Just because it’s capitalism doesn’t mean we can’t have a good time…

We, my family, are standing in the foyer of a badly lit, dilapidating square building with a life-size plastic horse outside, visible from the windows. My father, a proper Englishman, seems to be having difficulty comprehending what is happening in front of him. He looks to the glowing billboard screen menu thingy on the wall above the cashier / waitperson's head, and ponders. How does this all work, he wonders? Why can I order a steak at a kiosk before even having been seated? Why does a buffet become included with the purchase of a steak? Also, menu screens do not belong in steakhouses. Neither do plastic horses.

 I am emulating, and forcing my family to emulate, something I saw on TV. Anthony Bourdain goes to LA, meets up with a Korean American street artist whose style I immediately like, and said artist takes Mr. Bourdain to Sizzler, stating, with a certain amount of sincerity, that sizzler is his favorite restaurant in LA. I understand him immediately, as I delight in things boiled down to their essence, I delight in the soul affirming chintziness  that has been bred into me by years of saturday morning cartoons, serial television, back-to-school shopping, grocery store trips at young ages, toy stores, birthday parties, Black Friday and Little Caesars…the consumer in me runs deep and straight and true, and I have a sincere appreciation for pure American tack. Bright, garish, loud, better than the last one, no shame, no pretense, cloying appeals to buy it, and buy it more than once.

Regrettably, Sizzler does not operate outside of the West Coast. But Ponderosa does.

I told my family, before even leaving town for the Dells, that I was treating them to a night of fine food, good company, and a buffet that had a taco bar, orange jello, and sad, lonely spaghetti that looked almost pre-chewed. They did not understand the necessity for such a trip, and certainly not in the visceral way I did. Marina, to her credit, understands me, and therefore knows that after twenty four straight hours of commercial tourist traps, giraffe feedings, llama trains, haunted houses, blacklights, canyon tours (both horsedrawn and diesel powered) the only fitting meal to capstone such a day could be had at Sizzler. And failing that, one of the 16 remaining nationwide Ponderosas, one of which, as luck would have it, remains in the Wisconsin Dells. 

We started the day with the ‘Wisconsin Original Ducks.’ In the 1950’s, one enterprising young capitalist with a knowledge of the beautiful regional canyons and river valleys and a keen sense to make it big, bought a fleet of old army landing vehicles, amphibious in nature, whose role was to churn across bodies of water, drive up on shore and drop troops. Turns out, said vehicles, called Ducks, could be purchased surplus from the US Army in a cost effective way post-Normandy, and the fella that bought them got the idea to lead amphibious tours through aforementioned canyons and bodies of water. 

After a large amount of success, more vehicles were bought, local teenagers were brought on to drive them, and now, nearly 75 years or so later, the Duck fleet is going strong at 30 mph and a certain amount of knots I suppose. I am not nautical. They are an institution and a capitalist fever dream. Tourist dollars, raw and bloody, gladly hemorrhaged in a flow steady enough to fill the toured canyons. And they are really, really fun.

Next, The Lost Canyon, another canyon tour, but this one with some old-timey taste for godsakes, no surplus military vehicles here, we’d tour a very similar canyon the way god intended, towed by horses and reeking of shit. Dave led the tour, a stage coach situation holding maybe 12 people, pulled through beautiful, meandering scenery, narrow canyon passes, limestone, or sandstone, some kind of stone, I don’t remember which, and all the natural splendor. One of three or four separate stage coaches depart every fifteen or so minutes meaning that even traditional, old-timey two horse power vehicles could be harnessed to drive both tourists and profits.

Midway through both tours, vehicles are stopped, guides become Oliver Twistian, and the captive tourists are implored to please buy some postcards or magnets or something because the tour guides make the majority of their money from these kinds of sales, and the sponsoring company pays them in company script and chewing gum and wont you please spare a few bucks? I drove the horses / ducks so well, and it's all but silent here except for my soliloquy and the sound of opening wallets. And I am forced to wonder, as I hand over the five bucks my wife has wadded into my hand, whether or not my fellow tourists would give a guy on the street the same five bucks if he had a refrigerator magnet with a picture of the highway overpass where he’s panhandling emblazoned on it? Does systemic poverty sell better in trinket form? 

I can’t have thoughts like this now, though, not here. I am on god damned vacation, and nothing will taint my Ponderosa nachos, not even the mind-bending inequity that reaches into every stitch of the American fabric, even here in the Dells. But we’re not even close to dinner for fucks sake, we still have Timbavakti Wildlife Preserve and Safari Train to digest and discuss, and also the Ghost Outpost, and then and only then, Ponderosa. 

The wildlife park is a surprisingly affordable zoo impersonation with several big cats, pens full of stressed-out monkeys, a few kangaroos, a few sloths, and a safari train, a slightly larger than child-sized train that runs through open paddocks and pastures where Llama and other hooved quadrupeds are free to walk up to the stopped train cars and beg for / steal carrots, which can be purchased for four dollars a cup in the gift shops, and also at the giraffe feeding area, the next stop on the train’s voyage. 

And I am not mad, I am taken away by the whimsy and by hearing my dad in the row behind Marina and I exclaim that he “has been to a lot of zoos, but this in particular is really cool”. And we pull into Giraffe Station. I buy my four dollars worth of carrots after getting the nod from Marina, and a disinterested giraffe spies my long, outstretched arm over the riff raff of the other children and lopes towards me to eat my carrot. And I think to myself that I am some sort of high-vibration Tarzan, capable of summoning great beasts, communing with nature, one with the earth and the animals and the moon and the stars.

But upon reflection, I realize that I am in communion only with a buy and sell system, and that the giraffe and I are two perfect partners in this dance of commodity and sales. I buy the carrots, he eats the carrots, the train pulls away, and the cycle repeats with new rubes. That the giraffe came to me instead of anyone else I believe is a psychic manifestation of my complete and visceral understanding of American consumer culture. Also, I was several feet taller than the other giraffe feeders. Still, we played our respective roles perfectly. My power, if I have any, is not in a raw connection to the lifeforce, but in understanding the cheap quick thrill for money, and I am fucking spectacular at it. And the giraffe is cute as hell, and very good at eating carrots.The train pulls away, I am out four dollars, and they don’t have to feed the giraffe quite as much grain or giraffe feed or whatever at the end of the day. All creatures involved are happy.

My dad begins to have some difficulty in walking, he’s pretty old these days, and not in the greatest health. But we soldier on for a bit, and spy some fascinating birds, and a lazy tiger, and a kangaroo or two, and then he winces visibly and it's time to go. We skip a majority of the zoo, because we’ve seen zoos, and we’d prefer an hour or two of rest at the JW Marriott Collection Spring Hill Suites brand hotel, paid for by points, accrued from my parents' loyalty to one credit card brand, and many decades of winning at capitalism. We drop my parents, and they limp inside to get an air conditioned sit down and maybe some local network tv. This all sounds quite appetizing to Marina and I too, but first…

The Ghost Outpost. A slanted man, slightly overweight, stands at an enclosed counter, flanked by skeletons, plastic and with eyeballs, and speaks out of the side of his mouth that admission will be six dollars each, slightly more if we pay by card. The structure we are entering could be an old house, or purpose built for…whatever we were about to experience. It was difficult to tell. We ascend the stairs into a hallway that right angles away from sunlight, and two hung skeletons welcome us with prerecorded shtick, moving jaws illuminated by dim red, and admittedly slightly creepy light, and we begin what i would call an eleven minute journey of pure unadulterated…disorientation? Lots of skeletons, an animatronic spider, pitch black, wall feeling traverses, a spinning tunnel situation, more blacklights, loud noises, whooshes of air, and then, back outside through a separate door, possibly in an attempt to divert would be jilted complainers from having immediate access to the ticket salesman.

The Ghost Outpost is a raw cash grab in its purest form, all advertising, very little substance. And I loved every moment of it. I loved the bold audacity, I loved the careful measuring that they could charge six dollars without complaints, no more, and still have us sheep-like tourists lining up to run into a few walls, see a skeleton, and head to the next tourist dump.

There are more waterparks in Wisconsin Dells, by concentration to the square mile, than anywhere else in the world. My wife learned this in the public bathroom of a supper club from a fellow tourist. There are go-karts, instagram traps, 90 holes of miniature golf, theme restaurants, giant trojan horses and centurions on the side of the road…blatant screams for tourist dollars, and they do not go unheard. We all line up, happily shelling out hundreds of dollars each day in the Dells to be amused if not entertained, fed if not dined, and satisfied if not happy. You leave the Dells with way more microplastics in your testicles than before, and you simply no longer have the wherewithal to care.

I raise my Ponderosa plastic tankard filled with diet cola, and proclaim ‘to health’. One person at the table hears me loud and clear, hears what I really said. Over my plate of nachos, next to the grilled sirloin steak, spilling a drop of condensation on my buffet Jello, Marina knows that I am toasting the gods of tourism, of americana, and of the worst and most formed part of our American identity. For twelve dollars or so, you can eat the national character, and you can have as much of it as you want. 

But, there is another side to the Wisconsin Dells that deserves attention too. Amidst the standard, white middle class tourist family, there are other families also. A Black father shoots down a waterslide after his son. A multigenerational Latinx crew of twelve fill their own Lost Canyon stage coach. There are poor folks here, all ethnicities, and they can experience this America as well as anyone else. The Wisconsin Dells is accessible to most, which is what that big statue in the harbor says we are. We are supposed to be accessible to most, if not all, and here in this little corner of the Midwest, that dream seems real enough, and I applaud for that.

I came here first as a young boy, my parents were probably the age I am now at the time, and I had a plastic bow and arrow bought at a tourist gift shop and a stuffed lion. I shot the suction cupped arrows into the wood paneled closet of the hotel room and garnered great satisfaction from their sticking to the wall. We did tourist things, I don’t remember all of them, but there was the haunted mansion I was too afraid to try, and dinners out at a supper club. I remember concrete dinosaur sculptures and swimming pools and feeling like I never wanted to leave. I remember the Ducks from my youth, I remember bits and fragments that my parents made sure I could have. And I didn’t know it at the time, because I’d never really felt otherwise, but I felt warm and safe and like I didn’t want to leave. It was a feeling that, unlike almost anything else in the Dells, could not be bought.

Now, with my dad’s physical and mental capacities beginning to recede, and my Mom watching it happen while cautiously accepting that maybe, just maybe, I’d finally gotten my shit together, I can take them to the Wisconsin Dells with the money from my cool new job (and the help of my hot lawyer social worker wife). We can go on the train and share childlike wonder at the exotic-ish animals. We can honor our Wisconsin roots with prime rib and cocktails and multi-course supper club meals (authentic as fuck by the way), we can continue to stay in Marriot’s together, and we can still ride the Ducks and remember a time that I never knew, but that means all the world to me to be aware of its existence. We can, in our collective experience, remember when my father and mother were children, in swimming pools and gift shops in the Wisconsin Dells. 

And now that they are fading a little bit, and I need to help some with the planning, and maybe help with directions, and can finally help a bit financially, I get to do something that I’d always hoped I could do. I can take care of them, and thank them for the life I have. Like they did so many times for me, I can take them to this little corner of America, I can take them to the Wisconsin Dells, I can take them to relive their childhoods, to remember giving me mine, and I get to take them to a place that makes them feel warm and safe and like they never want to leave. I’ll drink to that. At the Ponderosa.