Today had to be one of the most bizarre but activity-filled days since we started the trip. We spent the daytime portion going to a very weird place called The House on the Rock and the evening we spent at Wisconsin Dells Raceway Park watching the stock car races.
The House on the Rock is located in Spring Green, Wisconsin, which is quite near Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin masterpiece. We could see Taliesin from the road and it is a gorgeous creation although we did not get to do a close inspection because it is privately owned. They give tours in October and April, neither month being one in which I would choose to be in Wisconsin. Pity.
Five miles from Taliesin is House on the Rock. It is a creation by a guy named Alex Jordan, Jr. who was definitely a proper madman with obsessive-compulsive disorders of the first magnitude along with a tendency to hoard everything. We chose the Ultimate tour which set us back about $25 a head but it was the proper choice. The Ultimate tour takes visitors through the house, then a museum-like portion and finally through the weirdest organ room imaginable.
The house is a warren of passages that emerge into strange rooms that seem to be intended for small, intimate conversations among small groups of 6 or less. There must be about 20 such rooms and the maze-like passageways between them all have very low ceilings. I spent quite a bit of time touring the place with my head ducked down and my back bent because the ceilings are very low. I understand the guy that built the place was over 6′ tall so he must have crawled around quite a bit, too. The room all have windows which are screened with ornate woodcut screens with the exception of one called the “Infinity Room” that sticks out from the rock supporting the house about 200 feet horizontally. The Infinity Room starts near the rock as a wide, triangular walkway with glass on the two bottom sides of the triangle and it tapers down at the far end to nothing. From a viewpoint a half mile away, visitors can see this enormous prong projecting out over space and surrounded by trees. It is quite dramatic and also completely useless since you cannot go all the way to the pointy end because it tapers to a fine point. The guy that created this place was very clever about utilizing the surrounding rocks and trees because, as you proceed through the place, you wind around lots of rock pinnacles and fireplaces that serve the little conversation nooks. The nooks are really all the house has, although it has about 20 of them, because they are all on slightly different levels. There are absolutely no flat floors or passageways in the entire place. We took lots of pictures although the place is very dark since virtually all of the windows are covered with perforated woodcuts which are very ornate.
From the house we continued into the guy’s museum, for lack of a better term. Alex Jordan, Jr. was a compulsive collector and hoarder and his strange efforts are clearly displayed in this section. He has a collection of wooden ship models from all over the world which are installed in a gigantic room some four stories high with a enormous plaster sculpture of a toothed whale locked in combat with an equally enormous octopus. The whale is about 150 feet long and has a big open maw with a partially broken-up whaleboat resting on his tongue. The ship models are arranged along a long spiral ramp that goes around the sculpture a couple times. The ship models do not seem to be of a particular era or type. I guess the owner wanted to be fair so there are WW I battleships, 17th and 18th century sailing boats, junks, Chinese galleys, WW II Navy vessels and almost every type of other big ship imaginable. This same portion of the tour has his extremely large carousel (nobody gets to ride) with a terrific assortment of fantastic mounts like tigers with human faces in the mouth, twin mermaids pulling undersea carriages, dogs, pigs, rhinos, unicorns, knights in armor and a few horses. The carousel is surrounded by enormous music machines which operate automatically with everything from triangles and piccolos down to tympani struck by air and steam-driven actuators. The lighting is very ornate with some 200 chandeliers on the merry-go-round. This portion of the tour also has extensive collections of dollhouses, model airplanes, lots of music machines of a size I have never previously considered, an underground half-scale village with all kinds of shops, an amazing collection of devices which seemed to be associated with advertising diamonds that operate when you push a button, a big collection of model circuses and circus trains, an assortment of electric typewriters and adding machines, china, fancy glassware and paperweights, furniture and almost any other form of collectible stuff you can imagine.
The third portion of the tour takes you through something called the Organ Room which really isn’t an organ room, per se. There are huge, ornate organs in there but the rest of the room consists of steam engines, generators, large wooden clocks all located around long, serpentine walkways leading the viewer through the room. One enormous steam engine in the room has a propeller attached although it is installed in a masonry well preventing it from turning without breaking up the block. There are two more miniature carousels in here with dolls mounted on fanciful creatures. The mini-carousels are more than 20 feet high and maybe 40 feet across. There are not adequate descriptors in my vocabulary to express how strange this collection is.
After about 4 hours of wandering through these massive collections of stuff, we finally emerged into a quite beautiful Japanese Garden where we sat for a bit resting our feet from the long tour. The Japanese garden is gorgeous. It has two nice waterfalls that kept getting obscured by foreigners who I hope do not think all Americans are as strange as Alex Jordan.
We hopped back into Charlotte and headed back towards our campsite near Wisconsin Dells. We ate at Paul Bunyan’s (ribs and chicken on the menu today) and got back to our campsite in just enough time to change clothes and head a mile or so away to the stock car races. The crowd here seemed quite different than the Indiana crowd we sat with back at Twin Cities Raceway Park in North Vernon, IN. We did not see anybody missing all their teeth nor any persons with locating ankle bracelets that allow the authorities to keep track of the wearer. We had another three hours of fun watching the locals bend up their sheet metal before calling it quits for the evening and returning to the Invader. It was a great day.