and footloose soul you would imagine choosing to live out his retirement on a sailboat. Talk to him for a while, though, and you soon discover a surprisingly conscientious and meticulous individual, one who reels off the details and specs of his thirty-three-foot boat—which, he informs me, is really a motorsailer rather than a sailboat—and the routes he has sailed.

    Since the end of January, Caola and his friend Monique, a newcomer to the live-aboard life, have sailed or motored 2,400 statute miles. They began in Miami, sailed north on the Atlantic, and traversed the width of Florida via the Okeechobee waterway. On the Gulf coast, they followed a route of commercial waterways and open sea that eventually brought them to Mobile, Alabama, where they began an inland journey up the Mobile, Tombigbee, Tennessee, and Ohio rivers. And then, at Cairo, Illinois, they embarked on old muddy itself—the Mississippi River.

    The early days of fall are an ideal time to be on the upper Mississippi, Caola says. Even in a dry year like this one, the view of the changing leaves is spectacular from the river, as is the setting sun reflecting off the steel skin of the Weisman Museum, a short sail up the river. Soon Caola and Monique will turn the MS Beluga around and sail back south, this time down the entire length of the Mississippi to New Orleans.

    Over the years, Caola has been pleased to see the water quality and boating facilities on the Mississippi improve. Although the boat traffic has also increased, the river is still a remarkable refuge. “It is amazing,” he says, as we gaze up at the busy bridge from the west bank of the river, “that you can be right in the heart of the hustle and bustle of a big city and down here it is all peace and quiet.”
    —Dan Gilchrist

  • Speed Bumps

    On June 30, LouAnn Clarissa Kilpatrick was killed by a turtle just outside of Grand Rapids. The 66-year-old swerved to avoid hitting a turtle and died when her car careened off the road. Her tragic accident was a reversal of the usual state of affairs between turtles and humans. Each year, thousands of these reptiles meet their end crossing the pavement. As anyone who has ever adopted a highway knows, the animal’s evolved defense mechanism is no match for a two-ton SUV. Unfortunately, here in the metro area, turtle habitats are increasingly fragmented by new exurban roads. Their nesting areas have been paved over by new driveways and parking lots.

    To alert drivers during the turtle nesting season—most of the summer—the Three Rivers Park District posts turtle-crossing signs (which are, incidentally, quite popular with urban sign thieves). Although she encourages drivers to avoid hitting these slow-moving pedestrians, naturalist Madeleine Linck tells people it is far preferable to hit a turtle than to cause a car accident by swerving violently to avoid it. If you do come across a turtle in the road, Linck says, you can pick it up and ferry it to the side it was heading for. “But don’t get hit by a car in the process!” she adds sensibly.

    Three species of turtle, the Western painted, snapping, and the endangered Blandings turtle, are most commonly found crossing the road. In a daylong journey, the females seek higher ground with dry, sandy soil and good sun exposure. This is where they want to bury their eggs. Most migrating turtles travel a few hundred yards, although the Blandings turtle, distinguished by its long, yellow-throated neck, may cover more than a mile to reach its nesting ground.

    As if the encroaching concrete jungle weren’t enough, some of the state’s unluckier turtles might find themselves trapped, crated, and loaded onto a plane to Asia, where indigenous turtle populations have been crashing dramatically. In China, turtles are used for everything from soup to cures for cancer (a mysterious and disturbing substance called turtle jelly is highly prized for its alleged medicinal properties). Locally, taking turtles for a family or church dinner is also a Lenten tradition in the Catholic communities around St. Cloud.
    The DNR recently proposed significant changes to the regulations that govern turtle harvesting, changes the agency hopes will stem the apparent decline of Minnesota’s turtle populations. The DNR will allow the twenty or so current holders of commercial turtle licenses to continue operations, though under tighter rules.

    The Minnesota Herpetological Society, the state’s biggest and most active group of reptile enthusiasts, helped pass the legislation that led to the new rules on taking turtles, but one of the group’s members recently dealt with a much more bizarre abduction. Bill Moss, a bearded fiftysomething who lives on St. Paul’s East Side, is an active member of the society. On an unseasonably warm day last November, Angus, his 45-pound African spurred tortoise, was nabbed from his lawn. “I came back outside after some work indoors and he had vanished,” Moss said. “I knew he couldn’t have jumped the fence!”

    Although Moss did not suspect celebrity as a motive for the disappearance, Angus’s local fame is rivaled only by the long-suffering and now retired giant tortoises that children used to ride like ponies at the Como Zoo. For years Angus had made an annual appearance the Minnesota Renaissance Festival as a mascot for the Minnesota Herpetological Society’s booth. He’d roamed the grounds as “Angus of Clan McTortoise,” festooned with a plaid kilt and bearing a donation cup on the top of his shell.

    After a frustrating month of near misses and dead ends, Moss eventually recovered Angus in a warehouse apartment in Northeast Minneapolis. His pet’s involuntary migration apparently included three successive short-term owners, numerous unsuccessful attempts to sell the animal to local pet stores, and, finally, a custom-built plywood platform complete with a warming light and a garden pond inside the warehouse apartment. Although he hit up Moss for the $200 he had spent on the plywood habitat, owner number three had let his conscience get the better of him. After receiving one of Moss’s missing-tortoise flyers via owner number two, he called Moss. Luckily, Angus seemed unaffected by his time in trendy Nordeast. “Honestly, I suspect he was fairly oblivious to the whole thing,” said Moss with a chuckle.—Dan Gilchrist

  • Carp per Diem

    In his 1653 book The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton declared the carp the queen of the rivers, and the species is still highly regarded as an angling prize in Britain and the rest of Europe. Anglers on this side of the pond still reject the monarchy, and the carp is generally regarded as a trash fish. The Minnesota DNR used to encourage people who landed carp to leave them on the bank to rot—though you’d be ticketed for doing so today.

    It was not always this way. In the early days of the state, Minnesotans wrote to the fisheries department in Washington, D.C., to demand that the carp be introduced in the state. According to Karen Kobey, who is a naturalist with the Three Rivers Park District, the carp was introduced to Minnesota waters in 1883 from Germany. “Across the country, they thought this would be a fish that would be prolific and a great game fish—they’re big and they reproduce well,” she said.

    After a few false starts, the fish took off. With no natural predators and an ability to live in low-oxygen and even polluted waters, they soon filled the bottoms of rivers and lakes across Minnesota. The fish’s ubiquity, its appetite for other species’ roe, and its reputation for roiling up mud in previously clear lakes have meant that the carp’s standing among Minnesota anglers has gradually matched its bottom-of-the-river habitat. Even among carp fans, catch-and-release fishing is the norm, although immigrants from Southeast Asia and Russia often take carp for food, according to DNR conservation officer The-Phong Le.

    At the annual Carp Festival, held earlier this summer at Coon Rapids Dam Regional Park, 700 carp anglers took to the Mississippi to seize the carp. Children swarmed around a Plexiglas tank that contained some of the larger catches of the day, mostly to crinkle their noses at the big fishes’ barbell-lipped mugs and their dregs-o’-the-river reek.

    Paul Pezalla drove all the way from suburban Chicago to compete in the contest, after a friend here bragged that he and his family planned to win the contest. Pezalla’s 18.72-pound catch edged out the runner-up in the adult category by less than a tenth of a pound. Pezalla, a tall and lanky guy who, with his shock of unkempt white hair, could pass for Albert Einstein in a funhouse mirror, is a serious carp fisherman. He says he goes out at least twice a week for 12 hours at a time on Lake Michigan and Chicago-area rivers. He even owns a bait shop that specializes in European carp fishing gear and supplies. So what’s the attraction?

    “They’re about the smartest freshwater fish there is, and they grow to be extremely large; the world record fish is in the range of 80 pounds. They also fight as hard as anything,” Pezalla said. “Just about everyone in North America lives within an hour’s drive of trophy-sized fish—20- or 30-pounders. And you don’t need fancy equipment to catch them.”

    The Carp Festival’s results back this up. The biggest fish of the day was landed by the children’s category winner, scrappy 11-year-old Jimmy Roppo from Minneapolis, who took 10 minutes and a little bit of help from his fishing mentor, Josef Settele, to reel in a 19.31-pound carp on a line baited with canned corn. This was only his third time fishing.—Dan Gilchrist

  • Busting Baghdad

    Two days after one of those giant statues of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Firdos Square, and had its head chopped off and dragged through the streets of Baghdad, artists at the University of Minnesota were participating in the art department’s 34th Annual Iron Pour, casting new and graven images for artistic fulfillment and academic credit. Dozens of artists in heavy protective clothing, safety glasses, and a hodgepodge of facemasks and respirators braved the acrid smoke from the coke-fired furnace, which stung the eyes and embedded in clothing. Manipulating heavy crucibles on pulleys and poles, teams of artists poured molten steel into sand molds. It was a delicate and carefully timed group performance, not something you see too often among go-it-alone artist-types.

    Given the sweat and planning required to finish even the simplest of these metal sculptures, did anyone here experience a pang of sadness for the public art being pummeled in Iraq? Max Thomas, a University senior in red safety glasses, said that seeing a 40-foot statue come down was an amazing visual experience in itself. He said, “I wish all sculptors could have an armored M88 tank to do stuff with!” His eyes went wide with the possibilities.

    First-time pourer Peter Schmidt, a student from Southwest State, had doubts. “It’s a shame to see all those statues being torn down. It’s like taking away history—like burning up pictures and paintings.” Although no fan of that particular subject or its execution, Schmidt hoped the statue’s remnants would one day end up in a museum rather than, say, the basement of a frat house at Baghdad U.

    Jim Swartz, another visitor from Southwest State, considered the artistic possibilities of the fallen Saddam statuary. “I figured you have two choices with all those statues: Either put them in a museum for bad art from bad regimes, or cut them up and reassemble ’em in a really nice abstract way. That’d be the first thing I’d do,” he said.

    Actually, the bad art museum is not all that far-fetched, said iron-pour organizer and U of M art professor Wayne Potratz. “I can certainly understand why people would want to destroy a symbol that’s been oppressive, but one of the things that’s happened in the former Soviet Union is that they’ve taken a lot of the sculptures of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin and put them in these very bizarre sculpture parks. Then they’re all together, representing an era.” Indeed, in Grutas, Lithuania, a local entrepreneur assembled more than 60 statues and busts of Lenin and Stalin in a park that locals dubbed “Stalin World.” The park, which its creator has boasted “combines the charms of Disneyland with the worst of the Soviet Gulag prison camp,” has not been without controversy among Stalin’s victims. But it has become a popular tourist attraction. Would a future Saddam Land be any less tasteful or popular among history buffs?

    “The statue of Hussein does speak about a particular style and an idea of what art is,” Potratz said. “I thought it was pretty typical of what I call totalitarian art, which follows very closely the aesthetics of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. It’s naturalistic work depicting heroic figures. It’s very much like a lot of the post-Civil War statuary you find here in the States.”

    Structurally, the Firdos Square Saddam got low marks from Prof. Potratz. “My impression was it wasn’t made very well, because they had big steel pipes in the legs and it was broken up pretty easily by people with hammers. That leads me to believe it wasn’t such a great casting.” What would Potratz create if given the opportunity to build a 40-foot sculpture intended to weather the ages and sway the masses? He thought for a minute and then grinned. “Me, I’d make a giant turtle.”—Dan Gilchrist

  • Feeling Minnesota, Looking Nebraska

    Illustration by Christopher Henderson

    I’m going to miss Minnesota—not because I’m going away, but because Minnesota is. The north woods? There’s a fairly good chance I will outlive them. A walk through the spruce, the cry of a loon—a lot of experiences we think of as quintessential Minnesota may disappear. Or emigrate to Canada.

    In February of 2000, the American Birkebeiner, the largest cross-county ski race in North America, was canceled for lack of snow for the first time in its 30-year history. Although the region of northwest Wisconsin that’s home to the Birkie received 16 inches of snow in the week leading up to the race, that winter wonderland was liquefied by four subsequent days of rain and warm winds. Pastor Lynn Larson of Cable, Wisconsin, remembers the week well. “We had a snowman holding a pair of skis outside our church at the beginning of the week,” he says. “By the middle of the week, we replaced the skis with an umbrella.”

    A direct son of Norway via eight immigrant great-grandparents, Larson has skied the marathon 17 times. That year, he watched thousands of crestfallen skiers—nearly half of whom had come up from the Twin Cities—trudge around Hayward with a sour look on their faces. “That really got the wheels turning for me,” he says. “I’m convinced that this is all related to climate change—the greenhouse effect.”

    Worried that the Birkie was in jeopardy, Larson started a group called Cross Country Skiers for Global Cooling. To join, members must take “the patriot’s energy pledge,” vowing to conserve energy and do whatever they can to minimize their own greenhouse emissions. Forty people have joined this very loose club, which, as it turns out, is mostly about the nifty T-shirts.

    Many winter-lovers in the upper Midwest believe that the halcyon days of consistent cold and snow in the region are behind us. The state of Wisconsin seems to agree; Tourism Secretary Kevin Shibilski recently announced plans for a program that will offer loan guarantees to businesses that depend on snowmobiling or cross-country skiing in low-snow years.

    Ahvo Taipale has run a cross-country ski shop in the Twin Cities since 1973 and is widely seen as the dean of Minnesota cross-country skiing. He says that Minnesota and western Wisconsin used to get fairly consistent snow. Until the mid-1980s, when warming spells began forcing event organizers to cancel ski races. “In particular, the last five years have been very weird,” he says. Another telling phenomenon: He says he can be fully stocked with new equipment an entire month and a half later than he could 10 or 20 years ago.

    A look back at the record with longtime Birkie staffer Shellie Milford seems to underscore Taipale’s anecdotal and personal take on the trends: Half of the races in the last ten years have been characterized by challenging snow conditions. In the previous decade, four races lacked snow or cold compared to only one race in the Birkie’s first decade.

    It’s not just the carbo-loading set that’s starting to worry. On the motoring side of things, it’s also been tough sledding for the past five years. Pete Bohlig sells recreational vehicles for the Hitching Post in South St. Paul. With the less reliable snow he’s seen lately, he sells a lot more four-wheeled ATVs than snowmobiles. “If I had a nickel for every time someone tried to trade in a sled for an ATV, I’d be a rich man,” he says.

    John Prusak, editor of several national snowmobiling magazines, says one should take such doom-and-gloom talk with a grain of salt, noting that the industry has gone through six distinct boom-bust cycles in the last 30 years. Snowmobile sales follow snowfall more closely than they do the economy, and the industry did very well in the upper Midwest as recently as 1998, he says.

  • Segue to the Future

    Members of the baby boom generation may not be getting the hover cars or personal helicopters that the futurists of their youth forecasted, but it appears they will have a self-balancing, battery-powered two-wheel scooter. As the focus of one of the biggest hype campaigns in recent memory, the Segway scooter is slowly being rolled out to U.S. consumers at $5,000 a pop.

    The Twin Cities’ first Segway was sold and delivered in January to young urbanites Tod Lane and Nell Rueckl after Tod entered an essay contest for the privilege of being an “early adopter.” The two also received a Willie Wonkaesque tour of inventor Dean Kamen’s factory in New Hampshire. The Whittier couple are exactly the kind of product evangelists that marketers dream about: Tod reeled off statistics and facts about the machine’s masterful engineering, and Nell, who uses the Segway to commute to her Northeast Minneapolis massage studio, talked about how graceful she feels, whirring quietly down Nicollet Mall.

    Its quiet efficiency may be the Segway’s undoing. For safety concerns, San Francisco has banned the two-wheeler from its sidewalks even before the device really arrived there. “Ever since that came out about San Francisco, I’ve been stressed out, thinking, ‘Oh no, I need to make friends on the sidewalk, and on the street, be nice to them,’” said Nell. “I don’t want to be zooming around and scaring people.”

    Although the Segway can go as fast as 12 miles per hour, Tod said that some of the safety concerns about the Segway on sidewalks are misguided, because unlike bikes, which are already banned from most walks, the Segway doesn’t need to be moving forward to balance upright. “You can ride this thing more slowly than you could comfortably walk, or you can easily ride alongside someone who is walking and carry on a conversation,” he said.

    Despite this tag-team sales job, The Rake was still skeptical, until we had a chance to try it out. There is just no getting around it: This thing is cool! You step up on the footpad (“Aircraft-grade aluminum,” said Tod), hang on to the handlebars, and the thing balances itself. A slight lean forward and the Segway begins to creep ahead; stand up straight, and it stops. Turn the grip on the left handlebar and the thing spins around. It’s like you’re standing atop Harry Potter’s magic lawn fertilizer. Four stars—our highest recommenda-tion!—Dan Gilchrist

  • Running Amok

    There’s ice on the banks of the Mississippi, a fact I might have put to good use if I’d noticed earlier. As it is, I’m halfway across—and neck-deep in—a backwater somewhere near Fort Snelling. I can only hope these are the last few steps of a run organized by the Minneapolis Hash House Harriers. The water is cold enough that I can’t help gasping, and my feet have quickly become two points of sharp pain trudging through the mud. As I emerge from the water on the other side, holding my shoes and socks above my head with one hand and a guide rope with the other, I reflect on how quickly I opted for a great deal of acute pain to avoid running a two-mile detour on dry land. In fact, I’ve spent much of my life avoiding running. This is the first time I’ve ever been tempted to take part in a group running activity, and the main attraction was the Hash House Harriers’ motto of being “a drinking club with a running problem.” I figured I hate running, but I like drinking beer, so somewhere on the running-drinking continuum I might find fitness.

    My adventure with the club began about two hours earlier, in the parking lot of a St. Paul shopping mall. Twenty of us running drinkers (or, in some cases I suppose, drinking runners) circled up and received a chalk-talk on the basics of hashing. In today’s “hash,” two “hares” started out 15 minutes ahead, marking a trail by bouncing a tennis ball covered in flour, and marking intersections with chalk.

    The traditions and vocabulary of the hash have their roots in “hounds and hares,” the English version of hide-and-seek. In 1938, a group of British expatriates in Kuala Lumpur re-created the children’s game with adult refreshments, and there are now more than 1,500 clubs worldwide dedicated to the activity. Along the way, hashers have developed their own traditions, including the use of embarrassing or vulgar nicknames for each other, such as “Balls of Ice,” “Dogbreath,” or “Mr. Ed.” Many people who have hashed together for years do not know each other’s real names.

    Once the hares ran off, the rest of us stood around swapping off-color jokes, and a couple of people showed their obsessive commitment to cardiovascular health by smoking cigarettes. Indeed, although a few of the “hashers” had the thin, gazelle-like bearing of a serious runner, most of us would easily fit into what the running world delicately calls the “Clydesdale” category. My dream of the hasher lifestyle as an effective weight-control method seemed optimistic.

    And then we were off… on a slow jog, then a walk, then a stop, a double-back, then a walk, then a scramble down a hill, and so on. To keep the run interesting, the hares mark numerous paths, some of which end up being false trails. The faster runners sprinted ahead to scout the prospective paths, while the rest of us milled around in a generally forward-moving direction, waiting to hear which was the “true path.” In fact, the hardest running segment of the day was a jog up the riverbank to a promised martini stop. Unfortunately, the hooch was all gone, which spoiled the mood considerably.

    After an hour and a half, up and down the riverbank and over a highway, six of us arrived at the river crossing. Luckily, the submarine experience was followed quickly by a fire in a warming hut, cold beer, and the bag of dry clothes we had been warned to bring along. “Second Base,” a happy-go-lucky nurse from Minneapolis, told me that previous outings have taken them through swamps and multiple river and stream crossings. “I still have marks on my legs from running through the forest last August!” she said. Two of her friends who accompanied her on their first hash were notably unimpressed by the experience. “I thought I’d have time to go shopping this afternoon!” sniffed one.

    “Sucks,” a tall real estate assessor from a hashing club in Milwaukee, took another view. “It’s a good way to meet people, it gets you outside, you get to drink, and the chicks get naked,” he confided.

    At the post-run soiree in a Richfield basement, the party mood was odd—a weird cross of women’s rugby, Dungeons and Dragons, and “Girls Gone Wild.” While the group was holding its traditional post-run circle to “down the hare”—basically making the trail-setters drink—a couple of women visiting from the Milwaukee club actually took off their tops, while yelling drinking songs at the top of their lungs. In the end, I left neither drunk nor sold on the hashing lifestyle. But I have to agree with another hasher, who said, “It’s a good way to kill an afternoon!”—Dan Gilchrist