Pilgrims of the Holy Can

When I offered to take Jane anywhere in Minnesota, within reason, I expected a lake. Maybe a supper club. Instead she insisted on the Spam Museum, in Austin, down near the Iowa border. Austin is the home of Hormel, and the museum sits in the shadow of the company that made it. These days most of the world knows spam as the junk that clogs your inbox. But the word started here, with the luncheon meat that grosses out millions of people and is eaten, happily, by millions more.

Spam was not the first meat in a can, but it is by far the most famous one: spiced pork and ham, pressed into a loaf, that never needs a refrigerator until you open it. The very idea of meat in a can is a little absurd, and generations of people have entertained themselves imagining what else might be in there.

So it is a pleasure to report that several travel guides list the Spam Museum among the best museums in Minnesota. This is the state of the Walker, the Guthrie and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. And here is Spam, holding its own.

Jane and I roamed the museum on a hot June afternoon. It is impossible to dislike a museum this cheerful about itself. It knows exactly what it is, and it is having more fun than any art museum I have ever been in.

Spam in the Pacific

If I had one complaint, it was that the museum skipped Spam’s greatest adventure: its conquest of the South Pacific, and the rumor that follows it around, which involves cannibals.

Hawaiians, Tongans, Samoans, the Chamorros of Guam, Cook Islanders and their neighbors eat more Spam per person than almost anyone on earth. It arrived with the American military in the Second World War, when fresh meat was scarce and Spam was everywhere, and it never left. In Hawaii it turns up in sushi, on breakfast plates and at McDonald’s. Pacific Islanders have paid a price for the switch from fish and garden food to canned and processed meat, but nobody is giving up their Spam.

Then there is Paul Theroux. In The Happy Isles of Oceania, he suggested that islanders love Spam because its taste nearly approximates that of human flesh.

Theroux has repeated the line to audiences for laughs, and it has traveled the world; the neurologist Oliver Sacks brought it up too, in The Island of the Colorblind.

It was a joke, and a good one, but the rumor has outlived the joke. Cannibalism did happen in the Pacific, most famously in Fiji, but there is little evidence it ever happened in Hawaii. The real reasons islanders took to Spam are the war and the price of fresh meat shipped thousands of miles across the ocean. Still, I would have paid extra for a museum wing on the cannibal theory.

Without it, the museum is exactly what you would expect from Austin’s largest employer: a cheerful, cheeky, wildly successful advertisement. I loved it anyway.

We left Austin delighted, already rehearsing the story for our friends back in Minneapolis. Every Minnesotan is secretly curious about the Spam Museum, and every one of them swears they will go someday.

Amish Country

We headed east on Highway 16, the Historic Bluff Country Scenic Byway, toward Lanesboro, one of the prettiest towns in Minnesota. Lanesboro sits among limestone bluffs that rise hundreds of feet above seas of corn. A river meanders through it all, and off in the distance stand dozens of wooden barns and steel silos.

Lanesboro is the edge of Minnesota’s Amish country, which centers on the little town of Harmony, just above the Iowa border. In downtown Lanesboro we stopped at a small Amish gift shop, where I lost myself in the books on Amish life. I picked one up that explains why the Amish wear plain clothes.

The book was more forward than I expected. It says, more or less, that the English, meaning the rest of us, dress like sluts, and that just because something feels right doesn’t mean you do it. Bikinis are out. Suffering through hot weather in long sleeves is part of the faith.

Americans love the Amish, rolling down these country roads in their black buggies. It is a funny kind of love. In the last thirty years we have traded our own small-town traditions for Walmarts, convenience stores and big-box churches that look like Walmarts. Maybe the Amish remind us of the America we gave away.

The Amish of the Midwest also surprise the English by how much of the modern world they let in. Cell phones are common among Amish teenagers. And rumspringa, Pennsylvania Dutch for running around, often means a few years of tasting life on the outside.

For kids raised far from alcohol, cigarettes, drugs and rap music, the temptation is real, and a few fall hard. In The Devil’s Playground, a documentary about Amish teenagers in Indiana, one boy becomes a meth user and a dealer, and is arrested.

About nine in ten decide that the life of hangovers and loud music is not for them. From the outside, it looks like rumspringa almost encourages the hangover, so that a young Amish man learns, at exactly the right moment, that beyond the quiet farm the world is just nuts.

I like what the Amish remind the rest of us. I believe in progress, but the Amish began as radicals in their own time, and they use far more technology than outsiders imagine. Plenty of Amish carry cell phones, run diesel engines and ride Amtrak.

Niagara Cave

The Amish may see the outside world as a devil’s playground, but there is a real underworld right beneath their fields. Southeastern Minnesota sits on limestone riddled with hundreds of caves and sinkholes, and Jane, perhaps to make up for the Spam Museum, steered us toward one of them just outside of Harmony.

A guided tour took us down into the lighted passages of Niagara Cave, past an underground waterfall. Our guide pointed out fossils in the walls, some 450 million years old, from when all of this was the floor of a shallow sea: round, seed-patterned shapes of Receptaculites, a strange extinct creature that some scientists think was a giant alga. Up top, there are now about 400,000 Amish in North America, and with their big families they are one of the fastest-growing groups on the continent. I couldn’t help wondering: if the Amish ever took over Minnesota, would Austin keep making Spam? And what would they make of those beautiful fossils, laid bare in the cracks beneath their farms?