In America, the "U" is pronounced short



Poster for the “The Birds,” a film starring Tippi Hedren, a native of New Ulm, Minnesota.

Before you ask, yes, I did go to New Ulm on Saturday for the reenactors’ event. It wasn’t our period, being mostly fur trade wares on sale in a local hall, but we were going to meet a guy who had some stuff to sell us that he wanted to get off his hands. We did that deal, and now my friend is pretty sure we got skinned. But skinning is what fur trapping is all about, after all.

I’ve come to think of New Ulm as a kind of mythical place, like Brigadoon, which you can only visit by accident. Although it’s a not least among the tribes of Minnesota, no one has ever built a direct route to it from the Twin Cities. It’s tucked away in a valley out of sight, so that you’re never sure you’re getting there until you’re right on top of the place.

It was even tougher than usual to get there on Saturday, because for a good stretch of the route we experienced white-out conditions. It wasn’t actually snowing, but it had snowed the night before, and now we had a strong wind that blew that new snow off the fields and across the highway, in a reasonable facsimile of a blizzard. We were actually stopped by emergency trucks and told to go back, which wasn’t the greatest idea as the highway behind us had also been effectively instruments-only for twenty miles or so. We turned onto a parallel gravel road, and a nice old couple who passed us told us that if we followed that road and “turned at Five,” it would take us directly into New Ulm. They, needless to say, were actually Underground Folk (see my novels) trying to lead us astray and put our souls in peril. Fortunately they weren’t very good at it, because the road we ended up on, though not the one they promised, did get us where we were going.

We had lunch in a local Rathskeller, where we waited about an hour for a couple hamburgers. (Anti-Norwegian prejudice lives on.) The most interesting conversation I had was with a gunsmith in a beaded top hat who insisted on telling me all about his work (which was wonderful), though I warned him at the outset I wasn’t in the market for his fine wares. Did you know that the best way to make a brass rifle barrel is to dig a very deep, thin hole in the ground, and pour the brass in straight down?

OK, you knew that. But I didn’t.

0 thoughts on “In America, the "U" is pronounced short”

  1. I fear I won’t be able to blog much this week with family guests and busy workload. I have posts in mind, but I may not be able to get to them.

  2. I figured that you’d written all you meant to write for this posting, really. But read everything except the first and last paragraphs.

    Now wouldn’t that make a nice opening for a story? The ensuing story could turn out to be comic, slice-of-lifey, or fantastic. But what a nice start.

  3. Since almost everybody in New Ulm is German, I naturally assume that poor service in a restaurant means they recognized us as Norwegian and didn’t want our kind in their place. I mean, what else could it be?

  4. Perhaps a survey is in order. Maybe that restaurant has spotty service, or maybe they have other biases, or even your server is particularly bad.

  5. I took my wife to that restaurant for our first anniversary. Since we spent our honeymoon driving around Switzerland, Bavaria, Tyrol, Lichtenstein and the Black Forest, we wanted to celebrate our first anniversary with southern German veal and spaetzle. But all they had in New Ulm was northern German sausage and sauerkraut. I don’t recall the service being bad. But I have to say that German Sausage is the Wurst.

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