Travel Log: The Great Midwestern Road Trip #5
The Great Midwestern Road Trip Part V: Really Fake
[From June 4th to June 13th my family piled into a rental car and drove through eleven states straight down the middle of the country. This is Part V. Click here to see all parts.]
Welcome to Wahpeton
I don’t really know what Wahpeton is like. I can tell you it has a highway, some gas stations and hotels, a college, and plenty of space. I can also tell you that it was the host of the 2023 North Dakota Boys Class B State Golf Tournament.
Our hotel was filled with a particular kind of male smugness that can only come from mixing male athletes at their absolute physical peaks with rich families who can absolutely shield those athletes from the consequences of their actions.
Imagine if someone held a convention for every Ethan, Logan, and Carter whose families owned boats. That was the energy.
While we were happy to be in Wahpeton, many of these families were not. We learned from one angry dad that Wahpeton was not only located on the wrong side of the state, but they didn’t even have a Class B high school! The nerve!
The same dad also bragged to us that North Dakota has more golf courses per capita than any state. “About ten would do it,” I thought, but I chose not to say anything because he already seemed pretty sad about being so close to democrats over the Minnesota line. We all have our crosses to bear.
Really Fake
Speaking of bears, we did stop to see “The World’s Largest Catfish.”
This is the Wahpeton Whopper. “Because the town is named ‘Wahpeton’ and he’s a whopper,” one local man over-explained.
When my kid was three he asked for a “real lightsaber” for Christmas. This was quite a conundrum, but it’s given me many years to reflect on a paradox: a real lightsaber is fake but a fake lightsaber is real.
I’ll wait while you mop up the pieces of your blown mind.
So it turns out the “world’s largest catfish” (non-accredited) isn’t really a catfish at all. You could get sad about that, but if it was a real catfish it probably wouldn’t be very big or mounted nicely in a park. Sometimes you gotta play with the fake lightsaber.
It’s fair to say that we all enjoyed this giant cat fish equally — it’s fair, but not accurate.
While she was posing with the fish, I yelled out, “Now show us the ring,” and she obliged. She may or may not marry a fish, but if she does I bet this picture will make the slide show.
I don’t remember what Maria was talking about when she made this gesture, but I’m sure glad she was. Also, she wore a dress on this Monday because she takes the Dakotas very seriously.
Next to the whopper there is a little pier where you can walk out and catch a breath of Minnesota, should the need arise. I went down the pier to catch my family coming down. It didn’t make for great pictures, but I did learn how nice my wife would look in a fish hat, so there’s always something to be thankful for.
Like flower and hot oil, Maria makes catfish look good.
Remembering Minnesota.
Before we got out of town, we decided to stop at the Chahinkapa Zoo. I’m not sure what the Lakota word chahinkapa means, but from context I think it was something about oddly defensive white middle aged people.
This is the first guy we met when coming through the gates.
Talukan and I both wear 280 lbs., but he makes it look good.
Shockingly, we already knew this monkey. (People tell me that monkey is the incorrect term, but I refuse to participate in ape-monkey divisions. I know a monkey when I see one.) He used to live out in Salt Lake with us.
It just goes to show that there really isn’t any point in traveling.
While we were getting caught up with our old friend, an extremely nice zoo keeper began to tell us all about Talukan, or “Tal” as his friends call him.
The older kid obviously not buying what this guy is selling.
With no prompting at all, the zoo keeper pointed to a nearby building and said something like, “His inside space is bigger than you think. He has enough room. He doesn’t come out much at all in the winter because he prefers to be inside.”
Huh. Up until that point I hadn’t really thought about keeping a rain forest monkey year-round in North Dakota or worried about his bedroom at all, but I sure was now. The guy was so nice, but darned if he didn’t keep doing stuff like that throughout our visit. “Many animals are much happier here.” “The cheetahs don’t even want to run if it’s cold.” “There is absolutely not a pile of dead koalas by the dumpster no matter what you’ve heard.”
Okay, that last one didn’t really happen, but it felt like it could’ve.
Just to be clear, I don’t think anything nefarious was really going on. Everyone seemed very nice and interested in doing right by the animals such as they could. I just thought the whole thing was so funny. Imagine if McDonald’s changed their motto from “I’m lovin’ it” to “You can’t prove we use horse meat.” It felt like that.
If they did want to be defensive about anything, it probably should be this sign.
When I texted this to a group of friends, the first reply was, “Grandpa, no!”
I guess “Grandpa’s Petting Zoo” is passable for a section of an actual zoo, but it’s a terrible name for a romance novel and downright inappropriate as a daycare.
Also, the sign really makes it look like if you go left, then you’ll eventually run into a solitary Paul-Hogan type doing the “That’s not a knife” bit, which was not the case.
Apart from these ticky-tack observations, the zoo was great, and if you’re into these sorts of things I would highly recommend you make the time. It was small town enough that you could get up close and there were no crowds or $20 hamburgers, but not so small that the “zoo” was just some goats and a miniature horse.
The mural on the outside of Tal’s definitely big enough bedroom.
With murals like these, who needs real animals, right?
Two animals that would eat the other.
Look at this happy customer. There isn’t a zoom lens here. I was probably 4-5’ away, which shows the virtue of a zoo of this size.
This is a real otter, but it’s not very big.
This is just a door back to the big monkey’s room. There’s nothing special about it other than the headstone cracking me up. Can you just imagine the ancient hands that carved “2010 A.D.” into the foam under that stucco?
At least one difference between a Lion’s fan and a Vikings fan is the Lion’s fan dared to pet the snake.
I wouldn’t trust a person who wasn’t into monkeys.
Jump man!
Girl and nose lizard.
Nose lizard up close.
I felt an affinity to this guy. Hard to say why. I hope he doesn’t run into Paul Hogan.
The same delightful zoo keeper that kept preemptively reassuring us about things no one brought up also told us to check out the sculpture garden just out side the zoo entrance, and I was glad for the recommendation.
I have no regrets. Lots of folk are in the vain of things-made-of-other-things, like a tree made of forks, or moose made of car parts. However, I only captured two things on camera — one because I felt a deep sense of kinship and one because it was noisy.
I do not remember posing for this.
$5,000 of drum lessons
And with that, our time in Wahpeton was done. If you’re in the area and you like big fake animals, and regular-size real animals, you simply must stop.
Detours & Tours
At some point while planning this trip we held a family meeting. I asked everyone present to consider how far out of their way they would drive to see the world’s largest hairball. One the count of three, we all blurted out our answers:
Maria: Negative-fifteen minutes!
Mikayla: Two to four hours!
Thomas: Twenty minutes!
Daniel: Forty-five minutes!
Mikayla’s answer, God bless her resolve, really brought up the average, and so we went forty minutes out of the way to Webster, SD.
I was sort of hoping the hairball would be on a large rotating pedestal right by the highway, but that wasn’t the case. We had to park, move our legs, and talk with other humans. It was a whole thing.
It was clear we hand landed in the middle of a multi-acre museum that these elderly volunteers were very proud of. Immediately, my sense of tact kicked in and I thought I had better pretend to act super interested in the history of fishing and tractors, and, you know, if I just so happened to notice the world’s largest hairball, then I might take a picture of that too.
But that’s the perspective of an old guy who has given a damn about stuff.
A twenty-two-year old will just burst through the door like the Kool-Aid man, ignore everything else, and demand, “Where’s the world’s largest hairball?!”
They elderly folks didn’t seem to mind or even be surprised. They just pointed to a little table off to the side and then quickly walked back the boasts that have been made online. “It’s not the largest hairball,” an impossibly old man offered. “It’s probably the second largest.”
For anyone who isn’t eagle-eyed enough to read the sign, it mentions a known hairball nearly twelve times the size of this hairball, so it’d be pretty outlandish to believe that this specimen is even making the hairball playoffs.
Still, props to the cow who ate all that hair and kept it in her stomach all those years. Got me beat.
But, as it turns out, the very large hairball wasn’t the very best the Museum of Wildlife, Science, and Industry had to offer.
I have a sort of inverse relationship with museums: the less money they are asking for admission, the more I’m going to enjoy it. This museum was free, less a reasonable donation, so chance were good I was in for something special. I was not disappointed.
The fake shoe house is realer than the smiles of my kids.
For instance, have you ever wanted to see your kids pretending that they are happy in a house shaped like a shoe? Here’s what that looks like for me, and now I know.
I guess the old sayings about kids loving hot rooms with old fashioned shoes just aren’t true. Maria, however, tapped into her matron ability to find things “neat” and faired a little better.
If you think the “Museum of Wildlife, Science, and Industry” sounds like an overly ambitious title, you’d generally be right. However, Webster showed out and really delivered. They could probably add “creepy mannequins, plates, and out-buildings” to the title and still over deliver.
Honestly, we flew through this place and were still there long enough for our blood sugar to crash. (If you go, bring provisions. There’s a lot of ground to cover.)
The past had made us hungry, so we took a short drive over to Pereboom’s Cafe, which seemed cute and small-towny, and it was. However, I had forgotten from my own youth that small-towny can also mean overtly racist, and that seemed to be alive and well at the table next to us.
A bunch of guys that had “their table,” which I assume means they are regulars, went on and on about stuff I’m not even sure how to mention. In a sense I want to repeat it just so people will know how bad it was, but in a greater sense, I don’t want anything to do with guys like that.
By the nonsense they were spouting, it was so clear to me these guys didn’t know or interact with people from any of the races they disparaged in any meaningful way. I suppose in the absence of knowledge and understanding, we can all make whatever boogie men we need to absolve us from our own failures.
I was thrilled when we could leave and deeply sorry that there are still people, however old and in whatever town, that think it’s okay to feel and talk that way.
We pulled out of Webster and I was sad the town couldn’t stick the landing. So close. I get that there are probably assholes in every town, but it’s rare to see it without the shame that comes from the disapproval of peers.
The view leaving Webster. There are lots of flooded farms, which my family didn’t get to see, because they would all fall asleep immediately when we got in the car, except Maria, who really did try.
Still, I hope you’ll stop there. It’s worth it to take in what is not the world’s largest, or even close to largest, hairball, and see if your pie comes without racial slurs. And maybe if enough people who are committed to respecting others go there, those who don’t share the commitment move on.
Up next: the world’s only corn palace and a questionable mascot.
