Lake Wobegon Days (29 page)

It was Booger Day. When Mrs. Meiers turned her back to write her loopy letters on the board, John Potvin whispered, “Bunny boogers. Turkey tits. Panda poop,” to Paul who was unprepared for it and laughed out loud. Mrs. Meiers snatched him out of his seat and made him stand in front, facing the class, a terrible humiliation. Everyone except Darla felt embarrassment for poor Paul; only Darla looked at him and gloated; so when Paul pretended to pull a long one out of his
nose, only Darla laughed, and then she stood up in front and he sat down. Nobody looked at her, because she was crying.

On the way home, we sang with special enthusiasm,

I liked Mrs. Meiers a lot, though, She was a plump lady with bags of fat on her arms that danced when she wrote on the board: we named them Hoppy and Bob. That gave her a good mark for friendliness in my book, whereas Miss Conway of fourth grade struck me as suspiciously thin. What was her problem? Nerves, I suppose. She bit her lips and squinted and snaked her skinny hand into her dress to shore up a strap, and she was easily startled by loud noises. Two or three times a day, Paul or Jim or Lance would let go with a book, dropping it flat for maximum whack, and yell, “Sorry, Miss Conway!” as the poor woman jerked like a fish on the line. It could be done by slamming a door or dropping the window, too, or even scraping a chair, and once a loud slam made
her
drop a stack of books, which gave us a double jerk. It worked better if we were very quiet before the noise. Often, the class would be so quiet, our little heads bent over our work, that she would look up and congratulate us on our excellent behavior, and when she looked back down at her book,
wham!
and she did the best jerk we had ever seen. There were five classes of spasms: The Jerk, The Jump, The High Jump, The Pants Jump, and The Loopdeloop, and we knew when she was prime for a big one. It was after we had put her through a hard morning workout, including several good jumps, and a noisy lunch period, and she had lectured us in her thin weepy voice, then we knew she was all wound up for the Loopdeloop. All it required was an extra effort:
throwing
a dictionary flat at the floor or dropping the globe, which sounded like a car crash.

We thought about possibly driving Miss Conway to a nervous breakdown, an event we were curious about because our mothers spoke of it often. “You’re driving me to a nervous breakdown!” they’d yell, but then, to prevent one, they’d grab us and shake us
silly. Miss Conway seemed a better candidate. We speculated about what a breakdown might include—some good jumps for sure, maybe a couple hundred, and talking gibberish with spit running down her chin.

Miss Conway’s nervous breakdown was prevented by Mrs. Meiers, who got wind of it from one of the girls—Darla, I think. Mrs. Meiers sat us boys down after lunch period and said that if she heard any more loud noises from Room 4, she would keep us after school for a half hour. “Why not the girls?” Lance asked. “Because I know that you boys can accept responsibility,” Mrs. Meiers said. And that was the end of the jumps, except for one accidental jump when a leg gave way under the table that held Mr. Bugs the rabbit in his big cage. Miss Conway screamed and left the room, Mrs. Meiers stalked in, and we boys sat in Room 3 from 3:00 to 3:45 with our hands folded on our desks, and remembered that last Loopdeloop, how satisfying it was, and also how sad it was, being the last. Miss Conway had made some great jumps.

QUESTIONS FOR CLASS DISCUSSION

Yes, I should have, and also in Scouts. Einar Tingvold, our Scoutmaster, quit Scouting the year after I joined and I knew it was frustration with me that drove him out.

Three decades later, I keep running into my failure in Scouting. I cannot identify trees, flowers, fish, or animal tracks. I know only four knots: the square, the half-hitch, the one I tie my shoelaces with, and
the bowline hitch, which is useful if you’re in a pit and rescuers throw down a line, which has never happened to me.

Every Tuesday night in the basement of the Lutheran church (the Catholics had their own troop, run by Florian Krebsbach, that met at Our Lady), Einar tried to coach us in semaphore signals, animal tracks, knots, and the Code of the Trail. He was a skinny old guy with a white crewcut and black horn-rimmed glasses; his Adam’s apple bobbed like a cork as he sat on a bench murmuring woods lore to the good Scouts who sat cross-legged around him, taking it all in. I was curious about the Adam’s apple.

What does it look like? Like a piece of apple, some kid said; the chunk of apple that Adam ate and got original sin. I doubted that God would put a piece of apple in our throats, but the sight of Einar’s, rattling and jumping around as he talked, made me think that, apple or not, it was definitely loose in there. A person could choke on it. Einar’s even slipped to the side, did somersaults, came almost up into his mouth when he swallowed.

Einar also had ropy spit, a fact I discovered when he got angry at us for flipping cards into a hat when we should have been practicing our semaphore signals. “You guys don’t care, do you! You really think you can sit on your duffs and let other guys do the work! Well, I don’t need you here! You can go sit someplace else as far as I’m concerned.” Some secret ingredient of his saliva made it stick to his teeth and tongue as his mouth moved, producing ropes of spit in there, long liquid stalagmites that made different formations for each word. It was very interesting. I tried to do it in front of a mirror and couldn’t, not even with a mouthful of spit.

Why did we need to know semaphore code? Einar said it was handy for sending messages in the outdoors at a distance of up to a half-mile. “Imagine you’re camping on a hill and another troop is on another hill a half-mile away. Suddenly you need medical help. You flash a mirror at the other camp to get their attention. They train their binoculars on your camp, and meanwhile you take two shirts and tie them to sticks. Now you’re ready to send a message, using semaphore code. This is why we need to learn this. Imagine if someone were sending you an urgent message and you couldn’t read it. Help could be delayed for hours. Someone might die as a result.”

Einar’s answer only raised a lot of questions in my mind. (1) What hills? You’d need to have pretty high hills to be able to see a fellow Scout waving his flags a half-mile away, even with binoculars. We don’t have hills like that around here. Usually, we camp in a ravine, down near the creek so we don’t have to haul the water so far. Flags in a ravine aren’t going to do anyone any good. (2) What binoculars? None of us Scouts had a pair. Einar had one, but what good would that do if he was with us, the troop that needed urgent medical help? All he could do with his binoculars then would be to see that the other troop couldn’t see us. (3) What other troop? No other Scout troop camped around where we camped out in Tolleruds’ pasture (with its one extremely
low
hill). The only people to see our semaphore signals would be the Tolleruds, and probably they’d think it was just some kid waving a couple of shirts. (4) If we needed urgent help, why not get in Einar’s car and drive to the doctor’s? Einar always had his car when we went camping. That’s how we got there. Why stand around waving at a nonexistent troop on a hill that wasn’t high enough and probably misspelling words in the process (“UNGENT/SEND HEAP/I’M BADLY CURT”) when we could hop into Einar’s Studebaker?

I raised some of these doubts with Einar one night during semaphore practice. We were paired up and told to send messages back and forth, and when Einar found out that Donald Scheid and I were only pretending to wig-wag and were really whispering the messages, he grabbed me by the shoulder, shook me, and told me it was time I started getting serious about Scouting. I told him that I
was
serious but that I didn’t think semaphore signaling was a useful skill. I mentioned the fact that he always took his car on camping trips.

Whenever Einar got extremely mad, he turned on his heel and walked away. Something seemed to snap shut inside him, he couldn’t talk to you. His back stiffened, his face flushed, his fists clenched, and he had to go straight outdoors and calm down or otherwise he would kill you. (Once on a camping trip, when we put a juicy booger on the tab of the zipper on his tent, and then when we stayed awake until two
A.M.
giggling about it, Einar suddenly jumped up and walked away. He took our breakfast with him, three dozen eggs that he threw one by one at a clump of birch trees.)

When I pointed out that his car would be more useful in the event of a medical emergency than semaphore signals, he walked away from Boy Scouting for about fifteen minutes. When he returned, Donald was telling Speedy Gonzalez jokes. They were the first Speedy Gonzalez jokes we had ever heard, and we were flopping around on the floor, sobbing and grabbing our pants to keep from peeing in them.

Einar stood and watched us. It took us a while to come to attention. We’d get almost to attention and then the thought of Speedy would make one boy break down and that got the rest of us going. Einar stood the whole time and didn’t move a muscle, just stared us down. When the snickering had mostly died out, he made a speech that we had heard once before, after the tent zipper. He said he had gone into Scouting because he wanted to help boys grow up into fine young men, and most boys had done exactly that. They had become the sort of fine young men who defended their country in Germany and the Pacific and in Korea. Those boys knew how to have fun but also when to be serious. We were not like them. We were, in fact, the sorriest excuse for Scouts he ever saw in all his years. We were the laziest and most disobedient and
worthless
Scouts—in fact, he wouldn’t even call us Scouts—the most worthless
children
he’d ever seen. Ever! We did not deserve any of this—the great tradition of Scouting, the sacred outdoor lore learned from the Indian and passed down by generations, the honor of the Scout uniform—we did not deserve this because we had dishonored that uniform as surely as if we had thrown it in the dirt and spit on it! He had never known boys like us before. He didn’t know what to do with us. He knew that, under the laws of Scouting, he ought to kick us out right away—take away our neckerchiefs and khaki shirts, our clasps, our badges—ought to cancel the camping trips, and if our parents asked why, well, he would tell them. That’s what he ought to do. But he thought that every boy deserved a second chance. We had been given many second chances. This was going to be our last second chance. There would be no more after this one. If we continued to dishonor the uniform, then it would be all over for us: “And you—” he said, his gaze sweeping the room,
“you
will become the first boys in the history of this town to have your badges stripped from you.”