The Librarians of Kasson, Minnesota

Jump: Preston, MN → Hayfield, MN – School grounds: 55 miles
LEFT out of the lot and arrows back to HWY 16 WEST
RIGHT onto HWY 63 NORTH towards Rochester
After you pass I-90, look for a LEFT onto HWY 30 WEST to Hayfield… arrows to the lot
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm

Nothing in Hayfield, so I drove to Blooming Prairie

Nothing in Blooming Prairie, so I drove to Dodge Center.

Nothing in Dodge Center, so I drove to Kasson.

Nothing in Kasson but by then I was sick of driving so I ducked into the local public library where the librarian – big blonde, looks like she should be serving 18 months in the slammer for steroid use on the professional wrestling circuit – eyed me suspiciously.

Civil service or not, this librarian would not pass her performance review in the San Francisco Bay Area, lemme tell you.

For one thing she kept trying to get my car towed. At regular intervals I would hear her on the phone, presumably with local traffic control: “Well, the red car’s been there for two hours then, dontcha know –“

And I would rise from the little desk where I’d been typing, announce, “It’s my car! Do you need me to move it?”

And she’d say, “No, no. So long as you’re in the library, you’re a library customer, you can park there. But it is taking up a parking space.”

There were never more than four people inside that library the entire time I was there. There were six parking spaces.

Also she didn’t seem to like Hispanics. And Kasson – unlike the moribund farming towns surrounding it – had a significant population of Hispanics, possibly because of its proximity to Austin where the Hormel Chile and Spam factory is located.

Whenever a little blond-haired, Howdy-Doody-faced, white child wandered up to the front desk, asking where – say – the Harry Potter books were located, she’d flash her horrible, cavernous smile and gush, “It’s better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish.” Then she would proceed to try and indoctrinate the hapless child in the mysteries of the Dewey Decimal System.

Whenever a dark-skinned, dark-haired child asked the same question – accent strongly suggestive that English might not be her first language – the librarian would snarl, “Over there somewhere,” then rudely turn her back.

(JB, to whom B told this story, thought it was so hilarious that at the end of the last show, after all the trash receptacles had been cleared away, when a lady approached him with a cotton candy wrapper in hand, asking, “Where can I dispose of this?” he waved his hand expansively: “Oh, just throw it on the ground. The brown people will deal with it.”)

Who Is Albert Lea and Why Did They Name This Place After Him, Huh?

JUMP: Hayfield, MN → New Richland, MN – Next to American Legion: 40 miles
STRAIGHT out of the school grounds where we came in…Arrows back to LEFT onto HWY 30 WEST
Follow HWY 30 WEST to New Richland… arrows to a very tight lot
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm

Town of New Richland so depressed they couldn’t even afford a marker pointing to the downtown. Not that it would have mattered – I think every single one of its storefronts except two were empty.

Also a townie screamed at me when I took the dogs out after the Jump. “Don’t let those animals go to the bathroom in our park!”

(I always get a kick out of that “go to the bathroom” – like the dogs travel with miniature canine commodes which they whip out and sit down upon whenever duty calls)

I smiled at the woman, held up a plastic bag. I never leave home without one. Long time readers of this journal may remember I always used to pick up trash whenever I walked around Monterey. Guess what? I’m in Minnesota and I still do. If it was an – er – unusual habit in California, it’s grounds for commitment to Lake Wobegond Asylum for the Criminally Insane here in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes.)

At the sight of the plastic bag, the woman grew practically apoplectic. “You think if you pick it up that makes it all right?” she hissed. “It doesn’t.”

Well, gee, lady, I thought. Dunno what to tell you. If a dog’s gotta shit, a dog’s gotta shit.

I wondered why she was so angry. Was it personal? Was she reacting to the fact I was connected to the circus? Does she think circus folks are like carnies, crooks and thieves, geeks and scoundrels, whose only purpose in life is to lift her wallet and desecrate her grass? (Say lady – if I didn’t have a dog, I’d shit on your lawn myself.) Or was this a kind of road rage sparked by the hopeless economy?

In either case, it left me with very little interest in checking out New Richland. (New Rich Land – hah!) so I got in my little red Veedub and drove 20 miles to the city of Albert Lea.

Which I found amazingly interesting. Although probably no one else on the planet would. And of course it didn’t have an espresso bar (the main reason I drove there.) They don’t seem to drink a whole lot of espresso in this part of Minnesota which I find rather odd since there were certainly café’s aplenty north and west of here. I blame the proximity to the Iowa.

Not so very long ago Albert Lea was a very prosperous city. It had an opera house. It had banks. It had a Woman’s College. A lot of industry and manufacturing was based here – it was once the headquarters for what’s now the largest privately owned company in the United States∗.

Left photograph in the pair above was taken in 1940. You’re still looking at a street that makes sense as a business venue, that hasn’t degenerated into a hodgepodge of junk shops, chiropractors, bars, wacky storefront evangelical churches.

Right photograph this afternoon from more or less the same spot shows an almost apocalyptic meltdown of the local economy. Part of it, I suppose, was the food processing plant that burned down in 2003 taking 750 jobs with it. (For a town of less than 20,000, that’s a significant number of jobs.)

That’s only seventy years. That’s not that long.

Anyway, I walked around for several hours entertaining myself by cataloging the arcane ornamentation of the old architectural derelicts and making up stories – there’s this Philip Marlowe-like detective, right? And he’s looking for someone who committed a crime seventy years ago – maybe the guy was a Nazi spy, I don’t know. Ur-Marlowe will receive some vast sum of money if he can bring the perp in, liver spots, leaky prostate and all. Only he can’t find a trace of the perp except then, one night, the forlorn derelict little town …changes... back into the town it was in 1940. (Marlowe is actually entering it through the dreams of an old lady who lays dying in Albert Lea’s satellite Mayo clinic.) Repurposed Tom’s Midnight Garden, dontcha know…

Albert Lea has the big terroir. That’s why I like it.

∗ In 1870 W. W. Cargill moved to Albert Lea so that his fledgling grain elevator and warehouse business could take advantage of the expanding railroad system. One hundred and fifty years later Cargill has diversified into the production and distribution of a staggering assortment of agricultural products – that Egg McMuffin you had this morning? Cargill. The company is now headquartered in Minneapolis.