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HELL-RAISING MAN

While pastors came and went and people spoke out of turn and the Darwins wept for their mother, Roger Hedlund, the county assessor, took note of a whole series of farm sales— the Dickmeier, Tingvold, Halvorson, Kreuger, Pfleiderscheidt, and Schroeder farms, a considerable piece of real estate, sold to Dixon Holding in Nashville, and it troubled him though he was in the middle of a heated conversation with Mrs. Tollefson who was incensed at her tax bill. She said, “You, sir, are dumber than a boxful of hammers if you think my taxes went up by 40 percent in one year. If you were any slower, you’d be in reverse. Look at this. Look at it.” And when he bent down to read the bill closely, she said, “Your toupee looks like a cat that a truck ran over,” and gave it a yank, but it was his own hair, not a toupee, and she said, “Who did your hair? The undertaker?” And in the heat of the moment, he forgot about the farm sales until the subject came up in a planning commission meeting a week later, and a couple dozen citizens showed up to protest the Dickmeier sale, arguing that the World’s Largest Pile of Burlap Bags, which the Dickmeiers had built up over the years, which had gotten Lake Wobegon into the Guinness Book of World Records, should be protected as other noted sites such as the World’s Largest Ball of Twine in a nearby town had been.

The Dickmeiers had begun building the Largest Pile in August 1965, out of thanksgiving for having survived the great tornado that struck to the north and west. A sunny day in Lake Wobegon, but debris was carried by high-altitude winds and out of a clear blue sky a barn door came flying in, whirling like a top, and a 1957 Chevrolet picked up from behind Helen’s Hi-Top Lounge in Fergus Falls, which fell to earth missing the Dickmeiers’ house, with nine children in it, by inches, judging by the fact that the TV antenna from the roof was found impaled in the car’s left rear tire. The garden where the car hit was where the Largest Pile was begun. It incorporated a wooden crate that had contained 24 bowling balls and lifted off from the Breckenridge train depot in the twister, eventually splitting open and raining bowling balls on the town, one of which bounced on the loading dock behind Ralph’s Grocery, flew a hundred feet in the air, and landed in the cemetery on the Dickmeier plot—a message from Above not to be ignored. The memorial Pile was raised, but of course, with time dedication flagged, and none of the Dickmeier children took an interest, and the grandchildren regarded it as a freakish absurdity, and so the land was sold.

Unfortunately, the Largest Pile had got onto the Internet as a source of phlogiston, a gaseous element believed to relieve kidney stones, and so vanloads of people suffering from painful urination made a pilgrimage to the Dickmeiers, which persuaded them to put up a fence and charge admission. The neighbors complained that many of the pilgrims, on their way home, stopped to relieve themselves in the ditches and woods. So the sheriff blocked the road, allowing access to residents only. He was sued by the Dickmeiers, and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled, in World’s Largest Pile v. Sheriff Burnquist, that a presumed purpose of public urination does not justify restriction of the freedom of movement, and the day the ruling came down, the freedom to pee was celebrated by hundreds in the Supreme Court plaza. People opposed to the sale didn’t trust the lawyer for Dixon Holding, who promised that the Pile would be preserved. (It was leveled a few months later.) “What’s all the land going to be used for anyway?” asked Roger. The lawyer said, “Recreational acreage.” It had been a long meeting and everyone was exhausted and they adjourned.

But Roger googled the Dixon Trust and learned that the owner was a trucking tycoon named Dick Dixon who owned a fleet of 2,000 semis and a lot more. In 2018, Mr. Dixon had gotten a bee in his bonnet to run for Congress in Tennessee, challenging a right-wing Republican, C. J. Buzzhardt, in the primary. C. J. wanted to close the borders to immigration, require the wearing of flag insignia by every American over 18, institute the memorization of Bible verses in the public schools, forbid State Department employees to learn foreign languages, and require every federal employee to take a loyalty oath while hooked up to a polygraph. It didn’t leave a lot of room for an opponent to run to the right of him, but Mr. Dixon did some intelligence work and got a video of Congressman Buzzhardt in a Starbucks, saying, “I’d like a latte light with soy milk and a sesame croissant, please, Stephanie,” and he spent a million bucks to run that video on cable and Facebook along with a country band singing, “We don’t need a latte light to fight for what we know is right, let’s send a man from Tennessee to Washington, D.C.” The way the congressman said “soy milk” and “sesame croissant” sounded definitely effeminate.

Congressman Buzzhardt was a fighter. He did some scouting around and found a video of Mr. Dixon at a charity ball, singing “I Feel Pretty” while wearing a blond wig and a summery dress and pearls. It was a fundraising stunt in exchange for someone donating $40,000 to a fund for muscular dystrophy, but he sang the song in a lovely falsetto with real feeling, and Buzzhardt ran the video with a deep voice saying, “Do you want a patriot or a patty-cake representing you in Congress?”

It was a tight race that went to a recount, and Mr. Dixon won by 160 votes out of 180,000 cast, so Buzzhardt entered the general election as an independent and he hit hard on the flag, the Bible, and true-blue Americanism, and secretly distributed pictures of Mr. Dixon wearing a blue surgical mask and head covering and gown. It went viral in the district, with the caption “Why does Nurse Nancy want your vote?” Dixon put out press releases pointing out that he was visiting his old aunt in the hospital and didn’t want her to catch his cold, but explanations carried no water compared to the visual: he looked unmanly—he wore the gown with shorts underneath so it did look like he was wearing a dress—and to drive the point home, the video played “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” and he was whipped soundly and that was the end of it.

For a Bible-toting pro-life fiscal conservative, Mr. Dixon had an interesting personal life. Three marriages and a couple of romances with bosomy singers with big hair working his Eldorado casino in Florida and a half-ownership of the cable channel NSFW and a personal friendship with the outlaw country artist Johnny Rogers. Quite a portfolio. Plus trips to Morocco for purposes unknown and 87 e-mails recently deleted to a woman named Hot Pants.

Dixon and Johnny had met by pure chance years before in the private-jet terminal at Nashville International airport, Dixon waiting for his Gulfstream, Rogers for his Bombardier, both headed for LA, and Dixon mistook him for Kenny Rogers, which Johnny didn’t mind at all, and when Dixon found out he was the guy who wrote “Born to Raise Hell,” he was thrilled. “My favorite song,” he said, and he sang a couple verses.

I got sick of this old town,

No excitement to be found

Now everybody’s telling stories

How I trashed the lavatories

When I walked by the fire barn

I saw the box with the steel arm

I broke the glass, I rang the bell

I raised hell.

You can see my writing on the wall

In every lavatory stall.

Set off sirens during Mass,

Threw a rock through the stained glass.

I done my job very well

I was born to raise hell.

Nobody in Nashville had done a song in praise of vandalism until then, and it was an odd song for a conservative Republican to love, but he really did, and they sang the last verse together:

One last time I saw your face

I had to rip up the place

Shot the lights on every pole,

Emptied every garbage can

You took up my time but not my soul,

I am a hell-raising man

Dixon’s plane was delayed and Rogers said, “Hell, fly with me,” so he climbed into the Bombardier with Rogers’s road manager, Sam, and the band, the Trashmen, and they sat knee to knee all the way to LA and drank whiskey and talked politics, and Rogers wrote a song.

I used to be a Democrat

But I grew up and got over that.

No longer to the left I bow,

I’m a Republican now.

We’ll fight Iran and the Muslim axis,

Lower confiscatory taxes,

We’re all Republicans now.

Nuts to Europe and the rest of the world.

Got a hold of the trigger and our finger’s curled.

Give us steak, I’m done with kung pao,

I’m a Republican now.

Dixon came along on Rogers’s Hell-Raising Tour in 2008 after his No. 1 hit, “Driving Truck,” with the famous refrain: “Only thing I’d rather do than driving truck, And that’s walk up to you and say, Let’s—.” It was banned by every radio station in America, and that drove it to No. 1 and it stayed there. It inspired thoughtful opinion pieces in the Times about cultural decline, and when Johnny Rogers did his tour and played every racetrack in America, that was the song the crowd was waiting to hear, and every time he sang the refrain, 10,000 people shouted the rhyme and every woman raised her shirt. Tanker trucks of beer were sold, and the air was thick with illicit smoke. Every concert got in the news for the sheer number of public indecency arrests, complete strangers having sexual intercourse in the parking lots. When Dixon was asked about the song during his congressional campaign, he said, “If you don’t like liberty, then you’re living in the wrong country.”

Liberty was the bond between the staunch Republican and the man who sang about vandalism, and when Roger Hedlund read about the Keep America Truckin’ park on Dixon’s Facebook page, he guessed it wouldn’t be a wildlife refuge. The figure of 2.2 million visitors came from an architectural firm Dixon had hired and also the fact that the two high-rise hotels would be sited just behind Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility church and next to Bunsen Motors. (“There’s our buyer,” Clint told Clarence. “We’ll become a parking lot. It could be worse.”) Roger talked to some of the neighbors of the Tingvold, Halvorson, Kreuger, Pfleiderscheidt, and Schroeder farms that Dixon had bought, and they admitted they’d been offered awfully good money for their property and they were weighing the offers.

“It occurs to me,” Roger told Clint, “that if we don’t move quickly, this town may become suddenly extinct.”

Clint said that if Mr. Dixon offered good money to buy Bunsen Motors, he, Clint, would not have to think too hard or long before accepting it.

“What about Lake Wobegon? What about the rest of us?”

“Most Americans think Lake Wobegon is fiction,” said Clint. “What’s the harm in selling a piece of fiction?”

Clearly, the Dixon project was on the move. While the town had an epidemic of bad behavior to deal with.