An exaggerated year
David Feela - 01/16/2025My first visit to Paul Bunyan’s professed hometown coincided with my first breath. For my mother it was a relief. I was the only child born to my parents in Brainerd, Minn. Paul Bunyan and Babe his blue ox also hold a dubious claim over some kind of birthright there. I do remember the lumberjack actually greeting me by name much later, during a childhood vacation visit to the town’s local tourist attraction called Pioneer Village. Even then, I suspected my parents arranged the encounter. How else would Paul Bunyan have known my name? And besides, his voice sounded kind of tinny for a 26-foot-tall woodsman leaning on his axe.
Bemidji, Minn., and Bangor, Maine, also prominently display Paul Bunyan statues and these cities compete in a good-natured rivalry about the giant lumberjack’s true hometown, along with Oscoda and Ossineke, Mich. Then there’s Westwood, Calif., and one more Paul Bunyan that was sold and emigrated from Baxter, Minn., to North Carolina in 2011. Folklore makes many dubious claims. Out of more than 30 Bunyan statues in America, I alone possess an honest signed-and-sealed certificate to prove my birthright, no matter what the other 30 statues say.
Before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, small towns across America sought to entice an ever-increasing influx of automobile tourists by constructing gigantic roadside attractions. The tradition led to the world’s largest chile pepper in Las Cruces, N.M., the “biggest” ball of twine in both Cawker City, Kans., and Darwin, Minn. Even a pest control company in Providence, R.I., designed and built a 4,000-pound blue termite in 1980. Fondly known by locals as Wiggles Woodaway, it’s an unavoidable reminder to have your house treated for bug infestations.
Folklore’s enduring history and traditions have passed through many generations by word of mouth. They teach us lessons, which are readily recognized as exaggerations. Designed to make us smile, they are so different from the misinformation that clings to our social grapevines – not lore, but lies, enough to overfill the world’s largest paper cup in Riverside, Calif.
In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, an ungraded 35-foot-tall Santa welcomes travelers to the Christmas season, and the old 5-foot diameter Times Square Ball in New York City – once illuminated by 100 incandescent bulbs – is now 12 feet wide and uses 32,000 LED lights. Our expectations continue to grow.
A flurry of ambitious resolutions also arrives with each New Year, revealing a portrait of excesses we have dragged along with us. New goals and better habits are popular. Improved fitness and wiser finances rank as the most popular plans. Drinking less, however, consistently appears near the bottom of the list, supporting the notion that what begins as a raised glass often ends up to be toast.
One resolution never reported but always informally offered is “I resolve NOT to make New Year resolutions since I never keep any of them,” which sounds much like what Lewis Carroll’s hookah-smoking Caterpillar thinks while confronting Alice. He sits on his mushroom pedestal and presides over Alice’s altered reality, repeatedly demanding “Who are you?” After confronting her own mind-altering experiences wandering in Wonderland, Alice responds that she’s not sure, and sometimes neither are we. Who can blame us, especially after years spent inhaling the toxic smoke of an ever-changing BIG political lie.
Mis-and-dis information has had its way with all of us. Facebook is responsible for over 2 billion daily active users and qualifies as the world’s largest manure spreader. WhatsApp encourages another billion daily users. It appears the taller the lie, the more attention it receives.
Alice turns herself into what an onlooker might consider a tourist attraction when she mentions to the Caterpillar, “Well, I should like to be a little larger, sir, if you wouldn’t mind ... 3 inches is such a wretched height to be.” The Caterpillar is sitting on the answer to her wish. It’s right in front of her nose. But when she breaks off a piece from the mushroom’s right side and nibbles on it, she shrinks even more. Then she takes a morsel from the left side and undergoes an unbelievable growth spurt, so tall her head towers above the canopy of trees.
So it is with the challenge to stay sane in our own little Wonderland of political theater. At first I was inclined to close my eyes and ignore the news. Then I heard from a neighbor the rumor of a special where for a mere $360,000 I could live comfortably on a cruise ship for the next four years. Instead of signing up for a GoFundMe platform, I decided to try following Alice’s example: fill my pockets with the sensible nibbles from the left, because being made to feel ever so small by the right is no way to live a life. I’ll just see how gracefully I can rise above it all.
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