Spring Grove's Norwegians ride a Viking boat down Main Street during the Syttende Mai parade.
At first, the southeast Minnesota town of Spring Grove looks like any other town.
There’s a café, an antiques store and a park full of statues. But Spring Grove isn’t ordinary. It’s full of Norwegians.
In the park, two bronze men appear to be squabbling; they’re characters in a nationally syndicated comic strip written by a Spring Grove man 50 years before Neil Simon came up with “The Odd Couple.’’
Across from the park, there’s a goofy concrete troll with a "Belly by Budweiser" banner draped across its bulbous brown stomach. Tovar the Terrible, a 12-foot Viking, wields a bright-blue shield nearby.
Spend a few hours in Spring Grove, Minnesota’s first Norwegian settlement, and you’ll learn that, while Norwegians are proud of their heritage, they like to poke fun at it, too.
A plaque at the Ballard House antiques shop sums up the approach:
“O Lutefisk, how fragrant your aroma. O Lutefisk, you put me in a coma. You smell so strong, you look like glue, you taste yust like an overshoe. But Lutefisk, come Saturday, I tink I’ll eat you anyway.’’
They love their rømmegrøt, a butter-soaked cream pudding that should be called heart-attack-in-a-cup. But they’ve also given the world Spring Grove Soda Pop, made with cane sugar and in bottles, just as it has been since 1895, and in flavors that now would be called gourmet – cream, strawberry, orange, root beer, grape, black cherry and lemon sour.
We were in Spring Grove on Syttende Mai, or May 17, the day in 1814 when Norway declared independence from Denmark and adopted a democratic constitution. To celebrate, the gallery had put out a spread of rosette cookies, heart-shaped waffles with lingonberry spread and rye crackers with salmon, so we sampled and then went outside to watch the big parade.
On Main Street, the locals rolled by in a Viking boat with a red-and-white striped sail. Polka dancers from La Crosse’s Oktoberfest marched by, hoisting steins and blowing horns, and princesses from La Crescent rode an apple float. The emcee stood in the balcony of the log Syttende Mai Hus, commenting on the entries. Everyone waved Norwegian flags.
The Norwegians loved the high ridges and flat-bottomed valleys of southeast Minnesota, part of the Driftless Area that includes northeast Iowa and southwest Wisconsin. Just across the border in Iowa, Decorah also celebrates Syttende Mai. So does Westby, in the coulees southeast of La Crosse.
After the parade, we went into the Fest Building for lunch, piling our plates with rolle polse and varma polse – meatballs on lefse and dried beef on a roll – and krumkake, the dainty Scandinavian rolled cookie.
At the end of the line, we took cups filled with rommegrot, a porridge made of flour, butter, sugar and cream, but hesitated when one of the servers encouraged us to top it with more sugar, more butter and cinnamon.
“Go ahead, put it in, everybody will wait,’’ she said. “When you live in a cold climate, you have to put on some fat.’’
Norwegians don’t waver once they make up their mind. They’re world-class stubborn, so stubborn it has landed them in the Guinness Book of World Records.
When we were in Spring Grove last May, we stopped into the Bluff Country Artists Gallery. All those long winter nights made Norwegians good with chisels, paintbrushes and knitting needles, and the gallery features works from dozens of artists who work in the area.