by Howard Mohr
Midnight Baseball, Spit in the Ocean, or Mission Impossible will not be permitted because they are silly games of chance and would send the wrong message to students.
Gambling will obviously bring new life and big money to the schools, but there are other advantages:
Students will be prepared for jobs in the gambling industry after graduating.
Jobs will be created in the schools for change walkers, dealers, security officers, and so on.
A wider variety of people will be attracted to the teaching profession.
Discipline will improve because the hope of getting something for nothing is one of the oldest drives for excellence.
Living Off the Land, Snowbirds, and So…Then
TALKING WITH SNOWBIRDS
If you live in Florida or Texas or Arizona, you can practice Minnesotan without leaving your state by finding some snowbirds to talk to. Snowbirds are Minnesotans who abandon us in the winter and head south with the birds. They love to talk about home because they feel so guilty and ashamed for having left it.
A guy we’ll call Kyle from a town in Yellow Medicine County retired when he was sixty-three and said he wouldn’t live anyplace but Minnesota. His first winter in retirement, he stayed put. The second year, he and his wife sneaked off to Florida for a couple of weeks. “A little vacation—the heat made me feel sick, though.” The next year Kyle and his wife spent January in Florida: “January’s kind of rough on us. We like to stay around for the holidays, then get a little sun, and then come back to where our roots are.” The next year it was January and February. “No sense driving back before March. You never know what you’ll run into. In some ways it’s cheaper to live there. We’re partners in a little trailer home.”
The year after that, they decided that they could suffer through Christmas in Florida if they worked at it—they would leave after Thanksgiving. But that year they had the car packed on Saturday and got walloped by the traditional Turkey Blizzard. Blizzards have struck eight out of ten Thanksgiving weekends for over a century in Minnesota. Kyle looked it up. “Let’s go just after Halloween next year.” And they did.
They finally rounded it off to six months, October through March. “It’s easier to keep track of.”
But it’s not easy on them when they come back in April.
“Kyle, I see you’re back,” somebody will say. Somebody else delivers the punch line: “Were you gone, Kyle? I didn’t even miss you.”
Around mid-August, at the café where Kyle drops in for coffee twice a day, the boys start giving him a rough time. “It dropped below 60 last night, Kyle. That’s kind of chilly for you, isn’t it? You could catch cold.”
Neither one of them needs to be given a rough time because they already feel bad enough about spending half the year in Florida. Golfing in the winter makes them feel guilty. Having an air conditioner on in the winter makes them feel guilty. Hardly a day passes when Kyle doesn’t say to his wife, “If we’d just have about two or three inches of snow every so often so I could help scoop the walks here in Sunshine Village, I think I’d be happier.” But I doubt it.
SO…THEN
The So…then construction is used to frame many Minnesota questions. In the situation where a person not from around here would ask:
—“Who are you?”
The Minnesotan would ask:
—“So who are you then?”
So…then softens the question and gives it a friendly, personal touch, once you get used to it. But when you hear it for the first time—out-of-state people have told me—it can sound real sarcastic, or even snoopy.
Here are some foreign questions followed by their Minnesota equivalent. Try translating the questions yourself before checking the Minnesota version.
THEM: “Why did you buy that car?”
US: “So why would anybody in their right mind buy a car like that then?”
T: “Is the whole-life policy a better investment?”
U: “So you’re saying if a guy took that whole-life policy it wouldn’t be too bad a deal then?”
T: “Should I send these ties to Goodwill?”
U: “So I should just throw out five perfectly good wide paisley ties that match my suit then?”
T: “Where are the tent stakes?”
U: “So, tell me, is it too much to ask that the tent stakes would be in the same place as the tent and the beer cooler then?”
T: “When are you leaving?”
U: “So when do you think you might start making your move toward leaving then?”
T: “When?”
U: “So when then?”
T: “Why?”
U: “So why then?”
T: “Will you take my personal check?”
U: “So I was wondering could you maybe cash this personal check for me if it’s not too much trouble then? I’m not a criminal or anything.”
T: “Why are you eating candy?”
U: “So does that one-pounder bag of M&Ms you got there in your hand mean that’s about it on the diet then?”
T: “You’re not going to the family reunion?”
U: “So if they didn’t bother to send you an invitation to the reunion even why should you bother to go then?”
In a variation of the basic construction, So…then can be attached to the front of your statement or question. You are talking to a young couple about to be married:
—“So then it’s marriage for you two, is it?”
In long statements, a safe policy to follow is to insert maintenance thens periodically. In the following example someone has just given you directions: you would then use one so at the beginning and plant thens here and there for clarity.
—“So you say I turn right then at the first stoplight and veer left at the curve by the Beauty Shop then, and it’s just on the other side of the alley then, or was it the second stoplight then?”
I don’t want to make your head spin, but I’ve got to point out that 99 percent of the time then has nothing to do with time and is not the opposite of now by a long shot. The following question should clear up the confusion:
—“So what you’re trying to tell me is that this is now and that’s then then?”
WHERE TO GO IN MINNESOTA
Living Off the Land
[Note: My brother farms out in southwestern Minnesota, and since 1968, he has had five different tenants in an old farmhouse at a building site he owns on what he calls “Mortgage Hill.” The renters were all young people who wanted to live off the land. My brother had no objection to somebody trying to live off the land. He’d been trying it himself for years.
Three of the tenants lasted less than a month. They all took off the same way: in the night and leaving nothing behind but a lot of marijuana seeds in the carpet. The fourth tenant, a young man, lasted four months—until his VW van caught fire and rolled into the creek. He stuffed his worldly possessions in his backpack and thumbed down the road.
But in 1970 my brother got a tenant who was determined to stay. We all thought he’d make it, but he didn’t. After he moved out—thirteen years later—my brother found the following copy of a letter he had evidently sent, or planned to send, to his old friends back in the Twin Cities. I have left off his name. If he happens to read this guide, though, my brother says stop by sometime and tip a couple in the backyard.
It’s a pretty sad deal, in a lot of ways, but he didn’t lose his sense of humor, even though he lost about everything else. You might find it instructive, especially if you’ve been toying with the idea of subsistence living in Minnesota. We’ve got a bunch of abandoned farmhouses for you to choose from if you decide to make your move. —H.M.]
Dear Friend or Current Resident:
Surprise.
When I moved out to the Minnesota prairie in 1970 to start the Great Experiment on four acres of land, you and I promised to stay in touch with each other. I was supposed to be the point man, you recall, for the second big migration, and you had some notion of following
me if my reports from Eden were favorable. You kept your side of the bargain by writing to me until 1979. Off and on I have felt guilty, but it always passed and so did the years. Now it’s 1984.
This is my first report.
The recurring question in your later letters boiled down to this: “Did you fall in a pit or something?” I knew what you meant. If it’s any consolation, I did fall in a pit, but only once, and I got out of it. It wasn’t the reason I never wrote. I don’t know why I never wrote.
The pit I fell in was west of the house but it didn’t look like a pit, it looked like part of my lawn. In other words it looked like dandelions, quack grass, chamomile, clover, foxtail, and pigweed. Give me some credit—if it had looked like a pit I wouldn’t have fallen in it. Actually, I didn’t fall in, I sank in. I was walking around the house checking for a strange creaking sound in the siding, when I disappeared into the lawn up to my waist. Under the lawn was an old cistern that had been used as a large garbage can by previous tenants and then covered with dirt when it was full. I’m just thankful the previous tenants didn’t operate a nuclear power plant.
I got a lot of mileage out of the cistern story in the early days, but it has worn fairly thin lately, like so much here.
I want you to know that I did reread all your letters before starting mine. Well, not all. The chickens got into the red shed (that’s where the overflow from the house goes) in ’76 or ’77 and pecked holes in most of 1975’s letters, causing large gaps of meaning. On top of that, the chickens had added some unusual punctuation. It wasn’t the chickens’ fault. I left the door open and they hopped in.
I never did keep the chickens in a pen because I wanted them to be free to scratch for crickets and worms and other natural foods and free to build their nests where they wanted. That made egg gathering a little tougher for me, and since the chickens tended to congregate on the front stoop during the day, it made walking barefoot tougher, too.
Which reminds me of the guy whose chewing gum fell out of his mouth in the chicken yard and he had to try five pieces before he found the right one. That joke is one of the big box-office grossers in this area, and depending on who tells it, the guy who loses his gum is a carpenter, a schoolteacher, a hippie, or a Norwegian. It’s always a man, though, and not a woman, which makes sense to me, but I don’t want to explain why I think so.
Your 1975 letters were pecked into nonsense no later than 1977 because that was the year the last hen bought the farm. At first I always kept a rooster with the hens because it was more natural to eat fertilized eggs, according to a brochure I picked up at the Silver Surfer Food Co-op in town. Silver Surfer sold only fertilized brown eggs.
The co-op was called Silver Surfer because the board didn’t want anybody to confuse it with a supermarket that sold processed foods, not that they had anything to worry about. Also, Ben, the first coordinator of the co-op, had a large collection of Uncle Scrooge and Silver Surfer comics. He wanted to call the food co-op Uncle Scrooge but he compromised. Ben quit during the “Cheese Blowup.” The board had decided that the co-op workers should wash their hands before they cut the bulk cheese into chunks for display. Ben said he didn’t wash his hands when he cut cheese at home and he didn’t see why he had to do it at the Silver Surfer. Telling people to wash their hands violated everything the co-op stood for. Next thing you know it’ll be a supermarket, he said.
Ben went deeper into the wilderness after that, but when he came out in 1982, I heard he was driving a truck for Coke and taking night classes in computers. The Silver Surfer became the Friendly Food Co-op in 1980 and at present offers a full line of snack foods, some of them with preservatives. There’s also orchestra music coming out of the ceiling, and once a week they have a drawing for “Bonus Bucks.”
Fertilized egg doesn’t sound nearly as appetizing now as it did when I got the first flock, I will say that. Anyway, the rooster always roosted on the rafters above the car in the garage. Getting up there was not easy for him, because his wings—like the wings on most domestic chickens—were not designed for flying. Modern chickens are bred for meat and eggs, not for wings, the way modern man is bred for watching TV and drinking beer. The modern chicken starts running and flapping its wings until it’s airborne, in a manner of speaking, but it’s about as aerodynamically sound as a St. Bernard. The rooster was overweight besides. It took ten minutes of clawing and flapping for him to reach the rafters at sunset. It was something you didn’t like to watch too many times. Everything is beautiful in its own way except for a fat rooster going to roost or modern man watching Monday Night Football from a lounge chair.
The rooster got so it couldn’t distinguish between the rising sun and the yardlight. Intelligence is not a chicken’s strong suit. Four or five times a night the rooster would thud and flap onto the hood of the old Nash and go out under the yardlight and crow because he thought it was morning. I probably could have adapted to it, but that rooster’s crow was not your fairy-tale “cock-a-doodle-doo.” It was a cross between a plugged sump pump and a TV evangelist with tight underwear. To make a long story as short and as pleasant as possible, let me just say the rooster eventually ended up in the food freezer, after expiring suddenly one morning about 3:30 under his beloved yardlight. The hens, one by one, fell victim to the fox and the weasel.
After that I began buying unfertilized white eggs in plastic cartons. I didn’t know it then, but that was the first step on the long downward trail of moral erosion.
And whatever happened to Cathy, you’ve asked in your letters. Our first and only winter together, we had a vicious blizzard. On the north side of the house there was a large hole under the eaves that the squirrels used as a door into their play area, but we didn’t know that. The attic above the bathroom drifted full of snow. We didn’t know that either, until the mid-January thaw.
The plaster ceiling of the bathroom disintegrated and collapsed. I put up some plastic sheeting and positioned peanut butter tubs under the big drips, but still the water would plop on us when we least expected it. It was really the last good laugh Cathy and I had together. The next blizzard in early February knocked out our electrical power for ten days. The first day we snuggled and read Kurt Vonnegut to each other, but on the third day Cathy withdrew into herself. In March, she moved to Long Beach and eventually started a gift boutique with a loan from her father. We wrote back and forth for a few months. You know how it goes.
My original philosophy about living on the land came partly from the Mother Earth News, but most of it came from Catch-22. My hero was Orr, the WWII bomber pilot who always crash landed on every mission because it was good practice in case he ever had to crash-land. And that’s what I figured I was doing here on the prairies: I was living the simple life on the land because it was good practice in case I ever had to live the simple life on the land.
That philosophy has its flaws, I see that now. Take the skunks. At present, I see no reason why I had to practice removing skunks from under my house. But back then I was more idealistic. So when I came home from town one night in May after Cathy left, the house was filled with the smell of skunks (they had been mating under the house). I didn’t even think about looking in the Yellow Pages. And how would I have paid Acme Skunk Eradicators anyway? With fertilized eggs?
Getting twelve skunks (the final count) out of the cellar and crawl spaces under the floors was just one more episode in the saga of self-sufficiency. For your information, this is part of what you need for skunk removal: steel traps, hamburger, command post of hay bales, red eyes from staying up all night, shovel. I would rather not go into details.
Maybe some people would say it was inevitable, but there came a point finally when I stopped practicing and decided to make a permanent crash landing. It wasn’t the skunks or fertilized eggs that finally did it, and it wasn’t the gophers chewing through the pump wires, or the squirrels in the ceiling. It was the garden. I never thought it would be the garden. It was like being cheated by a priest in a poker game
or struck by a pacifist. You don’t expect it and it’s such a shock.
From the beginning the garden was the centerpiece of the experiment, the jewel in the crown. The idea was to grow everything I needed. You can’t grow cheese or yogurt, so I bought milk products with the understanding that I could easily do without them. Animal protein was not a big concern for me either, but every so often that first year I would wake up with this craving for barbecued pork ribs and a pitcher of draft beer. But I knew that barbecued pork ribs were not necessary for life, and neither was Grain Belt beer. The beer I brewed in a plastic tub was plenty serviceable if you didn’t drink the sludge that formed in the bottom.
By the third year my garden had expanded to half an acre and I had shifted from a spade to a gasoline-powered Rototiller (I felt bad about it). I had two compost heaps and a never-ending supply of sheep manure from a neighbor. Nothing made me happier than a wheelbarrow full of sheep manure. Those were the days.
What more could a person want? Half the year I was studying seed catalogs and the other half I was working in the garden. I grew northern jumbo peanuts, kale, Jerusalem artichokes, lima beans, four varieties of lettuce, three varieties of carrots. You name it, I planted it, cultivated it, watered it, mulched it, harvested it, stored it. Except rice. The rice paddy was a miserable flop and it took its toll.
Last year I grew only potatoes, carrots, onions, tomatoes, and lettuce. But when the seed catalogs started coming in January this year I decided I had practiced gardening long enough. I knew how to do it in case I ever had to do it. I didn’t order my seeds. I’ve got a few jars of canned tomatoes in the cellar, but when they’re gone, it’s back to the grocery store, not back to the land.
My plans are to return to the Twin Cities in September. Maybe I’ll see you around. I apologize again for not writing sooner, but look on the bright side, I saved you a lot of trouble.