Knee High by the 4th of July Read Online Free PDF Page B

the police tape?”
    His Poncherello-style reflective sunglasses were impenetrable as he grabbed the yellow tape from his trunk and strung it around the elm trees despondently circling the Chief’s former position. The empty stand the Chief had stood proudly on for a quarter century stood out like a tombstone. We had lost our leader.
    In this part of the state, erecting twenty-three feet of kitsch to honor a person, event, or creature was not out of the ordinary. In fact, if a person happened to be cruising around in space and looked back at Earth, and if the only discernible shapes from that distance were continents, oceans, and gargantuan statues, Battle Lake and its environs would stand out like a white-trash Stonehenge.
    There was a reason so many statues ended up in the area, and it was called tourism. The population of any Minnesota town situated near a lake (which is every Minnesota town) swells in the summer as hordes of white-backed men come to fish and drink, long-suffering women come to shop and drink, and kids come because they’re forced to. This built-in audience serves as the perfect justification for creating oversized replicas of everyday phenomena, a dioramic playground for Bob’s Big Boy’s fiberglass family.
    The tiny town of Battle Lake, population 747, had more to offer than Chief Wenonga, of course—there were the walleye honey spots, antique shops, an ice cream and candy parlor, cozy resorts, and bait stores—but it was its position at the center of a maelstrom of strange effigies that made it the crème de la crème of tourist stops. Oh, yes. The glorious and disturbingly sexy twenty-three-foot fiberglass statue of the Chief had just been the beginning. Eighteen miles to the west of the Chief lay the town of Ashby, where the world’s largest coot overlooked Pelican Lake. The ten-foot-tall concrete mud hen was so heavy that the wings had to be supported by a metal brace.
    Fifteen miles to the west and north of the coot sat Fergus Falls, where the world’s biggest otter kept an eye on the shore of Grotto Lake. He was forty feet long from his black nose to his rump of pure poured concrete. Vergas was farther east and served as the residence of a twenty-foot loon. North of that was the world’s largest turkey, twenty-two feet of fowl fiberglass, in Frazee.
    South and east of that, in the town of Ottertail, rested the biggest dragonfly in the universe. If you followed the back roads farther south, you’d end up in Alexandria, where you could get your picture taken between the welcoming fiberglass thighs of Ole Oppe, better known as Big Ole. He was a twenty-eight-foot-tall Viking, and although he was taller than Chief Wenonga, I think the Chief could take him in a fair fight. Driving northwest back toward Battle Lake through Vining, you would find everyday objects rendered colossal in scrap metal along Highway 210—a huge clothespin, a titanic toe, a supersized square knot. There was more, but you get the idea.
    Every bit of this deranged splendor was flaunted in or within sixty miles of Battle Lake, situated in Otter Tail County in west central Minnesota, a land unto itself where there’s one boat for every six residents. My three months living here had proven that Otter Tail County had all the makings of a Midwestern Bermuda Triangle, and the fact that Chief Wenonga had gone missing just underscored that notion.
    By the time Gary Wohnt had come full circle with the yellow and black tape, a crowd had gathered and two more police cars had pulled up, one county and one Battle Lake. Kennie Rogers was in the back of the Battle Lake car, behind the cage. When the driver failed to let her out immediately, she began pounding on the inside of her window. The crowd chuckled, but had the sense to do it facing away from her.
    “For heaven’s sake, didn’t your mama raise you right?” Kennie demanded of the young officer, once she was released. Her Southern accent was eternally puzzling, given that she