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Once a year the Prospect Park neighborhood opens the doors of the Witch’s Hat Tower. This 1912 landmark is visible from many vantage points in the Twin Cities owing to the fact that it sits atop one of the highest points within city limits. It was built because the homes perched in the immediate vicinity lacked water pressure at the turn of the last century. Whatever else may go on there in the way of witches’ covens and warlock’s circles, the tower’s interior is occupied mostly by a 155,000-gallon water tank that is no longer in use.

When it was decommissioned as a water tower in 1952, and struck by lightening a few years later, the city proposed tearing it down. By then, the community had come to view it as an irreplaceable icon that lent the neighborhood much of its charm. In a rare case of preservation defeating the urge to demolish, the city relented. The Tower was restored to its present state of glory. Before long, it bristled with radio antennae and cell-phone relays discretely positioned on, in, and under the hat.

Of course the tower’s main attraction is to children and childish adults who view it as a castle garret for the witch who lives there. (Only the most pedantic parent will insist that the tower is, in fact, named for the witch’s hat.) And the opening of the tower—which is secured by three doors and six locks—is accompanied by an impressive street fair that draws Twin Citizens from as far as you can see. This year, revelers stood in long lines not only to file up the narrow spiral staircase inside the tower, but to buy brats and upscale focaccia sandwiches, to watch a startling belly-dancing exhibition, and to commission face-paintings.

The Minneapolis Police dutifully manned a bike registration table. It was the only vacant attraction, and across the way, next to a moon-walk fully inflated in the middle of Malcolm Avenue, rowdy teenagers horsed around with an unregistered unicycle. Another small group of beltless boys tumbled head-over-heels through the steep underbrush below Tower Hill Park, screaming as if they were actually falling, or as if they were in a Jackass video. Heads turned.

Not all the horror was an act. Inside the tower, on the dark and dank and not entirely safe approach to the viewing platform, small children clutched at their parents. The narrow stairway would not admit two large adults passing, and many were disheartened at how hard the climb turned out to be. One woman failed to heed warning signs about low clearance, and she burst a wall-mounted light bulb with her forehead. There was a loud pop, glass fell, and children screamed. The bouncer at the door, a kindly retiree representing Prospect Park’s neighborhood association, speculated that admitting the public once a year may be too frequent.

At the south end of Minneapolis-St. Paul International airport, adjacent to an east-west runway, there is a single row of parking spaces off Post Road. This provides a vantage point to watch planes landing and taking off. If the weather is nice, a few planespotters congregate here among the loitering limo drivers and couriers who wait here for their next pickup. While thousands of south metro residents have installed expensive, elaborate soundproofing in order to forget their proximity to the airport, there are those who want to be as close to the roar of jets as they can be.

On a recent night, Phil from Richfield was one of several spotters—all guys in their 20s and 30s in need of a shave—who sat alone in their cars with aviation band radios. By switching between different frequencies for different runways and cross-referencing the chatter with a flight schedule, he figured out that the 727 landing just then was from Omaha. Beyond the raw appeal of watching these improbably huge vehicles get off the ground, the spotters said they find something reassuring in the buzz of commerce and recreation that plane traffic represents.

Birdwatchers get heart palpitations at the sight of a flame-colored tanager or a red-throated pipit. Do planespotters have similar epiphanies? Phil got a distant look in his eye when he recalled how six Blue Angels jets took off in unison on one MSP runway a few years ago, and another time—five years ago in Miami—when he watched a Concorde jet throttle up over the beach on which he was sunbathing. “That was incredible!” he said. “Of course, I’ve always been a plane junkie. I used to ride my bike here to watch planes when I was seven or eight. I’m 34 now.”

Phil’s interest in planes pervades his life. He was laid off as a baggage handler following the drop in air travel after September 11, but he was just recalled for duty. Any big plans after returning to work? “Maybe I’ll finally take some flying lessons,” he said with a wink from behind his aviator sunglasses.

Several spots down, Bill, a burly man in a sleeveless T-shirt, and his wife Sharon brought their two sons. They watched the planes from folding chairs in the back of their pickup. Bill explained that the airplane noise drowns out the sound of their TV set in their South St. Paul home, especially in the early evening. “So we figure we might as well come down and watch them,” he said, without a trace of irritation. They come to watch planes two or three times each week. The visits have recently taken on a near–ecstatic quality for the kids, who are looking forward to their first plane ride—destination Disney World—in a few weeks. “We like the planes ’cause they’re loud!” hollered one of the boys.

At least 10,000 whitetail deer will give their lives this year to auto-animal conflict, converting Minnesota’s roads into a 130,000-mile dinner table for a growing population of crows. Depending on when you count, Minnesota’s whitetail population rises to about 1.1 million (about 20 percent of the state’s human inhabitants) before the fall hunt. At a glance, roads are hardly a good deal for the whitetail, few of whom drive at all, but who suffer crash fatality rates at least 16 times that for Minnesota humans. So it makes sense that MnDOT is working to develop technology that might keep the critters off your hood in years to come. They’ve added an amber light to the top of existing “deer crossing” signs. Nearby motion sensors can activate the light via transmitters for about a minute at a time to warn drivers. If a two-year trial at three locations shows promise, the system could be deployed statewide.

In the meantime, the car-animal death match continues, and someone has to get rid of the leftovers. The Rake recently met with several Minnesotans who have stepped up to the job in the years since the DNR relinquished the responsibility in 1987.

Rick Johnson has contracted with counties (including Hennepin) and cities to dispose of whitetail road-kills for the past 12 years. “It’s really nothing special,” Johnson said modestly. “I have a winch and a truck and a board I put up to the back and throw the winch around the neck.” By lunchtime on the day we spoke, he had recovered six animals this way. Johnson strongly disapproves of local maintenance operations that simply stack the animals and mulch them with their woodchipping operations. It’s not unheard of for snowmobilers, for example, to collide with these above-ground graves, he said. “It’s disgusting.” MnDOT’s Kent Barnard states emphatically that MnDOT does not apply this disposal method to any road kill, but that it is approved by the Pollution Control Agency and may be practiced in some counties. MnDOT only uses landfills licensed to receive the animals, though in remote areas they can be dragged clear of the road and left for the benefit of scavengers. How does Rick Johnson honor the dead? He delivers about 1,000 deer each year to feed private collections of wolves, tigers, lions, and other predators, a route that puts 80,000 miles on his truck annually.

At the top of the food chain, humans rarely miss an opportunity for free meat. Out of 10,000 deer confirmed dead in traffic by the DNR, about 4,000 will be claimed with “possession permits,” available at no cost to folks who like to eat what they run over. At least one MnDOT employee admits having fed the family this way, and Kent Barnard promotes this use of unintended harvests. “What you call road kill, some folks call food,” he quipped, cautioning that penalties including vehicle forfeiture await those who bypass the permit process.

Closer to home, the victims are less likely to be supper than the family pussycat or pooch, which makes for a more delicate topic with Minneapolis Animal Control’s Bob Marotto. “We don’t refer to it as road kill,” Marotto recently said. “For us, we are dealing with ‘deceased animals.’ Obviously people have a close bond with their pets and we would absolutely never refer to them as road kill.” In Minneapolis, it’s Marotto’s sad task to impound 5,500 to 7,000 animals annually. In 2001, about 1,000 of them were pets killed in traffic. Marotto and his staff also undertake the job of owner notification, “One of the most difficult things we deal with.”

But for a chosen few creatures, the end of the road in Minnesota is also the launch of a more distinguished career—in modeling, naturally. The University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum holds one of the DNR’s handful of salvage permits, which allows Jennifer Menken and other museum staff to resurrect any dead animal for educational purposes. Current road kills on display are the raccoon in the museum’s touch-and-see room, and the popular “wing table,” which makes use of the flight anatomy when “the rest of the animal was too badly damaged,” said Menken. She noted that a wolf recently retired from the exhibit was also a rare road kill trophy. Eventually, said Menken, the wolf was “loved to pieces” by the 700 kids a day hosted by the museum in springtime—a kinder death, no doubt, than its first.

It’s been a year and a half since the passing of Mahlon Nickence, the best-known voice of WOJB-FM 88.9 in Reserve, WI. Since then, former program manager Dave Kellar has resumed hosting the Saturday honky-tonk show that brought Mahlon his notoriety.

On Saturday nights, the station’s switchboard still lights up an hour before the show goes on the air, with old-timers requesting songs by Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, and Wilma Lee, children asking for novelty tunes like “Funny Face,” and young lovers asking for the off-color John Prine-Iris DeMent duet “In Spite of Ourselves.”

Nine years ago Mahlon, a Korean War veteran and a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwes, began bringing suitcases full of his personal record collection into WOJB’s modest studio. He was trained in as a volunteer DJ by Kellar, but his popularity was due in part to the fact that the training never quite stuck. He missed needle drops, talked over the records, and he was sometimes hard to understand. If you didn’t know Mahlon was a lifelong teetotaler, you might have thought he’d had a nip or two. According to those who knew him well, his somewhat garbled speech was due to his refusal to wear his partial dentures on the air. “You’d hear him on the air and he’d make these mistakes and people loved it, because they said it was real,” said station manager Camille Lacapa recently. “They could relate to him because he was just like them. He made mistakes, and he laughed at his mistakes.”

Before taking over the honky-tonk show, Mahlon was well known on the reservation for his community work, including serving as its first fire chief. According to Bob Albee, a Minneapolis media professional who helped found WOJB 20 years ago, Mahlon’s broadcasts also helped “turn the hearts” of his fellow elders on the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation. They were skeptical and suspicious of the reservation’s radio station until they heard one of their own on the air, playing the old country songs they’d grown up with. By the time of his death, Mahlon had amassed a large and dedicated listenership among locals, both Indian and non-Indian, and among the thousands of hunters, anglers, mountain bikers, and cross-county skiers who flock to northwest Wisconsin throughout the year. Evelyn Nickence, who served as call-screener for the honky-tonk, said she and Mahlon would often get calls from Twin Cities residents who had driven north and east until they could pick up WOJB’s signal, then they’d pulled off the road, parked, and listened to the show.

I hadn’t smoked pot in more than a year, but why not? I’d just packed up and dragged everything I own 1,700 miles from Minneapolis to Seattle. Quite a daring move. I was feeling like Lewis and Clark in one, Amelia Earhart, a pirate even. A little marijuana? Peee-shaw. I huffed a huge drag. Unfortunately for me, the dope in Seattle is nothing like the dope in Minneapolis. I found myself embarking upon one of those harrowing journeys of acute self-examination.

Seattle sits just two hours from the border of British Columbia, where some of the most potent marijuana in the world is grown indoors with wicked scientific precision. “B.C. Bud,” as it’s known in these parts, shimmers with purple resin crystals and boasts a punch twice as lethal as that of competing varieties from northern California and Oregon, six times that of common Colombian and Mexican imports. The pot from our unassuming, aw-shucks neighbors to the north contains 30 percent THC, while bud from Mexico contains somewhere around 5. It’s like a revenge or something.

Penalties in Canada are low. Enforcement is laughable. One unit of the B.C. drug squad drives around in a recycled van with duct tape over whatever logo was once on its side. And despite America’s most hearty efforts, smuggling across the border (where price and demand immediately skyrocket) is pretty easy. This part of the world has too much water, too many islands, miles of undeveloped wilderness. The stuff comes across in duffel bags, trucks, car trunks, on snowmobiles and dog sleds, by boat, sea kayak, and jet ski.

The buzz felt great for the first half hour. Real jokey. I noted sharp ironies, fielded puns of modest hilarity, all the while looking into everything. Music sounded extra melodic. Apples with peanut butter tasted like ambrosia. This is so much better than drinking, I thought. On pot you just sit around munching and contemplating beauty. You don’t hang out the car window whacking mailboxes with a broom handle. I flipped through my CDs and came up with the Replacements’ Pleased to Meet Me.

The music from home played. “Alex Chilton,” “Shooting Dirty Pool,” “Skyway.” I perched on a plaid, garage-sale rocker and stared out the window. It had rained the day before. The sky was gray, streaked with hopeful wisps of almost–blue. I considered Seattle’s soggy climate, its long darknesses and lush, overgrown greenery. Moss clumps stuck to roofing like cheese. Frogs croaking in the fog. The culture here is centrifugal, remote, the best effort from the last outpost. Ideas don’t escape, they only spin round and round beneath thick cloud cover. People here don’t have children. They don’t go to church. They don’t protest injustice. They read books, drink espresso, make art, cut their bangs too short, and smoke super-bionic pot. Craziness like seeds in fertile ground.

What am I doing here? Suddenly, with broiling romanticism, I longed for Leinenkugel’s, Liquor Lyle’s, and Dulano’s Pizza. Unironic institutions. How many people did I know in Seattle anyway? Three? Four? I was severely out of context. I’d abandoned friends I’d known since high school. With a hearty laugh, I’d gone. Off to find a new life. Now I felt like a woman lost. I thought, maybe who you are isn’t really up to your head and heart, but the collection of people, places, and things that surround you. The liquor store where you first bought beer underage. The girlfriend who fell off the dock in her lawnchair, who comforted while you bawled over some lousy guy. And what about mom? She was getting on in years. Smoked like a chimney. I hadn’t spent enough quality time with her. I pictured myself touching down at Minneapolis-St. Paul International just as the undertaker arranged roses around her casket. My eyes stung, urging tears. I’d be the stranger with all the regrets.

Then I heard it, the deep timbre of a boat horn wafting up the hill from the Sound. It shook my insides like a passionate kiss. You know, I thought, there is a charm to this place. I began to laugh. The creeping, tentacled psychosis withdrew. The black veil flipped up like a window shade. Back to Lewis and Clark and all that.

Recently, I attended a Paul Westerberg in-store performance at a Seattle record store, his first show in six years. I stood with 600 or so other fans as he played songs from his new album, Stereo. “No day is safe from thoughts of you leaving. Marriage License. I can’t help thinking. It’s all for nothing. You’re so unholy. Up in the stars now, she’s getting lonely.” It sounded like the old stuff. Paul looked handsome. He felt like home. I peered about the room, picking out the Minnesotans by their unconcerned demeanors. By their bangs of normal length. Rugged individualists. Smokers of mild pot.

There are days when Morrill Hall, the main administrative building at the U of M, seems like a beehive of activity, and other days, usually in the summer, when it seems like a morgue. On the day President Mark Yudof announced he would be leaving for Texas, it was both: A solemn mood hung over a buzz of endless speculation. Was he really leaving for personal reasons? Who would succeed him? How would a number of top vacancies in the administration be filled?

The next day the newspapers trumped TV coverage in capturing the moment, with close-ups of Yudof, his eyelids red and his face wan, delivering the results of what had clearly been a difficult decision. At a private meeting with staff earlier in the day, he had been choked up to the point where he could barely speak, but by the time of his press conference he was somber and philosophical. In his departure, there was no underlying anger for the governor or the Legislature. Even when someone reminded him of the barrels of ink outraged sports writers had spilled on him, he only seemed bemused. A consensus among the drones at Morrill Hall formed quickly. Yudof was being straight with people. In going to Texas, he was truly going home. For the delicate ego of this state, which has elevated the notion of its high quality of life to a near-religious concept, there was at least some solace in the fact that Yudof’s decision was a personal one.

But other uncomfortable questions remained: Didn’t professionals who come to Minnesota end up wanting to stay here because of the people, the arts, the commitment to education—remember Wendell with the walleye on the cover of Time? And now the Mary Tyler Moore statue? Why did it have to be Texas, a state whose braggadocio is the inverse of Minnesota’s quiet smugness; Texas, which took away the state’s professional hockey team a few years ago and may one day take its football team? Moving to New York, Washington, D.C., or California might have been understandable. Iowa or Wisconsin unthinkable. Texas was somewhere in between, but still a hard decision to swallow.

People who worked with him marveled at his ability to charm audiences inside and outside the University. Some of his persuasiveness arose from genuine charisma, or some kind of leadership juju we don’t pretend to understand. But we attribute much of Minnesotans’ goodwill toward Yudof to the fact that the difference between the public and the private man was never really that great. You could see that in his refusal to rehearse for his speeches, which sometimes drove his staff crazy. The logic was never articulated, but we suspect he balked at rehearsing when he was just going to be himself in front of an audience. Why practice being himself?

For five years Yudof was genuinely committed to the enterprise of the University, to its students, to its role as an intellectual center for the state, and to its improvement. Minnesotans could sense that. There was a level of personal accountability for the large and unwieldy institution he had taken on that really connected with people. In ways his recent predecessors had not, he became the face of the University of Minnesota. But university presidents can’t serve that role indefinitely. The job is too taxing and the enemies gradually accumulate over the years. Although we wish Mark Yudof had given Minnesota another two or three years, only the Gopher lives forever.

…and clean up the beer bottles and ashtrays?

We don’t feel inclined to dog pile on our departing governor, although we’re wondering whether he’ll still make his Huck Finn run down the Mighty Miss on one of his beloved jet skis. Frankly, we’re not surprised that he’s pulling the plug on a second term. The word from inside the compound was that first lady Terry was less than thrilled with the job. We’ve never been convinced that Jesse wanted the job either—surely not if it meant having to hobnob on the blower all day with pasty pipsqueaks from backwaters like Kasota, Backus, and East Grand Forks. Jesse struggled with public speaking, too, especially when it involved having to engage others in serious dialogue about the issues. It was so much less complicated when it was just him and a microphone and the dense, excitable listenership of KSTP radio.

No, Jesse Ventura wanted the job for one reason: Jesse. He was, is, and shall remain a celebrity. And today he’s bigger than he’s ever been. You think he could have acted his way off the B-list to the top of the A-list in the past four years? You think a cameo in Predator X would have landed him on the cover of Time?

We have fond memories. Jesse was possibly the most surprised person on the planet when he became Minnesota’s 38th governor. We thought we saw his jeans riding a little lower when final election returns actually came in that night so long ago. For once, he was at a loss for words of any length. To be sure, Jesse Ventura was a refreshing half-nelson in the milquetoast realm of Minnesota politics. But we were distracted by his constant gripe—a celebrity’s gripe, textbook—that others would profit from his name and likeness, and he spent a lot of time trying to prevent that kind of dough from slipping through his own fingers.

The other complaint that started to trip so easily off Ventura’s tongue in recent months was also straight out of the celebrity operator’s manual—that his family was entitled to its privacy. But this is one of the great tradeoffs of fame, whether you’re leading a state government or guest-starring in a Schwarzenegger flick. The cost of celebrity is privacy, and it’s a full-time gig. If Ventura wanted to enjoy his millions in peace, perhaps he should have been a brain surgeon. Then again, he was accustomed to hunting man, not serving him. Anonymity would be the death of The Body.

The problem with celebrities, of course, is that they so rarely know when to bow out of the limelight, and never do it gracefully. They tend to hang around in smoky backrooms and crappy straight-to-video releases, comparing their miniscule Q-ratings against the great totem pole of superstardom—the one with Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts up on top.

The truth is that Ventura is not bowing out of celebrity at all. On the contrary, he’s losing the annoying day job, with a resume that’s a lot longer than it was four years ago. It’s padded not with memorable political achievements, but with major media appearances. Just so, will anyone read it if it doesn’t arrive on the State of Minnesota’s letterhead? Perhaps the biggest surprise is yet to come for Ventura. Will Tim Russert, David Letterman, and Hugh Hefner still come calling when he’s no longer putting the “guber” back in “gubernatorial?”

You love them or you hate them. But would you lose your career over them, the way Kris Hasskamp did? The Rake revisits the tetchy subject of personal watercraft, just as our lightheaded governor pledges to drive one all the way to New Orleans.

Kris Hasskamp began her difficult crusade to regulate jet skiers five years ago with the noble intention of helping elderly retirees find a little silence in the great north woods where they had moved to escape the noise and traffic of the city, only to spend their summers irritated and isolated by the ceaseless noise of miniature powerboats circling their lakes for hours at a time. As a representative of the Brainerd area, she knew well how one of the state’s premiere vacation resort areas had become a cauldron of noise during the summer months.

With their concerns in mind, the House DFLer went to work crafting a modest piece of legislation that would eventually bring about the end of her political career and leave emotional scars that still sear. Although personal watercraft (PWCs) had been around commercially for more than 20 years—remember that first one in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me?—their design grew more sophisticated over the past decade as manufacturers moved from the rough-and-tumble standup models requiring a touch of balance and athleticism to sit-down models as easy to drive as a motor scooter. To lake visitors and residents, they had been a mild if tolerable nuisance until the recreation boom of the 1990s. Then the high-flying economy fueled a dramatic increase in PWC sales. Elderly folks reported trouble, in particular, with the noise of jet skis. One resident of Hasskamp’s district had constant summertime angina attacks caused, his doctors thought, by exposure to jet ski noise. Another moved after feeling the stress of noise was effecting his health. One couple tried to escape the PWC roar by cowering in their basement on weekends, when an influx of urban riders added to the cacophony of motorized boats. While seniors could suffer motorboat noise, since it tends to pass quickly on a lake, jet skiers have an annoying habit of going around and around in circles and jumping waves, creating a high volume of noise for hours on end.

“I was getting calls for several years about jet skis after I was elected in 1988,” Hasskamp says. “Part of the reason was the number of jet skis quadrupled in number in the state. Older people were coming to me in tears and angry about all the noise. And then when I heard threats from some residents that they were going to start shooting guns from docks at jet skiers I figured something had to be done.” Never one to shy from a fight and known for her theatrical flair, Hasskamp introduced a law in 1997 and played a tape of a chainsaw to let fellow legislators know just what a jet ski sounds like on a lake. A radio announcer and avid jet skier by the name of Jesse Ventura heard the chainsaw story and, angered by any regulatory efforts involving his favorite recreational vehicle (he owns six), dubbed her “Chainsaw Hasskamp,” a moniker that stuck.

In those Pre-Governor Ventura days, Hasskamp got support from then-Governor Arne Carlson, a majority of the public in polls conducted by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), and many members of the Legislature. She lost on a couple of key issues, such as banning PWCs on lakes of fewer than 200 acres (jet skiers argued that would have put a majority of the state’s lakes off-limits) and a proposal to allow citizens to file complaints with the DNR against unruly riders. She did, however, manage to see some regulations passed. The new laws forced riders to abide by a150-foot no-wake zone near shore, they restricted PWC use to the hours between 9:30 a.m. and an hour before sunset, they required training of firms renting jet skis, and they imposed age restrictions on riders. The current state jet ski license carries all the state’s regulations printed right on it, so users have no excuse for not knowing them. While those laws may not seem particularly aggressive, they represented progress in a state where summer comes accompanied by the hum of mosquitoes and of jet skis, where one of their major manufacturers, Polaris Industries, resides, and where the governor loves them so much he plans to embark on a trip from the Twin Cities to New Orleans on one.

After being named a “public enemy” by the jet ski industry and the Jetsporters Association of Minnesota (JAM), Hasskamp lost her seat in the 2000 election. But her legislation worked. Jet ski complaints are down and lake owners appear pleased with greater respect riders have for other Minnesotans. The regs also started a small movement to begin to place limits on motorized watercraft in Minnesota through local control. If Hasskamp paid a steep price, the results have impressed even her. “There was going to be road rage on the water and there was great public demand for these laws. Polls both showed more than 90 percent of the public wanted jet ski regulations,” she says. “This is a story about legislation that actually worked.”

Illustration by Matt Adams

Two watch-at-night thrillers that rely mainly on mood and atmosphere for their impact, each very pleasurable in its own way. Be warned: Neither is very big on the element of surprise or particularly strong in plotting. Mothman is of the MTV generation in its abrupt, disconcerting imagery; it’s a glossy B-movie that charms by its unexpected visual verve. Director Mark Pellington has a terrific sense of tempo that makes the most of periodic creepy interludes. Not the least of its charms is the unshakably placid Richard Gere, an actor who was a great wooden Buddha long before he began stumping for the Dalai Lama. The Others , with its methodical, foreboding gothic air, is more substantial and more thoroughly fun. Its director, Alejandro Almenabar, is a talent to watch; he made Abre Los Ojos [Open Your Eyes], the original, superior version of Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky . Which probably explains why we have this Tom Cruise-produced Nicole Kidman movie at all. It was surely part of a quid pro quo to secure the rights to Open Your Eyes . Ironic that The Others , the afterthought in the deal, turned out to be so much better than Crowe’s folly.