4
AS I’ve already told you, when we were going to get to go North, we didn’t have any idea we’d run into such an exciting and dangerous mystery, but when a gang of boys get together on a camping trip in the wild North, something is pretty nearly always bound to happen, which it did.
On the way we went through a city which advertised itself as the Capital of the Paul Bunyan Playground—Paul Bunyan being what is called a mythical lumberman of the North, and was supposed to have been terribly big like a giant in the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, which is a fairy story every boy ought to know—only instead of Paul Bunyan being a bad giant, he was a good one, and was always doing kind things for people.
We stopped to get some gas for Barry Boyland’s station wagon—which is what we were all riding in—right across from a tourist camp called “Green Gables,” and Little Jim gasped and said, “LOOK! Who and what is that?”
I looked out at what Little Jim was looking at, and saw what he saw, and it was a great statue of a man with a beard and mustache, standing with one hand upraised and the other on a back of a statue of a great big extra big blue cow which had horns. Poetry spoke up and said, “That’s Paul and Babe.”
“Paul and Babe Who?” Dragonfly wanted to know, and Poetry, who, as I’ve told you before, had a lot of books in his library, all of a sudden reached down into a briefcase he had with him and pulled out a book and said, “That’s Paul Bunyan and his big blue ox, whose name is Babe. It was the blue ox whose footprints were so large that when it walked around they sank deep into the ground, and everywhere it went it left big holes. Then when it rained, the rain water filled up the holes and that made all the eleven thousand great big blue-watered lakes which live in Minnesota.”
Little Jim, who likes fairy stories and legends, grinned and said, “What made the water blue, then? How come?” You see, nearly all the water in nearly all the great big hundreds of lakes we’d already seen on our trip was as blue as the blue on the hair ribbon Circus’ sister wore to school at Sugar Creek.
“What made the lakes blue?” asked Poetry with a question mark in his voice. He puckered his fat forehead, and said, “Blue—oh that!” He thumbed his way through the Paul Bunyan book quick, to see if there was anything in the book to explain it, but there wasn’t. So he said, “Old Babe, the ox, was blue, you know. One day when he was out swimming in the headwaters of the Mississippi, the blue began to come off, and pretty soon the Mississippi, which flows through a lot of lakes up here, was all blue. The water flowed all around from lake to lake and pretty soon the lakes’ waters were all blue, too!”
Well, it made as good an untrue story as any of the rest of the exaggerated ones in the Paul Bunyan book so we added it to the list and decided to tell it to our folks when we got back to Sugar Creek.