Lake Wobegon Days Read online

  In school we sang

  Hail to thee, Lake Wobegon, the cradle of our youth.

  We shall uphold the blue and gold in honor and in truth.

  Holding high our lamps, we will be thy champs, and will vanquish far and near

  For W.H.S., the beacon of the west, the school we love so dear.

  And also

  We’re going to fight, fight, fight for Wobegon

  And be strong and resolute,

  And our mighty foes will fall down in rows

  When we poke ’em in the snoot! (Rah! Rah!)

  But those were only for show. In our hearts, our loyalties to home have always been more modest, along the lines of the motto on the town crest—“Sumus quod sumus” (We are what we are)—and the annual Christmas toast of the Sons of Knute, “There’s no place like home when you’re not feeling well,” first uttered by a long-ago Knute who missed the annual dinner dance due to a case of the trots, and even Mr. Diener’s observation, “When you’re around it all the time, you don’t notice it so much.” He said this after he tore out the wall between his living room and dining room, which he had not done before for fear that it was there for a reason. In the wall, he found the remains of a cat who had been missing for more than a year. The Dieners had not been getting full use of the dining room and had been silently blaming each other. “It’s good to know that it wasn’t us,” he said.

  In school and in church, we were called to high ideals such as truth and honor by someone perched on truth and hollering for us to come on up, but the truth was that we always fell short.* Every spring, the Thanatopsis Society sponsored a lecture in keeping with the will of the late Mrs. Bjornson, who founded the society as a literary society, and though they had long since evolved into a conversational society, the Thanatopsians were bound by the terms of her bequest to hire a lecturer once a year and listen. One year it was World Federalism (including a demonstration of conversational Esperanto), and then it was the benefits of a unicameral legislature, and in 1955, a man from the University came and gave us “The World of 1980” with slides of bubble-top houses, picture-phones, autogyro copter-cars, and floating factories harvesting tasty plankton from the sea. We sat and listened and clapped, but when the chairlady called for questions from the audience, what most of us wanted to know we didn’t dare ask: “How much are you getting paid for this?”

  Left to our own devices, we Wobegonians go straight for the small potatoes. Majestic doesn’t appeal to us; we like the Grand Canyon better with Clarence and Arlene parked in front of it, smiling. We feel uneasy at momentous events.

  Lake Wobegon babies are born in a hospital thirty-some miles away and held at the glass by a nurse named Betty who has worked there for three hundred years—then it’s a long drive home for the new father in the small morning hours, and when he arrives, he is full of thought. His life has taken a permanent turn toward rectitude and sobriety and a decent regard for the sanctity of life; having seen his flesh in a layette, he wants to talk about some deep truths he has discovered in the past few hours to his own parents, who have sat up in their pajamas, waiting for word about the baby’s name and weight. Then they want to go to bed.

  Lake Wobegon people die in those hospitals, unless they are quick about it, and their relations drive to sit with them. When Grandma died, she had been unconscious for three days. She was baking bread at Aunt Flo’s and felt tired, then lay down for a nap and didn’t wake up. An ambulance took her to the hospital. She lay asleep, so pale, so thin. It was August. We held cool washcloths to her forehead and moistened her lips with ice cubes. A nun leaned over and said in her ear, “Do you love Jesus?” We thought this might lead to something Catholic, involving incense and candles; we told her that, yes, she did love Jesus. Eight of us sat around the bed that first afternoon, taking turns holding Grandma’s hand so that if she had any sensation, it would be one of love. Four more came that evening. We talked in whispers, but didn’t talk much; it was hard to know what to say. “Mother always said she wanted to go in her sleep,” my mother said. “She didn’t want to linger.” I felt that we should be saying profound things about Grandma’s life and what it had meant to each of us, but I didn’t know how to say that we should. My uncles were uneasy. The women saw to Grandma and wept a little now and then, a few friendly tears; the men only sat and crossed and uncrossed their legs, slowly perishing of profound truth, until they began to whisper among themselves—I heard gas mileage mentioned, and a new combine—and then they resumed their normal voices. “I wouldn’t drive a Fairlane if you give it to me for nothing,” Uncle Frank said. “They are nothing but grief.” At the time (twenty), I thought they were crude and heartless, but now that I know myself a little better, I can forgive them for wanting to get back onto familiar ground. Sumus quod sumus. She was eighty-two. Her life was in all of us in the room. Nobody needed to be told that, except me, and now I’ve told myself.

  Incorporated under the laws of Minnesota but omitted from the map due to the incompetence of surveyors, first named “New Albion” by New Englanders who thought it would become the Boston of the west, taking its ultimate name from an Indian phrase that means either “Here we are!” or “we sat all day in the rain waiting for [you],” Lake Wobegon is the seat of tiny Mist County, the “phantom county in the heart of the heartland” (Dibbley, My Minnesota), founded by Unitarian missionaries and Yankee promoters, then found by Norwegian Lutherans who straggled in from the west, having headed first to Lake Agassiz in what is now North Dakota, a lake that turned out to be prehistoric, and by German Catholics, who, bound for Clay County, had stopped a little short, having misread their map, but refused to admit it.

  A town with few scenic wonders such as towering pines or high mountains but with some fine people of whom some are over six feet tall, its highest point is the gold ball on the flagpole atop the Norge Co-op grain elevator south of town on the Great Northern spur, from which Mr. Tollefson can see all of Mist County when he climbs up to raise the flag on national holidays, including Norwegian Independence Day, when the blue cross of Norway is flown. (No flag of Germany has appeared in public since 1917.) Next highest is the water tower, then the boulder on the hill, followed by the cross on the spire of Our Lady, then the spire of Lake Wobegon Lutheran (Christian Synod), the Central Building (three stories), the high school flagpole, the high school, the top row of bleachers at Wally (“Old Hard Hands”) Bunsen Memorial Field, the First Ingqvist State Bank, Bunsen Motors, the Hjalmar Ingqvist home, etc.

  I’ve been to the top only once, in 1958, when six of us boys broke into the Co-op one July night to take turns riding the bucket to the tiny window at the peak of the elevator. It was pitch-black in there and stifling hot, I was choking on grain dust, the motor whined and the rope groaned, and up I rode, terrified and hanging onto the bucket for dear life—it was shallow, like a wheelbarrow, and pitched back and forth so I knew I’d fall into the black and break my neck. All the way up I promised God that if He would bring me safely back to the floor, I would never touch alcohol—then suddenly I was at the window and could see faintly through the dusty glass some lights below that I knew were Lake Wobegon. The bucket swayed, I reached out for the wall to steady it, but the wall wasn’t where it should have been and the bucket swung back and I fell forward in one sickening moment; out of my mouth came an animal shriek that almost tore my face off, then I felt the cable in my left hand and the bucket swung back to level, then they released the brake and the bucket fell twenty or fifty or a hundred feet before they threw the brake back on, which almost broke my back, then they cranked me down the rest of the way and lifted me out and I threw up. Nobody cared, they were all crying. Jim put his arms around me and I staggered out into the night, which smelled so good. We went to someone’s house and lay on the grass, looked at the stars, and drank beer. I drank four bottles.

  Right then I guess was when I loved Lake Wobegon the most, the night I didn’t quite die. I turned sixteen the next week and never told my parents w
hat a miraculous birthday it was. I looked around the table and imagined them eating this pork roast and potato salad with me gone to the graveyard, imagined the darkness in the tight box and the tufted satin quilt on my cold face, and almost burst into tears of sheer gratitude, but took another helping of pork instead. Our family always was known for its great reserve.

  We climbed the water tower, of course, but spent more time on the third highest point, Adams Hill, which rose behind the school and commanded a panoramic view of town and lake from the clearing at the crest. As a small boy who listened carefully and came to his own conclusions, I assumed that the hill was where God created our first parents, the man from the dust in the hole where we built fires, the lady from his rib. They lived there for many years in a log cabin like Lincoln’s and ate blueberries and sweet corn from the Tolleruds’ field. Adam fished for sunnies off the point, and their kids fooled around like we did, Eve sometimes poking her head out the door and telling them to pipe down.

  There was no apple tree on Adams Hill, but that didn’t weaken my faith; there were snakes. Here, above the school, God created the world.

  When I was four, I told my sister about the Creation, and she laughed in my face. She was eight. She gave me a choice between going back on Scripture truth as I knew it or eating dirt, and I ate a pinch of dirt. “Chew it,” she said, and I did so she could hear it crunch.

  There, for years, to the peak of Paradise, we resorted every day, the old gang. Nobody said, “Let’s go”; we just went. Lance was the captain. Rotting trees that lay in the clearing were our barricades, and we propped up limbs for cannons. The boulder was the command post. We sat in the weeds, decked out in commando wear—neckerchiefs and extra belts slung over our shoulders for ammo and Lance even had a canteen in a khaki cover and a khaki satchel marked U.S.A.—and we looked down the slope to the roofs of town, which sometimes were German landing boats pulled up on the beach, and other times were houses of despicable white settlers who had violated the Sacred Hunting Ground of us Chippewa. We sent volleys of flaming arrows down on them and burned them to the ground many times, or we pounded the boats with tons of deadly shells, some of us dying briefly in the hot sun. “Aiiiiieeee!” we cried when it was time to die, and pitched forward, holding our throats. There were no last words. We were killed instantly.

  Near the clearing was a giant tree we called the Pee Tree; a long rope hung from a lower branch, which when you swung hard on it took you out over the edge and showed you your real death. You could let go at the end of the arc and fall to the rocks and die if you wanted to.

  Jim said, “It’s not that far—it wouldn’t kill you.” He was bucking for captain. Lance said, “So jump then. I dare you.” That settled it. It would kill you, all right. It would break every bone in your body, just like Richard. He was twelve and drove his dad’s tractor and fell off and it ran over him and killed him. He was one boy who died when I was a boy, and the other was Paulie who drowned in the lake. Both were now in heaven with God where they were happy. It was God’s will that it would happen.

  “It was an accident, God didn’t make it happen, God doesn’t go around murdering people,” Jim said. I explained that, maybe so, but God knows everything that will happen, He has known every single thing since time began, and everything that happens is part of God’s plan.

  “Does He know that I’m just about to hit you?” Jim said.

  “Everything.”

  “What if I changed my mind at the last minute and didn’t?”

  “He knows everything.”

  Jim believed that God sort of generally watched over the world but didn’t try to oversee every single detail. He said that, for example, when you’re born, you could be born American or Chinese or Russian or African, depending. In heaven are millions of souls lined up waiting to be born, and when it’s your turn, you go down the chute like a gumball to whoever put the penny in the slot. You were born to your parents because, right at that moment when they Did It, you were next in line. Two seconds later and you could have been a feeb. Or a Communist. “It’s just pure luck we’re Americans,” he said.

  When it was hot, we all lay around in the grass and talked about stuff. At least, if you were older, you could talk. Little kids had to shut up because they didn’t know anything. Jim leaned on one elbow and tore off tufts of grass and threw them at my face. I told him twice to quit it. He said, “Tell God to make me quit it. It’s God’s plan. He knew that I was going to do it. It’s not my fault.” He said, “If you think God planned you, then He made a big mistake, because you’re the dumbest person I know.”

  I was on top of him before he could blink and pounded him twice before he wriggled out and got me in an armlock and shoved my face into the dirt. Then Lance broke us up. We sat and glared at each other. We fought once more, and went home to supper.

  I lived in a white house with Mother, Dad, Rudy, Phyllis, and we raised vegetables in the garden and ate certain things on the correct nights (macaroni hotdish on Thursday, liver on Friday, beans and wieners on Saturday, pot roast on Sunday) and sang as we washed dishes:

  Because God made the stars to shine,

  Because God made the ivy twine,

  Because God made the sky so blue.

  Because God made you, that’s why I love you.

  God created the world and ordained everything to be right and perfect, then man sinned against God’s Will, but God still knew everything. Before the world was made, when it was only darkness and mist and waters, God was well aware of Lake Wobegon, my family, our house, and He had me all sketched out down to what size my feet would be (big), which bike I would ride (a Schwinn), and the five ears of corn I’d eat for supper that night. He had meant me to be there; it was His Will, which it was up to me to discover the rest of and obey, but the first part—being me, in Lake Wobegon—He had brought about as He had hung the stars and decided on blue for the sky.

  The crisis came years later when Dad mentioned that in 1938 he and Mother had almost moved to Brooklyn Park, north of Minneapolis, but didn’t because Grandpa offered them our house in Lake Wobegon, which was Aunt Becky’s until she died and left it to Grandpa, and Dad got a job with the post office as a rural mail carrier. I was fourteen when I got this devastating news: that I was me and had my friends and lived in my house only on account of a pretty casual decision about real estate, otherwise I’d have been a Brooklyn Park kid where I didn’t know a soul. I imagined Dad and Mother talking it over in 1938—“Oh, I don’t care, it’s up to you, either one is okay with me”—as my life hung in the balance. Thank goodness God was at work, I thought, because you sure couldn’t trust your parents to do the right thing.

  Until it became a suburb, Brooklyn Park was some of the best farmland in Minnesota, but Lake Wobegon is mostly poor sandy soil, and every spring the earth heaves up a new crop of rocks.* Piles of rock ten feet high in the corners of fields, picked by generations of us, monuments to our industry. Our ancestors chose the place, tired from their long journey, sad for having left the motherland behind, and this place reminded them of there, so they settled here, forgetting that they had left there because the land wasn’t so good. So the new life turned out to be a lot like the old, except the winters are worse.

  Since arriving in the New World, the good people of Lake Wobegon have been skeptical of progress. When the first automobile chugged into town, driven by the Ingqvist twins, the crowd’s interest was muted, less whole-hearted than if there had been a good fire. When the first strains of music wafted from a radio, people said, “I don’t know.” Of course, the skeptics gave in and got one themselves. But the truth is, we still don’t know.

  For this reason, it’s a hard place to live in from the age of fourteen on up to whenever you recover. At that age, you’re no skeptic but a true believer starting with belief in yourself as a natural phenomenon never before seen on this earth and therefore incomprehensible to all the others. You believe that if God were to make you a millionaire and an idol whose v
iews on the world were eagerly sought by millions, that it would be no more than what you deserved. This belief is not encouraged there.

  Sister Brunnhilde was coaching a Krebsbach on his catechism one morning in Our Lady lunchroom and suddenly asked a question out of order. “Why did God make you?” she said sharply, as if it were an accusation. The boy opened his mouth, wavered, then looked at a spot on the linoleum and put his breakfast there. He ran to the lavatory, and Sister, after a moment’s thought, strolled down the hall to the fifth-grade classroom. “Who wants to be a nurse when she grows up?” she asked. Six girls raised their hands, and she picked Betty Diener. “Nurses help sick people in many different ways,” she told Betty as they walked to the lunchroom. “They have many different jobs to do. Now here is one of them. The mop is in the kitchen. Be sure to use plenty of Pine-Sol.”

  So most of Lake Wobegon’s children leave, as I did, to realize themselves as finer persons than they were allowed to be at home.

  When I was a child, I figured out that I was

  1 person, the son of

  2 parents and was the

  3rd child, born

  4 years after my sister and

  5 years after my brother, in

  1942 (four and two are 6), on the

  7th day of the

  8th month, and the year before

  had been 9 years old and

  was now 10.

  To me, it spelled Destiny.