The Viking Altar

 

1.

Terwilliger hosts a blog named Wacky and Weird Roadside Attractions.  The blog has 720 followers and, even, claims a couple sponsors:  some advertising, links to an energy drink and a hotel booking site.  Terwilliger hasn’t posted any new content for a couple of weeks.  I wonder why he’s been off-line.

2.

The last posting on Wacky and Weird Roadside Attractions is this:

Noerenberg Gardens (Wayzata, Minnesota) – Beer built this place: Noerenberg Gardens on Lake Minnetonka’s Crystal Bay is all that remains of the palatial mansion of the German emigrant, Frederick Noerenberg, the owner of Grain Belt Brewing Company.  After the wealthy brewer died, his mansion was razed and an ornamental garden built on the site.  The grounds are often used for weddings and there are beautiful flowers in ornamental beds, day-lilies along the parking lot, and paved trails that lead to a pier with a Chinese-style gazebo thrust out into the lake.  Cool breezes blow from the lake and there are Adirondack chairs in the gazebo that invite the traveler to recline and rest and enjoy the view.  A tea house, locked on the day of our visit, sits on the footprint of the old mansion and an informative plaque shows pictures of the gloomy old place – it looks haunted for sure!  Free admission.

The preceding entry says:

Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home (Sauk Centre, Minnesota) – Although mostly forgotten today, Sinclair Lewis was a best-selling novelist born in this small central Minnesota village.   You may have heard of some of his novels which include Main Street, Babbitington, and The Jungle, a famous muck-raking book about the meatpacking industry.  Though his books were fierce, Lewis came from genteel background as shown by this small cottage near the infamous Main Street described in the novelist’s book of that name.  The place has flowers and, even, a white picket fence.  The home itself is dusty with lots of old pictures, old-fashioned furniture, a sewing machine, and much memorabilia about the Noble Prize Winner’s life and achievements.  Admission: 8 dollars.

The entry appears before another much longer post about Charles Lindbergh’s childhood home located in a Minnesota State Park near Little Falls.

3.

Terwilliger’s learned about the Viking Altar by accident.  The place isn’t listed on any recent maps (real places never are) and internet directions are confusing and inconsistent.  As it happened, Terwilliger had spent half-a-day at a State Park on the upper Mississippi visiting the old farmhouse where the great aviator, Charles Lindbergh had been born and lived as a boy.  As a teenager, Charlie slept on a cot on the home’s porch, a narrow, somewhat abject-looking, bed to which the boy retreated when his parents (whose marriage was troubled) were battling.  Charlie’s dog slept on the floor beside him and he sheltered on the porch in all weather, even when it was very cold.  In the barn building, an early automobile that Charlie built with his own hands is on display.  A hundred yards from the farmhouse, the Mississippi river flowed past the Lindbergh property, donated to the State by the family in 1931 after Charlie had become very famous for his trans-Atlantic flight, indeed, much more famous than his father who was a State Senator.  

When Terwilliger went back to his car, his cell-phone’s battery was low and, so, he looked around for a road map.  At last, he found an old map in the glove compartment of his vehicle - the map was wrinkled and coffee had been spilled on it, not once but several times, and some of the creases had torn so that when he opened it on the trunk of his car, the mid-day sun shone through the tears.   Terwilliger thought that he would tour the Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home later in the day.  Sauk Centre where that attraction was located was about 45 miles away on back roads that crossed an uninhabited part of the State were there were many pothole lakes and marshes and the highways ran on causeways over the soggy terrain.  

To the east of Sauk Centre, the map was marked to show the Viking Altar.  This point-of-interest was placed alongside an unnamed lake foetus-shaped lake.  Terwilliger thought he’d stop at that attraction on his way to the Sinclair Lewis home.  So, he got into his car, an old red Honda Civic, and drove from the State Park onto a two-lane highway that snaked across the marshy terrain, making great bends to avoid the lakes and swamps crowding around the road.  Town were few and far between, mostly miserable places with medieval-looking Catholic churches and big clinker-brick rectories with polished granite monuments nearby dedicated to children murdered by abortion.  Dairy farms with old cavernous barns stood at the end of meandering gravel lanes.  On the low ridges, pine trees grew above narrow terraces on which corn had been planted.  

Terwilliger plugged the phone-jack into his car’s console and powered up his cell-phone.  Map Quest didn’t recognize the “Viking Altar” as a location in this area.  For some reason, the point-of-interest marked on the State map from 1992 had vanished.  A governor with a handsome blonde wife greeted visitors to the State using the map – Terwilliger didn’t recognize the man’s name and assumed that the politician was long dead.  The old map was vague as to the site’s location and Terwilliger reached Sauk Centre without finding the place.  He turned around and asked the counter-girl at a Casey’s General Store where he bought gas about the Viking Altar.  “Never heard of it,” the girl told him.

A river flowed along the eastern edge of the town and there was small roadside park next to the concrete bridge spanning the stream.  A monument encumbered a grassy rise next to the river and a couple of Asian men were fishing from the sod banks overlooking the water.  The Asian men didn’t understand Tewilliger’s inquiry.  The monument was inscribed with words about an expedition of French explorers who had camped in this area hundreds of years ago.  There was nothing about a Viking Altar.  

Terwilliger typed queries into his cell-phone’s internet connection, sitting in his car with the door open because the sun was warm and rapidly heated up the inside of his vehicle.  He found some grainy pictures of a big boulder, a couple of newspaper clippings about an “ecumenical service” held at the Altar in the late sixties, and an entry in an index called “Viking Monuments in North America” that said that the stone with strange grooves and carved cup-shaped indentations was located on a hill near Snake Lake.  Terwilliger located Snake Lake, a few miles away just across the line between Stearns and Todd County.  The lake was said to be in Little Sauk township. 

Terwilliger drove to Little Sauk Township.  He followed a few deeply rutted and pot-holed gravel roads along section lines and came to a low hill above the expanse of water.  Old inlets at the lake had become marshes and were full of tall, lance-like reeds and hillsides, inaccessible beyond swamps and meandered streams flowing in deep, muddy incisions cut into the peat, were speckled with dark funereal pines.  The township roads intersected in lonely places in the country and there were no farm houses, no sheds or barns, just a patchwork of shallow lagoons and stony hillsides.  If people had lived here once, they had deserted this land for better, less desperate places.  None of the roads ventured too close to the lake – it was as if the cold body of water, twitching with little waves that flicked up and down like a cow’s tail swatting flies, was perilous in some way, dangerous, and to be avoided.  

At the bottom of a hill, the lake was hidden behind the ridge studded with boulders, Terwilliger found a faint track, just a cartway, running toward the pines on the high ground.  The land was enclosed with a net of barbed wire and electrical fence behind which some cows were cropping grass next to a marshy seep.  A small sign was posted: “No Trespassing – Viking Altar Historic Site: key kept in Wayzata at Lake Minnetonka.  Call for tours: (a phone number)”  Terwilliger was intrigued.  He rattled the iron gate but it was padlocked shut.  The track ran for a couple of hundred yards before vanishing amidst the copse of small, beleaguered pines on the hillside.  He took his Moleskin from his pocket and wrote down the phone number.  

4.

When he reached Sauk Centre again, it was after five p.m. and there was no one at the Sinclair Lewis Interpretative Center. The small cottage stood among other similar buildings, small houses with porches under ornamental fretwork and protected by neat picket fences.  Terwilliger went on the home’s porch and copied down information from a State Historical Society plaque posted on the wall.  Some bright red flowers were gathered together in a tight mass in boxes running along the edge of the wooden porch.  Bumble bees were buzzing among the flowers.  Terwilliger tried the door but it was locked.  Shading his eyes, he peered through the dusty window.  Shadows marked some nondescript furniture and reflections ran across the glass in picture frames.   Terwilliger thought he saw an old sewing machine mounted on a table where rays of late afternoon sun were peeking into the house.  

The neighborhood was residential but completely still.  The sidewalks along the streets gleamed white in the sunlight but no one was outside.  An alley ran behind the houses and Terwilliger saw garbage bins next to the asphalt.  In a backyard, a chained dog barked.

5.

A few days later, Terwilliger went to Wayzata and called the number he had written in his Moleskin.  A woman answered after a half-dozen rings.  Terwilliger said that he wanted to see the Viking altar.  The woman sounded as if she were half-asleep.

“Are you some kind of Viking?” she asked.

“No just a curious person.”

“Do you want to play Viking?”

“Not that I know of,” Terwilliger said.

“You must know how to get to the gate,” the woman said.  Then, she called a man’s name, telling him that there was “someone who wanted to honor the altar.”

A man’s voice, then, sounded on the phone.  “Can I help you?” the man asked.

Terwilliger repeated that he wanted to see the Viking Altar.

The man said that he could arrange for a visit.  He gave Terwilliger instructions as to how to reach his home located a quarter mile away.

Terwilliger drove along a curving road next to the big lake.  Some of the homes were old cabins, very small and even decrepit, located in the thick woods along the water.  Other places were enormous, with big boat houses and sloping concrete launches, high walls, and, even, guest houses.  The address where the owner of the Viking Altar lived was an old cabin, a building with a ramshackle open porch and big fieldstone chimney.  The lake’s presence here wasn’t open water but a yellow swamp pierced in places with blue-green lagoons.  A new addition to the cabin, all glass windows and redwood balconies was cantilevered out over the marsh.  Next to the new structure, a big retaining wall had been heaped up with cyclopean blocks of red granite ashlar.  Below the cantilever of the addition, an above-ground pool stood chest-high next to the muck, the round vat full of still water and the color of turquoise. 

A middle-aged man came from the dark, hunched cabin part of the house as soon as Terwilliger parked on the narrow street at the address.  The man was bald and built like a weight-lifter.  But he was barefoot and Terwilliger saw that his toes were long, with ill-kept nails, and very pale skin.

The man beckoned that Terwilliger sit with him on cast-iron chair drawn up next to a cast-iron table.  The lawn furniture was atop a patch of soft-looking green grass running along the sheer edge of the retaining wall.  

“Watch yourself,” the man said.   “I don’t want you to fall off the wall.”

“I’ll be careful,” Terwilliger said.

“Do you see the blocks piled here to make the wall?” the man asked.

“I do,” Terwilliger replied.

“Very historic,” the man said.  “Salvaged from the Brewer’s mansion when they razed it to the ground.  I bought the blocks and used them to make this wall.”

“It’s quite a wall,” Terwilliger observed.

“There’s a county park, a garden where the mansion was once located.”

“Really?”

“It’s important to protect historical artifacts,” the man said.  “That’s why I bought the land around the Viking Altar.”

The man said that, in fact, he paid a caretaker to protect the site on Snake Lake.  He told Terwilliger that kids sometimes busted through his fence and vandalized the altar and that he had spent a lot of money sand-blasting off an inscription on the boulder that read Class of 21.

“It’s well worth visiting,” the man said.  “A true Viking altar from the old pagan days, probably around1200 or so.  When the Vikings were here and explored Minnesota.”

The man said that Terwilliger should pick a date and time and he would, then, communicate with his caretaker to arrange to have the man meet him at the gate and provide him access to the altar.  

“What do I owe you?” Terwilliger asked.

“Nothing.  We’re working on getting the site approved as a Federal Historical Monument, but there have been hitches, delays.  I’m just pleased you’re willing to honor the Altar.”

Terwilliger thanked him.

He used his cell-phone to inspect his calendar on his phone and picked a date and time to meet the caretaker at the gate.

Terwilliger looked down from the rampart of the big, red-granite wall.  A woman was standing between the glass walls of the cantilevered addition protruding out over the blonde and blue swamp.  The woman’s eyes were very bright and she seemed to glare at him.

“My wife said that you’re neither a Viking or someone who wants to play Viking.” 

“That’s true,” Terwilliger said.

The woman in the glass pier overlooking the marsh turned her back to him.

“I’m sure you will find the altar very wonderful,” the man said.

6.  

Terwilliger looked up the Viking Altar on-line.  He concluded that it was very unlikely that the site had anything to do with Vikings.  A hundred years ago, second-generation Norwegians often claimed to have discovered runestones and Viking swords on their farms in central Minnesota.  The runestones were inevitably hoaxes and the so-called swords usually turned out to be fragments of farming equipment. Terwilliger had already composed the first line of his blog note: The Viking Altar belongs, not to the history of real events, but to the history of credulity.  He was proud of that description.

The care-takers’s Suburban was parked in the grass next to the gate.  Terwilliger stopped on the stub of gravel bending off the section road toward the hillside above the lake.  It was clear day, cool, during deer season.  Now and then, Terwilliger heard the report of a rifle firing.

After parking his car, Terwilliger walked down the cartway to the Suburban.  The gate was already open.  On both sides of the gate, barbed spirals of wire twisted across the meadow and the metal fence behind was studded with electrical conductors.  The care-taker got out of the Suburban.  He was a man in his early sixties, dressed in hunting clothes, camouflage with an orange vest.  The man’s eyebrows were grey and bushy and he had a crumpled sort of face, features all mixed together.

The care-taker introduced himself as “Knute.”  Two younger men were standing behind the big SUV apparently urinating.  The younger men approached.  

“This is Kimmy and Terry,” Knute said.

Kimmy and Terry seemed to be identical twins, although one of them was marked by a pale scar running across his cheek, possibly a brand of some kind so that people could tell him apart from his brother.  Both men were wearing hooded sweatshirts with a big Minnesota Vikings football decal on their chests.  Terwilliger noticed that the Suburban’s rear bumper was marked with Viking stickers, the profile of tough-looking bearded man wearing helmet with horns.  The twins had pudgy faces with little eyes dark like spent rifle cartridges.

“We’ll take you in to visit,” Knute said.  The twins guffawed as if Knute had made a joke.

“I’ll follow you,” Terwilliger said.

Knute shook his head.  “No, it’s best that we drive behind you.  That’ll work better.”

Terwilliger nodded his head and went to his Honda Civic.  He drove through the gate.  The Suburban followed him at a distance of about two car-lengths.  Knute stopped the Suburban and, so, Terwilliger slowed to a stop.  The two men got out and carefully locked the gate behind them.

About three-hundred yards from the gate, Terwilliger came upon an oval patch where the grass was trampled down and cut by wheel marks.  A small fire-pit was nearby, inside a soot-blackened ring.

Terwilliger saw in his rear-view mirror that Knute was signaling that he should park his car.

The hillside ahead was dotted with dark evergreens, small trees standing against the slope.  Above some grey boulders were strewn along the top the ridge.  A foot trail zigzagged up the hill.  Some deciduous trees were interspersed among the evergreens and their leaves were mostly fallen so the trees showed as abstract dark skeletons standing in the knee-high grass.

Knute pointed to the trail and they hiked another hundred yards up the hill to where the wind was coursing over the ridge.  The lake spread out below them, fringed with reeds and amber-colored marshes.  The body of water was shaped irregularly, without beaches, or even clearly marked shorelines. Whitecaps unsettled the grey surface of the lake.

The Viking Altar was a house-sized glacial erratic, split open by a couple of old oak trees.  The boulder was granite, flecked with mica, and possessed a lap-shaped hollow.  Knute led Terwilliger up to the stone’s lap and pointed to some cup-shaped boreholes, four of them, spaced in a parallelogram formation.  Some indented grooves ran down the face of the rock beneath several flattened shelf-like steps chiseled into the granite. 

The twins were a little to the rear, carrying big burlap sacks.  They didn’t seem interested in the altar and stopped twenty feet from it, opening the sacks and removing their tools to display them on the sod.

“We think the Vikings put posts in the round holes, probably for a tapestry shelter over the elements,” Knute said.

“Elements?”

“The sacrificial elements,” Knute answered.  “They would have inserted a pole, likely with a cross made of iron here –“

He pointed to a smaller, more crooked-looking indentation in the rock.

“I thought they were pagans,” Terwilliger said.

“Well, Christianity had many pagan elements in 14th century Norway,” Knute replied.

A white plastic bucket stood in the leaf-litter next to the lower table-like surface on the boulder.  Terwilliger noticed a sack of lime, some bleach in small jugs, and some scrapers with serrated metal edges.  

Knute said:  “Kids come out here and paint all sorts of vile shit on the altar.  They’ve got no respect.  We have to clean off the graffiti.”

Terwilliger saw some initials still faintly marking the boulder and letters that seemed to spell MURDER.

Kimmy and Terry carried a paper sack up to where Terwilliger was standing next to Knute.  They removed a bratwurst, blackened and split apart from the grill.  One of them held a bottle of Aquavit.

“A picnic?” Terwilliger asked.  

“We generally sacrifice a sausage and have a couple shots before a ritual,” Knute said.

“So there’s a ritual?”

“Oh, yes,” Knute said.

“So how was the altar used?”

“We can show you,” Knute said.

One of the twins had a deer-rifle slung over his shoulder.

Knute saw that Terwilliger was eyeing the weapon.

“We have permission to hunt the land,” Knute said.  “I haven’t got my limit yet.”

Terwilliger nodded.  A couple of big black birds skimmed overhead.  The land was empty and, except for the wind sweeping waves from the surface of the lake, nothing moved.

“It works like this,” Knute said.  “They cut up the sacrifice.  The hands went up there –“

He gestured at one of the shelf-like alcoves cut into the boulder.

“They put the legs down here,” Knute gestured toward a fissure in the rock above some parallel grooves running down the face of the granite.  Terwilliger saw a tarry patch of grease at the base of the boulder under the grooves.

“So are you thinking a human sacrifice?”

“Yes,” Knute said.  “And the torso with the head still attached – it went up there.”

Terwilliger looked to where he was pointing and saw a step in the stone, also marked with some streaks of black grease.

The twins spread out a blanket on the grass.  They set some black rubber straps on the blanket.  The straps were about 18 inches long and marked with a semi-circular red marking that looked like a picture of a slice of watermelon.

“What are those?”  Terwilliger asked.

“Combat-grade tourniquets.  You can buy them on-line.  Military-grade for hemorrhage control.”

One of the twins opened a small green satchel and removed a foot-long blade with serrations attached to a green, folding plastic handle.

Knute said: “That’s a bone-saw.”

“What is that for?” Terwilliger said.

“I told you: it’s a bone-saw.”

Terwilliger looked around.  He didn’t see any deer.

 

7.

I heard this story at a tavern with dock-side tables on Upper Fox Lake near Avon in Stearns County.  After I returned home, I checked the internet and found Terwilliger’s blog Weird and Wacky Roadside Attractions.  It has been inactive for several months.