Sári Gordon

Ricin Beans

When anyone hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart. This is the seed sown along the path. — Matthew 13:19

But if water has been put on the seed and a carcass falls on it, it is unclean for you. — Leviticus 11:38

In the small towns on or near rural Highway 55 — Brooten, Sedan, Starbuck, Terrace — the news has been the same for years. Snowmobiling accidents, auctions and Ag Days make headlines. With the exception of a few letters to the editor and small notices of property seizures, political aberration rarely registers a blip. For the past decade, however, a handful of men and women with anti-government beliefs have gathered in homes and storefront churches to discuss their out-of-the-ordinary ideas about the U.S. Constitution, religion, common law, militias and their suspicions about the media, crime and taxes.

But the news changed in spring 1991, when 32-year-old Bert Henderson, who shared these anti-government views, pulverized a handful of castor beans in a shed behind a house at 304 Lake St. in Alexandria. Not only did he release one of the most toxic chemicals on earth, Henderson and three friends went on to become the first to be charged, tried and convicted under the 1989 Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act, thus heightening concerns of domestic terrorism in a state that prides itself on political tolerance.

A tour of the Minnesota towns where the so-called conspiracy to possess a biological weapon was hatched is an expedition through the looking glass of an alternate legal and moral universe. On paper, the men who plotted to kill U.S. marshals, judges and sheriffs seem sinister. But one trip through the rabbit hole of their beliefs dissolves any phantasm of goose-stepping neo-Nazis. Instead, a vision of amateur lawyers firing paper shotguns filled with Bowery Boys legalese, apocalyptic paranoia, myopic perspectives and good, old conspiracy-theory kookiness prevails. If Henderson hadn’t crushed up the castor beans, most of the men involved would have seemed no more harmless than the bookish, bearded men who hang around military paraphernalia shops, gun shows and splatball games.

The irony is not that these anti-government activists are now lining up in prison cafeterias for three square meals a day at taxpayers’ expense, but that they are now in line to become chiseled into the pantheon of such right-wing martyrs as Posse Comitatus leader Gordon Kahl and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, tax protester Randy Weaver. The men claim they’re being imprisoned for their beliefs. The government contends the four men were convicted because they are armed and dangerous.

At the time he was arrested, Dennis “Bert” Henderson was a drifter. A former Marine who was divorced, he had no fixed address. He lived with friends he grew up with around Alexandria. In the police photo taken when he was arrested, Henderson’s face is a fishy white oval hiding behind a jaunty handlebar mustache and large, thick glasses. In person, Henderson is talkative and jumpy — a human exclamation point.

It was late 1990 when Henderson ran into an old acquaintance and ex-convict, 38-year-old Scott Loverink. During the years since Loverink had served his two-year sentence from 1979 to 1981 in Indiana for a felony assault, he had been a truck driver and worked for a cattle breeding company and a lumberyard near his hometown of Garfield, a few miles northwest of Alexandria. At the time they met up, Loverink was unemployed and cut off of his state unemployment checks.

It was later revealed in court that Loverink had a big stack of ultra right-wing literature to show Henderson. Among the papers was a bulletin — the Oregon-based newspaper, The CBA Bulletin (assumed by authorities to stand for Christians Bar Association) — which carried articles about conspiracies, Christian vigilantes and ads for “Proof that John Paul II is a Mason and a Jew” and “The Holocaust is a BIG LIE!” One advertiser in the bulletin offered tools of justice and retribution specifically tailored for this present wicked age of oppressive viciousness and corruption, where evil seeks to reign supreme, unhindered, and unchallenged. Nature’s God has provided us another sure way to “kill-a-cat…” Beneath skull-and-crossbones images displayed in the ad were the words “including instructions for extracting the deadly poison ‘ricin’ from castor beans.”

Soon after receiving the bulletin, Henderson told Loverink that he had placed an order for the castor beans. Loverink, who claims he had a pang of conscience, turned to his father for guidance. He and his father notified a family friend about Henderson’s purchase. That friend informed an agent at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, who informed Douglas County Detective Jerry Werner. After completing a year-long local investigation and subsequent inquiry, the FBI took on Loverink as an informant on Henderson and three other men for plans to murder government officials, which the government says were germinated by the newspaper.

Throughout the summer of 1991, Henderson was hanging out with Loverink at his Garfield residence, which included an outdoor gun range. Henderson, who had had a run-in with Otter Tail County Deputy Sheriff Dave Ahlquist over fireworks, talked big about getting revenge against Ahlquist.

Court documents say it was Henderson who introduced Loverink to Richard Oelrich, a 51-year-old from Alexandria, who was respected in the underground for his common-law knowledge. Oelrich, a fireplug of a man with a clear broad head and bright blue eyes, has the clear and steady mien of a short Paul Newman. If, as the government claimed, Oelrich and Henderson were the kingpins of an anti-government conspiracy, Henderson was the hopped-up Beavis of the bunch and Oelrich, the steely-eyed logician. (Apparently, however, Oelrich’s legal expertise was not enough to keep the Internal Revenue Service from seizing his Alexandria home in 1994 for back taxes and unpaid bank loans that totaled between $30,000 and $40,000.)

Court documents state that late that summer, Henderson brought a baby-food jar that was three-quarters filled with white powder to Loverink’s house. He called the powder “Maynard.” Loverink said that Oelrich once told him the powder could cause a “bureaucratic flu” among government officials, locally and in the Twin Cities. Though Henderson did not refer to the substance as “ricin,” he told Loverink that he had ordered the castor beans he used to make the powder from “Maynard’s Avenging Angel Supply,” in Ashland, Oregon. Oelrich was acquainted with bean supplier Maynard Campbell, a hero in tax-protester circles, according to Loverink’s testimony. Henderson also showed Loverink the recipe he used to process the beans into ricin, Loverink testified.

That summer, Henderson had been crashing at the Alexandria house of an old friend, 55-year-old LeRoy Wheeler, and his wife, Judy, according to an affidavit by FBI Special Agent Daniel Lund. Since Henderson was broke and homeless, Wheeler paid for and took delivery of the mail-order beans. Rather than process all of the beans, the two planted a few of them in the garden behind Wheeler’s home, according to Loverink’s testimony.

By February 1992, Wheeler had grown tired of his house guest. An acquaintance of Wheeler’s, 56-year-old salesman Duane Baker, says that without calling him first, Wheeler drove 50 miles south from Alexandria to Sedan to unload Henderson at Baker’s house. Baker says that he and his wife, Mary Jane, normally would have taken in the transient Henderson, but “one of our… sons was having problems with [his] wife and got the god-danged cops all involved and we just didn’t have time for it.” Baker says he sent Henderson to stay with his son Doug, who lived down the road.

Although that son is now in prison for possession of ricin, many say Duane, an anti-government doomsayer, was the real target of the FBI and local police. Duane and his family had long antagonized local cops, including suing the police for trespassing on their property. Doug and his wife, Colette, lived with their two children in a mobile home on property adjacent to Duane’s. Doug, who is now 31, had worked as a welder and carpenter. Though Colette was suffering from lupus and unable to work outside the home, the couple allowed Henderson to stay, with the agreement that he would help out by chopping wood for their fire-heated home. After about a month, according to Colette’s testimony at Henderson’s trial, they too kicked Henderson out, claiming that he hadn’t held up his part of the agreement.

When he moved on in March 1992, Henderson left various belongings around the Baker’s home, including a coffee can containing a baby-food jar full of white powder. By that time, the police had known about the ricin for about a year. Shortly after noon on May 21, 1992, Colette walked into the Pope County Sheriff’s office in Glenwood. No one was around, so she spoke with Joan Holtberg, the sheriff’s secretary. The young woman had come to the sheriff’s office to turn in some very poisonous material of her husband’s. “Ms. Baker stated that she planned to leave her husband,” according to FBI agent Lund’s affidavit, “because he had pointed a shotgun at her and threatened to kill her.” Colette also said that she feared for the lives of her parents and that her children were in peril because of the contents of the can. She opened the Folger’s coffee can for Holtberg and took out the contents one by one: the Gerber’s baby-food jar; a pair of gloves, a nail-polish bottle filled with green gel and a yellow Post-It note.

On the note, written in a childish scrawl, were the words, “Doug, Be extremely careful! After you mix the powder with the Gel, the slightest contact will Kill you! If you breath [sic] the Powder or get it in your eyes, your [sic] a dead man. Dispose of all instruments used Properly. Always wear rubber gloves and then destroy them also. Good hunting!! P.S. Destroy this note!!” A smiley face had been drawn at the bottom. Colette told Holtberg to be very careful with the substance, saying that the poison would “kill on contact.”

Two years later, on August 4, 1994, about 20 agents stormed Wheeler’s mother’s farm south of Alexandria, arresting LeRoy Wheeler on charges of possessing a biological substance for use as a weapon. Wheeler did not put up a struggle. Neither did Doug, who was arrested later that same day for the same crime. Hours after his arrest, Wheeler signed a nine-paragraph confession hand-written by agent Lund implicating himself in the possession of a biological weapon. Doug never made a confession. After five more days of questioning, Wheeler and Baker were released on $10,000 bond.

Even before the trial of Doug Baker and LeRoy Wheeler began on February 23, 1995, the two defendants began their campaign to bring their own brand of justice to the proceedings. Their defense attorneys had to wrestle with their clients’ legal maneuverings — and those of Doug’s dad. About a month before his son’s trial, Duane Baker put an ad in the Alexandria Echo Press, requesting jurors for a “constitutional jury trial.” Though the trial was advertised as “an historic common law trial,” Baker now says he cannot remember the name of the judge who presided at the VFW club meeting room. About 15 people showed up and found both men not guilty. Duane Baker issued and distributed an official-looking notice stating that his son had been found innocent and that the United States need not continue its prosecution.

Nevertheless, the Bakers drove their son the 250 miles to the Federal Building in downtown St. Paul for the three days of his real trial in February 1995. Relying on testimony from the FBI’s toxicologist, Collette Baker, informant Loverink and FBI agent Lund, the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Nate Petterson, quickly wooed the jury to his side. Though eyewitness testimony was scarce, the toxicologist provided a lengthy description of the chemical ricin. The defense brought only two witnesses: Doug’s mother, Mary Jane, who was begrudgingly compliant, almost surly, on the stand; and a family friend named Tim Schirmer who had lived at Doug and Colette’s. Schirmer, the prosecution revealed to the surprise of the defense, was himself an ex-convict.

Doug Baker’s court-appointed attorney, Scott Tilsen, the articulate and rumpled public defender who worked on the Qubilah Shabazz team with the late William Kunstler, says he had no conflicts with his client’s alleged anti-government beliefs. The Baker family believed that the federal government had no right to convict or even to try Doug. Doug and Duane Baker clogged the federal clerk’s office with letters and motions. They said they didn’t want an attorney but, because of their views, they refused to sign documents dismissing their public defender. In a profusion of “writs,” motions and other common-law commandments, Duane Baker made frequent references to the Uniform Commercial Code, the Magna Carta, Supreme Court decisions, habeas corpus rulings and Fourth Amendment claims.

Tilsen says he had long conversations with his client’s father, and agreed with many of his client’s anti-government sentiments. Still, he says, “The bottom line is they’re [the Bakers are] just wrong. They want to believe that there’s a secret answer to what’s wrong with the world.” Despite his client’s unpopular political beliefs, Tilsen never defended Baker’s views. The government centered its case around the ricin. The state merely had to prove — in this, the first prosecution of the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 — that the men possessed the poison “for use as a weapon.” Whether they ordered it through a Nazi fanzine or from the local hardware store was of little consequence.

“Let’s say somebody publicly or secretly bitterly criticized the government, said it was awful, said it was terrible, that public officials ought to be shot for the jobs they’re doing,” Tilsen says from his office in downtown Minneapolis. “Let’s say that same person buys themself three guns legally. Should we be worried about that? What if he goes out and buys himself a supply of rat poison? I guess the question is whether you connect the obtaining of something that is arguably dangerous with their politics.”

Of those eventually tried for possession of ricin, Doug Baker best fits the role of patsy. His pre-sentence report portrays someone who had disliked school and who was indifferent to serious issues. When his father talked to him about politics, Doug said he couldn’t care less. Doug had no previous criminal record and always paid his taxes. He didn’t own a phone, drink or do drugs. Loverink, the state’s only eyewitness, had never met Doug Baker, and had never claimed that Baker was part of the alleged conspiracy to kill government officials. Tilsen says that Baker’s mistake was letting Henderson stay at his home, where the poison was left behind. But what about the note addressed to “Doug,” found in the can in Doug Baker’s closet? Tilsen argued that Doug never saw the note, and that there was, in fact, another Doug — Doug Madison — hanging around that summer.

Although LeRoy Wheeler’s fingerprints were found inside the gloves contained in the Folger’s coffee can, private attorney Neal Shapiro says Wheeler was a nice guy who couldn’t have been involved in assassination conspiracies. Asked why Wheeler grew the beans in his back yard and allowed ricin to be manufactured in his home, Shapiro, who was appointed to defend Wheeler, says, “Why do people collect guns? I don’t know why. Loverink talks about Wheeler and Henderson and Oelrich as blowhards… ‘We’re gonna kill this guy!’ and ‘This sonofabitch arrested me!’ just like a bunch of guys down at the bar who get a couple of beers, and they’re gonna do this and they’re gonna do that, but they never do it! These guys are great talkers, but they never do anything.”

Neither defendant spoke much in the courtroom. Wheeler, who testified at the subsequent trial of Henderson and Oelrich, did not take the stand. On February 28, 1995, after just four hours of deliberation, the jury found both defendants guilty of possession of a chemical for use as a weapon. Though there are no sentencing guidelines for conviction under the Biological Weapons Act, the law specifies that life imprisonment is an option. Petterson asked Judge Robert Renner for 10-year sentences. Before both men were sentenced to 33-month prison terms on May 18, 1995, Doug Baker read a 10-minute statement in court, with references to himself as “the aggrieved party,” claiming that the federal government had no jurisdiction in his case and that his court-appointed attorney had no license to practice law. Doug Baker is currently serving his sentence at the Rochester Federal Medical Facility and working in the commissary. Wheeler, whose confession and testimony were instrumental in the convictions of the other two defendants, is being held at the Federal Prison Camp in Duluth.

Eight months later, Petterson represented the government again in charges against Richard Oelrich and Bert Henderson. At the time of the Baker-Wheeler trial in early 1995, no others had been charged with ricin-related crimes. But newspaper accounts of the trial referred to two unknown “mystery men” whose involvement seemed to overshadow the proceedings. To secure testimony from Baker and Wheeler against others still being investigated, the government declined to name Henderson and Oelrich, the two men it planned to bring to trial. In July, the government filed “Secret Indictments,” naming Bert Henderson and Richard Oelrich, who were then arrested. Both were charged with possession and “conspiracy to possess” ricin. Henderson was arrested on July 27, 1995, at an Alexandria apartment. Oelrich was nabbed a few days later in his car near Detroit Lakes. A police search of Oelrich’s car turned up a veritable survivalist’s supply cabinet: nine 30-06 cartridges, 959 rounds of .22 ammunition, three boxes of shells for a Russian-made SKS assault rifle, as well as clothing, bedding and canned foods.

Henderson and Oelrich’s two-day trial began October 23, 1995. Each attempted to represent himself and to introduce politics to the proceedings. Henderson rejected outside counsel, and Oelrich allowed only minimal help from his court-appointed attorney, Douglas Scheel, who spent most of the trial in the back of the courtroom. The trial was punctuated with a flurry of objections from the two defendants, among them the claim that they would not allow their names to be used in open court. After the state’s handwriting analyst testified that the smiley-face note was written by Henderson, Henderson cross-examined himself. Government prosecutors proceeded much as they had in the earlier trial, though for this trial, they put LeRoy Wheeler on the stand. And this time, the jury returned a pair of guilty verdicts after two hours. At Oelrich’s sentencing on February 19 of this year, he stood at the podium in his tan jail-house coveralls and plastic sandals, dutifully reciting 20 minutes worth of “aggreiveds,” referring to himself as “this freeman character, having lawfully expatriated” and to his arrest as “kidnapping.” As Oelrich read, he instructed the court reporter to place a name in uppercase letters. The reporter rolled her eyes. Oelrich’s two stern-faced sisters and one brother sat in the courtroom. They refused to comment, saying only that their brother had been convicted for “having a big mouth.” Oelrich was sentenced to 37 months in prison and was later moved, presumably due to a heart condition, to an out-of-state facility. No relatives were at Henderson’s sentencing, when he gave his final statement to the court in tones of rising indignation. After he read his statement, he turned to the nearly empty courtroom and pulled his fist down in a sign of athletic triumph, “touchdown!” Chief Judge Paul Magnuson seemed to be shuffling papers during each of the men’s statements, glancing up occasionally as though he was looking at a mute television at a noisy bar. He sentenced Henderson to 48 months in prison.

Since the trial, Henderson and Oelrich each have sent court officials and reporters bills for up to $1 billion for “libel of my Christian name.” Duane Baker says that his son has a newfound interest in studying and is poring over law books in his cell. The senior Baker’s hope is that Doug will “be able to get out and speak to huge numbers of people and tell them exactly what this is all about. And I think [he and Colette will] be pretty good advocates of people that have made a commitment to one another in marriage to say, ‘Hey, if you got problems, try to deal with them yourself. Do not involve 911, never call in the police, never involve the state, because once you’ve got them in your life, you’ll never get ’em out.’” U.S. Attorney David Lillehaug says, “The sentences are disappointing. It’s clear that there are at least several more jail-house lawyers in federal prison.”

Petterson: What did Mr. Henderson say about the effect of ricin on people? Loverink: He laughed and said that, as I understand it, “They shit themselves to death.” — Court transcripts

Ricin, along with numerous other legal and lethal homegrown toxins and biological poisons, is “about as complicated [to produce] as manufacturing beer and less dangerous than refining heroin,” according to America the Vulnerable: The Threat of Chemical and Biological Warfare by Joseph Douglass and Neil Livingstone. The concoction the four Minnesota men allegedly agreed to make was simple and heinous. To extract the ricin, Henderson boiled down the crushed seeds a few times through an elementary distillation process. The trick then was to get the powder into the victims’ bodies. The government claimed that the four men mixed the ricin with aloe vera in order to make it easy to smear on door handles, steering wheels and inside someone’s shoes. Then they added dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a powerful, commercially available solvent once popular among arthritis sufferers. DMSO creates a warm sensation when applied to the skin. Thomas Lynch, the FBI toxicologist who testified at both men’s trials, said DMSO would speed delivery of the drug into a victim’s bloodstream. When the men tested the DMSO on their wrists in Loverink’s loft, they reportedly could taste the aloe vera in their mouths instantly.

The Department of Agriculture says that it’s legal to sell castor beans, and numerous people involved in these cases say they can be purchased at “any hardware store.” But at Lyndale Garden Center in Richfield, management pulls castor-bean packets out of mixed shipments, locks them in a safe upstairs and then returns them to the supplier. The garden center sold two packages of 10 beans each to the Twin Cities Reader for $1.39 apiece. The bush on the seed packet looks, at first glance, like marijuana. “CASTOR BEAN (Ricinus communis) forms a giant plant with huge fleshy leaves,” the description on the back says. The seeds themselves are the size of grapes, with a brown mottled exterior and a small, whitehead-like tip.

There is no known antidote to ricin poisoning, which induces abdominal pain, vomiting, bloody diarrhea and decreased urine production. Death by ricin has been said to occur within 10 minutes, but the FBI toxicologist testified that the fastest a person could die from ricin poisoning would be three days. Ricin is viewed by many as a perfect murder weapon, since it virtually disappears from the body after ingestion. Lynch testified that the powder manufactured by Henderson was 3 percent ricin, and amounted to about 129 lethal doses.

Despite doubt about an amateur’s ability to properly extract ricin, many hopeful poisoners have turned to ricin through the years. Saddam Hussein reportedly included it on a list of desirable biological weapons. The most famous case of ricin poisoning was the 1978 assassination of Bulgarian exile Georgi Markov in London. Markov died when he was stabbed with an umbrella that lodged a ricin-filled pellet in his leg. In 1983, FBI agents arrested two brothers who manufactured the toxin in Springfield, Massachusetts. They had managed to make an ounce of nearly pure ricin, which they kept in a 35-mm film canister. A Nashville neurosurgeon was recently charged with conspiring to kill another doctor by soaking the pages of a book with ricin. In Kansas City, Dr. Deborah Green put castor beans in her husband’s food, but he didn’t die. In December, Thomas Lavy was arrested for possessing 130 grams of ricin and became the fifth person in the United States charged under the Biological Weapons Act. Authorities first became suspicious when Lavy was detained at the Canadian border in 1993, while in the process of moving from Alaska to Little Rock, Arkansas. In addition to ricin, officials found 20,000 rounds of ammunition, $98,000 in cash and “Nazi literature.” On December 23, 1995, Thomas Lavy hung himself in his jail cell.

Many observers agree that, of those investigated, the most ardent anti-government partisan, the common-law patriot with the most highly evolved theoretical critique, is 56-year-old Duane Baker. Duane, who has 11 grandchildren, looks remarkably young. His black hair is slicked back, with just a hint of a pompadour. He is ropey and dark, and wears a Dayton’s Boundary Waters wool sports coat and jeans. On the bumper of his van is a sticker that says, “I love my country. It’s the government I’m afraid of.” Sitting on the orange vinyl chair of the Hometown Cafe in Brooten, just a few feet from the storefront where he used to hold religious meetings, Baker says he thinks his son went to prison so that Congress could justify the Biological Weapons Act passed five years before Doug’s arrest.

He says he doesn’t advocate violence, but he believes in the threat of a “one-world government.” Putting innocent people in jail for “thought crimes” is just the beginning, he says. Gesturing to a binder swelling with papers relevant to his son’s conviction, Baker lowers his voice. “They know that the truth is coming out… They’re getting scared,” he says. Baker has created an artillery of literature, documentation and educational material in pursuit of his politics. He and his wife recently returned from Ohio, where they attended a seminar regarding their “rights.” A veteran “networker,” Baker has sold vacuum cleaners and used cars, but his greatest vocational passion is his most recent one: CARE International, the “structured” selling organization that supplies him with tapes, literature, income and “product.” He says he is in the “health and wellness” industry. After lunch, he quickly pops several capsules of brownish powder into his mouth, explaining that he ingests and recommends the use of enzymes, “the life of the plant,” which he claims have cured attention-deficit disorder. Baker refuses to travel by air because he believes that the “virus” known as Gulf War syndrome is more dangerous than AIDS and can be caught through airplane ventilation systems. When asked about ricin, he says, “Would a common, ordinary person living out in the boondocks know how to make ricin? I don’t think so.”

FBI agent Lund’s affidavit stated that Baker and his sons “are avid advocates of ‘people’s rights’ and have intimidated their entire neighborhood. They were heavily armed, and Duane Baker always carried a sidearm.” When the FBI tapped Duane Baker’s home and business phones for six months in 1993, the bureau discovered enough phone calls between the four men to substantiate suspicions of a conspiracy. According to the FBI, Duane Baker “held weekly meetings, under the guise of religion, attended by his supporters.” Lund’s affidavit states, “Baker was very secretive about what transpired at the weekly meetings.” Until recently, Baker hosted meetings at the small storefront a few feet from the Hometown Cafe and Bowling Alley. The government alleges that the group was known as “The Patriot’s Council.” (In an interview in Anoka County Jail, Henderson called the Patriot’s Council “the biggest bunch of sit-on-their-ass do-nothings I ever met.”) Dennis Dalman, in the Alexandria Echo Press, reported that two confidential sources claimed that the Patriot’s Council “was an informal group of people who have met off and on at various places in Central and West Central Minnesota, including St. Cloud, Alexandria, Glenwood and Starbuck.” Others say the group claimed to be a campaign center for “Bo” Gritz’s 1992 run for the White House.

Baker says he’s never heard of the Patriot’s Council. He says the meetings were at the Church of Israel, and that’s where his son met LeRoy Wheeler, and that his old friend, Dick Oelrich, attended the small services led by Pastor Don Solomonson from Stacy. He said he finally broke up the church because he didn’t want to endanger people’s lives “like Waco.” He claims there were helicopters and squad cars in constant surveillance of the former Laundromat. Asked about his political beliefs, Baker says, ominously, “One day something’s gonna have to be done. There’s gonna be cleaning. There’s gonna have to be a housecleaning some way or another. It’s gonna have to be a mass uprising of people. Good people who say this bullshit’s all over. We don’t want people who are in there for their own selfish motives who are promoting corporate America. We want people who have a concern for the average, working person.” Baker also says that if the Twin Cities Reader “twists and perverts” his words, he will “never, ever do another interview.”

Mark Hedner, the sheriff of Pope County, is a big man with a neck that spills over his starched collar. He has bright blue eyes, a down-home style and unwavering dislike for the remaining “tax protesters” in his county. Hedner says the groups still operating in his county are the Patriot’s Council and the tax-protesting Posse Comitatus, though he says most of that group’s activity is centered in Todd and Otter Tail counties. Since the arrests, a couple of the most “avid” protesters, who were closely affiliated with the Bakers, “have moved out, thank goodness,” he says. To Duane Baker’s claim that his is a good family and that God will prove him right, Hedner says in true Minnesota downplay, “Well, we’ll see. The investigation is still open. Four guys have been arrested, and who knows, there might be more.” “People don’t put up with that bullshit. The neighbors think they’re crazy,” Hedner says. Asked if he wishes the rest of the protesters would leave town, Hedner says simply, “Yeah.”

Douglas County Detective Jerry Werner, the detective who first investigated the case, will not comment on Duane Baker as an ongoing subject of investigation, but concurs with Hedner that there have been problems in Otter Tail and Todd counties. Another 50 miles northwest of Alexandria the stretch of highway is bleak and the fields close-cropped. At his office in Fergus Falls, Otter Tail County Sheriff Gary Nelson is tightlipped about local political activity. He wears a brown uniform with dark brown trim and a large belt buckle emblazoned with “GOD, GUNS AND GUTS.” Whether he is calculatingly quiet about local investigations or simply suspicious of outsiders, Nelson won’t allow taping. He has a “Clinton Countdown” daily calendar and says, “There are no investigations.” The last he heard, a “common law” group requested permission to speak at the Todd County Courthouse, and they were granted rights for 100 people, but 150 showed up. According to local newspaper reports, right-wing jargon identical to that used by the four defendants during their trials was in abundance at the meeting. The Henning Advocate, for instance, reported last November that a group calling itself the “Justices of Our Own Supreme Court” “served” Sheriff Nelson with a 77-page document alleging that Otter Tail County is in violation of “Man’s Law.” “I went,” Nelson says. “They were articulate. They quoted from the Bible, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. There was nothing to disagree about.” He says he has no problems with the regular meetings that take place in Browerville because “the Constitution is almost a sacred document, and they don’t talk about anything violent.” He adds, defensively, “What about the SLA and the Weathermen [the Weather Underground], the American Indian Movement and the Black Panthers and left-wing groups bombing draft places? Detroit. Watts. City after city went up in smoke. The liberal media elite said we were supposed to understand these misunderstood people. Violence is violence whether it’s on the left or the right.”

Duane Baker says he has no desire for violence. “All I can do is furnish information. Some of the seed falls on fertile ground, some of the seed falls on rocky ground, some of the seed germinates and grows up but never produces fruit — the Bible talks about it. All I can do is plant seeds. If they won’t germinate within you, and it doesn’t take root, that’s not my problem. That’s God’s problem. He’ll deal with you.” ◆

Close Encounter: Cult’s Earthly Travel Brought Eight Followers to The Twin Cities

Sitting at the conference room table of the Twin Cities Reader, I found myself asking a question which I have never asked in an interview before, “Are you,” I posed to the leader of the group of four young men and one woman, “a human?”

The man, who would only give his name as ‘Logan,’ looked otherworldly. His head was big and appeared to bobble on his skinny neck. His eyes were large, pale blue orbs, he had no upper lip and his face was smashed flat, as if he had been raised in a petri dish, face down. Unlike his companions, Logan looked fit, like a marathon runner in his early 60’s, tan and lean. The men looked, as I wrote in my notes that day three years ago, like people bred to work on computers: long, skinny fingers, pale skin, and clothes which hung on their bodies like plastic bags caught in the branches of a tree.

Logan answered me simply, eager to go on explaining his group’s mission. “No,” he said, he was not a human. The two absent leaders of the group, known as Bo and Peep, He and She or Chip and Dale, were also not human and the female had already left the planet. Logan would not tell me where the male alien lived. The other people sitting on either side of him along the luminously polished table of the Twin Cities Reader’s conference room, however, were still human. “We are at the end of the age,” he said. It would soon be time for the chosen few–including the people sitting to his left and right as well as others not present–to “graduate,” to leave the earth for another “real, physical level of existence” somewhere in the sky. He said it didn’t matter if it made sense to others; “the aliens don’t want everybody.” When Logan spoke of someday leaving his body behind, like a suit of clothes,” all five people gazed at me and smiled.

Last week, 39 members of this group apparently made this dream come true in Rancho Santa Fe, California. Whether they brought any Minnesotans with them is still unknown, but when the eight members of “Total Overcomers Anonymous” came to the Edina Community Center and the Walker Community Library three years ago, they attracted the attention of at least 150 people, one of whom may may since have died in a rented California house with plastic bag knotted around his head. Logan has since been identified as John M. Craig (aka Logan Lahson, 63) who was among the dead.

After the hour-long interview, I was anxious to see who would show up for their FREE community meetings. The first, held in the Edina Community Center on a Thursday night, drew about 25 people. I assumed they had come as a result of the legal size flyers which had been posted around the university and uptown areas. “Organized religion (especially Christrian) has become THE PRIMARY PULPIT FOR MISINFORMATION AND THE ‘GREAT COVER-UP,” read one. The rest of the flyer was crammed with jargon-ridden, nonsensical, quasi-biblical prouncements, with little white space. Another, given to me by the group, advertised a previous meeting in Little Rock, Arkansas, on April 9. Neither flyer provided a phone number or address where they could be reached if one was interested in joining. The modus operandi appeared to be to remain secretive unless a particularly absorbent candidate asked for more information. I was given a post office box in California where I could send a copy of the article.

As I approached, I struggled to remember the names the five “crew members” had given me. Wendy, the older woman. Derwin, the gangly, slightly misfit-looking one who worked with computers, Alex, the talkative ardent apprentice and Ray, whom the group had named in accordance with their leaders’ own musical pseudonyms, Do and Ti. Five, including Logan and Wendy, sat at the table facing the rows of folding chairs. Though their clothes were not identical, their shirts were collarless, or asymmetrically designed worn open over dark, baggy pants.

During the informal presentation and subsequent dialogue with the audience, one member kept vigil at the back door, Ray sat in the audience and Derwin stood against a wall, watching our backs. With no notes, handouts, literature or visual displays, Logan simply began, “Now let’s talk about aliens.” With that, about ten audience members promptly got up and left the room.

The ones who remained, however, were skeptical but not entirely comprehensible. In a “What’s My Line,” interrogative style, one woman spoke up. “So… you’re from outer space… and this kingdom place really exists somewhere…” sensing no objection, she continues. “Okay… so… where is it?”

The female on the panel speaks just above a whisper. Something about a “security risk” preventing her from revealing or even knowing where the kingdom is.

Alex cuts in. “Well, she didn’t mean to say ‘security risk,’ exactly–”

A man in the audience jumps on the chance, “No, I think that is what she meant” and tries to pin down the address of the place the aliens will be moving to. Now Logan attempts to describe it. “We don’t have a headquarters that’d be like… like… a… headquarters… exactly.”

A grey-haired woman in the front row whose friend is wearing two watches asks the aliens how quantam physics figures into their cosmology. Logan waves his hand, “Oh, we’re not into that at all.”

Just then, a very large, wet-looking man walks in and takes a seat. He breathes very loudly and smells like Fritos.

A man who looks like a college freshman decides it’s time for his critique of the aliens’ pitch. “You know, if Jesus came back, he wouldn’t be making up flyers that talk about space ships.”

Alex glares at the young man.

Now a woman in the audience tries to help the aliens communicate, “It’s just that your energy feels like it’s not from the heart. You should try to give more from your heart chakra.”

The whispering female alien jumps in. “The joy that we experience is the knowledge that we have to serve in our father’s kingdom and the future eternal life.”

A man with a hat in his lap is now sketching pictres of the aliens on the backs of their flyers. “Where have I heard that before?” he mutters.

From the back of the room comes a loud voice, “We all know that civilization is going to end.” Everyone turns to look at the man wearing red suspenders in the last row. As he speaks, he zips up his backpack, “And I’m not planning on staying here too much longer. What I want to know is, are you aware that the six-pointed star on your poster is the symbol for Moloch?” Logan merely stares at him and blinks.

Later, as Alex explained that our sexual desires and human concerns were unimportant because extra-terrestrial beings–whom we should emulate–do not have genders. When another spectator quickly announced “Everyone knows that aliens have genders!” I thought, God, I’ve really walked through the looking glass this time. What a great story.

When I read this week that a number of the members had been castrated, Alex’s strangely infantile perspective on human sexuality now made sense. The androgynous appearance of the eight people I met, their self-censoring attitudes on normal human drives and appetites–suddenly the act of mutilating one’s own sexual organs had a kind of reason to it.

“Well,” said Alex, trying to pick his words carefully, “Well, it’s true that certain aliens do have bumps where males have bumps and other aliens have bumps where females have bumps…” He finally gave up in exasperation, “It would be foolish for me to try to explain this to you.” Alex, who appeared to be in his early twenties, started to dominate the discussion. His speeches were only partial evangelical zeal. He just seemed to be trying to find a way to explain himself. After a particulary losing round with an audience member about the exact location of the “Kingdom,” Alex tried to put an end to the confusion. “Look, there’s this kingdom,” he says, aiming his eyes at one audience member, “There’s a way to get out of here and there’s a formula. If this doesn’t make sense toyou, it doesn’t make a bit of difference.” Alex’s personality had not, apprently, been completely streamlined to the group consciousness. After the meeting, the older woman, “Wendy” approached me and asked, hopefully, “Did that make sense?”

After this informal meeting, a couple of phone calls (they had a temporary local phone number) and some reading from their flyers which made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, I realized I was witnessing the nascent age of a cult. Written in a cramped typeface on the flyer advertising the two Minneapolis meetings, was “That formula for being born into the Evolutionary Level Above Human requires: the shedding of all human-mammalian behavior, such as sexuality (all forms); ties (to family, human relationships, possessions, and responsibilities); addictions (of all types); habits; and self-concerns.”

It was a baby cult, I was sure, but a dangerous blend of domination, apocalyptic thinking and intellectual isolation techniques were being braided into one very tight rope. In my notes, I wrote that these were people had spent way too much time on their computers. From the cultural vacuum they had created for themselves had erupted a cynical mirror version of Christianity–with hierarchies, good aliens and bad aliens, monasteries and biblical references updated for the hyperlink generation.

I sensed, at the time, that the group was savvy enough to repel any attempts to paint them as a cult. Logan emphasized that people could “volunteer” their belongings, but were not required to relinquish them. They were careful not to “recruit,” preferring instead to liken their teaching methods to an “astronaut training program” in which qualified students could meet with “representatives of the next level.” As Logan told me, “A dog can’t teach another dog about the human kingdom. It takes the human to domesticate the dog.” Which is why, he explained, the group all lived together in California, sharing their money and food, and why, Ray, the newest member of the group, told me “you gotta have somebody with you 24 hours a day to tell you what’s wrong and right. We need constant instruction and correction.”

Today, it is Ray’s likeness I am searching for on the Internet. When, on that Saturday afternoon in 1994, I showed up for the second meeting in the basement meeting room of the Walker Library in Uptown, Ray’s face lit up when he saw me. I talked to him for a minute alone, in the lobby of the library, and asked him what he was doing three months ago. “Sitting around the Santa Cruz mountains, smoking pot, waiting for them to show up.” He actually met them about 50 miles north of Santa Cruz, at a meeting just like this one, in Palo Alto, my hometown.

The look on Ray’s face as he told me about the girlfriend he sacrificed by joining the group known then as “Total Overcomers Anonymous” was heartbreaking. Of the eight members, he was the only one whose expression was not completely consumed by the distraction of The Message. Just as our conversation began to warm into normal tones of commonality, Alex appeared at Ray’s shoulder and the talk about girlfriends ended abruptly.

In the Fifties, aliens were malevolent. On the modern day Twilight Zone, with the cultish following, the X Files, aliens are menacing, secretive and somehow related to shadowy government officials. The strangest phenomenon, howeverr is the recent embrace of aliens as welcome visitors, mute angels victimized by human technology. As computers become more a part of our consciousness, it poses as a candidate for spiritual transcendance. The almond-eyed, bald-headed and somewhat cherubic alien is now the icon for a generation spooked by the end of a century.

“The question,” said Logan during our first interview, “IS what do you have to do to get out of here?”

[Sari Gordon is a freelance writer living in Minneapolis. Her story, “Out There: Aliens Offer a Trip to Their Kingdom,” appeared in the Twin Cities Reader on April 26, 1994.]

The original page, preserved in the Wayback Machine →

Cat Scratch Fever: Inside the World of Exotic Animal Ownership

About a year ago, on an April afternoon, Al Wolter drove to his neighbor’s house in Sandstone to help with a controlled burn. The neighbor, Cynthia Gamble, a wild-animal trainer, was his best female friend and the two regularly shared cocktails and sang karaoke together on his home machine. “She had an earthy sense of humor,” he said, an affectionate way of indicating that Cyndi could tell a good dirty joke. Gamble seemed to be most comfortable with male friends and often phoned Wolter to let off steam about personal problems. Lately, the problems had been mounting. Her business partner, Craig Wagner, had just left the state with a majority of their holdings, and her fourteen-year-old son Garrett was floundering in school.

Wolter unlocked Gamble’s front gate and, seeing that his friend wasn’t around, shot hoops for a while with Garrett. The two then walked through a pasture where a musk ox grazed and headed toward the modified pole barn Garrett shared with his mother. Inside the barn, the living quarters were separated by sliding glass doors from a row of twenty large cages. Three of the cages contained tigers, the B-grade animals Gamble had agreed to keep when her exotic-cat business, the Center for Endangered Cats, went bust. The animals were not trainable and Wolter knew that Gamble took care of them only because they had nowhere else to go. One in particular, a ten-year-old Bengal named Tango, was notably vicious. Said Wolter: “She knew this tiger was a killer.”

Cyndi wasn’t afraid of the tigers, cougars, jaguars, servals, coyotes, and caracals she’d trained and worked with for more than twenty years. Nor did she kid herself by considering them pets. She followed meticulous feeding procedures, especially with the tigers, which could consume more than ten pounds of food per day. Feeding them wasn’t what you’d call fun. It meant opening a small, six-by-eighteen-inch window and throwing in large chunks of the meat she kept in a freezer. Once, when Wolter was helping out, he tossed a slab and missed the window. When he moved forward to retrieve it, Gamble hollered in a booming voice, “Get out of there!” Wolter leapt back in a heartbeat.

Garrett entered the section of the barn where the cats were kept and walked toward Tango’s cage, which was partially covered by a sheet of plywood. Something made him yell and run for a .22 rifle, calling to Wolter to shoot the tiger. Unarmed, Wolter approached the cage, where Tango was roaring and leaping against the sides. A safety door — a remotely controlled guillotine contraption — had been left open, which was unusual, not to mention dangerous. It was then that he looked beyond the piece of plywood and saw a tableau that will remain with him always. His friend Cynthia Gamble’s nude and destroyed body lay limp on the floor of the tiger’s cage. Tango had stripped her of clothing before eating her breasts and both arms up to the elbows and then licking her clean of blood.

The tiger had to be tranquilized in order to retrieve Gamble’s body. And then, of course, it was killed. The news cameras rolled and reporters tried to explain how such a situation had come to be. They concluded that Cyndi, who two years previously had filed for bankruptcy and taken a job at a local casino, had been struggling to scrounge up enough meat to keep the tigers adequately fed. In fact, she’d fallen back on donations of road-killed deer. The tiger, given the opportunity, had attacked because it was starving. Tango and the other two cats were at least one hundred pounds underweight.

And so it was that Cyndi Gamble — passionate animal lover, professional wrangler in films and demonstrations, author, film editor, conservationist, amateur biologist, mother, wife, daughter, and ultimately victim to her life’s work — became the tragic public face of a very private and reticent network of exotic-wildlife owners. For that brief moment, the lights flashed on and the average person realized that some of their fellow Minnesotans kept tigers and lions and bears in their backyards next to swing sets and tomato plants. And then, just as suddenly, the lights flashed off again.

From the time we are children, our imaginations are filled with animals. We surround ourselves with furry companions — dogs and cats and rabbits and gerbils — that we imagine admire and love us. And when we want to test our limits and step up to examine our true place in the ancient pecking order, we surround ourselves with wild animals. We swim with dolphins, dangle in shark-infested waters, and have our yearbook pictures taken with purring white tigers. According to psychologist Chilla Bulbeck, who studies human relationships with dolphins and monkeys, zoo attendance “far exceeds that at professional sporting events; the amount of money spent by pet owners on their animals exceeds that spent by parents on baby food; and the amount of mail received by the U.S. Congress regarding the protection of animals exceeds that received in relation to Vietnam.”

What we see when we look into an animal’s eyes — entertainment, sport, friend, food — depends on the particular way in which we’ve mythologized them. We project upon animals our fears and hopes. We manipulate them to our wills. And sometimes when we look, we see ourselves. As Schopenhauer wrote in 1851, “In the heart of every man there lies a wild beast which only waits for an opportunity to storm and rage.” Perhaps people like Cynthia Gamble, people who own exotic animals, are not content simply to watch. More than most, they wish to skate along the thin ice of the pond.

Tammy Quist is another of Gamble’s neighbors in Sandstone, a town that seems to be a sort of wild-pet mecca. Quist has worked for years with large cats, but she doesn’t defend private ownership of lions and tigers. Her experiences instead have convinced her that the practice must end. Though Quist acknowledged that there are responsible owners, she said, “the cons outweigh the pros.” Just weeks before Gamble’s death, Quist had expanded her nonprofit retirement home for rescued cats, called The Wildcat Sanctuary, from a ten-acre facility in Isanti County to a forty-acre spread in Sandstone. She reports that in 2005 alone, the Sanctuary rescued one hundred wild cats.

Ask groups like PETA why they oppose the private ownership of exotic pets and they’ll say that when an animal like a tiger attacks a person, it’s the cat that pays the price. Often they are euthanized, such as after Gamble’s death. As of April, according to PETA, big cats had killed seventeen people in as many years in the U.S. Since 1990, there have been 426 non-fatal injuries involving captive wildlife. Mary Hartman, a Rochester woman whose young daughter was bitten in 2001 and dragged into the woods by a neighbor’s pet tiger, believes keeping undomesticated animals “creates the illusion that you’re getting a piece of the wild.”

Ironically, while tigers are in danger of extinction in the wild, the captive U.S. population is reaching “epidemic” proportions. India is home to just under five thousand wild tigers. It’s estimated there are three times as many in our country, not including official zoos — fifteen to twenty-five thousand privately kept tigers by most zoo officials’ reckoning. There are no official estimates for Minnesota, but Tammy Quist receives more than thirty calls per month from locals who can no longer handle their exotic cats.

Statistics like these led the state, in 2005, to enact a statute that prohibits “purchasing, obtaining, or owning certain exotic animals.” The list includes all cats (except domestic), bears, all non-human primates, and any hybrid cross. The law doesn’t apply to people with USDA licenses, such as research facilities, breeders, dealers, and zoos. Nor would it have made a bit of difference to Cynthia Gamble. Existing animals were grandfathered in, though owners now have to register them with the state Board of Animal Health. So far, the BAH has registered forty-six felids. The law hasn’t exactly coaxed enthusiasts out of hiding.

Last July, Congress began debating a federal bill that would ban most human contact with wild animals. Owners staged a mini-protest, posting dozens of pictures of themselves lounging with their pussycat tigers and lions. While animal-rights groups have Pamela Anderson and Tippi Hedren, exotic-animal owners have Zuzana Kukol, a passionate voice for liberty in these matters, who cites her background as a political refugee as the pilot light that heats her furor against restrictive legislation. In a January letter to Cat Fancy magazine, Kukol wrote: “All it takes is one big cat attack or any rare incident involving an exotic species, for the local and state governments to go into action doing the only thing they know how to do — write and pass more laws.”

People acquire exotic animals in a variety of ways — through networks of friends and like-minded collectors, publications, and even zoos. The web serves as a veritable exotic-pet store, with ads for sugar gliders, hedgehogs, binturongs, coatimundis, lemurs, kinkajous, fennec foxes, genets, red pandas and wallabies — and, further down, coyotes, musk oxen, camels, elephants, zebras and even dingoes and seals. The Animal Finder’s Guide, the oldest resource for the private exotic-animal trade, is a simple newsprint catalog published eighteen times per year. On its first page was an ad for a USDA-licensed zoo in Ohio going out of business: for $2,800, three tigers, a bear, a coyote, a timber wolf, and two mountain lions — “All are hand raised and pettable” — tranquilizer gun included.

Another ad offered five free tigers. “I need to make room,” explained Tim, reached by phone at his home in Indiana. Tim has dedicated three of his eight acres to twelve tigers, two leopards, a cougar, four bobcats, a serval, two ocelots, a binturong, a wallaby, and several hawks and owls. Given the regulations, the danger, and the sheer expense of feeding the animals, why keep such a large collection? “Because I love animals,” he said. Though Tim takes in rescues from people who don’t properly care for their animals, he has no plans to stop breeding his own tigers: “I’m not gonna knock the nuts off. I love dealing with the babies.”

The Feline Conservation Federation is the premier organization representing wild-cat owners — hundreds of people worldwide “interested in the propagation and preservation of all the wild feline species.” Its most recent convention was held at an aging Holiday Inn in the Cincinnati suburbs, chosen because members were allowed to bring their animals. Vendors displayed cat foods, nets, gloves, enclosure and insurance brochures. At the opening-night cocktail party sat board member (now FCF president) Lynn Culver, playing with the bobcat kitten in her lap. Dogs and cats are man-made, said Culver, but looking into a wild cat’s eyes is akin to “looking into the face of God.” Back home, she and husband Bart have six cougars, thirteen bobcats, two Canadian lynx, three caracals, six servals, and thirteen Geoffrey’s cats.

A number of women, in fact, have chosen rare, endangered, or potentially dangerous cats over parenthood. One owns two of only twenty Sokokes in the country — purely wild housecat-sized cats from a small forest in Kenya. “I think people are really removed from nature,” she said. “Most kids think the future will be lonely and unclean and there will be no animals or plants left.”

After much reading and searching and cajoling, I found a woman named “Lisa” who offered to show her Canadian lynx in its home setting. Driving through northern Minnesota toward her house, the twilight pushed into night. Finally there appeared a long driveway that led to a large, newer two-car garage and a neatly cut expanse of lawn. A sign that read, Caution! Regulated Animal on Premises, spurred the kind of thrill a person just doesn’t get pushing through the turnstile at the zoo. Two thigh-high, mixed-breed dogs bounded out. Lisa was close behind. She apologized that she couldn’t shake hands — she’d taken her lynx to the vet the day before and though it had been given Valium for the trip, the cat had managed a clumsy swipe that cut her hand.

In the living room of her contemporary A-frame house, Lisa pointed toward the vast space above, where carpeted shelves were built into window ledges near the ceiling. “It’s a lot of work,” she said of her lynx, sounding like a first-time mother. “He eats everything: wood carvings, shoes, leather…” The only real damage the twenty-five-pound cat, “Lance,” ever caused was to himself — leaping at a window molding expecting to grip it like a tree, he fell onto the cast-iron woodstove below, was paralyzed for a few hours, and didn’t walk normally for a week.

Outside, in the dark, Lisa led the way toward a small grove of pine trees. With tufted ears alert, Lance circled his fifteen-by-fifteen-foot pen, his eyes fixed on Lisa and the Styrofoam tray of raw chicken parts in her hand. She entered the pen and set the meat on the table. In one fast, fluid movement, Lance leapt onto the table, snapped up the chicken, whirled around and dropped silently to the ground. When he’d finished, Lisa let the dogs into the kennel. The three animals wrestled and played and scrambled around the enclosure. Being in the presence of a wild cat wasn’t like being around any other animal — not only its sheer physical power, but also the absolutely revolting smell of piss, almost visibly radiant, encircling the pen by roughly twenty feet even in the crisp northern Minnesota night air. “It’s pretty strong,” laughed Lisa. The smell literally makes her husband Bob vomit — but competition between husbands and male pets is a different matter entirely when you’re talking about a lynx. If she ever had to choose, Lisa acknowledged she’d get rid of the lynx. As if on cue, her husband appeared at the back sliding door after finishing his work shift. Lisa shrugged: “Why would you own a lynx if you couldn’t snuggle?”

Is Red Wing the Artspot That Could, Or Will It Give Artists the Boot?

John Kerwin has big plans to turn the historic Maltery in downtown Red Wing into affordable artists’ spaces. The jury’s still out on whether he’ll be able to see those plans to fruition.

Five years ago I quit my high-paying corporate job in Eden Prairie and moved to Ellsworth, Wisconsin, to write a book. I wrote and wrote and spent up my 401(k) and wrote some more. And then I sold some stuff on eBay and kept writing — until a squirrel moved into the ceiling over our bedroom and I stopped writing and started sitting outside with a .22. Today, I’m broke, I have a manuscript somewhere on a hard drive, and the land around me is squirrel-free. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Red Wing is the nearest big town. I went looking for other writers, musicians, and artists to hang out with. It took awhile. If you walk around downtown Red Wing, you get the feeling that the cool part of town is right around the corner. While Red Wing has great arts institutions, the artists themselves are hard to find. In fact, I’d lived here three years before I found my pal David Culver, the amazing sculptor, living right down the road from me in Bay City, Wisconsin. There should be a community.

About twenty years ago, a tide of money washed over Red Wing. NSP built a nuclear power plant and paid the local Prairie Island Indian Community $2.25 million a year to store nuclear waste. Then the Treasure Island Casino opened, and is now the area’s biggest employer. Between 1978 and 1990, at least six major sites were rehabbed: the St. James Hotel, the Red Wing Pottery Place project, the Red Wing Armory, the T.B. Sheldon Theatre, the Riverfront Development Centre and the Red Wing Depot Renovation. Robert Hedin and his wife purchased the Anderson Center grounds and building outright from the Red Wing School District during that period and developed it privately.

Today, Red Wing is faced with a challenge. According to a 2007 Comprehensive Plan, “[Red Wing] contains no major advantages relating to institutions, infrastructures, labor, incentives, and other such issues: quality of life comprises its primary attraction for businesses, residents, etc.” The report repeatedly states: “The City should promote other complementary businesses and organizations engaging in visual arts (galleries), music/entertainment, artisan-related uses [and] arts-related development incentives.”

Robert Hedin, the Executive Director of the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Arts, told me that in the last fifteen years of urban renewal, the arts have undergone “nothing less than a Renaissance.” The 52-year-old Red Wing Arts Association is at the center of the rebirth. Its gallery and shop sit prettily in the old Amtrak station in the center of the riverfront district. There are only 250 RWAA members, but they raise a $120,000 annual budget and host perhaps the most popular Red Wing event, the Fall Arts Festival, which brings over 15,000 visitors to the area annually.

One of Red Wing’s most recent arts pioneers are John and Val Becker, proprietors of the Red Wing Framing Gallery. They moved to Red Wing from Minneapolis after 9/11, leaving their careers behind to follow a shared passion for art. In 2005, they invited Max Becherer, a New York Times photographer working in Baghdad, to show his war photography. Last year, the gallery featured the extensive vintage pin-up art collection of Grapefruit Moon Gallery. Just last week, they opened a show of never-before-displayed original illustrations from the early 20th-century Cream of Wheat ad campaign.

But even with all these shiny new arts venues, the contrarian brat in me scoffed at them all. My knee-jerk reaction to the Anderson Center was, that’s the place for workshop writers who win grants. Real writers don’t apply for grants, they smoke and drink and, sometimes, write books. But after five years of book-free smoking, I deigned to make the ten-minute drive to the Center. The buildings look a lot like the correctional facility, the other big institution across town: solid red brick, wide lawns, and good fences. Sylvia Plath would have found them both alluring. I happened to visit during the annual Studio Ramble, so there was a steady stream of people walking between the numerous outdoor installations and the 16 artists’ studios on the grounds. That tranquil afternoon at the Anderson Center reminded me of nothing so much as a time, several years ago, when I visited an open-air, 15th-century courtyard in Fez, Morocco, where I lounged on carpeting and listened to hours-long performances of East Indian devotional chants. After that I felt like writing.

A Place to Keep Your Nuts. John Kerwin darts among the rubble and ruin of the old Maltery Building in downtown Red Wing, anxious to show me what he has seen. The historic industrial warehouse is still outfitted for barley processing — the floors are actually perforated steel sections where the grain was left to drain, and nearby there are huge concrete casks. Kerwin first jokes that they’re the site of future SCUBA training classes; it turns out, he’s actually got plans for them to become circular galleries. The Maltery has only been empty for ten years, but a decade of emptiness has been hard on the structure. At this point, the job of turning these gargantuan spaces into lofts looks impossible to my eye, but that’s precisely what Kerwin, an engineer, envisions. And he’s done it before.

Kerwin says he learned how to transform buildings from the late photographer Gus Gustafson in the early ’80s, when he bought and rehabbed the Milton Building in Lowertown St. Paul. From there, he moved on to renovate the ATR Building, the Purity Bakery Building in South Minneapolis and the Nicollet Island Building. What he sees in Red Wing’s Maltery Building is an 80-unit building, with space for restaurants, underground parking, and working studios where tourists can observe artists at work. He concedes that his for-profit status means that many sources of funding are closed to him. So Kerwin is asking Red Wing for a $100,000 interest-free loan to help make his vision for these artist lofts a reality. In return, the city will have a place where Anderson Center graduates can continue to live and work in the area.

Robert Hedin loves the idea. “It could be a cornerstone of the renovation of the riverfront area,” says Hedin. “I’m very, very hopeful. He’s got a great vision and the obstacles are titanic, but he seems to be a forthright visionary.” Kerwin’s plans have a number of supporters on the city council and among downtown business owners, but progress seems to be wearing heavy boots. Dan Guida, RWAA’s director, says the association is impressed with Kerwin’s plans, but doesn’t have the resources to become a funding partner. “I have absolutely no artistic ability,” Kerwin confesses as he stands in the Maltery’s demonstration loft. Even though I moved down here to a twenty-acre retreat of my own, I feel the stirrings of envy when he tells me his vision is to develop the building into low-income housing for artists, with rents between $350 and $700.

The Torpedo Factory — a like-minded endeavor just outside Washington, DC in Alexandria, VA — has been a massively successful enterprise for artists and business. Kerwin flew the Torpedo Factory architects to Red Wing. They liked what they saw. Ed McMahon of the Urban Land Institute says the prettier a city is, the more dates it gets. McMahon’s message is similar to that of Richard Florida: court the creative class if you want business. Personally, I think Red Wing seems more likely to let squirrels move in. For now, Kerwin is working his way down an extensive and somewhat discouraging 24-item punch list of paperwork from the city. I know one thing: Red Wing should have hired a professional metaphorian like me. I might have advised against their choice to scatter painted four-foot-tall cement boots around the city as an expression of Red Wing’s creativity.

Fine Line Drawing in Stockholm. In contrast to Red Wing, Stockholm, Wisconsin artists are happily burning their work. City leaders are happy to see it go up in flames, and thousands come to town to watch. Art+Fire is a community project begun last year by Andrea Myklebust and Stanton Sears. As the sun sets, a huge wooden dragon sculpture on a thin jetty in Lake Pepin is lit up with blue spotlights. Sculpture students from Macalester light the dragon on fire. An hour later, it is gone. Across the railroad tracks in town, business was brisk all day. The entire project went from idea to ashes in only one year, and next year’s festival looks to be even more popular than this one.

Every Tuesday is pizza night in Stockholm. No one calls A to Z Pizza by that name — it’s simply the Pizza Farm. We all gather — locals, visitors from the marina or the city — and blankets are set out on the big lawn surrounded by tall trees. The pizza is completely hand-made with ingredients grown on the farm in all its organic glory. There are no drinks served and no trash cans. It’s bring-your-own and carry-your-own, and on Tuesdays, after a long week of solitude, or labor, the Pizza Farm is the most beautiful place in the world.

It’s in Stockholm that I’ve found the community of artists I was looking for in this area. The Abode Gallery is a wonderland of local talent. Inside you’ll find David Culver’s granite and wood “pencils,” Gaylord Schanilec’s prized wood engraving and printmaking work, and something by local bestselling author Mary Logue: scarves hand-dyed with local berries, flowers and bugs. Six miles south of Stockholm, in Pepin, is the ironwork shop of Tom Latané — a true craftsman, working year-round in front of a roaring fire. There’s something strange in the middle of all this: in an unnamed patch of meadow is a giant horse statue, made from chicken wire and other recycled scraps, rapidly losing its flesh to the elements, revealing the bare but towering skeleton beneath. I don’t know whose horse it is and I don’t much care. To me, it says everything about the creative life down here. Art begets art, which begets life, but the wary villagers have to open the gates and invite the stranger in.

About the author: Sari Gordon is a professional writer.

A Woman of Action

Reading that Mayor Chris Coleman hired Melanie Huggins as director of the St. Paul Public Library last year, one wondered if he’d done so at least in part for the mere embraceability of her name. Certainly one could not be blamed for imagining that Ms. Huggins, a Southerner with an almost impossibly sunny nature, had arrived at the office via umbrella. Yet soon after she landed, she decided to close one of the most popular branches — Merriam Park — on Sundays, giving residents reason to wonder if she hadn’t actually flown in on a broom. “I’ve been here six months and a whole neighborhood hates me,” Huggins remembers thinking.

The cut was made so that the Central library, that grand antique situated on Rice Park, could open on Sundays. Eight hundred people showed up there the first Sunday, and now four more branches are open seven days a week. Turns out Huggins was making a play straight out of the new mayor’s handbook. As metro libraries across the nation became known as repositories more for the homeless and jobless than for books and information, Coleman recognized that St. Paul needed to realign its community services. He drafted a vision of a city with many doorways, each leading to a network of public resources.

To preside over that metaphorical entry to the city’s libraries, Coleman needed someone tenacious, decisive, and brimming with good cheer. Huggins was only thirty-seven when she got the job, but her résumé was robust. She’d grown up fast — literally: her parents strapped their infant daughter to the back of a motorcycle as they toured the countryside. In her twenties, she became besotted with a man she met in a bar. They moved in together the next week, and within a year they were married and pregnant. They just had their third child, a boy. She is, she says in an endearingly girlish voice, “a woman of action.”

Sitting in her vast office on the top floor of the Central library downtown, Huggins looks, in her trim yet stylish gray sweater, like a coed hanging out in her rich uncle’s executive lair. She was charged with giving the library an extreme makeover; eighteen months later, one result is that persnickety shushing has been replaced by a hissing espresso machine in the library’s ground-floor coffee shop. “One of my neighbors told me, ‘The library isn’t quiet anymore and I love that,’” laughs Huggins.

“My job is to start conversations and ask, ‘Why can’t we do that?,’” she explains. “Then my staff moves in and makes things happen.” She meets with the chief of police to discuss making the neighborhoods around libraries safer. She brainstorms with the school superintendent about ways to teach kids to read when they start school. She listens to church leaders and community organizers. Among those “things” she’s made happen: a satellite library that will open at the domestic violence center; and the job search workshops, free ESL classes, and child care at the new Rondo branch.

Huggins attributes her positive outlook to her mother, a nurse, who swept Melanie and her brother along in her passions for gardening, pottery, painting, and reading. Her dad was a solitary, self-contained trucker who read a lot and liked to debate — and sing; her childhood was awash with the soundtrack of him singing along with Billy Joel and The Mamas and The Papas.

After graduating from Winthrop University at seventeen with a BA in Fine Arts, she entered nursing school, as her mother had, in 1992. Then she found her first library job at the local unemployment office, a place where the words “light assembly” were more common than “benefits package.” “They did make sure I wasn’t crazy or drunk,” jokes the South Carolina native. “The guy who screened me said I had a good voice” — an attribute that led to a job reading to kids at a library in Columbia, SC. Ten months later, she left nursing school and started work on a master’s degree in library science, which she earned in 1995. In 1996 she worked at an inner-city library in Charlotte, NC, and in 1999 she became the youth services director at the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County.

In other words, Huggins is no stranger to kids leading tough lives, kids who might have no safe place to go other than their local library. But she is also a member of “The Sunshine Club,” a group that includes nine of her oldest girlfriends, all of whom go on vacation together every year. Last time they met, it was decided that matching tattoos were in order. Huggins was first in line. Consider that proof that if she was going to be the one to heal a beleaguered but vital library system, she has enough sugar to make any medicine go down.

On the Block: Country Auctions the Jack Hines Way

There once lived a very rich man in Hudson, Wisconsin, who suffered from manic-depressive disorder. A couple of years ago, during an upswing, he drove to Seattle and bought five cars at an auction. Among them were a purple mid-eighties Jaguar with gold trim and rims, and a 1972 red Mercedes convertible. I first saw the cars during an auction preview at the Red Barn in Spring Valley, Wisconsin. Even with her delicate bloom of Tropical Nights air freshener, the old Jaguar attracted only snickers from the Carhartt-and-coveralls crowd. The Mercedes had many more suitors. One by one, they sunk into the driver’s seat — the car had black leather upholstery as soft as Roy Rogers’ saddle — and turned the key, to no avail. They pulled up her hood and poked around. Even their fluency with engines of every kind could not arouse the low-slung beauty.

Inside the Red Barn’s auction hall, Jack Hines stepped up to the podium and intoned the invocation he uses for some two hundred auctions a year: “Folks…” With sons Jeff at his side and John in front of the portable computer cart recording transactions, Hines spent the next four hours selling hundreds of things left behind by the deceased, divorced, broke, or retired. Over the past forty years, countless pieces of Pierce County history have passed through his hands. Every object — from grandfather clock to writing desk to bagel cutter to Twins pennant — was once new and valued. Hines’ job is to connect these things with the folks who can put a dollar amount on that value.

“We’re going to start ’er off at ten dollars, who’ll give me ten dollars? How about five, who’ll give me five, no one? One. One dollar. Who’ll give me one? One? And one! We’ve got one, now who’ll go two, two dollars, we’re at two, do I hear three? OK, we’ll sell this the hard way, $2.50, do I hear $2.50? $2.50! Now three dollars?”

At the previews, antiques dealers and serious collectors can be identified by the big Rubbermaid tubs they carry and the stacks of newspaper (for breakable items) under their seats. Gun and coin auctions bring masses of people who sit with thick price guides like hymnals in their laps. Everyone’s searching for treasures, or at least something of use, but some country-auction offerings are particularly sad. They usually come in lots jumbled together in cardboard box lids. Too many copies of National Geographic, Sean Cassidy records, and rusty old colanders can make an auction feel like a garage sale. Other auctions open doors into private lives, like the small stacks of vintage nudie photographs sold in the driveway outside a dead man’s storage facility one very cold day in Ellsworth a couple of years ago. A mysterious man in a dark cloak paid more than five hundred dollars for the bunch, an obscene amount.

“Folks,” Hines said, “Bob, a very well-known and past highway commissioner for years, was taken from us by the dear Lord and so to settle the estate, the following personal property will be sold at auction.” Among the listings were houseplants. The houseplants were fresh because the auction was held quickly; the same week as the obit.

Hines led us outside to the lineup of cars, lawn mowers, jet skis, go-karts, and unidentifiable farm implements. The Jaguar went for the price of a K car. The snickering stopped abruptly as the clump of thirty or forty guys put on their poker faces for the Mercedes. After I won it, my mechanic husband reached under the hood, reconnected the vacuum hose he’d seen hanging loose and started the car.

I’ve hit a few other jackpots, like a first edition of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums (paid four dollars, sold it for four hundred dollars) and the four Red Wing plates (bought for less than ten dollars, sold for seventy dollars apiece on eBay). Hines knows when he’s holding hot stuff, but he never shows it. He gives knives with swastikas the same “Gosh, what have we got here?” demeanor as he does with two-thousand-dollar John Deere signs or broken mantle clocks. “Folks, this clock looks like it’s missing one hand, but” — he turns to Jeff — “you know what they could do with that?” “What’s that?” says Jeff, without missing a beat. “They could buy the next clock, take the hand off that one, and put it on this one!”

Before I drove off in the Mercedes, trailed by the glares of the losing bidders, a woman approached me. “I hope you enjoy that car, it’s a beauty.” She had once been married to the man who’d bought the car. She, like the cars, was another casualty of his illness. His name turned out to be a familiar one in western Wisconsin. He’d shipped four of the cars from Seattle and driven the Mercedes back home in a manic storm of snow and sleeplessness. Apparently he got hungry somewhere in the middle of North Dakota, pulled over, and without getting out of the car, got out a rifle and started shooting at some elk. He was arrested and spent a night in jail; then he returned to Hudson and hung himself from the light fixture in his living room. His ex-wife and daughters turned to Hines to sell off the estate.

Later I would find condoms and piles of burned-out disposable lighters under the seat of my graceful and classic — and amazingly fast — car. I drove it for a couple of summers, then put it up on eBay. I made a slim profit and, after an astonishingly easy procedure, shipped the Mercedes to her happy new owner in the United Arab Emirates.

The Super Shammy Man

Spring was still months away, and standing just inside the entrance of the “Twenty-fifth Annual Cycle World International Motorcycle Show,” at the Minneapolis Convention Center, two blond girls were handing out plastic bags. They looked old enough to get their first tattoos, but demure enough to keep tugging at the creeping hemlines of their neon-green mini dresses. With their skinny legs clad in nude panty-hose and knee-high platform boots, they looked like they were playing dress up. My friends and I took our bags, hoping to fill them with freebies.

Inside, the hall was a circus of brand names — Yamaha, Suzuki, Ducati, Moto Primo, Vanson, BMW, Buell, and, of course, the elephant in the tent, Harley-Davidson. Most of the salespeople stood back and let the booths and the bikes do the talking, while the hungrier ones lurked around the perimeter like hyenas. The more aggressive or desperate vendors darted into the slow-moving herd, hoping to hook a few weak-willed stragglers. “Say, I noticed you have some sunglasses there, if you have just a minute —” Like a perfume salesgirl, one predator popped up in front of me armed with a spray bottle, but I ducked and dodged. Safely out of range, my friend confided that her husband got roped in earlier. “And you know what?” she whispered. “He said his glasses were the cleanest they’ve ever been.” After an hour, my swag bag was still empty. No one else seemed to be scoring anything, either.

At the very back of the hall a small crowd had gathered. Despite the lousy location, spectators were standing three-deep around a booth and pushing in to get a better look. Above them, on a platform, stood a man with his shirtsleeves rolled up, his face red and moist from the lights flooding his stage. He spoke into the round foam ball of his headset and somehow managed to make eye contact with everyone and no one all at once. “Folks, you’ve probably seen something like this on TV, but I can guarantee,” he said, punctuating his words with finger jabs, “You have never seen the Super Shammy.”

He grabbed a large bottle filled with some kind of cola and poured it all over a square carpet sample. As he talked, he held a fan of yellow swatches and dealt them out to the crowd. “As you can see, folks, the Super Shammy isn’t just absorbent, it’s super absorbent,” said Super Shammy Man as he pressed a piece of the magical material onto the carpet. He soaked up all the liquid, then lifted the dry carpet up high for all to see. He proceeded to mop up all the excess soda on the table, too. Then he squeezed the Super Shammy, with its bulging payload, over a rubber dish pan filled with murky grey water. The stream seemed endless. There was the roar of the stunt bike demonstration going on nearby, but Super Shammy Man’s crowd was completely silent. They heard only the sound of that nasty, unwanted liquid trickling into the plastic tub.

“Folks, the Super Shammy isn’t just for sunglasses, spills, and shiny shoes. The Super Shammy is great for” — he whirled around and caught me taking his picture instead of listening to his pitch — “cameras like yours, honey.” He moved on. “What about the bathroom, the kid’s room, the boat, the RV, the soccer game?” He didn’t even bother to mention motorcycles, but his audience was spellbound nonetheless.

We moved on without buying anything, but the huckster’s fading monologue lingered. When was the last time a salesman trudged the rural roads of this country, serenading the Lady of The House with his shtick? When was the last time the Lady of The House was even home and willing to open her door to strange men?

The next day I wanted to ask Super Shammy Man about his job and his life, but none of the event coordinators had any information. They knew him only as the exhibitor in booth 147. His accent — Canadian, I think — suggested that he wouldn’t be sticking around after the last day of the show. My Super Shammy samples don’t have logos or toll-free numbers. Super Shammy is on the web, but it seems they’re distributed exclusively by lone peddlers like the guy at the Cycle World show. These characters buy their stock from the Fuller Brush Company, the outfit that once upon a time jammed thousands of well-worn shoes into front doors all across the country.

The four of us left the show without a motorcycle, a young spokesgirl, or even a bagful of free souvenirs. Still, I felt like the farmer’s wife left holding the bogus receipt for a family Bible and yet smiling as she watches her thief in the night heading down the trail to his next mark. Now I wish I had let Super Shammy Man wring a few bucks out of me. He and his increasingly rare brand of late-night infomercial seduction was more satisfying and a lot less humiliating than the twelve-dollar admission fee I paid for the privilege to ogle motorcycles that cost a thousand times that much and which I wouldn’t even be able to use for another three months. — Sari Gordon

Two Artists Bring New Warmth to Old Crafts in Stockholm, Wisconsin

Stockholm, WI — September 17, 2007 — The Abode●Stockholm gallery is thrilled to feature two remarkable women as part of the Fresh Art Fall Tour (October 5, 6, & 7, 10–5). To celebrate, the gallery is hosting an opening Friday, October 6 for Tanya Charlesworth Garvis and Mary Anne Wise.

Tanya Charlesworth Garvis works with extremes. In a centuries-old process known as vitreous enameling, she performs a modern alchemy between copper and tiny granules of glass into sophisticated compositions of light, color and texture. Arranged and framed in tiles, her mosaics are like quilts of reimagined nature: clouds captured in water, fire absorbed into rock. Her strictly one-of-a-kind works shimmer with their own illumination while reflecting the natural world in any setting. “Tanya’s work is totally unique and the craftsmanship is astonishing,” says interior designer and gallery co-owner Alan Nugent. “Her work is totally inspiring — I could create entire themes to complement one of her pieces. The colors and texture are like jewelry for a room.” Charlesworth Garvis’ work is currently being featured in Vail and Telluride, Colorado galleries and will be featured in the Bachman’s Floral, Home and Garden Store in Minneapolis in November.

Mary Anne Wise has chosen the Fresh Art Fall Tour to present two of her latest pieces. Mary Anne Wise has been a full-time textile artist for 25 years and her work hangs in private homes and businesses across the country. Rug hooking is a traditional craft, one which some believe is the only truly indigenous folk art in America. Rug hooking artists create wall hangings, clothing and jewelry — the perfect fusion for Abode●Stockholm’s vision of contemporary prairie arts. “Wisconsin’s rural landscape,” says Wise, “is a constant point of reference in my hookings. My hooked rugs explore my relationship to the land.” The level of detail is remarkable in her works which feature elemental yet refined gardens with roses and hollyhocks framing familiar views from the bluffs of her home Stockholm overlooking the Mississippi River. Red-roofed farmhouses, windmills, orchards and fields are all rendered in the affectionate regard of a true native artist. “We choose our artists very carefully,” says Nugent. “Wise’s exceptional artisanship and unbelievable passion for what she does is why she is known all around the world. We’re really lucky to have her here at home.”

How do they do it? Wise will be giving demonstrations on rug hooking and Charlesworth Garvis will introduce the techniques she uses for creating copper tiles with colored glass (though she won’t have the 1,000- to 1,600-degree heat she generates in her home studio). Perhaps a visitor will be struck, as Charlesworth Garvis was several years ago when she herself was a visitor to a gallery and was smitten with the enameling process. She left her name with the gallery owner, hoping to speak with the artist. Two years later her apprenticeship with Dennis Berry began and today she works from her Deephaven, Minnesota studio, her years in restaurant and marketing work long behind her. Most of the artists featured in the Fall Fresh Art Tour will be at work on the second day of the event. Come admire and learn more about ironwork and tinware, wax, stone and wood carving, weaving and basketry with our little village of artisans in this communal invocation of gathering and warmth before winter.

Our home, our town. Abode●Stockholm opened in 2004. Stockholm is the little historic Wisconsin river town many consider a rare gem among day trip destinations in the Upper Midwest. With its incredible vistas, fine dining, top quality cottage and B&B amenities, sophisticated and urbane storefronts, and distinctive annual art fair, Stockholm has a European atmosphere cherished by its residents and guests. Stockholm prides itself on its progressive and creative character. “Everyone loves living here, even if they only come for the summer and dream of living here year-round. We’re all very close and all the businesses are very supportive of one another.” Stockholm has always been a favorite hideaway for painters, sculptors, architects, chefs, illustrators and writers.

Abode●Stockholm features an upscale array of uniquely collected adornments for the home. Though the selections are always varied, customers count on Alan Nugent’s fine interior design sense for a stunning assortment of lamps, rugs, textiles, pillows, sculptural vases and stunning, hand-crafted pieces for that warm, loving and welcoming glow your home needs. Abode●Stockholm also houses an art gallery — pastoral painters are a specialty and a regular collection of masterpieces is always on display. Every month a new artist is welcomed and represented. Some public favorites include painters Nathan Hager, Christopher Copeland and Dan Wiemer, weavers Mary Anne Wise and Kelly Marshall, sculptors David Culver and Myklebust & Sears, and furniture makers John Capper and Burt Levy. For information: www.abodegallery.com · Contact: alan@abodegallery.com · Phone: 715-442-2266 · ###

Balancing the Books: In the trenches with a St. Paul tax artist

One Saturday morning about six weeks before April 15, our national day of fiscal confession and atonement, an Orthodox Jewish man and his son walked along Highland Parkway. The two passed a nondescript side-by-side duplex, where a half-dozen tax preparers were knee-deep in paperwork—the kind of work, the onerous old stereotype goes, usually handled by the dark-suited men now walking to temple on the Sabbath. Across the street, the Lubavitch Day Care Center and Day School sat in darkness while clients continued to stream in and out of the duplex, which houses Mohs Tax Service, until 9:00 in the evening.

Through the last thirty years, Linda Mohs has turned her one-woman shop into a virtual empire by working with artists, musicians, actors, and other margin-dwelling, small-business taxpayers. She has ten thousand clients. Her full-time, year-round staff of twelve mans the calculators twelve hours a day, six days a week during the tax season. Mohs herself finds an almost unholy joy in doing taxes. She says it’s “superfun.” She may be working on another man’s Sabbath, but her principles are one reason so many people are drawn to Mohs.

Among the business cards in her waiting room and the names listed on her website are caterers, geriatric care specialists, freehand faux finishers, early-childhood Spanish teachers, and doulas. There are a sprinkling of listings in other languages. Mohs said that half of her job consists of counseling people through crises like divorce or severe financial loss. “My clients are sane and insane, rich and poor, nice and naughty. I love the variety.”

When you walk in the front door of Mohs’ office a computerized voice announces, “Front door, open.” That’s where the formalities end. The wild style of the interior makes one wonder if the rooms are just as noisy when they’re empty. The waiting room is a museum of coffee mugs. Elsewhere, shelves are bowed with paperweights, glassware, and souvenirs. The “South of the border room” is filled with fishing nets and plush toy parrots. The walls are thick with lurid-hued paintings, printed slogans, postcards, one-liners, and family portraits. Employees and their clients sit in ersatz cubicles made from turquoise Naugahyde restaurant booths. Even the kitchen is operational: During tax time, a cook serves homemade lunches and dinners.

Mohs is diminutive and sports a short cap of brown hair and a dazzling array of rings. She has a wide open face and darts from room to room like a squirrel in a giant oak tree as she fields questions about esoteric tax laws, or chirps requests for copies or files over the din. She buys coffee and toilet paper by the vanload and is notorious for her thriftiness, no doubt the result of her childhood among eight siblings on a farm with no electricity or plumbing in Ogilvie, Minnesota. Her family was miserably poor, she said. Her mother worked and her father’s income was negligible. “If we could shoot it or grow it, we ate.” Many times, they went hungry.

Mohs’ relationships with her own children are as distinctive as her business. She can’t tell you how many children she and her husband Tom have raised. They made three of their own, but informally fostered, adopted, and cared for so many other kids, they’ve lost count. She estimates that she has shepherded a dozen kids to their high school graduations. She took in her ninety-year-old great aunt and adopted a three-month-old girl simultaneously. “They were the best of buddies. The little one would hitch a ride on the wheelchair and they had lots of tea parties together.”

In the seventies, Mohs had been doing taxes for her friends in exchange for pizza and beer when she realized she’d lost her appetite for the compensation, but not the work. She did the books for two photographers, Boyd Hagen and Joe Giannetti. When they dissolved their partnership, their employee, Ann Marsden, started her own business and Mohs followed.

Susan Thompson, who has worked with Mohs for ten years, had to leave work early on Saturday for a family emergency but made a point of pausing on her way out to testify about Mohs’ charitable nature. “She’s amazing.”

“She’s more than amazing,” said another employee, Desiree, jumping in when she overheard Thompson.

In addition to her open-door policy to those needing a home or a meal, Mohs and her husband cook and prepare forty turkeys in their kitchen each Thanksgiving and serve dinner at their church. She’s been known to encourage altruistic pricing among her staff.

Despite her advocacy on behalf of her artistic and often beleaguered client base, Mohs believes that the current Republican-controlled legislature has given more breaks to taxpayers than any other administration. She adheres to the commandment that government mind its own business—that may be why so many people return to her for their annual reckoning, and leave uplifted.

Brainpower: John Haaland designs mind-controlled software

Staring at the computer screen, I am absorbed in a new game. After choosing which of the two images I want to take over the screen, ShapeChanger starts. Pixel by pixel the photos morph into one another, until a beep prompts me to begin. I’m trying to get a picture of a wave to take over a picture of the earth. It’s like Pac Man, but I can’t use a joystick, mouse, trackball or keyboard. I am trying to push these images around with my mind.

I find myself mentally groaning, like when I’m waiting for a call, staring at the phone and thinking “ring… RING!” After each three-minute run, the computer gives me my score and a little message, “Nice Try!” “Wow! Resonating!”

Beep.

“Come on wave, go WAVE!” I stare hard for three minutes as the images blend. For a few seconds, the earth seems to be winning. Then the wave begins to dominate.

Beep. Damn, the earth won out. “Nice try,” the computer tells me.

A few more rounds of staring and begging the wave to fill the screen. I get low scores in the 20’s and 30’s. The manual says I’m not doing much better than random, 50-50 chance.

Beep. Try again. I glance once at the screen, and turn to the in-basket on my desk. In less than three minutes, the game stops. Success! The wave prevailed. Again I start the game, and go about my work day. I take a big drink of coffee, glance at the game over my cup, let my mind go blank. 96 out of 100! I repeat the thought pattern and again I get a score in the high 90’s. After 30 tries I get an overall score of 19, which is not great, but the feeling of mental power from the successful runs is intoxicating.

Though ShapeChanger would appear to be the product of New Age hippie types, the creator, Dr. John Haaland, has never done drugs in his life. The 62 year-old with a PhD in biophysics says he’d rather stretch his mind with Taekwondo and science. Because of Taekwondo, for instance, he says he can break boards with only the power of his concentration. If this sounds like the old spoon-bending craze, he does that, too.

He also plans on making quite a lot of money with various brain-powered devices he has patented. ShapeChanger, the first software product of Haaland’s company, Mindsong, has already sold out of 1,000 copies. Even if he can’t convince people he can bend spoons, he and other scientists and business leaders are gambling that they have the power to influence consumers.

In the summer of 1969, the year that thousands were “consciousness expanding” with drugs, meditation and trips to India, John Haaland was in Paris, studying the effects of lasers on cells. As a scientist working for Honeywell back in Minnesota, Haaland had helped design vehicles, space suits and control panels for Apollo missions. After his trip to Paris, however, he moved to New York where he worked for a firm which designed a systematic way to provide health examinations.

While Haaland was in New York, Pillsbury faced two major crises: the explosion of a mill in Buffalo, NY which killed 14 people, and increasing reports of food contaminated with wire and glass. Haaland had become familiar with Pillsbury executives while at Honeywell. The Minnesota-based company had had a contract with Honeywell providing food to astronauts. Haaland was hired as a consultant to deal with issues of product safety, human safety, crisis management and other duties best handled from an outsider’s point of view.

In 1973, Haaland became Pillsbury’s Director of Environmental Systems and by 1976 had risen to Corporate Vice President of Information Management and Environtmental Systems. In 1981, Haaland was given a dream job: as part of Pillsbury’s “Project Galaxy,” Haaland had 12 months to predict what the year 2000 would hold for the company. At the time, “far future studies” were popular, and Haaland was free to travel the world, on a mission to explore one of the risks Pillsbury sought to conquer: the unknown future. His goal was to concoct possible “scenarios” of Pillsbury’s future.

“That’s where I got into looking at consciousness,” says the 62-year-old Haaland. The scientist and executive decided to focus his research on new technologies: microprocessors, renewable energy, biotechnology and the physical well-being of people. What people ate, and how we would take care of ourselves was an extension of what Haaland had studied while at Honeywell. He became more interested in how people and technology would relate to one another.

In the late 70’s, “a very specific event occurred,” says Haaland. The Minneapolis Foundation sponsored an international “human consciousness.” It was there Haaland met many of the people who now staff MindSong or sit on its board of directors. Some have even invested $50,000 in Haaland’s venture. Pillsbury, Medtronic and other heavy Twin Cities hitters sent executives to the seminar. Soon after, The Pillsbury Foundation donated $15,000 to one of the presentors, a controversial scientist at Princeton who was studying the effects of consciousness on computers. The second year, according to Haaland, the research got “a little too far out,” and the company backed off from it’s charitable donation to the pioneering lab. What Haaland had seen, however, changed his life.

When he quit Pillsbury in 1983, he was permitted to use any of the non-confidential information he had discovered in Project Galaxy. Haaland decided to take those visions and share them with the world.

Although Wendell King worked with Haaland on the Apollo project at Honeywell in the 60’s, they two didn’t become friends until they were both at the Northstar Research and Development Institute at the University of Minnesota in the late 1970’s. The two quickly learned that they shared interests in what King today refers to as “fringe” science. King went on to become staff scientist for Medtronic, then director of Research and Development and finally left the company as a Vice President and General Manager in 1985.

Medtronic, says King, was “a very avante garde company.” In 1973, for instance, the corporate headquarters had a meditation center for it’s employees. Earl Bakken, the founder of Medtronic, and Chairman of the Board in the late 70’s, was also interested in those fringe developments. To explore those interests further, Bakken, King and John Haaland formed the Archeus Project. Monthly meetings were held at the Bakken Library in Edina. Everyone from University of Minnesota Professor Emeritus Otto Schmitt, who invented an essential component of television technology, to “[people] in St. Paul practicing Wicca” would attend. In addition to sponsoring lectures by researchers in the psychokinetic, or “PK” field, they held three or four “spoon bending parties”-gatherings at local restaurants where participants could “playfully” experiment with their own psychic abilities and attempt to bend the family silver.

Today King is a venture capitalist and can easily afford to bend all the silver he wants. In addition to funding the start-up a couple of medical device companies, he has also helped raise Rave Sports, a company which makes trampolines and other water toys for adults. He is also the Vice President of Development for MindSong. Though he says having to choose his favorite venture is like picking a favorite of his own four children, he says MindSong is “the one that most captures my interest and passion.”

King himself has explored his psychic powers, but it is his trust and respect for John Haaland which motivated him to work with his old friend. “If I only had to have conversations with one male for the rest of my life,” says King, “it would be him. He is one of the most creative, most intelligent, most well-read people I know.”

Haaland’s business partner and life partner of nine years, Susan Groh, 43, had so much faith in Haaland that she quit her job in 1995 and worked full-time for MindSong, developing their written and online materials. “He’s not much into material things,” says Groh. He continues to run the Rice Street Taekwondo Center where she first met him, even though it barely breaks even. “He does it for the love of it,” she says.

Haaland himself is built as if he could walk through a brick wall but has the visage of a gentle elder in a Star Trek episode. He says, in fact, that he once had a violent streak, but has not lost his temper since he attained his black belt in 1978. Instead, he focuses his intensity into his curiosity of the unseen.

“Science that is still in a[n]… exploratory stage,” says Haaland in his windowless Rice Street office, “is always going to be controversial.” Newton, Jung, Einstein–they all explained unknown forces with unknown theories. In particular, Haaland is betting on risky theories from two areas of science: statistics and quantum mechanics.

According to statisticians, a penny tossed will land heads up half the number of times it falls. The more you do it, the more likely you will have seemingly astounding “runs” of heads. A penny flipped 10,000 times will yield at least one run of 10 heads in a row. A million times, and there will be twenty such hits. Another important part of statistics and one which PK researchers like to cite, is that if everyone in the country started flipping pennies, there would be more instances of these patterns. Whether these extremes are anomalies or characteristic of chaos is what forms the great divide between researchers and skeptics.

The second ingredient in Haaland’s speculative recipe come from quantum theory. In quantum mechanics, simply, there is a form of energy which defies the rules of traditional physical laws. Electromagnetic energy, one of the four known forces in the world, dissipates with distance, like a frog jumping into a pond and sending out ripples which eventually disappear. Quantum theory, however, says that the frog can jump into a pond and simultaneously cause a coconut to fall in Bali. This quantum leap, which Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” can travel faster than the speed of light and has been appropriated by psychic research advocates as proof of forces which can operate from “non-local” positions. In other words, one object can affect another object without visible means of force, and without regard to time or space. Which means not only can a person change an image on a screen, they can do it from thousands of miles away and even weeks before the software is launched.

In an article written for the Skeptical Inquirer, the magazine published by the formidable Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), Victor J. Stenger points out that quantum theories work only in tiny spaces, and have never been proven to operate on a human level.

“It’s very easy to get people to believe that things are significant,” says Charles Geyer, a statistics professor at the University of Minnesota. Geyer believes there is “a possibility” that the psychic software is legit, but he is “not convinced.” He believes that two much more pedestrian forces are at work. The statistics, he says, are either being handled by an amateur or falsified. “Real scientists do this. Professors at this very university do this.” As “PK” research becomes more scientific, Geyer asserts, it becomes “extremely hard to debunk this stuff.”

Before beginning a recent interview in his office, Haaland indicated that a light in the corner would be going on and off, according to his thoughts. He said that the light was on continuously before the reporter’s arrival, but started to flicker and remain dark as he became more anxious and guarded. The dim light continued to stay dark for the duration of the interview, but mysteriously blinked on at various times. Those were the moments when, says Haaland, he was talking about the things he cared most passionately about: Taekwondo, physics or the research being done at the Princeton lab he hopes to fund with the sales of his software, ShapeChanger.

Haaland tells me, however, that ShapeChanger is just a game. The ShifterCell, on the other hand, is the non-descript metal box into which is plugged the blinking floor lamp. This is the hardware Haaland says could one day be the envy of the military. It’s the patented technology that can be used to help heart patients who want to monitor their own unsteady heartbeats. It will change the lives of quadrapalegics. It will replace TV controls and computer mice. Like a dog napping in the corner whose ears perk up when she hears her name, the light blinks on when Haaland talks about it.

Haaland’s tendency to treat the ShifterCell as if it’s alive (Wendell King also has one and says it’s like having a pet) is eery. In the same way that the software gently encourages me with it’s typewritten cheers, the ShifterCell make me feel like there’s an observer in the room, giving me feedback, blinking its approval. If this thing is real, I could be witnessing the future of warfare, of education, of transportation, and of literature. Or I was being manipulated by the simplest of technologies, made to seem human, and therefore more readily embraceable.

Regardless of my skepticism, Haaland and King already have a meeting scheduled with a Chinese subcontractor who manufacturers Star Wars action figures for LucasFilms. The result would be a Yoda, for instance, that would move and respond to children’s thoughts, milking even more money from the catch phrase, “may the force be with you.” King says the Chinese executives are “really into it.”

After talking with Haaland, I think about the motion detector I just installed, electricity, Invisible Fencing, cell phones and garage door openers. I have to admit, when Wendell King says that he and Haaland are in the business of changing “the paradigm of the society we live in,” I’m intrigued. Would I have dismissed Steven Jobs so easily?

After a day of typing and added strain to my Carpal Tunnel wrist, I wish they would hurry up and develop this stuff. I would love to sit back and code my web page, balance my checkbook and chat with friends while putting on another pot of coffee. On the other hand, I realized that on the following Friday when I attempted another 30 rounds of mentally pushing waves over pictures of the earth, a 23-foot tsunami demolished a sizable chunk of Papua New Guinea.

Asked whether he will mind being ridiculed like the now-infamous cold fusion scientists in Utah, Haaland rapidly declines, “I would love to be laughed at publicly if it gets people to buy it.” Besides, says the man with the infectious grin, “I’m a martial artist and I like a good fight.”

Caged Heat: Man-on-man action in a Maplewood, Minnesota bar

Americans have long suffocated under the dead weight of silly, made-up sports like World Wide Wrestling and American Gladiator. Football, basketball, hockey, baseball, NASCAR, even golf and tennis have grown corpulent with corporate money and more branding than you see at a cattle ranch.

Then there’s boxing, the oldest sport in the world, which has become a sterilized show-off between billion-dollar babies in silky shorts and puffy red mittens. When Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates are the only writers still buzzing about a sport, you know you’ve got a big bloated corpse on your hands. Then this young Turk writer Palahniuk comes along, writes Fight Club, and all of a sudden, pugilism is back off the mat. It’s been seven years since the movie version of Palahniuk’s novel came out, and guys in the Twin Cities are still strippin’ down to their skivvies and engaging in bare-knuckle fighting for no apparent purpose and with few rules.

Ultimate Fighting, or Mixed Martial Arts, is the punk rock of combat sports. As one local promoter puts it, “We have for-real people beating each other up, for real.” The best place for action around the Twin Cities is the Myth, the Maplewood nightclub that’s the size and shape of a Best Buy. Once you’ve passed the “no gang colors” dress code, the friskers, and the metal detectors, the club bursts its tethers and blasts off on Red Bull-powered rocket boosters to a galaxy where the men, women, drinks, and action are all served straight up. The shoulder-height stage at one end of the room is reserved for patrons, who sit on metal folding chairs. The octagonal cage fills the dance floor on a five-foot-high riser. About one hundred people have paid a couple of hundred dollars each (or been comped) for the VIP seats and tables that sit back about fifteen feet from the action. Several collapsible tables and chairs are pushed right up next to the cage for the medic, judges, or fighters’ mates, who cling to the black-plastic-wrapped fence and holler advice or fling water bottles over the top of the twenty-foot wall to the fighters between rounds. The entire club is dark except the ring, which is tented in a hot pool of lights. Backlit silhouettes of heads and waving arms are visible behind a railing in the second deck, the equivalent of nosebleed seats at a football game. In this galaxy, only the royalty below get within spitting, sweating, and blood-spurting distance of the gore.

Once the fighters make the long walk through the cheering crowd and into the cage, the referee locks the gate. The combatants aren’t the ones fighting to get out; it’s the audience that wants in.

Fights go three rounds, five minutes a round, with a minute-long break in between. The amateurs kick things off, grappling around in a double crab walk most of the time. When two guys just wrestle around on the floor, it’s easy to forget the lawlessness of the sport—until someone wriggles an arm free and starts punching the other guy’s face while the referee does nothing but watch. It’s amazing how much a face can swell in just a couple minutes.

After a particularly bloody recent bout, the winning fighter stood up long enough to have his triumph declared, then promptly bolted from the cage and landed on all fours over a bucket. “Now folks,” yelled the announcer, “you know you’ve seen a good fight when the winner is puking!”

Half the crowd is made up of women, and they’re screaming, not wincing. Most look like sorority girls hoping for a glimpse of Brad Pitt. Two Asian women perched on their white boyfriends’ laps in the front row don’t look like they go to school or do anything but what they’re doing right here: jumping up and down and screeching, loud enough to be heard over the rest of the crowd, “Kick his fucking ass, you motherfucker!” So much for the cultural cliché about passivity and obedience. Then there’s a cadre of women thin and sparkly enough to be dangled from their own magenta cell phones. On the professional Ultimate Fighting Championship circuit, they’re called “Octagon Girls.” They go everywhere in a single-file line, wrapped in shreds of hot-pink fishnet and tottering on Kiss-style white platforms like candy stripers in a Russ Meyer fantasy. This night, they lent an especially poignant accompaniment to the announcement from the promoters of a new breast-cancer-awareness project.

During the next round, a fighter went down and out. A blue-gloved medic rushed to his side. Every pair of eyes in the house was on the body of the inert man while the victor stood awkwardly off to the side until his opponent was revived and wobbled out of the ring.

A current topic of hot debate in the Ultimate Fighting Championship world concerns groin attacks. Opponents of the nut-punch ban say that freestyle fighting should be exactly that. And if groin kicks become legal again, the only rule from Palahniuk’s vision—“You do not talk about Fight Club”—could be rendered completely moot.

Hu Are You: The Rake considers the merits of Eckankar, the “Religion of the Light and Sound of God”

About twenty years ago I had a spiritual awakening. Actually, it was more like a little chat. I was lying on a hospital bed, staring out the window. “Okay, I’m willing to believe you’re out there,” I said to the steam coming out of the sewer in front of St. Mary’s, “if you’ll help me quit heroin and get me out of this place.”

The sun came out from behind a cloud and on a bitter winter day in Minnesota, three thousand miles from home, I felt something… I don’t know… something big come over me. I felt something even heavier lifted off of me. I didn’t want to disappear completely so I quickly tacked on, “and please don’t make me a Jesus freak.”

I still think I’m pretty spiritual. I was baptized in the Catholic Church, and officially converted to Judaism when I was ten. Our family did Transcendental Meditation, Dad did EST, and in the last twenty years, I’ve gone to four different synagogues and attended St. Joan of Arc, the South Minneapolis Catholic church with a gay pastor and a liberal pulpit. I’ve also chanted “nam yoho renge kyo” with Buddhists, taken numerous Zen classes, prayed with Sufis in Morocco, and done a few sweat lodges and Wiccan ceremonies. I’ve haven’t gone through any rebirthing rituals in the mud, but I like my friends who have.

I know about cults, too. I lost a brother to one in California. I mingled with the Heaven’s Gate people when they came to Minneapolis to spread the word about aliens and Jesus, something I never really did figure out. They didn’t stick around to help explain it, either.

Then there’s the sect that I actually belong to—the one I’d leave, but they can’t kick me out. Once it dawned on me that I had gotten on my knees for a lot less than what a twelve-step program had to offer, I realized I had no more excuses. I’ve been going to meetings for a long time now. I spent the first few years poking at AA with a stick, waiting for something to crawl out. Nothing ever did. I’m not saying this as an official spokesmodel for AA, because there aren’t any. My observations are simply my own, based on meetings I’ve been to. I haven’t paid anything, I haven’t met anyone in charge, and there’s no mecca to which we all flock every year. People with a few hours of sobriety go to the exact same meetings as those with decades. Most detractors point to the G-word up on the wall, but I’m an agnostic (maybe a Deist) and I’ve been clean and sober for some time and no one has come to take my secret decoder ring.

When I read that Eckankar was having its worldwide seminar here in Minneapolis this month, I was curious. I had seen Eckankar stickers back home, usually on humble old Datsuns. Eckankar and I, it turns out, were both born in the early sixties in the South Bay Area. I grew up in the backwash of Joan Baez, Neil Young, Ken Kesey, Charles Manson, and Jim Jones. Right after I moved to Minnesota, my dad and his wife bought a house in the foothills above Palo Alto, in a pretty enviable neighborhood. The seller was a guy called Sri Harold Klemp, a name I didn’t easily forget. I was impressed that the leader of a religion had such good taste and resources. Klemp had sold the house so that he—and his church—could follow me to Minnesota.

Or was it just a coincidence?

The basic teachings of Eckankar are virtually identical to Hinduism: Students (“chelas”) strive to rid themselves of the karma that keeps their souls from going directly to heaven for good. This involves reading, meditating, chanting, dream interpretation, and soul travel. Chelas can advance through a numbered series of initiations that correspond to the level of their self-knowledge, “god-consciousness,” and mastery of Eck principles. High Initiates (or HI’s) get special privileges and act as mentors and leaders to first and second “circle” members. The initiation rites are secret, but you can’t be a HI without paying your dues on time for at least two years.

Eck has no rules. The official party line is that they are a group that studies spiritual principles. The group is not exclusive, and joining doesn’t cost much. You don’t have to change your clothes (no saffron robes), your religion (Jewish, Lutheran, or Catholic Eckists are simply supplementing their own religions with Eck principles), or your diet (unlike their Hindu predecessors, Eckists can and do eat cows). Sexual orientation doesn’t matter, and there’s no hanging out at the airport. In other words, Eck is not a cult. It doesn’t require much of its practitioners, at least on paper. There’s a recommended twenty-minute daily incantation of a single syllable, “Hu,” which members do together at seminars and regular gatherings.

There are twenty-six thousand Eckists in the U.S.; there are no numbers for Minnesota members. Every state has at least one local-branch “Satsang Society,” or study group. Satsangs all over the world host identical programs for both the public and for members, from studies of the Eck “bible” (the Shariyat Ki Sugmad) and other Eck religious tracts to talks like “Discover Your Greatness as a Soul” and “How to Have More Love in Your Life.”

Members and seekers can also get the Eck message on local cable stations, which usually feature videotaped talks by Harold Klemp, whose image is ubiquitous in their materials. Master Harold is the “Mahanta,” the highest human incarnation of “god-consciousness.” Klemp is just the latest of thousands of Mahantas, but there can only be one on Earth at a time.

“Mahanta,” like “chela” and “Sri,” is a common Sanskrit word used in Eastern religions. (Today many of those words are trademarked by Eckankar.) Chelas are encouraged to look at a picture of Klemp when they meditate. The official portrait can be had for twenty-five dollars, unframed or in wallet-sized versions. Nearly every photo of the Mahanta is the same: A simple, professional head shot of a bespectacled Klemp, dressed in a blue leisure suit and tie. I’d be more tempted to ask him about Roth IRAs than I would about the nature of my soul, but Eck likes that conservative image and many Eckists model their dress after him.

The slightly dated picture and the deification of his image led me to believe that Klemp no longer walked among us. It turns out he’s alive, though no one I spoke to seemed to know or care where he is or what he does for a living. But they do gather to revere him in the flesh occasionally; this month, five or six thousand Eckists will fly in from all over the world to see Harold Klemp in person as the Saturday-night headliner at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

Klemp’s whereabouts aren’t the only secret in Eckankar. There are no public records for Eckankar’s finances because it is tax-exempt and qualifies as a religious organization under IRS rules. Local Satsangs that take in less than $25,000 a year don’t have to file tax returns, and nearly every Eck Satsang falls into that category. But there are no records for the headquarters, either. No one knows how much is spent on salaries or on the new building being constructed for office staff, who are currently housed in New Hope. There are, however, records of numerous properties owned and sold by the Church, some of them in spiritual and real estate hot spots like Sedona and Hawaii.

Yet members pay only $120 a year to belong ($50 for other countries). Their websites do list cover charges for many classes, workshops, and seminars, which range from $25 to $150. Those numbers don’t add up to much. But some Eckists who have left the organization say money plays a big role. One of them, Elizabeth, says the pressure to donate is constant. Elizabeth was a member from the age of thirteen, when her parents, siblings, and grandparents signed up. She recently left Eckankar and was “disowned.” Only one sister risks the rare conversation with her. When I asked Elizabeth about interviewing her parents, she said I would get nothing more than canned responses and outright denials. After she told me that her mother told her “never to contact her again,” I dropped it.

Elizabeth says Eck’s family rate is $160 a year, but that’s just the beginning. She says the Satsangs need donations, as do the discourse/Satsang classes, book-discussion classes, workshops for training, and regional seminars. Donations are requested from those who attend all Eck functions. Then there are books, videotapes, music CDs, pictures, posters, recruitment materials such as reply posters with tear-off information cards, business cards, bumper stickers, and fundraiser items like T-shirts, jewelry, and coffee cups, all of which can be bought by Eckankar tax-free.

Paul, who was a twenty-eight-year veteran of Eckankar and a High Initiate before he bailed out five years ago, told me that he feels his life was wasted on the organization. “I spent thousands of dollars on Eckankar,” he said. Paul believes now that it was a “fraud and illusion” designed to profit the people at the top.

Paul Twitchell, Eck’s founder, was born in Paducah, Kentucky. Like his friend L. Ron Hubbard, he published a few science fiction novels and in 1964 or 1965, after studying under a couple of Indian yogis, Twitchell introduced Eckankar to the world from his home base in Menlo Park, right near the place where my family once played miniature golf. Twitchell declared himself a “Living Eck Master” and said that he had been given the “Divine Rod of Power” by Rebazar Tarzs, a hundred-year-old man who today “still lives in a hut in Hindu Kush Mountains,” according to Eck publications.

Eck’s detractors have a hundred complaints, but most agree that Twitchell was a plagiarist. The most vociferous critic and documenter is David Lane, who says Twitchell simply cut and pasted text from books like Julian Johnson’s Path of the Masters. The 1939 book is widely considered among religious scholars to be the pioneering account of a Westerner’s interpretation of Eastern religion. Anti-cult advocates in particular cite Johnson’s first and foremost declaration that “Real Masters never charge for their services,” a passage Twitchell neglected to crib. Less academic are accounts of Twitchell’s questionable relationships with his spiritual mentors, peers, wives, and near-wives.

Twitchell died in the early seventies, around the time I was blacking out on Mogen David after my bat mitzvah. He had named Darwin Gross the next “Living Eck Master,” and he reigned until 1981, around the time I left California in search of a simpler life. It is said that Gross then handed the “Rod of Power” to Harold Klemp and soon after, Master Harold brought Eck back to the Midwest, near his Wisconsin hometown and beginnings as a Lutheran minister.

Gross, however, says that the Rod wasn’t handed to Klemp at all and that Klemp and his associates, including the current president of Eckankar, Peter Skelskey, wrested it away in what Gross calls a “coup.” Gross maintains that he is the true Living Eck Master/Mahanta and heads up his own religion, called Ancient Teachings of the Masters (ATOM). The overthrow of Gross—who looks like a guy who has a nice Mac Davis collection—doesn’t strike me as a South American bloodbath so much as an eighth-grade slap fight in the computer lab; then again, I’m an immature, superficial snob who can’t read any Eck material without thinking of a bunch of kids in a tree house fighting with foil swords stealing names from Mad magazine.

Of course, I didn’t blink when I bought pot from a guy named Gogo Garfinkel, so I decided to drop by the Eck temple out in Chanhassen and keep an open mind, at least for as long as I could go without a cigarette on their 174 acres of smoke-free grounds. It’s probably the only place in this country where you have to specify which pyramid-topped building you’re looking for, but basically the white one is Prince’s, the gold one, Eck’s.

I pass by a basket of paper slippers offered to protect the carpetand chat for a minute with the host and hostess on duty, Burdoc and Esther. Esther is really happy to see me. She’s wearing a sharp suit in a confident shade of red. Her jewelry, hair, and accessories say, “Have you had your luggage in your possession the entire time?” I like her, she’s peppy. She’s enthusiastic. Now she’s getting a little too excited, so I ask if I can just look around for a while on my own. She tells me the official tour won’t start for another forty-five minutes. That’s fine, I say. I’ll just wander around. There are excellent walking trails outside. I’ve been out there before with my dog. Esther and Burdoc exchange looks. “How about if I show you the library?” she says brightly, while

Burdoc picks up the phone.

Esther tells me that an inordinate number of moving vans were appearing in her life. She calls these coincidences “waking dreams.” First there was one on her street, then another on the way to work, and, well, you get the picture. “What does it mean?” I ask. She looks so excited. “Well, it means I’m going somewhere.”

“Really? Like a vacation?”

“Oh no, as soon as I get home I’m packing everything up. I’m going to be moving soon,” she says, with the same assurance one would use in saying that the sky is blue. I squirm out of her suggestion that we do a “Hu chant” together by asking for directions to the ladies’ room. When I return, Jennifer Exsted, Public Information Coordinator, is waiting for me. She looks out of breath. I feel terrible that Burdoc had summoned her from a picnic she was enjoying nearby at Lake Ann on this beautiful Saturday afternoon. “Oh, no, no, it’s no problem at all,” she reassures me. She shows me around the empty temple, opening doors, flicking lights on and off as we peer into one immaculate and dull classroom after another. The whole place looks like a hotel conference center. Most classrooms contain a bunch of chairs, a vase of fake flowers, and a silver dish with a doily in the bottom, presumably to muffle the sound of donated change. On the walls hang faithfully rendered paintings of visions by various Eck members. There is a preponderance of castles in clouds and vast natural settings with solemn human figures standing under stars with extra-long rays.

When I ask if the temple was built with security in mind, Exsted says that the building was designed for longevity, not defense. Neither of us mentions the vandalism—including bullet holes—that the temple suffered in the early eighties, some even while it was still under construction.

At the back there is a windowless room with a few rows of theater seats, a miniature chapel. It’s meant for smaller ceremonies, Exsted says, like weddings or rites of passage for youth. Eck has no position on gay marriage. In fact, when I ask about the usual hot topics—abortion, divorce, gay rights, polygamy, plus a few curveballs I make up on the fly, such as can you be a porn star and still be a member in good standing?—she bats every one out of the park. They abide by the laws of the state. They don’t do anything outside of the law and don’t encourage anyone to do so.

I keep her in the chapel a little too long. I’m entranced by the ten pictures of Eck Masters on the wall behind the podium. One in particular looks like a roadie for Siegfried and Roy. He’s got long blond hair and blue eyes and is clearly Caucasian. Exsted tells me I’m looking at Gopal Das, “from Egypt.” There’s the famous Rebazar Tarzs, who looks like Jim Marshall, the Vikings Hall of Famer. There’s Peddar Zaskq (Paul Twitchell), Yaubl Sacabi, and the guy with my favorite name, Fubbi Quantz. The most recent addition, Kata Daki, is the only female Master. She doesn’t look as if she’s been painted by the same artist as the others and I wonder if she’s been tacked on to the lineage to show gender sensitivity. Exsted doesn’t know much about her.

Jesus, says Exsted, was not an Eck Master. Many of the Masters were just simple people who “appeared” to those in need of guidance. You don’t even need to use one of Eck’s Masters; “it could be someone who you would say you love,” says Exsted.

“Okay, so can I just worship the Quaker Oats guy?”

“Well, uh,” she says, almost missing a step, “I guess you could, but Harold’s picture has a strong vibration.” The secrecy around Klemp, says Exsted, is intentional. He is a celebrity, and the sheer numbers of followers—reported at fifty thousand worldwide—simply makes it impossible for the Master to be available to everyone on the phone or in public. When Eck first began, the leader would wade among his students, but those days are gone, says Exsted, gazing at the Master’s picture.

When I ask Exsted if Harold Klemp is actually alive somewhere, she says, “That’s a good question. You’d have to ask him.”

So people can just pick up the phone and call him?

“There isn’t really the need to do that,” she explains.

She’s right. Talking to Eckists, I find that they are perfectly comfortable referring to recent discussions they’ve had with Harold even though they have never personally met him. They converse with Harold in their minds. Exsted agrees with my conclusion that Harold Klemp is in many ways like the pope. Still, for this guy whose human form is insignificant, five or six thousand people are flying in from all over the planet, paying $130 to get in ($155 at the door), and I’ll bet they won’t be expecting to hear their Master’s voice from a TV monitor. The seminar, to be fair, is also a chance for Eckists to hang out together, to visit the temple, and to attend workshops specifically tailored to their initiate level. The theme this year is “the Year of the Eck Missionary,” and attendees will go home equipped with suggestions like “be sure to mention Eck to at least one new person a week.” I’m curious about how these “missionaries” work in an organization that claims a non-proselytizing platform.

Exsted says that these and other questions about the Master should be taken up with Eck’s president, Peter Skelskey. Uh-oh. Isn’t he one of Harold’s bouncers who snatched the Rod of Power from poor old Darwin? Then again, he is like a founding father: It would be like asking Thomas Jefferson why he kept slaves. Fortunately for us both, Exsted calls me later to say that Skelskey doesn’t want to talk to me. I bet she told him about my Quaker Oats question.

Exsted finally knocks me off the log when she tosses out a second invitation to do a quick Hu chant. I stumble. I get all embarrassed and say no. At that, she leads me out of the chapel, triumphant and ready to show me the new kitchen.

I thought very, very hard about Eck during the drive back home. I mean, there are coincidences in life that I just let go all the time. And I do have dreams that leave big footprints on most of my days, which I normally kick onto the “maybe I’ll figure it out later” pile.

Just to prove I wasn’t chicken, I tried chanting the Hu. I start with “Hoooooo, hoooooo,” and then I remember that it’s pronounced “hew,” so I start again. “Hewwww…hewwww…” Oh, no way. This isn’t going to work. All I can think of is David Sedaris’s boyfriend. Then I start wondering why David Sedaris’s voice sounds so much like Klemp’s. I give up. In September of 1991, two thirty-four-year-old members of Eck committed suicide, one near Syracuse, New York, and one in Kansas City. Eck spokesman Kent Livingston* told a New York paper in an official statement, “These things happen with members of all sorts of religions,” he said.

Now, I’m willing to allow that two suicides might be considered an acceptable loss of life—even better than average—for a worldwide congregation of fifty thousand. But last month a small news item appeared in the French newspaper, L’Express: Ten bodies were discovered in a house in French-speaking Mauritania. The news never got picked up by English-language outlets, and the only subsequent details provided were that two of the probable instigators (the ones who died last) held Eck medallions in their pockets. The others, it was reported, had been followers of the religion who had become entangled with the pair in various money-lending scenarios. In other words, this little group of Eckists was a cult, at least by one definition.

Most Eck practitioners don’t seem to hear, know, or care about the charges being lobbed over the walls of their castle. Only a few esoteric anti-Eck books have been published, people don’t protest their meetings, and there are no instances of dramatic deprogramming rescues.

Online, however, it’s a different story. After slogging through thousands of debates ranging from the philosophical to the juvenile (“Hey, Doug, do you still cut your hair using a salad bowl?”), I’m frankly relieved to simply walk away from the cacophony and call it a draw.

What sticks like a JuJube in my molars, though, is Klemp’s apparent power to amend Eckankar’s sacred texts and official history. His job, in fact, is to interpret the texts and update members with the latest from Fubbi Quantz and Co. Sadly, Klemp and others have simply erased or taken out of print those publications that disrupt the current image of the organization. Not only does Eck have a very short history; it seems to be written in pencil. A few troubling citations do remain:

“…the mission of the Mahanta on this earth is to stir the millions of non-initiated into revolt against all orthodox religions. It also means that anyone who opposes the Mahanta in any of the worlds is foolish for the ECK will work swiftly in retribution.”

—Book I, p. 181

“But once the chela has become a member of the inner circle, he cannot resign. Those few have found that spiritual decay sets in immediately, affecting the health, material life and spiritual life, and brings death more swiftly.”

—Book II, p. 197 (p. 166 in older editions)

Since neither Klemp nor Skelskey wants to talk to me, I’ll assume that these citations are still in play.

One recent morning my partner’s stomach was growling and it sounded exactly like the intro to “Dreamweaver.” Clearly, all this Eck stuff was starting to get to me. What did this mean? Was he merely hungry or was Harold trying to talk to me? Maybe Harold was hungry. I read somewhere that he may be suffering from environmental illness. What could I possibly feed him? Maybe he was trying to tell me to give away my Aveda products?

I didn’t get it.

Admittedly, I was ready to have an encounter with Eck like the one I’d had at St. Mary’s more than twenty years ago. To be honest, writing full-time in rural Wisconsin does get a little lonely. I looked for a parting of the clouds, for a ray of sunshine that may have led to a fellowship like the one I have enjoyed in a variety of twelve-step programs.

In the end, I realized that the true guiding light in my life is right in front of me every single day that I am fortunate enough to open my eyes. I’m happy as a spiritual amoeba; I’ll continue gravitating toward warmth and light and avoiding cold, pointy things. It’s just a tad too noisy there among the Eckists and anti-Eckists. Besides, I tend to feel at home with loners and survivors, not joiners and believers. Out here, among the crickets and coyotes, I can hear God speaking pretty clearly.

Most of all, I guess I’m no longer in the market for the surrogate sense of belonging I once got from dope and those first uncomfortable AA meetings. I am surrounded by infinite proof of a universe that has a place for me right here, right now. Besides, my God doesn’t mind if I smoke while we pass the time.

*Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the speaker. We regret the error and hereby correct it.—Eds., 11/11/04

The Nuts And Bolts of ‘Making Music’

Writer Sari Gordon previews the May 7 ‘Making Music’ conversation and performance with jazz musician Jason Moran and offers a bit of background on this intimate, accessible five-year-old music series presented by The Whole and series host JG Everest.

WHEN NOTORIOUS INDUSTRIAL AUSTRALIAN BAND SPK TOURED THE US IN 1982, they subjected their audiences to a barrage of excruciatingly loud, non-musical, electronic noise. The three men performed before a 20-foot screen on which played footage of a severed human head performing oral sex on a dead body. One member of that band, Graeme Revell, went on to become a successful Hollywood soundtrack composer.

SPK only appeared in five US venues in 1982. Two were in Minneapolis: The 7th Street Entry and the Walker Art Center. At the Entry’s show, Revell hacked away at a skinned cow’s head with a hatchet, sending bits of flesh and brain into the audience of about 150, who stood at a safe distance. The night before, SPK played at the Walker Art Center, sans cow head, before an audience held captive in their bolted-down seats, without drinks.

The Walker demands we pay attention to contemporary artists, especially the ones who leave viewers wondering just what they’ve seen. With live music, audiences can all too often be distracted by formality or, as is the case when many independent or nascent musicians play, the distracted chatter of a bar scene. The Walker has been a fervent advocate of performance without alienation, of creating a space for discussion about art.

But such behind-the-scenes conversation isn’t conventional to the rock show scene. Musicians don’t expect to be interrupted for questions from the audience. Performers don’t usually return to the stage after a show, face towel and beer in hand, to explain what they just did. That’s what makes the Whole Music Club’s Making Music series noteworthy: it provides a time and place for just that sort of dialogue. Think of a Making Music event as your chance to ask, “How’d you do that?”

In My Mind is the three-dimensional, multimedia culmination of Jason Moran’s ruminations on art, history, and jazz great Thelonius Monk.

The line-up of talent on stage for the series has been impressive. Over the course of Making Music‘s five-year run, local musician and host James Everest and The Whole have hosted conversations with Black Blondie, Dan Wilson of Semisonic and Trip Shakespeare, Dave King of The Bad Plus and Happy Apple, Wendy Lewis of Redstart, Martin Dosh, Robert Skoro, Haley Bonar, the members of Atmosphere, Tapes N Tapes, Mystery Palace and Spaghetti Western String Co.

Under the circumstances, it’s no wonder the Walker has taken an interest in the series. In fact, the Walker’s Michèle Steinwald has been exploring the possibility of collaboration with Everest and Whole director David Hill for several years.

“Making Music,” says Steinwald, “gives UMN students and local music folks … great discourse about music composition and the early influences that shape an artist.”

Finally, those plans for collaboration have come to fruition. The Walker Art Center partnered with The Whole to bring a couple of big-ticket national acts to Making Music this spring: Dirty Projectors’ frontman Dave Longstreth made an appearance in early March; and, later this week, the two venues are teaming up to bring in acclaimed jazz musician Jason Moran, who will wrap up the 2009 season of the series.

*****

Jason Moran is not merely a musician or a composer. While the Walker was undergoing construction in 2005, Moran was an artist-in-residence, toiling away on his own reconstructions in the basement of the site. He spent time studying and thinking about visual artists, letting his thoughts percolate before he made them audible in the Walker commissioned piece Milestone. Moran’s further ruminations on art, history, and jazz have produced a three-dimensional, multimedia homage to jazz great Thelonius Monk. The artist combines music, poetry, photos, video, and audio recordings; and, on May 9, Moran will present his new work at the Walker’s McGuire Theater.

(Below is a short YouTube video of Moran talking about Monk and performing “Crepuscule with Nellie” with his band in an in-studio interview with WNYC)

A couple of nights before the main event, Moran will share the McGuire stage with Making Music host James Everest for an intimate performance and dialogue that will give audience members a rare opportunity to chat with the musician about this new composition (aptly titled, In My Mind).

The performances and dialogue in this series, says Everest, “weave around the idea of process on two levels: the process of growing up as an artist, and the creative process of making work. Focus is put on the individual’s own experience and development, and the people, art, and experiences that shaped that development. These conversations, which typically take place at The Whole, in the basement of the U of MN’s Coffman Memorial Union, are contextualized with live ‘unplugged’ performances, archival photo and video (childhood snapshots, early band videos) and audio samples (early influences, first record, early demos, current work, current faves) to give the audience a larger view of the many factors that go into making music.”

While formal performances can be costly, Making Music evenings are free (even so, advance reservations are a good idea). What’s more, there is already a generous archive of expertly videotaped discussions from the series available on YouTube.

Here’s hoping the Whole’s Making Music evenings get the audience and critical attention they deserve, well into the future. The series offers a meaningful, accessible chance to become more intimately acquainted with a musician’s work–and it’s a much nicer way to get inside a composer’s head than a hatchet.

Noted events: The free Making Music dialogue and performance with Jason Moran is scheduled for May 7, 7 pm at the McGuire Theater in the Walker Art Center. You can catch the full performance of In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall 1959 by Jason Moran and the Big Bandwagon, also on stage at the Walker’s McGuire Theater, on the evening of May 9.

Crazy Daisy Press Release

Crazy Daisy Design Releases New Line of Paper Creations and Innovative Keepsakes (Minneapolis, MN) May 21, 2006

Crazy Daisy Design is thrilled to announce its latest line of beautiful and distinctive personal correspondence line: The Essential Collection and Quote Notes.

These out-of-the-box creations are the highly anticipated “ready-to-wear” collection created to complement the breakout success of their award winning “couture” wedding designs. Offered at an extremely attractive price point, The Essential Collection and Quote Notes are an out-of-the-box alternative for customers who don’t want to sacrifice the personal touch and keepsake value of Crazy Daisy’s signature style. Crazy Daisy designers never use templates and have had impressive success with their intuitive understanding of client’s wishes.

Sold individually and in packs, The Essential Collection will appeal to anyone looking for a distinctive, exclusive variety of general stationary for special occasions, including thank you cards, bridesmaid cards, and party invitations. The affordability of these high quality cards and stationary will surely increase Crazy Daisy’s reputation and popularity in the years to come.

Quote Notes are a quick and thoughtful way to convey affection between friends, loved ones, co-workers or family members. These lovely cards feature evocative and heart-warming quotes and come in a bouquet of simple cards, cards with attached magnets, pressed flowers or other collectible treasures. Each design provides that special long-lasting reminder not always found in store-bought cards.

Crazy Daisy has quickly become the star in the highly competitive wedding invitation design business, with creations befitting formal balls to neighborhood halls. In 2005, Minnesota Bride magazine chose Crazy Daisy Design’s for the “Best Invitations 2005.” The award is a highly coveted one in the fiercely competitive market, and cherished by the young [HOW OLD?] company. Local and national publications have recognized Doherty’s work and she is a featured expert in The Knot magazine. The Twin Cities’ Star Tribune extolled Crazy Daisy’s work in “Groom With a View,” stating, “For sheer beauty and elegance, the invitation of [Crazy Daisy Design clients] Denise Hanson and Brad Steinbring won hands down.”

Owner Sara Doherty’s precise and passionate style makes clients’ visions bloom. Her special flair is apparent in her obsession with quality and detail. Doherty is adept at an array of styles, from the urbane and modern to the romantic and elegant. Every design evokes the love which each wedding celebrates.

As a professional designer with a fine arts background, Doherty eagerly follows the latest trends in paper design, text treatment, graphic and illustration techniques. “I let each client guide the direction of my work, but I also closely follow international style trends, the art world, and bridal and special event fashions to keep my work current.”

When clients see their finished pieces, brides, grooms and future mothers-in-law many have exclaimed, “How did you know? That exactly the kind of look we wanted!” Crazy Daisy designers seem to have a gift for intuition and enjoy fine-tuning client’s ideas.

Crazy Daisy is the most sought-after designer in the wedding industry because its work is always flawless. Now that remarkable style is available to friends and sweethearts of all kinds with The Essential Collection and Quote Notes.

For Immediate Release:
Contact:
Sara Doherty
Crazy Daisy Design
Phone: 612.385.7541
Fax: 866.583.3570
Email address: sara@crazydaisydesign.com www.crazydaisydesign.com