P.N.ZOYTLOW

[The interview was conducted by the agent/editor at a place selected byP.N.Zoytlow, the Flying J Travel Center in Limon, Colorado.  The time was mid-afternoon and Zoytlow was seated in a booth with a view of the Interstate. He was drinking a small coffee out of a disposable cup. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt purchased at the place of his last Field Report (FR), Why, Arizona. After a friendly greeting and a handshake, Zoytlow signaled that he was ready and the recording device was turned on.]

DB: You’ve no doubt noticed in the correspondence I’ve forwarded to you from your    readers that some of them see you in the tradition of the hidden writer, like B Traven. Some have wondered if you exist at all and I myself have been accused of using you at a front.

PNZ:  [Frowns]  And this surely bothers you?

DB: Why no, not at all. But I’m hoping that you can reveal enough of yourself here to put some of those questions to rest.

PNZ:   Have they read that bio section, what’s it called? On the  blog, I mean.

DB: About.

PNZ: About, OK., they know I was born on June 15, 1950. But not much more, as I recall. Well, here’s more. Galena, Illinois. Went to NIU  at DeKalb. Journalism. Then to Iowa, Rural Sociology and in 1983 had my first academic posting as a researcher for the Institute for….well, let’s leave it there. But you may surmise that my interest in field research begins in those years.

DB: Yes, you make no secret of wanting to make a notable contribution in some area that you vaguely refer to as the “social sciences,” but isn’t it really Anthropology where you hoped to make your mark?

PNZ:  “Hoped?”  What’s that supposed to mean? It’s pretty clear that in 24 FRs I nailed down one paper after another. What do my readers say?

DB:    Without denying that your work is, ah, unique, many seem to think that you reveal a deep loathing for yourself and for academia which, if I may be so blunt, marched to a different tune than you were hearing.  One of your readers said that she could not endure your obvious talent for taking a dynamite research idea and as she puts it “messing it up, big-time.” I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise to you?

PNZ: What does?

DB: That your work seems flawed, perhaps tragically so, and that you yourself…

PNZ:  [coughing] …I myself am some sort of paradigm for tragedy?  Well, now, that WOULD be something!  It rather pleases me, that turn of phrase, rather elegant!  Hah! Nice epitaph, I’ll call the obelisk makers in the morning. [Laughs.]

DB:  Let’s turn now to your oeuvre.

PNZ: My what? [Shakes head.]

DB: Your stuff.  How did you decide on the Field Reports?

PNZ: I was curious if I could extract a useful amount of information, an impression really, of a place or situation in seventy-five minutes of observation time. Like going into a large art museum, tearing though the place in an hour, then lingering at some painting or drawing that sort of bulges out at you and says: this is what this is. In every 75 minute FR, I had to hope that something would “bulge” and show me what I had been doing there in the first place. Now some of these FRs were really terrifying for me. I had to contend with the possibility that nothing really happened and that I would be held up to derision by the world.

DB: We can talk about that later, but I have to tell you that your FRs on the bloghave not gone anything near “viral” as the expression goes. Go back to what terrified you. And by the way, what does the “N” stand for in your name?

PNZ: Nepumuceno. I got very scared with FR # 7

DB:   The Beethoven House in Bonn?

PNZ: Un-huh. Nothing seemed to be happening and then everything seemed to be happening. But that’s how human culture operates, everything at once and from there I learned that stuff is happening all at once all the time, like some sort of molecular movement, only this is cultural. Look over there [points to a family looking upwards at the food service menu] there is an amazing report over there, or maybe we should just call it a story. If I sat here for 75 minutes, a hell of a lot would be happening but would I be smart enough to have a feel for it? And would I be able to convince you that you were part of it to?

DB: You’ve been unhappy with some of your FRs? Were there some you could not squeeze the essence out of?

PNZ:  The one on wine tasting haunts me. Something eluded me. I still don’t know what it was. But that was pretty effortless, too. I was already there and it fell, too easily right into my head. Take the one on the Iceman Oetzi–there was one I drove especially to see the thing, Bolzano. I was very keyed up because it just had to be a good topic. Poor devil and more so the poor devils who were there to see him. [Sighs deeply.]

DB: Do you include yourself in that category?

PNZ:  What do you think? Sure, doing FRs leads to a conceit. You’re always in thedriver’s seat and then the road narrows and becomes a grass track and thenyou’re in the sand. Wheels spinning and all that dust…

DB: OK, OK, I follow that. What were the FRs you might have done had you not, ah, retired from this work?  You did think of it as work, yes?

PNZ: The “work” was deciding if my instincts had been correct in choosing a FR. Butonce I chose a topic, I would stick with it to the end for reasons that I think I have explained, meaning everything has a hook.

DB:  A hook.

PNZ: Yes, it gives you a flash, a brief insight which says “follow the Yellow Brick Road” or something like that. It tells you it is worthwhile and that if you play your hunch carefully enough,there will be be a  payoff, a fully-evolved revelation which I called “Field Report.” Now, as to those “hooks” that it would have been a fine thing to be presented with, let me think on that.[Pauses] Remember, I did not chose the FR so much as I always thought it chose me. Recall the FR on the motel culture, or whatever that was. A bland, ordinary thing which suddenly just asked me to think on it. I always sensed an attraction to, let’s see….churches, those quick oil change places, poetry readings, and the kitchens of restaurants or hotels. But I never got to those places or if I did I wasn’t bitten. People would suggest FRs to me, but that never worked. I could not love their muse. Easier to be motivated by a half-dead sea cucumber and by the way, that one was so wonderful. This small thread of idea and then…..Jesus!

DB:  Some of your readers are indifferent to the news that the FRs have reached an end. Others seemed disappointed, at least mildly so. A few wanted to know why.

PNZ:  I gave it up because I wanted to, that’s it. Time to do something else. Anyway, as I must have made clear, none of the FRs ever quite reached the point where I thought some social science journal would get excited over it. I knew all along that I could not discipline myself to keep the subjective stuff out, keep it at bay. So, no surprise that each FR, in its own way, just reaffirmed that.

DB:     So what’s next, Phil?

PNZ: I don’t like it when people call me “Phil” and I thought you knew that. And this thingyou call an interview reminds me of the bad times I had trying to figure out thepoint of a FR.

DB: Just like your readers?

PNZ: So, that’s the way it’s going to be, is it?  Look, I’m out of coffee and I don’t want more. What’s holding me here? My joy in travesty?

DB: Your call, but if  you want to continue–what’s your thinking on the likelihood that readership of the blog has been, uh, light.

PNZ: Scant?

DB: Sparse.

PNZ: Too many blogs, too little time. I only read about six myself.

DB: So, what’s next Mr. Zoytlow?

PNZ: You’ll see. Don’t expect me to lay a curse over it by telling you “what’s next.” I hate that expression.

DB: Of course not. Whatever it is, good luck with it!

PNZ:  And if “what’s next” is nothing, just empty time and space?

DB:   Thank you. We’re done.

Note: I had made no plan regarding how the interview might end and this seemed to work for both of us. Zoytlow seemed indifferent. We shook hands. I stayed in the booth and watched the traffic for a few moments longer. Zoytlow wandered over to thepostcard rack and, moments later, was gone.

[Editors Note] I was surprised to see P.N.’s almost casual reference (contained herein) that this would be the last Field Report.  Subsequently, I called him and he refused any relevant details. However he did promise to sit for an Interview (something that has been in the works for some time, readers may recall) and perhaps as early as this June.   Most on his mind was his success at avoiding any use of the word  “why” except with reference to the subject, Why, Arizona. “If  you find one, don’t tell me about it!” said he with a laugh.

Followers of these Field Reports will note that once again, the Reporter/Observer has chosen an obscure place for an investigation. The reason is obvious: the place has a peculiar name, amusing to some, deeply serious to others.  For Zoytlow, it was a mix of both but the point was to go and verify that such a place (Why, Arizona) existed at all and was not merely a bit of cartographic whimsy.   Zoytlow, as is well-known, takes these types of investigations seriously and especially so if they touch on geographic locales. Proof simply must be found, backed by photographic evidence as required to support either the existence or the nonexistence of Why.

To begin, documentary sources suggested that Why would appear just east of the boundary of the Tohono O’Odham Reservation, ten miles south of the town of Ajo, and thirty miles north of the Lukeville border crossing with the Mexican Republic. What may lie to the West is open space, many miles of parched, trackless desert until one might reach Yuma.  Zoytlow, rising that morning with the task of driving to Why, felt the vague unease that desolate highways bring.

Zoytlow saw the first road sign with “Why” on it about 30 miles out. He was on the narrow highway that bisects the Reservation, a place with names like GuVo and Hickiwan which were somewhere out there, unseen, left or right at rare intersections. Such inhospitable, hot country.  As if to confirm his apprehensions, Zoytlow noticed many descansos as the roadside memorials to those slain along the road are called. Most are simple affairs, a grotto with flowers or icons, but others may include hubcaps, flags, sorrowing madonnas and photographs of the deceased Zoytlow was glad he was not on this road at night. Ten miles from Why another sign appeared and shortly thereafter and indication that the seniors of the town had “adopted” a stretch of road. This was reassuring: all over the country groups had for years been volunteering to pick up the trash that seemed to fly out of passing vehicles. That there should be such a group in Why reassured Zoytlow. Why existed. It was probably as benign as old folks who gleaned the junk.

When Zoytlow arrived at Why he saw that it was not much of a place, really. A ten minute drive along the main street confirmed this. Not far south of Why was a Border Patrol checkpoint with cheerful looking Labradors eager to please and sniff cars. In recent weeks they had apprehended significant cargos of marijuana coming up one of the numerous drug pipelines from Mexico.  On he north side of Why stood a complex of buildings, a regional Border Patrol HQ with many of the familiar green and white trucks  unfailingly encountered on and sometimes off-road in these parts.

This cursory survey through Why told Zoytlow that the ganglion of the place was at the Texaco station, the Why-Not Travel Shop. The place was surprisingly large and cool inside. Under a low ceiling and along rows of shelving, lay a remarkable range of groceries, camping equipment, and souvenirs. The place appeared empty except for a short man at the counter. He had a serious beard which covered the first word of a message on his tee shirt so that all that could be read was “can count to 10.” Zoytlow put aside an impulse ask the Bearded One to lift that hairy sheaf so that the first word or words of the message could be read. It would have to be something like “my horse” or ‘“even idiots,” but supposing it simply said “Why.”  Instead Zoytow began with an apology: he had come to Why to ask about the name, probably a near-predictable request?  The Bearded One smiled (a relief to PNZ) and motioned him to a glass counter beneath which was taped a yellowed news article on peculiar Arizona place names. Prominent among them was Why.  Zoytlow read the relevant paragraph.

While he was doing so, the Bearded One loudly announced that there was a rat running about outside near the gas pumps. Laughter followed and Zoytlow abruptly realized that there were four others in the store. The “rat” in question was a patron’s miniature dog, a Chihuahua with a grey muzzle and a limp. Now woman appeared from the back room of the store. Her badge said “Manager” and she joined in the laughter. “Oh,” said she, “that rat!”  Zoytlow said, to no one in particular, that Why seemed to have a good humor to it.  All four patrons and the two employees agreed. “Why not?” said one. More chuckling. The patron at the gas pump entered the store carrying the dog/rodent. It growled and the laughter began anew. Why has a year-round population of less than 100 persons, perhaps more like 42. Winter saw some increase due to refugees from the Cold Zone elsewhere.  Zoytlow learned that the best method of taking the census here was t to count the number of active water meters. Anyway, with six humans and one dog before him, it was likely that more than ten percent of Why was enjoying a few moments of presumable rapport in the Why-Not.

This laughter was genuine and innocent and refreshing. There was nothing to suggest simple-mindedess and none of the obvious or cynical ironic twists so necessary to get a laugh in other venues.  The ice being broken (ice in the hot desert!) Zoytlow felt at ease to ask more questions including whether the town had a festival of any sort such as a “crazy days” or a “homecoming” or a “pioneer weekend.”  Nope, was the answer, and then, unselfconsciously, the woman with the dog said, “Why make a fuss?”  Then everyone laughed, and Zoytlow, forgetting the seriousness of Field Reporting, laughed loudest of all. Seconds later, another laugh: the Why water supply came from deep wells that some years ago had tested positive for arsenic. “Tasted great but it will kill you, so we dug a new well.”  Kind of like tequila? Zoytlow volunteered, and they rewarded him with another honest cackle (for such it was). Zoytlow felt good about Why.

Back to work: regarding Why, it hung on, yes because it lay at the junction of two highways, but also because it was only minutes from the northern end of a national park, Organ Pipe Cactus National Park. You are standing, said the owner of the still-growling Chihuahua, in the Wal-Mart of Why!  Now, here was the missing irony. Alas, business was down: the recession, the drug trouble in nearby Mexico, the ominous presence of the Border Patrol, and so on. People used to drive this way to go to Puerto Penasco a.k.a Rocky Point, a tourist destination at the top of the Sea of Cortez.  Now they were afraid, though the media was roundly condemned for making matters worse.

The lack of a customary flow of tourists to the Park or into Mexico meant that keeping the store stocked was constant guesswork. The Bearded One told Zoytlow that they only stocked “thrice requested” items.  Zoytlow pointed an overflowing box of candy suckers with real scorpions trapped inside, amber style. “Bet you have a hard time selling these,” PNZ commented. “Not so–very popular” said the manager who was dusting some cans of SPAM in the next aisle. “Lots of folks like them,” she said, “the kids say they taste like salted nuts.”  Zoytlow thought that Why, lacking a community festival day, might still have managed a to agree on a favored snack?  However, the Bearded One averred that he would never eat one, he’d stomped on too many of them and knew the color of their guts. (Laughter)

Readers of these Field Reports may assume that with a place like Why as a topic, the usual 75 minute of research time, so crucial to the methodology, would, in this case suffice. That is also what Zoytlow thought. He left the store with ten minutes of research time left and spent it slowly driving the scant and dusty streets. Down Why Road, up Mesquite, along Higgins, and back using Sonoita.   He noted the Howling Coyote Campground, the small Casino on the edge of the Tohono O’Odham Reservation (small compared to others elsewhere and with very few vehicles in the lot), the absence of churches, the discovery of a second gas station and, most curious, a restaurant which closed on Saturdays and only Saturdays. Any reason for that? Zoytlow noticed on a nearby house a weather-worn Star of David with small lights, the sort of thing you might use as yard decor during Chanukah. Could it be that the diaspora of the Israelites had reached Why?  Too many new questions, so little time.

Leaving Why, Zoytlow stopped briefly to give a final scan to the topography, the setting of this, his last research effort. There, in the distance mountains, southwest of Why and so obvious that no feat of imagination was needed, sat The Buddha.

The Great Buddha of Why

Editor’s Note: I received this Field Report from Zoytlow just the other day. It was sent by ordinary surface mail, postmarked San Felipe which I took to be something of a joke coming from a man named Phillip. But the more I read the handwritten pages torn from a wide-ruled notebook, the more I suspected that he was unaware of the connection between his name and the name of the place. It had taken three weeks for the letter to reach me, not unusual when one posts in a more remote part of the  Americas. In addition to the manuscript, he attached a small note written on a note pad supplied by a place where he had apparently stayed. From that I gathered that Zoytlow was in Central America, but he had scratched out the name of the hotel and directed me not to refer to it.  As for the Field Report he left only a brief comment: “ See what you can do with this. It’s not a true piece of legit (sic) social science of the sort I aspire to, but see what you can do with it. Please title it as I have done. Thanx. PNZ.”  And that was that.  I rather liked it, but fail to see why he took such pains to disguise the location. Presumably it is a different place than the one referred to in the report which follows.

[ Eds. note: The Reader may skip this paragraph.]  Looking back on it now, I should not have gotten so close to “social studies” in grade school which then led to that fateful course “Social Science Panorama” in high school, and then the me’lange of courses in college that put me into bondage to the the likes of psychology, sociology, and, worst of all, anthropology.  I say worst of all since it was here that I was nearly forced to nail my left foot to the floor so as to keep the right foot from wandering off into the full-blown and seductive humanities. But never mind that. During my stay in Termino Real, no thought of disciplining my feet came to mind. I fear I have betrayed the social sciences once again. There is some irony here since Termino Real seemed perfect for writing a masterwork in cultural anthropology.  But it turned out differently.

How did I come to the small village of Termino Real?  I had wanted to pay a winter visit to one or another of the small and warm Central American nations.  Termino Real just happened along, appearing at the end of the road at the tip of a peninsula deep in a howling tropical forest. How to render even a small village into a credible Field Report oppressed me. It was likely that Termino Real had never been described or even noted. This thought electrified me; imagine a scoop in terra incognita.

Such a strange name.  I learned, from a sign affixed to the iron gate of the small stuccoed chapel that the full name of the village was San Felipe de Los Remedios Terminados . The sizable expat community had little patience with all this and referred to their adopted neighborhood as Termino Real or just “TR” and many had forgotten (for they were much given to oblivion) what the name of the town actually was.

I met my first expat, a Welshman, the moment I exited the dusty taxi that brought me the sixty or so miles from a grass airstrip to the north. Paved roads gave out after just eighteen miles, so the journey had been lapidary, in the true sense of a pebble (me, P.N. Zoytlow) being ground about in the back of the cab.  The Welshman, who did not offer his hand but called himself Arthur, greeted me with a hearty “Welcome to TR!” and asked where I intended to lodge, the shadows having become long in the meantime.  “Sun sets early and quite suddenly in the tropics.  No street lights here. Got a torch?”  I felt a growing unease.  No torch. Where might I stay?  “My place.  Hotel Batz, down the street 200 meters.”

I slept like a dog under the ceiling fan and to the accompaniment  of forest squawks, barks, and the occasional scream from things with feathers.  Inside, hidden geckos chirped. I was in the tropics. But in the morning, after a breakfast of black beans, rice, and scrambled eggs, I also knew I was in trouble. How to render an entire village, not just an event (as most Field Reports tended to be) into a meaningful lump of information? Arthur sat at a nearby table (there were only three in the dining room of the Hotel Batz) watching a fuzzy soccer game on a small TV situated on the bar.  I decided I had no choice but to reveal my intent to do a brief study of Termino Real for a journal of the social sciences.  Arthur  betrayed no particular reaction to this, as if I had already been the fifth person to appear that week for that purpose.

“Do this.  Walk west on the road here,” he said, raising his arm slightly, “and each time you get to a corner, turn right. Turn four rights and you’ll end up back here. This should cover about a mile and take you, I would think, forty-five minutes.  You’ll see what you need to in that time.  Think of it as ten blocks on the…I mean in… Termino Real. Then, with the time left–you said you had one hour, fifteen minutes, yes?”  (I nodded.)  “Then go down to Mauricio’s and have some lunch. The village will come to you in that place especially the expats.”  Arthur’s plan was better than no plan.  “One thing,”  he added, “never extend your hand to a gibbon.”

I took this last advice as a jest. I knew that gibbons were Old World monkeys.  I returned to my room and stared at the ceiling fan. The remark about gibbons gnawed at me: the man must think me a fool.  I decided to scrap his suggestions and just establish myself at Maurice’s for a strict 75 minutes of observation time.  Never mind the village walk. Never mind the village!  My head was clear: the subject was now the expatriates of El Termino!

At 11:00 AM I walked to the restaurant.  More than once I was overcome by the dust of traffic: a taxi, five fat-tired all-terrain vehicles driven by bare-chested young men whose mouths were covered, bandit style, with kerchiefs.  These were norteamericanos. Some wore rakish googles that recalled the look of Japanese pilots in their Zeros.  The foliage along the road had turned a powdered grey and would stay that way until the seasonal rains washed them and turned the road to mud.

Maurico’s was a small block building with an large yellow awning over the the gravel dining area.  Two small picnic tables and benches and one folding table made up the seating.  Just beyond the dining area, facing the road, was a dirt parking area for cars, ATVs, motorbikes, and oxen.  A large tree with wide-spreading canopy branches, a remnant of the forest that had been here twenty years earlier, provided the shade.  High up, parrots shrieked and grackles made their irritating sounds, the same ones they brought far to the north some months later when it was time to nest. I saw in them something of the hedonism of the local kids on light motorbikes blatting up and down the street trailing the adobe brown dust.  I remembered that Termino Real was a cul-de-sac.  The road ended here: there was nothing more to see beyond Mauricio’s.  End of the world would have been a better name for the place.

I sat in a plastic garden chair near the end of a picnic table and ordered a bottle of tamarind drink.  Impossible to describe that flavor.  I’d wait until the lunch crowd came and observe what they ordered. The menu itself revealed nothing so much as a triad of fish, rice, beans  with some tomatoes or squash fritters on the side.  Behind me, the small older man I took to be Mauricio and his family were chopping, frying, boiling, rattling, clanking and talking.  The radio played an old Mexican tune. Then, by ones, twos, and threes the customers arrived for their lunch.  An old couple took seats at the other table which, it soon became apparent, was the table preferred by the Spanish-speakers, natives to this locale, citizens of the realm.  The table I sat at now filled up, according to tradition with a collection of expats whose lingua franca was English. In truth, they were North Americans, Belgians, Swiss, Dutch, and a couple from Argentina who preferred the company of English speakers This must have been why Arthur of the Batz steered me here, to experience in concentrated form the expats of Termino Real. Arthur did not appear, nor had I expected him, but I could not explain why this was so.

Most of them greeted me with a disappointing lack of curiosity. Stray tourist, they likely concluded. Were they wrong?  A few asked where I was from and one asked if I knew someone named Jack Something. Besides the eight or so ex-pats who sat at the table there were five others just standing around sipping chilled coconut water through straws after Mauricio had lopped the top off with his machete. Most of the talk centered on building materials, the search for reliable and cheap labor, and cheap ways  to leave the country for the three days required to renew quarterly non-resident visas.  The Americans all seemed to have been in the building construction back home; Long Island was mentioned repeatedly.  A Swede seated next to me whispered that all Americans will tell you the same thing: a builder from Long Island. What was the real story?  And why when it came time to renew visas, did they never combine that with a trip “home”? Later, one of these “builders” told me that the Swede was “so far Left  that  even the Swedes threw him out.”  A Luxemburger told me he was homesick for real cheese, but little else. A woman in the darkest sunglasses I had ever seen warned me that the Hotel Batz got rowdy on the weekends.  Overall, the expats exercised a wary civility towards each other.  On average, they had been in TR  eight years. They professed to have tired of the places they had left and seldom followed the news. Local news, more interesting to them, was by word of mouth, and they kept an eye on any and all things in “TR” e.g. who was getting a well drilled and how much of a bribe was needed to speed up the necessary paperwork.  But land was cheap, labor was cheap, and building supplies were available in a town three hours to the north.

Mauricio’s  food was excellent: grilled fish, rice, stewed plantains, black beans, a salad. As my table-mates dug in, I took a furtive look at my wristwatch, now clouded with humidity.  Only a  few minutes left.  I felt a familiar anxiousness: where was this Field Report going?  Another opportunity dribbling away?  I decided to gamble on one one last question:  did they assume that the local folks appreciated their living so much better than they did? Had I spoken too softly?  No one responded or even looked my way. I felt  foolish, my face reddened; I sweated beyond the expected sweat of these hot latitudes. Later in the afternoon, waiting for my cab in the bar of the Hotel Batz,  I revealed to Arthur my moment of discomfort at Mauricio’s.  “Ouch, that was the wrong question, mate,” said he in a voice slurred by drink.  “Know what I think? How’s it go?  Something about being guinea pigs in some huge laboratory.  Meet any gibbons at Mauricio’s?  Remember not to extend your hand?”  With this he began to giggle, resting his head on the bar, and then throwing it back in guffaws which left him wheezing and gasping “Oh, Sweet Jesus!”  The cab arrived.  I left Termino Real.

[Eds. Note: I could never get Zoytlow to elaborate on any of the details of this Field Report which, he admitted, had “gone off the rails.”  I thought I could make him feel better by doing an internet search on the one person in the account who had both a first and a surname: Arthur Batz. I learned that Batz had worked briefly in a small college in Wales and was known locally as a fierce promoter of Tennessee Williams.  I also learned, quite by accident, that “batz” is an indigenous Central American name for the howler monkey, a creature sometimes mistaken for the gibbon, an ape of the Old World.]

Three Polish Beers

Attending yet another folk festival did not call strongly to Zoytlow, yet this is precisely where he found himself in mid-October. Each year, depending on where he travels, Zoytlow has opportunities to wallow in the Ethnic Soup. Over the years, without losing an appreciation for the efforts of ethnic groups to share their culture with others, he concluded that a certain formulaic approach hangs like musty drapery over most folk festivals. Music, food and drink, dance, and a display of dated cultural artifacts: that’s the stuff of folk festivals. Here and there enterprising merchants attempt to peddle something suggestive of the Old Country to the visitors. Supporting it all are the volunteers who move things around, cook the food, take the tickets and dress up looking ethnic and friendly. Really, there is nothing wrong with the concept, just don’t attend too many.

So it was that P.N. Zoytlow attended the Fifteenth Polish Festival on the grounds of the Polish Roman Catholic Mission Church of St. Maximillian Kolbe. He was persuaded to attend and observe for the best of all possible reasons: curiosity. For years (whilst in town) he had often passed this small and simple church in San Diego and wondered about its unexpected appearance so far from the better-known regions of Polish settlement in the United States e.g. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Illinois. No, St. Maximillian Kolbe had put down its roots in a part of San Diego better known for its surfer subculture and just a few streets over from a modest Hare Krishna Temple. San Diego is only about 2% Polish, probably half of them immigrating since 1980. Compare this to Posen, Michigan with its 61% Polish population.

The church (specifically a “mission” serving the particular cultural and linguistic needs of Polish Catholics) is named in honor of St. Maximillian Kolbe, canonized in 1982 by Pope John Paul II who called him a “patron saint of our difficult century.” He is considered the patron saint of prisoners, particularly political prisoners. Kolbe was killed at Auschwitz in 1941 after volunteering to die in place of a prisoner who had a wife and children. He had provided spiritual comfort to others and did so until the moment he was given a lethal injection by his Nazi captors. Besides Kolbe, the modest church features a few other of the venerated: the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Patroness of Poland, and a cramped portrait of Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta. The church also gives testimony to the sufferings of the Poles under both fascism and communism and, in particular, the Katin Forest Massacre in 1940.

Leaving the somber little church, Zoytlow passed through a gate onto what is usually the parking lot. There stood a tall, slender man with an enormous cap of tawny-colored bear skin (presumably) a regular forest aristocrat from the land where European bison still wandered dense ur-forests. He wore a wooden pendant with the image of the Dark Virgin, the Madonna of Czestohowa. Another visitor had just inquired about this object and this Noble Pole, with glittering eye, was giving testimony to the miracles ascribed to this image: how the Hussites had put two slash marks onto her cheek and how her visage had become so dark, and how she had protected Poland against the Swedes and so on. These tales were well told, but told at some length against the competing allure of music and cooking smells and so PNZ was reminded of some distant poem, decades ago in high school English class in which some old fellow keeps a polite younger man from going to a party. Something like that.

As folk festivals go, this one attempted too much in too small a space. The church itself was smaller than most upscale California homes in this region. In the parking lot (with a cramped capacity of 17 vehicles-a small congregation) the event attempted to squeeze six food tents, a stage and dance platform, a section of folding chairs for an audience of perhaps 150-200, an inflated play area for children to flop and hurl themselves, several vendors, a few stand-up tables for eating, and a beer tent. Under these conditions one’s sense of personal space might edge into the range of elbow-to-elbow, but not yet cheek-by-jowl

The food was classic Polish fare: pierogi, kielbasa, golabki, bigos, and placki . Zoytlow (whose name may or may not suggest a Slavic connection) found these words intoxicating and began with the pancakes (that’s the placki) and was soon flabbergasted and possibly gobsmacked, realizing that they were, without doubt, the best he had ever eaten!! This was unexpected. The search for perfect or near-perfect potato pancakes had been a quest of many years. Had he found the pancake apotheosis? Wonderful to think of it that way, but Zoytlow also felt a lingering sadness that the search was now over. This kartoffel quest had taken him from his mother’s table to street vendors in Europe through countless American breakfast joints and now this—these plates of burnished amber: the Poles make the best potato pancakes!! Dutifully, he sampled the other fare (mostly permutations of pork, potato and cabbage), but looked in vain for a slice of dewy-moist poppyseed cake to finish the meal. Due to the small space and few tables available, most visitors ate leaning against fences or simply weaving on their feet, disposable plate in one hand, plastic fork in the other.

On stage, a father-daughter duo played accordion and sang tunes advertised in the program as “best-loved Polish songs.” A small audience filled the chairs and two couples had ventured on the stage to dance. The dancing appealed mostly to those who were middle-aged and portly, if not outright obese. The audience was delighted at how nimble these dancers were and one might say even elegant during a tango, one of those “best-loved” tunes along with “Besame mucho” sung in Polish. But there were others which came right from the Polish heartland, songs about beautiful places with chestnuts and fields and rivers. Because Zoytlow continues to be faithful to the 75 minute rapid-research concept which has produced these Field Reports since the beginning, he was not present to hear the more contemporary music of Zbigniew G. who, it was said by a man enjoying his bigos (a cabbage stew) to be the one to see tonight. (“You don’t want to miss him!”). But, Zoytlow would be gone by the time Zbig lit up the night.

Behind the church was the area designated as the “beer garden.” This, Zoytlow quickly concluded, was not a beer garden. He recalled the blunt statement found in the beloved Wikipedia:

The characteristics of a traditional beer garden include trees (no sun umbrellas), wooden benches(no plastic garden chairs), gravel bed (no street pavement), and solid meals (no fast food).

No problem with “fast food” here–everything was slow cooked; in all other respects this “garden” failed. Geography was destiny. This beer venue was forced to absorb a section of a public alley behind the church, obviously some municipal permission had been required. The result was a ten yard square section of concrete surrounded by a temporary six-foot steel cyclone fence. Capacity was set at 130 persons, inadequate for a Festival which had touted Polish beer a the beer garden thereby creating high interest in this corner of the scanty fesitval grounds. To enter in, one had to wait in line until enough patrons left. Once cleared by security officers you passed by a
counter where three brands of Polish beer were offered–in cans! No fresh brewski on tap! . And each can cost $5. But the line of expectant communicants for this Polska piva never lessened despite these hardships. Tatra, Warka, and Zwieck were the three brands available. Saying these words sounded (to Zoytlow) like anincantation to summon (Holy Parking Lot notwithstanding) a demon or to placate the stone-faced security men guarding the entrance and egress of the ever-restive beer zone.

The Poles had always had challenging geographical problems but had always survived and here, on this postage stamp of California real estate, they once again demonstrated that geography need not be destiny. Everywhere, from beer dispensary (not “garden!”) to the stage now awaiting the arrival of Zbigniew G. and his band, were men, women, and especially comely maidens of Polonia-in-America wearing t-shirts, usually red with white eagles, proclaiming “Polska.” And they were happy. The good humor of the Polskas moving through the throng was contagious. Zoytlow was half-giddy and also pleased with himself for remembering that someone has once quipped that Poland was a “geographical expression.” Emboldened by this small but seemingly clever idea, he asked one of the ubiquitous maidens if she perhaps knew of that signature polka “Kiss Me, I’m Polish.” To avoid any confusion regarding his own possibly goatish intent, Zoytlow smiled innocently and waved towards the musicians on stage. She smiled back a tad uncertainly, but no, she had not heard of it, and hurried on to the kitchen somewhere in the church basement. A man and his wife, overhearing him, tried to recall such a tune. It sounded familiar, but it also sounded, said she, “like a lotta things.” Cheerfully, her husband called to a man in a brown Polska shirt serving up pierogi in the food tent. “ Hey, Zarek, you know “Kiss Me?” Zarek looked up, shrugged, sure they just played it, you know, “Besame Mucho.”

Zoytlow looked at his watch. No more time left and if Zbigniew G. and his band were doing “Kiss Me, I’m Polish!” he would never know about it–but such are the pitfalls of a rigorous methodology in field research.

[Editor’s note: PNZ told me that he had found “Kiss Me, I’m Polish!” on U-Tube, mostly in Polish, performed by the Grammy winner Eddie Blazonczyk and the Versatones somewhere in the true Polish-American heartland back East. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIQBVQ8P8FU&NR=1) California, he added sourly, was not a good place to look for the real thing.]

It was noon on a summer Sunday in front of the bronze doors of Berlin’s seven-century old Marienkirche [St. Mary’s Church].  The service had ended and the huge old church was emptying. Members of the congregation passed by the bent Roma woman waiting for them at the door, paper cup in hand.  From inside came the last notes of the organ, once played by Bach in 1747.  It was “Israel Sunday,”  an annual event when this Protestant congregation invited members of the Jewish community to participate in a service dedicated to acknowledging common roots and aspirations.

Spread out around the church was Berlin with its weekend sounds of families at the nearby Neptune fountain, the clanging of yellow trams on Karl Liebknecht Strasse, and distant street musicians strumming guitars and tootling saxophones.  Perhaps a hundred persons, members of the congregation or the curious, now gathered in a loose circle on the worn concrete before the church as two white-robed clergy passed out long-stemmed dark red roses.

Street sounds occasionally made it difficult for all to hear the brief comments of the ministers of the Marienkirche, but none seemed to be unaware of the significance of the ceremony; this was an unusual event, an act of remembrance and contrition.  A representative of the city’s Jewish Community read a traditional Jewish prayer in German before asking the slender Cantor at his side to sing it in Hebrew.  The emotion of the cantor’s voice was unmistakeable: lament, sorrow, loss, but also healing.

Precisely as the Cantor ended, a single bell of the church began a lento tolling.  Members of  the congregation, one at a time, stepped forward and placed a red rose in the center of the assembly.  Some stood briefly with bowed heads.  The great bell high in the steeple tolled 42 times as 42 roses were placed on the concrete. A moment of silence followed and many present were moved by the simple dignity of the proceedings.

Passersby might reasonably have concluded that this gathering was a commemoration for victims of the Holocaust, common enough in a city with memorials both great and small to that hideous scar of the last century: the murder of European Jews.  However, this brief ceremony commemorated another event:  the trial of 4 Jews and one Christian in this very place before the Marienkirche in the year 1510.  In those days this church towered over the low buildings and the market place of a much smaller city, one still far from realizing its future importance in German and world affairs. The verdict of that trial half a millennium past:  death to all, either by burning or decapitation.  Moreover, the execution was followed by a widespread expulsion of Jews from the city and from the Province of Brandenburg. Reflecting on this event, who would not also think of the horrors of the death camps and other lapses into murderous intolerance over the centuries?

The accused Jews of 1510 heard no Cantor as they faced the flames, so these moments in August, 2010 were for them as well as for us.  In Spandau, a western section of the city, a museum had arranged an exhibit explaining the trial in context.

Briefly told, here is the story, based on the only document of the time The Sumarius [Frankfurt/Oder,1511].

During a night in early February, 1510 a certain Paul Fromm, who made his living repairing metal vessels (in German, a kesselflicker, and in English, a tinker) stole a number of sacred objects from the village church at Knobloch, in the Province of Brandenburg, west of Berlin. Among these objects was a brass container with two communion wafers. As it happened, these ritual wafers had been consecrated and thus understood to be, in effect, the body of Christ. This outrage was soon widely known and suspicions fell upon the Jews of Brandenburg. However, some four months after the theft, Fromm, a Christian, was apprehended. He immediately confessed and stated that he had himself eaten the host. Open and shut case?  Hardly. The Bishop of Brandenburg, apparently had his own motives for complicating matters and ordered a further investigation of Fromm which included torture. The tinker now changed his story: he had only eaten one of the sacramental  breads. The other had been sold to a Jew, Salomon of Spandau.

Salomon was quickly apprehended and under torture stated that he had desecrated the host verbally with curses and then by stabbing it with a knife. Then, broken into pieces, it was given to a number of other Jews who similarly misused the holy object. Within weeks some 100 Jews had been arrested, incarcerated, and accused of having played a role in this grave insult to Christendom.

Host desecration has a long history in Christian-Jewish relations. Jews were traditionally (and often continue to be) seen as responsible for the death of Jesus. Worse, they presumably  sought to continue the pleasure by stealing and defiling communion bread.  Superficially, this seems to make the Jews adherents of the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation in which seemingly ordinary bread becomes the flesh of the founder of Christianity.   Communion wine (the blood of Christ) is seldom mentioned as an object of theft and a feature of desecration. However, Jews were often accused of abducting Christian children in order to bleed them for those Jewish rituals which required the blood of a Christian child, usually a male. Not surprisingly, this accusation became part of the charge against the arrested Jews in Berlin in June, 1510. It mattered not at all that no child had been reported as missing during this period–authorities preferred to believe that the clever Jews, desperate for Christian blood to make Passover matzos, had likely chosen their victims from among transient or peasant populations less likely to come to the attention of church officials in Berlin.

On the 19th of July, 1510 before the doors of the Marienkirche, a crowd had gathered, to watch the show trial of 41 Jews who had been deemed the guilty parties in the desecration of the host and the wanton use of Christian blood. In short order, all were condemned to death by public burning. Two of the Jews had opted to be baptized as Christians; they escaped the flames and were “mercifully” beheaded instead. Only one Jew escaped the death sentence, a man who had a reputation as an eye doctor–he was allowed to live out his life in a monastery.

The execution took place a mile and a half away at a place called “Rabenstein” associated in those times with public execution. At that time, it was presumably a more open space than the area near the Marienkirche, thus less danger of fire spreading to the houses.  The bound prisoners, most likely wearing pointed caps signifying their status as culprits, were marched through the crowds who now looked forward to a spectacle.  Paul Fromm, the Christian tinker whose crime had begun this horrific fever of anti-semitism, was carried in a cart and along the way tormented with hot irons by the townspeople. He would be burned to death in a pyre of his own. The 38 Jews were arranged on a three-layered platform of wood, straw and pitch. Customarily, their ashes would be dumped in the river Spree or on nearby fields. Incineration was deemed most appropriate to discourage any notion of an afterlife. Such executions were popular and served to strengthen the Christian unity of Berlin.

Who were the victims? No list of names was provided in The Sumarius of 1511. Using other sources, the possible names of those burned to death that day were identified only by their first names e.g. Mosche, Mendle, Salomon, Nathan, Meyer, etc. and the Spandau exhibit represented them with a series of empty picture frames: persons scarcely known to history.  At their end, what thoughts might have come to these terrified victims concerning a world so lacking in compassion and justice?

Shortly after the executions, which affected many families among the estimated 400-500 Jews in the Province, the survivors, whether incarcerated or not, were expelled and many reportedly moved east towards Poland. No Jews were officially welcomed or allowed in Brandenburg for nearly thirty years. Here, as elsewhere, there is potent evidence that economic motives and envy of the Jews help explain this event.  These were often deliberately obscured by traditional Christian religious rationales for mistreatment of Jews.

Now, 500 years later almost to the day, the brief ceremony outside the Marienkirche ended. The officiants shook hands and the participants dispersed.  The roses remained on the ground before the church. The old Roma woman stayed as well. When the ceremony ended the church was again open to tourists, and she stood beside the door and held out her worn paper cup to them. Several days later, the roses, now faded and dry, still lay where they had   been placed.

[Editor’s Note]

P.N. Zoytlow called his last Field Report (#19) “a debacle, not at all what I had in mind” and wished he had ignored the Picacho Peak Civil War Event. When pressed why this was the case, he offered no comment. Just a shrug. I took the opportunity to take him to task: why this torment over achieving his exalted goal of producing a Field Report admired and published by one or several branches of the academic world? I had heard him rage on other occasions that he no longer cared which discipline accepted his work (“I’d even be happy with a Political Scientist’s approval!” he once fumed.)

As editor’s go, I may have more hubris in the area of “knowing my man” than others. In the case of Zoytlow, each Field Report seems more nervous, more desperate. It shames me to admit that I briefly considered putting some old professor up to merely footnoting one Report somewhere. Or I myself would write a reference on the wall of a men’s lavatory e.g. “Read Zoytlow!”

That said, and having said that, at the end of the day (two neo-cliches much in vogue of late), it is time to cross our fingers and offer another

Field Report (#20 The Demonstrators).

Her name (as indicated on the name tag) was Minna. Of all the persons interviewed for this Field Report on the tireless workers who dish up samples for us in food stores, she was the one I like to remember. On seeing her name, I thought immediately of Mina Harker, the terrified wife of Young Jonathan (?) Harker in Stoker’s Dracula. Despite the difference in spelling, I wanted to ask her if there was a connection between herself and the heroine, perhaps a parent who had liked the book or the film, but I stifled such unsuitable curiosity. Today, perhaps more than on any other day whenI embarked on a Field Report (so like a carriage ride into Transylvania) the strictures and the ethics which drape themselves on the statue of the Goddess of Research were solidly with me. Or so I hoped, for this is the Muse I had worshipped with wretched abandon before.

[Editor’s Note] STOP! Hold on there! I have retained that paragraph so that the reader may see what a fevered state Zoytlow was in as he began this “do or die” project. I prevailed on him to breathe more deeply, not try so hard and to trust himself more. And so he continues…]

Minna appeared to be about 70 years of age. She was a small woman with deep creases in her cheeks, a slightly humped back, and pale blue eyes magnified by her glasses. She stood on a rubber mat behind her stainless, movable “demo station” with a microwave oven on her left and a tray of warm corn dog samples directly in front of her. To the right, two packages of the product: Pluck County Corn Dogs. Minna was dressed in white, wore plastic gloves, and an oversized hairnet which billowed over her ears and down to her collar. I approached her station just as she was beginning her patter to a dull-looking couple who had eyes only for the corn dog slices. These were, she said in a kindly voice, either a snack food or a dinner. The sausages were all beef hot dogs with a batter that was either “original flavor” or “salsa.” Five minutes, from freezer to table. Two boxes at a special price. She invited them to try the product, each morsel already speared with a toothpick. The couple did so, chewed the sample thoughtfully, thanked Minna, and then moved on to the next demo station, featuring a small piece of breaded fish with a bowl of tartar sauce nearby. And beyond this station, another offering small paper cups one-quarter filled with “Chicago Style” beans cooked in a luminescent yellow cheese sauce.

It was a good day for sampling food and I had come to learn about the labors of what I had initially called “sample ladies.” However, those who provide samples prefer to be called “demonstrators,” a term intended to convey a level of pride and professionalism. The food store in which Minna sliced corn dogs for eight hours (but subtract 30 minutes for lunch and two 15 minute breaks) was renowned for the number and range of its demonstrators. On a weekday there might be five or six demo stations; on Fridays and Saturdays up to fifteen. Such stores are considered, with some admiration, as places “a guy can put together a lunch just on samples alone.” Other stores might not have as many demo stations, but they might be offering more upscale fare such as a small piece of cheese cake, or something associated with a holiday such a small portions of corned beef and cabbage with a few square inches of soda bread for Saint Patrick’s Day. Minna’s store was not of the upscale sort, but was well-regarded for its dependable sample selections.

A word about methodology here. With the usual 75 minutes of research time, I thought it best to interview anywhere from 12-15 demonstrators spread over a number of stores and in different regions of the United States. Thus, the interviews would have to be fast and to the point. Standardized questions. Five different stores in three states were visited, but the names and locations of these will be obscured because some anonymity must be insisted upon here; however, I have used the actual names of the demonstrators. Overall, I found nearly all the subjects easy to engage provided they were not distracted by their tasks or by a customer. I have seldom been more confident of myself as a social scientist and, quite frankly, following my time with Minna, looked forward to the broad dissemination of this research.

Of the fifteen, Minna was the oldest and had been on the job for 23 years. No, she was not tired of it because she swore to me that she loved meeting people and teaching them about products they might otherwise miss. It did not matter what the product was, even if it was something that she personally did not care for. Working with a microwave oven or an electric frying pan added to the challenge of being prepared for a large number of people to pass by her station at once. It did not bother her if she ran out and had to tell people to come back in a few minutes. “Why, if you want to try something good, you have to be patient.” Some products (chicken or other meat products) were frequently probed with a thermometer and no sample would be let go without a careful scrutiny with this instrument. Minna was a professional and her answers, friendly and to the point, suggested a devotion to duty and a focused seriousness that one might not have associated with the distribution of greasy corn dog morsels, a food item originally associated with county fairs and sometimes disparaged by the health-conscious.

Gwen (pumpkin bread) was half Minna’s age and had demonstrated for seven years. She wore a large button with a photo of her son, about ten years old. Like her older colleague, Gwen had a welcoming demeanor and seemed to enjoy my questions. Yes, this was fulfilling work. How many customers would become pumpkin-bread converts that day? She hoped she would hear from management that they had a good run on the one pound loaves. And if she did not? I asked how she could blame herself when it was the product in the mouths of others that had to do the selling. This opinion was the wrong approach with Gwen and she lost her smile. Obviously she thought of herself as the one critical element in the sale of pumpkin bread. Quickly I asked a barrage of distracting questions: her favorite product to demonstrate? Cottage cheese on Ritz crackers with some reddish seasoning salt on top. Why? because it looked nice, sort of cheerful and she tried to make every one of them look identical to the last and placed in careful symmetry on the serving dish. Then there was the added stack of cocktail napkins on each side. In fact, everything at the demo station was in perfect symmetry. “You know,” she said, “it’s really so interesting when a customer takes one and I have to rearrange everything again. Then three more come and it really gets challenging, especially if I have to make up new ones, or the cottage cheese gets low, or the seasoning runs out. It’s very interesting to keep a balance, to keep it under control, you know what I mean? I love that.”

At the next demo station stood Lupe (sausage pizza) rolling the cutter over the pie. She had noticed me talking to Minna and Gwen and already expected more than the usual interest in her product. She warned me that the pizza was hot and could cause a burn (another feature common to demonstrators: avoiding lawsuits). After learning that Lupe had been on the job only eight months, I expected little new information from her, but here I was wrong. “Know what’s good about this job?” she asked and continued in the same breath, “it’s the discount when I shop here.” With three children and single parenthood, Lupe needed a break wherever she could get it. The worst thing about the job was customers who asked her where to find an item somewhere else in the vast store, a complaint I heard from others as well. “I mean, do I know where the vinegar is at? Or how ‘bout the birthday cards? I’m a demonstrator, not a one-woman information desk,” she stage-whispered to me although there was no else present. And glancing at where Minna was doling out corn dogs, she sighed. “Poor old lady. She really hates it here. She just about dies at the end of the day. Husband left her fifteen years ago and she can’t make it without this job.”

I decided to switch stores and and stopped at a well-known source of specialty foods, wines, cheese, and affordable gourmet items. It was smaller than the average food supermarket and sought to attract a more educated “demographic,” though not necessarily an affluent one. The approach to demonstrating here was unique and successful. Instead of small demo stations, a back corner of the store was given over to a small kitchen where more complex samples were prepared. These sometimes reflected seasonal choice so at Christmas a small paper cup of egg nog and two cookies might be presented on a small plate. St. Patrick’s in March meant a piece of corned beef, a slice of fingerling potato, and a piece of Irish soda bread. Thanksgiving meant a piece of turkey breast with cranberry sauce and a small dinner roll. All of this was prepared by one employee who was dressed in a tropical shirt and no head cover other than a ball cap. [Are hair nets mandatory, or are they just a ploy to make a store look more health conscious? And what about those notices posted in the restrooms stating that employees MUST wash their hands before returning to their duties.] Gregarious and well-spoken, these cook/demonstrators know they are a prime focus in the store. Get to the store early enough and you get a token breakfast of mango juice, granola and skim milk as well as cheery good wishes to “Have a nice day!”

But that was high end. Low end would be those stores that have done away with demonstrators but have not given up the idea of offering something. Here, the human presence (and its payroll burden) is absent and samples appear on trays placed strategically in the aisles. They are covered with dome-shaped plastic “sneeze (or spit) guards” with a small opening (“the cutout”) allowing removal of the sample. Typically, small paper cups with nuts, snack items, banana bread, or pieces of fruit are available. The advantage to this sample i.e “demonstration” station to the shopping public is that, unless there is awareness of the TV camera observing them from the ceiling the customer feels no awkwardness and far less opprobrium in taking two or more samples at once. A store famous for an unsupervised tray of 34 mm. doughnut balls must tolerate those customers walking off with their coat pockets full.

At a well-known food market in Colorado a demonstrator whose badge said “Frieda W. 12 yrs of service” on it stood and ladled marinara sauce over 20 mm. meatballs. A paper cup held them both and a small plastic spoon was supplied. Frieda had attracted a small group of hopeful customers, drawn by the scent of something warm and tasty. “This,” she said, “is Carnavale Marinara Sauce, based on a family recipe. It’s the only way to eat spaghetti. All natural ingredients and I wish I could say the same about the meat ball. Don’t know what’s in that, but we have to demonstrate the sauce with something. Who knows what they put into meat these days….but you’ll love the sauce, trust me. It’s your business if you eat the meatball.” A woman asked why she didn’t just use breadsticks or elbow macaroni instead of the noxious meatballs, but Frieda W. ignored the question.

I looked at the meatball, about 13 mm. in diameter, and waited until the consumers (“clents” in professional demonstrator lingo) had moved on before asking Frieda W. why she had disparaged the little meatball, noting that I never heard a demonstrator bad-mouth a product before. “Because I wouldn’t feed this crap to stray dog.” But that was only the beginning. “Hell, why should I care? If you saw what I have to put up with! Take these meatballs. Management knows how many are in a bag so they think they can check how many we give out. If you don’t make the goal for the day, they put you on pineapple next day. But the people! Give me a break! Where do they get these people? Kids dropping food all over–these are the kids whose parents send them for another portion because, after hitting me up for three, they finally have some shame. And no one says thank you. And all the slobs that pretend they are interested with a phony “my, my, what’s this? it looks so good!” and all the time they could care less about what it is they’re gonna stuff in their pie-hole as long as its free.” She shrugged. “And don’t think you’re special just because you asked me a question. You can tell the manager for all I care. I’ve only pushed one sack of these poison meatballs today, so it’s off to pineapple tomorrow.”

[Editor’s Note: And with that, Zoytlow lost his will to continue. Three additional demonstrator interviews had been planned, but as he explained it “something in my gut told me Frieda W. was right and who would believe anything I offered as a conclusion. I wanted certainty and I got doubt. I can’t submit this for publication to any social science journal, that’s clear.” As this Field Report shows, he lacked the interest to even enquire as to the significance of pineapple in the world of demonstrators.]

A large nimbus of pure white smoke rose and drifted over the battlefield as if in benediction.  The spectators, draped on a nearby rocky hillside, shielded their eyes to follow this phenomenon.  P.N. Zoytlow shook off the suggestion that he had drifted into the wrong event, perhaps a religious pageant, but here were too many screaming Johnny Rebs and gruff Blue Jackets of the Grand Army of the Republic present to suggest Jesusalem. No, it was 1862 again and he was at the Spring Reunion of Civil War Reenactors at Picacho Peak in Arizona.  Picacho Pass had been the site of a “skirmish” [meaning a quite minor event] in April, 1862 between the Blue and the Grey, the westernmost incident of the War Between the States which ravaged the American nation between 1861 and 1865. The ring of smoke came from the firing of a cannon and not the bellowing of a wrathful Jehovah.

Zoytlow was attracted to this annual event not because he had an interest in the War itself but rather to ask why people dedicate time and treasure to such activities. His modus operandi would be the same as in prior Field Reports: seventy-five minutes of observation time, but this time it would have to be non-sequential, meaning that blocks of fifteen minutes could be assigned to various promising elements. The scale of this event was larger than any other he had yet attempted, larger by far than the overwhelmingly difficult attempt to encapsulate the University of California at Berkeley for the first Field Report. He was a younger, more confident researcher then, less inclined to sweat over methods as he clearly did today, his damp canvas Stetson hat betraying the heat of the afternoon but mostly his unease. For Zoytlow, each Field Report caused him to fret more about the ambiguity of the so-called “real” world. To ask why people pretended they  existed 150 years before the present was simple; to get at the truth of it would not be so simple. At least that is what he assumed. As always, the elusive goal of just once crafting a fine, praiseworthy, publishable piece of research caused dread deep in the bowel.

On this Saturday afternoon in March, the theatrical battles with their mounted cavalry, foot-soldiers, clouds of smoke, popping guns and booming artillery drew a large, oddly diffident crowd. The Reenactors had prepared themselves to present three battles here on the meadow before towering Picacho Peak, the ragged tooth of a landmark between Phoenix and Tucson. Zoytlow observed portions of two of these but quickly concluded that his sparse observation time would be better spent elsewhere. The brief “battle” of Picacho Pass was the only authentic one presented as it had taken place nearly on that spot. The Battle of Glorieta Pass occurred hundreds of miles away from this place. Nevertheless, only a purist would express displeasure at such deviations from fact. The latter battle, Glorieta Pass was the largest event of the day with perhaps a hundred or more men in the field (and a few women combatants passing as men, hair tucked under their caps). The soldiers marched to the field looking oddly defeated. Perhaps the weight of the past had descended and they had become tired veterans, in this case doomed to fight each battle over and over in a loop of tedium. But duty called and once in the field they surged forward, then fell back as the outcome of the battle seemed to hang in the balance. Now and then a man would give a groan (of relief?), slump forward, fall to the ground and arrange his wounded or dying self into a comfortable position. For him, as they say even today, the war was over though the melancholy of that chorus from the old song “Just Before the Battle, Mother” was happily irrelevant here:

Farewell, mother, you may never
Press me to your heart again,
But, oh, you’ll not forget me, mother,
If I’m numbered with the slain.

Meanwhile, the crowd on the hillside watched with impassivity. Perhaps no one knew what to make of this obvious simulation, so tame when compared with unflinching tempest of blood and viscera in films today.  The attempt to provide commentary by means of a few loudspeakers was drowned out by the guns and barking of orders on the field.  What was going on? Without a frame of reference and defeated by the “fog of war” whole families began to drift off to Sutlers’ Row where eager merchants awaited them.

Sutlers’ Row meant vendors of period “stuff” from over-priced sarsaparilla drink to clothing appropriate to the era such as sunbonnets or military caps.  Replicas of firearms for small boys and a few girls were selling and so did the sacks of caramel corn whose fragrance had already suffused the battle just ending. These vendors (“sutlers”) had an authentic place here for in earlier wars merchants followed armies into the field for commerce between the battles, sometimes augmenting what the army had failed to supply.

Further on, the general Encampment of many tents brought to mind that Civil War hit, “Tenting on the Old Campground” with its mournful lyrics “Many are the hearts that are weary tonight, wishing for the war to cease…”  Seeing those tents provided Zoytlow with one of several moments when he felt the war, but no one tenting here wanted this war to end. Reenacting it was too much fun, to which everyone he interviewed that warm afternoon gave cheerful testimony. No one took sides here and there were no obvious lingering 19th Century sectional loyalties. Nor had any of today’s partisanship crept into the Encampment. “Oh, no, no politics here,” said the man selling plastic swords.  Religion? The large man who sat before the Chaplain’s tent wistfully intoned that on Sundays “some of these good folk” joined him in the larger band tent where they sang period hymns and generally prayed for deliverance from evil.

Overall it was the womenfolk who were the more informative. From them Zoytlow learned that while many had been brought into Civil War Reenactment because of the interest of their menfolk, the battles were less central  than one might think. In fact, very few women in their often spectacular outfits (think Gone With The Wind) even attended the battles. They were, many of them, back in the Encampment having tea, quilting, cooking stews in iron pots, or listening to the band play tunes from those times. What motivated many of them, men as well as women, was more than the chance to dress and pretend it was 1862; it was to learn about that past. Some had come to see their role as educators and to share their reverence for the past with the public. Others had an ancestral connection with this war that many Americans know of and (oddly) love.

Zoytlow, walking along the rows of tents, observed men playing games with dice, cleaning guns, or just sitting and staring vacantly at the horizon as men everywhere do. Their women were making pills and lotions or assembling hoops to wear beneath their skirts. At each tent he learned more of their motives for spending a weekend in a canvas tent with few of the amenities of life today.  Of course, most of them knew each other and they gathered like some species of plump fowl, parasols in hand to protect their prized milky complexions, passing along gossip. These were indeed the women whose honor men strove to protect!  They were serious people. Not without humor, but no parody allowed; respect the past, and learn from it. Before a tent displaying various corsets which had once painfully lashed women into a fetching hourglass shape, Zoytlow learned of the evolution of women’s foundation garments. Serious stuff: did everyone know that even pregnant women wore specialized corsets to help maintain femininity? Did they realize the health dangers corsets posed to women, and all because wasp-waistedness was “the look” of the times?

If the smoke and thunderous blasts on the battlefield did not always engage the interest of the visitors, the display on Civil War field hospitals did. Here was the grisly detail of which bullet did the worst damage (the Minie ball) and required the consequent development of equally gruesome instruments of amputation.  Worse yet, the rapt audience learned that the anesthesia could only be administered once; thus if the overworked surgeons were delayed reaching the soldier with the shattered limb….the horror of it all…he endured that rasp of the saw or toothed cable plain and simple.

Having nearly exhausted the permitted research time, Zoytlow turned in the direction of the parking lot and, on impulse, spoke to a woman in a sunbonnet with three daughters. He complimented her dress which caused her to life her skirt very slightly and apologize for her inauthentic though comfortable athletic shoes. Her youngest daughter, perhaps ten years of age and barefoot delivered a curtsy in a natural and unselfconscious way.  A classic curtsy, she had gently touched the sides of her frock, lowered her gaze, and bent her knees slightly. It was the first curtsy Zoytlow had experienced in his lifetime and it caused him a pang of nostalgia, but for what?  He thanked her for her gesture, conscious that she had provided him a better representative image of the event than the one he had been turning over in his mind: the Rebel colonel with bits of mucilaginous caramel corn throughout his lengthy beard.

The curtsy turned out of be a key to the Reenactors. Most of the participants had that dignified quality of wanting to appreciate and enjoy the past. Some may have wanted to escape the present. For the long weekend, there were no obvious sources of outside news, no hateful politics, domestic or foreign–just the quotidian hum and companionship of life in an earlier time. It was a fine fantasy to be part of, and everyone came home from the battles.

[Readers kindly note: in case you missed it in the “About” section, P.N. Zoytlow has postponed the long-awaited interview. Except for this obdurate attitude, he appears to be in good health and spirits. While he realizes that the latest Field Report once again fell short of “praiseworthy social science” he seems confident that the next one will, as he put it “turn the corner” for him. Stay tuned.]

For Observer Zoytlow, there was no other way to describe it than “a long and stormy week.” For days the wind had lashed the sea and the tides were higher than he had seen them before on this stretch of the California coast. Daily, great loads of kelp and debris were dumped on the otherwise inviting sands. When the storms of late January ceased, Zoytlow took a walk along the water’s edge. Rocks, shells, and human junk were abundant. On the beach lay plastics in all their contemporary forms: toys, rope, containers and obscure fragments. And wood: soggy lumber, branches from somewhere, and the occasional yellow pencil. Also cloth: shirts, a piece of blanket, hats, a canvas shoe. Each item raised a question: whose were you? Where did you come from? Most of the curiosities were woven into heaps of yellow-brown macaroni that had been part of the offshore kelp forests. In a few days, caravans of equipment and dump trucks would haul it away.

Zoytlow had not undertaken his beach combing with any thought of a Field Report. No, in his researches, he usually hoped for more drama than mere debris; a beached whale, for example. Then he came upon a thing which did not belong on the beach, a thick, flat black slug-like affair nearly a foot long and two inches across. It looked like a large piece of rubber, perhaps a section of a fastening belt off some cargo vessel. It lay there, posing the question: am I organic or inorganic? Have I expired? Zoytlow tapped it with the edge of his sandal and it squirmed and half-contracted briefly in a repellent way. Such an ugly thing, worse than the nightcrawlers that lay on wet lawns on a summer night, prone to elongate and shrink in inhuman ways. But this thing was still alive and not likely to find its way back to the receding tide. Zoytlow was reluctant to touch it directly, recalling that the most unlikely creatures had irritating secretions or hidden stingers. Yet to let it expire? At a moment like that, Zoytlow reflected, anything that one had ever heard about the defense weaponry of the natural world came to mind like a klaxon. He nudged it back to the sea and watched. When the creature lay rolling about in the shallow surf a number of transformations began to take place: the rubbery elongation was replaced by a stout, cylindrical shape while the color changed to a more mottled surface of browns with red highlights. Here and there, small protuberances appeared: feet, horns, antennae? Each receding wave favored its return to the sea and soon it was gone. Initially, he called it a “sea slug” and then refined it to “sea cucumber.” Or was it a sea hare or urchin?

Zoytlow was troubled. How could he be sure the thing was what he assumed? Worse, he had already felt the tug of a new Field Report and this dispirited him. As readers of earlier Reports well know, the Observer has persistent hopes of writing something that would find its way into a respectable social science journal; such a publication would crown his efforts and his method (rapidometrics) with approval from other scholars. Men and women like himself who toiled in the unknown. Like them, he was a soldier in the Army of Reason, bound to the sacredness of “pushing back the barriers of superstition and ignorance” as a biochemist had once soberly expressed it. Too late now to reject this lump from the sea: it was worthy of a Field Report. Of course, Zoytlow never saw that particular “First Cuke” (as he came to think of it) again. Now, more than an hour of the allotted 75 minute research time remained and the chances of seeing another sea cucumber on that beach, unless equally moribund, were slim. Since there was a famous oceanographic institution with an aquarium nearby, his research must take him there.

Standing at the tidal pool among several dozen seventh graders, Zoytlow wished he had come earlier in the day. As it was, the creatures in the tidal pool (a simulated concrete affair) were due their weekly feeding. The crowd leaned over the edge to watch the various starfish, crustaceans, and anemones as the attendant dropped whatever it was into the pool. As the reactions from the pool to these nutrients were too subtle to sustain the interest of the students, they drifted off and Zoytlow peered into the pool looking for something that resembled the creature on the beach. Across the pool, perhaps a meter distant, stood a docent who was also peering into the pool and, as it happened, Zoytlow had first seen the reflection in the still water. It was a young woman, decades younger than Observer Zoytlow (at least that was his sense of it) with flaxen hair, a light blue shirt, dark jeans and the near-mandatory tan UGG boots favored by women in Southern California. Botticelli’s Venus, out of a tidal pool. Her name, according to her badge, was something Irish with the words “Science Intern” in slightly smaller letters beneath it. In the time that Zoytlow spoke with her, the present Field Report twitched to life again.

This Fiona (as she will be referred to in this Report) had a passion for the things of the tidal pool and quickly pointed out a “Warty Sea Cucumber” and stated that in all likelihood that was the life he had saved, an act he liked to imagine brought him into her favor. They were favorite gull fodder, she continued, and if he had not saved it then a gull would have dispatched it anyway. Part of the food chain, you know. Somewhat deflated, Zoytlow rapidly (rapidometrics, remember?) asked more about the sea cucumber (the Holothurians as science identified them). They were, he learned, the gleaners of the sea floor, essentially nothing more than a mouth, an anus, and a tube between them, Like earthworms, they process matter and expel it. Movement is by means of small tubular legs. They are important to the health of the ocean floor and are as mild-mannered as soft, blind, spineless and brainless creatures ought to be. Their only defense mechanism is self-evisceration: they blow out some guts to distract enemies. Some of these secretions may be sticky. Having performed this partial disemboweling they either shift to an alternate set or quickly grow another. There are many varieties of sea cucumbers, some smaller and some much larger, and they are found in all the oceans. Finally, there is really nothing about them that suggests cucumbers but the term appears in a number of languages.

Zoytlow, was quite taken with all this biological palaver, but he remembered that he was, after all, a social scientist. He asked Fiona what interest the social sciences might have in sea cucumbers. Her answer was terse and he concluded that she had tired of him. “Folks eat them,” said she, “go to a sushi bar.”

There are many sushi venues in the city, and Zoytlow learned that in the tourist districts their menus were slight compared to what was offered in an ethnic enclave. Look for namako in Japanese sushi bars, and ha shen in Chinese restaurants. The Chinese will not serve sea cucumbers as sushi, but there are a number of dishes prepared with it. Zoytlow did not wish to spend the time looking for such places and he contented himself with the description of cooked or raw ‘Holothurians” tasting like nothing more than tofu, quite dependent on what it is cooked with for flavor. Besides, visiting a restaurant just to ask about namako or ha shen seemed too silly and crossed some ethical boundary for this Investigator. [Digression: for a collection of nearly 1000 haiku poems on the subject of sea cucumbers, see Rise, Ye Sea Slugs! by Robin D. Gill which appeared in 2003.]

A better idea, and less compromising, would be to pursue the matter at one of several large Asian foods supermarkets. The one Zoytlow had in mind featured an enormous variety of live, fresh, frozen and canned fish. The heart of the fish department was the long counter where four slender men in black rubber aprons stood and hacked at fish like talapia, sea bass and catfish that had moments earlier been crowded together in glass tanks. Each of these fish had a different style of tank occupancy as did the crabs and lobsters further off. Talapia swam back and forth with their silver sides showing The catfish, black with white mouths all faced front, hundreds of them, each more than a foot in length and with their barbels waving in the current. They were gulping and their homely mouths gave them the appearance of a silent chorus, desperate and accusatory. It was hard to look at them.

Zoytlow approached a man arranging plastic trays of refrigerated minnows in a case. Did they sell sea cucumbers? The man was either deaf or had chosen to ignore the question, or he did not speak English. Zoytlow asked again and the man shook his head as if he wished to free himself from an irritant. Back at the counter, over the din of living fish being clubbed to death (how fortunate for us, thought Zoytlow, that fish are voiceless) he noted a Mr. Fang (“fish manager” according to his badge) speaking accented but obvious English to a woman holding up a squid. Did he have any sea cucumbers? There followed a rapid consultation with a worker slitting the belly of a catfish lately of the tank choir. Yes, in the frozen section. On the way, he verified that no sea cucumbers were in cans. Among the frozen things, he found bags of the subject of this Report either from Taiwan or Fiji. The black sea cucumber seemed to be cheaper than the white and the most similar to that First Cuke washed up after the storm. They were flattened out as well leading to the conclusion that dying sea cucumbers relax their novel endoskeletons. Nothing caught local, presumably, although only a few months ago two Chinese men had been stopped at the U.S-Mexican border with 343 pounds of sea cucumbers (dead) in suitcases which they were attempting to move into the United States where their contraband might have sold for $45 a pound. Or perhaps their fate would have been to be dried and sold as a medicine. Good for arthritis, circulation, cancers, and or as still another presumed aphrodisiac. The men were fined, denied visas, and the cukes were turned over to Fish and Wildlife. [Digression: In 1913, French composer Erik Satie wrote “Desiccated Embryo of a Holothurian” which was inspired by a sea cucumber. It is less than three minutes long and seldom performed.]

Let’s wrap this up, thought Observer Zoytlow. For a moment he had considered finding out what a Federal Agency might do with dead contraband sea cucumbers, but what stopped him more than anything was the realization that anything you get too curious about has no real beginning nor an end. He was peering into a tunnel, gray and endless with permutations of the sea cucumber in politics, art, economy, and (who knew?) philosophy. In truth, the sea cucumber had lead Observer Zoytlow to an epiphany. Hard to ignore was the thought of the Big Bang and this chance encounter with a little-known (to him) creature on the beach. Older than humankind, there it was, by the millions at sea bottom, nearly brainless, endlessly foraging and defecating, ancient and, once one got used to the idea, venerable. Going backwards, somewhere between the Bang and the today’s sunrise, humankind and the sea cucumber converge. Had P.N. Zoytlow not been the rigorous social scientist he was, he might have wept.

The following Field Report was received from P.N. Zoytlow on the 15th of December 2009.  In many ways it is typical Zoytlow reportage and follows the usual formula that we associate with him.  It may be that Zoytlow is in something of a rut. Number 17 is now the third North Dakota Field Report in half a year. This is not a complaint, just an observation that Zoytlow has become more sedentary or has found an irresistible vein of material in a region he himself labeled “mysterious.”  On the other hand, his use of the first person to relay the information is unusual for a purported social scientist and may signal a break in his methodology. Time will tell, of course.

There are two methods of welcoming and enduring winter in Eastern North Dakota and I have tried them both. First, the only true means of enduring the darkness that descends along with the thermometer near the Winter Solstice each year is to purchase a quart jar (must be glass) of genuine Korean kim chee. A generous spoonful in the evening will suffice to balance off the gloom. However, it is equally important to find a means of embracing winter. While others may use the well-established extreme of ice fishing, in my opinion the consumption, once in December and once in January of lutefisk has a general palliative effect with unexpected resonant overtones no other method can match.

There are many who know of lutefisk only as an ethnic joke, one of the several things that makes Scandinavians of the Upper Midwest humorous to others and also to themselves.  There is a tradition built around the notion that codfish soaked in lye and served hot is amusing; bumper stickers, T-shirts, aprons, and so on all give testimony to presumed mirth associated with this fish.  After Ole and Lena jokes, lutefisk is probably the second most common topic of thigh-slapping fellows.  I suppose anything can be rendered humorous and joke-worthy, but for purposes of this Field Report, lutefisk will not be considered one of them. Serious business.

“Codfish soaked in lye and served hot.” Was that a fair summation of the stuff which I will argue here is the “piece of cod that passes all understanding.”  That line was read on a t-shirt some years ago and may be responsible for my reporting on lutefisk as a sacrament celebrated in church basements, community centers  and at Sons of Norway lodges.  I wish I had originated it but whoever did was risking the opprobrium of High Lutherans for its flagrant parody of Philippians 4:7 (i.e. “peace of God.” Can lutefisk be understood only as an improbable object of consumption or is it more?  Only attendance at a Sons of Norway lutefisk dinner can possibly provide an answer,  though the ultimate meaning of such gustatory behavior may indeed “pass all understanding.”

So what is lutefisk?  Translated from the Norwegian as “lye fish” suggests something about the texture and odor of cod prepared in this specialized manner, but not why it occurs as a pillar of Nordic cultures. There is no agreement on the antiquity of the practice of reconstituting dried and split cod (called stockfish in this form) by soaking it in a bath of sodium hydroxide, or lye. Lye causes the fish to swell, lose some of its protein, and acquire a gelatinous texture. The soaking must be done in several stages until the caustic quality is reduced to the point where it can be, after cooking, safely eaten. Another food prepared with lye is hominy where dried maize is reconstituted and swells. Both lutefisk and hominy retain a hint of lye. This taste is perceived though cultural and highly personal lenses, something I am desperate to try to explain here.

At the Sons of Norway lodge in Fargo, and at similar lodges in other towns and cities, winter is a time of lutefisk dinners. In Fargo, these occur regularly on the first Sunday of the month with peak months being the two dreariest, December and January. Serving is done beginning at 11:45 until 1:30, timed to serve the many coming with appetites honed by piety from their respective houses of worship. Oh, the growling gullets of these solid folk as they entered the Sons of Norway clubhouse, and the discipline as they waited for their turns to enter the serving line. Such are the crowds that nearly everyone has to wait in a dining cohort, perhaps twenty persons whose assigned number entities them move forward from a holding area (the bar, defunct on a Sunday) together towards the serving line. Most of the diners are middle-aged and beyond, though not a few have brought younger members of the family along. They may have to wait for half an hour in which time the topics that appear to be most commonly exchanged in this nearly homogenous group of Nordics are apt to be (1) how cold is it and how cold has it been and how cold will it get?  (2) memories of lutefisk consumption past (3) recent illnesses and deaths noted.  This passes the time nicely. Occasionally some fellows will trade good-natured wit about how the smell coming out of the kitchen made them wonder if they should stay or how much butter it takes to make lutefisk edible.

The Sons of Norway lodge is meant to suggest all that is good, and strong about Norway itself. As with many descendants of immigrant groups, memory has not kept pace with modernity in the “old country.”   How many of those waiting for lutefisk know, or want to know, that Norwegians eat significantly less lutefisk than Norwegian-Americans?   Lodge decor includes references to the Norsemen (the S of N logo features a Viking ship), kindly portraits of past and present Norwegian royalty such as Kings Haakon and Olaf and Queen Maud. A miscellany of trolls, gnomes and other gremlin types complete the decor of the place. Remember: in sagas such as Beowulf folks sat about in lodges drinking, boasting, and gorging.

Attending a Sunday lutefisk feed alone as I am doing is atypical as the eating cohorts are mostly acquainted, made up of couples, and quickly recognize commonalities. In order to promote the normal behaviors at these events, I kept myself (with my lack of Scandinavian roots) apart and listened carefully for my cohort’s number to be called. It would not do to try to blend in: I was alone, Zoytlow is a peculiar name, and I could not claim membership in any of the usual Lutheran churches. Nor was I native to Fargo or some outlying community. This is not a critique of the insularity of ethnic groups generally, just a recognition that as a relative stranger I would have tainted the purity of this event and, who knows, knocked it into an unseemly aberration such as a food fight. Granted, this may only be a fantasy induced by waiting twenty-six minutes in a room dominated by troll imagery.

Half an hour into my visit (and with forty-five minutes left given the rules of these reports), I began to relax. There would be enough time to do a responsible Field Report. A bell rang, a number called, and now I was in the steaming serving line where the cheerful servers asked how well each guest liked lutefisk. The answer might be any of the following or some variation thereof:    “Oh, you know, normal.”  “Pile it on, and don’t spare the butter”  or “You know, ah, I’m here for the meatballs so just a taste of the lutefisk.”

In fact, most lutefisk events feature meatballs and gravy in unspoken recognition that not everyone can abide the fish. Tales abound of those who carelessly came out of curiosity and, with the merest of samplings, recoiled in shock at the alien taste and the mucosity of the texture. The most amusing variations featured persons from outside the region who had been invited to attend. With each telling of such anecdotes, the bond of lutefisk for many Norwegian-Americans becomes stronger. Though they would reject the analogy, this was another type of Communion on a Sunday. I listened with full attention to the banter about the potatoes, the lefse (yet another communal feature), and the way the grandparents used to serve the lutefisk and on and on. Over each table of six or eight diners,  a mist arose from the primal slime before; a good slime of love and recollection.

In the main dining hall, S of N ladies in folk costumes helped seat each cohort or cleared away the dishes of the departed. A certain tension becomes evident the longer a group sits at table knowing that there are those famished ones, distant kinfolk perhaps, still languishing in the bar. On average, a sitting at lutefisk might take forty minutes including the ice cream desert and coffee.

I glanced at my watch. Less than fifteen minuted of the permitted seventy-five minutes of research time remained. The three couples at the table were finishing up. It was obvious that I was one of a very few to attend alone and so this table for eight had an empty chair to my right. Thus far I had alternated looking at my plate or listening to the table talk. Most of it was a continuation of that triad of topics noted earlier: weather, illness, and lutefisk memories. One interesting fragment appeared, a long tale of a “nice Lutheran girl” who was getting serious with her Italian boyfriend (“and he was a Catholic, wouldn’t you know?”). Well, the parents decided to discourage this and invited the couple over for dinner one January Sunday. They prepared lutefisk and made sure it was made from stockfish (dried cod) which is more odiferous and has a stronger taste than other fish such as haddock. To heighten the drama, plastic knives and forks were set to make the point that lutefisk corrodes normal flatware (true mainly of silver).  The story ended with “and they never saw him again!!”  (Laughter and comments of “that was mean,” etc.).

I plunged in and asked the question that seemed to hang over the whole affair: why lutefisk?  Since dried fish was prepared all over the world without the use of lye, why did some Scandinavians prefer it to the simpler(and more nutritious) cod without benefit of a fearsome chemical? The question seemed to surprise my table-mates and one could conclude they had never thought about it. But the reason for their reticence was that I had asked a question so obvious as to induce a stupor. Finally, the woman to my right offered the view that “we like the way it looks, and tastes and feels when you eat it” and she made her point by causing her fork to jiggle a gelatinous lump that remained on her plate. De gustibus non est disputandum!

I could have saved myself the effort of coming out on a frigid Sunday, gamely shoveling down some lutefisk, and disturbing the tranquility ofsome nice folks had I just recalled that obvious well-known Latin phrase which is probably older than lutefisk.

For those who have never been in Fargo, North Dakota nor have attended a Roller Derby, the combination of the two must have a synergy filled with  promise and spectacle.  Fargo on a Saturday night (for this is when the Roller Derby appeared) offers the usual tired diversions on the town or the option or simply staying home to endure the lackluster offerings of television or yet another rented film.

So it was that weeks before the scheduled Saturday in November word spread that the first-ever (in the memory of most) genuine all-female Roller Derby event would take place in a downtown sports facility.  The “girls” of Fargo-Moorhead would stand against those of Winnipeg, the considerably larger and reputedly sophisticated Canadian metropolis to the North. Hardly an inconsequential event, this. Although Canadians are not seen as problematical like so many other foreigners, they remain plainly not-one-of us.

The Roller Derby as sport began in the late nineteenth century and took two forms, both on oval tracks: the faster banked track and the flat-track which (given the forces of gravity and centrifugalism) lacks the speed. Today, most would have an impression of roller derby based on films such as Kansas City Bomber (1971), heavily dependent on the body of the then relative newcomer to Hollywood, Raquel Welch. More recently a film called Whip It (2009) helped developed an interest in the sport. The Fargo-Moorhead skaters benefitted from (and encouraged) the view that a roller derby bout was an intimidating event in which angry, competitive she-devils delighted in colliding with or tripping up their opponents. Although it was not their spoken intent to maim the Canadians, everyone understood that this was not a genteel sport such as lawn bowling or golf. No, Roller Derby was first cousin to the baleful likes of hockey.

PNZ was further moved to attend by the proliferation of posters advertising the event. There she was, a regular Roller Derby Queen, muscular and tattooed of thigh, and with suitably Nordic braids emerging from under a blue helmet. And the look on her face as she leaned into a turn, arms extended for balance: scowling determination, yes; malice, maybe.  Nor was a hint of cleavage absent. Apparently many others, despairing of nothing else to do on a Saturday, were similarly inspired by an event that promised sex, speed, aggression and the pathos of wincing pain.  Arriving thirty minutes early, PNZ found the ticket line nearly two city blocks long and, once inside the building, a further serpentine of the curious stretching along a number of interior hallways. PNZ spent nearly as long in this line as he had so see a cadaver (of Oetzi, see FR # 8). As in that report, waiting in line took up far too much of the alloted research time, but it had its rewards. In both cases the long lines were made up of those who wished to see something that few had seen before.  In each case, it was more than simple curiosity. While one crowd looked forward to a more than five thousand year corpse and possible homicide victim, the Fargo crowd hoped to witness what insults to mind and body the Roller Derby girls might inflict on each other. PNZ was ever hopeful that significant social truths lay all about him, waiting to provide him the longed-for chance for publishable fame in some branch of the social sciences.   Brow furrowed, he scrutinized the crowd around him and concluded that they averaged about 30 years of age, wore mainly dark colors,  and perhaps 40% showed some obesity, thus confirming all the recent dire research about the expanding girth of Americans.

Despite rumors that there were no seats left and that hundreds would be expelled into the night, PNZ successfully paid the $12 admission and climbed the steep stairs to find a seat overlooking the action. He stood on the first landing and despaired for at first no empty seat was obvious. Spotting one some distance above, he signaled to the persons on either side who confirmed that the seat was available. The bout was a quarter of an hour underway by the time he was seated, but given PNZ’s nearly total unfamiliarity with the proceedings this hardly mattered. Above the din of the crowd, he asked the large woman to his right what he had missed. She shrugged; two national anthems was the answer, for she was not certain either with what she was seeing on the concrete oval below.  “It’s kinda slow,” she volunteered. To his left, another broad-beamed neighbor offered a program which had a condensed version of the rules, none of which could be absorbed in time to make sense out of much of anything–in fact, the program described the rules as “a bit overwhelming to the unfamiliar eye.” Clearly, two groups or seven women were skating, rather slowly, around the oval. At times, although there was some forward motion, the entire group seemed to come to a stop. This was normal. Sustained fast skating is impossible on a flat track. That much must have been known to this crowd of nearly 1800 “unfamiliar eyes.”

Wedged into his seat high above the action PNZ tried to pay attention. Despite the often plodding pace that characterized most of the bout, there were occasional departures as when a relatively sylphlike “jammer” passed the beefier “blockers” to score points despite the wary postures of the latter. Auto racing came to mind in that the tedium could be broken only by a daring plunge past other drivers or (better yet?) by a dangerous move which resulted in a collision or spin out of the track. Inescapable was the impression that the Fargo crowd saw this parallel quickly and cheered loudly if (a) a jammer made a dash past others and (still better) knocked down another who then slid and tumbled about until she could regain her feet. However, the (best yet!) was when a collision or miscalculation caused a girl to careen past the boundaries of the track into that part or the crowd in the “suicide seats.” PNZ observed one such tumble into the suicide seating area. The people seated there on the ground, mostly young men, had little warning as a large blocker lost control and skated directly into them, falling on and among them. The crowd rose as one and yelped. Now this was Roller Derby!  Now we were getting somewhere!  Woo-hoo! PNZ was not surprised at this reaction. Not only had Girls Roller Derby developed something of the panache of women’s “professional” wrestling with all its hair pulling and so on, but the printed program contained a warning about the danger of sitting in the suicide seats:

“Sit at your own risk! Be prepared, you might end up with a skater in your lap tonight…Paramedics are on hand in case any injuries should occur. Don’t worry though, the bruises you incur from a derby girl in your lap will be a great conversation started anywhere you go!”  Of course, by sitting there you did absolve the Fargo-Moorhead Derby Girls from “any and all responsibilities for any injuries…”  No mention of death, at least, but the attempt to evoke an ambience of peril and pain was promoted throughout the event. For example,  most players choose a pseudonym, printed on the backs of their jerseys; thus playing for Fargo-Moorhead were the likes of Athena Barbitol, Donna SoreAss, Maulflower, and Shock Therapy.  The Winnipeg team featured Sourpuss Slasher, Killendula, Countess Bashory, and Gunna Die to name a few. After the bout (as stated in the program) at least some of these girls would be at a nearby bar where all spectators were invited to “meet the skaters…at your own risk.”

Plenty of hype and all in good fun. For PNZ,  too much of that fun had been forced, especially by the annoying duo (“personalities”) who stood on a stage, microphones in hand, bellowing intended witticisms in non-stop fashion. None of it was interesting or clever to PNZ who was quite simply beyond enjoying himself and only twenty minutes after taking his seat.

Always mindful of the strict requirements of his discipline, PNZ was watching the clock and felt relief as the 75 minutes of observation time came to an end. Though 15 of those minutes were assigned to the experience of standing in line, the rest had taken place in the sports center.  He squeezed himself out of his seat, bid his neighbors good evening and descended towards the large exit that in Roman times would have been called the vomitorium.  It was half-time. On the floor, three young women dressed in black and twirling long pink boas strutted and then inexplicably lay on the very concrete that scant moments earlier had seen the dueling Sourpuss Slasher and Maulflower maneuver around each other. These were the Saloon Girls, apparently a fledgling group of three burlesque dancers. Halftime entertainment, an afterthought.

The Fargo-Moorhead Girls beat Winnipeg 101-55. PNZ, home long before the bout ended, assumed that the crowd was pleased. The Roller Derby had arrived. Nothing else like it on a November Saturday night in Fargo.