Minnesota & Wisconsin

30 April 2024

As I rolled into Pierre yesterday, with a pale gold, late afternoon sun on my back and stretching my shadow out ahead, I thought: “Yes; this is what expected. This is what I want.”

The motel is one of the better ones and the Italian restaurant, attached to the slightly posher hotel over the street, is above average.

But the next morning, winter is back again. And if not winter early spring or late fall. The forecast says drizzle but that looks like pissing down to me. After 70 miles and with a further 220 to go, without hyperbole, I am soaked to the skin. No motorcycle gear can cope with this weather, and I suspect this is pretty mild, in the grand scheme of things.

And then it gets worse. The intensity of the rainfall is so high, it becomes like mist and it’s impossible to see more than 100 yards ahead.

East of Brookings, traversing a desolate plan, a 40 MPH wind whips up and drives the deluge horizontally. Ahead, I can see the spray from vehicles ahead going 90º left, seemingly defying gravity.

The next two hours are like sailing in more ways than one. Getting drenched further has no impact, but having to physically pitch the bike into the wind to maintain a straight course is exhausting.

Oh yes, the midwest is fundamentally farmland which means the roads are coated with mud and animal shit of various flavours, turned to a slippery slurry with the rain. The traction control warning light keeps blinking, reminding me the tyres have fuck-all grip.

I know I keep saying: “these are the worst conditions, blah, blah, blah..” But this really is. For over 250 miles.

And the worst is behind me, not metaphorically but literally. My satnav has a weather option that indicates another front following behind me with even heavier rain. I think I'm staying ahead of it. Just.

As I arrive in Springfield, I've outrun the rain. I get my sodden gear inside, turn their aircon up to 80ºC in an attempt to dry it out, and warm up under a scalding shower.

By the time I’m out, the weather front I raced has arrived. My bike is parked 20 yards from my room but I can barely see it through an opaque curtain of water.

Only one photo today. I know it’s pretty crap but there was literally nothing else to see.

The scale of US weather, like the geography, is beyond European comprehension. Both just go on and one and on. Relentless.

But… It’s eight-thirty. I’m in Outlaws Bar & Grill next to the motel. Foreigner are on the jukebox and I’ve just had two pints of Alaskan Red Ale. The 1/2 lb ‘Californian’ burger (only onion, tomatoes and lettuce; no cheese or bacon…) with sweet potato fries was surprisingly good and the Sutter Home Cabernet Sauvignon, out of a airline-style minature bottle, tasted way better than I know it is. Getting the bill, while sipping a Canadian Whisky over ice, with every muscle pleasantly aching, life seems pretty damn perfect.

01 May 2024

Unusually, I’m on the road at 06:00 as I have 318 miles to cover before 13:00. I have booked the ‘full-house tour’ of ‘Taliesin’, Frank Lloyd-Wight’s (FLW) home for over fifty years, near Spring Green in Wisconsin. As a minor compensation or the early start, I get this:

Wisconsin looks more like home. Well, not like Epping, but not what I’ve seen over the last couple of months.

Later, chatting to a retired calligraphy lecturer from Lichfield, Staffordshire (down the road from where the pedantic School Teacher from Upper Spondon and I first met, forty-eight years ago), we agreed the closest European comparison is Alsace-Lorraine, usually in France but occasionally part of Germany.

There are endless miles of softly undulating countryside, combined with occasional dense forests. The neat towns and farms look like they’ve been freshly washed. Best of all, it’s warm and not raining so it can look like Stoke-on-Trent or Scunthorpe for all I care.

The only way of seeing Talisien is on a pre-booked tour. There are only six people on the one I’m on, so has an intimate quality to it that ends up being unnerving.

The first clue is when the bus ascends a steep, unmade track to the house, a mile from the Visitor Centre and closed to the public. We troop off.

This doesn’t look or feel like a museum: dandelions are growing through the grass; the fabric of the structure is weatherbeaten and crumbling. Inside, nothing is behind glass and there is not a National Trust-style velvet-rope, in sight.

We are instructed not to touch anything to prevent wear and tear. The position of the artefacts has also been determined precisely from old photographs and first-hand accounts of his family and students, handed down over the years.

It’s like chancing upon a forgotten, abandoned house where everything has been left just as it was when the owner left, hurriedly, not knowing it would be for the last time.

Dan, the guide, explains that FLW’s last wife never liked the place as she considered it “another woman’s home”. Consequently, she wouldn’t fund its upkeep after she took control of the FLW estate following his death in 1959. It subsequently fell into disrepair until 1991, when the current foundation took it over.

It’s certainly a curious structure, rebuilt twice following two major fires. FLW was also continually adding to and adapting the design. Only his genius managed to preserve the integrity of the overall vision rather than looking like a Frankenstein’s monster, DIY project.

The picture Dan paints of FLW is balanced. For example, there is none of the ‘loveable rogue’ affection in evidence, that I encountered with the volunteers at John Steinbeck’s house.

The picture is one of a narcissist, a hard-working perfectionist, a control freak, serial-shagger and appalling spendthrift. By way of random examples, he seduced the wives of his clients’ and had continual affairs and mistresses in addition to three spouses. He blew the equivalent of $12 million on obscure Japanese art from a commission of $16 million for designing the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Only problem was he hadn’t actually designed or built it then.

But It’s difficult not to admire a man who lived by the credo: “I spend my money on the finer things in life; the necessities will take care of themselves”.

His work rate, energy and output though, was prodigious. He was 63 when he founded his architecture school at Taliesin. 40% of his ‘built’ buildings were conceived and constructed in the last ten years of his life, when he was in his eighties and nineties.

He was also an impressive bullshit artist. On one occasion, the client of ‘Fallingwater’, a private house in Pennsylvania, and after the Guggenheim Museum in New York, possibly his most famous building, called FLW at Taliesin unexpectedly. He was nearby and asked if he could see the plans. Previous attempts to see what he was paying for had been ignored.

FLW just said ‘Of course! Come for lunch!” then spent two hours, hurriedly drafting the elevations of what became the final building.

Ushering his client away for a long lunch, FLW’s acolytes then went in and collected the sketches as they’d been instructed. They then beavered away, producing another twenty or so detailed drawings to provide some substance to the sketches. They were ready for inspection when FLW and the client lurched back from the terrace, who then went away content on all counts.

But the most shocking point in the tour comes when we sit down, around the perimeter of the main lounge, just as FLW’s guests might have done to hear him play his Bechstein Grand Piano that is still in one corner.

Dan then chronicles the events of 15 August 1914. Just two weeks after the beginning of World War I, it’s maybe understandable why the events on this day in sleepy Wisconsin have been largely forgotten.

The short version is this. A disgruntled former employee murdered FLW’s romantic partner and her two children with an axe, just out there on the terrace, after he’d locked four people in the room where they were having lunch, poured petrol under the door and incinerated them.

Having created the inferno, he hid himself in an underground room with only a little hydrochloric acid for sustenance. His plan being that he would drink the acid and kill himself if he was discovered.

He was and he did. But it didn’t kill him for seven days during which time, he could not speak, so went to his grave without explaining his motive.

It’s only on this point that Dan becomes reticent at sharing his professorial knowledge, and refuses to speculate on the whys and the wherefores. He just presents the evidence, including showing some charred supporting timber work that survived the blaze.

That initial sense of unease starts to make sense: it felt like visiting a perfectly preserved crime scene. And to some extent, that’s what it is.