It's a surreal sight I won't forget: The erstwhile leader of the Soviet Union tossing back drinks with his entourage in a Lindsborg tavern as bemused locals observed. Like me, Mikhail Gorbachev had come to town because of the local chess school, which is affiliated with the Russian chess deity Anatoly Karpov. The culmination of the chess school's "Chess for Peace" event was a program that featured Gorbachev speaking at the local Bethany College, after which he decided not to call it a night, but instead, to sample Lindsborg's nightlife. As far as I could tell, that consists of a single bar, the Ol Stuga. Being the journalists that we are, photographer Victor Cobo and I reflexively retired to said bar, unaware of Gorbachev's presence, and got a good looking-over from Secret Service types before we entered. I passed near his table and had a close look at the famous port-wine stain, which seems redder in person. Strangely, for a former dictator, he seemed a bit shy about all the attention and soon left.
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I don't want to come off as some snooty cosmopolitan. After all, I'm basically a product of standard-issue, middle-class American suburbia. Nevertheless, my six-day stint in Lindsborg, population 3,300, was the longest stretch of time I'd spent in a place so small and isolated in a long time. Walk 10 or 20 minutes from any point in town, and you're standing in the middle of a deserted, echoing field. At one point, I wanted to buy a cell phone charger, but no store stocked them. It was also difficult to find a place to eat, especially in the evenings. The first few nights of my stay, the hotel in which I slept was totally deserted. One night I had a dream in which it seemed I had lived in Lindsborg for a long while, yet I knew nobody.
After I concluded my reporting, I returned to my home in a large metropolitan area. A couple days later, I went shopping at Trader Joe's and bought a jar of olive tapenade—great on a ham or turkey sandwich—among other items. Things felt back to normal. But when I was putting the tapenade away in the cupboard, I saw the jar of Swedish lingonberry preserves I had brought back from Lindsborg. My hand froze, and I stared at the preserves, feeling as if I was alone in the middle of a large, empty land.
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In any other small town in Kansas, if you want to buy seeds or something like that, you head on down to the ol' co-op—the cooperative. In Lindsborg, however, you need to go instead to the Kooperativ. Lindsborg bills itself as "Little Sweden, USA," and residents don't intend to let you forget it—leastwise, not when it comes to signs, names of businesses, and such. There are Välkommens and Hej Dås plastered in homes and stores all over town. Spoken Swedish isn't much in evidence, however. And the signs generally come across as cultural remnants—reminders, perhaps, of how grandma used to talk. Still, the pretense of Swedishness helps maintain Lindsborg's status as a town apart. It's certainly nothing like any of the towns around it.
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