Garrison Keillor: Fishing on Lake Wobegon

Uncle Jack was a reprobate, an infidel. And so he plunged himself into the murky depths of alcohol. Nonetheless I loved him, though he did bad things to good people, and tormented my aunt whom I loved as well.

He saved my life once. We were camping. Boy scouts, 40 below zero, in a tent, all heaped up like sled dogs in our little sleeping bags. And I had to pee so bad I lay there, my breath billowing out of my mouth in the bluish moonlight, weighing my options. Finally I extricated myself from the pile and walked over the frozen tundra, through a birch grove, and down a ravine, and over a rise - having come from modest people.

I walked a ways away. Now, when you are that age—13, 14 years old—your bladder is a powerful instrument. You expel water from you in an arc that goes about 12 or 13 feet. It comes out of you steaming hot, and when it lands on the snow 12 feet away it is turned to ice chips. This is fascinating at that age, so you write your name, way off there in the distance. You write your name, and a few additional thoughts, and then you start to wonder how far up the arc the ice might come. And then you stop.

But I lost track of where I was and might have frozen to death out there, but Uncle Jack was skiing back to his hunting shack on the way back from the Sidetracked Tap, and singing a vulgar song. I heard it coming through the pine trees:

Keillor sings: 'Roll me over, in the clover, roll me over lay me down and do it again - Eh! Eh!'

To be saved by a sinner and a drunk singing a vulgar song opens the world up for you, in a way. And I loved him. He took me fishing one day, the mists out there on the lake mysterious and beautiful on a summer morning at four a.m. It was the end of his day, the beginning of mine, and there we met. We rowed out into the mist and put the minnows on our line and dropped them down; I could smell his cigar and the flavouring that he put in his coffee, could smell the mist and the summer air. And then I heard him behind me:

Keillor recites Poe’s Annabel Lee, which concludes:

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

It was a poem for my Aunt Evelyn, I’m sure, who had shut him up in his sepulchre, in his hunting shack.

I rowed the boat back to the dock and I got out – I was supposed to tie it up to the post, but I forgot. He walked up the beam of the boat and stepped up on the mid-seat and then stepped way over to the dock as the boat gently drifted away, and he hung there in the sky like a planet, like a moon, and then dropped in the water up to his armpits, and did not curse.
He waded to shore, took off his pants and shirt, wrung them out, put them back on, looked at me and said, “you shouldn’t go fishing if you’re afraid of getting wet.”

He died on a January afternoon. He was on his way to the Sidetracked Tap and he saw his old enemy, Mr Burgey, coming towards him, with whom he’d been carrying on an argument for years. Both of them forgot what it was about, only that they believed deeply in whatever their side was. And they cursed each other in Norwegian, which was rich in insult.

Two old men shrieking at each other on a bitterly cold January day, and my uncle felt the pain in his chest, and reached out and grabbed the parking meter (there’s only one in our town, they put up one as an experiment and it never worked out) and his last words on earth were “you’ve got shit for brains”.

He fell down dead on the ice. Mr Burgey leaned down, “You go to hell”, he said, then saw this might be the case. He called the sheriff, the sheriff called the constables, the ambulance, the fire department got into it, the coroner came, red and blue flashing lights, walkie-talkies, radios going off, yellow plastic ribbon around the scene – a scene of crisis!

My uncle enjoyed a crisis so much in his life – and to miss out on this, to miss out on it by just 15 minutes…