How to Talk Minnesotan

by Howard Mohr

  Helpful Cop Gets Last Laugh During Blizzard

  Dorset Andersen, town constable in Boxelder, was sitting in his office watching Hogan’s Heroes when a woman called and said she was starting labor and she was alone ten miles out in the country and the car wouldn’t start, and besides, it was snowed in. Dorset had just told the radio station that anybody who went out in this mess should have their head examined, when he took off in the patrol car at three miles an hour tops. At midnight Dorset found the farmhouse the woman described, but it was abandoned. “I knocked several times and shined my flashlight through the broken windows.” Dorset got back in his car and headed down what he thought was the lane, but it wasn’t. It was the ditch. The police radio was on the blink. He reached one guy on the CB and he said he wouldn’t drive out in that weather for love nor money. Dorset stayed with his car and ate the bag of sugar cookies his sister gave him for the kids. They were shaped like Santa Claus. When the blizzard blew itself out about dawn, Dorset walked to the road and hitched a ride on the county plow. He said the incident restored his faith in humanity. “I was beginning to think nobody had a sense of humor anymore. People are great. That was a great joke, really.”

  WINTER DRIVING

  Survival Kit

  No traveler should be without a winter survival kit. Keep it in the car at all times in case you are trapped in a blizzard. This is what I carry in my basic winter survival kit. It takes up most of the backseat, but peace of mind is worth it. Stay with your car until help or spring arrives, whichever comes first.

  6 long-burning plumber’s candles (for heat and cooking)

  kerosene stove and fuel cylinder (for extended stays)

  string

  extra blankets, sleeping bag

  dried foods

  5-gallon water jug, filled

  matches

  deck of cards

  flashlight, extra batteries

  transistor radio, extra batteries

  CB radio

  set of cooking utensils

  wire

  machete

  rifle, extra shells

  chain saw

  toilet paper

  paper towels

  hunting bow, extra arrows

  hunting knife

  Bible

  Hunting from a Stranded Car, by Jack Jackson

  How to Field-Dress Game Inside a Car, by Jack Jackson

  dot-to-dot puzzles

  pictures of my family

  first-aid kit

  3 cartons of cigarettes for bartering

  twenty-foot fiberglass pole with red flag

  (car locator)

  wash basin

  soap

  clean underwear

  toothbrush, toothpaste

  salt

  ketchup

  Starting the Car in Winter

  If you drive to Minnesota in the winter and come from a place like Phoenix or Miami, where winter is when you turn off the air conditioner and open the windows, you could be in for a shock when you go outside your motel in the morning and try to start your car. It’s one of the last great adventures in a world dominated by high tech.

  Starting yourself when the temperature is minus 15 is hard enough, but starting your car is harder because it requires two people coordinating their efforts, one inside the car and one outside under the hood. And even that is no guarantee. In the rest of the country there’s no such thing as a free lunch. We have a little free lunch all the time in Minnesota, but there’s no such thing as a car that will start every time in the winter. And that would include the low-mileage rental car you drove from Arizona.

  —“Hold it, hold it. We’re not getting any juice. One of the jumper cables came off.”

  —“Are you sure you got negative connected to negative? There’s smoke coming out of the radio.”

  —“Red is negative, isn’t it?”

  —“I thought black was negative. Try switching ’em.”

  —“Okay, there, got it. Hit that thing again.”

  —“It almost caught, it wanted to go.”

  —“Pump that footfeed. Kick it. Kick it. Don’t flood it.”

  —“Maybe you should give it a shot of starting fluid. Not too much, though.”

  —“What? I couldn’t hear you, I was squirting starting fluid in the carburetor throat. Hit it.”

  —“That was close. Shall I hit it again?”

  —“Hold it a second. I’m gonna try pounding on the coil. Could be frozen coil. They’ll do that. Okay, let’s get serious now—before you turn the key, put your forehead on the steering wheel and lean into it, and think start—a lot of it’s attitude. Hit it!”

  —“Nothing.”

  —“Forget it. That’s all she wrote.”

  At this point do what we do. Go back in and have a little lunch.

  If you ever get your car started, then you’re ready to plow into a snowdrift or skid off the road, in which case you need to know how to go about:

  Getting the Car Out of the Snow When It’s Stuck

  As with starting the car, this procedure requires good communication skills.

  Here’s the deal. You bury your Buick in a large snowdrift on an unplowed street. At first you begin rocking the car by gunning it forward and then gunning it backward. Drop it into forward. Flip it into reverse. Forward. Reverse. If you are the person in the car, say nothing—you just grit your teeth and lunge. You can beat your forehead on the steering wheel, too, if you’re in the dramatic mood. The person outside the car will stand back and encourage you:

  —“You almost got it that time. Try it again.”

  —“That was close.”

  —“Gun it, gun it.”

  —“Stop, stop, something’s hot under the car.”

  You probably hit Park instead of Reverse that last time. And with the wheels spinning at 80 miles an hour, that’s hell on transmissions.

  This is what Al—of Al’s Transmission—will say. (Bob’ll say it, too, and Ernie, and all the rest—forget shopping around.)

  —“They don’t give these transmissions away…I’d say we’re talkin’ six hundred bucks, and that’s just to look at it…and if there’s anything wrong with it, this is just a guesstimate, but, oh, I’d say somewhere around eight to nine hundred bucks…now that’s if the bands are all okay, otherwise add three hundred. And if the housing is shot add another two hundred.”

  You can say

  —“That seems like a lot for just a transmission.”

  But it won’t do doodly squat for you. They’ve got you by the short hairs. Another thing: the bands are never okay.

  What to Say When Someone Shows You His Smartphone

  In 1987 the digitally challenged phone was what most of us had, so you can therefore be confident that the original lesson in connection with that antique device is still valid. Be advised that a landline rotary dial phone has “AARP” written all over it.

  The following smartphone dialogue, like all the dialogues in classic How to Talk Minnesotan, is from an actual conversation, not from Wikipedia. The exchange is between Terry and Elmo, two old buddies for whom age forty is a fading memory. Purely by chance they ran into each other at the local medical clinic and are sitting side by side, waiting for the nurse to shout their first name loud enough to be heard in the parking lot.

  TERRY: “Gotta tell you, Elmo, this smartphone is great! Look at this, look at this. See, you just touch it and—ahh, what happened!”

  ELMO: “I think it shut off when you poked at it with your finger.”

  TERRY: “It’s called touching, not poking.”

  ELMO: “Whatever, but it does look awkward.”

  TERRY: “Come on, Elmo, lighten up. Check this out. See, if I swipe the screen with my finger the photo I accidentally took this morning comes up. Cool, eh?”

  ELMO: “You could say that. The photo seems to be a bare foot with a pretty decent dollop of Cool Whip on it.”

  TERRY: “Good call, Elmo. It is my foot. But that�
��s not Cool Whip, it’s a blob of shaving cream that fell off the razor when I was shaving.”

  ELMO: “Should a guy have his smartphone in the bathroom?”

  TERRY: “I carry it with me wherever I go.”

  ELMO: “Would you answer the phone if you were in a public restroom?”

  TERRY: “Why not?”

  ELMO: “Hygiene and germs come to mind, as does the fact that a lotta guys know that a smartphone is also a camera.”

  TERRY: “I grant you that one, Elmo. But, listen, you gotta get one. You can see the actual weather on it by simply touching this little picture of a lightning bolt.”

  ELMO: “Yahbut, I can look outside to see what the weather is doing or go outside and stand in it to get a really good view.”

  TERRY: “Sure, Elmo, but can you see what the weather is in Idaho? One swipe left and I’m in Idaho.”

  ELMO: “I’m not interested in Idaho weather, not today anyway.”

  TERRY: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, some of the pictures are so danged tiny, hard to see, I’ll put on my cheaters. Nope, it’s not Idaho’s weather radar. Sorry, it’s my mobile bank account.”

  ELMO: “I hope it’s not too mobile, Terry. Aren’t you afraid there could be a privacy leak using the phone for banking?”

  TERRY: “No, no, Elmo. I have the bank’s privacy statement stored on my phone. Two taps and a swipe will get me to it.”

  ELMO: “No, I believe you do have it stored on your phone.”

  TERRY: “Here it is, no, sorry, that’s an app that searches for restaurants in the area. I know the privacy statement is here someplace.”

  ELMO: “Maybe it’s so private you can’t find it.”

  TERRY: “This is no time for your sarcasm, Elmo. I’m just getting used to the phone.”

  ELMO: “I wonder if a guy should read the manual first.”

  TERRY: “You’re talking Dark Ages, Elmo. This smartphone’s operating system is all intuitive. There is no manual. What to do just comes to you, like wizardry.”

  ELMO: “My home phone doesn’t have a manual either Terry, and the deal is when somebody calls me, it rings its bell, and I pick up the receiver and start talking, and I do it automatically.”

  TERRY: “I feel sorry for you, Elmo. You’re gonna be left behind as the world surges into the future. And for your information we don’t have mechanical bells on smartphones, we have ringtones. Mine plays ‘The Times They Are A-Changin” on bagpipes when a call comes in.”

  ELMO: “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Books, Fuel Oil, and Coffee Crusades

  Sadly Neglected Books

  from the Gopher State

  An Overview for Visitors

  by Marla R. Seemur, Historian

  No matter where you live in the U.S., you’ve no doubt heard of (and maybe even read) The Anderson Saga, Knute Swenson’s epic five-volume work that tells the story of one Minnesota family’s rise to power in the dairy business. I’m not saying it’s not a good book. Of course it is. “Two Hands, Four Teats,” the chapter omitted in public-school editions of Saga, is the best writing of that kind I’ve seen. I do, however, agree with critics that “One Busy Bull,” from Volume Two, has little to recommend it but the graphic humdrum of the barnyard. So, all things considered, a fairly good book, but it’s not the only one. That’s the point I want to make.

  For a more balanced view of Minnesota, I’d like to suggest three books that deserve your attention. They’ll be a wonderful preparation for your visit here.

  Midgets in the Earth chronicles the struggles of a group of circus clowns to establish a home on the prairies in the mid-nineteenth century. This is probably the most sadly neglected book I have ever read.

  Warm Quilts is the brutally realistic autobiographical account of Alma Moss’s tragic lifelong fight against familial chilling.

  Orville Remembers is one of the best oral histories ever compiled in Minnesota and that says a lot. Mike Budson has taken “the matter of Orville” and molded it into a series of finely crafted stories that deal with almost every aspect of life in Minnesota, including the past. I never get tired of reading in this huge book (1,568 tiny-print pages). I keep it beside my bed and often fall asleep with it in my hands. But why go on when I can show you its power? Here’s one of my favorite stories from Orville Remembers.

  “Nutmeg, I Think”

  (from Orville Remembers)

  I remember one time we had to go to town to buy somethin’ at a store. I think it was sugar, but it might’ve been nutmeg. We drove to town in a car. We called ’em autos sometimes, too, which was short for automobile. These cars we drove had steering wheels. You maybe know what I mean. The steering wheel was round like a wheel and had spokes on a shaft. She connected to a kind of gearbox, so when you turned the steering wheel there in the driver’s side of the auto or car, you see, that made the wheels in the front of the car turn different ways, depending on the way you turned the steering wheel. It was somethin’, I’ll tell you. You could go places and turn corners. She did the job, she really turned the car, that steering wheel. I guess I put in a lot of turning in my time, you bet.

  We kept the keys to that car hangin’ on a nail in the porch. A porch used to be this little room hooked on to a house. That porch of ours had shelves to put things on. They were something, the way they held things so they would be handy when you wanted ’em. You don’t see shelves much anymore, not the kind we had. They made shelves to last in those days.

  One time I was puttin’ something up on one of those shelves. We did that back then. When we took something down, we put it back up there. It sure brings back memories. What was it I was puttin’ up there that time? A pair of gloves, maybe, or it could’ve been a pliers. Anyway, just as I was reaching up there, I happened to look out the window we had there by the shelves and saw some clouds in the sky coming from the west. They were puffy and white, you know, and kept comin’ over most of the day. Nowadays kids don’t seem too interested in clouds.

  It reminds me somehow of the time we had the Chevy on the road. Chevy was the name of our car. It was short for Chevrolet. Well, we came to a hill that went down to a creek. At the top of that hill we were doin’ a good thirty miles an hour, but when we got to the bottom there by the bridge, we were doin’ forty-five. A lot of times a car would do that, pick up speed goin’ down a hill.

  Funny how things come back to you. I remember the hog that ate slop like it was yesterday. Bought it from a neighbor. He was quite the character. Wore long underwear in the winter, you bet. He had a dog that would chase cars. I remember one time that dog of his barked at our Chevy when we had to go to town to buy somethin’ at a store. Nutmeg, I think it was. But that’s another story.

  WHERE I LIVE AND WHAT I BURN FOR FUEL

  [Note: The following story has appeared in several farm newspapers over the years. The author is anonymous and the names of the people and the town are obviously made up, but the story is true. The moral is clear: learning how to talk Minnesotan is hardly half the battle if you decide to make rural Minnesota your home. —H.M.]

  * * *

  When my wife and I moved to our farmhouse near Hornet, Minnesota, fourteen years ago, we needed number-one fuel oil for the furnace, so I called the Hornet Co-op Oil Station to order some up. It’s the world’s second co-op oil station, established just before the stock market crash in 1929, according to its sign. I never doubted it.

  “This is Harold Mire,” I said.

  “Harold who? Where do you live, anyway?”

  I had that memorized. It’s always a good idea to memorize where you live. “North of town,” I said, “a long three miles on County Road 12. It’s the farmplace on the hill.”

  “Hill?”

  “Well, maybe it’s more like a rise,” I said, “or a large bump.”

  “County 12? Is that the blacktop that runs by the Methodist cemetery and takes a dogleg around the drainage ditch?”

  “That’s the one, only it takes another d
ogleg before it runs by us. We’re right where the dog’s paw would be.”

  The world’s second co-op oil station seemed to lack a basic orientation, I thought, but I didn’t mention it. Maybe the guy on the phone was new, too.

  Then he said, “Oh, sure, you mean the Fletcher farm.”

  “I do?”

  It turns out Orville Fletcher used to live where I live now. Orville had a habit of putting his initials into every concrete object he built during his long residency. The clean-out plug for the cement-block chimney says “O.F. ’54.” The steps to the cellar, “O.F. ’37.” The concrete floor in the dairy barn has a row of initials (Orville’s brothers’, probably), concluding with “O.F. ’57.” And a couple of cat tracks. Cats make good supervisors.

  During my early fuel-ordering years in Hornet, I’d sometimes get an older fellow on the line. “This is Harold Mire. Could you please bring me some number-one fuel oil?” I would say.

  “Who? Where?”

  I knew the shortcut to my place by now. “Out at the Fletcher farm.”

  And he would say, “The what?”

  “You know, two doglegs north on County 12, past the Methodist cemetery and along the ditch.”

  “Oh,” he’d say, “you mean the Prindel place.”

  I’ve never been surprised by anything I’ve heard from the world’s second co-op, so I said, “If the Prindel place is four acres of house and buildings with Orville Fletcher’s initials all over everything, you got it.”

  It turns out the Prindels lived where I live before the Fletchers did. The Fletchers lived on the Prindel place, you see, and I live on the Fletcher farm. It seemed complicated, but I didn’t question it. I kept hoping the Co-op would deliver the fuel oil to me and then bill it out to either Orville or one of the Prindels. But it was the other way around. I paid for the fuel oil and the Co-op delivered it to the Fletcher farm or the Prindel place, depending on who answered the phone. The Co-op didn’t care where they delivered oil as long as I paid the bills.