Natural Fireworks

            In the Agassiz Basin of western Minnesota, the little town of Bejou derives its identity from an Ojibwe word for ‘hello’. My father liked to remind folks of this fact, smiling perhaps with the simultude in his own name, Joe.

            He was living there with my older brother Jon in the late 70s when a massive tornado blew in, roundabout the 4^th of July. Farmers lost full barns and livestock, doomed within or scampering the range. Pickup trucks turned into tiddlywinks and ransacked rooftops: mindless mercenaries to a ruthless wind. Dad was a Lutheran pastor and spent the rest of the month holding a lot of hands; Jon was a shaggy teenager and a handyman in his own right at several farms. They described the actual storm in conventional terms—a freight train on rocket fuel—and the fallout more personally. The uninsured lost everything; the insured thought hard about tractor-ramming a downed tree into an unharmed side of a house—in order to lose everything instead of collecting on the mere incidentals.

            I came later that summer and don’t remember much, at least what we did. But relationships must have deepened in this remote county that I loved more than my suburban Chicago home. They must have, because…

            The following summer had me and my younger brother, Josh, arrive earlier. Jon had his own stuff going, Josh had quiet dreams I should have honored, and Dad had ongoing pastoral calls. I was completely in love with a girl whose father called ‘George’ on account of his deadpan desire to have more sons on the farm: following his eponymous ‘Jimmy’, he turned daughter #1 into ‘Ralph’, daughter #2 ‘Fred’, daughter #3 ‘George’. A belated angel child ‘Danny’ became the clown prince in the mix, providing George and me a hellion to tease, even as the kid lavished the attention. He tried to retaliate—making me carry a slimy newborn Holstein his dad ordered into the calfbarn, ridiculing my urban clumsiness and desire to show off my muscles in front of his sister, who also laughed before lending a hand. A feisty calf is no light matter.

            George didn’t make the 4-mile trip to Bejou more often than for church services or the odd softball game; that summer, though, she rode in by horse to show me killdeer eggs in grass nests, make sure I’d protect them from the town’s lawnmowers. Bejou was prepping for a 4^th of July stomp, with carnival booths, a platform for local bands—the whole shebang. George would need to ride that horse home before dark, but then would want to come back for the dance. My optimism and pessimism darted simultaneously off-scale as she galloped east to the farm that would likely give her hell for missing out on afternoon chores.

            Nonetheless, her brother Jimmy drove her back, when the skies were darkening a touch earlier than usual. TV forecasted a thunderstorm, but hey— Independence Day! Apparently he was destined to Mahnomen, the county seat, where bigger things were happening. Maybe Ralph and Fred had driven there separately, maybe saddled with Danny. All I knew was that gorgeous George was here with me, and Bejou was happy beyond its inherent salutations.

           

            For 2, 3, 4 hours… I lost track of how things ticked by, where my brothers were, what act was on stage, when the fireworks were set to go. Though there were rumors of hailstorms around Ada, 30 miles west, weather tonight appeared to have given Mahnomen County a pass, balancing out for a rough one last year. So the dancing went on. Bliss. Oblivion—until the sound of a distant freight train, evidently not from the nearby stretch of railroad.

            The man at the mic hollered something to the effect of don’t panic! as the rest of his crew grabbed what they could and bolted to the VFW, the only public building with a basement. Few houses, for that matter, had anything other than a ground floor. Yet the parsonage had a cellar that Jon had been trying to make habitable—a den for smoking with his friends and playing pool on the pub’s toss-away table. Jon was probably in Mahnomen this very night, but I was glad that Eddie, who typically tagged with him, huddled us into the northwest corner where a there was a moldy couch and a BAD COMPANY blanket covering up a section of wall that was more dirt than concrete.

            Dad descended to see that we were alright—questioned the corner, but Eddie waved it off as safe enough—freeing Dad to rush upstairs and outside to gather any stray sheep. The winds were howling over the drumbeats and dollops of water and ice. The naked lightbulb was on, so we could see each other: Josh, whom I had all but forgotten during this myopic day, some other kids his age, Eddie and what could have been his girlfriend (hard to say), George and me. The members of the band on the blanket—their ‘Burning Sky’ album cover—made it look like they rounded out our motley congregation.

            I laughed at that, or something else, and George punched my ribs. “Shush,” she spitfired. “Nothing’s funny.”

            Ashamed, but really not, for how she clutched my skinny arm, I ventured a smaller whisper, “why? just a thunderstorm.”

            “It’s a tornado, dummy. Can’t you hear the freight train?”

            The light went out and everyone coiled further in. I can’t remember saying anything more, nor wanting to. George, then Eddie, then the other girl, then George again recalled in gasped fragments what last year’s twisters had done, reviling their sick joke for coming back exactly now.

           

            In fact, they didn’t. Helluva storm, was all, knocking down electric lines, mainly, yet rather calm through the night. A case of natural fireworks that, to some extent, took us away from the holiday, one way or another.

            George and I checked the killdeer eggs at morning’s light.

            ‘Hello’, they seemed to say, ‘all’s well.’
 

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2019)