Lake Wobegon Days (5 page)
Authors: Garrison Keillor
Have you
come to Jesus
for the
cleansing power
,
Are you
washed
in the
blood
of the
Lamb? (Slam. Bang.)
When Lucy of composition class, who let me have half her sandwich one day, asked me if I had a job and I told her I was a dishwasher, she made a face as if I said I worked in the sewer. She said it must be
awful, and of course when I told her it was terrific, she thought I was being ironic. Composition class was local headquarters of irony; we supplied the five-county area. The more plainly I tried to say I liked dishwashing, the more ironic she thought I was, until I flipped a gob of mayo at her as a rhetorical device to show
un
subtlety and sincerity, and then she thought I was a jerk.
I didn’t venture to write about dishwashing for composition and certainly not about the old home town. Mr. Staples told us to write from personal experience, of course, but he said it with a smirk, suggesting that we didn’t have much, so instead I wrote the sort of dreary, clever essays I imagined I’d appreciate if I were him.
Lake Wobegon, whatever its faults, is not dreary. Back for a visit in August, I saw Wayne “Warning Track” Tommerdahl stroke the five-thousandth long fly ball of his Whippet career. “You move that fence forty feet in, and Wayne could be in the majors,” said Uncle Al, seeing greatness where it had not so far appeared. Toast ’n Jelly Days was over but the Mist County Fair had begun and I paid my quarter to plunge twenty-five feet at the Hay Jump, landing in the stack a few feet from Mrs. Carl Krebsbach, who asked, “What brings you back?” A good question and one that several dogs in town had brought up since I arrived. Talking to Fr. Emil outside the Chatterbox Cafe, I made a simple mistake: pointed north in reference to Daryl Tollerud’s farm where the gravel pit was, where the naked man fell out the back door of the camper when his wife popped the clutch, and of course Daryl’s farm is
west
, and I corrected myself right away, but Father gave me a funny look as if to say,
Aren’t you from here then?
Yes, I am. I crossed Main Street toward Ralph’s and stopped, hearing a sound from childhood in the distance. The faint mutter of ancient combines. Norwegian bachelor farmers combining in their antique McCormacks, the old six-footers. New combines cut a twenty-foot swath, but those guys aren’t interested in getting done sooner, it would only mean a longer wait until bedtime. I stood and listened. My eyes got blurry. Of course, thanks to hay fever, wheat has always put me in an emotional state, and then the clatter brings back memories of old days of glory in the field when I was a boy among giants. My uncle lifted me up and
put me on the seat so I could ride alongside him. The harness jingled on Brownie and Pete and Queenie and Scout, and we bumped along in the racket, row by row. Now all the giants are gone; everyone’s about my size or smaller. Few people could lift me up, and I don’t know that I’m even interested. It’s sad to be so old. I postponed it as long as I could, but when I weep at the sound of a combine, I know I’m there. A young man wouldn’t have the background for it.
That uncle is dead now, one of three who went down like dominoes, of bad tickers, when they reached seventy. I know more and more people in the cemetery, including Miss Heinemann, my English teacher. She was old (my age now) when I had her. A massive lady with chalk dust on her blue wool dress, whose hair was hacked short, who ran us like a platoon, who wept when I recited the sonnet she assigned me to memorize. Each of us got one, and I was hoping for “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” or “Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” which might be
useful
in some situations, but was given Number 73, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” which I recited briskly, three quatrains hand over fist, and nailed on the couplet at the end. The next year I did “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.”
Listening to combines on a dry day that is leaning toward fall, I still remember—
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang….
Learned at sixteen in a classroom that smelled of Wildroot hair oil and Nesbitt’s orange pop on my breath, it cheers me up, even “the twilight of such day/As after sunset fadeth in the west” and “the ashes of his youth.”
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
*
“R
ight on this road 0.7
m.
to OLD WHITE BARN, then right 1.2
m.
to LAKE WOBEGON (1418 alt., 942 pop.), named for the body of water that it borders. Bleakly typical of the prairie, Lake Wobegon has its origins in the utopian vision of nineteenth-century New England Transcendentalists but now is populated mainly by Norwegians and Germans who attend LAKE WOBEGON LUTHERAN CHURCH (left at BANK .1
m.
) and OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL RESPONSIBILITY CHURCH (right at CHURCH .08
m.
), neither of which are remarkable. The lake itself, blue-green and brightly sparkling in the brassy summer sun and neighbored by the warm-colored marsh grasses of a wildlife-teeming slough, is the town’s main attraction, though the view is spoiled somewhat by a large GRAIN ELEVATOR by the railroad track.
North of town .3
m.
is the junction with an oiled road.”
—
Minnesota
, Federal Writers’ Project (2nd edition, 1939)
*
I
t is Dr. Nute, retired after forty odd years of dentistry, now free to ply the waters in the
Molar II
and drop a line where the fighting sunfish lie in wait. “Open wide,” he says. “This may sting a little bit. Okay. Now bite down.”
*
T
he stone plaque on the facade fell off one hot July afternoon, the plaque that reads
CENTRAL BLDG
. 1913, and crashed on the sidewalk, almost hitting Bud Mueller, who had just stopped and turned to walk the other way. If he hadn’t, he would have been killed. He didn’t know why he had turned. “It was like something spoke to me right then,” he said. Others realized then that
they
had been on the verge of walking by the Central Building moments before and something had spoken to them. “You know, I was thinking, ’Maybe I will go to Skoglund’s and purchase a pencil,’ but then something said, ’No, you wait on that,’ so I didn’t go. If I had gone, it would’ve killed me,” Mr. Berge said. He was one of many whose lives had been spared by a narrow margin. The plaque broke into five pieces, which Carl Krebsbach glued together, and it was remounted on the facade with a protective mesh to keep it in place.
*
I
grew up among slow talkers, men in particular, who dropped words a few at a time like beans in a hill, and when I got to Minneapolis, where people took a Lake Wobegon comma to mean the end of the story, I couldn’t speak a whole sentence in company and was considered not too bright, so I enrolled in a speech course taught by Orville Sand, the founder of reflexive relaxology, a self-hypnotic technique that enabled a person to speak up to three hundred words per minute. He believed that slow speech deprives us of a great deal of thought by slowing down the mental processes to one’s word rate. He believed that the mind has unlimited powers if only a person could learn to release them and eliminate the backup caused by slow discharge. I
believe
that’s what he said—it was hard to understand him. He’d be rattling on about relaxology one moment and then he was into photography, his father, the Baltimore Orioles, wheat germ, birth and death, central heating, the orgasm—which was satisfying for him, but which left me in the dust, so I quit, having only gotten up to about eighty-five. And after a few weeks, I was back to about ten or eleven.
*
T
hough unpromising for agriculture, the Lake Wobegon area is beloved among geologists for the diversity of its topography, lying within the Bowlus Moraine left by the retreat of the Western Lobe of the Superior Glacier and including the St. John’s Drumlin Field of pale brown sandy till featuring numerous Precambrian rocks and pebbles that come to the surface in the spring. Certain plutonic rocks, mainly granite, appear in outcroppings, while some metamorphic minerals such as garnet and anchorite crystals have been found, but not enough to make much difference. Had the Superior Glacier moved slower twenty thousand years ago, permitting the Moorhead Glacier to race eastward with its valuable load of shale-rich soil, Lake Wobegon’s history would be much brighter than it is. Adding insult to injury, geologists now point out that the town lies in a major fault zone, where deep-seated forces may one day with no warning send us running in terror from our beds.
The first white person to set foot in Lake Wobegon and claim credit for it was either Father Pierre Plaisir in 1835 or Count Carlo Pallavicini the following year, depending on whether Father Plaisir set foot here or much farther to the west. According to his own calculations, he was near Lake Wobegon (or Lac Malheur, as the voyageurs called it), but the terrain he describes in his memoir,
Le Monde
(1841), seems to be to the west, perhaps as far as Montana. The mountains he says he saw were not any of ours.
He and his six
amis
had come to the New World to gain
gloire
and
honneur
through
nouveaux exploits
despite
les dangers
, but instead got lost and spent June and July looking for the route back to where they had come from, the Northeast Passage. When they made camp at Lac Malheur, if that is where they were, their confusion was complete and their leader was suffering from
abominable abdominale.
He was
misérable
even before he lay down to sleep in the grass and the
muskitos
attacked him.
He had observed in his journal that “these are big vicious
muskitos
,
not like our French insects,” but that was before they got serious. A cloud of them descended after dark, and he lay and suffered for a while, then yelled,
“J’expire! Je quitte!”
and tore into the underbrush. His friends shouted,
“Courage, mon père!”
and ran after him. Their footsteps made him think his
ennemis
were coming, and he dashed west in
terreur
for some distance until he was captured by the Ojibway. They looked on it as protective custody, but when Father Plaisir returned to France and wrote his book, he described them as savages and said the country was a wilderness and he would never go back. He forgot that he had never been invited.
Count Carlo, who took one look and decided Lake Wobegon was
not
the headwaters of the Mississippi but was not far from it, was happier there.
“Mio contento,”
he sighed as he stripped away his count’s clothing and waded into the cool waters after a hard morning of exploring. He is said to have eaten a cheese sandwich and written a poem (“La Porta” or “The Door”) before continuing. He did not know that Henry Schoolcraft had discovered the headwaters four years before and far to the north. He thought of Lake Wobegon as the gateway to his great destiny.
The first white folk known to have spent time in the Wobegon area were Unitarian missionaries from Boston, led by Prudence Alcott, a distant and wealthy relative of the famous Alcotts of Concord, a woman who sent a stereopticon and a crate of boysenberry jam to Henry Thoreau at his cabin by the pond, although he never mentioned her in his book.
On June 14, 1850, at two-forty
P.M.
, according to her meticulous journal, while crossing Boylston Street on her way to reflect in the pond of Boston’s Public Garden, she had a vision of a man in hairy clothing who told her to go west and convert the Indians to Christianity by the means of interpretive dance.
Having witnessed an Algonquin Rain Dance at the Lyceum [the] previous night, the Expressive Beauty of their Spirits convinced me that the worship of the Supreme Being in our English Language is dry, tasteless, & insufficient to the present Need, & then amid a scene of such confusion & Commerce &
bustling Traffic, it was shown to me that All is One under Heaven, All are Children of God & I must preach to our savage Brethren, using the language of Dance. I proceeded to my beloved Pond filled with Certainty and Rejoicing.
Selecting three of her friends to be her followers, Prudence made plans to entrain immediately for the territories, taking only enough cash to see them to the Mississippi whence they would cast themselves upon Providence, but their departure was delayed by the enthusiasm of local savants who subjected them to an exhausting round of parties, lectures, and receptions, so they did not leave Boston until September 21 and arrived in Minnesota just as the weather was turning ugly. Staying only one night at Fort Snelling, the Unitarians pushed north, traveling upriver with a band of Ojibway merchants for ten days until, rounding a bend in the river and seeing a pine in the shape of a V, Prudence shouted “Here!” and there they were dropped: Prudence, her cousin Elizabeth Sewell, a seminary student named George Moore, and a poet, Henry Francis Watt, who was interested in native speech rhythms.
