Here's the story behind one of the best stories I heard during my trip this past autumn through the East and Midwest.
It was a cold blustery day - Monday, Nov. 11, to be exact - with a persistent spattering of rain turning to snow. We stopped for gas in Francesville, Ind.I bought $25.35 worth of unleaded for our RV at Onken's Service Station. The man who took my payment - maybe Mr. Onken - told me the story.
Actually, he told it to me and my wife, since both of us went inside the station to get out of the cold. We mentioned that we had pushed the camping season too far this year and were heading south and west toward home, and that triggered this little story:
"There was a guy around here one time who got really sick of the long, cold winters and the snow. One day he tied a snow shovel on the front of his truck, and he said he was going to drive south until someone asked him what that thing was. That's where he wanted to settle down."
I'll admit that it wasn't a detailed or dramatic tale, but it fit our situation perfectly and was a tale to tickle a folklorist's fancy. Its prototype is some 3,000 years old!
In "The Odyssey," the epic poem credited to the ancient Greek bard Homer, the hero, Odysseus, returns home to the island of Ithaca after 20 years of adventures following the Trojan War.
Exhausted by his wanderings and sick of the sea, Odysseus asked a prophet what to do, and he received this advice (I'm quoting selectively from a translation):
"He told me to visit city after city carrying an oar until I find people who know nothing about ships and oars. . . . When someone meets me and says I have a winnowing shovel on my shoulder, I should fix my oar in the ground and sacrifice to Poseidon, then live there with my people happy around me."
From this ancient tale, called "The Sailor Who Went Inland," the oar and winnowing shovel, or in other translations a fan, have evidently been combined and transformed into a snow shovel.
There are intermediary versions that confirm the story's survival in folk tradition. Here are two examples, each adapted by storytellers to make a particular point:
First, in 1956 when my mentor, the late Richard M. Dorson, collected folklore in Jonesport, Maine, he heard a story about a young fisherman who wanted to marry a girl who knew nothing about the sea. So he went courting with a small carved model oar stuck in his pocket.
He decided to marry a girl who said she thought the oar was a "pudding stick," but during their honeymoon his bride betrayed herself by using nautical terminology, saying, "There's been a squall, and I've got everything clewed up."
Another version was collected in 1963 in the Chesapeake Bay area by folklorist George Carey. He spoke to someone who heard it told by an old oysterman:
"I've lived here all my life, working on the water, and I'm getting kind of sick of it. When I retire, I'm gonna get me a rowboat and oar down the river until somebody asks me what this is I've got in my hand. When somebody asks me what it is, I'll say `You don't know what an oar is?'
"And if he says `No', I'm gonna throw my oars away, let that rowboat go with the tide and spend the rest of my life right there."
The funny twist in that version, of course, is that the old sailor in the story can't imagine a place on a river where the tide's influence is not felt. Yet he thinks folks living so close to the sea will fail to recognize an oar.
"The Sailor Who Went Inland" became something of an in-joke among folklorists. In 1968, when Prof. John Greenway was retiring as editor of the Journal of American Folklore, he alluded to it in his farewell editorial.
Fed up with academic controversies, he wrote, "Your Editor now proposes to throw Dr. Richard M. Dorson across his shoulder and walk steadily inland until someone asks him what that thing is. There he will lay down his burden and settle in peace forever."
I've been compiling such versions of the story for years, but this past November in Francesville, Ind., was the first time I heard a variation told live and in a non-seafaring context.
It's just the kind of thing that makes folklore study so rewarding!- "Curses! Broiled Again," Jan Harold Brunvand's fourth collection of urban legends, is now available in paperback from Norton. Send your questions and urban legends to him in care of the Deseret News.