Some years ago Mary and I stayed several days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner spent about ten years of his childhood. I had read Stegner's Wolf Willow, and I wanted to see for myself, as I always do. The visit was a remarkable experience for me, and produced this essay (which was previously published in New Stone Circle magazine in slightly condensed form).
We have an undying sense of duty - to our families, our communities, the land. Duty to our friends, to the animals we raise for slaughter, to the crops in the field. Duty to goodness and right. The horse is harnessed to the wagon and by God we're gonna go. Don't look back. What we're here to do, we do it, we don't argue about it, we put our head down, we lean into it. Such devotion is admirable when it is honorable and necessary; but sometimes maybe we don't know when to say whoa, we don't know when to say this horse has had enough. We care for aging parents at the expense of a life of our own, sometimes. We carry our children, sometimes, when they damn well ought to be walking. Our sense of duty limits our perspective and we've got no sense of humor about it. "Sorry, gotta go - time to milk the cows," we say, our lives not the least bit our own. "Independence," we say, deluding ourselves. Yeah, sure, independence, if that's what you call it. Criminy. On the other hand, it was good, solid, and virtuous middle westerners who tapped an ex-professional wrestler with a knack for putting his foot in his mouth - Jesse Ventura - to serve as governor of Minnesota. Who says we don't have a sense of humor? Part of our charm, I guess, comes when we are a little off-plumb, a little out of square in our very square and certain world. Perhaps our humor, at root, is dark: as dark as our woods, our waters, our rock. As dark as the soil we work. Perhaps our laughter is laughter in the face of that which we cannot change. A gallows humor. Holding our breath as we pass the cemetery. Ours is a humor at one's own expense. To be continued....
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