Slipstream

First I google it. Then I map it. Then I drive there and sit in the parking lot. I’m south of downtown Minneapolis, just past the airport. My last stop before I head into Wisconsin.

The building looms large before me, several stories high, its bulk measured not in feet, but in football fields or baseball stadiums or 747s. Two giant parking structures tower on either side, with cars flowing in at a steady rate. Vehicles not suited to the towers—the trucks and buses and vans and RVs—park on a vast expanse of asphalt that stretches along the front the buildings. 

That’s where I sit, staring at the main entrance. And at the giant sign above the entrance, with its glowing white letters and enormous stars-and-stripes banner.

The Mall of America.

It reminds me of a Fourth of July picnic. Home of the red, white, and blue.

I enter the mall through Sears and follow the flow of foot traffic into the inner sanctum. There I’m greeting by three jam-packed levels of retail space—2.5 million square feet in all. That’s over four miles of store front. Over 500 stores. Over 11,000 year-round employees.

I move quickly through the maze of lights and signs and carts and kiosks and trees and bag-toting shoppers. I weave my way to the heart of the enterprise—the Nickelodeon Universe amusement park—and watch scores of visitors get shaken and rolled and twisted and dropped by everything from the Avatar Airbender to the Brain Surge to the Splat-O-Sphere to the Spongebob Squarepants Rock Bottom Plunge.

The mall averages 40 million visitors a year. My guess is that most of them are here today.

A week ago, I was crawling through a red-rock cave in Colorado to view 13th-century Native-American pictographs. The cave sits on friends’ property outside of Fort Collins. To get to the paintings, we had to walk through a minefield of grasshoppers that had taken over the grounds around their home and decimated their plants and garden. As we passed, the grasshoppers leapt into the air like popping corn, in numbers large enough to make Moses as happy as a laughing Buddha.

The grasshoppers disappeared as soon as we climbed over a fence into the more natural vegetation, a field of scrub brush and sage and juniper pine, where rattlers are a much bigger concern than lettuce-munching insects. But we reached the cave without incident and slipped in beneath a ledge covered in bat guano to view a place where families had gathered many centuries earlier, leaving behind only these simple drawings to mark their eastward passage.

The hunters in the pictographs carried shields, large shields, indicating that they predated the arrival of domesticated horses on American soil. That is, before European settlers took away their land. They traveled as a group, young and old alike. They knew all about having no child left behind.

After Fort Collins, I headed up to Devils Tower in Wyoming and hiked around its base, around the giant basalt columns that survived the onslaught of erosional forces. Pieces of colored prayer cloth hung in the trees along the path, left by Native Americans as part of their spiritual practices.

It’s not surprising that they’d chose Devils Tower for their ceremonies, given that they view the area as sacred grounds. That’s why they ask people not to scale the steep rock face. For the same reason Christians would frown on nonbelievers scurrying up their church steeples, local tribes have requested that climbers stay off these hallowed walls.

Even so, I saw several climbers pulling themselves up the graceful spires.

I also saw a lot people with cameras, pointing and clicking endlessly as they tried to capture the moment. Perhaps they wanted evidence that proved they had stood before Steven Spielberg’s mountain. A number of men, in particular, insisted on posing their significant others on rocks in front of the tower and then capturing them in pictures.

Overall, however, I saw few people who stood before the soaring tower and simply watched and listened, without comment, without taking photos, without climbing on the sacred walls.

From Devils Tower, I traveled to Badlands National Park in South Dakota. On a clear, bright morning, as I stood atop one of the wide mesas, I listened to the wind whip through the deep canyons and against the steep cliffs. I watched how the white dusty rock glowed in the morning light. I felt the deep serenity that must have filled these valleys for centuries as wind and rain eroded their delicate walls.

Then a car full of tourists arrived. They sat with their engine running as they gawked at the canyon through their closed windows as their stereo banged against the glass.

For 11,000 years, Native Americans camped throughout these secluded valleys as they hunted for food. In fact, not far from here, local tribes performed one of the last ghost dances they would ever conduct in the area in the hope that white settlers would vanish and their hunting grounds would be restored.

We all know how that went down.

A couple nights later, a friend and I canoed the Mississippi River up near Lake Bemidji in north-central Minnesota. The sun had just set and a pale orange glow reflected off the still waters. We glided through lily pads and wild rice as we skirted the giant stalks of cattails. Along the shores sat massive homes—mostly empty—overlooking the river. The majority of houses had docks that jutted out into the river. Tied to those docks were colossal powerboats that could slice through these waters like a hot knife tearing into a slab of butter.

The Mississippi is 2,350 miles long. For thousands of years, hundreds of native tribes depended on the river and its tributaries for trade, travel, and of course, food. The river supports 241 species of fish and 326 species of birds, which use the river as their migratory flyway.

The upper Mississippi is also fitted with 29 locks and damns in order to allow commercial vessels to more easily navigate its waters.

When traveling between Colorado and Minnesota, I could not help but notice the countless number of US flags—plastered on cars, hanging off front porches, waving at town borders, marking the entryways of various businesses. In many cases, the flags seemed to grow in size proportionate to the size of the car or the house or the nature of the business. Restaurant chains especially found big fat flags useful for marking their territories.

I also noticed an inordinate number of anti-abortion signs. The human fetus, it seems, is sacred enough to pour hard earn dollars into giant billboard ads despite a faltering economy. I did not, however, see any signs against unjust wars, diminishing wildlife habitat, treatment of Native Americans, out-of-control handgun use, or capital punishment.

I leave Nickelodeon Universe and continue my stroll through the Mall of America. Actually, I’m not continuing anything. I’m trying to get the hell out of there. I’m trying to get away from children screaming for bigger and better, from families guzzling Big Gulps as they race from store to store, from acres of corporate signage that continue to promise life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—despite all evidence to the contrary.

I climb into my van and drive east toward the Wisconsin border.

Tags: Badlands, Bemidji, Colorado, Devils Tower, Mall of America, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Mississippi River, Nickelodeon Universe, South Dakota