Hard Road (25 page)

 

 

"But he didn't," I said.

 

 

Jeremy said, "No. Because he was too kind."

 

 

"And Princess Ozma asked him to eat something because he was so hungry. And he said—"

 

 

Jeremy shouted, "He said it's no use. He already tried that and he just got hungry again."

 

 

In Quadling country a Toto look-alike contest was in progress. Yipping and yapping echoed off the Emerald City castle, waking Cynthia. She gazed around and blew a bubble. There were at least seven dogs that looked exactly like Toto. And also three basset hounds, several cocker spaniels, dachshunds and collies and a big Great Dane. Did their owners really think they'd win?

 

 

"How do the judges decide between perfect Totos?" I asked Barry.

 

 

"They have instructions to give prizes to all of them."

 

 

"Oh."

 

 

A green clown passed us, juggling green sparkling balls. A Tin Woodman on stilts walked by. There was a woman in a Munchkin costume selling doughnuts. Her doughnuts were piled on a stick stuck through their holes.

 

 

A medieval fair must have looked a lot like this.

 

 

A bulletin board held big digital photos of yesterday's Wicked Witch look-alike contest, one winner and three runners-up. I remembered the sign. The witch contestants had to be sixty-five or over.

 

 

In the distance the official Oz band played "Over the Rainbow."

 

 

"Would you believe," I said, "that song was almost cut from the movie?"

 

 

Maud said, "No, really?"

 

 

"I want lots and lots of popcorn, Mom," Jeremy said.

 

 

"Oh, gee, I don't know. It's just a little while before dinner—"

 

 

"Popcorn is good for you," I started to say. "It's whole grain and full of fiber." Then I stopped myself. Enough is enough.

 

 

"Your dad did a great job with the festival, Jeremy," I said.

 

 

"He sure did." Barry beamed.

 

 

A fanfare of trumpets sounded from the bandstand near the castle. Loudspeakers blared: "The balloon ascension is about to commence. Ladies and gentlemen of Oz, and miscellaneous visitors, your Wizard will soon ascend into the skies to cross the Deadly Desert." More trumpets.

 

 

Jeremy spotted the top of the green-and-gold balloon over the peak of the castle.

 

 

"Let's go!" he said. "Hurry up!"

 

 

Barry said, "Okay, okay. But it'll take quite a while for him to get airborne."

 

 

"Hurry up!"

 

 

Laughing, we strolled toward the castle. The P.A. system announced again that the Wizard was about to leave.

 

 

The tiny "square" in front of the castle was full of people and many more pressed in as we moved closer. The balloon was a beautiful thing, metallic gold stripes alternating with the bright green. Beneath it was a wicker basket. The balloon lurched woozily, not yet fully inflated.

 

 

A little man dressed as the Wizard of Oz stood in the wicker basket, smiling and waving. Dorothy was nearby, holding a tiny wicker handbasket with Toto inside. She was waving good-bye.

 

 

The Wizard said to the crowd, "I have put off going away to perform before the crowned heads of Europe, just so that I could be here with all of you." He sounded more like W. C. Fields than Frank Morgan. "It's been wonderful visiting this great city on the plains. But now I'm off. Good-bye, Chicago! Good-bye, Dorothy! Good-bye, children! Never stop dreaming."

 

 

The Wizard stooped and turned up a small gas burner, which had been kept on a low flame, just barely maintaining the high, round shape of the balloon. As more warm air filled the silken globe, the basket and balloon became a living unit. It struggled against the guy ropes holding it down. When the balloon was fully inflated and pulling hard, the ground crew of Munchkins untied the ropes. The balloon rose in a dignified and stately manner into the air. When it was about ten feet off the ground, the Wizard dropped overboard three bright green sandbags. Splitting open on impact, they proved to be filled with gold-wrapped chocolate coins.

 

 

The children in the crowd rushed for the coins, gathering them all in less than a minute. They looked up, and now the balloon was fifty feet in the air. The prevailing westerly breeze caught it, and as it lifted, it was borne slowly to the east.

 

 

In a few more moments, it had begun to move at the same stately pace as several wisps of white clouds.

 

 

The balloon, so enormous while it was on the ground, began to dwindle. The Wizard still waved from the basket, and the crowds still cheered, but in the cheers there was a sense of farewell, the sadness of going away.

 

 

Jeremy held his father's hand. His mouth was a big round O. Finally, when he couldn't see the Wizard any longer, just the balloon like a ball against the blue-and-white sky, he said to his baby sister, "When you're bigger, I'm going to read to you about Oz. It's a beautiful place, all surrounded by the Deadly Desert, so that no bad people can get in. Nobody ever dies in Oz. It's ruled by a girl named Ozma, who's I guess a lot like you're going to be when you grow up. And you know the best thing of all? There's lots and lots of Oz books and we can read every one."

 

 

The balloon got smaller and smaller and became a tiny dot. The green and gold blended into a sparkling green, heading eastward over Lake Michigan, and then the dot vanished.

 

 

 

The Wooden Gargoyles: Evil in Oz
by Brian D'Amato

…the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.

 

 

—L. Frank Baum,
editorial in the
Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer
,
December 15, 1890

1. MACATAWA

There used to be steam ferries all over Lake Michigan, the
John Sherman
out of Ludington, the
Chief Wawatam
from Macinaw City to St. Ignace, and the Père Marquette Railway Line's fleet of numbered steamers running from Milwaukee and Chicago to small Michigan ports like Benton Harbor, Muskegon, and Holland. Early in the summer of 1905, my grandfather and his mother were crossing to Chicago on the PM Line with a group of other summer residents of the beach resort community of Macatawa Park in Holland, Michigan, which included Lyman Frank Baum and two of his sons. As the boat came up on Chicago, Baum gathered the children in the party together at the prow and proudly pointed out the first visible words among the riot of bills papering the wharves and grain elevators that at that time lined the lakeshore, ornate black and gold letters painted twenty feet high across the largest of the dock houses:
What Did the Woggle-Bug Say?

 

 

At this stage in his career, at forty-nine, Baum was already at least nationally famous for
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, but possibly less for the book, which he'd published in 1900, than for the lavish operetta version he'd written and produced the year after, and which was still touring to full houses all over the country. In Macatawa, Baum had built his beach house, "The Sign of the Goose" —the site of riotous children's parties remembered fondly by my grandfather— with proceeds from his first success, the pre-Oz
Father Goose: His Book
, two years before the debut of
The Wizard,
and filled it with goose-themed decorations. According to my grandfather, Baum had also dabbled in local gossip journalism, and had written, under a pseudonym, a book called
Tamawaca Folks,
a barely à clef novel about some of the more notorious personages at the Macatawa resort.

 

 

A few years ago I finally tracked down a copy of
Tamawaca Folks: A Summer Comedy.
It turns out there are strong similarities between its plot and that of
The Wizard,
written only a year later. Jarrod, the hero, is an honest lawyer from Kansas City who comes to "Tamawaca" for the summer and finds that although it's a place of great beauty— described, more than once, as a "fairyland" —the entire resort community is under the thumb of a pair of fraudulent businessmen: the charming, blustering Wilder— who has double-sold lots, built cottages in the center of public streets, and owns all the businesses— and the elderly, austere Easton, a thoroughly crooked moneyman who "loves to pray for your spiritual welfare while he feels for your pocketbook."
¹
In the course of the novel, Jarrod aligns himself with several of the other cottagers; exposes Wilder's subterfuges, false advertising, and misdealings; and serves Easton with an unanswerable lawsuit. Easton, bested in a final confrontation with Jarrod on the latter's veranda, whimpers, "Ruined— ruined! At my age to face the poorhouse! Oh, my poor family— oh, —oh, —oh!," leans backward, throws up his arms, and falls over the rail of the porch "to lie motionless on the soft sand beneath."
²
At the end of the book, Wilder is forcibly reformed and reduced to ordinary citizenship, Tamawaca is taken over by the householders and administered on a new cooperative plan, and Jarrod goes home for the winter to Kansas City. It's hardly necessary to point out that "Wilder" has the same number of letters as "Wizard" and that "Easton" sounds like "East" —although in
The Wizard
, it's the Witch of the West who ends up melting away, not into sand, but "like brown sugar."

 

 

Unfortunately, Baum's
The Woggle-Bug—
an extravaganza even grander than the musical
Wizard,
and based on the second Oz book,
The Marvelous Land of Oz
(1904) —didn't equal
The Wizard
's success. One guesses that one problem may have been the general resistance of insects to what could be called "cuddlification." Enlarged to human size and towering in the footlights, even the jolly, harmless Woggle-Bug may have looked a bit creepy and Gregor Samsa–esque. The next season Baum had sold his house in Macatawa and moved to Hollywood, California. He made five silent feature films there from his own scripts, each heavy with pioneering special effects, and at one point even tried to finance an Oz-based theme park. But while Baum had certainly sensed which way the media winds were blowing, none of these projects clicked for him the way similar ones would for Walt Disney a few decades later. In 1919, Baum— who by then had written thirteen other Oz books besides
The Wizard
, a number of other Oz-related fantasies, and dozens of other titles under several different names— died with roomfuls of heartfelt fan mail from all over the world but very little cash.

 

 

The Oz books have more or less remained in print, with some newer editions reproducing the fine color plates of the originals, and the books subsequent to
The Wizard
still have many devoted fans. But so many millions of people have been so affected by the MGM musical version of Oz that Baum's original work has become something of a victim of its own generative power. I'm quite sure Baum would have loved the movie, not just for its brilliance but because it followed several leads from his own films, for instance the device of having Dorothy's trio of friends appear briefly at the beginning as farmhands. Nevertheless, it's a shame that most people who enjoy
The Wizard
stop there without reading another book in the series, and a bigger shame that many writers and critics— even those who take Baum seriously— tend to dismiss the later volumes: Salman Rushdie, in his book on the MGM film, sums up the standard assessment by calling them "admittedly of diminishing quality."
³

 

 

To me and to many other Oz fans, this seems quite wrong. Like most people I know who were exposed to all the Oz books as children, when I was just old enough to read them (and when my opinion on the genre was certainly worth more than it is today), I preferred the books to the movie, and the later books to
The Wizard
. In fact, as far as I can tell, it seems that few people who read all the books at a young age prefer the first. Gore Vidal, in his essential 1977 essay that revitalized Baum scholarship, said his favorites as a child were
The Emerald City of Oz
(1910),
Rinkitink in Oz
(1916), and
The Lost Princess of Oz
(1917).
⁴
Suzanne Rahn, in her
The Wizard of Oz: A Reader's Companion,
says her favorites were
The Emerald City
and
The Lost Princess
.
⁵
My own favorite when I was little was
The Scarecrow of Oz
(1915) —which toward the end of his life Baum himself also said he preferred to the others— although since then I've found more to think about in the fourth book of the series,
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
. But each of the thirteen sequels, in which Baum progressively refined his vision, has something singular to offer. Lately a newer crop of articles such as Alison Lurie's excellent "The Oddness of Oz" in
The New York Review of Books
⁶
has helped redirect Oz studies toward these later works, rightly returning more of Oz to itself.

 

 

2. AN AMERICAN UTOPIA?

Now, as Rushdie points out, the actual dominion of Oz— crystallized in the later books as a rectangular country bordered by impassable deserts, the rectangle divided into five regions whose prevailing colors were green in the center, at the Emerald City, and purple, blue, red, and yellow in the north, east, south, and west respectively— underwent a certain progressive domestication throughout the series. By the last installments it was a land without birth or death, where babies remained forever burbling happily in their cradles, and where even Dorothy and other permanent guests from the standard world would never age, and were vulnerable to death only through accident or violence.