Wisconsin: Supper Clubs, the Cavernous Prop Room of America’s Fractured National Psychosis, and a Death in the Family

I have been exposed to Wisconsin several times in the past few years, and my fondness for the state and its people has surprised no one more than myself. In this multi-part Author's Tier series, we'll take a look inside my trips — water parks, supper clubs, cultural events, and a death in the family — as I plumb for insight about the unlikely attraction of this place. 

I'll be releasing installments every few days, email-style. That is to say, not as one big PDF. Read it right then and there, enjoy a pleasant "huh," get on with your day. I've been enjoying Lev Grossman's regular email updates, so I'm trying out this informal format. I also don't want every installment you get here to be bog-down long.  

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Part One: Prelude. 

Europeans have a jokey old chestnut about America, which goes, “Americans are great magicians: if you want to make the rest of the world disappear, simply pick up one of their newspapers.” Our global neighbors, you see, hold the conviction that not only do Americans look like Tweedle Dee on laundry day, but that, for us, the world beyond our borders simply blurs into a cacophony of yelling and paprika. I am unimpressed by this, because as a son of California, I know an even more powerful magic trick: open one of our local papers, and the rest of the country disappears. The typical Golden State rag is a reverse cloak of invisibility.

Or was, anyhow. I don’t read those anymore. I live in Oregon now. The paper gets wet too quickly to make much out, but I imagine the stories are about various seasonally-depressed branches of the animal kingdom, and muffler theft. 

When I met my partner, Lauren, she mentioned she was from Wisconsin. I got that same nonspecific geographic mental image that children get when you tell them that Santa Claus is from the North Pole. I smiled; I figured it was a nice place full of honest people whose food was speckled with umlauts instead of pepper. She had blonde hair, a long German last name with a repeated consonant at the end (it hadn’t snapped off during the long winters, apparently), and the merciful nature not to ask me to locate Wisconsin on an unlabeled map, so things went well. 

That night, after our first walk together, I looked it up. There Wisconsin sat, smack-dab in the middle of the country, the jewel in the crown of the “guess I’ll go warm up the car” belt. 

Wisconsinites like to think their state looks like a mitten, but this is untrue. It is no degrees where they live, and they are just happy at the thought of insulation. Wisconsin, no matter how you look at it, doesn’t look like anything. Italy looks like a boot and that is universally accepted; if aliens who had legs landed here, they would look at Italy and go, “Wow! It looks just like what we in our galaxy call a boot.” American states look like a bored person with a ruler was forced to honor a few rivers.  

A feeling of rootlessness — imagine the bareness of a rental cabin’s cupboard, where the goofy seasonal textiles and fairy-tale books born of our regional carnivorous fauna should be — pervades many west coasters. Our families haven’t been in America for more than a few generations, and have been out west even fewer; we don’t have centuries of tradition tied to the land we inhabit. We have accrued no heritable gravity, save the vague archetypes of cowboys and surfers, and those are just emotionally underdeveloped people who think their distaste for walking constitutes a personality. 

As a west coaster, the idea of Wisconsin culture comforted me: it may have been all triangular foam cheese hats, football, and sausage, but if you haven’t got a tribe of your own, any flag feels like safety. And the ghosts of my father’s heavily western-European side of the family, whose primary surviving tradition was to steam wads of dough in a wet margarine bath and find the low spot where the umlaut could settle, seemed to smile warmly upon Lauren’s and my union. 

Before our first trip to Wisconsin — my unconcealed excitement at visiting America’s Dairyland genuinely surprised not just her, but most of my friends and family — I was briefed in the subtle linguistic differences I would face. You don’t go to someone’s Packer party, you go by it. (Perhaps it feels presumptuous to insert oneself into another’s home, even verbally, so instead you suggest that you were merely standing by the house, in the snow out front, making demands of no-one; more likely, though, is that it’s a German language carryover.) Drinking fountains are called bubblers, even though they are not carbonated. The paper cup that your ice cream comes in is referred to as a dish, even though it is not at all a dish. And…actually, upon reflection, that might be about it, as far as notable linguistic differences go. 

Before we left for my first visit by her motherland, the only other major culture shock I experienced was hearing that they dip their french fries into chocolate malts, and often order these items together for the express purpose of doing so. To mitigate my displeasure at having to taste a dish (sorry, “abomination”) that was clearly invented by people who smoke in humid Oldsmobiles with the windows up, I was routinely reminded that I would get to enjoy many “kringles” while there. The kringle — a mythical, bountiful filled pastry the size and shape of a toilet seat — became the golden ring of my hungry Hobbit’s journey. I envisioned beaming, gap-toothed Bavarian maids placing one around my neck as I alighted from the plane. Hopefully raspberry.

(If you want the real goods on Midwestern culture, written by a pro and native, I strongly encourage you to pick up How To Talk Minnesotan, by former Prairie Home Companion writer Howard Mohr. It’s a loaf of buttered pumpernickel in a sea of Wonder bread.) 

Next Time: "First Contact: Kwik Trip."