“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.
If people were to live by comparison shopping, the town would go bust. It cannot compete with other places item by item. Nothing in town is quite as good as it appears to be somewhere else. If you live there, you have to take it as a whole. That’s loyalty.
This is why Judy Ingqvist does not sing “Holy City” on Sunday morning, although everyone says she sounds great on “Holy City”—it’s not her wish to sound great, though she is the leading soprano; it’s her wish that all the sopranos sound at least okay. So she sings quietly. One Sunday when the Ingqvists went to the Black Hills on vacation, a young, white-knuckled seminarian filled in; he gave a forty-five minute sermon and had a lot of sermon left over when finally three deacons cleared their throats simultaneously. They sounded like German shepherds barking, and their barks meant that the congregation now knew that he was bright and he had nothing more to prove to them. The young man looked on the sermon as free enterprise.* You work like hell on it and come up a winner. He wanted to give it all the best that was in him, of which he had more than he needed. He was opening a Higgledy-Piggledy of theology, and the barks were meant to remind him where he was: in Lake Wobegon, where smart doesn’t count for so much. A minister has to be able to read a clock. At noon, it’s time to go home and turn up the pot roast and get the peas out of the freezer. Everybody gets their pot roast at Ralph’s. It’s not the tenderest meat in the Ninth Federal Reserve District, but after you bake it for four hours until it falls apart in shreds, what’s the difference?
So what’s special about this town is not smarts either. It counted zero when you worked for Bud on the road crew, as I did one summer. He said, “Don’t get smart with me,” and he meant it. One week I was wrestling with great ideas in dimly lit college classrooms, the next I was home shoveling gravel in the sun, just another worker. I’d studied the workers in humanities class, spent a whole week on the labor movement as it related to ideals of American individualism, and I thought it was pretty funny to sing “Solidarity Forever” while patching potholes, but he didn’t, he told me to quit smarting off. Work was serious business, and everybody was supposed to do it—hard work, unless of course you thought you were too good for it, in which case to hell with you. Bud’s wife kept telling him to retire, he said, but he wasn’t going to; all the geezers he’d known who decided to take it easy were flat on their backs a few months later with all their friends commenting on how natural they looked. Bud believed that when you feel bad, you get out of bed and put your boots on. “A little hard work never killed anybody,” he told us, I suppose, about fifteen thousand times. Lean on your shovel for one second to straighten your back, and there was Bud to remind you. It would have been satisfying to choke him on the spot. We had the tar right there, just throw the old coot in and cook him and use him for fill. But he was so strong he might have taken the whole bunch of us. Once he said to me, “Here, take the other end of this.” It was the hoist for the backhoe. I lifted my end, and right then I went from a 34- to a 36-inch sleeve. I thought my back was going to break. “Heavy?” he said. Nooo. “Want to set her down?” Nooo. That’s okay. “Well, better set her down, cause this is where she goes.” Okay. All my bones had been reset, making me a slightly curved person. “Next time try lifting with your legs,” he said.
People who visit Lake Wobegon come to see somebody, otherwise they missed the turn on the highway and are lost. Ausländers, the Germans call them. They don’t come for Toast ’n Jelly Days, or the Germans’ quadrennial Gesuffa Days, or Krazy Daze, or the Feast Day of St. Francis, or the three-day Mist County Fair with its exciting Death Leap from the top of the grandstand to the arms of the haystack for only ten cents. What’s special about here isn’t special enough to draw a major crowd, though Flag Day—you could drive a long way on June 14 to find another like it.
Flag Day, as we know it, was the idea of Herman Hochstetter, Rollie’s dad, who ran the dry goods store and ran Armistice Day, the Fourth of July, and Flag Day. For the Fourth, he organized a doubleloop parade around the block which allowed people to take turns marching and watching. On Armistice Day, everyone stepped outside at 11 A.M. and stood in silence for two minutes as Our Lady’s bell tolled eleven times.
Flag Day was his favorite. For a modest price, he would install a bracket on your house to hold a pole to hang your flag on, or he would drill a hole in the sidewalk in front of your store with his drill gun powered by a. 22 shell. Bam! And in went the flag. On patriotic days, flags flew all over; there were flags on the tall poles, flags on the short, flags in the brackets on the pillars and the porches, and if you were flagless you could expect to hear from Herman. His hairy arm around your shoulder, his poochlike face close to yours, he would say how proud he was that so many people were proud of their country, leaving you to see the obvious, that you were a gap in the ranks.
In June 1944, the day after D-Day, a salesman from Fisher Hat called on Herman and offered a good deal on red and blue baseball caps. “Do you have white also?” Herman asked. The salesman thought that white caps could be had for the same wonderful price. Herman ordered two hundred red, two hundred white, and one hundred blue. By the end of the year, he still had four hundred and eighty-six caps. The inspiration of the Living Flag was born from that overstock.
On June 14, 1945, a month after V-E Day, a good crowd assembled in front of the Central Building in response to Herman’s ad in the paper:
Honor “AMERICA” June 14 AT 4 P.M. Be
proud of “Our Land & People”. Be part of
the “LIVING FLAG”. Don’t let it be said
that Lake Wobegon was “Too Busy”. Be on
time. 4 P.M. “Sharp”.
His wife Louise handed out the caps, and Herman stood on a stepladder and told people where to stand. He lined up the reds and whites into stripes, then got the blues into their square. Mr. Hanson climbed up on the roof of the Central Building and took a photograph, they sang the national anthem, and then the Living Flag dispersed. The photograph appeared in the paper the next week. Herman kept the caps.
In the flush of victory, people were happy to do as told and stand in place, but in 1946 and 1947, dissension cropped up in the ranks: people complained about the heat and about Herman—what gave him the idea he could order them around? “People! Please! I need your attention! You blue people, keep your hats on! Please! Stripe No. 4, you’re sagging! You reds, you’re up here! We got too many white people, we need more red ones! Let’s do this without talking, people! I can’t get you straight if you keep moving around! Some of you are not paying attention! Everybody shut up! Please!”
One cause of resentment was the fact that none of them got to see the Flag they were in; the picture in the paper was black and white. Only Herman and Mr. Hanson got to see the real Flag, and some boys too short to be needed down below. People wanted a chance to go up to the roof and witness the spectacle for themselves.
“How can you go up there if you’re supposed to be down here?” Herman said. “You go up there to look, you got nothing to look at. Isn’t it enough to know that you’re doing your part?”
On Flag Day, 1949, just as Herman said, “That’s it! Hold it now!” one of the reds made a break for it—dashed up four flights of stairs to the roof and leaned over and had a long look. Even with the hole he left behind, it was a magnificent sight. The Living Flag filled the street below. A perfect Flag! The reds so brilliant! He couldn’t take his eyes off it. “Get down here! We need a picture!” Herman yelled up to him. “How does it look?” people yelled up to him. “Unbelievable! I can’t describe it!” he said.
So then everyone had to have a look. “No!” Herman said, but they took a vot
e and it was unanimous. One by one, members of the Living Flag went up to the roof and admired it. It was marvelous! It brought tears to the eyes, it made one reflect on this great country and on Lake Wobegon’s place in it. One wanted to stand up there all afternoon and just drink it in. So, as the first hour passed, and only forty of the five hundred had been to the top, the others got more and more restless. “Hurry up! Quit dawdling! You’ve seen it! Get down here and give someone else a chance!” Herman sent people up in groups of four, and then ten, but after two hours, the Living Flag became the Sitting Flag and then began to erode, as the members who had had a look thought about heading home to supper, which infuriated the ones who hadn’t. “Ten more minutes!” Herman cried, but ten minutes became twenty and thirty, and people snuck off and the Flag that remained for the last viewer was a Flag shot through by cannon fire.
In 1950, the Sons of Knute took over Flag Day. Herman gave them the boxes of caps. Since then, the Knutes have achieved several good Flags, though most years the attendance was poor. You need at least four hundred to make a good one. Some years the Knutes made a “no-look” rule, other years they held a lottery. One year they experimented with a large mirror held by two men over the edge of the roof, but when people leaned back and looked up, the Flag disappeared, of course.
* The smoke machine at the Sidetrack Tap, if you whack it about two inches below the Camels, will pay off a couple packs for free, and some enterprising patrons find it in their interest to use this knowledge. Past a certain age, you’re not supposed to do this sort of thing anymore. You’re supposed to grow up. Unfortunately, that is just the age when many people start to smoke.
Lake Wobegon Days Page 12