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Town that time forgot still exists
(by Barbara Christian - September 23, 2010)
WINDOW ON MAIN STREET, BY BARBARA CHRISTIAN
Town that time forgot still exists
Radio personality Garrison Keillor has for years charmed listeners with tales of Lake Wobegon, his mythical hometown somewhere in Minnesota.
The stories of the people and places are vivid, and they are the stuff of what radio was and is meant to be. Close your eyes, listen and let the life and times of Lake Wobegon unfold. You can almost smell those famous buttermilk biscuits.
Lake Wobegon is the kind of place that does not exist any longer in America, except between 6 and 8 p.m. each Saturday on your local National Public Radio station.
Sad to say, small towns have either dried up or become suburban enclaves that have no center, no front-porch culture but mostly people who barely know their neighbors. Mark it up to progress, the Internet, Facebook, Twitter. Whatever.
Well, I am are here to tell you Lake Wobegon lives. It's not in Minnesota but in an unlikely place called Kenny Lake, Alaska, a rural hamlet with a population of 410. It is one of the last farming communities to be homesteaded in America.
Thanks to Wrangell St. Elias National Park, some members of my family have the privilege of living in this place time forgot. Did I mention it exists in a time warp dating back around 1953? We expected to see a picture of Dwight Eisenhower hanging in the hallway of the National Blue Ribbon Kenny Lake School. Classroom computers reminded us it was some 60 years later.
At the insistence of three of the children who attend that school, I got to see, through the magic of video recording, the 2009 Kenny Lake School holiday play, "A Charlie Brown Christmas." It was oh so reminiscent of the big Christmas shows Chagrin Falls Lewis Sands School kids used to stage that it brought tears of nostalgia.
What is interesting about Kenny Lake is that the lake for which the town was named dried up years ago, thanks to an earthquake. It exists now only as a distant memory and a small pond that has taken its place.
But the spirit in the community is alive, and you can witness it firsthand during mid-August at the Kenny Lake Fair. It's a real hometown event with booths sponsored by school groups and organizations and food made by local purveyors, including a nearby inn with dishes honoring Alaska's fabled Russian history. The fair is centered by a stage where an array of Kenny Lake musicians perform almost non-stop throughout the day with everything from fiddle players to opera singers.
And what's this? We saw no piercings in odd body places, no look-at-me hair colors or tattoos. We saw no one on their cell phone or texting. It was as if time stopped sometime before the information age began.
Kenny Lake is the kind of place where a teacher might call a student in the middle of summer to say she is coming over with a book she found while tidying her room and thought he would like. It's where a neighbor will stop with a few extra salmon he knew he would not use. It's where the town librarian is still apt to "shush" a conversation that has risen above a whisper.
Yes, Lake Wobegon exists and not just the one Garrison Keillor invented. You just have to go a bit north and west of his imagination to find it. It's at 61 degrees latitude and 144 degrees longitude. You can't miss it.
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