Our unique world unto itself needs a storyteller
When insomnia strikes, I listen to audiobooks – although I avoid thrillers, which, if they induce sleep, tend to induce nightmares. Besides, when you’re drifting in and out of consciousness, it’s impossible to keep track of characters and plot twists. Was that Professor Plum in the library clutching a candlestick? Or was it Colonel Mustard with a rope? And who the hell is Miss Scarlet?
If you’re looking for audiobooks to stay awake to, you can’t do better than listen to stories written and read by Garrison Keillor about his (fictional) home town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where nothing overtly dramatic ever happens.
Keillor, who has an unhurried delivery, begins and ends his stories with phrases I’m now so familiar with I could . . . well, recite them in my sleep. ‘‘It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town,’’ he says as he launches into another story about decent and hard-working folk and small-town happenings which are both funny and full of pathos.
The citizens of Lake Wobegon are lugubrious folks of Norwegian extraction and Lutheran beliefs who are suspicious of happiness and overt expressions of emotion. Minnesota’s long, harsh winters only exacerbate this disinclination to lightheartedness: they gather for coffee and delicious homemade rhubarb pie in the town’s Chatterbox Cafe, but they definitely don’t chatter.
I thought of this last week as I sat in a Westport cafe with a friend after a couple of days with the dog at a bach a few kilometres from Punakaiki, with a roaring fire and a view of the sea crashing spectacularly below.
The houses we drove past on the way down from Nelson hunched unhappily against the weather. Rusted farm sheds barely held themselves upright. ‘‘Land for sale’’ signs reminded us of Dennis Glover’s poem about the broken dreams of Tom and Elizabeth: ‘‘Year in year out they worked/while the pines grew overhead . . . But all the beautiful crops soon went/to the mortgage man instead/And Quardle
oodle ardle wardle doodle/the magpies said.’’
The first day of our stay was cold, wet and blustery, and Punakaiki was almost deserted. We walked around the blowholes with the wind tearing at our clothes. The sea roiled and hurled itself at the rocks. The nikau palms struggled to hold their heads up against the onslaught.
Feeling almost giddy with ozone, we drove to Blackball looking for hot food. Only the salami shop and the dairy were open. We bought a salami. The dog had a pee. We waited in the car for the pub to open.
When it did, we were first at the bar with an order for coffee and a plate of chips, which we ate near the fire, surrounded by artefacts of the working man’s struggle for fair pay and working conditions on the Coast.
Somewhere amongst them must have walked the ghosts of my paternal forbears – Irish West Coasters. The men – blacksmith’s striker, wagoner, publican, miner – wore blue collars if they wore any collars at all. The women scrubbed the collars clean, bore endless children, and watched many of them die young of disease, or later in drownings and accidents. One shot himself in despair on the Australian goldfields.
The second day of our trip dawned tranquil and sunny, and suddenly the Coast seemed kinder, more benign.
We walked around Cape Foulwind, sweating gently under too many layers of clothing, then drove to Westport for a coffee. After the long vistas of sea and sky, it took time to adjust to the narrower horizons of the town’s main street, and to find a cafe that was open, and did not have smeared windows, deep-fried offerings, or a ‘‘Business for sale’’ sign taped to its doors.
But find one we did. It made me think of Lake Wobegon’s Chatterbox Cafe. It was certainly nononsense enough: closed doors, and dark blinds drawn over the streetfront windows; a dimly lit interior; patrons sitting in pairs, in utter silence, at tables spaced widely apart. Definitely no chattering.
However, the young women behind the counter were friendly and cheerful, so we ordered and then retired to a booth next to the windows.
Through the blinds, we watched four mobility scooters buzz past in quick succession, one of them accompanied by a middle-aged woman trotting at a fast clip beside it. As another woman strolled by with a pink metal flamingo under her arm, our waitress appeared bearing coffee and quiche, which were hot and delicious.
I’ve come home thinking that the West Coast is in need of a chronicler like Garrison Keillor, who builds true fiction out of a deep understanding and affection for a particular landscape, climate, history and people. Stories that Keillor says ‘‘ought to be as common as dirt and yet try to raise people up a little bit.’’
After the long vistas of sea and sky, it took time to adjust to the narrower horizons of Westport’s main street.
Read more at greyurbanist.com.