Lake Wobegon Summer 1956

by Garrison Keillor

  Ding motioned toward an old blue mud-spattered Buick parked by the right-field fence, a man inside, his chin on the door, watching the game. It was Alvin Guppy, war hero and the only Whippet ever to bat .400.

  “If I’d had a life like his, I’d sure want a son like Roger,” said Ding. “Someone who was trying to make me proud, by God.” He blew his nose. He was close to tears. Uncle Sugar was unmoved. He sat up in his seat and crossed his legs and looked straight ahead. He sighed. Then he leaned over to me and said, “I’m trusting you to look after her, you know.”

  I mentioned that Kate was someone who does pretty much what she wants.

  “Just while you’re at the ballpark. You’ll be sitting up there in the press box”—he gestured with his thumb back over his shoulder—“you can make sure there’s no hanky-panky in the parking lot.” He patted my knee. “You’re my right-hand man, you know.”

  15

  Ravine

  From the ballpark I walked across the gravel parking lot and into the ravine where I spent so many afternoons back in 1950, when we first moved to town. A creek bed that wound along the south side of town, cornfields and pasture on one side, backyards on the other, and in the spring a creek ran through it for a couple weeks, and then it was dry all summer. We boys used the creek bed for a trail, and about a quarter-mile east of the ballpark, it went under the highway through a culvert you could crawl through, and into a narrower and rockier ravine that led to the lake. The ravine was not so deep, maybe fifteen feet, no more than twenty-five, but the moment you descended into it, you were safe from adult supervision and correction. Nobody went down there except boys. Grown-ups lived for years within a stone’s throw of it who knew nothing about the gorgeous goings-on that boys were privy to. We conducted our wars here, Indian wars and World War II and skirmishes between crooks and G-men, and our favorite, the Civil War, the Confederate cavalry chasing after the boys in blue, the shouts of a lone sentry, figures darting behind trees and dashing from the brush, charging the artillery behind the breastworks, and rifle fire, and a brave boy writhing in the grass and lying crumpled and still, and the quiet on the battlefield, smoke drifting east, the valiant dead, the ground torn by hoof and shell. A short and glorious life. I hadn’t gone in the ravine for two whole years. I set down the briefcase with the dictionary and took off the snap-brim hat and walked down the slope through the sumac to where the main camp was, at a bend, on a bed of rocks around a sycamore tree, and the camp wasn’t there anymore, there was just the rocks and tree.

  16

  Human Events

  That night, on the porch, Daddy is concerned about army caterpillars. He saw two of them on the sidewalk, and where there are two, there likely are ten thousand, he says. He wonders if we should spray. An infestation of army caterpillars and the yard will look like ground zero at Hiroshima. “Those guys’ll eat your eyebrows if you let em get out of hand.” He was lying on the daybed, relaxing, trying to forget about Hjalmar and some hullabaloo at the bank, but now the prospect of devastation by insects has aroused Daddy, and he pads over to the screen door in his stocking feet and peers out into the dark, as if he might sense caterpillar movements in the underbrush and could attack with a bug bomb.

  Mother says, “I wish you’d take a summer vacation like everybody else in the world. You need the rest.”

  “When I lose my job at the bank, I’ll have all the vacation I can handle. Years of it. We’ll be vacationing at the county poor farm.”

  Hjalmar is hiring his nephew Lars, fresh out of St. Olaf College, as assistant cashier starting in September. The boy majored in English. His experience with banking is limited to having had his own savings account and having filled out the withdrawal slips—Daddy shudders to contemplate what lies ahead.

  Mother says she has always wanted to see the Gunflint Trail and the North Woods and cross the Canadian border. The North Woods holds no allure for Daddy. It’s nothing but miles and miles of trees. A lake, then more trees. “We can’t go off willy-nilly and leave the house, the garden—” He is envisioning busted plumbing, the basement filling with water, the furnace exploding. He has always taken a dim view of traveling, period. Why not see it in the National Geographic and save the wear and tear? Mother showed him a brochure with color photos of log cabins nestled in the pines, each two-bedroom unit with fully equipped kitchen, but he isn’t buying it. Something in him rebels against the very idea. He says he could never sleep in motel beds and would be a nervous wreck inside of three days. She points out that in Greenland he slept on bunks for three years. “That was an experience I don’t care to repeat,” he says. “I have yet to get over it.”

  But with the danger of army caterpillars looming over us, there is no point in discussing a vacation. “Put it out of your mind,” he says. He lies listening to the night crickets, a car passing, the electric meter turning, turning, on the wall of the garage, money leaking away. The tide’s running against us. Hope dwindling. The precariousness of the situation. Danger and decay, funds evaporating, prices rising, bankruptcy beckoning. The auction sign on a stake in the front yard, creditors coming to seize furniture and silverware, china, clothing, the sheriff ushering us to a squad car to be driven to the poor farm and given blue coveralls and put to work picking potatoes.

  Mother is absorbed in the latest Star story about Ricky and Dede. They eluded a sheriff’s posse that tracked them to the Overlook Tourist Cabins outside Butte, Montana, and banged on the door at 2 A.M. but it wasn’t their cabin, it was the cabin of a minister and his wife from Des Moines, and by the time the posse established the fact that the man was a minister and married to the woman, the two fugitives had crawled out the bathroom window of the cabin next door and snuck away to the highway and thumbed a ride, leaving behind some socks and underwear. Meanwhile, the FBI has released Ricky’s poem:To live in peace is our desire.

  We love each other. Hold your fire.

  Why is love believed so wrong

  That we are hunted all day long?

  You can chase us ’til we drop,

  But our love you cannot stop.

  Your machinations only show

  We have a love you’ll never know.

  Because you live in emptiness,

  You seek to cause us great distress.

  But soon will come the tragic news:

  Your sons and daughters you will lose.

  Remember this, for it’s a fact:

  The pain you cause always comes back.

  Mother reads it out loud from the paper and Daddy groans: “I don’t think Robert Frost needs to worry much.” Mother thinks it’s sweet. So do I.

  “Did you know he wrote poetry?” she asks.

  “I think I saw some of it. I can’t remember.” But I do remember. It was one morning before first hour, beside Leonard’s locker, and Ricky Guppy was there with Leonard and another boy, looking at a poem of Ricky’s that Miss Lewis had written Rather sophomoric!! at the top of. Which we, being in the eighth grade, at first thought was high praise indeed until Leonard set us straight. Ricky was embarrassed to have us see his poem, entitled “Her Eyes of Brown,” a sonnet, I could see, in which Dede was rhymed with sweetie, and he took it away from Leonard before Leonard could give it his full attention. “Maybe you could rewrite it,” said Leonard, but Ricky didn’t seem interested in discussing the matter. He wanted to collect the 50 cents the other boy owed him and get the heck out of there. The other boy rooted around in his pockets as Ricky fidgeted. And then I noticed how he was facing us, head down, his back to the mob coursing down the hall, and it was obvious he was sheepish about being seen with us. With me and Leonard, the class intellect. The same boy who two months later swiped his folks’ car and absconded to Montana with his girlfriend. The boy whose face is now (according to Leonard) on a Wanted poster in the Lake Wobegon post office. He was afraid of being publicly identified as a friend of the toad.

  Mother reads the story again, soaking up the small details. The Overlook Tourist Cabins
were owned by a Mormon family with eleven kids. The minister was Dutch Reformed and he and his wife were celebrating their silver wedding anniversary and he got his feathers ruffled plenty by that posse, which (according to him) treated him like a common criminal and threw him down on the bed and stripped him. The minister thought the police should be able to tell the difference between a 17-year-old kid and a 52-year-old man. “Maybe it was dark,” says Mother. “Maybe he looks young.” What offends her is the FBI agent saying that more manpower is being brought in for the dragnet, highway patrol, G-men, sheriff’s deputies, town constables, and an Idaho man who trains bloodhounds.

  “I say it’s time to forgive and forget and bring those kids home,” she says. “What is the point of a posse of grown men chasing around after a couple of teenagers? Let them go and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them.”

  Daddy says that Ricky, like any other felon fleeing the arm of the law, must be brought to justice, otherwise it’d be every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, which unfortunately we already have in this country, thanks to the Democrats, but there’s no sense in letting it get even worse than it is.

  “Bring them home, and when they finish high school, give them a nice wedding.”

  Daddy snorts. “I wouldn’t have my daughter marry somebody who beats up his mother and steals her car.”

  Daddy is busy over there on the daybed. He turned off the Millers game long ago and got out a tablet and started writing, and now he is reading it to Mother, though she still has her head in the Star—it′s a letter to the editor of the Herald Star complaining about the upcoming Fourth of July celebration. Daddy has gotten wind of an appearance by the Doo Dads at the celebration. I am thrilled to hear this. The Doo Dads! I’ll actually get to see them sing in person and finally figure out how they do all those great sound effects they do.—Daddy is outraged. Someone at the American Legion Post must have a screw loose to even consider inviting this gang of delinquents to entertain us on the birthday of American independence.

  “Delinquents?” says Mother.

  “Loan delinquent. The guy can’t pay his bills. What sort of example is this? To put them on a stage in front of families, small children, everybody, and the American flag, and there they are cavorting around and singing suggestive songs.”

  Mother suggests that he speak to someone in the Legion and hear their side of it.

  “I’ve heard it! Heard them talking about it in the café yesterday over lunch! Couldn’t believe my ears!”

  Daddy says the Legion wants the Doo Dads because they’re popular and draw a young crowd and the Fourth of July program hasn’t been drawing well in recent years. The ballgame and the fireworks and the picnic and the Living Flag get a good crowd, but the program—the heart of the whole thing, where the Legion guys lead the Pledge of Allegiance and somebody reads the Declaration of Independence (not all of it, the highlights, the When in the Course of human Events and the self-evident Truths and unalienable rights of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness and the actual declaration at the end and the pledging of Our lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor, and skipping the long whiny part in the middle about what the King did)—the program is lagging, only about eighty people turned out for it last year, which is pitiful. And so some genius at the Legion, some guy who probably was in his cups at the time, thought, “Doo Dads,” and mentioned it to the other geniuses, and everybody went along with it like a herd of sheep.

  Daddy is good and steamed. He reads his letter:I take up my pen reluctantly, believing as I do in the virtues of patience and forbearance and not wanting to stir up a “hornets’ nest,” but when it comes to the Fourth of July and what it means to us as Americans, I’m afraid I must take a firm stand, unpopular though it may be. Perhaps freedom is not of interest to everyone in this community. As it says in the old song, “You don’t miss the water till the well runs dry.” Nevertheless, someone must make sure that deadly poisons are not seeping into our drinking water. And that is what is happening with Lake Wobegon’s upcoming observance of the “Glorious Fourth.” I’m sure that the planners of our Independence Day festivities have worked hard, and I do not question their dedication or their loyalty to our nation and its principles. But they are making a tragic mistake when they sully the Fourth of July tradition by inviting a so-called “rock-and-roll” group to appear as featured performers. If the adherents of such music wish to enjoy its cacophony and wild gyrations in the confines of a night-club, such is their privilege in the “Land of the Free,” but when this Godless music is thrust upon an entire community, forcing us to choose between endorsing said music and its lascivious excesses or turning our back on the beloved Fourth, then you are abrogating the very freedom that the day is meant to celebrate. I beg the planners to reconsider this decision in the light of principle. The Declaration of Independence, adopted in Philadelphia on that auspicious July 4 so many years ago, pays reverence to “Nature’s God” and to the “Creator” and to “Divine Providence.” Does anyone believe that “rock and roll” does likewise? Or does this decision mark the end of the Fourth as we know it and its descent into mere sensuality and drunkenness until it becomes the sort of heathen carnival that no God-fearing family could support? Are we nearing a time in this country when patriots must celebrate in secret? Does this augur the approach of some greater, all-encompassing darkness that will require the “Lovers of Liberty” to take the same determined steps and make the same terrible sacrifices that our Founding Fathers made one hundred and eighty years ago? I call on all citizens who love their country to ponder these questions.

  “Oh dear,” says Mother. “You’re going to send it to the paper?”

  Daddy is worn out from the effort of composition. “Is it too long?” he asks.

  “It may be.”

  He hands her the pages, four of them, dense scribbling with a lot of cross-outs and insertions and squiggly arrows. She glances at it.

  “Remember what Lincoln said about writing angry letters,” she says. Daddy says he didn’t know Lincoln had expressed himself on the subject.

  “Lincoln said that you should write them and then put them away and not send them.”

  He lies back on the daybed. “Somebody has to take a stand,” he says, forlornly.

  “You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar,” she observes. He says that catching flies isn’t the point, he wants to make people think.

  “You’ll make them think, all right, but they may not think what you think they should think. They may just think that you’re grumpy and trying to cause a big ruckus.”

  Daddy lies in silence, eyes closed, his hands folded on his chest. He knows she’s right. Mother knows the score. You have to toe the line and keep your mouth shut in this town. These are stubborn people and the rules are chiseled in stone and one of them is Don’t swim upstream. Don’t piss into the wind. Get along by going along. The commander of the Legion Post is Florian Krebsbach. He got the job as part of the deal when the Catholic War Veterans merged with the Legion. Probably the Doo Dads idea came from his son Carl. Florian doesn’t care about rock and roll. Wouldn’t know it if it came up and bit him. Makes no difference to him. But maybe Carl put the bug in his ear, and so they’ll have the Doo Dads get up and sing something. No big deal to Florian. But you send this letter to the paper and they print it and Florian is going to feel this is an attack on the Roman Catholic Church, his family, and his own honor. He will never say one word to you about it, but he’ll have plenty to say to a lot of others, and for the next twenty years you’ll be walking around in a shadow with a stone in your shoe, all because of one letter.