Lake Wobegon Days (16 page)

“I don’t know. What would people think?”

“I suppose they would think it was funny. Naming a furnace after your parents. Not many people would do it, I suppose. Why
did
you?”

Luther thought. “My parents were the proudest people I’ve ever known. My mother wouldn’t let even relatives in the house except on Sunday when it was clean. My father drove forty miles to deposit his money because he didn’t get invited to meet the King of Norway in 1926. If they could choose a memorial for themselves, I’m sure they’d prefer a carillon, but I always thought—if pride were kindling, our family could heat the church for twenty years. So—”

“Well,” David says, “if I dedicated the gas tank to the memory of my great-uncle, we’d have us a complete set. Here’s to you, Luther. Good health.” And they drank a toast and smashed the Dixie cups underfoot and turned out the light and went to lunch. The brass plate to the memory of Paul and Florence above the window; inside, the little flame flickering. It was a good furnace all last winter, they didn’t have a single problem with it: it ran real quiet and when they turned up the thermostat early Sunday morning, she went from fifty to seventy in about an hour flat.

Why isn’t my town on the map?—Well, back before cartographers had the benefit of an aerial view, when teams of surveyors tramped from one town to the next, mistakes were made. Sometimes those towns were farther apart than they should have been. Many maps were drawn by French explorers in the bows of canoes bucking heavy rapids, including Sieur Marine de St. Croix, who was dizzy and nauseated when he penciled in the river that bears his name. He was miles off in some places, but since the river formed the Minnesota-Wisconsin border, revision was politically impossible and the mistakes were inked in, though it left thousands of people sitting high and dry on the other side.

A worse mistake was made by the Coleman Survey of 1866, which omitted fifty square miles of central Minnesota (including Lake Wobegon),
an error that lives on in the F.A.A.’s Coleman Course Correction, a sudden lurch felt by airline passengers as they descend into Minnesota air space on flights from New York or Boston.

Why the state jobbed out the survey to drunks is a puzzle. The Coleman outfit, headed by Lieutenant Michael Coleman, had been attached to Grant’s army, which they misdirected time and again so that Grant’s flanks kept running head-on into Lee’s rear until Union officers learned to make “right face” a 120-degree turn. Governor Marshall, however, regarded the 1866 survey as preliminary—“It will provide us a good general idea of the State, a foundation upon which we can build in the future,” he said—though of course it turned out to be the final word.

The map was drawn by four teams of surveyors under the direction of Finian Coleman, Michael having left for the Nebraska gold rush, who placed them at the four corners of the state and aimed them inward. The southwest and northwest contingents moved fast over level ground, while the eastern teams got bogged down in the woods, so that, when they met a little west of Lake Wobegon, the four quadrants didn’t fit within the boundaries legislated by Congress in 1851. Nevertheless, Finian mailed them to St. Paul, leaving the legislature to wrestle with the discrepancy.

The legislature simply reproportioned the state by eliminating the overlap in the middle, the little quadrangle that is Mist County. “The soil of that region is unsuited to agriculture, and we doubt that its absence would be much noticed,” Speaker of the House Randolph remarked.

In 1933, a legislative interim commission proposed that the state recover the lost county by collapsing the square mileage of several large lakes. The area could be removed from the centers of the lakes, elongating them slightly so as not to lose valuable shoreline. Opposition was spearheaded by the Bureau of Fisheries, which pointed out the walleye breeding grounds to be lost; and the State Map Amendment was attached as a rider to a bill requiring the instruction of evolution in all secondary schools and was defeated by voice vote.

Proponents of map change, or “accurates” as they were called, were chastised by their opponents, the so-called “moderates,” who denied the existence of Mist County on the one hand—“Where is it?”
a moderate cried one day on the Senate floor in St. Paul. “Can you show me one scintilla of evidence that it exists?”—and, on the other hand, denounced the county as a threat to property owners everywhere. “If this county is allowed to rear its head, then no boundary is sacred, no deed is certain,” the moderates said. “We might as well reopen negotiations with the Indians.”

Wobegonians took the defeat of inclusion with their usual calm. “We felt that we were a part of Minnesota by virtue of the fact that when we drove more than a few miles in any direction, we were in Minnesota,” Hjalmar Ingqvist says. “It didn’t matter what anyone said.”

In 1980, Governor Al Quie became the first governor to set foot in Mist County, slipping quietly away from his duties to attend a ceremony dedicating a plaque attached to the Statue of the Unknown Norwegian. “We don’t know where he is. He was here, then he disappeared,” his aides told reporters, all the time the Governor was enjoying a hearty meatball lunch in the company of fellow Lutherans. In his brief remarks, he saluted Lake Wobegon for its patience in anonymity. “Seldom has a town made such a sacrifice in remaining unrecognized so long,” he said, though other speakers were quick to assure him that it had been no sacrifice, really, but a true pleasure.

“Here in 1867 the first Norwegian settlers knelt to thank God for bringing them to this place,” the plaque read, “and though noting immediately the rockiness of the soil, remained, sowing seeds of Christian love.”

What’s special about this town, it’s pretty much like a lot of towns, isn’t it?
There is a perfectly good answer to that question, it only takes a moment to think of it.

For one thing, the Statue of the Unknown Norwegian. If other towns have one, we don’t know about it. Sculpted by a man named O’Connell or O’Connor in 1896, the granite youth stands in a small plot at a jog in the road where a surveyor knocked off for lunch years ago and looks down Main Street to the lake. A proud figure, his back is erect, his feet are on the ground on account of no money remained for a pedestal, and his eyes—well, his eyes are a matter of question. Probably the artist meant him to exude confidence in the New World, but
his eyes are set a little deep so that dark shadows appear in the late afternoon and by sunset he looks worried. His confident smile turns into a forced grin. In the morning, he is stepping forward, his right hand extended in greeting, but as the day wears on, he hesitates, and finally he appears to be about to turn back. The right hand seems to say, Wait here. I think I forgot something.

Nevertheless, he is a landmark and an asset, so it was a shame when the tornado of 1947 did damage to him. That tornado skipped in from the northeast; it blew away one house except for a dresser mirror that wasn’t so much as cracked—amazing; it’s in the historical society now, and people still bring their relatives to look at it. It also picked up a brand-new Chevy pickup and set it down a quarter-mile away.
On a road. In the right-hand lane.
In town, it took the roof off the Lutheran church, where nobody was, and missed the Bijou, which was packed for
Shame
, starring Cliff DeCarlo. And it blew a stalk of quackgrass about six inches into the Unknown Norwegian, in an unusual place, a place where you wouldn’t expect to find grass in a person, a part of the body where you’ve been told to insert nothing bigger than your finger in a washcloth.

Bud, our municipal employee, pulled it out, of course, but the root was imbedded in the granite, so it keeps growing out. Bud has considered using a pre-emergent herbicide on him but is afraid it will leave a stain on the side of his head, so, when he mows, simply reaches up to the Unknown’s right ear and snips off the blade with his fingernails. It’s not so noticeable, really; you have to look for it to see it.

The plaque that would’ve been on the pedestal the town couldn’t afford was bolted to a brick and set in the ground until Bud dug it out because it was dinging up his mower blade. Now in the historical society museum in the basement of the town hall, it sits next to the Lake Wobegon runestone, which proves that Viking explorers were here in 1381. Unearthed by a Professor Oftedahl or Ostenwald around 1921 alongside County Road 2, where the professor, motoring from Chicago to Seattle, had stopped to bury garbage, the small black stone is covered with Viking runic characters which read (translated by him): “8 of [us] stopped & stayed awhile to visit & have [coffee] & a short nap. Sorry [you] weren’t here. Well, that’s about [it] for now.”

Every Columbus Day, the runestone is carried up to the school and
put on a card-table in the lunchroom for the children to see, so they can know their true heritage. It saddens Norwegians that America still honors this Italian, who arrived late in the New World and by accident, who wasn’t even interested in New Worlds but only in spices. Out on a spin in search of curry powder and hot peppers—a man on a voyage to the grocery—he stumbled onto the land of heroic Vikings and proceeded to get the credit for it. And then to name it
America
after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian who never saw the New World but only sat in Italy and drew incredibly inaccurate maps of it. By rights, it should be called Erica, after Eric the Red, who did the work five hundred years earlier. The United States of Erica. Erica the Beautiful. The Erican League.

Not many children come to see the runestone where it spends the rest of the year. The museum is a locked door in the town hall, down the hall and to the left by the washroom. Viola Tordahl the clerk has the key and isn’t happy to be bothered for it. “I don’t know why I ever agreed to do it. You know, they don’t pay me a red cent for this,” she says as she digs around in a junk drawer for it.

The museum is in the basement. The light switch is halfway down the steps, to your left. The steps are concrete, narrow and steep. It’s going to be very interesting, you think, to look at these many objects from olden days, and then when you put your hand on the switch, you feel something crawl on it. Not a fly. You brush the spider off, and then you smell the must from below, like bilgewater, and hear a slight movement as if a man sitting quietly in the dark for several hours had just risen slowly and the chair scraped a quarter-inch. He sighs a faint sigh, licks his upper lip, and shifts the axe from his left to his right hand so he can scratch his nose. He is left-handed, evidently. No need to find out any more about him. You turn off the light and shut the door.

What’s so special about this town is not the food, though Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery has got in a case of fresh cod. Frozen, but it’s fresher than what’s been in his freezer for months. In the grocery business, you have to throw out stuff sometimes, but Ralph is Norwegian and it goes against his principles. People bend down and peer into the meat case. “Give me a pork loin,” they say. “One of those in the back, one of the pink ones.” “These in front are better,” he says.
“They’re more aged. You get better flavor.” But they want a pink one, so Ralph takes out a pink one, bites his tongue. This is the problem with being in retail; you can’t say what you think.

More and more people are sneaking off to the Higgledy-Piggledy in St. Cloud, where you find two acres of food, a meat counter a block long with huge walloping roasts and steaks big enough to choke a cow, and exotic fish lying on crushed ice. Once Ralph went to his brother Benny’s for dinner and Martha put baked swordfish on the table. Ralph’s face burned. His own sister-in-law! “It’s delicious,” said Mrs. Ralph. “Yeah,” Ralph said, “if it wasn’t for the mercury poisoning, I’d take swordfish every day of the week.” Cod, he pointed out, is farther down in the food chain, and doesn’t collect the mercury that the big fish do. Forks paused in midair. He would have gone on to describe the effects of mercury on the body, how it lodges in the brain, wiping the slate clean until you wind up in bed attached to tubes and can’t remember your own Zip Code, but his wife contacted him on his ankle. Later, she said, “You had no business saying that.”

“I’ll have no business, period,” he said, “if people don’t wake up.”

“Well, it’s a free country, and she has a perfect right to go shop where she wants to.”

“Sure she does, and she can go live there, too.”

When the Thanatopsis Club hit its centennial in 1982 and Mrs. Hallberg wrote to the White House and asked for an essay from the President on small-town life, she got one, two paragraphs that extolled Lake Wobegon as a model of free enterprise and individualism, which was displayed in the library under glass, although the truth is that Lake Wobegon survives to the extent that it does on a form of voluntary socialism with elements of Deism, fatalism, and nepotism. Free enterprise runs on self-interest.
^*
This is socialism, and it runs on loyalty. You need a toaster, you buy it at Co-op Hardware even though you can get a deluxe model with all the toaster attachments for less money
at K-Mart in St. Cloud. You buy it at Co-op because you know Otto. Glasses you will find at Clifford’s which also sells shoes and ties and some gloves. (It is trying to be the department store it used to be when it was The Mercantile, which it is still called by most people because the old sign is so clear on the brick facade, clearer than the “Clifford’s” in the window.) Though you might rather shop for glasses in a strange place where they’ll encourage your vanity, though Clifford’s selection of frames is clearly based on Scripture (“Take no thought for what you shall wear….”) and you might put a hideous piece of junk on your face and Clifford would say, “I think you’ll like those” as if you’re a person who looks like you don’t care what you look like—nevertheless you should think twice before you get the Calvin Klein glasses from Vanity Vision in the St. Cloud Mall. Calvin Klein isn’t going to come with the Rescue Squad and he isn’t going to teach your children about redemption by grace. You couldn’t find Calvin Klein to save your life.