SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE 83
Wisconsin dive bar apocalypse, three ways.
THE PLYWOOD PALACE
It’s hard to say how many people live in Moquah, an unincorporated community within the town of Pilsen (pop. 216), though my guess would be somewhere between 12 and 24. Here in the far northwestern corner of Wisconsin, amidst endless rolling farmland and miles of ATV trails, there are a few weather-worn houses, a Catholic church, a town hall, and the most infamous dive bar in all of the Midwest. For years I had heard whispers about the Plywood Palace, the nickname for what was once called simply “Moquah Bar.” In photographs, the place appeared to be a plywood hovel with no running water and minimal electricity, decked with dollar bills and forsaken panties, and owned and operated by a hermit known as Bud. “Definitely a must see! Just for the experience! You won’t regret it!” said one reviewer, who continued: “HOWEVER JUST get BEER or something that’s served PACKAGED! & Use the bathroom BEFORE visiting!”
It was mid-July when I arrived in Moquah, the afternoon before the last day of the Lumberjack World Championships. In the dirt parking lot were a handful of Harleys and a mud-splattered UTV with a coonhound panting in the passenger seat. Waving a greeting to the aging bikers pounding Busch cans at the picnic table, I stepped around the errant cinderblocks and inside the Palace walls, which were not made of plywood but even cheaper OSB board, and seemed ready at any moment to collapse in a strong breeze. It took a couple seconds of adjusting to the dimness to take in all the details: a canopy of some 500 dollar bills; walls of worn-in bras and underwear Sharpied with come-ons or warnings (“THE END IS HERE,” “CALL 4 THE RIDE OF UR LIFE”); dozens of empty cans littering the cracked concrete floor. Elsewhere, a broken jukebox, a trash-strewn foosball table, and a man of maybe 75 slumped silently in the corner, looking rather like a frame from an old Tarkovsky film.
“Hi!” I squawked to the old man, who grunted softly back. Avoiding ice and glassware, I ordered a can of High Life; in the absence of running water, or so I had been told, Bud would bring a water bucket from home with which to “wash” the dishes, which he’d dry on his shirt. This had been going on for roughly 50 years now, though these days the Plywood was only open 16 hours a week (Friday and Saturday afternoons til roughly 9 pm). “How long have you owned the place?” I asked, having heard through the grapevine that Bud had inherited his father’s bar after it burned down. “1975,” he muttered, staring miserably past me. “You stay open through the winter?” I wondered, examining the uninsulated walls. “Yep,” he answered curtly. “What do you do for heat?” I pressed on, our “conversation” now feeling tantamount to elder abuse. Bud pointed a shaky finger towards a space heater in the corner. “Heater,” he grumbled, beaming a clear-cut psychic message for me to kindly scram.
Relenting my interrogation, I scuffed around in painful silence, eyeing the shelves cluttered with burnt-out lightbulbs, ancient tins of cashews, and dozens of yellowed newspapers reporting decades of losses of the Minnesota Vikings, to which Bud had added his own handwritten captions (“CRY-BABY QUEENS,” “CHOKE AGAIN 2017,” “MORE CRYING 2018”). Reviews had stressed that the bathroom should at all costs be avoided, but it was an hour back to Hayward with no rest stops in sight. Out the back and towards the woods, I strode grimly towards the wooden assemblage leaning at an obtuse angle, which unavoidably appeared to be the women’s outhouse. (There is no men’s outhouse at the Plywood Palace; instead, fellas drop trou and commune with the great outdoors.) Inside the dark and tilted hutch was a scene from a horror movie, cobwebbed and swarmed with flies, with an aroma best left to your imagination. Back inside, a new arrival was tormenting Bud with questions. I headed out on Highway G, glad to have come and gladder to leave.
WHITE CREEK TAVERN
“Is America’s Most Disgusting Dive Bar in Wisconsin?” asked the first headline that popped up when I searched for “White Creek Tavern,” which struck me as a bit of a trick question. A study on binge-drinking from 2024 named Wisconsin home to 7 of the country’s 10 drunkest cities, with Green Bay, Eau Claire, Appleton, and Madison rounding out the top 4. If there’s a most anything dive bar in America, my money’s got it landing somewhere in the Badger State. In any case, the 92-year old tavern in the unincorporated community of White Creek (formerly called Cascade) has been open every single day since 1933. Once a bustling stagecoach stop between Friendship and what’s now Wisconsin Dells, with hotels, general stores, a dance hall, and a waterfall-powered gristmill, the village’s decline began in the early 20th century when it was bypassed by the railroad, and later, State Highway 13. A 2005 article from the Adams County Historical Society ended with this epilogue: “Today White Creek is a bedroom community for residents who are employed elsewhere. Mobile homes, two taverns and some newer houses sit within a block of County Highway H along with decaying remnants of some of the original buildings of the promising village of Cascade.”
Lorenzo and Alice Smith opened one of those two taverns just before the end of Prohibition in fall of 1933 along County Highway H, where it still stands today. With its weathered wooden facade and rusted Hamms and Schlitz signs, the White Creek Tavern looks more or less the same today, at least from the outside. You could say its reputation as “Adam County’s most legendary dive bar” is somewhat based on its long and storied history, which is, shall we say, evident just about everywhere you look. What I mean is that the White Creek Tavern is a hoarder’s bar. “You need to walk into the place with a nonjudgmental perspective on the condition and hoarding,” wrote one online reviewer. “Walk in, breathe through your mouth and sit at the bar and talk with Wayne. He is a sweet guy and has had quite an interesting life. You do sit and wonder why? How can this be?” In photos of the place, it is barely possible to make out a bar at all beneath the mounds of trash piled shoulder-high from wall to wall. A meme posted to the White Creek’s fan-run Facebook page in 2020 (“official fan page for one of Wisconsin’s last great historical taverns”) overlaid a photo of the bar with a caption: “IF YOU’VE GOTTEN A GOOD DRUNK HERE, IT IS GOING TO TAKE MORE THAN CORONAVIRUS TO BRING YOU DOWN.”
I’d been told by the bartender of the nearby Famous Garage Bar to ask Meryl at the White Creek about her photo albums. “Tell her Tracy says hello,” she said, then added optimistically: “It’s not too hot today, so the smell won’t be too bad.” Still run, if not quite maintained, by the Smith’s three children, the White Creek Tavern claims the oldest family-owned liquor license in the state; Meryl, the only daughter, wasn’t said to be a talker, but knew more about White Creek’s history than anyone in the county. From the empty parking lot, the place seemed dubiously open, but I entered anyway just after 3 pm. The smell hit me immediately — sour, ancient, and borderline fleshy, like an animal was decomposing somewhere just out of sight. Stacked, just like the pictures, shoulder-height and wall-to-wall were mounds of decades-old juice cartons, styrofoam takeout containers, brimming garbage bags; behind them, a mid-century Schlitz clock (somehow still working) and a poster commemorating the bar’s 75th anniversary in 2008. Sitting behind what remained of the bar, which had space for three stools where photos once showed seven, was an unsmiling, gray-haired woman, apparently astonished to see anyone at all. I passed on Tracy’s greeting, but her expression didn’t change. “I don’t know anyone from the Garage Bar,” she insisted. “I don’t leave town hardly at all.”
Meryl disappeared into the back room to grab my can of High Life, and I surveyed the scene: a broken CD jukebox, calendars from the 2000s, and dozens of black-and-white photos cluttered behind the bar. We sat in silence for a while when she returned — me nervously drinking, Meryl half-watching the game show on TV. “I heard you have some interesting photo albums,” I said after some time, and Meryl’s face opened into what you could almost call a smile. From somewhere under the bar, she retrieved a stack of albums whose greasy pages seemed to have been turned thousands of times. “This was the old mill,” she said of the first photo. “This was my father outside of the dance hall. And right there in the back row,” she went on, pointing to a blurry face in a group portrait outside the tavern, “that’s me.” She identified her aunts and uncles, grandparents, and two brothers, who some reviews had mentioned. (“One guy talks to ya, the sister just stares in silence, and the older brother looks like a maniquin in the corner.”) It was hard to grasp the idea that any person in the photo, staring gravely from another world entirely, was alive at all, much less here beside me watching Family Feud.
Page by page, Meryl took me through the albums — years of party flyers (one from 1984 advertised a tug-of-war tournament, bikini contest, and a four-hour performance from the “Drinking Man’s Band”), ancient photos of her siblings, and more recent ones from the 2000s in which a ruddy, flannel-clad man blew out candles on a cake whose icing spelled out “WAYNE.” A middle-aged, tan woman entered, the second customer of the day. “I stop by as often as I can to pay her company,” she whispered as Meryl scuttled off to fetch a Miller Lite. “It used to be her and Wayne here together every day, until he lost both of his legs to diabetes. I go to visit him at the rehab when I can. He gets lonely.” I lingered there a while longer, talking about the old times. Then I headed north on Highway 13, and Meryl stayed.
TOM’S BURNED DOWN CAFE
From the ferry, the peak-fall foliage of the mainland faded to a blur of red and green and gold as we made the 25-minute passage across the bay to the Apostle Islands. The group of islands in Lake Superior off the northern tip of Wisconsin is protected as a national lakeshore: land mined for copper and timber in the early 20th century, now returning to its wild, primitive state. All but one of the 22 islands are presently uninhabited, home instead to white-tail deer, black bears, bald eagles, and coyotes who live among the sandstone sea caves, marshes, and old-growth forests. Only the largest, Madeline Island, is open to private ownership, with a winter population that hovers around 300, expanding in the summer to 2,500 or 3,000. Upon the yearly freeze-over of Chequamegon Bay, island visitors are whisked across the lake by windsled, a propellor-driven vehicle like a hovercraft with skis, until the ice is thick enough to safely drive a car across.
Madeline Island is the spiritual center of the local Ojibwe bands known as the Lake Superior Chippewa, who called the place Mooningwanekaaning (“Home of the yellow-breasted flicker”). Centuries before the Europeans arrived, the Ojibwe were guided by Kitchi-Manitou (Great Spirit, the Creator of all things, or my own favorite translation — the Great Mystery) to migrate westward to the place “where food grows upon the water.” Their journey brought them to present-day Bayfield, gateway to the Apostle Islands, where wild rice grew in the marshes along Chequamegon Bay. For hundreds of years uninterrupted, they made Mooningwanekaaning their home, hunting and fishing, harvesting leeks and berries, tapping maple trees and stripping birch bark for canoes.
Then French fur traders and missionaries arrived in the 17th century to set up trading posts and churches in La Pointe, the only village on the island’s western shore. The American Fur Company’s La Pointe post was headed by Michel Cadotte, a trader of French and Ojibwe ancestry; his wife was Ikwesewe, or Madeline, the daughter of the local chief for whom the island is named. After the 1842 Treaty of La Pointe ceded Lake Superior Ojibwe lands to the United States in exchange for hunting and fishing rights and reservations, most of the Madeline Island Ojibwe resettled to the mainland. Today the island runs on summer tourism, though it’s the only place in Wisconsin not on a reservation with bilingual signage in both English and Ojibwe. “Gidanamikaagoo Mooningwanekaaning,” read the sign as the ferry slipped into the dock. “Welcome to Madeline Island.”
The visitor’s brochure I’d picked up at the Bayfield terminal advertised the island’s many art galleries, wine bars, and kayak rentals. But it was halfway through October, the end of shoulder season, and what remained open for business were two restaurants, a grocery store, and Tom’s Burned Down Cafe.
The name of Madeline Island’s only bar is slightly misleading — there is no food at Tom’s Burned Down Cafe other than peanuts, although there is a Tom, whose place did indeed burn down. After the bar formerly known as Leona’s was set ablaze in 1992, allegedly an act of arson by a disgruntled employee, owner Tom Nelson — longtime Madeline Island resident and notorious thorn in the side of the local chamber of commerce — built a new bar from the ashes. Well, perhaps “built” is a stretch. You might describe Tom’s Burned Down as a vast, open-air junkyard partially covered by a tent repurposed from Big Top Chautauqua. The mismatched chairs were excavated from the island dump; the marble bar top was reclaimed from Bayfield’s Pureair Sanatorium. Every other surface not embellished with birch branches is nailed with boards painted with one-liners ranging from alcoholic to anarchic, with quotes from Hunter S. Thompson (“I never advocated drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity, but they have worked out well for me”) to Alexis de Tocqueville (“ALL THOSE WHO SEEK TO DESTROY THE LIBERTIES OF A DEMOCRATIC NATION OUGHT TO KNOW THAT WAR IS THE SUREST AND SHORTEST MEANS TO ACCOMPLISH IT”). Rising from a rusted mast in the middle of the compound is a painting of a phoenix emerging from the flames. It all gives the impression of what the Duluth News Tribune once called Madeline Island’s “post-apocalyptic Margaritaville.”
The gray sky threatened rain at any moment as I entered Tom’s Burned Down, past signs that read “SORRY WE’RE OPEN” and “FOR SALE BY NEIGHBOR.” Immediately it was clear who were the tourists and the locals — the former huddled in hiking gear beneath palm frond umbrellas, while the latter gathered at the bar dressed in greasy workwear, giant dogs napping at their feet. A few had just finished their shifts at the marina, shrink-wrapping the island’s sailboats for winter storage. Others, with their gnarled white dreads and wind-burnt faces, had more of a “chronically unemployed” vibe. “Dude, you gotta see this video,” a stoned 30-something in Carhartt coveralls drawled to his friends. “This dog saves a baby from getting snatched up by an eagle.” “Dude, that’s totally AI,” replied his leathery companion. The crestfallen stoner took a swig of Spotted Cow, one of the few bottles left of the season’s dwindling supply. “Man... for real?” he sighed. “Coulda fooled me.”
One could be tempted to make assumptions about the ideological spirit of a remote island dive bar in the far north of Wisconsin. (An F-150 parked beside me on the ferry had decorated its rear windshield with a decal symbolizing their family as two parent-sized assault rifles and three child-sized Glock 17s.) Those people might be surprised to notice “BLACK LIVES MATTER” painted large enough outside of Tom’s to be seen from satellite, or the Palestinian and rainbow flags flapping in the breeze, or to hear the songs requested from the place’s rowdy regulars. “I wanna hear some SWV right now!! Let’s GOOOO!!” hollered a shaggy fellow who had climbed behind the bar, now gyrating under a sign that read “LET’S MAKE GETTING IN TROUBLE FUN AGAIN!” The bartender’s earrings dangled as he poured the bar a round of shots requested by the hippies — equal parts Blanco, Reposado, and pickle juice, which wasn’t nearly as disgusting as it seemed. No one seemed to notice that it had begun to rain as the tourists and regulars danced and chain-smoked to the sounds of Whitney Houston, Ludacris, and “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl).”
“You guys don’t even know what this song’s really about,” hiccupped the stoner.
“It’s about... Brandy,” said the fisherman beside him.
“No, dude. It’s about way more than that,” the stoner insisted.
“It always is,” the fisherman replied.
