Photos by Caitlin Abrams
Rivertown
Midmorning on a Wednesday in the middle of the pandemic summer is when we decide to load the poodle into the back of the Subaru and hit the road. We need to get out of the house. Get away. And one nice thing about the world being shut down is that, because you’ve got nowhere to be, you can be wherever you want.
We want to be exploring river towns, so I climb into shotgun, my wife, Maggie, hits the gas, and we put Northeast Minneapolis in the rearview. We’re wild-eyed and famished, and our only real goal is pure decadence—pie for lunch.
Barely an hour later, we’re cruising the Wisconsin side of the river under ancient sedimentary cliffs draped in the greens of poplar, cottonwood, oak, maple, and ash. The length of a single Bon Iver album is all it takes to get to another world.
Minnesota map
The landscape in this corner of the state is the obverse of our northern lake country. That’s because roughly 9,000 years ago, the two-mile-deep icecap that covered most of proto-Minnesota finished melting and left behind arable glacial drift and 10,000ish lakes. But those last glaciers never encroached into what geologists refer to as the Driftless Area, and fathoms of meltwater sluiced through this limestone and sandstone, carving out the cliffs of the Upper Mississippi River Valley. A thousand years later, the Chippewa River slammed into the Mississippi and created a natural dam that backed up into a long, shallow body of water the French called Lac de Pleurs—Lake of Tears—before eventually changing it to Lake Pepin.
Humans mythologized these hills for thousands of years. The best of it tends to be about “Winona,” the firstborn daughter of Dakota chief Red Wing. Mark Twain spun Winona’s yarn in his book Life on the Mississippi, but the roadside marker version—found near the Maiden Rock overlook just five minutes outside of Stockholm—recounts the tragic myth just as well. Standing there is heavy. From the marker you look back across the road at a foreboding cliff of yellow rock. That’s where Winona, in love with a boy in her tribe but promised to one from another, leapt to her death in an act of romantic defiance. The best cure for the melancholy we’re suddenly feeling? Pie.
Good thing that just down the road from where Winona became legend is Stockholm—population 66. The town is so bucolic and adorable that it’s almost unsettling. But we don’t waste much time pondering its eerie quaintness, because there’s pie to be had.
Stockholm Pie and General Store’s Crisco-layered epiphanies attract a steady pilgrimage of drooling sugar zombies that can double the city’s population on a sunny Saturday. But this is a Wednesday, so we have the place to ourselves. Maggie eschews fruit pie—borderline sacrilege for Stockholm stans—for a slice of the chocolate cream. It turns out to be a savvy play and ultimately fuels a spin through the Northern Oak Amish Furniture showroom up the street, where she finds a swell cherrywood cribbage board for $35.
Back in the car, we discover 1260 AM, a classic country station that alternates between Conway Twitty tearjerkers and news alerts about corn and wheat futures. The market reports are a reminder that the Mississippi is still very much a working river, with tugboats pushing barges of soybeans and corn toward Iowa and Illinois.
You know you want to visit Pepin, if for nothing else than to find out what the Pickle Factory is all about.
Sign post
We make a pit stop in Pepin to peep the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum (the author was born seven miles away, near Lund). We skip the tour but buy a book of her letters in the gift shop on the way out. Next, we swoop across a bridge that crosses low over the Chippewa River delta. The landscape sinks into swampy effluvium before the sandstone cliffs rise again just past Nelson.
Eventually, we hit Alma. Founded by Swiss immigrants, the river town reached new heights when German American lumber baron Friedrich Weyerhaeuser turned the area’s natural slough into one of the most lucrative logging waypoints in the entire world. We snake up a hill past tiny dairy farms to Buena Vista Park. The park is perched 500 feet above the town on a natural sandstone balcony. The geology feels downright didactic from this vantage, as if the cliffs are teaching us about the movement of water, people, and commerce that have passed beneath them for millennia. Blair, that poodle from the beginning of this story, wags his tail, relieved to be out of the car.
From Alma it’s a half hour to our final stop before heading home—this one on the Minnesota side of the river—the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona. Its multimillion-dollar collection of Impressionist and Hudson River School masterworks is legendary, and somewhat surprising. What are Renoir and Cassatt and Turner doing within view of a half dozen barges of soybeans, 100 miles away from the urban core, anyway?
As we walk the gallery, I think about another legendary maiden, Clueless’s Cher Horowitz, and her definition of a Monet: “From far away, it’s OK, but up close it’s a big old mess.” Neither Maggie nor I have been inside a museum for months, so while touring MMAM’s uninhabited galleries—the two of us monitored on a 1:1 ratio by their security guards—my mask pulls double duty as it also hides my total awe. Among the insane treasures? An early Van Gogh of the Dutch coast, a deliriously misty Turner watercolor, one of two existing versions of Washington Crossing the Delaware, and, yes, two shimmering Monets.
But MMAM’s most fitting work resides in the Hudson River School gallery—Alfred Bricher’s On the Mississippi near Winona, Minnesota—Shower Clearing is an 1868 scene from the New Englander’s trip up the Mississippi and was painted from a vantage point just downstream.
Bricher probably arrived here by steamboat, of course, not Subaru, but looking at his happy little cloudburst over the river valley and his depiction of the now familiar yellow cliff-top rocks, I am reminded of something: that people have been leaving their homes and routines to commune with this remarkable piece of the river—and to think about their connections to each other and to time in a way in which its waters are particularly attuned—for as long as it has meandered through these hills.
River Towns by the Numbers
- 8,000—Number of years ago that the Chippewa River first converged with the Mississippi, forming Lake Pepin
- 500—Distance in feet above the Mississippi River at the Buena Vista lookout in Alma
- 220—Estimated number of years ago that Winona, daughter of Chief Red Wing, threw herself off Maiden Rock in despair
- 85—Miles from Prescott to the Winona Bridge on historic Wisconsin State Highway 35
- 7—Miles north of Pepin that Laura Ingalls Wilder was born
- 6.23—Price in dollars of a slice of chocolate cream pie at Stockholm Pie Company
- 4.5m—Price in dollars that Winona’s Minnesota Marine Art Museum benefactors Mary Burrichter and Bob Kierlin paid for J. M. W. Turner’s 1841 watercolor Heidelberg with a Rainbow
