Chronillogical

Dr. Evermor’s Fore­vertron¹ is a sculp­ture park in Bara­boo, WI, about an hour’s drive from Madi­son. It is a place we went to and boy we are sure glad we did!

John and I drove up to the Fore­vertron from Chicago back when I was still living in the Mid­west, some­time in Sep­tem­ber 2009. We took a bunch of pic­tures during our visit and have been mean­ing to write a post about the place ever since, but for one reason or another we’ve never quite gotten around to it. So, now that I’ve for­got­ten pretty much every­thing about our visit, I’ve finally decided to com­plete our little write-​up.

See that? That’s me! I was the driver for the day, since I was the only guy with access to a car. John sat in the front, replete with all sorts of gear (binder, pen, etc.) for Get­ting Work Done. This was going to be a Pro­duc­tive Jour­ney for him, since he had a good 3–4 hours of pris­tine free time each way.

He then promptly fell asleep, having stayed up the pre­vi­ous night so he could finish a Chronil­log­i­cal comic on time. Good work, John!

On the way up, we stopped for lunch at Culver’s.² John tried his very first taste of Culver’s frozen cus­tard and was largely unim­pressed. What a buz­zkill, that guy!

As we approached the gallery, I told John to keep a look­out for the proper turn-​off. John, for his part, saw sev­eral large metal sculp­tures all along the side of the road, right in the vicin­ity of where we were expect­ing the Fore­vertron to be. I didn’t see them myself, mostly because my atten­tion was focused on pre­vent­ing our Honda Odyssey from flying off the road and explod­ing into a flam­ing mass of twisted plas­tic and steel.

Inter­est­ingly, John utterly failed to men­tion these sculp­tures he saw—the sculp­tures along the side of the road that he saw right where we expected the sculp­ture park to be—the sculp­ture park that we were specif­i­cally look­ing for, out in the middle of rural Wis­con­sin. He failed to men­tion these sculp­tures, and instead we ended up wan­der­ing aim­lessly and self-​consciously around a small res­i­den­tial area for 10 or 20 min­utes. We finally found the Fore­vertron, tucked behind a scrap and sal­vage shop.

John even­tu­ally told me that he saw the sculp­tures when we were dri­ving along, and that he failed to bring them to my atten­tion. When I asked him “Why? Why did you do such a thing?” his only defense was that he had just assumed that elab­o­rate scrap-​metal sculp­tures were a big thing up in this neck of the woods.

As I men­tioned, the sculp­ture park was tucked away behind a scrap sur­plus store. After wan­der­ing around for a few min­utes, we saw a mass of metal jut­ting up from behind a group of trees in the dis­tance. It was an aus­pi­cious sight, Indi­ana Jones-​esque. We had stum­bled across the park.

As you might expect from a sculp­ture park, there were delight­ful sculp­tures strewn all about. Really, I can’t do it jus­tice with just words. In fact, I think this was the main reason both John and I dragged our heels so long on writ­ing this post: too intim­i­dat­ing a task to try and describe the place with mere prose. So instead, I highly rec­om­mend you check out the Flickr pho­to­set I made with all the pic­tures we took.

Below is a small sam­pling of the pic­tures we took, just to give you a taste of what was in the park.

And the end of the visit, we ran into Dr. Evermor’s wife. She was extremely kind and told us all about the park; I don’t remem­ber the details very well, but I dis­tinctly recall her speak­ing about the unex­ploded ord­nance they have to deal with around the site of the park. Some­thing about a live cannonball.

And so, with a sigh, we hit the road once more. The drive back was very much like the drive up, and we lis­tened to Radi­o­lab most of the way.

And upon arriv­ing home, John and I agreed that one of these days we’d need to return to Dr. Evermor’s Forevertron.