In which we administer a colonoscopy to an Upper Midwestern state

Jan. 9 – Wausau, WI

Wausau seems to be doing all right for itself, although I can't say what it is that drives the place. As it's a relatively far northern outpost in Wisconsin, my first guesses would have been lumbering or the manufacture of cheese, or perhaps skiing, since we lodged under the snowmaking floodlights of the Rib Mountain ski area. Wikipedia, the uncredited co-author of this blog, says it's paper-making, home building and insurance; from a peremptory survey of the various business fronts, I might add real estate, light manufacturing and banking to the list, and at the moment, capriciously re-arranging the highway grid seems to be another prevalent livelihood. Or hell, maybe it's just an outdoorsy Northwoods river town where thirty-eight thousand people just happen to want to live and work.

The Grand Theater (one of the few venues we've visited to use that spelling) is unremarkable but drew a healthy crowd, and we had a hoppin' time in the hotel bar that evening, playing darts and enduring the wiles of a rather inebriated Dairyland gal who seemed to be paying excessive attention to anybody other than her husband. The next morning I made the mistake of guessing when the Free Continental Breakfast would end and was off by an hour, leaving me with no other option than a Burger King several hundred sub-freezing yards farther away than it appeared. I passed a lone surveyor, no doubt plotting the further confounding of GPS street databases, and had the urge to ask him why they'd not built sidewalks to go along with the new double-barreled county trunk roads that stymied my efforts at a geometrically logical path toward my breakfast.

It was time to go back whence we'd come, to Iowa. Our travels, like an embarrassing doctor's visit, had caused us to invade Wisconsin from both its ends without piercing its middle, and Minnesota was showing a habit of following us about like a toilet paper streamer. Lunch on the way to Wausau had been at the Mall of America, in a suburb (what else?) of Minneapolis. If you count the amusement park in the middle (known as "The Park at MOA" for crying out loud), it is the nation's largest mall, and also the one most undistinguished from any of the others, making its name quite fitting. Hours prior, in Windom near daybreak, I'd bought coffee from a woman who was the Minnesota archetype; with her sensible, muted sweater and short, motherly, Nordic blond coif, she asked where we were go-een and showed us where the gar-beej was. A group of paunchy men, who looked like they knew something about ice fishing, looked on, apparently still rather awestruck by the arrival of our busload. They witnessed in five minutes more business transactions than they probably expected for the entire day, and I'm not at all sure that they didn't speculate afterward what the experience portended for the rest of their day.

End 'a story.

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