Lake Wobegon Days Read online

  Listening to combines on a dry day that is leaning toward fall, I still remember—

  That time of year thou mayst in me behold

  When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

  Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

  Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang….

  Learned at sixteen in a classroom that smelled of Wildroot hair oil and Nesbitt’s orange pop on my breath, it cheers me up, even “the twilight of such day/As after sunset fadeth in the west” and “the ashes of his youth.”

  This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

  To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

  * “Right on this road 0.7 m. to OLD WHITE BARN, then right 1.2 m. to LAKE WOBEGON (1418 alt., 942 pop.), named for the body of water that it borders. Bleakly typical of the prairie, Lake Wobegon has its origins in the utopian vision of nineteenth-century New England Transcendentalists but now is populated mainly by Norwegians and Germans who attend LAKE WOBEGON LUTHERAN CHURCH (left at BANK .1 m.) and OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL RESPONSIBILITY CHURCH (right at CHURCH .08m.), neither of which are remarkable. The lake itself, blue-green and brightly sparkling in the brassy summer sun and neighbored by the warm-colored marsh grasses of a wildlife-teeming slough, is the town’s main attraction, though the view is spoiled somewhat by a large GRAIN ELEVATOR by the railroad track.

  North of town .3 m. is the junction with an oiled road.”

  —Minnesota, Federal Writers’ Project (2nd edition, 1939)

  * It is Dr. Nute, retired after forty odd years of dentistry, now free to ply the waters in the Molar II and drop a line where the fighting sunfish lie in wait. “Open wide,” he says. “This may sting a little bit. Okay. Now bite down.”

  * The stone plaque on the facade fell off one hot July afternoon, the plaque that reads CENTRAL BLDG. 1913, and crashed on the sidewalk, almost hitting Bud Mueller, who had just stopped and turned to walk the other way. If he hadn’t, he would have been killed. He didn’t know why he had turned. “It was like something spoke to me right then,” he said. Others realized then that they had been on the verge of walking by the Central Building moments before and something had spoken to them. “You know, I was thinking, ’Maybe I will go to Skoglund’s and purchase a pencil,’ but then something said, ’No, you wait on that,’ so I didn’t go. If I had gone, it would’ve killed me,” Mr. Berge said. He was one of many whose lives had been spared by a narrow margin. The plaque broke into five pieces, which Carl Krebsbach glued together, and it was remounted on the facade with a protective mesh to keep it in place.

  * I grew up among slow talkers, men in particular, who dropped words a few at a time like beans in a hill, and when I got to Minneapolis, where people took a Lake Wobegon comma to mean the end of the story, I couldn’t speak a whole sentence in company and was considered not too bright, so I enrolled in a speech course taught by Orville Sand, the founder of reflexive relaxology, a self-hypnotic technique that enabled a person to speak up to three hundred words per minute. He believed that slow speech deprives us of a great deal of thought by slowing down the mental processes to one’s word rate. He believed that the mind has unlimited powers if only a person could learn to release them and eliminate the backup caused by slow discharge. I believe that’s what he said—it was hard to understand him. He’d be rattling on about relaxology one moment and then he was into photography, his father, the Baltimore Orioles, wheat germ, birth and death, central heating, the orgasm—which was satisfying for him, but which left me in the dust, so I quit, having only gotten up to about eighty-five. And after a few weeks, I was back to about ten or eleven.

  * Though unpromising for agriculture, the Lake Wobegon area is beloved among geologists for the diversity of its topography, lying within the Bowlus Moraine left by the retreat of the Western Lobe of the Superior Glacier and including the St. John’s Drumlin Field of pale brown sandy till featuring numerous Precambrian rocks and pebbles that come to the surface in the spring. Certain plutonic rocks, mainly granite, appear in outcroppings, while some metamorphic minerals such as garnet and anchorite crystals have been found, but not enough to make much difference. Had the Superior Glacier moved slower twenty thousand years ago, permitting the Moorhead Glacier to race eastward with its valuable load of shale-rich soil, Lake Wobegon’s history would be much brighter than it is. Adding insult to injury, geologists now point out that the town lies in a major fault zone, where deep-seated forces may one day with no warning send us running in terror from our beds.

  NEW ALBION

  The first white person to set foot in Lake Wobegon and claim credit for it was either Father Pierre Plaisir in 1835 or Count Carlo Pallavicini the following year, depending on whether Father Plaisir set foot here or much farther to the west. According to his own calculations, he was near Lake Wobegon (or Lac Malheur, as the voyageurs called it), but the terrain he describes in his memoir, Le Monde (1841), seems to be to the west, perhaps as far as Montana. The mountains he says he saw were not any of ours.

  He and his six amis had come to the New World to gain gloire and honneur through nouveaux exploits despite les dangers, but instead got lost and spent June and July looking for the route back to where they had come from, the Northeast Passage. When they made camp at Lac Malheur, if that is where they were, their confusion was complete and their leader was suffering from abominable abdominale. He was misérable even before he lay down to sleep in the grass and the muskitos attacked him.

  He had observed in his journal that “these are big vicious muskitos, not like our French insects,” but that was before they got serious. A cloud of them descended after dark, and he lay and suffered for a while, then yelled, “J’expire! Je quitte!” and tore into the underbrush. His friends shouted, “Courage, mon père!” and ran after him. Their footsteps made him think his ennemis were coming, and he dashed west in terreur for some distance until he was captured by the Ojibway. They looked on it as protective custody, but when Father Plaisir returned to France and wrote his book, he described them as savages and said the country was a wilderness and he would never go back. He forgot that he had never been invited.

  Count Carlo, who took one look and decided Lake Wobegon was not the headwaters of the Mississippi but was not far from it, was happier there. “Mio contento,” he sighed as he stripped away his count’s clothing and waded into the cool waters after a hard morning of exploring. He is said to have eaten a cheese sandwich and written a poem (“La Porta” or “The Door”) before continuing. He did not know that Henry Schoolcraft had discovered the headwaters four years before and far to the north. He thought of Lake Wobegon as the gateway to his great destiny.

  The first white folk known to have spent time in the Wobegon area were Unitarian missionaries from Boston, led by Prudence Alcott, a distant and wealthy relative of the famous Alcotts of Concord, a woman who sent a stereopticon and a crate of boysenberry jam to Henry Thoreau at his cabin by the pond, although he never mentioned her in his book.

  On June 14, 1850, at two-forty P.M., according to her meticulous journal, while crossing Boylston Street on her way to reflect in the pond of Boston’s Public Garden, she had a vision of a man in hairy clothing who told her to go west and convert the Indians to Christianity by the means of interpretive dance.

  Having witnessed an Algonquin Rain Dance at the Lyceum [the] previous night, the Expressive Beauty of their Spirits convinced me that the worship of the Supreme Being in our English Language is dry, tasteless, & insufficient to the present Need, & then amid a scene of such confusion & Commerce & bustling Traffic, it was shown to me that All is One under Heaven, All are Children of God & I must preach to our savage Brethren, using the language of Dance. I proceeded to my beloved Pond filled with Certainty and Rejoicing.

  Selecting three of her friends to be her followers, Prudence made plans to entrain immediately for the territories, taking only enough cash to see them to the Mississippi whence they would cast themselves u
pon Providence, but their departure was delayed by the enthusiasm of local savants who subjected them to an exhausting round of parties, lectures, and receptions, so they did not leave Boston until September 21 and arrived in Minnesota just as the weather was turning ugly. Staying only one night at Fort Snelling, the Unitarians pushed north, traveling upriver with a band of Ojibway merchants for ten days until, rounding a bend in the river and seeing a pine in the shape of a V, Prudence shouted “Here!” and there they were dropped: Prudence, her cousin Elizabeth Sewell, a seminary student named George Moore, and a poet, Henry Francis Watt, who was interested in native speech rhythms.

  A hike of three days brought them to the site of the present Lake Wobegon, where they built a lean-to of alder branches and settled in to await the leading of the Spirit, and where two days later they looked out in the morning to see a foot of new-fallen snow. Prudence’s certainty and rejoicing were just about all used up.

  Lay awake all night hearing cries of wild beasts, hoots, screams &c. Elizabeth sleeps easily but our diet of nuts & berries does not sit well & makes me restless & agitated & also Henry & George snort & grunt in their sleep & throw their arms & legs about & disgust me [with] their gross sensuality & brute appetites. This is a desolate & God-forsaken land & I do not see that any civilized society could find comfort and nurture here. Would that I had brought warm clothing!!

  By Thanksgiving Day, Prudence had said her prayers, laid down, crossed her arms, and hoped to die, when crashing was heard in the underbrush and into the clearing rode an immense swarthy man wrapped in bearskins who dismounted from his spotted pony, threw back his huge hairy head, and laughed out loud: “Haw! Haw! Haw!”

  “He was covered with sweat & filth & phlegm ran down his face unchecked & he gave off the aroma of one for whom bathing is as unwelcome a prospect as a broken leg,” wrote Prudence, but he was also, she learned, Basile Fonteneau, a French trapper, who knew his way around those parts, and when he offered to lead them to his hut at the other end of the lake and put them up for the winter, she did not say no. She was cold and hungry and wasn’t sure that Providence would make a better offer.

  In a few weeks, her spirits lifted somewhat. “M. Fonteneau delights in half-cooked bear meat which he eats sans utensil & sleeps in a heap with his four brutish dogs & sings bawdy ballads in a coarse voice & relieves himself in the open & engages in other lewd practices, but I am satisfied that Providence has led us here in order to test us with fire & I am happy to be proved & strengthened in my Faith,” she wrote.

  By the spring thaw, she had found in her heart some fondness for Basile and written two sonnets on the letters of his name. One of them began:

  Base metals may to pure gold changèd be,

  As, too, base mortals angelic may become,

  Silver-winged, gold-tongued, by fiery alchemy,

  Ill-bred their parts but O the glorious sum….

  By May her thoughts were centered on him. She gazed on him as he slept, and his face seemed to possess nobility of purpose and a spiritual demeanor she had not noticed during the cold months. “Compared to Basile—his strength, his native cunning, his constant good humor—Henry & George seem pale & slender stems of some weaker strain of plant. They while away the hours perched on rocks above the Lake & dispute theology & amuse themselves with their own wit & in their placid ignorance never take note that there is wood to be got. Each day I invent new reasons why we cannot press on with our Mission and must remain here a little longer, but there is no need to convince them—they would be content to sit until fall.”

  One evening as the sun set and a warm breeze carried the thought of spring flowers, Basile asked Prudence to walk with him to a peninsula to pick lady-slippers. As they walked, she found herself talking about her Mission to the Indians and her feeling that dance, not oratory, is the basis of true religion. As she talked, she began to dance for him. He ran after her as she danced on and on until, exhausted, she fell in a heap and he picked her up and carried her to the water’s edge and threw her in. He stripped off his clothing and jumped in after her.

  “I was astonished to see that he is actually quite a young man,” she wrote in her journal that night. “It was only his husk that was old & smelly & degraded & corpulent & when he shed it he appeared quite slender & muscular & all in all a very comely individual. We swam & sported in the cool waters & my petticoats were so cumbersome I dispensed with them &c. ‘You must not look upon me!’ I cried &c. He spoke to me in French, which I took to mean that he felt it was his Duty to look on me or else I might drown & he then took my hand & guided me to deeper water for modesty’s sake & showed me to swim &c. We returned to camp very damp & much refreshed & when I saw the others, reclining where I had left them & murmuring about the Spirit of Truth, I determined to send them back East & remain with Basile.”

  There her journal ended. She and Basile were married in St. Anthony in July by a Fr. Sevier, who also had come west to convert the Indians, and settled in St. Paul, where Basile built a hotel called The World, and they prospered and had seven children. The first account of Lake Wobegon to reach the East was Henry’s, in his poem “Phileopolis: A Western Rhapsody,” which begins

  I lie upon the vacant shore,

  Fleecy banners flying o’er,

  And look beyond this desolate place,

  To yon bright city turn my face:

  Phileopolis.

  Turn from this weedy tepid slough

  To yonder vision fair and true,

  From land of toil, care and grief

  To richer soil of my belief:

  Phileopolis.

  The poem, all 648 lines of it, was never published in the East, where Henry hoped it would make his reputation and lead to something, perhaps an introduction to Longfellow. The short and insistent meter, the sheer length (which, by line 182, is already leading to such rhymes as “sibylline/porcupine” and “cereal/immaterial”), and the burden of the poem—the emptiness and spiritual languor of the frontier and the comfort of civilization as found in dreams of Greece—left even Henry’s friends a little sleepy after a few pages, and the poem was eventually returned by James Russell Lowell at The Atlantic with a note: “We are grateful for having had the chance to see this and trust you will understand that, whatever the qualities of the poem, it does not meet our particular requirements at this time. (In the future, please enclose postage with your submissions.)”*

  Henry Francis was not easily discouraged. Back in Boston by September of ’51, he tried the lecture circuit and spoke in several towns and made a good impression on some people, including a handsome young woman in Amherst who became his wife and also a wealthy Boston coffee broker who was a partner in the Albion Land Company which, as it so happened, was looking to the Minnesota territory with an eye toward speculation.

  Henry’s lecture was entitled “Descriptions of Innocence & Independence in the West.” He had changed his mind. He had grown fond of “this desolate place” after a few months in the East, had come to imagine it as his true spiritual home. He wanted to leave Boston, which was crowded with poets and philosophers, and return to the lake and woods where he was the sole proprietor of serious thought. In “Descriptions,” he gave such a fine account of his thoughts, feelings, etc., as a poet in the West, and rose to such flights of imagination that he himself could not believe he had left such a paradise for “the stale, tedious, over-travelled roads of transcendentalism.”

  “Saw Emerson at a dinner,” he wrote in his journal. “How tired he looks! If that is what fame leads to, I would as soon be a simple schoolteacher in the wilderness!”

  A portrait of Henry and his new young wife shows a plump, somewhat damp young man with a faint aura of beard, seated, gazing far beyond the camera, with a sturdy woman in black silk standing at his side. She smiles modestly, her hand on his shoulder. On her fingers are three rings bearing large stones. His mother opposed the match. “My dear Son,” she wrote from Cambridge, “do you really know Elizabeth as a man shoul
d know his intended wife? Have you looked into her history, her family, etc.? Do not be enchanted by the flutter of talk & the whisper of feminine dress & the thin veil of youthful romance, but gather the plain facts as you would if you were entering into any other enterprise. Elizabeth impresses me as a peasant woman, quite possibly one of gypsy blood, who is unsuitable for a man of your sensitive health. This is sound advice from your mother. Ignore it at your peril.”

  Henry didn’t care about her history. It was enough for him that his wife looked on him as her teacher, her truest friend and her one sure guide. Nobody had ever trusted him so much. Far from questioning his dream of returning west, she encouraged it. “I wish to begin life anew in a new country,” she wrote, “and I pray God it will be with you, my friend.”

  His dream was simple. He would return to Minnesota and found a college, a city of learning on a hill, and would give his life to it. Harvard had turned him down as a teacher, so had Yale. Everywhere he encountered failure. Even “Descriptions” got him only five bookings in three months, and of those, three refused to pay the agreed amount after the performance and insisted on a much smaller fee, which he was forced to accept. The inheritance from his father’s furniture shop was small.

  So his meeting with the coffee broker was pure godsend. The man, whose name was Bayfield, was coarse, untutored, favored garish clothing, and had an unpleasant habit of chewing coffee beans and letting the brown juice run down his chin, but Henry swallowed his pride and cultiyated him, regaling him with pictures of the distinguished institution they two would together create, until at last Bayfield agreed. In the spring, Henry would travel to St. Paul, join a wagon train of the Albion Land Company, accompany them to a site, and begin construction of a town named New Albion and a college. Henry argued for stone; surely there must be a good supply of granite somewhere close by, and granite would speak for the permanence of New Albion in such a way as to encourage settlement; but Bayfield said no, it would be brick.