The following story is entirely true. None of the names were changed,
because I didn't know any of them.
Without the slightest odour of dung, there I was...
It all began on the Wednesday of pre-War Week. I was doing my usual
effort, standing around and looking pretty near the Coopers' store at
Pennsic, as is my wont, being the sort of garb-horse with a penchant or
propensity or something like that for off-showing. Out of the South
appears this pretty young thing.
"I hear you're from Canada," she said, nudging me with her elbow and
winking one eye. "And I hear you gots a lot of snow up there, eh?" she
continued with a slight but noticeable Southern drawl or accent, an accent
I would later find out was from South Carolina. But that's not
important...yet.
Upon hearing this, my heart soared. Saying to myself, "Thank you God, I
really need this," I smiled at her and said, "Why, yes. You know it ends
at the border, don't you?"
With a whimsically astonished gasp, she said, "Really?"
"Oh, yes," I assured her. "A long time ago, on the hottest day of the
year, they walked the entire border and said where there was snow, that
would be Canada. And where there was no snow, that would be the United
States."
Puzzled and bemused, she wrinkled her brow and said, "Really?" to which I
replied, "Yes!"
Sensing an opportunity for more fun, I added that we all ride around on
dogsled teams, for there is too much snow for wheels to work effectively.
In the animated silence, I also added, "Why, just to get here (Pennsic) I
had to drive my dogsled team for two days, just to get to the border, and
move everything from my dogsled to my car which I keep in storage at the
border leaving my dogsled team with a friend there, and then driving on
for two hours to get to Pennsic."
Wide eyed and thoroughly impressed, she exclaimed that that sounded
incredible. (I wouldn't believe it for a second.) At this point, I thought
perhaps she was having me on as much as I was having her on, but I didn't
really think about it too much, as I often do this sort of thing to
Americans, and don't really think much of it. Still, if she was, I'm sure
we both had a lot of fun.
As is the nature of this sort of conversation at Pennsic, we were
interrupted as other people came along wanting to ask questions about garb
and this and that and the other thing. And so, the lady and I were
separated, and I figured that was the end of it, and nothing more would
come of it.
Two days later, this pretty young thing appears before my eyes, sporting a
big grin, and says, "How are your dogs?"
I looked down at my feet, back at her, and said, "My who?"
By explanation, she said, "You know, your dogsled team that you left with
your friend at the border."
"Ohhhh, them!" I said in recognition. I shrugged my shoulders and said,
"How should I know?"
She continued, "You could phone your friend and ask."
"Phone?" I said, as if searching my memory for some long-lost concept.
"Oh! You're talking about the telly-phone!" Pointing at her, I smiled. "We
don't have telly-phones in Canada. It gets too cold, and the phone lines
freeze and break."
"How do you talk to people over long distances?" she asked.
Reassuringly, I clapped her on the shoulder, and in a calm voice, I said,
"Oh, quite simply. We use smoke signals. They may be kind of slow, but the
message always gets there. Sometimes it may take a week to get a message
across the country, but it does the job well." Again, I was thinking that
she was having me on., but there was always the glimmer of faith in her
eyes, and this did nothing but encourage me to continue. We talked more
about snow. I told her we had several hundred words for different kinds of
snow. Generally, I laid it on pretty thick.
Once again, we were separated.
That night, as with the first night, I went back down to the lake where I
was camped, and visited over at Ealdormere Royal (then Principality) and
shared with my fellow Ealdormerians the stories of my good fortune in
encountering this lady... We laughed a lot. A very lot. After all, having
fun with American minds is the Canadian National Pastime. Several of my
friends came up with some very good ideas I might have used to expand on
my fiction, but I felt that many of them were just too blatantly obviously
fallacious. More on that, tomorrow night (the operative word perhaps being
"moron").
Early in the afternoon the next day, others of my friends with whom I was
camped (Americans), who had also heard the story, came to me pointing to
the horizon in the south-east asking what they were saying. Looking where
they were pointing, I saw dark smoke billowing up from beyond the trees.
Realizing the humour of what they were asking, and the probable truth of
what they were saying, I squinted my eyes and slowly, as if reading from a
distance, said, "Help...help...my...car...is...on...fire." Impressed all
to hell my friends were when, later that night, we found out that
someone's car had caught fire on the highway, and that that was most
probably it.
However, long before discovering that, up in the market area, I was
visited once again by the Pretty Young Thing From The South. She said to
me that she'd been telling her friends with whom she was camped about all
the Canadian things I was telling her and that they were equally as
impressed, for none of them had been as far or further from South Carolina
as Pennsic. Thinking to myself, I just had to say, "Lady, your friends are
not your friends." But I also thought that she was pulling my leg too. So,
without anything to lose and years of fun to gain I continued.
Since she wanted to know more I said, "I've told you about the snow, and
all the names we have, and the dogs, but I haven't told you anything about
the summer yet. We do have summer, you know. Two weeks!" I exclaimed,
holding up two fingers. "Three weeks in a good year!" (Adding another
finger.) "And Lord Tunderin Murphy, but it gets geezly hot, bye. Sometimes
it gets up to 35, 36 degrees."
A little taken aback, she said, "My God, that's cold!"
As quick as greased lightning, I said, "Yeah, but it's hot enough to melt
your igloo." and stroked my beard whimsically as if remembering.
"I suppose so," she said.
"Sure," I reply. "And as soon as your igloo starts to melt," I continue
with a dead serious look on my face, "you have to get your wallpaper out
immediately or it's ruined." I looked back at her with an honest smile,
and she nodded her head as if it made perfect sense to her. So I went on,
driven by this innocent, gullible face. "So everybody takes out their
wallpaper, and hangs it on the trees, and the fences, and the dogsleds,
and the dogs," I said, trying to make it sound somewhat credible. I put my
hand on her shoulder, waved my other hand across the sky, and exclaimed,
"And, my God, you've never seen anything so beautiful as the The Great
Canadian Wallpaper Festival! You really must try to get up there some
summer. Oh, the colours. Oh, it's just fantastic. Everywhere is light and
colour. You really won't find anything like it in the world." (Especially
in Canada.)
She gazed back at me with a face that was definitely too full right
then...so I continued. Nothing is better done to excess than excess,
that's my motto. "Yes... This is also the time of year when all the young
eligible bachelors tie their dogsled teams to their sleds and go cruising
around town to see whose old man has got new wallpaper, and what kinds of
dower rights you can get. These kinds of things really matter up North,
because you really have to know where your wallpaper is. In Canada,
wallpaper is almost everything."
Quite dumbfounded, she just stood there and nodded slowly. Fortunately for
her, some people came by with garb-related questions and anxious faces,
and we were separated once more. Again I thought that that was it, that
she would catch on, and there would be no more. But what great fun I had!
Now, at this point I must acknowledge the assistance of others. There were
many people gathered around. Some would occasionally put their hands on
their mouths, withdraw from the circle, run off and laugh somewhere else.
Most people seemed to make a good effort not to spoil my fun, and I really
appreciate their efforts.
That night, back at Ealdormere Royal, there were many excellent
suggestions for further story embellishment. Probably the most famous (or
infamous) came from Kess, who came up with the idea of snow ants. Snow
ants, which are of course snow white, and travel in huge packs, are quite
invisible against the snow. Usually, the only way to know they're nearby
is when moose disappear in a puff of white with a little spattering of
red. There is so much more, but I will not bore you with it now. Suffice
it to say that we laughed ourselves silly, well past the point where our
sides had split. How fortunate were those who were wearing corsets! Of
course, they couldn't inhale enough to laugh properly anyway.
I think it was two days later, I ran into the lady again. She recognized
me, and wanted to know more. So, I got my shovel ready and started to go.
In response to her continued queries, I said, "Well, I've told you about
the short summer, the snows, the igloos, the Wallpaper Festival. There
isn't much left. Oh, yes." I said, with a glimmer of recollection, "we do
have some permanent wooden structures. There are of course the Parliament
Buildings, large wooden box buildings with pyramid roofs and shingles, but
they're uninteresting and nothing ever really happens there. However,
there are always the moose hatcheries. Probably they're the most
remarkable structures in all of Canada." (This is where it gets laid on
really thick.) I decided not to tell her about the snow ants, but instead
to go with something slightly more plausible, like the idea that moose lay
eggs. "Now, a moose hatchery is a truly remarkable building. It's a large,
squat, conical building rising up over the horizon like a great, shingled
breast with a big door at one end, and a huge pile of sand inside. Some
towns have many, some towns only have one, but every Canadian has seen
dozens of moose hatcheries and very few have ever been inside one. For
that's where the highest-paid civil servants in all the land work.
"Once in awhile a moose will walk in from the wilds, usually to the same
hatchery in which it was born, walk in the big doors, climb around on the
sand pile until it finds the spot that feels right, squat down and pop out
an egg the size of a football and then leaves. Moose are terrible parents,
unfeeling and unkind." I looked at her and said, "You should be very glad
you weren't raised by moose. You'd be a much different person today if you
were." (Maybe a bit smarter.) "But anyway, then the hatchery attendants
rush in and bury the egg. They turn it every now and then, make sure other
moose don't step on it, and after 17 months, the egg hatches. Out comes a
medium-cat-sized moose with little one inch antlers. And over the next few
months, it gets bigger and stronger, and starts to feel the call of the
wild. By the time it's the size of a German Shepherd (with longer legs) it
walks up to the door and wanders off into the wild. Most likely, never to
be seen again until it comes back to lay its own eggs.
"We don't know a lot about what they do, but we do know that they live out
the rest of the season eating what they eat, and at the end of the season
they drop their antlers and overwinter in a huge pack, all huddled
together, waiting for the new season, when they get to grow the next set
of antlers." My face filled with the look of nostalgia. I'm sure I looked
as though I was about to wipe a tear from my eye, when she stopped me and
said, "Woah, woah, wait, wait. Are you tellin' me that moose drop their
antlers and grow new ones every year?"
"Well, yeah," I said. "That is why we call them antlers and not horns,
after all."
To this perfectly reasonable assertion on my part, she said, "No, no, you
lie. You are lying to me." Just for the record, I'd like to say that this
is basically the first true thing I'd told this woman in a whole week, and
for some reason, she didn't believe it. Also, though, I was afraid that I
was gonna lose my fun, so I tried to rescue the situation, and go off on a
ten-minute dissertation on the difference between horns and antlers, and
that moose have antlers and that's how they work. But she just wouldn't
believe me, no way, nohow. And then, in a flash of insight, she said,
"Wait a minute, I remember from high school that moose are mammals."
Thinking that that may have been the only thing she remembered from high
school, I quickly replied, "The platypus is a mammal. It lays eggs." But
she was not to be persuaded but I still tried for a few more minutes.
Then, sensing that all was lost, I thought the least I could do was set
her straight on everything. So I told her the truth about all of it. But
she still would not believe that moose antlers drop off and grow back
every year.
Well, I like to think there's a moral to this story. Otherwise, why would
I keep telling it to people? (Hee hee hee...) I'm sure you can come up
with one or two yourself, but my personal fave is "Sometimes the truth is
even more fantastic than a lie." But I hope your moral to this story is
not, "Never trust a Tempus, ;)" because most of the time, if you catch it
unawares, a Tempus will be good to you.
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