Wisconsin, Part Two

PART TWO: FIRST CONTACT: KWIK TRIP.

We drove into Wisconsin after landing in Minneapolis and meeting a friend for coffee. The coffee shop was, inexplicably, one of those smug little boutiques which had air plants instead of dairy products, so I was even more eager to get to Old Wisco, where at least the bullshit came from cows. 

The fabled rolling green hills and big red barns greeted us as we crossed the state line; highway exits began to regularly feature large, hand-painted plywood signs which read, simply, CHEESE. Gas stations featured cold cases full of “road pork”: raw chops, bacons, chubs, rinds, pickled bits, you name it — no Harald-gone-a-visiting could be excused for arriving empty-handed. Bags of fresh cheese curds in a variety of dazzling colors (well, white, yellow, and flecked) lined yet more refrigerated bins. Reserve pallets of Milwaukee’s Best, a discount-style lager congenially referred to as The Beast, lined the hallways to restrooms that had been not just freshly cleaned, but decorated with signage that earnestly apologized in advance for anything that might not be up to the standards of serenity one typically requires during a vacation-style undisclosed bowel movement. 

A kind and motherly cashier at one rural Kwik Trip — after my purchase of fuel, Old Dutch potato chips, and one of those locally-baked apple things with the large sugar pieces on top — sent me off with a warm, “See you later!” I instinctively felt it would be a genuine offense if I did not actually make the effort to visit again at a later date, and then felt doubly guilty that I didn’t come clean and admit I was unlikely to be back by there for the rest of my life. 

“You bet!” I rejoined, surprised at how quickly I’d gone native, but equally glad to be leaving that roller coaster of an exchange. She seemed happily placated, and as the door closed behind me and the next customer was rung up, she continued along, eternally braiding her daisy chain of unbroken pleasantries.

Our first stop was Madison, home of Lauren’s alma mater, The University of Wisconsin at Madison. Haunchy young farm men with beefy necks and snug Wranglers clip-clopped across the quadrangles in unironic and deeply weathered cowboy boots, crossing paths in equal number with ninth-wave hippie kids whose grandmothers had given the hides of their corduroy couches so that their progeny’s pants might flare as wide as their minds. We had dinner at the sort of place you could imagine Phileas Fogg encountering his first veggie burger: a deeply-worn, dark old pub where the creased and greasy Trivial Pursuit cards asked questions in the present tense about Ronald Reagan, and which no doubt had been sneered over by both the current class, and their parents long ago. 

The next day was thrift shopping at “St. Vinnie’s,” a campus tour (the university has a strong agricultural program; they have a lab with a living cow that has holes in it, so you can individually furtle the cuds of its many stomachs), and meals at innocent little cafes whose clumsy pastries looked like they were made by hot-palmed bumpkins with no reference photos, and loyal friends. 

Lauren’s father spent his career in Milwaukee as a union ironworker. He is man who chews jumper cables like Twizzlers while pinching the terminals of dead car batteries between his daikon fingers. As we cruised into the skyline he had pieced together by spitting glowing orange rivets into I-beams while alternating gulps of Blatz, so she began to unfurl the ugly history of white flight and urban blight, acccentuating the tale with the click-clicking of our door locks. We rolled down a long stretch of minimalist public-assistance housing blocks, and into the driveway of an opulent four-story Victorian mansion that had become a bed and breakfast. 

A few of these leviathan treasures still dotted the neighborhood, monuments to the essential fortunes of a young nation: lumber, oil, beer, cookies. Our host, Andrew, was an energetic older fellow who had cashed out of another boom economy, computer programming, to rescue this polychotomous rattery from the blind jaws of the excavator and feed French toast an endless procession of travelers. Now known as The Manderley Inn, the 1886 Queen Anne home of a coal merchant and his wife, an author, had been purchased for a song, provided the buyer paid the back taxes on the derelict property. Fairly restored to a less-severe version of its Gilded Age self, it is now possible to relax in the home without fear of gunfire or secondhand crack addiction, which we did while Andrew filled us in on the joyfulness of the “bed and breakfast lifestyle.” For example, his immaculate chicken coop featured gingerbread siding, a widow’s walk, and a mansard dormer with a large stained glass of a rooster in a Friday night frame of mind. 

It took us weeks to shake the dream of moving back to Milwaukee and restoring our own bed and breakfast. Lauren was eventually able to remind me that if you go outside in the wintertime without a gallon of Brandy Old Fashioneds, Sweet, in you, your blood will instantly freeze, you will die, and if you are near a natural feature, that feature will henceforth be referred to as “Fool’s [Rock, etc].” (The Brandy Old Fashioned, Sweet, is a uniquely Wisconsin Old Fashioned typically made with Korbel brandy instead of whiskey, plus citrusy soda, and a garnish of green olives with an orange slice. Here you may be reminded of the french-fries-and-chocolate-malt concept mentioned earlier.)

Next time: Part 3, “The House On The Rock.”