Our final day, on the way (or rather out of the way) home, we decided to see a most peculiar attraction.
It was at my insistence. Shortly before we'd left for Wisconsin, my mom revealed to me the fact that she had once spent a summer there as an adolescent. One thing she remembered seeing was the House on the Rock. "I don't know if it's even still there anymore," she said, "but you should try to go check it out."
Since it showed up in every glossy rack of tourist brochures in Wisconsin Dells, we could be pretty sure it was still there. Pocket of Bolts balked a little at its middle of nowhereness, but the fact that there were penny squishers seemed to carry some weight. Mind you, I'm the one obsessed with squished pennies, not PoB, but he is exceedingly indulgent of my passion.
In short, on a monstrously rainy day we breakfasted at Cracker Barrel and began the long journey into nowhere. Eventually we arrived at in a surprisingly populous parking lot. I was quite taken with the reptilian strawberry pots. (In my picture, you can see how hard it's raining!) Of course, what I'd really like is strawberry pots with real lizards lounging on them. Well, you can't have everything.Though the creator of House on the Rock certainly tried.
Let's just call it eccentrically eclectic. I mean, we can start with the ladies' room, where there was a totally unmotivated collection of blue and gold glass bottles set up against a glowing wall. I have no idea why, nor was there a similar collection in the men's room, according to Pocket of Bolts. But that's how the whole house was, one strange thing after another, accretion without rhyme or reason.
The thing itself was vaguely Frank Lloyd Wright, but kind of FLW on a bad trip or having nightmares. Wikipedia gives a possibly apocryphal story of how Alex Jordan Sr., a great admirer of Wright, once showed him some plans and got snubbed and sneered at with such viciousness that on the drive back AJ Sr. vowed to build on some impractical pinnacle just to spite his former hero. The house itself was created by the son, Alex Jordan Jr., apparently his life's work. And yet he never actually lived there. He seems a strange and disturbed man, something like a bourgeois American version of the character in J.-K. Huysmans' Against Nature--that is to say, a collector with a prodigious grasp and a short attention span.
A lot of what was in there was second-rate (tenth-rate) Chinoiserie. I have not much of an eye for Chinese art, but I could recognize blurred copies of what I'd seen and studied. Buddhas and bodhisattvas, a Tang sancai horse, the Daoist ox and boy motif, teacups and the like. It a way, it was better that they were blurred copies, because it would be weirdly incongruous if the real thing were moldering away there.
Initially, I was pretty enthusiastic about the place, despite how dark and strange it was. (It was even darker and gloomier because of the stormy weather outside.) It seemed like a place that was at once huge and cozy, a burrow or a warren that seemed underground even though it was built on high rock. It was not particularly in harmony with its surroundings--if FLW had been been building it, it would surely have been much lighter and airier, more windows, more view. But it seemed the nature of Alex Jordan to turn away from the real world and make his own darker and often miniaturized or mechanical version instead.
We ended up liking the Infinity Walk the best, because it actually did take advantage of the light and the view. It was a long walk suspended out over nothing, and a cheap trompe l'oeil trick to make it look even longer. Cheap but kind of witty. It seemed like it would be a good place to pace back and forth, but nowhere to sit.
Speaking of mechanical, one of the least attractive things about the place (to us) was the automated music. Take the concept of a player piano (there was one) and extend it to whole ensembles, one in nearly every room, playing the same tune each time, whenever someone stuck a token in. It was odd and clever the first time, then mad and maddening. However, it could potentially be very eerie if done right. I could see the place as a very promising haunted house, much more psychologically creepy than the cheap tricks with slimy eyeballs and spiders we generally get, going for gut-level disgust. This picture was one of the more interesting ones, a music box made to look a little like a cubist painting, amusing but too weird to satisfy, too inhuman.
As museum, the place was even more exhausting than museums usually are. Especially the Streets of Yesterday. Maybe we were already tired; or maybe yesterday wasn't long enough ago to be interesting. In any case, we went fast mostly just to get through and soon moved on to the Heritage of the Sea with its 200+ foot whale-type thing, locked in battle with a giant squid thing and preparing to swallow up a small boat. According to the sign "it is part White Whale, part Killer Whale, part who knows what." Surely, Alex Jordan had read and been influenced by Moby Dick, but he must have skipped the informational parts that give magnificent detail about whale anatomy. Melville would have been disappointed.
Frozen in its plaster sea, the whale formed the center, while a multi-story sloping ramp ringed it round and round with the contents of a nautical museum which AJ had purchased entire. This was wearisome too--the context was just so strange for a sudden profusion of historical items--but I was mildly interested by the scrimshaw. I had always heard the word before, but had never really seen it or understood what it was.
Another thing I liked a little was the way the gulls hung in the sky, made to look higher than they were by a trick of scale. Probably gulls wouldn't be out flying around in a sky as dark as that, but the whole thing was not overly influenced by realistic considerations anyway, and it was an appealing effect in a strange way.
It was hard to see this place as a product of the mid and late twentieth century (though it's hard to really see what other era could have produced it either, in retrospect). Before we located and read the informational signs we were trying to date the thing (partly by the books in the library) and would have guessed much earlier. But then the architecture did, in a demented way, bear the stamp of Frank Lloyd Wright... No way would we have guessed that it was still being added to when my mom saw it in the sixties, that its creator actually lived on into the nineties. It was a place as out of tune with its time as it was with its surroundings.
But now recovered from the exhaustion of seeing the place I'm glad we went. It was a strange accident of history, a strange part of this world. a strange thing to have seen... but I'm not about to go back anytime soon.
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