House on the Rock
Posted by Robin Hemley on April 12, 2009 1:25 AM
I've been passing signs for The House on the Rock for years, driving between Iowa City and Grafton, Wisconsin to pick up my daughters from my first marriage. As with "Rock City" in Tennessee, the signs for the attraction simply seem a part of the landscape, blending in and easily ignored. But today, I decided to stop and I coaxed Olivia and Isabel, at first reluctant, to see exactly what the House on the Rock is. I thought it might be some precariously balanced piece of architecture, worth little more than a glance. We thought we'd spend ten minutes in the place, but spent more than two hours. It's filled with eccentric museum quality collections: Faberge eggs, antique cash registers, Asian memorabilia, carousel horses, Titanic and other shipwreck ephemera, and the world's largest carousel. But the most amazing collections were the calliopes and mammoth mechanical orchestras, at least a dozen, playing Ravel's Bolero, selections from the Nutcracker, and Beatles songs. I've probably never seen a more astounding collection of collections. And the mechanical fortune tellers seemed pretty accurate, too. One ancient machine told both my daughters they were "hot stuff" while another machine declared me a "hopeless dreamer" and the machine testing one's sense of humor labeled me "brain dead." A little mean-spirited those mechanical gods, kind of Greek in their petulance, but then who can blame them? They're not on Olympus but in a house on a rock in southern Wisconsin.
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