world’s largest ball of rubber bands, and so on. The world’s largest ball of stamps is in Omaha, Nebraska—it was collected by the residents of the orphanage known as Boys Town.
I visited the ball of stamps twenty years ago, on a road trip with a girlfriend during which we crisscrossed the country seeking out roadside attractions. Our relationship was falling apart, and so we sought a geographical cure. We visited Nebraska’s Carhenge, an exact replica of Stonehenge built out of junked cars, and South Dakota’s Corn Palace, a massive structure with a facade made primarily of corn kernels. We also visited several of the world’s largest balls, including both the world’s largest ball of twine rolled by one person in Darwin, Minnesota, and the world’s largest ball of twine rolled by a community in Cawker City, Kansas.* We broke up soon after, but we’ll always have Cawker City.
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There’s an Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” It’s one of the only poems I’ve managed to commit to memory. It ends like this:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -
Several years ago, a plank in reason broke within me, and I dropped down and down, and hit a world at every plunge. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but precedent is cold comfort when you feel the funeral in your brain. As I struggled to recover, or at least slow the plunge, my thoughts drifted back to the road trips I’d taken, and I decided to try a geographical cure. I drove to see the world’s largest ball of paint, which ended up kind of saving my life, at least for the time being.
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I’m fascinated by roadside attractions because they are one place where we see the work of huge systems intersect with the work of tiny individuals. We have so many roadside attractions because we have so many roads—our interstate highway system is built to move lots of people across vast areas of land.* Once you’re on an Interstate, it’s easy to stay on it until you need gas or food. To tempt you away from the cruise-controlled straightforwardness of the American highway requires something extraordinary. Something unprecedented. The world’s largest ______.
It’s the system that makes the roadside attraction necessary, but individuals choose what to make and why. Consider, for example, Joel Waul, creator of Megaton, the world’s largest ball of rubber bands. When first constructing the ball, Waul wrote on his Myspace page, “First, have a definite, clear practical idea, a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends. Third, adjust all means to that end. —Aristotle.”* For Waul, the definite and clear and practical idea was to make the world’s largest ball of rubber bands, which would eventually come to weigh over nine thousand pounds. I’m not sure why I find it beautiful to devote oneself obsessively to the creation of something that doesn’t matter, but I do.
The world’s largest ball of paint is located in the tiny town of Alexandria, Indiana. Back in 1977, Mike Carmichael painted a baseball with his three-year-old son. And then they kept painting it. Carmichael told Roadside America, “My intention was to paint maybe a thousand coats on it and then maybe cut it in half and see what it looked like. But then it got to the size where it looked kinda neat, and all my family said keep painting it.” Carmichael also invited friends and family over to paint the ball, and eventually strangers started showing up, and Mike would have them paint it, too.
Now, over forty years later, there are more than twenty-six thousand layers of paint on that baseball. It weighs two and a half tons. It has its own little house, and every year more than a thousand strangers show up to add layers of paint to it. The whole thing is free to visit; Mike even provides the paint. He and his son both still add layers, but most of the painting is done by visitors.
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As a child, just as I imagined technological advances were driven primarily by the brilliant insights of heroic individuals laboring in isolation, I saw art as a story of individual geniuses.
Shakespeare or Leonardo da Vinci or whoever used their innate brilliance to expand the human landscape, and by studying the lives and work of these individuals, I