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In a few weeks I’m boarding a van in the middle of the night with the man I love and five of the six children we share to drive for fifteen days from Minneapolis to Lake Ontario and back again. We’re going to take the S.S. Badger car ferry across Lake Michigan, ride a dune buggy on the gorgeous sands of Silver Lake, don raincoats and hats to feel the drenching raw power of Niagara Falls on the Maid of the Mist, spend a few nights in a rustic cabin on a remote privately owned island in Lake Ontario, parasail on Lake Huron, eat fudge on Mackinac Island, and pay homage to the greatest lake of all as we wend back home via Highway 2 along Superior, hitting Bayfield and Duluth on the way.

I hope I get some good stories out of the deal, because I can tell you that despite the thrills and overconsumption of fun and fuel, none of us are going to “find what we’re looking for” as we paddle toward the sea any more than we find it sitting in traffic on University Avenue. This truth goes back to the disillusionment of cactus and dust and angry bees on a summer day in childhood.

I was nine, living on the outskirts of Casper, Wyoming, with nothing but a six-foot cedar fence standing between my backyard and the wild open expanse of sagebrush, tumbleweeds, and prairie dogs leading up to the foothills of Casper Mountain, which loomed purple in the distance. Mostly this arid landscape was flat and uninspiring to a girl who’d not so long ago left the rocky majesty of Lake Superior.

I started riding my bike out behind the fence, as far as I could go in one direction and then another, learning to notice the humble beauty of various cacti and flora. And one day, I stumbled on the impossible, the wondrous: a gorge in the land, with two steep walls and a bottom, along which a pitiful but real trickle of water inched sluggishly along.

A hill, a stream—it clutched my heart with buried memories of home. I wanted to claim it, stick a flag in the ground, make it mine forever. It would be my secret place, my personal canyon, where I’d commune with the big sky and beyond. I’d return the next day to spend the whole afternoon, alone with myself and the world, snug in the safe crevice of earth that had found me at last.

I did return, my bike basket laden with the picnic I’d packed for a day in paradise. My heart thumped with anticipation and the happy exertion of the ride. Hot noon sun pounded down on me as I unloaded my goods and hauled them halfway down the dirt slope, scoping out a little bare spot to sit. I chewed a few dry bites of a peanut butter and honey sandwich, swallowing hard. I wasn’t really hungry, so I wrapped it back up and sipped orange juice from a plastic thermos. Sweat ran from my hairline into the corners of my mouth. The hard dirt was uncomfortable, the sun punishing, the cacti pokey. I didn’t feel magical. I felt sticky and itchy and awkward and dense and I had no idea what to do next. But to leave so soon would be to fail, to admit I’d been duped, that fairylands were make-believe and our cardboard house with its tin shell and flooded basement and scabs and boils was real as bone. And then, on cue, the bees arrived, swarming in for the honey and juice, and I grabbed my stuff, kicked up the dusty slope and pedaled home, heavy with a disappointment I could never have named.

The mindful among us would say, “Wherever you go, there you are.” But could I have understood then what I want so dearly for my own kids to hear now? That as summer’s limitless possibilities start popping like soap bubbles in the air around them, and the panic sets in, and they scramble to fend off the loss with more of something—anything—that wherever they go, and whatever they buy—there they will be, that to feed a monster only makes it hungrier? That those who can’t find satisfaction from others must turn to things—goods and services, toys and travel—to fill the emptiness within? That as Jack Kornfield writes in After the Ecstasy, The Laundry, “Socrates, who lived a simple life, loved to go to the market. When his students asked about this, he replied, ‘I love to go and see all the things I am happy without’”?

That I grew up dirt poor and money is better, that the tin house is thousands of miles past, but I’m still here, that life is tough but they can love it anyway, and that they are never going to find what they are looking for in the mall or even behind the cedar fence because The Wizard of Oz is absolutely a true story and they should listen up as fast and often as they can.

Best known for the Hitchcock-filmed Strangers on a Train and her series of books about psychotic aesthete Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith was motivated by a muse of bitterness, amorality, and disgust—not necessarily a bad thing for a crime novelist. She died mostly forgotten in 1995, but a full-on revival is ongoing with this her most prominent year yet. Shadow is only one of three forthcoming biographies, and John Malkovich’s film version of her Ripley’s Game is garnering good reviews. Though Highsmith was highly intelligent and a terrific writer, Beautiful Shadow makes clear her many faults. She drank. She nursed a lifelong resentment of her mother (who had attempted to abort her by drinking turpentine). She could be mean-spirited, cheap, manipulative, and bigoted, so often unpleasant that even her admirers say things like “I liked her incredible bitchiness.” Of course, this makes her life story all the more compelling.

The Schell’s brewery is reached by way of a trucker’s nightmare: a narrow twisting ribbon of blacktop that snakes up a wooded hill to the top of the bluffs overlooking the Cotton River on the southern edge of New Ulm. Most of the original brick buildings remain, converted to a museum, a gift shop, and offices. The 1885 mansion serves as a special events facility. Peacocks and their mates strut the grounds and one, a cock named Freddy, announces the comings and goings of commercial vehicles with squawking of remarkable volume. Four whitetails still inhabit the deer park that was one of August Schell’s favorite diversions.

Jodi Marti is married to the great-great-grandson of August. Her official title in the company is a trade secret, but her duties include playing a delightful June Cleaveresque role as cheerful housewife to an entire brewery, taking on such tasks as dropping family recipes into press kits that make it clear why beer was once promoted as a digestive aid. Even if she dines regularly on “sausage-stuffed beef rouladen with beer sauce,” she stays fit maintaining the grounds and gardens with the help of staffer Tammy Anderson. On the morning of my visit, Anderson pointed out the favorite basking spots of the garter snakes who populate the formal gardens. Whimsical sculptures of gnomes play cards under a fieldstone gazebo. The odor of cooking wort from the brewery wafts overhead. What decent beer wouldn’t want a home in a place like this?

Over the years, a number of orphaned beers have come to the Schell’s doorstep, wrapped in blankets, looking for a place to ferment. Twenty-one different beers are now brewed there under contract, including worthy competitor James Page. And now Grain Belt Premium, the only other beer with as much Minnesota history behind it as Schell’s, has made its home there. But Grain Belt Premium is no contract-brewed foster child. Evidence of its full membership in the Schell family arrived on the day of our visit; two flatbed trucks came from St. Cloud bearing a pair of spanking-new stainless steel brewing vats dedicated exclusively to the production of Grain Belt Premium.

To chat about the recent acquisition, I met with Jodi Marti’s husband, Schell’s President Ted Marti. His oak-trimmed, wallpapered office is a remnant of the original August Schell residence now attached to the brewery building. Marti is a soft-spoken guy, a perfect spy in the John LeCarre sense—a man of such average appearance he might have trouble attracting a waiter’s attention in an uncrowded restaurant. But on this day he glowed with paternal pride on the subject of the four-ton cone-shaped vats that will brew nearly 200,000 bottles of GBP every five weeks. Brewmasters know them as “uni-tanks,” which means they are insulated to permit individual temperature regulation. After fermentation, yeast can be drawn off, leaving the beer to age and pre-finish in the same tank. Giant holes were cut in the brewery roof to admit this new state-of-the-art technology, but Marti said it’s worth it for the sake of the beer; older methods might involve as many as three tanks for a single batch. Fewer transfers means better beer.

“Whenever you move beer, there’s always a danger of harming it,” explained Ted Marti.
“Unless it’s moving from the bottle into the consumer,” I pointed out. The fifth-generation brewmaster quite agreed.

Here’s a sign you can post in your very own home or office. Now all you have to do is personally notify everyone who enters the premises, and you, too, can have your very own gun free zone.

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The menu at Bobino founder Chris Paddock’s latest eatery ranges widely over central and South America, but the central organizing concept comes from Brazil’s churrascaria steakhouses, slow-roasting beef on open-flame skewers. On our recent visit we sampled the picanha—one of Mojito’s signature fire-roasted meats rubbed with garlic—and the feijoada, a tasty stew of pork sausage, black beans, and orange. The wine list is replete with South American vintages, or you could quench your thirst with the restaurant’s namesake cocktail, the minty-sweet Cuban mojito. Price, while not unreasonable, are what you’d expect from a steakhouse, but those looking for a cheap date should try the specialty pizzas, which feed two for $9 to $10

We noticed about a year ago that Jeune Lune just goes from strength to strength—and being, you know, attuned to classical tragedy, we wonder if hubris will bring them back to Earth anytime soon. It seems nothing is too ambitious for this brilliant company, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to a Cirque du Soleil tribute to an honest-to-goodness knighthood bestowed by the French government a few weeks ago. Well, what else is there? Opera, of course—and why not go after the biggest and best known? (No, not Wagner. Please.) Can they pull it off? We’re not betting against them. Jeune Lune, 105 N. 1st St., (612) 333-6200, www.jeunelune.org

Seven years, sixteen cities, and up to a million theatergoers later, Triple Espresso’s caffeine high refuses to wear off. This three-man vaudevillian cabaret act, in fact, is among the most successful shows our town’s ever produced, still getting sellout crowds night after night for the laugh-a-minute antics of the has-been trio Maxwell, Butternut, and Bean. What’s the big deal? Simply put, it really is that funny. Oh, sure, it’s theatrical comfort food, occasionally naughty but never crossing the line into grandma-shocking. But if it doesn’t ask you to think, it does ask you to laugh—and you will laugh. The plot is a piffle, really, a mere skeleton for the complementing talents of Espresso’s three originators—the wry, Newhartesque Bill Arnold and his mock-incompetent magician’s tricks, Michael Pearce Donley’s smarmy lounge-lizard, and the goofy dumb-guy antics of Bob Stromberg, whose inspired gorilla imitation is one of the show’s highlights. Next on the Espresso agenda is a full-scale European invasion, starting with Hamlet’s turf—three Danish actors just finished rehearsing here in Minneapolis and are set to open the first-ever foreign-language version of the show later this summer in Copenhagen. Music Box, 1407 Nicollet Ave., 612-874-1100, tripleespresso.com