[warm applause]
- So, I moved back to New Auburn.
I joined the fire department,
and basically, I'm just looking for a moment
to help me decide if I've made the right decision.
And so, the story I tell in the book Population 485
is that the biggest event of the year in New Auburn,
and by the way, I tell this in the present tense.
A few things have changed, but by and large,
it's still pretty much dead on.
But the biggest event of the year in New Auburn
is Jamboree Days.
And Jamboree Days consists basically
of a five-minute parade and a softball tournament. [laughter]
And the proceeds from the softball tournament
go to support the local park.
And so, as members of the volunteer fire department,
we're expected to pitch in
and help run the softball tournament fundraiser.
Now, in addition to the softball tournament fundraiser,
directly adjacent to the softball field
is a beer tent.
Ain't gonna lie to you.
That is where most of the fundraising happens.
[laughter] - Audience: Whoo!
- And we run the beer tent, as well, and--
You were there! So...
[laughter]
Now over the years, and as I said,
at this time, New Auburn had only one softball field,
and no lights on that softball field.
And over the years,
the tournament had become very popular.
And so, in order to fit all the teams through the brackets,
they have to start playing softball
at 8:00 AM on Saturday morning.
They play all day long until dark.
They resume play at 8:00 AM on Sunday morning,
and play all day long
until the tournament has been resolved.
So I get, shortly after I move back,
I get assigned the duty, by the chief,
of going down to the park on Sunday morning
of Jamboree Days
to help clean up the beer tent,
get it ready for the day.
I get sent down there
with one of the old timers on the department,
a guy named Bob the One-Eyed Beagle. [laughter]
Now, Bob the One-Eyed Beagle,
I've known him ever since I was this little.
We used to ride the school bus together.
He butchers my pigs.
He makes sausage for me.
But Bob the One-Eyed Beagle gets his nickname
from the fact that he is severely cross-eyed.
And when I say severely,
that one eye is not just a little bit off.
It's shot.
If his good eye is looking due south,
that other eye is looking due east.
[laughter]
And when I describe his eye and I describe it in the book,
I've had people--
You can feel sometimes some discomfort in the audience.
And I've even had people come up to me and say,
you know, it's very insensitive how you talk about his eye.
And all I can say to them is that...
he's aware. [laughter]
Like, he's checked it out in the mirror and everything...
[laughter]
from both directions.
[laughter]
Plus, he's one of these guys-- and you all know this guy--
that eye is the least of his problems.
[laughter]
This is a guy, he's got one eye, one kidney,
and two ex-wives,
both of whom work at the only gas station in town.
[laughter]
So he's gotta run nine miles south to Bloomer every morning
for gas, coffee, and chew
'cause they just won't serve him there at the home place.
[laughter]
So, me and the Beagle,
we get sent down to the park on Sunday morning
to get the beer tent ready for the day.
We arrive.
It is 8:30 AM on Sunday morning.
The first softball game of the day is already underway.
We're in the beer tent picking up paper plates
and plastic cups and napkins,
and this guy wanders in off the street.
Not a softball player, just a civilian.
[laughter]
I am always so grateful to the 10% of the audience
that gets that joke [laughter]
and knows those guys. [laughter]
So we're in the beer tent,
picking up paper plates, and plastic cups, napkins.
This guy wanders in off the street, and he says,
"Can I get a beer?"
And I said, "Well, it is 8:30 AM on Sunday morning.
"But, Beagle, you've been on the department longer.
You make the command decision."
And the Beagle says,
"Well, I guess there's no law against it."
And so, he goes around behind our little makeshift bar there,
and he draws the guy a beer, and he sets it down.
The guy hands his money over.
He puts both elbows on the plywood,
and he raises the beer to his lips.
And he's just about to take a pull at the foam
when he hears the crack of the bat on the softball field adjacent,
and he freezes.
Then he looks.
[laughter]
Then he brings his lips back in line with the beer,
which has not moved, and says,
[in a gruff voice] "Little early in the morning for softball."
[laughter]
[applause]
It is at that point that I said,
"Yes, I am back among my people."
[laughter]
This piece I'm gonna share now,
it's a very short little piece,
but it is definitely in that category of
"I got nothing; I gotta give 'em something."
And it's from a book called Danger: Man Working.
And it's a really deeply personal piece.
And...
if we can just get past the first sentence together,
I think we'll be okay.
Outside magazine asked 13 writers
to describe the greatest calamity
they'd ever faced in the wild.
There were stories of avalanches,
60-foot waves,
and guerilla war gunfire.
Alls I can say is,
"Everything's relative."
I learned to poop in the woods
[laughter]
while I was still in single digits.
Our small Wisconsin farm was surrounded
by hundreds of acres of swamp and forest,
and my siblings and I were often out of washroom range
when the urge struck.
We became precocious connoisseurs
of organic cleansing media.
[laughter]
Wipe-ability factors varied.
Oak leaves gave good coverage,
but their slickness limited absorption.
[laughter]
Pine needles were worthless, [laughter]
even injurious,
but had the benefit
of smelling like tree-shaped air fresheners.
Moss was fragile, soggy, and sandy
but it had a decent swab factor.
Finally, I can say without reservation
that a fat handful of poison ivy leaves
[groans]
did the job quite nicely.
The initial job, that is.
The sequelae, to use a physician's term,
were untenable.
I was 14, which, given my experience toileting al fresco,
made my mistake doubly knot-headed.
Grandpa had taken a bunch of us
to a riverside swimming hole.
I still remember squatting in the bushes
before going swimming and prospecting for leaves
after it was too late to relocate.
The only trees within reach were pines.
So, I groped behind me and felt a clump of flat, wide leaves.
Bingo.
It took a while for the itching to commence.
[laughter]
Early on, I felt squirmy twinges of an intimate nature.
But, hey, what's new?
[laughter]
Back home, two hours later,
I was race walking around the living room
[laughter]
fully prepared to drop my shorts
and do the 'naughty puppy carpet scoot.'
[laughter]
Cross-eyed and panting,
I racked my brain and reviewed the day.
When I got around to reenacting the outdoor toilet session,
I blanched.
I wound up with such a blistering case
that I was taken to a clinic for corticosteroid shots.
The doctor also prescribed a topical cream
and instructed my mother, [laughter]
a nurse, to apply it daily.
Florence Nightingale herself
wouldn't have showed up for that gig.
[laughter]
I spent a week sleeping on my stomach,
fitful and straddle-legged.
Standard bathroom procedure went out the window,
replaced by a wincing gavotte
in which I lowered myself to the seat,
did the deed,
drew a baking soda bath,
and delicately cleansed and patted myself dry.
One misstep and I would collapse
into a seizure of spastic monkey scratching.
[laughter]
Years later, I came across a poster
in a Nashville print shop that said,
"It's not the burning; it's the itching, man."
[laughter]
And I thought, "Amen."
For a long time, the fact that I'd wiped my hinder
with poison ivy leaves was my little secret.
I have to believe mom had her suspicions,
even though I explained it away
by saying I backed into the stuff
while changing into my suit.
She kept a log of my childhood illnesses,
and the entry for August 7th, 1979 says,
"Poison ivy, lower trunk."
[laughter]
[applause]
My other favorite "dealing with a New York person
in a skyscraper in Manhattan" story
is about one of my editors who changed my life.
She's wonderful, but I'm gonna make fun of her anyway.
She's not here.
[laughter]
She's at her farm in Connecticut.
I remember getting that call, going,
"Um, I'm just like you now.
We bought a little farm up in Connecticut."
I was like, "I bet you're not just like me."
[laughter]
But anyways, I'm just gonna read a quick little excerpt
from the book, Coop, that has to do with the cold
and something that happens when it's cold.
This morning, while splitting wood,
I attempted to clear my left nostril
using a rustic maneuver
known as the 'farmer snort'
and misfired badly.
[laughter]
My Eustachian tubes have yet to assume
their former diameter.
I bubble-gummed an eardrum,
shot fizz out both tear ducts,
and may have permanently everted one eyeball.
[laughter]
I believe I sprained my uvula.
[laughter]
The act of blowing one's nose
without benefit of Kleenex
is a skill appreciated along a wide spectrum
of background and endeavor.
Synonymous terms include
'fisherman's tissue' and 'air hanky.'
And my personal favorite,
which my New York City editor cut,
'snot rocket.'
[laughter]
[applause]
See, I wish, well... [applause]
I wish you would've been there
because I still remember being on the phone with her.
And this passage was difficult for her, as it was.
But she finally, tone of resignation in her voice,
she says, "Well, I guess I'll let you keep
"the 'farmer snort' section,
but 'snot rocket' has got to go."
[laughter]
And I said,
"Well, you're the boss, but it is literature's loss."
[laughter]
But I grew up calling it a 'farmer snort'
'cause them's my people and them's who taught me.
The lessons were not formal.
Watch and learn, learn by doing.
Same way I learned to spit,
although dad nearly derailed me there.
We was walking from Oliver Baalrud's barn to the house
for a lemonade break between unloading hay wagons
when I puckered up and goobered a stringer
down my miniature bib overalls.
[laughter]
I'd been watching Oliver all day.
He was a diminutive Norwegian and an accomplished spitter.
Not big tobacco-ey streamers, just frothy little pips,
but he did it constantly
and the flecks flew sharp and straight.
Gosh, it was just the neatest thing.
[laughter]
He could do it while talking, pitchforking,
or backing up the tractor.
I wasn't even in kindergarten yet,
but I was trying to march beside my dad
like a little haymaking man,
and I guess I figured spittin' would be the thing.
When I gobbed on my bibs,
dad didn't even break stride.
He just looked down and said,
"Don't spit until you know how."
[laughter]
Boy, that set up a conundrum.
I guess I got around it.
Later, when I lost my milk teeth,
the new set came in with a pretty good gap.
[laughter]
This helps with the aiming and has a rifling effect.
Given a gift, you work with it.
I can sit in the kitchen
and knock a horse fly off your door knob.
[laughter]
Executed smartly, the farmer snort is a source
of transcendent clarification.
In short, it really lightens your head,
and, consequently, your day.
Conversely, a misplayed snort
can put a serious crimp in your karma.
As with most things in life, your odds of success
improve through focus and rehearsal.
Determine your dominant nostril,
visualize success,
think through the snort,
that sort of thing.
I have encountered people who claim to be able
to perform a hands-free double-barrel farmer snort.
I'm skeptical,
[laughter]
and not about to hang around while they prove it.
The first time I saw my wife 'farmer snort,'
I felt a renewed flush of affection.
[laughter]
And I thought, "Now, there is a woman who can endure."
[laughter]
[applause]
A lot of writing is just eavesdropping.
Some of the funniest lines I've got
are just me writing down what someone else said.
And sometimes, you hear a line,
and you want so badly to use it in a piece of writing,
but you never find the right place.
And I'm just gonna tell a little story now
that ends with one of my favorite lines of all time.
And I carried that around with me for 20 years
before I ever-- no more than that--
40 years
because I was a little kid when I first heard it.
Once a summer, my brother John and I
were allowed to take a week off the farm
and visit my Grandma Perry
in the big city of Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
And it was thrilling to go visit Grandma because Grandma--
We were raised in an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect.
I like to say that 'cause it makes people uncomfortable.
[laughter]
Well, one of the things is
we didn't have television or go to the movies or anything.
Well, we liked to go to Grandma's
'cause Grandma had a TV
'cause Grandma was a sinner.
[laughter]
The other thing we liked about going to Grandma's
is that she fed us box cereal,
brand-new box cereal.
Now, that may sound funny, but I was raised
in a huge fluctuating family, great big family,
anywhere from, like, six to nine kids
depending on the day of the week.
And my dad milked a few cows, did some logging.
So, I don't know how my mom fed all of us kids.
I actually do know, she never went grocery shopping
'til she had a fist full of coupons
the size of a bad Uno hand.
[laughter]
But one of the ways that she saved money--
this was back in the days before Sam's Club or Walmart
or anything like that--
but down in Eau Claire,
there was this big old dark kind of scary steel building.
And it was filled with all kinds of damaged goods,
including what we called "injured cereal."
[laughter]
And mom would go down there
and she would, she would buy cereal for us.
And we only got boxed cereal...
We ate oatmeal or cornmeal all week long.
But on Sunday mornings, we got to have
what we called "boughton cereal."
And we called it "boughton"
because my mom either fed us oatmeal or cornmeal mush.
But then one year, our neighbor raised wheat.
Usually, he just did corn and soybeans.
But one year, he raised wheat,
and my mom took a big old plastic trash bin out into the field
and filled it full of wheat outta his gravity box.
And then, we got to have boiled wheat for breakfast.
[laughter] That was very exciting.
So, we always called, on Sunday mornings,
she would make her one concession to the economy,
which was, "I gotta get all these kids to church on time."
They can have boxed cereal that she had bought
from the dark warehouse.
And like I said, we called it "boughton" cereal
just because she didn't steal it
from the neighbor's gravity box.
[laughter]
And plus, it hardly ever had grasshopper legs in it.
[laughter]
[Mike chuckles]
We always, my brothers and I said,
"We never ate, we never ate boughton cereal
"that didn't look like it hadn't been backed over
by the truck that brought it." [laughter]
So we were very excited to go to Grandma's
because she would let us watch TV,
and then she would buy us our favorite cereal.
I always had Apple Jacks.
And we were very, we were so hungry
for any kind of bad food like that
that I remember my brother and I-- John,
he's been 74-years-old since he was three-- [laughter]
and we are sitting on the floor watching Grandma's evil TV.
And one of them Total cereal ads came on where it goes,
"You'd have to eat 12 bowls of Fruit Loops
to get the nutrition in one bowl of Total."
And my brother John looked at me and said,
"I'll take the 12 bowls of Fruit Loops."
[laughter]
So, we'd go to stay with Grandma,
and my Grandma Perry, she could be kind of harsh.
She was not a "bake you sugar cookies grandma."
As a matter of fact, she only made cookies once a year,
and that was at Christmas.
And they were those ones that were,
they were extruded from that caulk gun sort of thing,
you know, the spritz cookies,
yeah, that's it.
Plus, the other thing about Grandma's spritz cookies is
Grandma burned through about two packs of Carlton 100s a day.
[laughter]
And those spritz cookies kind of tasted like Carlton 100.
I always used to say,
"We not only breathed Grandma's secondhand smoke, we ate it."
[laughter]
And my brother, once again,
my brother made an observation after Grandma's funeral.
We were reminiscing.
And he said, "Yeah, yeah,
remember how she'd hold her fishing reel?"
She loved to fish.
He said, "Remember how she'd hold her fishing reel?"
I said, "I don't really remember."
And he goes, "Yeah, yeah, she would hold the reel handle
between these two fingers,
freeing up the other two for that... [inhales]
Carlton 100."
[laughter]
So she was kind of rough, but she had a heart of gold.
And she started the Eau Claire County Humane Association.
And during the time that we were going to visit,
she was just getting it off the ground.
They'd raised the funds, they'd built the building,
but they were still really shorthanded,
and they were still learning how to run the shelter.
And so, she would haul us boys out to the shelter
to help take care of the animals,
clean dog cages and clean cat cages
and walk the dogs.
And she would haul us out there.
And I remember she'd put us in the backseat
of her little red Plymouth Duster.
Grandma was a tiny little woman,
so I remember that very clearly,
sitting in the backseat,
and all I could see was her perm and her knuckles...
[laughter]
and that cigarette.
So, we'd get out to the shelter, and we would help.
Now because they were just getting off their,
just getting off the ground,
I don't know what the hiring policy was,
but the people who worked there,
let's just say that at a very young age,
my brother and I became very familiar
with the terms "Huber law" and "work release privileges."
[laughter]
But there was one guy, in particular, he was so sweet.
He was a tall, skinny guy, very nervous, very high-strung.
And I don't know-- his name was Randy.
I don't know what he did
that he wound up with that particular gig.
But there he was and he was a very heavy smoker
and this was in the days when you could smoke anywhere,
and they had a break room,
and it was always just filled with ribbons of smoke.
Well, one day, my brother and I decided
it would be funny to hide Randy's cigarettes.
Now we were, honestly,
I remember not thinking we were evil.
We really thought it would be a joke.
We, of course, had no understanding
of how vicious that addiction is.
And so, we hid his cigarettes.
Well, as the day goes, he's just getting more and more nervous.
And he's looking under magazines.
He's searching in the back.
He's searching all over.
He's going through the breakroom.
At some point, even my brother and I realized
this has got to stop.
And so, while he was in the other room,
we took his cigarettes and we put 'em
right in the middle of the table there in the breakroom.
And then, we kind of hid and watched.
And Randy comes in there.
He sees the cigarettes.
He pounces on them.
He picks them up with shaking hand.
He shakes one out.
He puts it in his lips, and he lights it.
And he takes a huge deep drag.
And then he utters my all-time favorite quote ever.
He goes, [inhaling cigarette]
"Oh, that's just like a breath of fresh air."
[laughter]
[applause]