The Last Word On Nothing

When I was young, my brother and sister and I caught salamanders in my grandparents’ garage and chased cats through the barn. The family farm was a big private playground, where we could poke at tadpoles in Nelson Lake (more like a large pond) and occasionally ride around on a giant lawnmower.

More often than not, though, we would spend our time on the other side of rural Highway 32, at a far more public and imposing place called Steamer Hill. Since 1954, this tract of rolling farmland donated by Grandpa and his siblings has been home to an annual festival called the Western Minnesota Steam Threshers Reunion, or WMSTR. Every Labor Day weekend, the unincorporated community of Rollag, with a population hovering around 30, swells to the size of a small city as tens of thousands of visitors and volunteers descend upon the Hill to experience what we now jokingly call “Tractorpalooza.”

Think of it as nirvana for gearheads. Dozens of exhibits over 210 acres pay homage to old farm machinery and the steam-powered successors of the mechanical mammoths that fueled the Industrial Revolution. There’s an old-fashioned main street and pioneer village, and a steam locomotive and carousel. There’s a blacksmith, print shop, watermill, flour mill and multiple sawmills, all from an era before science and engineering radically transformed business and agriculture.

Twice a day, crowds gather for a parade of steam engines, combines, threshers, tractors, trucks and anything else that’s old and able to be coaxed up the Hill past the parade announcer. Dad usually has two entries, provided that he and a group of friends wearing matching “Larry’s Pit Crew” shirts can get them started. One is a prairie gold 1937 Minneapolis Moline tractor; the other is a faded red 1934 Chevy truck that carries a Texaco gas tank on its flatbed but may have been the original Hamm’s beer truck in Moorhead, Minn.

As kids, we visited Grandpa at the west gate – where he sold tickets – and Grandma in the Rushfeldt pioneer cabin, where she gave us cups of a rich flour and whole milk pudding called rømmegrøt, topped with melted butter and cinnamon sugar. We played in piles of straw spit out by antique threshing machines connected to steam engines by long, wobbling drive belts. We ate caramel rolls fresh from the oven after fidgeting through Sunday morning church services in a building akin to an oversized tool shed. We shyly said hello to grease and soot-covered relatives whom we barely knew as they worked on giant Gaar Scott steam engines.

After the first twenty minutes, we were nearly always bored.

But time has a sneaky way of turning things on their head, and what I found tedious as a child I now find marvelous as an adult. Like spinach and politics, I have developed a new love for Steamer Hill.

When my partner Geoff and I returned this year for the show’s 60^th anniversary, my uncle and cousin were selling tickets at the west gate. My sister and I managed to find rømmegrøt at a church-sponsored food stand. I briefly drove Dad’s tractor (though not in the parade). I ate a caramel roll after filling in as an usher during a church service that Dad got off to a rousing start by telling two Ole and Lena jokes – in another oversized tool shed. We greeted my cousin’s grease and soot-covered friend after her shift on a giant Gaar Scott steam engine.

And I couldn’t get enough. I loved the elegant physics of the engines’ pistons and boilers and flywheels, and how the sudden downward thrust of a large steam hammer pressing commemorative aluminum plates made several spectators jump. We gaped at a mechanical precursor to the chainsaw and were delighted when the exhibitor started it up so we could see it saw through a log. I loved that we could buy organic flour at a steam-powered demonstration mill, and that nearly everyone had a decent sense of where and how food is grown or raised.

Maybe it’s all a matter of perspective, but I can now appreciate the trove of accumulated wisdom. And if not for the kind of people who will happily explain the mechanics of a steam shovel or teach a hands-on course during the popular University of Rollag Steam School, much of this knowledge and history would be lost.

Even the soap seemed better than I had remembered. An early memory of the handmade lye soap sold on Steamer Hill was that it stunk and was to be avoided at all costs. Lye, after all, is the deboning agent for lutefisk, a foul-smelling sort of cod Jell-o that tops the list of most hated foods from my childhood. This year, we bought the nearly odor-free soap, handmade with rendered animal fat, after a friendly woman reminded us of its usefulness as a poison ivy remedy and an all-natural cleanser on camping trips.

In the midst of it all, my uncle hosted a private party for Geoff and me in his garage that managed to perfectly encapsulate the weekend. My mother made a traditional Scandinavian kransekake, or celebration cake, while my cousin contributed a bright green and yellow tractor piñata.

When I first wrote about the festival back in 2000, a third cousin fretted about whether all of the stored knowledge was slowly slipping away. This year, during a public celebration honoring multiple generations of active WMSTR families, our three generations were easily outdone by a half-dozen families who were going on five.

Perhaps, like me, more people are gaining a new respect for the very old. Rollag will never be home – I’m too much of a city boy – but I’ve also learned to love my rural roots. My grandparents are both buried in the cemetery by Rollag Lutheran Church. So are an aunt and uncle. My parents just told us that they’ve bought plots there as well – close enough to the Hill that you can hear the parade announcer describe the mechanical beasts rumbling past another round of kids just starting to recognize their beauty.

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Bryn Nelson is a Seattle-based freelance writer and editor with an avid interest in biology, biomedicine, ecology, green technology and unconventional travel destinations.

Photos and video by Bryn Nelson