The Norman Borlaug Harvest Fest

I’d previously talked about the Mighty Howard County Fair, and the other fairs that went on over the summer that were town-centric. I was under the impression that the Mighty Howard County Fair was Cresco’s “fair” event, but in fact it’s more for Howard County. Cresco is just the county seat. What Cresco has is the Norman Borlaug Harvest Fest.

The Norman Borlaug Harvest Fest used to be called the “Ag Fest,” but was apparently changed in the last couple years in honor of Dr. Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist. I’m not sure who put this change forward, but I wholeheartedly approve of it. Personally, I think if you win a Nobel Prize your hometown should have an annual festival in your honor. It’s the least people can do.

The festival started on Friday afternoon, when the town closed off the main street in preparation for the big event. A few food vendors showed up, and the main businesses in town set up some displays. The main downtown area was also cleared for the classic sports car display. I still don’t know exactly how classic sports cars relate to a harvest fest, but no one else seemed to mind.

Actually, the “Norman Borlaug” part of the Norman Borlaug Harvest Fest was sort of glossed over, at least on the weekend. The Norman Borlaug Legacy Foundation had a bus tour to go out and see Norman Borlaug’s childhood home, which had a grand total of six or seven people on it. Half of them were members of the Norman Borlaug Legacy Foundation, going out with interested people to conduct the tour.  I decided to go, in no small part because when my family was here, my mom had tried to get the foundation to give us a tour of the Borlaug place. She tried for a week straight before finally giving up, since she couldn’t reach a member of the Borlaug foundation at any time we were available to take the tour. Going to see the Borlaug home felt like upholding the family honor.

The tour more or less started on the bus ride out of town, and I immediately realized two things about the Norman Borlaug Legacy Foundation. First, these people were not consummate professionals. One man gave a decent talk about Norman Borlaug, aided considerably by his wife. It was fun to watch them talk—you can tell when people have been married for so long their thoughts start to intertwine like two strands of ivy, and I enjoyed listening to them play off each other as much as I enjoyed listening to them talk about Norman Borlaug.

Tour at the Norman Borlaug House

The second thing I realized was the Norman Borlaug was the sort of person who inspires you. I’ll be honest—I don’t know any celebrities. I’ve met a couple at conventions, and they have all been unfailingly polite. But the members of the Norman Borlaug Legacy Foundation had actually known him, and they were all changed by the experience. I won’t get too deep into psychoanalyzing them, but the bulk of their conversation centered around Norman Borlaug, how great he was, and how inspiring he was. It was a bit like hearing Simon Peter talking about his old pal Jesus. It’s rare that someone can be that inspiring, but Norman Borlaug was apparently one of those people.

The Borlaug House sits in the country

About fifteen minutes after leaving town, the bus arrived at the Borlaug home.  It was a white two-story farmhouse, set in the middle of a field and somewhat shielded from the road by oak and maple trees. About fifty yards away was a pumphouse, a machine shed and a large white barn. It was the perfect place for a Nobel Prize-winning Agriculturalist to grow up. We all paraded into the house, and then the tour began. Actually, it was less of a tour than it was members of the Norman Borlaug Legacy Foundation telling all the stories they knew of Norman Borlaug, his family, and how some of the areas of the barn were used. As a tour, it was more disjointed than a David Lynch movie with Abraham Zapruder as the cameraman, but I enjoyed it all the same. The sheer enthusiasm these members had was infectious, and if you are ever in the area, you need to take the tour if you can. You’ll walk away inspired to do some good for humanity.

After that, I wandered down the five-booth flea market/craft show and the three-booth farmer’s market. I appreciated the effort, but part of the allure of farmer’s markets and flea markets is the number of things that are available. When you can count the number of choices on two hands with fingers left over, the allure kind of goes away. Fortunately, right around the corner was the classic sports car show.

I have to be honest, agriculture or no agriculture, the classic car show was fun. The cars are awfully pretty to look at, and in some cases you can see yourself getting in, starting up the engine, and taking off for parts unknown. Of course, when you actually get to drive these cars you realize they’re best at going forward, which is kind of a handicap when you actually do driving that requires you to, say, make turns or drive in reverse. Still, most of the time you don’t have to make turns or drive in reverse, so I can see the appeal.

I could go on about all the cars that I saw, but there was one that was particularly memorable. It was a red Mazda Miata, and as I was walking by I noticed a glint of silver on the rear. Walking around the car, I discovered that the glint of silver was one of a set of “girl reclining” silhouettes, the ones more commonly found on the mudflaps of pickup trucks driven by people with names like “Skeeter.” There was also a bumper sticker that read “Little car—Big payments!” Usually, when confronted with this level of tastelessness on a standard automobile, I think to myself that the owner of said car must be a submoron. I would like to say, for the record, my reaction is the same even when the car is a sports car. The only thing was, I encountered the owner of this car a day later. I can’t tell for certain, but it seemed like he had some sort of mental disability. It’s at times like this when you realize that being right about a person’s shortcomings isn’t as fulfilling as you would like.

It also raises a lot of questions, not the least of which is why would such a person own a sports car? I’m not against mentally retarded people owning sports cars as a general rule, but in a lot of ways it’s like treating a homeless person to a cutting-edge gourmet meal when he or she would get more food at a less fancy all-you-can-eat buffet. I will probably never get an answer to this question, and let’s face it, it’s none of my business anyway. Still, I do wonder.

The final big event in downtown Cresco was the parade. As far as parades go, this one was surprisingly big. Almost every business in town wanted to get in on the act, it seems, right down to the family farms. As a lot of parades go, this one was a mishmash of vehicles, including some of the sport cars and some antique tractors, along with some modern-day farm equipment, which easily took up both lanes of the street. There was also the Cresco High School marching band, which did a really good job. I was impressed, especially because I remembered the one time I had marched in a parade with the high school marching band in my hometown. The amount of preparation involved was a phone call a couple days before asking my brother Andy and I if we would like to participate in the high school marching band’s Fourth of July performance, along with the band director handing out some pep band music on the day of the parade. Looking back, I think it’s just as well that Steve Jobs did not invent the iPhone before I graduated high school. I’d also like to thank the YouTube creators for holding off as well.

The Norman Borlaug Harvest Fest may be the end of small-town festival season for the year. If so, it ended the season with a bang. Really, all that’s left is Halloween, and that’s got a decent enough celebration as it is.

Low Dining

I was coming back from Decorah today after purchasing a CD and I passed the Su-Z-Q s, a popular teen hangout in Cresco. Almost instantly, I knew what I was going to be writing about this week. I’ve written about the fine dining in Decorah, and some of the more interesting restaurants in Cresco. I have not, however, written about the low dining opportunities.

Low dining is a favorite topic of mine, owing in large part to what I humbly call “Chris’s Rule of Eating Out.” This simple rule states  that the likelihood of a restaurant ripping off a diner increases as the price of the meal gets closer to the price of an iPad. Low cost meals can be fun and may give you a more interesting atmosphere than you would get in more upscale restaurants. Still, you have to be careful. Otherwise, you may end up eating at Su-Z-Qs.

The primary food Su-Z-Q’s offers is grease. Deep-fried food rules the menu like Kim Jong-Il rules North Korea, although you will find the teenage staples of hamburgers somewhere on the menu, carving out a kind of No-Man’s-Land on the grill. There may be hotdogs on the menu too, but if I had to double check it I would actually have to go in the restaurant again, and I really don’t want to. I went there once, had the shrimp basket with a salad and a coke. I don’t want to be any more disparaging than I’ve already been, but when your waitress drops a small plastic bowl full of shredded lettuce in front of you along with a plastic cup of dressing, you know you’re not in for the greatest dining experience ever. On the other hand they did have ketchup for the fries, so the experience wasn’t all bad.  Also, at $7 for the whole meal Su-Z-Q’s may be the cheapest restaurant in town.

After I’d driven by, it occurred to me that Su-Z-Q’s is like a training restaurant, where teenagers go to practice eating out. They’re probably aware that there are better restaurants in Cresco, even a couple of fast-food franchises, but for right now Su-Z-Q’s won’t leave them penniless and the food is at least edible. It’s all preparation for when they go out on an actual date and go to a nice restaurant for some dinner, conversation and some awkward pre-sex talk before the sex and the unplanned pregnancy which will keep the happy couple in town for the rest of their natural lives. For now, though, it’s just practice.

My personal favorite area for low dining is the A&W restaurant, which for some reason shares space with a Long John Silver’s fast (sea)food restaurant. The arrangement is awkward, because A&W is all about the ‘50s nostalgia and the Long John Silver’s is all about the illusion that you’re dining on semi-fresh seafood. I’m not sure why these two chains have paired up, but I have seen other fast-food restaurants that host a Long John Silver’s in addition to another chain. They’re the symbiotes of the fast-food world—unable to survive by themselves unless they graft on to another more successful fast-food chain and offer enough value that the host fast-food chain doesn’t cut them loose. To be fair, they do offer decent deep-fried mushrooms. 

My reason for stopping has been and always will be A&W. I grew up with one in my hometown, and I can say that A&W introduced me to the simple pleasures of a foot long coney dog and onion rings, the joy of root beer and that cup of love known as a root beer float. It also introduced me to the concept of a black cow, a root beer float made with cola instead of root beer, which is a lot like going to see a cover band perform. I loved eating at the A&W, and I fondly remember eating there Sundays after church, with my Mom and Dad smiling as they watched my brothers and I chow down and wistfully dream about the time when they would be able to eat in a decent restaurant again.

I’ve been to eat there only twice this year, which is a good thing because the food at A&W’s is packed with extra calories. I’m not sure how, but everything A&W’s serves has more calories than normal. Just breathing the A&W air for ten minutes will cause the average restaurant patron to gain five pounds. Still, I think one of life’s pleasures should be having a coney dog and fries with a root beer float every once in awhile.

The A&W also has a classic car night once a month, usually on a Wednesday evening. I’m not sure why they chose a Wednesday evening, but let’s face it—Wednesday can use the help. Unless you live near a comic book store, there’s nothing to recommend to Wednesdays, so it’s nice to see someone doing their best to make a random day of the week special.

Of course, on classic car night you get to see how many people in the area do have classic cars. A lot of them are senior citizens, driving cars they may well have driven when they were teenagers except that these cars look as new as the day they were given. It’s great to see, especially since there aren’t many venues where you can take cars like that, outside of a classic car show, and I’m not entirely sure where the nearest one is. There’s also a DJ playing all the hits of the 50s, what writer Stephen King called teenage car songs, teenage love songs and teenage death songs. It’s a blast of nostalgia, and I have to admit I like it, although my nostalgia is a tad more recent.