Minnesota: Pelican Pete the worlds largest pelican

🦦 The Great Otter Debacle (and How I Almost Became a Divorcee in Minnesota)

Minnesota, bless its heart, is not a state that goes out of its way to keep you entertained on a long drive. Miles of flat farmland, the occasional grain silo, a sky so enormous it starts to feel oppressive. We’d been pushing westward along Highway 94 and then up through the central part of the state, and I had quietly decided that something needed to be done about the monotony before someone — probably me — lost the will to live.

My plan was roadside attractions. America does these brilliantly, and Minnesota, it turns out, is absolutely heaving with them. The state has a long and proud tradition of erecting enormous fibreglass animals in car parks and calling it tourism. There are giant cows, giant loons, giant prairie chickens, and at least one giant ball of twine that people apparently drive hundreds of miles to photograph. I was, quietly, in my element.

My first target — and I hadn’t mentioned any of this to Karen and the children, wanting to unveil it as a triumphant surprise — was a genuinely extraordinary thing: a 150-foot otter, reportedly standing in a park somewhere in a town called Fergus Falls. Now, Fergus Falls sits in Otter Tail County in west-central Minnesota, a town of around 14,000 people that was founded in 1857 and takes its name from a cascade on the Otter Tail River. It is, by all accounts, a perfectly pleasant Midwestern town. It is not, however, a small one. And I had no idea where the park was.

What followed was twenty minutes of increasingly aimless driving through residential streets, past churches, past a Dairy Queen, past what appeared to be the same roundabout three times. The family, of course, had no idea what we were looking for. Karen was asking questions I was deflecting with the masterful vagueness of a career politician. The children were beginning to sense that something was wrong with Dad, which, frankly, is not an unusual state of affairs.

Here is the thing about being a 60-year-old Englishman driving around an unfamiliar American town looking for a giant otter: you cannot ask for directions. I am aware, intellectually, that asking for directions is a perfectly reasonable and sensible thing to do. I am aware that no one would have judged me. I am aware that the entire situation was entirely of my own making. None of this mattered. I would sooner have driven into the Otter Tail River than walked into a petrol station and said, “Excuse me, could you tell me where the enormous otter is?”

Fergus Falls gradually receded in the rear-view mirror. The otter remained unfound. I stared forward with the calm, dignified expression of a man who had absolutely intended this to happen. Karen looked at me. I said nothing. This was, I think we can all agree, one of the closer moments our marriage had to reaching a premature conclusion.

🦢 Pelican Pete and the Town That Takes Its Bird Very Seriously

I am not, however, a man who gives up easily on important cultural missions. One failed giant animal is merely a setback. And so I pointed us south-west towards a town called Pelican Rapids, which sits in — you won’t be surprised to learn — Otter Tail County, about 28 miles south of Fergus Falls. The town was established in 1872 and sits along the Pelican River, which flows through a landscape of glacial lakes and rolling prairie. It has a population of roughly 2,500 people, and it has committed to its pelican theme with an enthusiasm that deserves genuine respect.

As you come into Pelican Rapids, the bird is everywhere. Not real pelicans — though American White Pelicans do actually migrate through this part of Minnesota, which is presumably how the town got its name in the first place — but pelicans rendered in fibreglass, concrete, painted wood, and every other material known to man. There are pelicans on signs, pelicans outside shops, decorative pelicans of every conceivable size lining the streets. It is, in the most affectionate possible sense, completely barmy.

The town itself is small and genuinely pretty. The Pelican River runs right through the centre of it, and spanning the river is what I can only describe as a rather lovely suspension footbridge — the sort of elegant, slender thing that looks like it belongs in a rather more famous location but sits here quite happily, connecting one side of a small Midwestern town to the other. We walked across it, which felt like the right thing to do.

Just downstream from the bridge, the river drops over the Mill Pond dam, a weir that sends a continuous white curtain of water churning into the pool below. And standing at the base of that dam, looking out over the river with the quiet authority of a bird that has genuinely earned its place in the world, is Pelican Pete.

Pete was built in 1957 — the same year, incidentally, that the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, though I suspect the people of Pelican Rapids were more excited about their pelican — and he stands fifteen and a half feet tall. He is made of concrete, painted white with an orange beak, and he has apparently been watching over this stretch of the Pelican River for the better part of seven decades. He is officially designated the World’s Largest Pelican, which is exactly the sort of title that sounds made-up but which I choose to take entirely at face value.

What makes Pete genuinely better than most of the giant roadside animals we’d encountered in Minnesota — and we’d seen a fair few by this point — is the dam. The constant rush of water behind him gives him a sort of dynamic energy that a fibreglass ox standing in a car park simply cannot match. He looked purposeful. He looked like he belonged. The children were briefly impressed, which, at this stage of a long American road trip, was about all I could ask for.

Karen, to her enormous credit, did not ask why we had spent forty minutes lost in Fergus Falls looking for something I still refused to name. I did not volunteer the information. Some things are better left as minor family mysteries. The otter, wherever it is, remains at large.