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Bunsen, Clint College of Low Technology Krebsbach, Carl Minnesota Language Systems Powdermilk Biscuits Walleye Phone Company
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Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. End of February and the ice fishing season has ended this last week. The old guys going out to haul in the fish houses out there on the ice. Most of them out in about the middle of the lake, about a half mile out from town. They brought them all in this last week because it's the law and also because they noticed a large pond was forming. It was a little bit warm on Wednesday and Thursday. A large pond was forming on top of the ice out there where the houses are, about 25 of them out in the middle of the lake.
They call it Fishtown, Fishville. Actually, it used to be the name of Fishtown, I think they call it. Twenty-five little fish houses made of plywood sitting out there where guys go and drop a line through a hole in the ice. They've got a mayor, town council of this little settlement that's out there for a couple months every year, hold meetings and everything. For all I know, they may have bond issues out there. They have bond issues. long-term street improvement projects or something. They have two streets out there in the ice fishing village, Main Street and First Avenue South. call them two streets they intersect and about 25 fish houses out around them which they hauled in on Thursday and Friday and some of them still coming in today I imagine because Clint Bunsen refused to use his tow truck after a certain point on Thursday afternoon when he noticed when he was out there sitting in the tow truck that the horizon was moving slightly up and down. He was parked at the time and made him think that the ice was getting a little bit tired and it was time to come in. It's a lovely thing, ice fishing. It's too bad winter doesn't last longer so that we could have more of it.
It really is, well, it's not really a sport. I don't see how you call it a sport. You just sit down the whole time. Sit out there in the dark in a warm place. Fish house, maybe eight by ten feet. Put a little wood-burning stove in it. Have a couple folding chairs, a table, deck of cards, whatever else you want. Cut a couple holes in the ice in the corner. Drop a line in there. Forget about them. Sit. Think. That's why guys go out there. You could do it sitting on the edge of your bed, probably, just holding you. holding a string down towards the floor if the light was poor. But it wouldn't have quite the romance of walking out there, driving out there, sitting in your fish house for a few hours. It's got it all over sitting in a boat and fishing, I think.
Because sitting in a boat and fishing, you have a whole skill and judgment factors in fishing. Deciding what kind of bait to use and deciding where to fish, whether to drop your line here, go over a couple hundred yards and fish over there. Casting, for example. Deciding whether you want to cast your bait out there or if you want to kind of cast it around behind your head and hook your left ear with it, you know. There's a lot to fishing in a boat. But when you cut a hole in the ice and just sit there and drop a line through it, you eliminate casting. You eliminate choice. You eliminate everything about fishing except just the religious part of it. Which is why people really do it. It's why men do it, I should say. I don't know why women do it. Men do it because they like to sit by themselves out away from people, out where it's quiet and sit and contemplate their sins. Sometimes I get that up on a stage, you know. away from people where it's quiet, but you'd get it even better sitting in a fish house. Think over your sins, contemplate them, decide which ones really were sins and which were just a sort of strange kind of virtue that took another way around. Carl Krebsbach went out and sat in his fish house on Tuesday of this last week. He was going to put up some sheetrock for Clarence Bunsen, but he went over there and discovered that Clarence hadn't gotten it yet because he was going to get it from a place where he could get it cheaper, but when he got there, he found out they weren't selling it as cheaply as he thought they were, so he decided to wait until the price comes down. So Carl didn't have any pressing work to do that day.
He hung around with some people and he had lunch at the Chatterbox and decided he would go out and fish for a while. He stopped by the house and put on his snowmobile suit and his warm rubber boots. He said, Margie, he said, I'm going out fishing. Anybody comes looking for me, don't tell them. She said, going out fishing? She said, it's not even 2 o'clock. He looked at his watch. He said, no. He said, it's about 1.30. Got in his pickup to go down to the lake. He drove out on the ice a little ways down by the swimming beach. And he thought about it. Two and a half ton pickup. The ice might be two and a half feet thick. That'd be about one foot per ton. Doesn't sound like a lot, does it? He had a few extra tools back in the box. Say, two and a half point zero zero one tons. He thought he'd walk out there. Walked out. Opened up his fish house.
Crumpled up a newspaper. Stuck it in the stove. Lit it. Put in some kindling. He built that fish house so tight it gets warm fast. Took off his snowmobile suit. Sat there. Flames. The only light. His shadow against the wall. Dropped the line in. Sat and watched it for a while. I don't know exactly what kind of bait he uses out there. It's kind of a secret that he's kept. But I think it's, he uses chicken gizzards that he fries up in a special kind of rancid oil. Motor oil, I think. and turns around four times, and I think he puts a toenail from his left foot into it or something. I don't know. But when he looked into the Tupperware dish where he keeps his bait, it reminded him of Christmas Day at the Krepsbach house, when Christmas morning... all of his children suddenly came down with a case of the stomach flu.
He was up at his parents' house, up at Florian and Myrtle's house, because she wanted him to check on the paneling in the kitchen, which she thought contained some chemicals that were giving her headaches and possibly were killing her even as she breathed. And when Myrtle worries, she worries hard and she worries rapidly. So you have to go up there. He went up there to check on the paneling and to try and calm her down. And Margie called up to the grandparents and said, come home, the kids are throwing up. He didn't drive home as fast as he could have. He took a slightly longer way around, and when he got home, he came into the kitchen where this disaster had occurred. First one child, and then the other children, all inspired by the first child. And looked it over, and gosh, I wish I hadn't brought this up. said, you start cleaning it up and I'll go downstairs and look for some extra basins.
She said, we'll both start cleaning it up. And they did. There's a certain comradeship between parents after they have finished a cleaning job like that in the home. They sat for a while, Christmas morning, not in any mood to eat real soon or even to look at dinner. Turkey, a lot of stuffing inside it. They thought they'd just let that sit for a while. He looked out. the window and thought he'd go out and feed his birds. He keeps a big feeder out in his backyard. Huge, huge feeder where birds have conventions out there. They have awards banquets. And he looked out the window on Christmas morning at about the exact time that a squirrel was sitting around on top of it. devouring all the sunflower seeds he had put out the day before. He has gotten along with squirrels pretty much over the years. Carl has. But this one, I don't know, you know how it is. You put up with squirrels for a while and then one comes along who's a real jerk. A real loud mouth and suddenly you care a lot. He developed a complicated system of counterweights on this huge bird feeder so that the additional weight of a squirrel would cause the whole thing to fold up.
You lost a little bird seed that way but you got rid of the squirrel. It took him about six weeks to design and build this thing and it took the squirrels about twenty and one half seconds to figure out how to stay up on and need off. And here was this squirrel, this jerk squirrel, sitting on top of the feeder on Christmas Day, stuffing itself and chuckling to itself, laughing to itself. One of Carl's presents that morning, along with socks and cologne, had been a powerful garden hose nozzle. A Rambo nozzle. Autographed by Sylvester Stallone. This was a special high muzzle velocity garden hose nozzle.
And he was inspired, Carl was, to go outside. He spent time on this. early in the afternoon on Christmas Day, building a frame out of two-by-fours, a tripod to hold this nozzle aimed towards the bird feeder and run the hose in through the basement window and down to the washtub in the basement where he sat, crouched between the washtub and the furnace, looking out through the basement window with his hand on the faucet. This is a more complicated story than I had thought it was going to be when I started. He had to wait for about an hour before that squirrel would prance out across the backyard and shimmy up that pole and up onto the bird feeder. But all that time spent waiting was worth it. When he turned on that faucet, And a laser beam of ice-cold water shot out in an arc across and caught that squirrel in the hindquarters, let's say. And that squirrel burst out into midair, just exploded out, hit the ground with its wheels spinning and took off and up another tree. It was worth it. So he waited a little bit longer to do it a second time. Took about an hour for the squirrel to get up its confidence to come back and try again. But he did.
Tipped to a cross and came up the iron pole and was up there on top of the feeder. And Carl turned on the faucet again and it was even better the second time. The squirrel said, oh shoot. Jumped off and took off. Carl went upstairs and poured himself a glass of whiskey to celebrate and sat all by himself in the living room as the sun started to go down on Christmas Day that had turned out better than he thought it would. When his little girl, his little girl, beeper, who had been so sick that morning, came up and said, Daddy, something's wrong with Chucky. Who's Chucky, he said. My squirrel, she said. What's wrong, he said. She said, he's hurt. Somebody hurt him. He looked out the back window of the kitchen And the squirrel was walking around by the bird feeder, eating a few breadcrests off the snow, limping. Carl could tell it was a fake limp. It was a limp that was meant to elicit pity from a child.
Cynical squirrel like most squirrels. But how could you explain that to a child? She said, Daddy, it's so cold out. He'll die. Couldn't we bring him in for the night? He could stay in my room. She cried. He held her in his arms as she wept. Poor little child. He tried to explain to her how it would be bad for Chucky to bring him in out of his environment into a house. It would be bad for him, thinking to himself, we could bring him in, in a gunny sack. teach him to swim in the bathtub. I tried to explain to her as she wept for this poor squirrel out in the cold, its pain that she could imagine this poor hungry squirrel on Christmas Day. She said, Daddy, couldn't we take him some food anyway, some special food for Christmas? He looked out the window, and the squirrel was limping on a different foot.
He said, I'll take him some special food, honey. Don't worry, Daddy take care of it. You go up to bed. And he found a little jar of jalapeno sauce... that his cousin had sent him from California years ago as a joke. He opened it. There was a little steam came out as he opened it. It made a little sound as he opened it, a little... He mixed it up with water to make jalapeno juice, and he put it in a squirt gun that one of the kids had gotten in a stocking and walked out back by the bird feeder. with some crushed walnuts in one hand and the squirt gun in the other, walked slowly toward the squirrel who looked up towards him, its mouth stuffed full of breadcrumbs. The squirrel opened its mouth and breadcrumbs trickled down its chin, whatever chin a squirrel has. He tossed the crushed walnuts on the ground and the squirrel instinctively leaned toward them. Then he lifted up the squirt gun. The squirrel turned to run, but couldn't run because it was still leaning towards the walnuts, which meant that its hind end was high in the air. And he fired.
The quiet of the winter night was broken by the sound of a squirrel singing opera. As he took off across the snow, running slightly sideways, dragging his hind quarters behind him to cool it off, And Carl smiled to himself and turned and saw in the upstairs window the face of his child who had seen the whole thing. He went upstairs, but she refused to look at him. She refused to talk to him. Daddy didn't mean it, he said. But she pretended to be asleep, and when he tried to hold her close to him, her body stiffened. He left her, tucked her in, turned out the light, and went downstairs on Christmas night. Sat and had another whiskey. And as he sat, saw... on the table by the chair, a Christmas card that Margie had not put with the other cards that were on the mantel above the fireplace. Looked at it for a moment, knew he should not do this, but opened it, and saw that it was from David Helfenstein, the boy whom she had gone with in high school for two years. the halfback on the football team, who was now a lawyer out in San Francisco someplace. It wasn't like a regular Christmas card, the text. It wasn't about the joyous feelings of the Christmas season. It was about old memories getting stronger as time goes by, feeling close to people whom you haven't seen for a long time. She'd gone with David Helfenstein, his wife had, for two years. And then he went off to college. And then she started going with Carl. He went up to bed. She was lying there. She was awake. He knew she was awake.
After you've been married for 30 years, you can tell. He lay down beside her in the dark. After a while, he said, I see you got a Christmas card from Donald Helfenstein. David Helfenstein, she said. I meant to show it to you, she said. Oh, did he write a letter? What's he up to? No, he didn't write a letter. Why? Oh, I don't know. You and him were close friends at one time, weren't you? That was 30 years ago, Carl, she said. She put her hand on his arm. He lay in the dark, looking up, thinking about the squirrel, thinking about his children.
And suddenly, in the pit of his stomach, he had that unmistakable feeling You can lie as still as you can. You can think pure thoughts. You can close your eyes. You can imagine that you are somewhere else. You can pray to God to make you well. And God will eventually. But first, something else has to happen. Well, he looked at his watch, sitting out in the fish house. No bites. He checked both lines. He brought them up. He put out the fire, closed the damper, put on his snowmobile suit and his rubber boots, closed the door, and walked home across the ice. It was dark, a clear sky, billions of stars in the sky.
The lake was white, shining, and straight ahead, just above the line of dark trees, the lights of the town, like stars in the sky. And one of them was his house where people were waiting for him and would be glad to see his face. That's the news from Lake Wobegon where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking and all the children are above average.
Radio Drama: Tom's sound effects door.
1986.02.28 Star Tribune