Kerkhoven Minnesota: Small Town Mayor Shenanigans

In August 2022 I read a story about James Rothers, the controversial mayor for all of 4 months in the west central Minnesota town of Kerkhoven.  The story mentioned a landmark of sorts: a 54 foot tower made completely from cement that may or may not be destined to be torn down in the future. I’ll share more about the tower later in this blog.  Not wanting to miss the opportunity to see this very unusual and storied “landmark”, I added it to my list of places to ride. So it was, on this very hot and sticky August day, that I rode to Kerkhoven.

The road seems to stretch on forever in much of west central Minnesota.  Corn fields, beans, and the buzz of cicadas in the heat.

In 2015, Rothers built this tower. During that building process, Rothers sued the city of Kerkhoven for $4 million claiming he was unfairly treated by the city over the building permit issues. Ultimately, the city settled the case for $25,000.00, and Rothers came just $3,975,000.00 short of his goal.  There have been many reasons given for the purpose of this tower, some of them boring and some of them more interesting.  Some folks speculate that Rothers built it for no other reason than to irritate his ex-wife who just happened to live across the street from the tower.  Some think the tower was built as a “fire tower” for the fire department to practice with.  This doesn’t seem too likely though, because the tower is completely hollow inside and there are no floors.  Plus, it’s dangerously close to another structure that would likely become a real casualty from any fires in the tower, practice or otherwise.  Rothers’ official reason for building the tower was to advertise his business, a now bankrupt construction company that built grain silos throughout the Midwest.  

Despite suing the city of Kerkhoven a year prior, Rothers was elected mayor of Kerkhoven in 2016. He resigned 4 months later after the city council became angry with him for not keeping his promise to tear down the odd tower.  Unfortunately for Mr. Rothers, the city council wasn’t the only entity fed up with Rothers’ shenanigans: So was the federal government.  Mr. Rothers was apparently defrauding creditors of his bankrupt construction company by hiding $1 million in assets with the help of his attorney.  In December 2022, Rothers was convicted of federal bankruptcy fraud and sentenced to 2 years probation.  His attorney was disbarred and sentenced to 18 months in prison.  And still, the tower stands.  Some residents in Kerkhoven apparently like the tower, perhaps for its novelty, or perhaps because of the traffic the half-dozen tourists who actually put such a destination on their go-to list generates, producing a little more income for local businesses. Despite some residents being fans of the tower, many other residents consider it an eyesore and want it torn down.  In fact, some Kerkhoven residents still like Rother as a person, even if they don’t like the tower. Apparently, when he wasn’t defrauding his creditors, he sometimes did nice things.  He once donated $40,000.00 in labor to rebuild the public swimming pool in town, and he rebuilt a barn that belonged to a local dairy farmer after it burned down without charging the farmer a cent.  

Here’s the lunch that I ate a few blocks away from the tower in Kerkhoven’s city park.  To the right of this shot is a very nice public swimming pool, the one rebuilt by Rothers’ construction company with donated labor.  The banana took a beating in the saddle bag…

That’s it from the road.  Thanks for looking!

 

Minnesota (And Beyond) Adventure - Day Two

 As hoped, I woke up this Monday morning in Baudette and set out for a place I’ve been talking about riding back to for several years: Angle Inlet Minnesota, that little spike jutting up at the top of our state.  As I rode West on Hwy 11 from Baudette, I had the bright sun rising at my back, and a light, comfortable breeze filling the air with the sweet fragrance of freshly cut hay fields and what I can only describe as the incredible smell of fields of clover.  The ride to Warroad was spectacular, and I topped off my fuel tank there because I knew there was over 60 miles between Warroad and Angle Inlet, and more than 20 miles of that road was bad dirt.  Here are some photos of my adventure today.

“Waters of the Dancing Sky Scenic Byway”. What a great name for a Scenic Byway!

While approaching Williams MN on Hwy 11, I saw this building off in the distance, so I detoured into town to get a closer view. 

This is the front of that building.  I didn’t wander onto the property, and I couldn’t find anything or anyone to tell me what it was.  Maybe I’ve seen too many abandoned schools lately, but I’m guessing it was a school?  

The border crossing into Canada went very well, and about 30 miles later I turned onto this paved road to find this warning sign.  I thought, great, I’ve had to battle mosquitoes and biting flies each day, and now I have to look out for flying stones.  On the bright side, I’d bet it’s easier to get a pound of de-winged stones than it is to get a pound of de-winged mosquitoes. 😉. 

I’m still in Canada at this point where the pavement ends and the dirt begins.  In around 1990, I made this trip on a large touring bike, pulling a small trailer no less.  Then, the road surface was very loose and very difficult to ride on.  This time, the surface was more hard-packed, though there were still many stretches of very loose gravel and rough washboard.  More on the washboard later.

In order to get to Angle Inlet by road, you must enter Canada first, and then re-enter Minnesota/the U.S. before reaching Angle Inlet proper. This means a total of 4 border crossings in all.

Each time I stopped along this road, the flies descended like a plague of… flies.  I was glad to be wearing full riding gear and a full-faced helmet along with a neck gaiter to cover any skin.  Fortunately, I didn’t have any trespassers into my helmet this time.

Much of the Northwest Angle is part of the Red Lake Nation.

I mentioned that to make the trip to Angle Inlet, you have to make a series a border crossings.  There aren’t any manned border checkpoints, but when you first arrive here, at “Jim’s Corner”, you need to go inside and report your arrival to the United States from Canada using an iPad located inside this booth. Fortunately, the booth is both air-conditioned and relatively free of flies.  I’d bet there were less than 100 flies inside the booth, which was a tiny fraction of the flies outside the booth.  When it came time to leave Angle Inlet and return to Canada, I had been instructed to use the phone mounted outside the booth which connects directly to Canadian Customs.  There’s a sign inside that says the iPad is not working for Canadian Customs for some reason.

Apparently, you can do a video chat on the iPad, but for some reason, maybe because I didn’t have an account set up, I had to fill out all my pertinent info about me, my driver’s license, and the motorcycle I was on, on an online form.  It went quick and easy, and less than a minute later I got an approval message saying I could enter the U.S.  I’m not sure what I would do if I couldn’t.

But I was approved, so I could smile when I reached my goal destination: the monument marking the Northernmost Point in the contiguous United States.  Truth be told, this point isn’t actually the true northernmost point. The actual point is located in a swampy area just north of here, but there’s no way to access that point by vehicle. So the folks who run businesses in Angle Inlet decided in 2019 to have a monument made, and to place that monument where people/customers could stand in front of it with cheesy smiles and shiny, slightly misshapen heads (from wearing a helmet), who would then perhaps buy something from them before leaving.  And that’s just what I did.  I had a very nice lunch at Jerry’s Bar and Restaurant, and I bought several stickers at Young’s Bay Resort for my sticker boards at home proving I was here.  Well played Angle Inlet!  And I might add, it was worth it for me.

You might not be able to tell, but my bike’s smiling too.

So now that I’ve reached my goal here in Angle Inlet, and I’ve had a very nice lunch and purchased my stickers, it’s time to let Canadian Customs know that I’m coming back into their country. This booth is located next to Jerry’s Bar and Restaurant, and the iPad doesn’t work here for Canadian Customs either, so I had to use the phone mounted on the outside of the booth.  There are no buttons on that phone; just pick it up and wait for someone to answer.  Luckily, someone did answer, and the process was pretty quick and easy.  In no time I was off into the dust of the dirt road.

Welcome to Manitoba!

With Angle Inlet well behind me, I celebrate my return to pavement under a chorus of flies.

Actually, part of the reason I stopped here was that the washboard-rough road had given my bike such a pounding that the left mirror bolt came loose so that the mirror was swinging in the breeze.  I thought I might attempt to tighten it here, but the flies were such a distraction that I decided to make the repairs when I reached Warroad.

Here I am in Warroad making said mirror repairs.  My tool kit is located under the seat, which meant I had to remove my dry bag and then the seat to get to the tools.  A 5 minute process to make a 2 minute fix. It’s not an adventure if there isn’t the occasional hiccup.

My route from Warroad to my next destination in Huot MN took me on a journey past fragrant fields, and towns that I didn’t know existed, like Salol and Strathcona.  At one point I just stopped on the road and turned off the bike.  It was quiet.  No cars, and no sounds except for the breeze rustling the nearby field of grasses.  It smelled of clover, and it was wonderful.  If I would have had a lawn chair with me, I’d probably still be sitting there. 

This is the road leading to the park where my next destination, the Old Crossing Treaty Memorial, was located.  Ironically, while I was preparing to mount my bike in front of the customs booth next to Jerry’s Bar and Restaurant in Angle Inlet, a man came over to me and struck up a conversation. His leg was bleeding from a horse fly bite, and he put his foot on my foot peg and scratched at other bites on his leg.  He said he was from Huot, where the Old Crossing Treaty Memorial is located.  He warned me that I would have to ride a stretch of dirt road in order to reach the memorial.  Then it dawned on him that I had already ridden nearly 30 miles of miserable dirt road to reach Angle Inlet.  He said, “Yeah, I suppose I didn’t really need to warn you about riding just a mile on another dirt road”.  We both nodded knowingly, and he limped away with blood dripping down his calf.  I chuckled.  Good talk.

We do have some neat signs out there.

Here is the Old Crossing Treaty Memorial that was placed here by the United States in 1932.  According to signage here and nearby, a treaty was signed within the area of this park between the United States and the Pembina and Red Lake Bands of Chippewa Indians that resulted in the Chippewa ceding 3 million acres of land in northwestern Minnesota and northeastern Dakota to the United States thus allowing the settlement of the Red River Valley.  Nothing I’ve read states what the Chippewa got out of the deal, so I’m not sure how I feel about this monument.  It makes me think back to last month, while collecting another Grand Tour of MN site, the largest peace pipe in the world, located in Pipestone MN, where I chatted with an older-than-me gentleman who ran the gift shop at the peace pipe monument and was a Chippewa Indian.  He shared with me what it was like growing up Native American, and he said that, as a child, he always wondered why nobody wanted to be the Indian when they played “cowboys and Indians”. He shared a few other stories with me that I won’t go into here but, after visiting the Old Crossing Treaty Memorial today, I would love to sit down with him again and get his perspective on it.

As I ride my motorcycle down the road, I’m punching a hole in the air with my bike and with my body. If there are leaves on the roadway, my wake blows them to one side or the other. That is, my presence is being felt physically by my movement through that particular space. The same can be said, I think, for our presence in other people’s lives, though not physically in the same sense that leaves are blown from the road. To those of you who receive my blogs by email, thank you for the many kind comments you have made, and thank you for your presence, both past and present, in my life.

As always, thanks for looking!

  

Minnesota Adventure - Day One

 This Sunday morning, I woke up near McGregor Minnesota with a mission to collect some of the locations for the motorcycle event that I am participating in all summer, the Grand Tour of MN.  Here are some of those locations I visited, plus a few others that I thought were interesting.  I hope you also find them interesting.

It is very peaceful in the early morning, beautiful even.  I don’t see this very often because I generally sleep late.  It’s times like these, in the early quiet, that I wonder why I don’t get up early more often just to enjoy it.

An abandoned school near Cromwell.

This is a wood carving of Chief Wrinkled Meat, a Chippewa Indian who reportedly lived to be 137 years old.  His Chippewa name was Ga-Be-Nah-Gwen-Wonce which, roughly translated, means “Wrinkled Meat”.  He also went by the name Chief John Smith. He lived most of his life near Lake of The Woods and Cass lake.  His true age has been argued extensively, and nothing conclusive has ever been determined.  He died in 1922 and is buried in a Cass Lake cemetery.  The birthdate listed on his tombstone is 1784.

This old photo was hanging in the shelter along with the Chief Wrinkled Meat statue.  There doesn’t seem to be a connection to the sculpture, but it is a cool photo.

The little neighborhood where the Chief Wrinkled Meat sculpture is located has quite a number of other “sculptures” and artistic endeavors.  This one is labeled simply enough…

This lumberjack statue in Bigfork MN is another one of the 20 locations I will visit for the Grand Tour.  

An abandoned school in Effie MN. There is still a maintained playground just to the left of this photo.

This sign in the window of a building caught my eye as I rode by it.  Less than a block later, I turned around, and I’m glad I did.  Up in these parts of Minnesota, gathering a pound of mosquitoes isn’t hard.  It’s removing all those wings that makes it not worth it.

This abandoned building is in Togo MN.  I couldn’t find any markings, but it looks like it may have been a school.  Interesting worthless information about Togo: Togo used to have a post office and had been assigned a zip code.  That zip code has been retired, and the mail is now handled by Cook MN. That’s 55723 for those of you who are curious.

The smell of the pines in this area was fantastic.  What you can’t see is how fat my lower lip is from getting attacked by a large mosquito as I paused on the shoulder of the road to enjoy the pines.  In this shot, I’m mulling around the idea of returning to Effie with the now wingless mosquito for my bounty. 

My next stop was Orr MN where not only is there a large bluegill statue that I need for the grand tour, but there’s the Mickey Elverum Bog Walk/Orr Welcome Center.  I didn’t walk the entire boardwalk though, mainly because this is a bog, and we all know what kind of winged creatures live in bogs. That, and my lip was the size of a grilled brat from the last time I stopped to enjoy the scenery. Besides, the welcome center was closed because it was Sunday.

The Boardwalk to a free blood donation.

Billy The Bluegill.

The Rainy Lake Visitor Center, fortunately, was open today.  Honestly, I thought this visitor center was located IN International Falls, and I didn’t know there was a town named Ranier on Rainy Lake.  This area is dominated by the National Park Service.  More on that historical tidbit later.

Here’s the statue I needed to “collect” for the grand tour.  I’m glad the visitor center was open so that I didn’t have to “settle” for a photo of the visitor center sign. 

The visitor center has some exhibits inside as well.  

This is a photo, one of many, that I didn’t realize I had taken while positioning my phone in the selfie stick to take my grand tour photo.  Lloyd, this one’s for you.

This town checked a lot of boxes for me, but I still had a fair distance to ride so I couldn’t fully appreciate everything the town has to offer.  That hair salon though…

This is Big Vic.  Interesting history here. Vic is named after Vic Davis who, in protest of the National Park Service exercising eminent domain to acquire privately owned property in order to establish Voyager’s National Park. The story is long, and I’ll include it in the next photo, but Davis fought the NPS tooth and nail, and he had this statue built in Sparta WI, plus another similar statue, Big Louie, which currently stands in Barnum MN. It’s a bit ironic that this statue stands literally at the entrance to Voyager’s National Park when it was built to fight the NPS for what how they were using eminent domain to take property from people in order to create a national park.

Here’s the story.

I turned over 12,345 miles on the bike today.  I’ve always wanted to stop and take a picture like this, so I did.

Just east of Birchdale MN, there’s a set of sculptures called “Basshenge”.  Not bass as in the fish, but as in the musical instrument. In 2001, Chicago Symphony double bassist Joseph Guastafeste collaborated with artists to create this monument to the double bass. Apparently, the spiral of sculptures forms a bass clef when viewed from above.

Willie Walleye, not to be confused with Billy Bluegill in Orr MN, is located in Baudette MN, where I will (hopefully) wake up on Monday morning.  Considering we have more than 10,000 lakes here in Minnesota, it shouldn’t be surprising we have a ton of fish statues scattered all around the state.

The route for today.  Thanks for looking!