A few years ago, on a drive across Canada, I decided to head down to the northern parts of both Minnesota and Michigan. It gave me a chance to immerse myself in a good dollop of the past, since I was born and raised in Michigan, and my father’s side of the family hailed from Minnesota.
It also neatly coincided with the opportunity to attend a recording of A Prairie Home Companion, a marvellous radio programme written and performed by Garrison Keillor (along with a great band and a whole host of other talent, of course).
Keillor is a literary hero of mine. He’s a wonderful writer and humourist, and even more a chronicler of much of the best of American values, the ones I know exist and tourists often comment on (the kindness and honesty and enthusiasm), but which these days appear to be submerged beneath the sad flotsam of a country seemingly tearing itself apart.
Keillor is also someone who writes about a make-believe place (Lake Wobegon) that nevertheless looks so familiar that I sometimes feel he must have known my relatives personally.
People who aren’t from this part of the Midwest might think his stories are preposterous. But to those of us who have grown up in the region, they’re like a documentary tangled up in our chromosomes.
Keillor’s work is often comic, but he doesn’t poke fun at the Swedes and the Lutherans and the small-towners to be mean. He laughs with them, not at them. And that’s just the sort these rural Midwesterners are.
If my childhood recollections are anything to go by, people in places like Minnesota (where the winters are long and cold, and you spend a lot of time indoors) like nothing better than making up what they call “Tall Tales”. They’re fun, and far-fetched, but always have at least a passing acquaintance with the truth.
And while Garrison Keillor is in my view the modern era’s Mark Twain (both famous performers as well as scribes), he more than anything else just happens to be a Minnesotan who very expertly writes his Tale Tales down.
So as you can imagine, coming from a part of America that when I was growing up never seemed to get even a mention in the world at large, it is truly wonderful to now have such a creative, prolific and kind exponent of a place and culture that sits so warmly around my family roots.
ooOOoo
Here’s a letter I sent for fun to Garrison Keillor. The two stories referred to are the sort you often hear told in the upper parts of Minnesota and Michigan. And while they don’t even come close to what Keillor manages to produce on a weekly basis, my hope is they offer at least an inkling of how evocative of place his Letter from Lake Wobegon episodes really are.
Dear Mr. Keillor,
This is just a quick note to tell you how much I am looking forward to attending your up-coming performance of A Prairie Home Companion in Interlochen, Michigan. I know that after thirty-six odd years, at least some of your American radio listeners might be a bit blasé about seeing you “in the flesh” at recordings of the programme. But I can assure you that for me it’s a bit different.
Believe it or not, I’m travelling all the way from New Zealand (pronounced by Americans, as if they can’t quite believe it, as “Nuu-ZEE-lan”), where I listen to your show on our National Radio.
New Zealand is not what you’d call “around the corner”. In fact, as my Minnesota born-and-bred grandfather used to thoughtfully joke, if I lived any further away, I’d be closer.
Part of the reason for my visit to the upper Midwest (besides seeing you on stage, of course) is pure nostalgia. But another purpose is to check out a few limbs on the family tree.
I’m especially interested in the grave of Thomas Van Eaton (or “Eten”), probably my first Minnesota ancestor. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard about Tom, but he had the distinction (although he wasn’t around to enjoy it) of spending at least a bit of his earthly rest in two places at once.
You see, Tom didn’t just lose his scalp to the local Indians (who understandably were a bit perturbed at having their land sold out from under them by the Bureau of Indian Affairs).
No, because Tom had been such a brave opponent (he killed eight Indians before becoming bogged down in a tamarack swamp), they thought he was actually worth worshipping. So they cut his head off, and hid it high in a tree.
As you can imagine, after spending some time unsuccessfully looking for what was missing, the grieving family had to put the “remaining” remains of Tom in the ground. And it wasn’t until several years later that a hunter found the rest of him.
The Indians had worn a circle around the tree paying their respects to the mighty warrior, and the hunter wondered what was up there that they found so interesting.
The skull was eventually identified as belonging to Tom because of the distinctive chip in one of its front teeth. It seems Tom was well-known for a particular party trick where he would bite the heads off pins. However, on one occasion he attempted it with a darning needle and his incisor came off second best.
I have it on good authority that Thomas Van Eaton is now buried in one place, in a cemetery in Grove Lake. But that’s not the end of the story.
His mourners wanted a grave marker, but not having the wherewithal to carve a stone, they decided to pour a rather substantial rectangle of cement, and then imprint it while still wet using a stamp they built out of pieces of wood.
Unfortunately, however, they failed to take into account the fact that when you make a stamp, you need to do it backwards. Otherwise, when the cement is set, people forever after need to hold up a mirror in order to read the inscription the right-way around.
ooOOoo
My trip will also be a bit of quest, one that I have reason to believe will be about as successful as those knights of old when they went looking for the Holy Grail. It all has to do with a photograph I found in my late mother’s belongings, which dates from sometime in the early 1950s.
It was taken in northern Michigan, not all that far from Interlochen, in fact. It shows a man, wearing a lumberjack shirt, standing on a dock with five other people, many of whom are similarly attired.
What makes the photo interesting is that he’s holding a fine specimen of a muskie, otherwise known as Esox masquinongy, or muskellunge (which I understand in the Ojibwa language means “ugly pike”).
As you may know, the muskie is the “Great White Shark” of northern freshwater lakes. I’ve read they can sometimes reach a whopping six feet in length, and they have a set of teeth that in a stuffed specimen that used to hang on our cottage wall, made me cry with fright when I was a small child.
It’s also said that they are particularly fond of small, fluffy ducklings, and I’m almost certain my grandfather once made a muskie fishing lure out of a rubber duckie, with three-pronged hooks where the feet should have been.
I don’t have any problem identifying where the photo was taken. It’s a lake near South Branch spelled J-O-S-E, a lovely summer holiday destination where you can always tell the tourists travelling through, since they pronounce the name “Hoe-Say”.
Locals, on the other hand, know that one of the earliest pioneers was Joe Thompson, and that the lake he owned was recorded for posterity sometime in the 19th century by a government surveyor who didn’t quite know how to spell.
But that wasn’t his only failing. Just like some people today, it would appear the surveyor also had a slight problem knowing when to use apostrophes. So regardless of the grammatical errors, Jose Lake is Joe’s, not José’s.
All of that, however, isn’t the reason for the quest. What I dearly would love to find out is anything about the caption hand-written on the back:
The Fish That Was Caught With A Shovel
I doubt whether you, or any of your listeners, can help me on this. But even if they can’t, you might at least be able to use it sometime in future. Lord knows where you keep coming up with ideas for your Lake Wobegon radio segments, let alone all the books about the place that you continue to write.
Best regards,
Cliff Van Eaton
~originally composed in July, 2012~