I sat down with Garrison Keilor last night, albeit at some distance. From the back row of the upper balcony in a California theatre, I listened to him spin tales of my homeland. We both knew Minnesota: “Land of 10,000 Lakes and a Few Weirdos,” as one of my t-shirts proclaimed.

So we were talking. He lamented the softness of childrearing that permeated the other states. “Parenting’ was a verb that didn’t exist in our day.” He elaborated. “Fighting our way to the bus stop through 40 degree below zero weather made us tough, and made me realize why families were so large in Minnesota: you needed an extra in case one of the children didn’t make it back.”

He also disapproved of all the discussion of feelings and the support groups for every possible worry and psychosis. “There’s a support group out here for the children of distant fathers. We thought we were supposed to be distant. Wasn’t that what our children wanted? Nowadays the children do everything they can to push parents away! The wear black, paint themselves black, hovel away in their rooms, put metal through every conceivable passage in their faces, eyebrows, noses, tongues. It’s as if they fell face-first into the tackle box!”

Then he struck a note. “It’s a wonder that more people haven’t escaped from Minnesota; but we stay. We get coerced. Oh, a few make the break successfully. You can tell who they are out here in California: they have that guilty look.”

I had to chuckle at that one. Then I shouted back over the crowd: “We have support groups out here!” My friends laughed. My wife was trying to decide whether to be embarrassed. I had assured her I would behave tamely in the presence of her boss and husband; yet here I was, shouting in a theatre. But Garrison and I were both from Minnesota: it was a shared experience.

“Who said that?” came the voice from the stage. People nearby laughed and looked at me. I was in trouble. Again. Too bad; we needed her job.

“He’s over there somewhere,” I shouted, pointing thirty degrees to port.

“Come on down here.”

This was taking a turn for the worse. My wife always warned me that I could get into trouble for talking too much. I was of the opinion that life was more interesting when we could comment about it along the way. At the moment, the scale was tilting in her direction.

“We came to hear you, Garrison,” I retorted.

“No, no; they’ll hear me. They’ll hear you too. Come on down here,” he insisted. I appeared to be caught.

I approached the stage nervously but was calmed by the mischievous glint in his eye. “So, you have escaped. Unlike Clarence Buntzen, you have remained at large.”

“Yes, it’s true. I came out for college and never quite found a reason to return.”

“And you have a support group of Minnesota refugees? When do you meet?”

“Every week, right after jazzercise and before yoga,” I responded. “You’re not going to send me back, are you? I go home to visit almost once a year, even in winter sometimes. I’m very dutiful.”

“Yes, but you do that only to laugh at us in our direst of seasons.” Then he added, “it’s not polite to mock.”

“I enjoy the winter — really! — for about a week. It’s like jumping in the snow, secure in the knowledge that you will soon return to the sauna.”

“But we do that in Minnesota: winter is the snow, and August is the sauna.”

“A little too spread out for me.”

Then he looked into me for a long moment and asked, “Do you believe you will be judged by God when you meet at the pearly gates and he asks why you have avoided your calling?”

“I just didn’t get into the suffering thing.”

“It builds character.” The laughter of the audience seemed to confirm this.

“In stories, anyway. But tell us more stories Garrison.” I was trying desperately to get out of this. “We came to hear you tell stories.”

“Tell I will. But I must, honor, my fellow Minnesotan as I do so. We must extract a few stories from you. Where are you from in Minnesota?”

“Excelsior.”

“Excelsior! Were you there when the amusement park flourished?”

“Yup. Well, ‘flourished?” It was a little run down in the sixties. We’d sometimes go down at night by boat. I liked to shoot the automatic bb guns, watch the water jump in the trough as I missed the target. We’d ride The Scrambler until we got sick. You see, I did suffer!”

“Excelsior. On Lake Minnetonka. Just west of Minneapolis, Minnesota. That’s a lot of ‘Minne’s.’”

“Many ‘Minne’s,’” I agreed.

“All born of the Indian culture.”

“Across the lake was an island — Boy Scout Island to the newcomers, but we knew it by its Indian name: Wawatosa.”

“What does that mean?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

“Were you ever abducted by Indians when you played in the woods or visited the island?”

“In all my years, I’ve never seen Indians on Lake Minnetonka. I often expected to be snatched by some band; but the dangers we faced had more to do with blizzards and squalls and snowmobiles with frozen gaslines in the middle of nowhere. The only Indians I saw were on street corners down Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis.”

“Boy Scout Island. That reminds me of a time when our troop spent the night outdoors on the coldest night of January.” Garrison proceeded to tell the tale of a freezing night in which he got lost on the way back from a necessary run in the darkness. He was saved by one of the rogue bachelor farmers who was carousing in the wee hours, unbridled by the settling effects of womanhood.

“My own memory of Boy Scout camping has to do with hunger,” I offered. “It was fall, not the dead of winter as you describe. Our troop went out to a wooded area — which in Minnesota is about as unremarkable as salt water in the ocean. I don’t know why we picked that location. The trees had lost their leaves; the sky was overcast — that gray that always depressed me permeated a dim day in the long, cold part of the year. I suspected these outings were in fact my parents attempt to get rid of me on the weekends. With five children, they had to thin down the numbers if they were to get any rest.”

“Were you ever afraid they’d refuse to claim you when you returned?”

“I was pretty sure that sense of parental obligation would kick in. Kind of like not littering.”

“We Minnesotans have a strong sense of responsibility, not to mention a pride in the environment. Moaning, homeless children wandering the countryside is to be avoided.”

“Indeed. At one of these refugee camps, my brother once spilled boiling water on his leg to get out of the long ordeal. He said it was accident, having to do with the way the water hung over the fire to boil. I knew it was to get out of a week of chores and tasks and camp songs.

“Those songs scared me. I still remember one with the refrain, “Green grow the Russians oh.” It was menacing; the Russians would come one day. They might be out there, hiding behind the trees at night. It was decades later when pondering this strange refrain that I deciphered its true meaning: “Green grow the rushes oh.” It was a nice little song about Minnesota wetlands. I marveled at how I got Russian-phobia out of that one; but it was the late fifties, early sixties. There were Nike missile bases in rural parts of the state.”

“Sputnik. The Russians were spying on us from space! They could see you at your campfire.”

“They were everywhere back then. But I digress. I was telling you about a particular camping trip where I came to know the true meaning of hunger. For me, hunger has forever been symbolized in the form of a triangle. You see, the scout leaders would starve us — whether by intent or poor culinary planning. We were always hungry. Perhaps it was their way of making us appreciate food that wouldn’t have passed muster in a homeless shelter.

“On this occasion, we huddled around a fire and cooked bread in a wide skillet. It baked for almost an hour. The troop leader sliced the round contents into slivers, as one would cut a pie. I stole mine away and retreated into my tent. There I hid the treasure on my sleeping bag. I just looked at it, and felt its warmth. I knew my survival depended upon stretching out this bread for hours until nightfall. I covered it, hiding it from predators of the two-legged kind.

“The most dangerous kind!”

“Indeed; yet somehow I survived. The next time I used that sleeping bag, I noticed a stain in the shape of a triangle, right where the bread had been. There must have been a lot of oil in it. I never could get that triangle out.

“That image has stayed with me: a dark triangle on a drab green sleeping bag. I see pictures on TV of hungry African children holding their hands out, begging. I’ve become anesthetized to such imagery. Yet when I see a dark, pie-slice-shaped triangle, I start to shiver. My stomach aches. I head to the refrigerator.”

Garrison took a turn, telling us stories of bear sightings and a wayward moose, always intertwined with characters who seemed bizarre, but believably so. He showed an amazing sense of detail — not so much to things but to behaviors.

I listened attentively to his art, eventually breaking my silence with another Minnesota story. “Many people conjure up images of loons when they think of Minnesota. I do too; love the funny critters. We’d see them on canoe trips up north. Sometimes they would wake us in the early morning and do their water dances. It was magical, as if you had stumbled upon the ancient sexual rituals of some primitive force.

“One of the treasured secrets of the Minnesota outdoors.”

“It was mystical; or maybe mist-icle, as I remember the cloud-like wisps on the lake during their dance. I haven’t seen that for a long time. You don’t suppose the drakes gave up dancing, do you? Perhaps there are singles bars over by the wild rice and bulrushes now.”

“I can see it now. Is there a cartoonist in the audience?” The crowd produced laughter but no such artist.

“In any case, it always seemed to me that Minnesota would be better represented by a more common, familiar creature. In a land where four glaciers had scraped and gouged their way, leaving depressions and holes that filled with water to make 10,000 lakes, it seems the state icon should be amphibious: the simple frog.

“The frog,” contemplated Garrison. “In a way, that’s quite fitting. They’re everywhere, hopping from puddle to pond to lake.”

“Perhaps frogs represent our salvation. I think they eat mosquitoes, keeps the population down.”

“They eat mosquitoes?” He had a quizzical look. “Are you sure?”

This was just a dim conclusion from unquotable data. “Not sure; but let’s make it a part of our oral heritage, like the Navajo do when sharing tales of mischievous gods with their children.” He smiled, seeming to like this idea. “Did you know that frogs helped trick coyote into leaving the stars in the sky?”

“Okay, now I know you’re fibbing. If that were a true Minnesota story, it would be about wolves.”

“Did I say coyote? I meant wolf. But frogs, for sure. Wood ducks are more glamorous; loons more unusual; but frogs are what Minnesota is about. Growing up on a lake, we came to know them in all their biological diversity: brown, green, even tiny tree frogs. There were also bullfrogs, though these we heard more than saw. As boys, we would catch frogs on the rocks by the shore. Daylight hunting required quite a chase, often resulting in the frog’s escape between two boulders. Even our small hands couldn’t pull him out.

“Night time was a frog-catcher’s paradise. Like the captivating snake eyes you told us about, frogs were susceptible to any light, especially those generated by two D sized batteries. If you caught the frog’s eyes in your flashlight beam, he would stay completely still, immobilized, until you got too close and he snapped out of it. If you held the light away from you a little, still focused on the frog’s eyes, you could reach around with your other hand, coming up behind him, and clamp down before he knew the gig was up.

“We caught many frogs this way. Of course, there was the part where the frogs would release their bladder tension after you’d scooped them up. I didn’t know whether this was a defensive move or a reaction to the panic of apprehension. Getting peed on was a danger of the trade.

“Maybe they were just getting back at you.”

“Could be. In any case, we learned to count in those days too, as frogs represented a livelihood for young boys. The saleable metric was the dozen. Old man Rachel wouldn’t buy 2 or 8 or 10 frogs for his bait shop. He bought and sold by the dozen. So we would gather and catch until we had 12, 24 or 36 frogs. Then we’d hop in the little boat and motor down to the Howard’s Point Marina, where we’d make the frogs-for-cash exchange.

“We knew Mr. Rachel doubled the price before he sold these frogs to the bass fishermen who would rent boats from him. This didn’t seem quite fair, and more than once I thought of going direct. But there was another element to these transactions.

“The feel of coins and bills in our hands was transitory, as Wally Rachel soon had us handing them back in exchange for another commodity: gumballs and licorice and Baby Ruth bars. We would return home in glorious, hedonistic victory. Soon, our bounty exhausted, we thought again about the economics of this business. We had empty hands, while fishermen had large mouth bass and Wally Rachel had a full cash register. Still, we loved the adventure of it all.”

“Young entrepreneurs. You should have stayed with it. You could have made a fortune!”

“Ah, but then I would have gotten comfortable, bought a big house and a heated garage, and been lulled into staying in Minnesota.”

“Would that have been so bad?”

“I would never have met my Cuban wife! There were no Cubans in Minnesota.”

“And Minnesotans only traveled as far as Florida.”

“Had I traveled to Florida, I might have met Cubans. But Florida was for my grandparents. I had to stay in Minnesota and brave the winter.”

“Good for you. I can see it built character.”

“I have been called that. Anyway, I’ll just tell you one last episode about frogs that took a somber and macabre twist. It was the Fourth of July in the early sixties. My brother, cousins and I had firecrackers — Black Cats, M80s and Cherry Bombs. We were playing a more active game of war with plastic toy solders scattered around the lawn. Rather than making sound effects like “boom” and “rat-a-tat-tat,” we’d stage a dozen men on a hilltop and place firecrackers beneath them. Lighting the fuse was always a bit “iffy,” as the precision of their manufacture varied. We took turns in a spirit of camaraderie — or of Russian Roulette; I’m not sure which.

“Soon we tired of such simple quarry. My brother and cousin, the older and more daring among us, came up with an idea. ‘Let’s get a frog!’

This seemed a bit ghoulish to me; but then, why not? There were plenty of frogs around. Already we captured them, sold them to sportsmen who skewered them with a hook, hurled them thirty yards through the air, and dragged them back to the boat, leaving them tormented by dark shapes beneath the water. Eventually, they died from the exhaustion of the routine, or worse — from the sudden quiver of water, the vertical launch of an erupting largemouth bass, and the crushing snap of sharp jaws. A sudden blast would be merciful by comparison.

“We all started searching the lawn and rocks for frogs. ‘I have a frog!’ said my little cousin Boozer. Billy — christened William but always called Boozer — was only about six or seven at the time. And no, he didn’t have a drinking problem, just a naming challenge. You know, “Boy Named Sue’ and all that. Anyway, he wanted to play with the big kids.

“’Good!’ said my brother. ‘Go get him.” Boozer vanished, returning a minute later with a large bullfrog. As the older boys stuffed a big firecracker in his mouth, I turned my attention to Boozer. He looked pale. It started to dawn on me that this might be a special frog and that Boozer was in a high state of anxiety. Something was amiss; but I was too young, too shy or too stupid to intervene. Events progressed as expected, with the frog making about three smoking hops. In mid-hop, there was a loud bang and he disappeared. Reconnaissance patrols turned up only the legs. Boozer ran off in a flood of tears, saying something about his pet frog. We didn’t chase any more frogs that day.

“Did your cousin ever speak to you again?”

“Not right away, but eventually.”

“It must have taken a while. Was he psychologically scarred for life?”

“No, he recovered, which was a remarkable testament to the strength of Minnesota folk. You see, he didn’t even have a support group.”

“Living in Minnesota. It’s not for the faint of heart.”

“True. The last few years, we’ve come back to visit family at Christmas. I rather preferred our visits in the summer, but it’s good family time during the holidays. Gives us the chance to see all the cousins, get a taste of cold weather, and appreciate our return to California.”

“No tenacity. No endurance. No suffering for the good of the Northwest!”

“I’ll leave that to you. As you might recall, last winter it snowed all Christmas eve and into Christmas Day. Because of the road conditions, we didn’t go to the traditional assemblage of family just across the St. Croix. When I called with my regrets, Boozer’s wife told me: ‘I guess some people have forgotten what it means to be ‘Minnesota Tough.’’”

“‘Minnesota Tough.’ We know what that means.”

“Me too, ‘though I don’t always choose that path. I’m okay with it. I don’t have to plow into a snow drift. I can stay inside during thirty below weather when everyone else is outside playing hockey. You know how?” Garrison waited patiently. “I have a support group, in the form of a Cuban wife.”

“As I said earlier,” he lamented, “those who left Minnesota have become soft.”

“Thank goodness more than a few of you have stayed to hold down the fort.”

“More than a few: women who are strong, men who are good-looking, and children who are above average.”