By  Tom Clynes

Done all the local festivals? Looking for an excuse to roadtrip? Within a day’s drive of Chicago, the Heartland summer is heaving with festivals and celebrations. Here’s a sample of Midwest happenings:

• Madison, Nebraska’s Days of Swine and Roses combines humbuggery and haute pork.  Highlights include a hog-calling contest—and the related husband-calling event—as well as the challenging Farm Olympics and the breathtaking Women’s Chore Outfit Fashion Show. Stay downwind of the Smelly Boot Competition, but line up for the mouth-watering pork BBQ and the new Kiss a Pig Contest. Madison lies about 100 miles northwest of Omaha on U.S. 81; for information call 402.454.2251. Read the rest of this entry »

By Mike Michaelson

Everyone loves an underdog. There are the unseeded tennis players who reach the Wimbledon finals and the amateur golfers who survive the cut in the Masters. There’s John Sayles making acclaimed films on a small budget. And tiny Oshkosh  with its massive air show. And then there’s Columbus, Indiana, David among the architectural Goliaths.

With a population of less than 35,000, this Hoosier town, surrounded by stubby cornfields, forty-five miles south of Indianapolis, has more distinguished architecture than cities fifty times its size. In 1991, when the American Institute of Architects asked members to rank U.S. cities based on design quality and innovation, diminutive Columbus came in sixth. It was exceeded only by, in order, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Boston and Washington. Pretty heady company. Read the rest of this entry »

By Rennie Sparks

House on the Rock is a cozy ski lodge fallen into a ring of Hell. It’s also the number one privately owned summer tourist attraction in Wisconsin.

Located in Spring Green atop Deer Shelter Rock, the House began in the 1940s as a tent and Hibachi where young Alex Jordan used to go to barbecue steak and drink a few Tom Collins. One day his dad, an architect wannabe, decided to bring a design to Frank Lloyd Wright, but when Wright laughed and said, “I wouldn’t hire you to design a chicken coop,” Alex told his dad he’d get the family’s revenge by building a house on Deer Shelter Rock (right down the road from Wright’s architectural school) that would rival the most graceful examples of Wright architecture. But, what started as a spit in the eye of the King of the Prairie School, now fifty years later, borders on the indescribable. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dennis Rodkin

It was a gorgeous late-summer weekend, and the new people in the house next door to ours were busy schlepping boxes inside from their back porch. They looked hot and tired, so my wife and I decided to make them feel welcome by offering them some of our tomatoes. The weather had been great for tomatoes, and we plant them in super-fertile compost, so we had way more tomatoes than we could eat. How nice of us—how downright neighborly—to think of the new neighbors.

It was either that or eat tomatoes on our sandwiches, tomatoes on our delivery pizza, and tomatoes on our Wheaties for another week. Read the rest of this entry »

Yeah, I’m an addict. I’ve traveled countless miles for my drug, risked death, blown off deadlines, screwed up relationships, wasted buckets of money and hung out with people even I consider unsavory. After a couple days without it, the low-grade D.T.’s hit me: edgy disposition, crawling skin, and the feeling that my muscles have slipped their tenuous connection to the skeleton.

I’m an endorphin junkie and as dependencies go, it works out well; the body has an endless supply, and when you play it right, the high feels like a junior-varsity version of ecstasy: mild euphoria, tingling on your skin, a paradoxical amalgam of exhaustion and world-beating verve. Many ways exist to get that rush, from laughing uproariously to having sex, but my standby method remains a somewhat dirty word in the “alternative” community: sports. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a picture on my dresser of a nondescript dirt path, leading to an unidentifiable footbridge, which crosses a thin, nameless stream, then continues on toward a rising set of foothills and beyond. I don’t remember where the picture was taken, but that hasn’t mattered for a very long time. The snapshot’s there simply to remind me of a search that can only occur outdoors. The goal, when there is something that finite, is often as simple as physical exertion or discovering where certain paths lead. I also know people who believe that things such as sandstone outcroppings, tall prairie cordgrass and stands of eastern red cedar trees represent our most intense connection to a spiritual life, and that nature gives off a rejuvenating energy; so they hike back into the wilderness or tramp through the dunes to recharge and become whole. Read the rest of this entry »