Garrison - Lake Wobegon Days

PENGUIN BOOKS

LAKE WOBEGON DAYS

Garrison Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, and is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion. He is the author of nine books, all published by Penguin, including Wobegon Boy and Lake Wobegon Summer 1956. A teacher at the University of Minnesota and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he lives in St. Paul with his wife and daughter.

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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc. 1985

Published in Penguin Books 1986

40 39

Copyright Garrison Keillor, 1985

All rights reserved

Portions of this book appeared originally in The Atlantic Monthly.

PUBLISHERS NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Keillor, Garrison.

Lake Wobegon days.

I. Title.

[PS3561.E3755L3 1986b] 813.54 86-798

ISBN: 978-1-101-64028-9

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Janson Alternate

Illustrations by Mike Lynch

Courtesy of Groveland Gallery

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Version_2

In the spring of 1974, I got $6000 from the New Yorker for writing a piece about the Grand Ole Opry, the most money I had ever seen, and so my wife and small son and I left home in St. Paul and got on the Empire Builder and headed for San Francisco to visit our friends, not knowing that this windfall would be most of my earnings for the year. I had never been west beyond Idaho, where I went to Bible conferences in my youth. We got a Pullman compartment and left Minneapolis late at night, awoke west of Fargo, watched the prairie roll by as we ate a good breakfast and lunch, and as the train headed into the northern Rockies, I sat in the bar car and took out a couple of stories from my briefcase and worked on them, a successful American author who provided good things for his family. In Sand Point, Idaho, late the second night, close to where the Bible conferences took place, we derailed coming through a freight yard. The train had slowed to a crawl so none of us were hurtour Pullman car simply screeched and swayed and bumped along the ties a little wayand we packed our suitcase and climbed out. We stood around a long time in the dark and got on an old bus that smelled of engine fumes, and headed for Portland, where we would catch the southbound Coast Starlight for San Francisco. My wife dozed next to me, the little boy lay across our laps and slept, and I sat and thought about the extravagance of this trip, the foolishnessone stroke of good luck, the Opry story, and I was blowing a big wad of the proceeds on what? False luxury, which was now derailed. The motive was good, to try to put a little life and color into a disappearing marriage, but I thought about the expense as we chugged across Washington, and the magnificence of the Columbia valley was lost on me, and reaching Portland at last, I made up my mind to finish up the new stories right away and sell both of them to the New Yorker and cut my losses. An hour later, I lost them both in the Portland train station.

I took my son to the mens room and set the briefcase down while we peed and washed our hands, and then we went to the cafeteria for breakfast. A few bites into the scrambled eggs I remembered the briefcase, went to get it and it was gone. We had an hour before the southbound arrived. We spent it looking in every trash basket in the station, outside the station, and for several blocks around. I was sure that the thief, finding nothing but manuscripts in the briefcase, would chuck it, and I kept telling him to, but he didnt chuck it where I could see it, and then our time was up and we climbed on the train. I felt so bad I didnt want to look out the window. I looked straight at the wall of our compartment, and as we rode south the two lost stories seemed funnier and funnier to me, the best work I had ever done in my life; I wept for them, and my misery somehow erased them from mind so that when I got out a pad of paper a couple hundred miles later, I couldnt re-create even a faint outline.

To make me feel better, we trooped up to the dining car and ordered steaks all around and Manhattans for the grownups, which only made me worry about extravagance again, which now I was even less in a position to afford. By the time we got to San Francisco, the two stories loomed as two lost landmarks of American comic prose, a loss to the entire nation, and I was ready to go home.

Our California friends were sympathetic and encouraging, and so were my friends in Minnesota when we got home two weeks later. People always are encouraging about a terrible loss, so that sometimes the loser would like to strangle them. People tell you about other writers who lost stories, Hemingway, Carlyle, great men who triumphed over misfortuneYoull go on and write something even better, they say, not knowing how good those stories were. I still have the two three-by-five file cards on which, bumping along on the train, I wrote everything I could remember about the stories: one is entitled Lucky Man and the notes describe a man who feels fortunate despite terrible things that happen to him. Even now, looking at it, I faintly recall what a fine work it was. The other is entitled Lake Wobegon Memoir, and the notes are sparse: Clarence and Arlene Bunsen, the runaway car, Wednesday night prayer meeting, and Legion club dance are the extent of it. The lost story shone so brilliantly in dim memory that every new attempt at it looked pale and impoverished before I got to the first sentence.