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“Zookeeper” is surely one of the top twenty coolest jobs in the world, and for Ross Taylor, a South Minneapolis native and University of Minnesota graduate, the path to this career started, oddly enough, in clown college. Studying to be a circus clown led to a job as big-top animal caretaker and then, for the past twenty-five years, keeper at the Minnesota Zoo. Taylor is one of the folks responsible for the animals on the Northern Trail—that’d be buffalo, Przewalski’s horses, moose, and of course the endangered Amur (Siberian) tigers. Lately he’s been especially busy with some new arrivals—a pair of female tiger cubs born in May. Visitors have been able to watch the cubs in their den via closed-circuit TV, but starting September 18, the youngsters will be on view romping around the main tiger enclosure. When we enlisted Taylor for our desert-island game, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that, unique among all our previous interviewees, he’s actually been stranded on a real desert island: specifically, Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands, during his two years with the Peace Corps in the 1960s. “The minimum temperature the whole time was seventy-one degrees,” he says. Here’s what Taylor would take along for another stint in the South Pacific:

1) “A machete, because you can’t drink one of those big coconuts without them. You can use it for building huts, or just about anything you can think of.”

2) “A refrigerator. Boy, do you miss ice when you don’t have it for two years. Solar-powered, and stocked with supplies to make the perfect Hawaiian Sunset—rum, a
little pineapple juice.”

3) “Several blank canvases and painting supplies for capturing the island sunsets. I mostly paint with acrylics, because they’re so easy to handle. Recently, I’ve been painting animal-related portraits—tigers, actually.”

4) “A jar of mayonnaise, for when a palm tree falls down and you cut out the heart for a heart-of-palm salad. If you haven’t had salad for a year, it’s pretty much beyond description.”

5) “Two cats, to keep the rodent population down, which is a problem on a desert isle. Two cats because you can amuse yourself watching their interactions.” But Taylor would probably leave the tiger cubs at home—referring to the book The Life of Pi, he notes that on a desert island it’s probably best not to live next to a predator that weighs three times as much as you do. “I’d stick with domestic cats,” he says.

It won’t be long now. September’s weight presses in on my teacher bones, and there’s only one way to stave it off and prepare for the shock of going back to school: Take a road trip of several thousand miles with five kids. So here we are in Mackinaw City, Michigan, where sturdy-looking Midwestern families gather to enjoy the azure waters and soft sand beaches of Lake Michigan.

The sky above the straits of Mackinac spans clear and stunning, the same as it’s been since I first started traversing the Upper Peninsula with my sister and our Nana eighteen years ago. Back then, after we’d dropped off Nana at our aunt’s house in Detroit, we’d turn around and head back north on I-75 for a long car party of Doritos and cigs and Tab and music so loud that one state trooper had to use the bullhorn to catch our attention. Finally we noticed him and pulled over. A cloud of air-conditioned smoke emerged as my sister rolled down the car window. “Ladies,” the trooper said through tight but upturned lips, “I’ve been following you with the lights and siren for the last three miles. It’s time to fasten your seatbelts.”

This morning, a rainbow kite with six tails flies impossibly high, and another exactly like it lags at least a hundred feet below, trying hopelessly to catch up. On the ground, the thick smell of fudge coats my nostrils. I’m sitting alone in a coffee shop in the bustling town square—which is actually an outdoor mall — and I’m pretending to be a serious novelist at work on a great manuscript instead of a harried columnist trying to work on vacation. Tomorrow, we head for a friend’s private island in the Georgian Bay, a place so remote that there is neither phone service nor electricity nor flushing toilets. At the nearby arcade, Jon and the kids entertain themselves watching the teen locals show off on the Dance Dance Revolution Extreme machine. It’s so entrancing that I blurt out a promise to get the home version for our basement.

Later, I find myself wondering if promises made in the heat of vacation are binding. After all, do we really know what we’re saying or doing or even who we actually are when we’re on the road?

Think how many couples tie the knot while vacationing, only to come to their senses with a sickening shock once the trip is over. Of course, for Jon and me, such a jolly and spontaneous act would be different. Since we’ve been living together for so long, we are already balancing all of the responsibilities of marriage and family life, just without the paperwork. Plus, we’ve been planning to marry for quite a while. By now, the most frustrating aspect of being unwed is the inability to use the simple terms “husband” and “wife.” Can a “boyfriend” have a touch of gray? Does anyone especially care to be a fiancée more than once? Can a heterosexual have a “partner”? And no offense, but I’d rather lock myself in the bathroom than have a “significant other.”

Traveling as a blended family brings all this up, since we’re meeting people and introducing ourselves over and over again. We get a little loopy. This morning at the cabin, while Jon and I were still in bed, I heard my daughter Sophie say something to her stepbrother about “when my dad and your mom get up.” Silence. Laughter. Who’s who around here, anyway? Isn’t that part of why we travel — to get enough perspective on ourselves and our lives to figure it out?

These questions must have been nagging me the other day, when I surprised the Mackinac ferry driver (who looked about fifteen) by asking him if he was licensed to perform weddings “at sea.” Alas, he wasn’t. But no matter, because after the Georgian Bay we’re headed south, to Manhattan, where we will dodge terrorists before heading to the Jersey shore near Cape May, which is awfully close to Atlantic City, if you get my drift.

At the table next to me a grandmother is sharing a sandwich and orange juice with a little girl about eight. The child is wearing a red T-shirt with a white cat on it. She reminds me of my younger daughter, and of the wistfulness of teenage girls before they grow up, and of myself years ago.

All these young families walking by the window, and the childless couples, bronzed and urgent, they remind me of time passing. Revisiting these places I’ve been so many times before, it’s oddly disorienting and comforting at the same time. I see my past and my future, but it’s my world right now that comes into focus. These kids we adore, the chaos and the effort and the comedy, honestly, it aches in that way I love to feel, because I know it will never be like this again.

When Fort Knox couldn’t hold enough gold to back all the paper money in circulation, the U.S. government in about 1913 began weaning the greenback from being a promissory note for precious metals. Instead, the mighty dollar became “fiat currency.” In other words, it became a slippery theoretical thing that depended on the Federal Reserve to wave a big wand and decree its value. The markets adjusted accordingly. No longer could you trade in your buck for its equivalent in gold. Presumably, that’s when they really locked down Fort Knox.

Critics carped that this decision was folly, and they blamed it for every subsequent recession, depression, and hyper-inflated bubble burst in the economy. Even author L. Frank Baum felt so bad about abandoning the gold standard that he penned a children’s book in which the characters “follow the yellow brick road” to the Technicolor land over the rainbow—a green city where money is measured by the ounce, abbreviated as “Oz.”

The slow transition to fake money was complete in 1968, when “silver certificates”—the last of the promissory notes—were removed from circulation. It didn’t take long for libertarians to respond acrimoniously (it never does). They dubbed the new bills worthless “frog skins.” But the government ignored them (it always does). Eisenhower silver dollars were soon drained of any precious metal and went out of circulation. A few years ago, the U.S. Treasury issued the quarter-sized Sacagawea dollar to replace the quarter-sized “Susan B. Agony.” The libertarians were ready. They scoffed at the brass coin as more government-issue “fool’s gold.”

Rather than sitting back and letting the system collapse and taking all our savings with it, some libertarians founded the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act in 1974. A mint master from Hawaii named Bernard Von NotHaus took the matter into his own hands and began issuing “liberty dollars” in 1998, backed by real silver and gold rather than the “national debt, Alan Greenspan, the IRS and taxes, and tanks and guns.”

“The most popular is the ten-dollar coin that is one troy ounce of silver,” according to James Hess, a local liberty-dollar advocate who lives in South Minneapolis. “There’s nothing like having the real thing. For someone who has never held an ounce of silver in their hand, it’s exciting and liberating. I buy gas with it, I buy lunch with it. I sometimes even buy groceries with it.

“Just as UPS and Fed Ex brought competition to the post office, the liberty dollar is forcing the Federal Reserve to improve its standards,” according to Hess. By way of a didactic warning, he added, “The Federal Reserve note doesn’t really belong to you. That’s why it’s illegal to deface a dollar. You’re just borrowing it. Even if it’s in your bank account, it’s not technically yours. All Federal Reserve money is just loaned out.”

But are liberty dollars legal? When I asked a woman at the U.S. Treasury, she deemed it permissible, and not counterfeit. “They’re doing what?” she said with a chuckle. “As long as it doesn’t say ‘legal tender’ on it, they can do what they want.” A man named Mike White at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing concurred. “Liberty dollars are not considered legal tender, but it’s fine if they do it,” he said. Many Twin Cities stores aren’t quite so sure. Liberty dollars are available at the Libertarian Party headquarters near Raymond and University avenues in St. Paul, so the Hampden Park Coop just down the street sometimes gets this alternate currency. In general, the coop doesn’t accept liberty dollars—unless a volunteer is willing to swap their own ten-dollar note with its rough equivalent in silver. Libertarian optimism is unfazed. “If you look back, not everyone accepted Visa or MasterCard, but now everyone recognizes credit cards. Same thing with checks. It was a trust issue,” explained Hess. He said there are now more than five million dollars of liberty currency in circulation.

Hess claims that a troy ounce of silver, or a ten-dollar liberty coin, is far more secure than a personal check or a Visa number. He claims liberty dollars can only gain in value. “If you look in the newspaper today, the price of silver is a little more than six dollars an ounce. The difference on the ten-dollar coin is the cost to mint the coin and pay for the shipping. Once the rate of silver is more than ten dollars an ounce, the tens will be melted down and made into twenty-dollar coins. You can trade in your ten-dollar coin and double your money!”

Banks do not share this enthusiasm about the new currency. At first, a local Wells Fargo branch accepted deposits of liberty dollars from a loyal customer, “but then they had to make a decision at the national level not to accept it,” said Hess. “I told them that I’d gladly take all their liberty dollars off their hands and give them regular Federal Reserve notes, but they wouldn’t do it.”

Nevertheless, Hess claims this is an asset that “banks don’t usually accept liberty dollars, because then the money doesn’t go to New York or out of town. It tends to stay in the community. It’s probably the main reason that I use the liberty dollar, because it helps the community I live in.”

Hess confessed that only a handful of shops, or “liberty merchants,” accept the coins in Minnesota, but “in Austin, Texas, liberty dollars are generally accepted in most stores. There are also five-hundred-dollar gold pieces made of an ounce of gold. Not many places will accept them, but I heard that there are some car lots in Texas that love them. So if you want to buy a car with gold, go to Texas.”—Eric Dregni

Last spring, while driving down an Arizona highway searching for an alt-rock radio station, I heard a woman’s voice cry out across the airwaves, as if in primeval prayer. A guitar answered, then dropped into a thick growl of minor chords while the melody swelled with the lyrics, before the whole thing sank into the depths of a ten-ton unison riff. My god, I thought, does Arizona have a DJ who’s into Nordic roots music? No, the song was by Melissa auf der Mar, former bassist for Hole and Smashing Pumpkins. Which means that in my mid-forties I’m becoming a headbanger. Or is it metalhead? Anyway, I couldn’t be happier.

My infatuation with loud, primal, dirge-like music started back in 1999 with Hedningarna, one of the first Swedish groups to fuse traditional Scandinavian tunes with rock as part of a movement throughout Scandinavia. Performing live in Minneapolis to a dance piece by local choreographer Joe Chvala, the band offered up an otherworldly mix of lush, heavy instrumentation and spectral melodies. The long notes of ancient instruments like the Hardanger fiddle, the hurdy-gurdy, and the Swedish bagpipes resonated at my core. And the singers, two Finnish women, were Valkyries, their clear voices slicing like shards of glass through the battle fray, lifting every note as if it were a dead warrior being spirited to Valhalla.

This music was nothing less than transporting. It took me to some kind of preconscious state: a place of vocalization, not vocabulary, where emotion flashes raw and unadulterated by memory or sentiment, and where instinct isn’t an impulse but a mode of survival. The kind of world created by William T. Vollman in his mythical Viking travelogue, The Ice-Shirt, populated by marauders who revel in, then lose, their ability to don the bear serk (literally, a bear shirt or skin), which makes them invincible in battle. And that was just the music. Hedningarna’s lyrics relate medieval tales of warrior kings and defiant women, of curses and enchantments, loyalties and grudges, of unfettered sensuality; they conjure a time when the boundaries between human and animal could dissolve with results both terrifying and exhilarating.

I had gone to see Chvala, one of my favorite choreographers, but in the process gained a new musical obsession. Chvala and Hedningarna were part of the first Nordic Roots Festival in 1999. Organized by NorthSide Records, a Minneapolis-based imprint that distributes Nordic roots music throughout the United States, the festival is now in its sixth year and runs September 17-19 at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis.

Through the past five festivals, and at other concerts over the years, I’ve become part of a local community intent on exploring the spectrum of Nordic roots music, which has found a hardcore fan base here in the Twin Cities. Its sounds include the goddess-infused ethereality of Gjallarhorn, named for Heimdal’s horn, used to transmit messages between the gods and humans; the disquieting yoiking of Sami singer Wimme; and the Hendrix-like delirium of Hoven Droven (which translates as “helter skelter”).

Garmarna, named for the dogs that guard the gates of Norse hell, is one group that consistently sells out here. The band’s work evokes a stark, terrifying beauty as electronic instrumentation whips primal grooves around singer Emma Härdelin. The feminine eye at the center of a testosterone storm, her voice pierces the music’s dirges of lamentation and grief, as riveting as her stage presence is calm. She brings to mind the Danish/Inuit title character of Peter Høeg’s novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow: She is urbane, intelligent, and self-possessed, yet governed by fierce aboriginal intuition.

While those groups have been fixtures at previous festivals, this year two Swedish favorites are headlining: Väsen (an acoustic trio whose name means “essence” or “spirit”) and Harv (“to dig deep”). Väsen concerts are a religious experience, the group’s earthy melodies and supple rhythms conjuring an incomparably joyous heartache; the two young men in Harv play self-described “bad fiddles” and “Harv-ify” every traditional tune they encounter, turning the Swedish three-beat polska and its relative, the Norwegian pols, into music as jagged and stunning as lightning.

How is it that a half-Scandinavian woman raised on Baroque music and the Bee Gees can listen to Garmarna’s Vengeance or the compilation CD Wizard Women of the North and feel a visceral connection to the soundtrack of her inner life? A couple of people in town have some pretty good ideas about that. “Nordic roots music just has this resonance,” says Bill Snyder, a critic who writes about Nordic music for such publications as Sing Out. “People say they feel like they have this music in their bones, or that they’ve always known it, or that it’s immediately familiar to them.”

It’s possible that the music’s mythic and medieval qualities—in lyrics, tunes, and instruments—contribute to that feeling. “Most of it has ancient roots in some way or another, even the modern compositions,” Snyder says. “If you believe in a collective unconscious, or that there are certain things in ritual that become part of humanity, then it makes sense that a lot of people have this visceral experience with the music.”

Snyder’s referring to archetypes: the rhythms, symbols, characters and stories that Carl Jung and mythologist Joseph Campbell employed to explain ancient patterns of experience that constitute our shared human heritage. “People dying from broken hearts. Murders. Folk music themes, whether they’re Celtic, Nordic, or Anglo-American, are very basic,” Snyder says. “It’s pretty bloody, often not happy. It’s about survival under harsh conditions. The specifics are dated, but these themes speak to a human condition—needs, desires, love—that hasn’t changed for thousands of years.”

Then there are the instruments used by Nordic roots groups—hurdy gurdy, nyckelharpa, Hardanger fiddle, Swedish bagpipes, and even the didgeridoo from Gjallarhorn’s ensemble—that strike a chord within the human psyche. “All of these are drone instruments, which create single notes that are omnipresent,” says Rob Simonds, who founded and runs the NorthSide label. Take the Hardanger fiddle and nyckelharpa. “They have strings that only exist to resonate. You don’t bow them, but they produce a subtle noise with an eerie quality, a natural reverb. Basically the resonance creates the ever-present drone of harmonics.”

So are those drones like the hum of a tuning fork pitched to the thrumming strands of our DNA? “Now we’re getting into an area in which I don’t have any expertise,” Simonds says, laughing. “But there’s a whole field of study called psychoacoustics that focuses on how people are affected by different harmonic structures and keys.” Aha. Maybe that’s the key to our insatiable appetite for Harv’s “bad fiddling.” Right, Simonds explains: “Bad fiddling refers to melodies and harmonic structure. Harv likes to play these ‘blue notes’ that are quarter tones—not what we’re used to in mainstream Western music. And, well, it does weird stuff to you.”

For another example, there’s the ever-present, polyrhythmic polska, the basis for a lot of Nordic roots music. This traditional dance is similar to a polka in that it has three beats, but as Simonds tells it, the polska’s rhythm more closely echoes the human heartbeat—and depending on which part of Sweden the musicians hail from, the first beat might be quick or long, with lots of “messing around with the space between the beats.”

As if medieval lyrics, harmonic drone, and polyrhythmic intensity aren’t enough, those groups with female singers often add to the mix Swedish kulning—the impossibly high-pitched calf-calling that causes the hair on the back of your neck to rise. On top of that, electric instrumentation and a dose of American influence also play roles in creating the Nordic roots sound. For instance, Simonds describes Stefan Brisland-Ferner, who does most of the arranging and composition for Garmarna (scheduled to play the Cedar in fall 2005), as a “studio geek” who grew up listening to Kraftwerk and David Bowie. Kjell-Erick Eriksson, Hoven Droven’s lead fiddler, is a well-known folk musician who, “when growing up, had a poster of some old Swedish fiddle player on one wall, and on the other, AC/DC and Kiss,” claims Simonds. Hedningarna (“heathens”) is among the oldest of the Nordic roots bands. The movement’s genesis lies within the folk revival of the late 1960s and seventies that started in America and then swept the world—an influence that’s reflected in much of the Nordic region’s lush, shamanistic, hard-rock approach to traditional music.

Both Simonds and Snyder emphasize that Nordic roots musicians consider themselves folk musicians, whether they’re playing new or ancient tunes, whether their sound is electronic or acoustic. “They think of themselves as doing the same thing folk artists have always done: taking the indigenous music of their country and imprinting it with their own personal slant,” Simonds says.

At a Nordic roots concert, age, race, social status, and cultural background are irrelevant. During a Garmarna concert once, I talked to two preteen boys from Duluth who eagerly explained that they discovered the music through their parents. I’ve chatted with an out-of-town grandmother cruising last year’s festival with her adult daughter. And there’s the night I found myself dancing between two unlikely partners—a leather-clad biker with a shaved head and piercings, and a punked-out kid in a black T-shirt and jeans. The three of us thrashed together, turning toward each other to howl with the delirious invincibility of berserkers.

If there’s a wild side at these concerts, there’s also nothing dangerous. The audience is unfailingly a peaceable group, assembled to revel in the music. “These bands have a remarkable way of bringing very diverse people together. This isn’t lost on these musicians,” Snyder says. It is, of course, not just the music, but the musicians themselves—unpretentious, devoid of ego, and downright fun—that inspire the outpouring of emotion and camaraderie during their live performances.

“It’s part of the Scandinavian cultural ethic that there’s just not much ego involved,” says Simonds. “The musicians really don’t think of putting themselves first as a general rule, they think of the group first. When these bands perform, it’s an ensemble psychology.” Conversely, he adds, “the audience is so tuned in and so with the musicians every step of the way, you feel as if there’s no wall at all.”

In other words, magic happens. The music is the portal through which to enter blood memory and swim back to ancient, raw, and irrefutable truths that lie far beyond our highly mediated, aggressively processed culture. It’s the incantation by which we put on our bear serks and for a couple of soul-satisfying, sweat-drenched hours, shapeshift into a community of dancing warriors at one with each other and the music.

Camille LeFevre is a St. Paul writer.

With the State Fair’s feeble lineup sounding the traditional power chord that marks the close of the summer concert season,Twin Citizens can crawl back under the rock of pre-recorded music for the cold winter months. Even in Minnesota, the Internet has not killed the used record store, nor the people who insist on taking their custom there.

“I’m well into my thirties,” said Brigid Phister, who lives just a few blocks from the Uptown Cheapo Records outlet, where she pops in about twice a week. “But I keep up.” She was dressed in a dark blue T-shirt, black jeans, black Doc Martens. She revealed a couple of modest tattoos and one visible piercing (nose). She did not look outrageous. But she was outraged. Well, a little. “This is just ridiculous,” she said in disgust, shaking her head and holding up a copy of the Talking Heads’ album Remain in Light. It’s ridiculous because Cheapo’s staff stocked the album—a pivotal work in the history of modern rock and a crucial text of the alternative canon—in its new “classic rock” section. It might have gone in the new “modern rock” section, but there it was, rubbing elbows with redoubtable seventies groups like Foghat and Triumph.

Cheapo staffers recently remodeled their store, and when they did, they had to figure out a way to make their massive rock section more accessible. “The problem is, when you use just the alphabet, it’s a long walk,” said store owner Al Brown. “I don’t want people to be intimidated by the hugeness of the store.” His idea was to create several little stores within one giant one. In all, there are nine sections under the new scheme.

But now, Cheapo has a problem. It’s a problem faced by grocers and librarians, Web developers, and radio programmers. That problem is: What goes where? And once it goes where it goes, what do you call it? Unlike groceries, though, music carries with it all kinds of extra emotional baggage. People identify with their music in a way they don’t identify with their mayonnaise. It’s part of what defines them. When you tamper with their music, you are spoiling for a fight.

There are those who would rather stay out of record stores altogether than be caught browsing through a “classic rock” section. There are just so many connotations they don’t want to be associated with: Do-rags. Mullets. Drum solos. Muscle cars. Bic lighters waving in the stadium darkness. George Thorogood. Even people who like “classic rock” tend to shrink from the label. Blame radio programmers, who gave us that label, but destroyed the music’s reputation by playing the same songs—both good and abominable—relentlessly for the past thirty years. So now, “Radar Love” and “Don’t Stop Believin’” are roughly the equivalent of “Happy Birthday” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Taken together, these criminal acts by corporate radio have led to Brigid Phister’s reluctance to shop in the classic rock section at Cheapo, even though that’s where she must now go if she wants Talking Heads.

To be fair, it’s not always easy to decide what is “classic rock” and what is “modern rock.” Where should Dave Matthews go? Pearl Jam?

Brown walked through the aisles with me recently, just as the exhausted staff was finishing up the restocking. The original idea, he said, was to split rock history in two using Nirvana as the breaking point. Every act whose debut album was issued before 1991 (the year Nevermind came out) would go into classic rock, everything that came after would go into modern. This presented problems right away, of course. For one thing, where does grunge itself go? Based largely on classic rock with some punk elements, you might think it should go into classic rock. On the other hand, grunge represented a tipping point in music history, marginalizing eighties hair metal and opening the way for nineties alternative and neo-punk. So bands like Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots went into modern rock.

But there were other, thornier problems. The whole idea behind the Talking Heads, Television, the Clash, and other such bands was to critique “classic rock,” to rail against its excesses, even to destroy it. Nonetheless, those bands were pre-grunge, so into classic rock they went.But then things began to change. CDs started getting moved. REM, another seminal modern-rock band who started in the early eighties, went from classic to modern. So did Celtic punks the Pogues, who probably deserve their own bin labeled “super-alcoholic Irish folk.”

One reason for the moves was confusion and disagreement among the staff. Many insisted on sticking to aesthetic principle. Others just wanted to get the job done as quickly as possible, and the grunge-based split seemed easiest. But there was another, more prosaic reason: “The classic rock section ended up being a little short,” said Brown, looking slightly sheepish. So, to balance things out, the grunge split was abandoned, and ad hoc decisions were made. Dead Can Dance and Del Amitri went into modern rock, but Talking Heads stayed in classic.

But if the original reason for this whole thing was to save customers’ shoe leather, it seems that arbitrarily sorting the merchandise would be counterproductive. If you don’t know who is stocked where, you spend a lot of time going back and forth between the sections. I did just that in looking for a Patti Smith CD—walking the entire lengths of both sections before I found it (it was in modern rock, despite having been recorded when Kurt Cobain was still in diapers).

“It can be a challenge to the customer,” admitted a store manager named Neill Olson. “We keep moving stuff back and forth.” He and the staff have been the objects of “good-natured ribbing” regarding the new layout, but they haven’t heard much in the way of caustic criticism from customers. Most of that has come from the staff itself. “At first we thought the whole thing was crazy,” he said. And while he’s grown “more comfortable” with it, some of his employees are less so.

“It’s been really frustrating,” said Sarah Johnson, an exasperated clerk. “It’s all based on opinion,” she said, indicating that this was a bad thing. “The Talking Heads,” she said, citing the band that seems to keep exemplifying the conundrum, “define modern rock to me.” She feels for the more confused customers. “I’m confused by it, and I work here.”

Olson has an answer for the hypothetical complaining customer. “Hey, buddy,” he said, eyeing me closely, and maybe sneering just a little. “There are other things to worry about besides what goes into classic rock and what goes into modern rock, you know?”—Dan Mitchell

The other day about eighty thousand Christians gathered at the State Capitol for Luis Palau’s Twin Cities Festival. Just a mile away, at St. Paul’s RiverCentre, a smaller but no less devoted crowd convened at the Midwest Scrapbook Association Convention, the better to observe the objects of its own faith—designer paper and vellum and bottle caps. These are the icons of the Holy Order of Scrapbooking. (Yes, it’s one word. And yes, like “journaling,” it’s now a verb.)

Like religion, the $4.5 billion scrapbooking industry is driven by fervor and motivated by guilt. “I do think a lot of it is guilt,” laughed Carrie Ingalls, who has worked in the biz since 1989 and is currently a manufacturer rep for a company called Bobo Co. It’s those neglected piles of photos that you’ve boxed and tucked away, she explained, never bothering to label or stick in a photo album. You feel like you should do something nice with them. And once you start to assemble them in scrapbooks, she said, “It’s an addiction.”

So how do laziness and avoidance translate into monomania? The novice scrapbooker is faced with a dizzying array of choices that go way beyond simple page layout. There are decorated papers, ribbons, buttons, glitter, stickers to commemorate everything from a trip to the zoo to a trip down the aisle, inspirational quotes on vellum, inspirational quotes on ribbons, and so on. In a modern scrapbook, the photos hardly matter. It’s all about the “design concept” of each page. This can require, for example, flattened and decorated bottlecaps stuck to the page with Dots candies.

Hoping to score a free copy of Simple Scrapbooks magazine, I leafed through a copy under the watchful eye of a booth-minder. “See?” she said proudly. “It will show you how to get started, what product you need, and how to organize a page, so that you can get more photos on the page and still tell the story.”

Aren’t the photos supposed to tell the story? Apparently not. Or they’re just not saying enough. A sample page on one vendor’s wall, for example, displayed a single photo of a newborn baby. It was nested in a congeries of striped pink and blue paper, surrounded by cutouts and ribbons trumpeting the definitions for words like precious, miracle, treasure, laughter, and blessing.

“This is never going to go away,” said C.D. Cross, an affable man who claims the title of first male designer in the industry. (Before that, he was a softball coach.) He tipped me off to two significant industry trends: torn paper and brads. Brads? “Like Brad Pitt,” he said. (Oh, now the appeal of scrapbooking is becoming more clear!) C.D. showed me a little tack-like doohickey that you can use to attach your paraphernalia to the page, to give it a kind of rustic look. A designer and representative for Outdoors & More, decidedly the most masculine booth at the convention, C.D. said scrapbooking is “the fastest-growing craft in America.”

“I think it’s replaced quilting,” agreed Carrie Ingalls. “It’s an excuse to get together. It feels good to you personally, to do it, and to share it with others. And it really is also sort of an addiction. People can’t have enough supplies. They’re always looking for the next thing.”

Many of the biggest scrapbooking companies are headquartered in Utah, and the Mormon interest in recording genealogy is most often cited as the progenitor of the country’s current cutting and pasting craze. It is an enthusiasm that accelerates during troubled times. Ingalls told us there was a huge surge in sales after 9/11. “That hurt a lot of industries,” she said. “But we grew by leaps and bounds. People are so passionate about this…it’s something they live.”

Over at a booth for an Oakdale store called Paige’s In Time, a woman wore a nametag that said “Marni Fabulous.” She had a captive audience as she demonstrated The Wizard, an embossing gadget that sells for $149.99. Like one of the hucksters at the State Fair’s horticulture building, Marni had a crowd of women in the palm of her hand—laughing and waiting breathlessly for an embossed gift tag to shoot out the other end of The Wizard—when she spotted a man in the vicinity. “Man alert! Man alert!” she shouted. “Man at the booth! Do not look at the man! Do not talk about the cost of golf clubs!” Even Marni’s victim laughed, because it was true: There weren’t a lot of guys.

When I asked Jackie Schoenbauer from Jordan about the convention’s abundance of estrogen, she said, “You know, the husbands have their hobbies. We can spend money, too.” (The average amount plunked down per visit to a store like Archivers, according to two insiders, is somewhere between forty and two hundred dollars.)

Schoenbauer came to the convention with her friend, Chrissy Kampen, from Lakeville. Both are twenty-nine years old; both are married. “It took me a year just to put my wedding album together,” said Schoenbauer, explaining that each page had to be just a little bit different. Said Kampen, “We’re a year or two behind with our photos. I don’t foresee us being current any time soon.”
—Shannon Olson