WisCousins
So sleeping in the back of a van in a Walmart parking lot isn’t all that bad. I only awoke once or twice during the night before finally deciding to get up around 8:30 when it hit me that actual people were outside our window, purchasing groceries and such. We ran back inside the store to grab a few more things then set out for downtown Cleveland and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
I have to admit I had a lot of mixed feelings about the idea of a hall of fame dedicated to rock music. Who the hell are these people calling the shots out here? Can they really be trusted with adequately honoring those that have given the gift of almighty music to our sad, sorry world? Probably not, I say, but rock ‘n’ roll is holy to me, and I’m enraptured by its history. More importantly, Gabby was down to check it out. So we made the trip.
First things first, this place blew my damn mind. I mean, it flipped me the hell out. How could I have been so foolish to think that a building containing Elvis Presley’s actual motorcycle, shreds of the plane of that Otis Redding died in, the handwritten lyrics to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, and the childhood couch and boyhood sketches of Jimi f*cking Hendrix would be even close to lame? I cried a little. More than once, actually.
There are seven floors to this place and I’m fairly certain you could spend an entire three day weekend or so exploring everything it has to offer. We began on the bottom floor which had an introduction to the art form, the African beat, Celtic folk, and early American country and blues that gave rise to it, and all of the amazing, convention smashing, history rewriting, paradigm shifting places it went from there. This place is a towering shrine to popular music. The Vatican, The Mecca, The Taj Mahal, The Great Pyramids of rock ‘n’ roll. It educated, it entertained, it edified, it enlightened.
They had sections dedicated to every city that had a powerful influence on American music: Memphis Country and Blues, Detroit Motown, San Fran Psychedelic, New York Punk. There was an area commemorating 50 years since the Summer of Love. There was a rock ‘n’ roll pinball machine area. Most importantly, however, were the three large displays that paid homage to The Beatles, The Stones, and Jimi Hendrix. God, the Devil, and Jesus Christ himself.
Perhaps my favorite part of it all was a small section on the bottom floor that was dedicated to the backlash rock music experienced in its heyday. On display were video compilations of all of the preachers and politicians who were panicked and feverish over the possibility of a young generation of autonomous thinkers who listened to the thoughts and ideas of musical artists rather than the thoughts and ideas of, well, preachers and politicians. The clips were absolutely hilarious and pretty shocking.
As a general rule in these posts, ignore the photography and focus on the content….please.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have all that long to spend in Cleveland, there was an 8 hour and 48 minute drive ahead of us, and so after a couple of hours at the Rock Hall of Fame, it was on to Appleton, Wisconsin to visit the first friend I have ever had, my cousin Ryan, and his lovely wife, Michelle.
Ryan recently moved out to Appleton on a job offer. An unlikely relocation, I know, but his family has roots in America’s Dairyland, and he’s also one of the nation’s greatest Green Bay Packers fans, so there was a lot of incentive, really, and his Wisconsin-born father couldn’t be more proud.
True, pure angel people.
What I knew about the Badger state going into this was relatively minimal and limited mostly to pop culture. You had Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, That 70s Show, the Green Bay Packers, and those wonderful “Behold the power of Cheese” commercials from the ‘90s. Hey, that’s not a bad resume at all, but we wanted to know more.
Turns out these commercials were really made by America’s Dairy Farmers, but my Uncle Mark loved them so much as a kid I just connected them with Wisconsin. Oh well, they’re great.
The trip there consisted mostly of Ohio farmland, a wonderful view of the Chicago skyline, and long, monotonous Wisconsin highways in the dark. Not much to mention there. The town of Appleton, however, was positively lovely as we rolled through it around 10:00 p.m. after overcoming an incredibly punitive missed exit.
Here’s another round of god-awful pictures from the road:
We came in to a wonderful homemade meal and a tour of Ryan and Michelle’s new home. We shared a quick pumpkin beer from a local brewery, then Ryan and I shotgunned a Miller Light to christen the place like the shameless apes we are, and we went up to bed.
I was up early in the morning the following day for a run in the brisk Wisconsin air. The sun was shining and there wasn’t a single cloud to be seen. It was mag-frickin-nificent. I could not get over how positively massive the sky was. The place is totally flat and so your view is a full 180 degrees of awe-inspiring blue. Absolutely beautiful.
Ryan and Michelle’s new town is an up-and-coming little place, right near Lawrence University, with a number of cool bars, rad restaurants, and hip coffee shops. They took us out to the Farmer’s Market right near Houdini Square, an area dedicated to a local-born escape artist you’ve probably heard of.
Escape artist, I thought to myself as I passed by, ah, a kindred spirit.
We stopped at their favorite coffee spot for an outrageous harvest chai, went over to some booths to buy Amish hand pies and a bag of sweet-smelling Cortland apples from Orchards and then went to a few lovely parks and finally a restaurant named Sangria’s for perhaps the best Mexican food I’ve ever had, which was shocking to say least.
It was a fantastic day made all the more fantastic by the graciousness of our hosts, but it couldn’t last long, for the road is ever-rolling and our trip had just begun. We packed it up and set out for Humboldt, South Dakota sometime around 4:30 that afternoon, where we planned to stay in a local park that welcomes campers. The GPS read just a hair under seven hours, and so we buckled in and pointed her west towards the mighty I-90 beneath a red Wisconsin sun.
On our way out we rolled past some beautiful bodies of water and farmlands with friendly cows and horses plodding along beneath the setting sun. I began to get this uncomfortable feeling that it was almost impossible to take in this incredible experience the way I really wanted to. To be both in the moment and totally present and at the same time organized and thorough enough to get it all in. I saw all of these locations blowing past me, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and was I really taking the time to absorb it all? To really understand the places and their beautiful people?
Then it hit me: I’d come to Wisconsin and I hadn’t even tried their cheese.
Good lord, cheese is almost sacred, and I’m about to leave the holy land without taking part in a sacrament.
I told Gabby to throw Cheese into her GPS and guide us to a store. She jumped on it and next thing we knew we were taking a ten-mile detour to Hwy 13 Liquor & Cheese in the tiny town of Adams.
Ya know, the old liquor and cheese shoppe.
The first thing we saw when we pulled into the muddy parking lot was the bewildered face of an older dude standing outside the front door smoking a cigarette. He had a long and wild white beard, a leather vest, and faded blue tattoos that covered his forearms. A true Wisconsin biker of yesteryear.
“What in the hell is that thing?” he shouted as we stepped out of Fishtank.
We could only really laugh and explain our story to him. We asked him if he liked Fishtank, to which he laughed and said, “Hey, it’s…different.”
Turned out this cat was the proprietor of the establishment and he was happy to sell us a block each of his finest seven-year Wisconsin cheddar and buffalo wing jack. As he rung us up smiled and said, “Beautiful, live it up, do it while you’re young. I did it back in the day on a bike. Six months of going all the hell over the place. Everywhere.”
“Damn, six months, we only have 32 days,” I told him.
“Yeah, well I didn’t give a shit about anything back then,” he said as he looked away from us, bursts and flashes of wild memory probably returning now to the fore.
“Watch out out there, there’s goofs everywhere you go,” he warned as we left him standing behind his counter and returned to our journey.
Now, that right there, Gabby and I agreed, was why we went on this trip.
The goods.
We cruised through the night, into Minnesota and beyond, until Gabby had passed out and I was left, bleary-eyed and a little delirious, to traverse the mighty I-90 with just my thoughts. I began to imagine strange things going on in the shadows out in the massive fields. Tremendous creatures from the swirling night, towering above in the vastness. The sky out there is just like the sky in Wisconsin, bigger and more imposing than any I’ve ever seen. I looked at the road and thought to myself how it seemed to never stop. It just rolled on forever and ever. They melded with one another somewhere along the way. The road with no end, the sky with no beginning. It made me feel infinitesimal, inconsequential, and infinite.
