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The north is the same wherever it might be.
—Sigurd Olson, Listening Point

Soon after I was born, my grandparents bought a cabin on a small lake in the Arrowhead, not far from my hometown of Two Harbors. My parents, in turn, took over the property after my grandfather died a few years later. With two brothers, I had ready companions to explore its woods, and to hunt, swim, and fish. Without hesitation, I would claim that the finest feature of the property is a seventy-year-old cedar-log sauna near the edge of the lake. The structure is both simple and elegant: two rooms, one for dressing, the other lined with benches and dominated by a cast-iron stove. A framework atop the stove cradles a bushel of smooth stones, heated to produce löyly, the tonic steam described in the Kalevala, the Finnish national myth. When our sauna is lit, the smoke rushes windborne up the hill from the clear lake, through birch, spruce, balsam, and pine, and out over the roadless, empty North Woods. I have spent countless winter evenings and quiet summer afternoons in this building. As boys, we would push the limits of human respiration and tempt the dermal flash point, emerging red-eared and hot-haired to plunge into the cool water. As an adult, I have practiced the immobility that such a room requires, the slowness of breath, the silent trickle of sweat down the spine, afterward gazing comfortably at winter stars in five-degree air, steam rising from my skin.

By the mid-nineties, the sauna was rotting into the earth, its logs at ground level turning to compost. The top of its doorway had sunk to the level of my chin. Inside, the wall separating the two rooms sank beneath the weight of the brick chimney. Strongly sensing the building’s importance, not simply as a cache of family memories, but also as folk architecture, I plotted to stop its decay. My father was skeptical. He advocated doing away with the old in favor of something new, tightly constructed from a truckload of Menards lumber. He questioned, not unreasonably, the feasibility of restoration: We were not masons, let alone Finn carpenters. This was not the sort of project we undertook. Everyone in my family knows their way around a toolbox, but this project appeared to require skills long since dead to our line. Then again, my father didn’t take saunas, a habit I had sorely missed during many years away from Minnesota. My efforts to convince him proceeded at a glacial pace, hampered by our ham-fisted communication; meanwhile, the sauna stovepipe canted farther earthward. Smoke billowed forth whenever the stove door was opened, filling the room. Finally, with the sauna nearly unusable, I saw no choice but to begin, knowing that sometimes forgiveness comes more easily than permission.

It was an improbable task, but my ambitions were affirmed by two sources. The first was Sigurd Olson, Minnesota’s conservationist emeritus, the legendary writer and adventurer who helped secure the Boundary Waters wilderness. In Listening Point, he recalls the creation of his own lakeside retreat. Foregoing the idea of a new cabin, he searched the backroads around Ely for a particular style of Finnish outbuilding he had always admired:

Built of tamarack, jackpine, or cedar, with dovetailed corners, these cabins are so expertly hewn, their logs fitted so tightly, that chinking is seldom necessary. The result of a long tradition of construction in the far north of Europe, they were designed to keep out the bitter winds. The settlers brought their broadaxes with them to Minnesota, and, more than that, skills perfected by necessity. Such a cabin, it seemed to us, would fit the point, for it would have tradition behind it, and in its soft grayness there would be no jarring note.

That description evoked our sauna: cabinetry writ rough and large. The first owner of such an outbuilding that Olson approached would not sell, but the next parted willingly, wondering why anyone would want to bother with such an old-fashioned hulk. Olson disassembled the old logs and rebuilt the cabin on his rocky point on Burntside Lake.

I also recalled the research of cultural geographer Matti Kaups. In the 1950s he had studied Finnish saunas in mining communities throughout the Lake Superior region, from the copper shafts of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to the iron pits of the Arrowhead. He described the typical Finnish-American farm sauna as eight by fifteen feet, constructed of squared logs, with two rooms inside, a window between them for a lantern to illuminate both the sauna and the dressing room, and passage outside from the dressing room. Ninety percent of Finnish-American farmsteads had a sauna (a higher percentage than farmsteads in Finland), and saunas were common at all types of Finnish residences. Kaups found that the sauna competed favorably with television as an evening activity among Finnish Minnesotans. While Finns were considered an obtuse, clannish lot in other neighborhoods of Minnesota iron ore towns, Kaups found them to be “most cordial and cooperative.”

I began the restoration of the structure by myself, ripping out the simple moldings, the wallboard, and the old studs. I removed the chimney brick by brick—a light tap of the hammer was all that was required to release the old mortar. One feature betrayed the economy of the original builders: When I removed the ceiling above the sauna room, I was showered with a mixture of stones and various materials that generations of squirrels had imported, stashed, processed, and forgotten. My predecessors had poured four inches of gravel between the rafters as insulation.

For the unpredictable task of jacking up the structure, I recruited my brother Tim, a man whose fearless mechanical skills I have always respected, if mostly from a safe distance. We had considered breaking down the building piece by piece, as Olson had done with his cabin. But we worried that the logs, once released from the structure, might warp or somehow need refitting. And in any case, the seventy-year-old roof only needed new shingles—ripping it apart would require much unnecessary effort. After several experiments, we ultimately used a single Hi-Lift jack, a larger version of the gadget that once inhabited the trunk of every American car. Alternating between the ends of the structure, we would insert the lip of the jack between the rotting lowest log and the log immediately above, jacking enough on one end to chock up the progress with cinder blocks before moving to the other. We strung winches to nearby trees to keep the structure from wandering horizontally, since with each upward tick of the jack, it wanted to lean. By sunset, the log structure rode high across two massive beams borrowed from our elderly neighbors, Merle and Fran, who had encouraged our progress all day long from nearby lawn chairs while draining a pitcher of whiskey sours.

Excavation for a new foundation came next. The sauna room had a concrete floor sloped to a drain, a necessary feature for a proper bath. I briefly contemplated removing that floor, which was perfectly intact. Noting after a few swings of the sledgehammer that the builders had embedded small-gauge train rails as rebar, I turned to a path of less resistance. It would be enough to cap it with another four inches of concrete, part of a new slab. I began digging around the perimeter of the sauna to make space for footings, but found them already there—football-sized stones buried beneath the walls. The Finns had built a mud sill—a base of large stones mortared with clay, something we non-Finns had never considered while mocking them for placing a log structure on the ground. Back in the day, Portland cement would have been hauled along logging trails from the rail stop at Rollins four miles away, and so was limited and saved for the floor of the bathing area; the materials for a mud sill were freely at hand. But seventy years of freezing and thawing, from the nineties in August to fifty-below in January, had quietly buried the mud sill, gravity’s r
elentless pull.

If water, vodka, and sauna does not help,
the condition is mortal.
—Finnish proverb

Heat, steam, and sweat have been essential components of bathing traditions and rituals in many cultures. Most indigenous North Americans used some variant of the sweat lodge. The Anishinabe of the Lake Superior region heated stones on a fire outside a small wigwam before bringing them inside. This soft-sided sauna had ceremonial, therapeutic, and spiritual uses. The anthropologist Frances Densmore described a four-stone arrangement, with three providing the base for the fourth, a red-hot orb etched with an ancient face—a messenger to deliver one’s appeal through the hot vapor to the other side. Not surprisingly, such traditions are most pronounced among residents of the high plains and taiga—the subarctic evergreen forests of North America and northern Eurasia. One can imagine the formidable psychological hedge that such an institution would supply against a hyperborean winter. The simple power of a community to not only repel but vanquish the long dark season with ritual might even be vital. But how that leads to a desire to plunge into icy water requires a deeper understanding.

The details may vary, but the activity is simple: heat rocks above a vigorous flame. Throw water on them. Sweat hard. Cool off, either with a swim, a shower, or a roll in fresh snow (for the uninitiated, the sensation is like rolling in flour). Repeat until you can endure no more. The sense of well-being and peaceful sleep that follow are unmatched. My preference is for a wood-fired stove (rather than an electric element, a modern corruption), untreated cedar-paneled walls, and a swim afterwards, as long as the lake is ice-free. Maybe a few drops of birch oil in the water to be poured on the rocks, which lends a bracing freshness to the blast.

The right stones are important—in our case, smooth, palm-fitting Lake Superior beach stones—and the more the better, heated thoroughly so that they will produce steam even after the fire has died. The earliest Finnish sauna, and the most authentic to contemporary purists, is the smoke sauna, which features an open central fire, stones generously piled within. There is no chimney; the smoke fills the room and is vented through the walls or roof, and the participants don’t enter until the smoke has cleared. The walls become sooty, but soot helps to scrub the skin and the smoke-cured interior is said to flavor the experience.

As I sifted through the sparse literature on saunas, I was pleased to find a map locating extant structures from the eighteenth century. All but one of these were in Finland, the exception being a smoke sauna at a hembygdsgården (homestead museum) in a village in western Sweden. This was a remarkable coincidence for me: Twenty years ago, a few weeks after my high school graduation, I had visited that very site. During that visit to relatives in Gräsmark, the old Swedes, who were my grandmother’s age, told me that the museum’s farmhouse was the childhood home of my great-grandfather Karl Hagberg, who had emigrated in the 1890s. Was it possible that he and his family were Finns? That something within me had been the target of all those “finlander” jokes I had heard as a kid?

Reenter Matti Kaups. His research suggests that the experience of Finnish settlers in the colony of New Sweden along the shores of the Delaware River in the seventeenth century was deeply engraved upon American backwoods colonization thenceforth. His primary evidence is an examination of frontier log structures across two continents, from the bog-edges of northern Europe to the hardwood forests of middle America. The architectural forebears of the American log cabin are scattered throughout the interior of Finland and the Swedish highlands. Kaups explains that a particularly zealous variety of Finnish homesteader (their Finnish name, kirvesmiehet, means “ax wielders”) was recruited by the Swedish crown, initially to settle the desolate mountain forests of Sweden. It turns out that the Gräsmark museum’s mission is to preserve this Finnish cultural imprint on the landscape in the heart of western Sweden’s mountain forest—the Finnskog. In other words, my Swedish great-grandfather was actually a closeted Finn.

Finns began emigrating to northeastern Minnesota in the 1880s, when the discovery of rich iron veins in the Lake Superior uplands transformed a wilderness into a serpentine collection of settlements called “locations,” kindling townsites built for the swelling population of miners and their families. (Gilbert is among the few that survived.) America’s westward progress was already running up against the Pacific, but this undeveloped region had been left in its wake. The Arrowhead rides the southernmost lobe of the Canadian Shield, the bedrock heart of North America, and it bears no resemblance underfoot to Minnesota’s rolling prairie and its basement of rich, black soil.

Norwegians, Germans, and Swedes fueled the agrarian settlement of Minnesota. Finns, along with Croats, Serbs, and Italians, arrived with the region’s extractive economy—first in upper Michigan’s copper mines during the Civil War, then west into Minnesota’s Iron Range.

Finns were also the region’s ethnic scapegoat. I grew up with “finlander” jokes, a species that amused those unfamiliar with the Arrowhead for its sheer improbability. “How many finlanders does it take to build a mine shaft? Who cares, they’re cheaper by the dozen.” Few had ever contemplated a Finnish brand of Americana, any more than they imagined Sibelius scoring the Three Stooges. But Finnish-Americans helped bring Duluth a socialist mayor in 1904. Gus Hall, the perennial Communist candidate for U.S. president, was a Finn from the Iron Range. Finns were perpetual outsiders milling at the edges of Scandinavian outposts, and there was discord. In 1920, a Wright County farmer brought suit against his Finnish neighbors to disband their use of a sauna as a “pagan temple.” In 1918, a Duluth mob frothing with patriotic fervor tarred, feathered, and lynched a Finnish socialist named Olli Kinkkonen, whose simple headstone is inscribed “Victim of Warmongers.” These incidents were the manifestation of a deep cultural fissure.

Finns were as likely to work the forests as the mines. They also doggedly farmed the Arrowhead’s thin soil, founding communities where wolves, caribou, and moose had roamed: Palo, Makinen, Toimi, Toivola, Esko. They seldom mixed with their neighbors. Finnish is incomprehensible to a Swede or a Norwegian, while Swedish and Norwegian are linguistic siblings. Finland seldom knew self-rule, passing mostly beneath the competing shadows of the Swedish and Russian empires until the twentieth century.

In America, Finns founded mercantile cooperatives where Finnish was spoken and a family could acquire everything from diapers to caskets. These co-ops sold to Finnish miners who had been blacklisted by local merchants following strikes and other uprisings. The fields of those who farmed yielded bumper crops of football-sized stones every spring, heaved high by the frozen extremes of winter. But the farms were consciously self-sufficient.

Most of these people did not seek riches. To the contrary, Finnish Apostolic Lutherans extolled the virtues of agrarian life as an escape from the ruthless cash economy of the mines. Finns were among the most literate of immigrants of the early twentieth century, yet they had the lowest-paying jobs. What they sought was escape from the shadow of Russians, Swedes, and now Yankees; they cared about autonomy. Saturday nights, in the depth of dark winter, they gathered in their hand-hewn log buildings to bathe, launder the aches of another week’s toil, and sit at the hearth of a chosen community. From our current perch, that seems at the very least modest, sustainable, and noble.

The sauna on my family’s property had clearly been the result of a thrifty form of
prosperity. It was built in the 1930s from wieldy red trunks of local cedar, with effort and time, by skilled hands using tried and trusted tools. But what mystery is that? This was the Great Depression in northern Minnesota, a boom-and-bust mining outpost, and the state of the national economy demanded little in the way of lumber or iron ore. I don’t know precisely how the Finnish-American business owners of our cabin fared during those times, but they were probably living lean. Maybe the breadwinner was clinging to a good railroad job. Or maybe they had nothing but time on their hands. But they owned a leisure property, a lakeside parcel that they acquired in 1931 from the company that had logged the Cloquet River Valley for forty years. And I like to think that in times of short work, this family devoted themselves to improving their retreat. Eventually, they sold the property to my grandparents and moved to Florida, exchanging the sauna for the beach.

For there ain’t nothin’ here now to hold ’em.
—Bob Dylan, “North Country Blues”

I tacked new shingles on the roof during a rare May scorcher, struggling not to inhale the cloud of black flies that hovered in my lee while a hot wind blew off the lake. Tim and I moved the heavy stove back inside on the freshly cured concrete. The remaining jobs were mostly things I could do by myself. I framed the sauna room around the stove, which was aglow again by winter. The new internal wall had no chimney at all—its slender steel replacement went straight through the roof. Inside the tightly puzzled log walls, I installed paneling and built benches from cedar grown in Idaho and hauled from Duluth atop my Swedish car. Meanwhile, the county paved the final six miles of a gravel road leading to our lake. Times had changed.

As had my awareness of my great-grandfather’s origins. I have long enjoyed and respected the products of Finnish culture: Sibelius’s Valse Triste during a calm summer sunset in the lake country; the playful fling of Saarinen’s Gateway Arch; the way a Nokia feels in your hand—and the idea that everyone should, every once in a while, get naked and sit together in a hot room until they can’t stand it anymore. But I still don’t seem to quite believe this revelation about my roots. You never really expect to become “the other,” even if you fancy it. Anyway, in America, the other eventually becomes you. The larger part of ethnic identity ultimately succumbs to a desire for more of the same. Someone eventually builds a better TV. (Perhaps, even, a better sauna: According to Matti Kaups, Hammacher Schlemmer sold a build-it-yourself sauna in 1963 for $2,395, more than our project cost at the turn of the millennium.)

Our old sauna sits refreshed, its decay forestalled for a few more generations. The stove burns hot enough to vigorously boil your average melting pot. Last July, a family reunion brought all of the cousins of my generation and their kids to the lake for an afternoon. They arrived in a downpour, and we all packed into the cabin for an hour as the humid summer storm lashed the pines. The sauna smoked down by the lake, baking the stones. Eventually, nine of us clambered onto the benches, only three adults among a pack of boys. Other than me, this crowd was all from Oklahoma, expatriates.

We enjoyed the implacable dry heat for a while, adjusting slowly to the relatively mild temperature of a hundred and fifty degrees. “Let’s call this one Duluth, maybe once a summer when the wind’s not blowing off the lake,” I said, tossing the first ladleful of water onto the stove. The rocks clicked, popped, and sighed heavily. Everyone braced, and the littlest ones scooted to the lower bench. We eased our way toward the idea of two ladles: “Definitely Dallas in August,” said the twelve-year-old, picking up the thread. Four ladles conjured Monterrey at midday while sipping habañero soup; you draw a steady breath before the sear hits you, exhale slowly, and turn inward while it passes. Minutes elapsed, everyone quiet, but all still accounted for. “Next stop Mercury,” I warned, tossing the bucket as six boys ran screaming for the clear and cool lake, feet thundering down the dock.

Unlike previous generations, who must have been chronically dehydrated by comparison, many young people today feel a need to carry around their own personal water supply clipped to a backpack or a shoulder bag. They often use a brightly colored plastic bottle with a screw-on cap known by its ungraceful brand name: Nalgene.

These bottles had their genesis in the laboratory—literally. They were originally manufactured as containers for chemical reagents. In the 1970s, enterprising lab technicians pilfered them for camping trips, because they were durable, leak-proof, and less likely than other bottles to add a plasticky taste to water. Nalgene, now probably the world’s best-known bottle manufacturer, got wise to the trend and began marketing them through camping supply stores. For many years, only outdoor types used them, inexplicably wrapping them in duct tape.

Today these bottles and their knock-off competitors are everywhere. Midwest Mountaineering, the West Bank’s venerable adventure store, saw its Nalgene bottle sales more than double between 1999 and 2002. The company’s product line has grown from the standard milky-white bottle with a blue cap to a rainbow of sizes and colors in transparent polycarbonate Lexan plastic.

Glacier blue is Nalgene’s most recent top-selling color, they say; others include sage green, honey yellow, and ruby red. (The latter have the unfortunate effect of making people look as if they are carrying around a copious urine sample or some spare plasma.)

Eric, a grad student in conservation biology, fits the old guard to a tee, from his mud-spattered mountaineering boots to his purple fleece jacket and scruffy beard. During a break from an academic conference the other day, he said he started carrying a Nalgene bottle fifteen years ago, at a time when he was backpacking a lot. Today he gulps from a beat-up, small-mouthed, smoke-colored bottle. “The only things that matter to me are performance and function,” he said with a sniff. “I find the recent trend of sorority girls carrying these newer bottles around as fashion accessories totally annoying.” His own reasons for carrying water around are twofold: to reduce waste from disposable containers and to ensure he’s drinking water he has personally filtered.

Yalda, a skinny, affable pre-med student at the U, may be part of the madding crowd Eric disdains. Even at a Dinkytown coffeeshop, she was drinking from her own water stash. She admitted that she bought her bottle because she was taken with way it looked. “Orange is my favorite color,” she said. She drinks a lot of water each day in pursuit of her two favorite sports, karate and figure skating.

Are compulsive water-chuggers doing themselves any good? In recent years, most self-help regimens have encouraged relentless hydration, pushing at least eight eight-ounce glasses of water a day (dubbed “8×8”). Even in the up-is-down world of low-carbohydrate dieting, water consumption is considered key. The Atkins diet recommends “8×8” as a minimum water intake (alcoholic or caffeinated beverages don’t count). An experiment with “8×8” by this embarrassingly sedentary writer yielded only an early summer cold and heightened awareness of tile patterns in the restroom.

On the other hand, it is possible to get too much water. In the 2002 Boston Marathon, one runner over-hydrated to the point of creating a fatal sodium deficiency. And one study linked chemicals that can leach from hard plastics to chromosomal damage in mouse eggs, leading one manufacturer to recommend hand-washing bottles with mild detergent to slow their deterioration.

Even if the mice give up the habit, the plastic-bottle trend may just be getting started. One vendor of customized tchotchkes told me that Wal-Mart recently ordered twenty-five million Lexan bottles from a Chinese manufacturer; that’s roughly one bottle for every eleven Americans, so drink up!—Dan Gilchrist

Finally, I’ve discovered Shannon Olson, local author of the novel/memoirs Welcome to My Planet and Children of God Go Bowling, and I’m in love. I am in love because she’s hilarious, because meeting her and hearing her read her work inspired me to write about ugly, touchy subjects in my last column (which always scares me, but a lot of you said you liked it), and finally, because she said I have nice hair, which made me happy at the end of a long, arduous day. And I’m in love with Shannon for the same reason I love a memoir in general, and for the same reason others hate them: It’s personal.

What I’m still reveling in after reading Shannon’s books—which I did over a weekend—is the delicious, guilty pleasure of eating up so many private details about another real woman my own age. I love that she picks at her toes and that her ex-boyfriend would catch her in the act, surprising her with the greeting, “Hey, little picker!” I love her for sharing this unflattering detail. This stuff is rare in everyday life, where we take care to guard the fragility of the truths and lies within ourselves, and with those we love.

I recently had a frightening beauty emergency that Shannon could relate to. The only person who knew (until now) is my sister, because she’s the one who got so excited about waxing products. I’ve only ever waxed my legs, and then only infrequently, so I’m not sure what (other than big sister’s voice in my head) possessed me to slap leg wax on my face to see how smooth it would make my skin. To make matters worse, I attempted to treat the stunningly immediate and painful breakout with the same brand of zit-zapper I used at thirteen. Apparently my adult skin had grown a little more sensitive, judging by the intense chemical burn I inflicted on myself.

I could go on, but the extent of my vanity is already embarrassing enough. People I know looked at me oddly but apparently didn’t know what to say, so I let them wonder. By the time I called my sister, we both laughed until we cried, which is what somebody like Shannon does for me in the dark of night. It’s comforting to know that other people have outrageous experiences, however inane they may be.

Do you remember Harriet the Spy, the eponymous girl detective who spied on her neighbors not to solve crimes, but out of sheer curiosity? She had a roster of homes whose windows she peered into, taking notes on the inhabitants’ activities; at one home she even hid in a household dumbwaiter on a regular basis. Harriet was my girlhood hero. I tried to emulate her for a while, creating a “route” of my own and talking my friend into being my partner, until her father warned us that we could get arrested for being peeping Toms. I retired my route, but never really stopped watching other people.

Years ago, a friend told me about being pregnant and waking up ravenous in the predawn hours one night. The cupboards were bare and she woke her husband to ask him to run out and get her an egg sandwich. He refused, and she hit him with a lint brush. She was ashamed, of course, but still she laughed in delayed rage and hysteria as she told the story. Another acquaintance announced once at a New Year’s party that her husband’s midnight kiss had been accompanied with the plea that they have sex more than twelve times in the coming year. I collect these small confessions like unusual bits of sea debris and store them away to examine, sometimes decades later, in the search for what is normal. These oddities are the great treasures of human connection, and it’s storytellers like Olson who bring them to light.

Books give us a singular brand of unobstructed access to the inner dialogue of one or more characters. They offer carte blanche entrée to somebody else’s inner life. Films can’t offer this, at least not nearly to the same degree. Cheesy devices such as voice-overs can’t plumb the depths of the human psyche the way countless pages of well-crafted rumination and narration can (and if a movie tried, we probably wouldn’t put up with it very long).

But writers like Anne Lamott, David Sedaris, and our own Shannon Olson, not to mention serious, breathtaking talents like Dorothy Allison, and tons of others I don’t have time to read—these writers attack topics as diverse as elastic-waisted pants, colic, and childhood sexual abuse, opening the doors wide to anyone who dares to walk in and pull up a chair. They’re the next best thing to Harriet’s route, and perfectly legal. You’ve gotta love ’em.

Is St. Paul Irish? Mostly not—there is an embarrassment of Lutherans and Germans—but that doesn’t stop the city from promoting a credible St. Paddy’s Day parade. Since the capitol city pulls off this stunt each March without a hitch, why shouldn’t it also decide, now and again, to become the seat of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire? Denise Kapler sees no reason why not. She has twice transformed the Landmark Center into the summer palace of Emperor Franz Joseph, for an event called the Viennese Ball.

The same skeptic who asks what is Irish about St. Patrick’s Day in St. Paul might be forgiven for wondering what is Viennese about the Viennese Ball. It turns out that St. Patrick’s Day is the wrong model. These Viennese folks are more like Trekkies, “except we’re going back in time, not forward,” Kapler pointed out a couple of days after this year’s ball. Viennese Balls have been popping up all over the country, attracting an itinerant following with a devotion to historical authenticity that can only be found in people pretending to be someone else. “The Viennese Ball has a lot of historical significance. We’ve done a lot of research to find out exactly what we have to do,” said Kapler. The requirements are daunting: rich, heavy foods, a lot of costumes, and speaking in the passive voice. Last year’s ball was a particularly good one. Kapler even snagged a real archduke. Though he holds no actual title in his native Austria (no empire, remember), Emperor Franz Josef’s great-grandson Markus Salvator von Habsburg-Lothringen regains his station on St. Paul soil. He exerts his considerable influence primarily on the dance floor.

Some of the pressure for authenticity rests on the shoulders of another person with identity issues. Giving his name only as “Klecko,” the production manager of St. Agnes Bakery admits his real name might sound Irish. I visited the cavernous bakery the day before the ball to see what he had prepared for the royalty. The most astonishing loaves—yes, bread can be astonishing—were what Klecko called “the visuals,” which would not be eaten. The fifty or so visuals included Polish sourdough wheels of about two feet in diameter called sun breads, with pumpernickel and flax seed in patterns on the top. Several pale loaves of single-time sourdough of about three feet in length were each studded with four rounds of raisin pumpernickel in a row on the top. Four is a lucky number in Austria, explained Klecko, “and there are a lot of superstitions in the bread.”

The bread that would actually wind up on the table was simpler, but the standards of authenticity, Klecko learned, are tougher. Rolling a rack of dinner rolls out of the proofer, he noted the aroma. “Seventy percent of the moisture in this dough is beer,” he said, “To the Germans, that’s like going home.” But at last year’s ball, he noted, the ethnic judges declared the rolls were a half-ounce too big.

Klecko, however, is no stranger to imperial and dynastic pressures in the kitchen. In his twenty-three years of baking (he looks about twenty-five), he has baked wild-rice sourdough for Mikhail Gorbachev and dinner rolls for the New York Yankees. He’s catered for the notoriously choosy Steve Tyler, the wide-mouthed singer of Aerosmith, who Klecko says was once a baker himself. Klecko even developed the humidity-resistant brat buns for the Xcel Center.

While pseudonyms are built on careers like this, Klecko reflected for just a moment about the pitfalls of fame in wholesale baking. “Who wouldn’t want to bake for the New York Yankees? But if you mess up they can have you hung.” Such are the risks of working with ersatz royalty.—Joe Pastoor

“Why?” is the one question that no longer matters in Hollywood, ignored by marketing-oriented studios that need not think beyond “when,” “who,” and “what.” The answer to “when” is simple enough: Formulaic romances get released in the spring, loud blockbusters in the summer, light-hearted comedies in the autumn, and award-hopefuls in the winter. “Who” is a no-brainer: The roster of today’s A-listers, from Cruise to Hanks to Witherspoon, could be recited by most ten-year-olds. “What” has become more compartmentalized than ever, reduced to the rigid genres of action, thrillers, romances, epics, comedies, or hybrids thereof.

That the question “why?” has faded into oblivion is particularly apparent during the annual onslaught of blockbuster season. Why did Troy neglect the scope and context of Homer’s Iliad? Why did The Stepford Wives reduce its ambitions to slapstick and one-liners? Why did anyone think a three-cell daily comic strip warranted Garfield: The Movie? There are no answers because these questions were never seriously asked. Sure, studios figured out who should star in Troy in order to attract the teenage girls, when Stepford Wives should be released to maximize exposure, and what tone should be used in Garfield to pacify families. After (or before) all that, why ask “why?”

Obviously, profits have always dominated the industry’s decisions, but in recent years the situation has intensified considerably. Because movie studios now take a greater percentage of ticket sales in the first weekend of a film’s run, the industry is now obsessed with a profit window of mere days. There was a time when films had weeks and months to find an audience and make an impact. Now films are marketed to maximize their opening-week grosses, and are declared successes or failures by the second day of their opening weekend.

This condensed world of the one-week hit has no room for the artistic question of “why?” It carries too much financial risk, and can easily throw off the reliable rewards of a solid what-who-and-when plan. Honestly, think about it: If a movie studio got pitched on a romance starring Brad Pitt to be released on Valentine’s Day, would the film’s story, let alone its reason to exist, really matter? Modern mainstream cinema is like those tawdry confections turned out by grocery-store bakeries: It’s all about the frosting, with the cake an afterthought at best.

It is no surprise, then, that remakes and sequels figure more prominently than ever in today’s Hollywood. Financially, they are the sure bets, drawing on the success of earlier works and guaranteed to attract some level of interest with minimal advertising. Just consider this partial list of 2004 sequels and remakes: Barbershop 2, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, Dawn of the Dead, The Ladykillers, The Whole Ten Yards, Van Helsing, Shrek 2, The Stepford Wives, Around the World in 80 Days, Spider-Man 2, Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, The Chronicles of Riddick, Before Sunset, Exorcist: The Beginning, Taxi, Shall We Dance?, The Ring 2, and Ocean’s Twelve, among others.

But I’m still compelled to ask the dreaded “why” this month: Why remake The Manchurian Candidate? Of all the classics to be remodeled and reissued, why this one, and why now?

Director Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) and screenwriter Dean Georgaris (Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life) surely see aspects in the original that lend themselves to an update. The 1962 film, based on the Richard Condon novel, stars Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra as Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw and Major Bennett Marco, two American soldiers brainwashed by Chinese communists during the Korean War. Shaw is unwittingly programmed to carry out an assassination and sent home; Marco becomes aware of the plot and must try to stop his friend. The most obvious of Demme’s revisions are substituting the 1991 Gulf War, changing the enemies from one-dimensional communists to evil-doing terrorists, altering the film’s most prominent female role from senator’s wife Angela Lansbury to vice president Meryl Streep, and using a black actor—Denzel Washington—for the Sinatra role.

Those revisions may be all well and good, but in tone and feel, this remake will almost surely fall short of the original (which is being released on DVD this month). Its trailer pitches the 2004 Candidate as a thriller—the countdown to an assassination—timed perfectly for mid-summer. While this is enough to answer Paramount’s what, who, and when, it misses the intangibles that liberated the 1962 version and allowed it to transcend the ordinary.

I continue to be amazed by the original. Here is a film that does not spoon-feed, but trusts us to keep pace. Through Shaw’s stepfather, a senator obsessed with communism and a clear satire of Joseph McCarthy, Candidate portrays the equal perils of both communism and the illogical national hysteria it inspired. Shaw’s mother, Mrs. Iselin (Lansbury), manipulates both her husband and son into unwittingly supporting a communist plot, allowing the film to turn the tables on gender roles, familial iconography, politicians, and the naiveté of blind patriotism.

I am also swept up in the assured style of then-young director John Frankenheimer, who never again attained the success he found here. In Candidate he strikes a balance between the realistic side of the film’s story and the surreal, expressionistic depiction of Shaw’s distorted worldview; he also creates a seamless union between the populist conventions of a thriller, such as the story’s assassination sequence in Madison Square Garden, and biting, acerbic commentary, as when Senator Iselin uses a Heinz ketchup bottle to arrive at the figure of fifty-seven communists in the State Department. Looking again at the film, you could say that Frankenheimer is, in fact, urging us to ask “why?” in regard to communist dangers and conspiratorial plots. You could also say he was almost too successful, prophesizing a culture that would soon be overcome with Kennedy’s assassination and its attendant conspiracy theories, the growing debacle in Vietnam, Cold War fears (and fear-mongering), and cynicism bred by corrupt leaders.

The original Candidate also has stood the test of time, in that today it calls up a whole new generation of references. Iselin’s manipulation of her husband and the press parallels Vice President Dick Cheney’s behind-closed-doors manipulation of the Bush White House and the administration’s unprecedented cleverness in staging photo ops. The very nature of “brainwashing” suggests the rewriting of past and future, and links curiously to today’s unblemished canonizing of Ronald Reagan. And Iselin’s plan to use the threat of terrorism as a tool for the communist cause is eerily reminiscent of the jingoistic speeches from politicians and pundits during the months and years after 9/11.

Granted, it’s possible that Demme could give us a film that comments on overreactions to terrorism, tears down our elected officials, implicates the American government in collaborating with terrorists—and conveys all this while keeping us on our toes with a fresh visual approach and style. But given the promotions of his version and the current state of the Hollywood movie machine, not to mention the general tone that prevails in post-9/11 America, it’s doubtful that such relevance will emerge from 2004’s Candidate.

There’s also something intangible that goes awry with many remakes, a shortcoming that was most evident in Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Psycho. Van Sant updated Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece using a faithful, shot-by-shot methodology. Yet even with the same dialogue, story, and camerawork, he failed to recapture the power of what Hitchcock did with temptation, greed, guilt, and murder. It’s one of the most interesting failures in the history of film, proving that something is to be said for t
he metaphysical “being” of a film. There is something alive in the expression of a new vision that cannot be replicated in a remake. Really, is there any way that The Manchurian Candidate in 2004 can have the same spontaneity and impact?

This remake in particular angers me because nothing constructive can come of it. The original film strived to break the mold and buck the very system that is now remaking it. Given its timing and its position as a commercial work of escapism, the story that once rose above its structure will now be pressured to stay in line with formulas and expectations. Will terrorism be explored in equal proportion to communism, or the plotting of 2004 neo-conservatives to that of 1962 anticommunist government officials? Instead of remaking Candidate, I’d love Demme to take the current news of war, terror, and corruption and apply it to a new story that could carve its own path, much like Three Kings’ balance of action sequences and war profiteering, Wag The Dog’s mix of comedy and media commentary, and even The Terminal’s light-hearted laughs at the expense of the Department of Homeland Security.

I know why this film is being remade. It fits the industry’s needs and financial projections. I just think it’s sad that the innovative original will be obscured by this more marketable remake. Rather than why, maybe it’s time to tackle “how”: How can we turn this trend around? Like any good capitalist, I’d suggest starting with your wallet.

Most Americans depend on faraway countries for their fuel; Paul Michalke depends on Quang Deli in Minneapolis. Michalke, a cheery and energetic man who publishes trade-show directories, siphons used cooking oil from a dumpster in the alley behind Quang’s, a popular Vietnamese restaurant on Nicollet Avenue. Later, in his garage in South Minneapolis, he converts the grease into gas and uses it in his 2001 Volkswagen Jetta.

Michalke makes biodiesel by adding methanol, lye, and a little elbow grease to the oil. The end product is an egg roll-scented, biodegradable fuel that performs a lot like standard diesel. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, biodiesel emits nearly fifty percent less carbon monoxide than standard diesel. It costs Michalke less than fifty cents a gallon.

Initially, friends thought he was crazy, especially when he decided to test homemade biodiesel on his new Jetta. “They said, ‘Can’t you try it out on a lawnmower?’” Michalke recalled. “But there aren’t many lawn mowers around with diesel engines.” Although he admitted he was “scared as hell” when he first poured biodiesel into his car three years ago, it has led to trouble-free, economical driving ever since. Michalke worries about high fuel prices only in the winter, when it is too cold to use his stir-fried diesel. Most biodiesel begins to congeal at around thirty degrees, whereas standard diesel stays liquid well below zero. (On the upside, biodiesel exhaust contributes almost no greenhouse gases and smells like popcorn.)

Michalke learned the basics of home production from Joshua Tickell’s how-to-book From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank. Tickell told me his book has sold about twenty thousand copies, and estimated that twenty percent of his readers have tried to make biodiesel at home.

Homemade biodiesel is unlikely to catch on in the United States, since only one percent of U.S. automobiles have diesel engines. And of course most people would be afraid of killing themselves or ruining their cars. But Michalke swears that Tickell’s book puts home brewing within reach of even the most clumsy garage chemist. “It’s like a cookbook with pretty pictures,” he said. “It’s like making brownies.”

In fact, the biggest challenge may be asking ethnic restaurant owners for their used oil. “It was hard to explain what I wanted because of the language barrier,” Michalke said of his first grease run to a Chinese restaurant. “When they finally understood me, one girl looked at me like I was an idiot and said, ‘Why don’t you go to a gas station?’”

After filtering out any bean sprouts or bamboo shoots, Michalke takes a titration to determine how much lye he will need. He then dissolves the lye in four gallons of methanol. At ninety-nine dollars for fifty-five gallons, methanol is Michalke’s biggest expense, but that is enough to make about 250 gallons of biodiesel. Methanol also presents the biggest danger, especially when it combines with lye to form a hot, flammable, and corrosive mixture. Michalke mixes the two wearing rubber gloves and a gas mask, making him look more doughboy than environmentalist.

Once the lye dissolves in the methanol, Michalke pours the solution into a plastic barrel with twenty gallons of used vegetable oil. An enormous fish-tank heater keeps the mix above seventy degrees, and a mixer attached to a drill stirs it for an hour. Then the mixture sits overnight (most of the process involves waiting). In the morning, about twenty-three gallons of biodiesel have separated and are floating on top of the by-product, glycerin. Each batch of fuel will keep his Jetta running for 830 miles.

“I got into this because I wanted to leave as small a footprint as possible, and to live simply without being a Luddite,” Michalke explained as he washed the grease out of his jugs. Like other biodiesel folks, Michalke tends to be obsessive about doing good, minimizing pollution, and eliminating waste. Holding a sludgy mass of soap, he said proudly, “I made this from the leftover glycerin!”—Matt Dueholm

On a typical workday, Jeff Speed arrives at work at six-thirty in the morning. He has half an hour to climb twenty stories up to the little capsule where he works, which is at the top of a crane. He brings food with him—with only half an hour for lunch, there is no time to climb down, then back up again. While his fellow construction workers use Port-a-Pottys down on the ground, he keeps a jar up in the crane for nature’s call. “You learn not to drink too much coffee,” his site supervisor joked.

Speed has been running equipment on construction sites for twenty-five years. His training was not formal; he says he just got lucky. He started by operating smaller machinery—bulldozers, forklifts—and then had the good fortune to be around when someone needed him to operate something larger and threw him in front of the controls. He gradually moved on to bigger and bigger machinery, until he found himself two hundred feet off the ground. He’s been operating cranes for about fifteen years.

The first time was a thrill, he said, but now, “It’s kind of second nature.” He’s not always in the tall cranes; it depends on the job. He still operates forklifts and bulldozers sometimes; “I do whatever needs to be done.”

But if a crane is being used on a site, Speed is usually the one in it. “It’s hard to find good crane operators,” said Mark Brown, the superintendent at the construction site of the new Guthrie Theater. “Everyone is dependent on them.” The Guthrie has two tall cranes, including the one run by Speed, which daily perform a careful pas de deux.

Each carries heavy loads from one side of the site to another, delivers construction materials to workers on the upper floors of a building, keeping everyone working by keeping them supplied with what they need. The crane operator, in turn, is dependent on riggers on the ground, who strap on the materials and let the operator know via walkie-talkie when things are ready to be moved.

It’s a lot of stop-and-go, Speed said; sometimes everybody wants him at once, and he finds himself working through breaks, even skipping lunch. Other times, there may be a long lull when he’s not needed. “I read a book, I read a magazine,” he said. He keeps all of that stuff with him up in his miniature glass office.

Speed said he’d always wanted to operate machinery. He started on earth movers at age fourteen. “I like the challenge of being able to control something, I guess.” He appeared to set his mind on the problem from another angle, then stopped. “I’ve never really thought about why I do it. I just do it.”

His only complaint about the job is the erratic hours. He never knows in advance how long he’ll be at work. He could be stuck for fourteen hours, or he could get rained out and find himself unemployed for a week. His pay rate also varies—the taller the crane, the more he earns. Not all construction sites require the tallest kind of crane. “It’s hard to schedule life around work,” he said.

Overall, though, Speed is happy with his job, and seems to have a natural affinity for it. “You have to get to know the equipment,” he said. “You don’t want its movements to be clunky like a machine. You want them smooth. You have to control it like it was your own arm.”—Katherine Glover