Midwest Marvels

With my stomach in the sand and the sun beating down, I peer through my camera lens up at an enormous fiberglass sculpture to get the absolute best angle. A man looks down at me and asks, "Why do you want a picture of this old thing?"

When I explain that I've driven for countless hours searching for the biggest, the smallest, the oddest, the most mysterious and the one-and-only across the Midwest, he scratches his head. "Well, you've certainly picked a weird one. I drive by this darn thing every day, and I could never figure out why they put it here."

Asking "why?" only leads to existential paradoxes, but asking "who?" reveals characters who have followed their passion -- whether it's wrapping twine, stacking oil cans or stuffing rodents into disturbing dioramas. The folks who have created these marvels are not normal, thank goodness. Some are scorned as kooks and crazies, but these are the people who add character to our towns. Here are a smattering of little-known oddities that help make the Midwest marvelous:

Town drunks say the darndest things. Like this: Lumberjacks cursed their oxen so much that, upon death, the beasts had to be burned for seven years to cleanse their souls of profanity. If not properly cremated, they would reemerge as a monster called a hodag (horse meets dog) to wreak revenge.

That's the story of Eugene Shepard, a sometimes tipsy resident of Rhinelander, Wis. In 1893, Shepard allegedly encountered a hodag, which could kill a man with its noxious halitosis. Shepard and his buddies survived thanks to dynamite (although their dogs weren't so lucky).

At the 1896 Wisconsin State Fair, Shepard showed off a 7-foot hodag, supposedly captured in the woods. That's where a researcher from the Smithsonian Institution caught up with the hodag. The researcher had not discovered a new species, as he had hoped, but a hoax: a wood sculpture covered with horsehide and manipulated by wires.

Still, the hodag lives on -- as a statue that greets visitors to Rhinelander.

"I think there are already enough Paul Bunyans around," said sculptor Ken Nyberg of tiny Vining, Minn. "I want to do something else." And indeed he has. Scattered around town are Nyberg's giant creations of everything from a metal square knot to a spilling cup of coffee held up by the thickest java in the North Woods.

Nearby crawls a giant insect, tempting fate in the jaws of an even larger pair of pliers. "Some people think it's a beetle, a cricket or even a woodtick," Nyberg said, preferring to let folks interpret his work in their own way.

Nyberg's magnum opus is an enormous foot with a swollen toe greeting visitors to Vining along Hwy. 210. The owner of the Citgo station at the edge of town was so inspired by the sculpture that he renamed his store "The Big Foot Gas Station" and has allowed Nyberg to display other sculptures near the pumps.

While admiring his foot statue, Nyberg simply remarked, "Different, isn't it?"

During the Depression, amateur geologist Ole S. Quammen took it upon himself to beautify little Lemmon, S.D., with a homespun WPA-like project. Once the bottom of a freshwater lake, the fields around town were filled with giant trunks of petrified trees. Quammen proclaimed that the world needed to see these wooden stones, but the world would have to come to South Dakota.

For two years, Quammen enrolled 30 to 40 unemployed men to lug these boulders up to 25 miles into town. They stacked stones -- some of them 20 feet tall -- around the town square in a pattern whose meaning is known only to Quammen. Some were cemented together for a wishing well, little pyramids and a rest area made of petrified wood to sit and look at more petrified wood.

Amid this Petrified Wood Park sits a one-story "chateau," which houses the Lemmon Pioneer Museum and is made of 300 tons of petrified wood. Inside, stuffed jackrabbits play a miniature fiddle, while another rabbit holds an umbrella and carries berries next to her friend, dressed in a cowboy hat.

Push the button and the big bull proclaims, "I am about nine times the normal size of a Hereford and authentic right down to my toenails. ... Please drive carefully!" This is Albert the Bull of Audubon, Iowa, who towers 30 feet tall and elatedly advises visitors on the wonders of beef.

While most bulls are castrated to turn them into steers (with the leftovers fueling Rocky Mountain oyster banquets), Audubon' s bovine was left with his cement testicles intact so he could become the "World's Largest Anatomically Correct Bull."

Albert, the blue-eyed bull, has stood as "monument to the beef industry" since 1963. The mere vision of this "perfect Hereford bull" encourages hungry passersby to crave cattle and hopefully stop in Audubon for a steak.

When seminarian Paul Dobberstein suffered a nasty bout of pneumonia in Milwaukee, he promised the Virgin Mary that he would spend the rest of his days building a shrine to her if she would cure him.

He sought inspiration in the text of Isaiah 54:11-12, which begins (emphasis his): "Thou, the friendless, the storm-beaten, the inconsolable, shalt have a pavement of patterned stones, and their foundations shall be of sapphire."

When he miraculously rose from his sick bed, Dobberstein got to work. Having immigrated from Germany in 1872, he was inspired by Old World grottoes carved into the earth and stacked with stones where devout pilgrims could pray. When he was stationed in West Bend, Iowa, in 1898, however, there was rich black soil but nary a rock in sight. The priest spent the next decade stockpiling rocks, crystals and minerals from such places as Hot Springs, Ark., and the Black Hills of South Dakota.

For 42 years, Dobberstein worked on the Grotto of the Redemption, one of the world's largest such sites with the largest collection of semiprecious stones. Among the wonders are pinnacles made of mortar, steeples encrusted with gems and battlements covered with crystals.

In 1938, attendants in matching green uniforms at the Sinclair Brick Station in Casselton, N.D., pumped gas, changed oil and chucked the empty cans into a chicken coop set around an old windmill. The stack of cans swelled, more chicken wire was raised and the hens were left homeless.

Three precarious can piles soon advertised the little gas station on the prairie until the owner "got it in his head to build a big one. I don't know how he got up there to make it so tall," said George Loegering, the current owner and caretaker of this leaning tower of tin. The can pile rises 45 feet on an 18-foot base.

"He raised chickens in there for a while, then he raised homing pigeons," Loegering said. "It's now the biggest birdhouse in North Dakota."

When Loegering had to move the can pile to make way for his manufacturing business, he needed three tractors -- well over 100,000 pounds of machinery -- plus a bulldozer. Loegering looked up fondly at the pile. "Right after I moved it, a tornado came through and -- see that house across the street? It blew the roof clean off of it and scattered it all down the road and blew part of our building off, but the can pile just got a little tilt to it."

At first sight, the Moccasin Bar appears like just another northern Wisconsin bar with a stuffed fish on the knotty pine wall. Upon closer inspection, however, dead skunks, mink, pheasants, squirrels and other rodents act out dramatic scenarios behind glass.

In one Perry Mason-style setup, a wolf judge presides in a courtroom. Bobcat the Sheriff nabbed Bucky Badger for poaching and the big bad wolf is throwing the book at him.

There are four stuffed animal dioramas, and two pay homage to what the Moccasin is really all about: beer. A poker game features a bear cub puffing on a pipe and secretly trading a carrot to a white rabbit for an ace, while his rival bear accepts a nice tall beer from a stuffed otter. And finally, little chipmunks dressed in lederhosen raise high their beer steins in a rock garden in a toast to suds.

Eric Dregni is author of the recently released "Midwest Marvels" (University of Minnesota Press; $17.95).

SEVEN MIDWEST

SEVEN MIDWEST Marvels