P.N.ZOYTLOW

For nearly forty years, the town of Barnesville, Minnesota has celebrated itself and the potato on the last weekend in August. Why is this? There are the usual explanations having to do with this being potato country, just an excuse to have some fun, or a gimmick to boost the economy by attracting up to 14,000 visitors who reputedly come from all over the country?  Or is it the clear voice of Barnesville as it answers the Strawberry Days, the Apple Days, the Corn Festival, the Pork Fest, and the Blueberry Celebration of other small towns in the Upper Midwest?  But these are mere prosaic answers which do less than a teaspoon of dried potato flakes to stopper our hunger for deeper truths.  And Barnesville will not willingly tell you why it does what it does. So you have to go there and probe, to expose the tuber that lies beneath the subconscious soil of this usually unassuming town of 2300 inhabitants. Many scholars have treated the history and social influence of potatoes (Inca cities, Polish vodka, Irish famines, the curious potato gun) but none have devoted the required research effort to ask why a small town in Minnesota raises its annual song of praise to the potato.

Potato. Such a word. Potato Days, even better for its pleasant little beat. On radio and television, highway billboards, and with simple but omnipresent brochures, Potato Days seemed to create a drone, insistent, filling the mind: Potato Days! Potato Days! Soon it will be Potato Days!

Those familiar with these Field Reports will recall that they are governed by a severe methodology: no more that 75 minutes in the field. How would an extravaganza like Potato Days be served by such strictures?  A decade ago, this Visitor had gone to Potato Days for only the most crass reason:  to eat.  Recalled is a parade on Saturday evening with an abundance of farm machinery chugging down Front Street, Barnesville’s main street anchored at one end by the massive old Catholic Church of the Assumption and a bank near the other end. The six or eight blocks in between was where Potato Days really happens. Now, this year, the Visitor was no longer a callow tourist, but a shrewd Observer, tightly disciplined for this Field Report. Checking the schedule of events, it was quickly obvious how to spend the hour and fifteen minutes in Barnesville.  And the focus of observation? One word leapt off the pages of the Potato Days brochure: Mashed.  Three events featured mashed potatoes: Mashed Potato Wrestling in a field south of the Church on Friday afternoon and a Mashed Potato Eating Contest on the bandstand in the center of town and last, the Mashed Potato Sculpture contest in the Bank parking lot. There were no other events that could match this promise of drama, and that included Potato Car Races. Potato Sack Races, Miss Tater Tot Contest, Potato Soup Cook-off, or the Potato Peeling Contest to name a few.  When a thing is mashed, it must reveal.

Unexpectedly the road to Barnesville helped to set the context for this event. The visitor must drive there and, regardless of direction, the last 20 miles is a crossing on a disc of earth, horizons equidistant. No hills disturb this perspective, you are in one of the flattest places on the planet. On this day, great white clouds were marching evenly from the west and the fields looked healthy and green (the sugar beets) or gold ( the sunflowers or the wheat). No potato plants.  It is beyond this research to ask how it is that Barnesville has Potato Days without any in the nearby fields.  On those uncrowded highways, you might feel yourself floating, daydreaming, thinking of old stories in which the journey itself is the destination.

At the venue for the mashed potato wrestling lies a large blue tarpaulin lined with hay bales. A modest crowd has gathered early, sitting on folding lawn chairs. There is a problem. This wrestling area contains only a cream-colored depth of dry potato powder. Dry?  Two men are leaning against a truck, shaking their heads, waiting for the tardy fire department with a water tanker. While waiting we learn that the potato substance is “non-edible grade” meaning that it is usually fed to cattle and not people. Hence Barnesville cannot be accused of flaunting its potato plenty in the face of a hungry world. It is an explanation that will be given again at the sculpture event.  Still…one wonders if that which is about to be wrestled in or sculpted would not be seen differently in the famished regions of Africa?  When the water truck arrived, a dozen barefoot citizens slogged back and forth until the texture was  without dry spots or lumpiness. It looked more like a potato soup, a gruel but without the consistency sufficient to form gravy pockets.

First Disappointment:  the Observer had hoped to see large farmboys in overalls strip down to their swimming trunks and heave each other around with large gobs of potato flung out into the electrified audience.  And they would be followed by bikini-clad maidens, maybe even the daughter of the banker furiously shoving the face of the tractor dealer’s daughter into the starch.  Nothing like it!  Mostly young kids taking turns tripping each other until both were creamy with potato slurry.   One was declared a winner after five minutes of slopping about, then both reported to the truck where the fire department guys hosed them potato-free.

On the way to the next event, the Mashed Potato Eating Contest, the Observer passed the Dunk Tank where were manifested some of the class and sexual tensions so keenly missing at the wrestling.  A young woman, perhaps seventeen (who was in a bikini) sat on her perch above an unpleasant looking tank of dark water. For a dollar you got three softballs to throw at a target and if you hit it she would be dropped into the dismal tub. All the contestants and most of the bystanders were young males. They threw very hard, much harder than necessary and with scowling faces. Even when one of them succeeded they took no pleasure in it: some kind of score was being evened. The young woman seemed not to know these fellows and smiled unconvincingly as she climbed out of the tank and back on her perch. The hurling of softballs began anew.

Also on the way was a food vendor recalled from an earlier visit.  The church ladies of a nearby village served Swedish potato sausage wrapped in a sheet of Norwegian lefse. But they had temporarily sold out and a long line of the hungry was waiting for the next shipment to arrive. This was exactly what had happened a decade earlier. You cannot make enough potato sausage in a church basement to feed the demands of these faithful communicants.

Second Disappointment. At the Mashed Potato Eating Contest, one had to endure the music coming out of the speakers on either sides of the awning-covered portable stage. Was this potato music? In front of the stage were many picnic tables where the consumers of potato sausage, french fries, or lemonade sat with friends and neighbors awaiting the spectacle.  The contest was broken into age groups, and disappointingly it would be kids again. not four hundred pound men and women in bib overalls who would vacuum up the spuds with aplomb and then shyly retreat until next year, trophy in hand. The youngest contestants were six and the oldest sixteen. They were supplied with one bowl at a time of mashed potato (very white, stiff, and very edible) and allowed to bring something to drink on stage as they sat together at a long table facing the audience.  Note Rule # 1 :  No mixing your drink with the mashed potato!  The excuse given was that it created a mess, but it was easy to see that he or she who mixed up a kind of milk of potato would win by just gulping it down.  All you were allowed to add was butter and salt.   The mashed potatoes were late in coming from the Eagle Cafe just half a block away on Front Street. When they did arrive, they were plenty warm, almost too warm for the youngest contestants. But they were tough, these kids , who soon had clots of potato hanging from their mouths. Somewhere   paramedics must be hovering, wondering if insurance releases had been signed by parents. But this was Potato Days in a place called Barnesville where such intrusions from the more anxious world beyond the prairie disc were not in evidence. Except for one teenager who consumed four bowls, the event was quite discreet and one could say that most of the children must have fine manners drilled into them at home for they found it difficult to crudely shovel the potatoes into their innocent mouths.

The Mashed Potato Sculpture Contest was beginning a block away and I hurried to see the beginning. Contestants (and there were perhaps thirty including ten adults) were grouped by age once again. Each had thirty minutes to take as much cold mashed potato and complete whatever their inner Rodin dictated.  Alas, the Third Disappointment.  Not only were the sculptures small, less than a foot in height, but they were not of noble inspiration. I saw cats, dogs, pizzas, a radio, a sheep, numerous cartoon or Star Wars characters as well as five- pointed stars, and a candy bar. All made of mashed potatoes and often liberally adorned with food coloring or jelly beans. It took very little time to take all this in, but as this Observer was leaving he spotted a rough abstraction easily mistaken for the Venus of Willendorf.  He went to encourage the twelve-year old who had been working on it and to tell him that he should be awarded a prize. Where, one wanted to ask, did you learn about the Venus of Willendorf,? Just then he was heard to say to a girl working on a potato sofa for her Barbie Doll that he should not have attempted to sculpt a bullfrog; just too hard.

Crossing the great disc of the flat prairie again the Observer listened to the news and noticed a small quantity of mashed potato drying on a sleeve. The news was of the impending doom of distant hurricanes, of a soldier from some other place in Minnesota dead in Baghdad, and speculation over the ruinous impact of rising petroleum costs. Back in Barnesville, surely others were also becoming aware of small amounts of mashed potato in unexpected places.  But they had happily escaped the news of the day–was that why Barnesville does what it does?