vol. 5 IKL 3
Greetings,
I travelled the Trollway yesterday.
It’s in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, a scrolly town filled with friendly faces, which tend to pop up in unexpected places such as the washroom/dressing room/toilet/storage room of a gift shop.
As for being scrolly, I think I made up that word. It’s that I don’t recall ever seeing so many flourishes of a thin bristle brush in one actual place before. Where there is a wall or a door on a shop in Mount Horeb, chances are, there’s a swirly bit painted on it. That, I am told, is on account of the original settlers of the town being Scandinavian; this is how Danes, Finns, and Swedes decorate, apparently.
Ikea, with its clean lines and utilitarian designs seems to be the public facing side of a more romantic, if not downright frivolous, nature.
Speaking of Ikea, those Swedish meatballs with lingonberry jam? They are far saltier, fattier, and smaller than those served up in Mount Horeb, which also come with grilled rye bread and Irish butter.
As for the Trollway, it is not a reference to a trail of online insults shucked off by warring bloggers. That being said, if I am to believe what I was told by locals, its origin is indeed rooted in insults, only ones more playful than venal.
Beginning in the 1800s, the story goes, when the descendants of erstwhile Vikings sought to conquer new lands, trolls led the way from Scandinavia to the New World’s most fertile earth. And indeed, if ever there were deposits of rich, dark earth, it’s this region where cows and crops are in abundance.
It would seem that in thanks and praise of the little wayfinders, even Mount Horeb’s Lutheran church wears a troll cap.
This trollway theme was further celebrated last century, before GPS, during the heyday of the citizens band, or “CB” radio. When truckers passed by the giftshop on Mount Horeb’s Main Street, they would report over the CB that they’d just spotted another trucker’s mother, or even their own mother-in-law along the Trollway.
A local wood carver was inspired by this “semi” satire and set out to situate other such trolls along the route. He carved actual trolls for actual rolls of important citizens in town, and now there is a troll mayor in front of City Hall, a garden troll near the municipal plots, and a wayfaring merchant troll in front of the gift shop, among about a dozen other trolls ogering (I think I made up that word, too) around the town.
Although the truckers are now re-routed per a bypass on the outskirts of town, their collective humor lent itself to the creation of a novelty that draws in wanderers like me.
Peace,
Whitney