Day Seven: St Cloud part I
delsSaint Cloud—the patron saint of screwed up middle america. Our first day in the country without a show. CJ deposited us at a cloned suites hotel in a sub-urban sprawl of strip mall franchises, a landscape of two storey retail, entertainment and `hospitality' that stretched to the horizon. There was nothing to be seen that even vaguely resembled what passes for a city in the civilized world. The staff were wide-eyed at a fancy looking Prevost tour bus pulling in to the parking lot—never a good sign. But they were eager to please and had arranged for rooms to be made ready for us when we arrived at breakfast time which was a massive plus.
A day stuck in a room, or even at the poolside in a place like the IHG Holiday Inn Express & Suites, St. Cloud is not an enticing prospect. By early afternoon after a few hours sleep, sleep made very precious by being the first since we left Philadelphia airport that was not in a bunk travelling at speed on the interstates, the troops were getting restless.
Everyone has their own agenda on non-show days on tour. For some the lure of a television with king size bed with air conditioning, possibly complemented by a bottle or two of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc purchased and stashed in expectation, is too great to resist and they are unlikely to be seen again until bus call the following day. For others a shot of tequila (if there is any left from the previous evening) before alighting the Prevost sets the mood for the days activities. Finding a competitively priced supply of PBR might be all it takes to make the day a special one. Getting laundry done can be a pressing concern.
Not excited by any of these options I ventured to reception and engaged in conversation about where might be a good place to get some food and hang out in the sunshine. Aware that this might not elicit the ideal response from your typical mid-westerner whose ideal of a place to hang out might be a mall with a cineplex and a sports bar with a terrace and maybe a former branch of Border’s now selling remaindered self-help books and substandard skinny lattés, I tried to head off the conversation—``Somewhere downtown where I can walk around.'' I was joined in this exchange by another of our venerable entourage who emphasised his desire to partake of what made Milwaukee famous at reasonable prices. After a friendly exchange about where we were all from (Emily was far from her home near St Augustine Florida, a place we were headed in a few weeks) and input from a voice emanating from the back office we were given a clear recommendation:``The Boulder Tap House. Yeah, The Boulder. You guys’ll like it there.'' We summoned a car and after ten minutes of driving through the strip malls we were deposited at the entrance. Sparse two-storey retail surrounded by empty parking lots continued to spread as far as could be seen in every direction.
This is a mid-west I had never really experienced. The mammoth tours we undertook in the nineties (and on an smaller scale last year) have taken me to forty-five of the fifty states. But we were in clubs and theatres in college towns and cities. Sure, some of those cities were pretty screwed up urban environments. But the worst of these places (Detroit, Wichita, Louisville) still looked like they had once functioned as towns and, with a bit of TLC, might even do so again. This is something altogether more vulgar: a constantly churning and creeping morass of low rent businesses with short shelf lives. A large portion of the lots were up for rent or just abandoned. None of it can be accessed without private motor transport. You can find remnants of this is in the UK but the fact is that there simply is nowhere in Europe that has the space for this kind of culturally (and visually) hideous urban retail sprawl on this scale. Minnesota is vast and flat and, outside of the cities, underpopulated. There is no shortage of viable urban real estate here.
The Boulder Tap House had a daunting array of brews and an A3 sized laminated menu that offered a hundred versions of the same thing—bread with some stuff in it with fried stuff on the side. Cheese on everything. The brews were, not surprisingly, better than the food but with no budget PBR on offer my companion’s boxes were not ticked. The barkeep clearly knew his job though, and a barkeep’s job is to know his customers. Having dispatched the sandwiches and a gourmet brew each, and understanding that unique symbiotic relationship between skilled barkeep and customer, these customers knew that this was the person to guide us to where things were really at in the city of St. Cloud.
We were directed to 5th Avenue and West St. Germain, and after another ten minute ride through strip mall hell we were in something that looked like it might once have been a city: a few blocks of four storey brick buildings that had once have been stores or banks or warehouses. A shopping mall and a grim looking municipal conference centre with a grimmer looking Marriot attached lurked in the background. But there was a bar on each corner of 5th and St. Germain and a funky looking arts centre just down the street. Apart from those though, everything seemed to be for sale including the shopping mall and the conference centre. Downtown St. Cloud did not look like it would gentrify any time soon.
MC’s Dugout Bar and Grill occupies the north west corner of the intersection and who should be sat outside sipping on a Heineken Zero, none other that our intrepid leader. Maybe we should have been surprised by this but years of touring teaches you that, almost spontaneously, a behavioural entropy develops that can mean that even when the tour manager has put their phone off the hook and is prostrate on a king sized bed half way through watching Deadpool for the fourth time, about to open a second bottle of Oyster Bay somehow everyone still ends up in the right place at the right time. That JC had managed to make his way there directly from the IHG Holiday Inn Express and Suites certainly indicated that he had obtained better initial intel than us from the outset, but the end result was the same.
MC was down-to-earth enough to dispense PBR from his funky basement bar and even though JC was in high functioning mode and not tempted to move on from Heineken Zero to anything more destructive he was happy to have company so certain buttons were now pushed. In the ten minutes it took us to get there I had gleaned from the internet that there was a second hand bookshop a block from the bar. It was still only 5 in the pm and rather than order another drink I took the opportunity to indulge the bibliophile in me and I excused myself from table and headed off past the shuttered shopping mall in pursuit.
Being in a provincial US bookshop was more of a nostalgia trip than retail therapy. There was a time when I occupied my days off on US tours by seeking out the local second hand book shops. In a time before Web 2.0 this was not a trivial thing to do. Motel rooms still had telephones then and, more usefully, telephone directories—with the second hand book section from the yellow pages torn from this in my I would consult with hotel reception about which shops were nearby, ideally obtain a map of the area (in the days before mobile phone apps hotels generally had a supply of street maps to give out), circle the locations on the map, plan a route, and set off in a taxi to the first one on my itinerary. I did buy books (and have a collection of nice publishers editions of US classics that I picked up along the way) but I had also realised that the location of second hand bookshops was a pretty good indication of what part of town might be good to hang out in. Second hand bookshops came in two general categories. One was a place where monied bibliophiles purchased their incunabula and modern first editions. These were generally in a fancy bit of downtown. The other was a more down-at-heel, bohemian kind of place whose business was acquiring the libraries of unremarkable people in search of the occasional item of value that could be sold to the fancy downtown store for a few hundred bucks, and was filled with, well, pretty much everything else. Great places to browse and often a marker for where to find cafés, vintage clothes retailers and head shops in a hip part of town. (Which, not unreasonably, typifies second hand book sellers as coffee drinking, vintage clothes wearing bohemians.)
The bookshop in St. Cloud was definitely in the second category and after fifteen minutes browsing the chaff of St. Cloud’s outlived and outgrown libraries in Books Revisited the proprietor wanted to shut up shop. Rather than wander out empty handed, which seemed churlish as he clearly was not overrun by walk-in customers, I told him I was on a coast to coast tour of the US and looking for American road novels to read on the way; did he have a copy of On the Road, or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? Not having either of those he fetched a copy of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, a book I had never come across in spite of reading a lot of Steinbeck in my youth. It seemed to fit the bill perfectly and I wandered back round to MC’s to rejoin the party with my purchase.
In the scant half hour I had been in Books Revisited a couple of cans of cold PBR had already been consumed at the table. Beer drinking is never much of a spectator sport and JC was clearly not relishing the prospect of an evening engaging with this while sipping on alcohol free beverages. He announced that he was going to walk the five miles back to our hotel, reckoning it could be done off the highways. It was beginning to cool down and develop into a perfect summer evening, and this seemed like a much preferable option to an evening of cheap american lager-beer. I asked if he wanted company and fearless, with sat-nav at our disposal we set off south down 5th Avenue leaving our companion at the table attesting his disappointment at the company departing but not tempted to abandon the delights of MC’s at this stage of the evening in lieu of a two hour urban walk.