 |
Editor's ViewpointMeditations Of A Minnesota Mossback |
Suicidal Voles … Just Try To Buy Cigarettes On An Iceberg
Son Number 1 got home from the job last Thursday, and announced that Mittens the cat had caught something and was crunching merrily away on the small carcass out in our garage.
“She’s hasn’t lost it,” my 20-year-old said, meaning that at 14, Mittens is still the Resident Hunter even though she still doesn’t top 7 pounds soaking wet.
I took a look.
“It’s a vole,” I said dourly. “They mate for life.”
A look of panic crossed his face. “Maybe she already caught the other one,” he said hopefully, “and this one was suicidal.”
Whoever said playing computer games kills compassion – and creativity?
*
You can tell a lot about a person by the yarns they tell.
Some folks go for the practical joke, and derive endless pleasure out of spinning the story over and over—a little like casting for trout.
Will Riopel tells a tale about when he was haying at his place in Hugo and discovered some wild turkey eggs. He secretly planted one underneath Vern Peloquin’s laying hen; when it hatched, Vern was clueless as to why one of his baby chicks had long legs and an uncharacteristically low chirp. The story does lose something in translation, though; you have to hear Will tell it around a bonfire with all of the standard embellishments.
Some families enjoy joke-telling.
Dave Schumann can spin a yarn like nobody’s business, and he never forgets them: there’s a file cabinet of jokes between his ears.
Others are hung up on the lowest form of humor – the pun. (That would be me.)
The old expression, “The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree,” explains why.
It’s true: storytellers and joke-tellers run in families, and boy, my Uncle Wendell—an avid outdoorsman— can really tell a tale.
There was the time he decided to quit smoking. He and buddy Frank Howard arranged for John Winjim, a pilot friend out of Point Barrow, to drop them off in the Alaskan wilderness.
Wendell didn’t pack any smokes.
As the story goes, John was to pick them up in his little ’46 Piper Cub at a prearranged pickup spot on the frozen tundra three weeks later. By that time, Uncle Wendell figured he’d be well beyond the desperate stage and well into the recovery stage … you can’t buy cigarettes on an iceberg, he reasoned.
Well, John Winjim went and developed pneumonia. He didn’t get any better: in fact, the situation deteriorated to the point where his caregivers sent out the call for the last rites.
As Uncle Wendell tells it, at that point John, who was in an oxygen tent with a tube down his throat, asked the nurse for a pad and pencil. “Pick ‘em up at Tractor Lake,” he scrawled.
Uncle Wendell has never told me whether John Winjim lived or died. I figure that’s a professional storyteller’s prerogative; in fact, that detail might even spoil the story.
Needless to say, the pickup at Tractor Lake south of Point Barrow proceeded without much of a hitch, thanks to John, but it was a Cessna with a couple Search and Rescue guys piloting it instead.
Uncle Wendell doesn’t smoke anymore—he’s been 26 years without a cigarette—but he still has a very bad habit of telling tales.
*
Storytelling has been around since man’s beginning.
Every culture lays claim to its own set of stories which have been formally passed from generation to generation by word of mouth.
Word-for-word, the old stories were taught by a storyteller to his or her son or daughter, and repeated verbatim for generations in what has come to be known as the “oral tradition.” (They didn’t have pencils.)
For thousands of years, the tale-spinner has been welcome around the stranger’s campfire to pass an entertaining evening. They say a storyteller could scratch out a living while wandering the hinterlands and sharing a bit of dinner with other travelers in complete safety.
And no wonder: seeing as the IPod, CD, television, radio, harpsichord and the printing press hadn’t been invented yet, the real enemy was boredom.
Nobody in their right mind would give any trouble to a professional entertainer.
Research into the role of oral tradition in modern belief systems is still ongoing, and it’s an interesting field. While earning my degree, I took a couple of folklore classes and had a great time.
Imagine getting college credit for listening to “The Frog Prince,” the tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, told word-for-word by an elderly professor who, in his own special way, resembled the prince himself—before the princess transformed him from his froggy state.
Jack the Giant-Killer came to life in Professor Skeels’ body.
As he played the parts of Little Red Riding Hood, her grandmother and the wolf, Professor Skeels’ facial expressions held us spellbound.
We were enchanted.
Professor Skeels taught that only in some cultures do things happen in “threes” (remember the three wishes? the three billy goats? the three daughters? the three golden apples?); in many native American cultures, he told us, things always happen in fives.
And that made sense to me: I figured that the tale would spin out around the campfire just that much longer.
Will Riopel would likely approve.