Wabash Wingding!

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Happy July, citizens! Steve Penhollow here. What follows is another example of my Day Trips column in which I spend a day in a neighboring locale and try to do everything there worth doing and experience everything there worth experiencing. My subject this time around is Wabash, which should definitely be part of your summer fun plans, even if your summer fun plans only involve an old lawn chair and a beer-filled cooler. Wabash has cold beer and chairs and about 1000 other great things:

https://whatzup.com/places-food/city-wabash-welcome-to-wabash

Do You Dare Enter The Salt Cave?

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“First Person” is a new Whatzup column in which I try a relatively new pastime or regimen and report back to you, whoever you are, with my findings, such as they are. Incidentally, the salt cave in question looks nothing like the above photo. It is, in reality, a cozy and charming place. See below.

By Steve Penhollow

My doctor had just told me to cut back on salt.

And here I was about to wallow in it.

But I am nothing if not a daredevil. Which is to say, I am nothing if not the sort of person who thinks visiting a salt cave makes him a daredevil.

Since I hit middle-age, I have tried to get out of my comfort zone more. But salt is firmly ensconced in my comfort zone. In fact, my doctor believes I need to kick salt out of my comfort zone and extend a dinner invitation to salt substitute.

But the salt you sprinkle on already salty foods because aging seems to have neutralized your taste buds has nothing to do with salt cave therapy.

What? You’ve never heard of salt cave therapy? Have you been living in a cave? A saltless cave?

I’ll tell you this: A salt cave is not the same thing as a salt room. There are a number of so-called salt caves in Indiana that are really more like salt rooms.

For the real deal, you need to travel to Warsaw and visit Himalayan Salts & Scents.

Salt cave therapy was allegedly invented by a 19th century Polish doctor who noticed that salt miners didn’t suffer the same respiratory problems as other sorts of miners, which made those other sorts of miners insanely jealous. Luckily, they were too winded to seek revenge.

Thanks, in part, to that Polish doctor, the accidental act of breathing in fine salt particles is now purposefully called dry salt therapy or halotherapy. You may feel some skepticism about its efficacy, but chances are you are a firm believer in wet salt therapy, even if you aren’t aware of it. Who among us has not gargled with salt water, soaked in a salt bath or used a salty nasal rinse?

Who, I ask you?!?!?

Sorry, I got carried away.

Himalayan Salts & Scents is your one-stop shop for everything having to do with therapeutic salt.

Therapeutic salt is as different from table salt as Brie is from Cheez-Its. Pink Himalayan salt has beneficial minerals that table salt has been cruelly robbed of. Luckily, table salt is too inanimate to seek revenge.

Peg Custer, the owner of Himalayan Salts & Scents, is also a therapeutic salt wholesaler. She sells salt to people who want to sell salt.

To misquote the late Sy Sperling, Custer is not just company president; she is also a client.

Years ago, Custer knew a friend who carried smooth orbs of pink Himalayan salt in her pockets to treat hip pain.

“I thought she was cuckoo,” Custer confessed. Confessed to me, not to the friend.

In time, Custer, who was then a bookseller, started experiencing her own hip pain caused by the sort of arduous tasks that common are to the profession of bookselling: putting books in boxes, lifting the boxes, lifting large reference books about the history of boxes, lifting boxes full of large reference books about the histories of boxes and large reference books, etc.

In desperation, she bought smooth orbs of pink salt to carry in her pockets. And they worked.

The benefits of pink Himalayan salt go beyond breathing it in. Himalayan salt devotees believe it emits negative ions, especially when heated.

If you are as old as the same hills that I am as old as, you probably remember the old Harold Arlen standard that went, “You’ve got to ac-cent-chu-ate the positive and eliminate the negative.”

That’s good advice for life, but it’s not good advice for ions.

Negative ions are the accentuate-able ions. Only a Negative Nelly would doubt it. They are molecules charged with electricity. And there is compelling research to suggest that they convey real health benefits although perhaps not as many benefits as some devotees claim.

So I was forced to conclude that doing almost anything with salt is good for you as long as it doesn’t involve swallowing a lot of it.

What makes Custer’s cave unique is that it was made to resemble a natural salt cave. Without the mining.

Custer’s cave has four thousand pounds of salt in it. The walls are made of salt. Some of the furniture is made of salt. There is crushed salt in the ceiling and on the floor. There is a bed made of salt.

There are salt domes to place your feet on.

Not only does it resemble a natural salt cave; it also evokes an oceanside resort and an Old West set on a Hollywood studio backlot.

All these seemingly disparate elements combine to create a very pleasant place to be for an hour.

There are high-end deck chairs, toys for kiddos and a salt “beach” to feel between your toes.  

And let me tell you about that bed: You might think a bed made of crushed pink salt would be uncomfortable.

But the minute you lie down on it, you start thinking about launching a bedding company to compete with Purple. I’m calling mine Pink.

If you go with a group of people, you will probably fight them for access to the bed.

Luckily, the salt bed seems like it would be a good place to convalesce from injuries.

So what’s my final verdict? After an hour in the salt cave, I not only was breathing better but I was euphoric.

I am being serious here. All my middle-aged ailments were quieted, and I felt giddy for hours afterward.

I believe the salt cave works exactly as advertised.

Take that with a grain of salt if you must.

(Link to the original column: https://whatzup.com/places-food/himalayan-salts-amp-scents-ltigtwarsaw-salt-cave-gives-rustic-)

First Person: All the Rage Rage Rooms

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“First Person” is a new Whatzup column in which I try a relatively new pastime or regimen and report back to you, whoever you are, with my findings, such as they are.

By Steve Penhollow

If you walked into my basement office right now, you would naturally assume that someone had ransacked the place.

You might even peg me as the sort of person who gets so angry that he flips tables.

But I have never flipped a table in my life. I have bumped into plenty, but never flipped one. I’m just a slob; a passive destructive force.

Rage is something I have never been able to accumulate much of. So I wondered what sort of emotions I might experience at All The Rage, a series of “rage rooms” that opened in Fort Wayne in August 2019.

The rage room phenomenon started in Japan about a dozen years ago, according to Wikipedia.

For a fee, you don protective accoutrements and enter a fortified room where you are given license to break things such as printers and pitchers to relieve stress and tension.

Also, rage, presumably.

I would go so far as to say that rage rooms are safe spaces for rage instead of from rage, even though that’s the sort of seeming contradiction that caused computers to self-destruct on Star Trek.

As a clumsy person, my dream is to pay a fee to enter a room where I am prevented from breaking anything accidentally for at least an hour.

Nevertheless, I decided to visit All the Rage and determine if I could tap a hidden well of intentional destructiveness.

I brought my friend Jaclyn, who seems even less capable of accumulating rage than me. So incapable is she of accumulating rage that it really makes me quite angry.

Not really.

I am grateful to Abby Greutman, co-owner of All The Rage, for reassuring me that the dictionary definition of rage is not the same as the “rage room” definition.

“You don’t have to be angry to rage,” she said. “I am not an angry person either. I am probably the last person in a room who will get angry. But I find it to be a really fun letting go of responsibility.”

A Letting-Go-Of-Responsibility Room? Now you’re talking!

Jaclyn and I chose the Let’s Rage package, which provided us with 26 random items to break and one large item that we could choose.

In homage to a certain scene in the movie “Office Space,” we chose a printer.

“We hear ‘Office Space’ referenced often,” Greutman said.

Even I can admit that I have gotten angry in the past at errant printers and copiers.

If you have old stuff at home that you are angry at, All the Rage allows you to bring it in and exact revenge on it.

But you should exercise good judgment.

For example, you might prefer to give up your grudge against those old bottles of Nitroglycerine in the shed.

All the Rage gets its items from area thrift stores with which it has forged agreements, Greutman said.

Some rage rooms across the country allow patrons to tape a photo or drawing of someone they are angry at onto an object slated for destruction, but All the Rage doesn’t want to get into that.

“A lot of rage rooms do allow patrons to do that,” Greutman said. “But we have a strict non-violence-against-others policy.”

Before you enter a rage room, you have to dress up in what Greutman calls “marshmallow suits.”

In our marshmallow suits, cut-resistant rubber gloves and protective headgear, we looked like we were “about to go make some meth,” according to Jaclyn.

Let me assure you that we have no first-hand knowledge of that activity.

Patrons can choose whatever music they want to listen to while they are raging.

I tried to find a funk playlist on Spotify, but inadvertently chose a slow jam mix instead.

Word to the wise: You will laugh too hard to be able to swing a bat if you try to destroy property against an aural backdrop of Luther Vandross.

Speaking of (baseball) bats, that was my weapon-of-choice. Jaclyn chose a golf club.

Maybe it is because we’re wimps, but we quickly came to realize that breaking things is harder than it seems.

Nothing we threw against the wall broke.

Some items even resisted several initial bat whacks.

Jaclyn found her greatest satisfaction in jackhammering shards of things that I had already taken a crack at.

We had a good time, but I must be unflinchingly honest here and reveal that I wasn’t able to shake a certain ambivalence.

I felt bad breaking cups and dishes that were undeniably ugly, but which still had decades’ worth of use in them.

In fact, I asked Greutman if I could take an item home intact: a ceramic gingerbread house of the sort that might (and will again) adorn a table at Christmas.

What can I say? I am a softie.

For people who actually have some steam to work off, All the Rage provides a perfect outlet.

(Link to the original column: https://whatzup.com/places-food/first-person-smashing-success-fort-wayne-rage-room)