If, as is proper, I announced my topic to begin with I’d likely lose (and understandably so) many a reader. So I’ll not tell, and thereby discourage, you from considering a subject usually left to tourism promoters. Being honest ‘bout it, my keenest interest in visitors would be as curiously attired moving targets. 

Wasn’t it Twain who stood an age ago on the banks of the sacred Ganges where India’s more fortunate dead (if there is such a condition) were cremated? Yes, it was Twain who after observing for some time remarked he’d seen all of that he cared to see, unless he could pick the participants. 

Judging by that, Twain was my kind of visitor.

Having lured you this deep I should cough up the dratted topic so I’ll have a slightly clearer conscience, though somewhat late comes that for me. Never mind. 

The subject, now’s your chance to run, is museums. 

Hard to expect such a topic, especially since our north country is a bit shy museum-wise. If overlooks count we could count as somewhat more museum worthy. But a plaque (assuming there is one) falls far short of museum stature. 

Many a near-around community along with counties has a museum of some sort. As a guess I’d suppose the Park Point maritime affair is well known. I’m sure tourists go away with a sure appreciation of the fixed and folding stock anchor types.

There are some pits on the Range that can be gawked at amid bits and parts of mining equipment. Oh, and one for the bus line that birthed and spread on the Range, at least I think that still stands in Hibbing, along with a high school that’s almost a museum itself. 

Go here or wander there and you might very well come upon a museum of some sort dedicated to someone or thing others thought important enough to hold in memoriam. Or maybe they didn’t know what to do with a lot of stuff and concluded calling it a donation for tax purposes was a swell solution. I don’t desire being cynical, but questions arise. 

In the past I’ve said mixed things about Dorothy Molter’s establishment in Ely. Glad it’s there, but I find it pointlessly dead in its removed location. Things such as that are impossible to reconcile. Also, what doesn’t work well for me may be fine for others, thus leaving my critique with little purchase.

Back to Twain quipping about participants, I can’t escape the connection between museums and tourists. 

The thought seems to be that if the visitor can be slowed down and lured inside they might buy a card or book or something to drink and then remain long enough to fall in love with whatever and spend yet more on lodging, food and drink. 

After a very little while I find tourists as targets a more appealing prospect than as eaters, lodgers, buyers of T shirts or as museum goers.

But love ‘em we do. Split Rock is a true biggie. In terms of draw, the Rock ranks up there with heavy hitters such as Science and Industry or the Field in Chicago, each pulling more than a hundred thousand visitors each year. 

As a sixth grader I got a good education regularly visiting Science and Industry. These big museums exist to present general knowledge along with specialized content such as Bushman or U505.

Unlike specialty locations in the north country or the big general knowledge institutional museums there is a specific museum I’ll recommend as an experience (not living or recreational) museum. I mean the Rising Museum in Warsaw. 

The Rising or Uprising refers to populace revolt directed at Nazi occupiers late in the war. Losing to the western Allies, the Nazi ‘s were blessed by having the eastern Allied force be conveniently cooperative. 

For whatever reasons (you’d need lots of time to go through the positions) the Soviet Socialists (our eastern Allies) allowed the Nazi’s ample time to destroy Warsaw. (Similar in Soviet purpose to the earlier massacres at Katyn intended to weaken Polish resistance and culture.)

That aside, what makes the Rising Museum experiential? T

o see that we have to put away the notion of clearly explained exhibits. The Rising, starting with a schoolroom and evidence of children living in the war zone, does a reasonable job of bringing up a facsimile of what life would have been like with rubble everywhere and people independently going about tasks related to survival or military action. 

When I first visited the museum it was, I’d say, rather more experiential than now. I suppose there were complaints or simple improvements made to clean and clear the visitor experience of wandering in half light among and between objects and displays that were often bewildering. Why is this here? Oops, don’t trip on that. How does this belong? 

Imagine yourself in a city during an uprising. A museum making deliberate confusion gives a sense of survivorship as you grope along.

In a city with so many civilian and partisan deaths more and more free spaces became graveyards earning end-of-war Warsaw the title City of Crosses. Where death was everywhere around you a person begins to feel the importance of spiritual and religious comfort. 

Observing what many Poles called the Sacrifice of the Holy Mass led the mind away from the present. A helmeted soldier stopping in an empty café to play on an abandoned piano was as much part of survival as firing a weapon. 

What acts or words, after all, could equal what a survivor felt coming across the bodies of civilians rounded up by Nazis in the Wola district and then executed? A few dozen in a basement, a hundred burned inside a church, a single body executed on a street. 

The puzzle is too huge, while overhead Polish pilots in English bombers help drive the enemy out. Pilots who were later persecuted by the Soviets who helped start the war. 

Make sense of this, any of it. The museum dares. A little confusion felt visiting is but the merest scent of massed deaths we do not wish to see.