Wannaskan Almanac for Thursday November 15, 2018

                                     

Scientific Study Undertaken at Palmville Townhall 

formerly known as District 44 West

Palmville District 44 West One-room School est. 1904.

     Iclic Vermer spent a lot of time at the Palmville Townhall (aka Palmville District 44 West) in the years he served as the township constable and caretaker of the hall. He walked to it from his shack across County Road 8, near the woods where the school children used to tie their horses. The little one-room school was also known as the Billberg School for a nearby family of original homesteaders and an early-day schoolteacher named Clarice Boyum, who married one of them.

     Iclic knew many of the stories. He had visited with all sorts of people that stopped by the old one-room school house, or whom he found sleeping in their cars east of the building, either taking a nap after a long drive from somewhere--or sleeping it off after a drunken slosh toward home.
   
     One guy had passed out and left the keys in the ignition and his more sober dog had started the vehicle, and drove it smack-dab into the outhouse where the car had stalled. The dog found out they make outhouses pretty solid in Palmville.
   
     Iclic had to use his tractor to pull the car away. Uffda, did it ever smell, he said, but not so much the guy would notice as it looked like the man and the dog had been really living it up in that car all the way from Holt. They both finally sobered up and drove away. The outhouse wasn’t damaged.

     One afternoon Iclic spied Ula Josephson at the townhall laying in the grass north of the building. He had parked his Toyota truck off the southeast corner, so the reflection of sun in the truck windows caught Iclic’s eye, otherwise he’d never seen Ula in his blue Boston Red Sox cap, usually a proper sort of guy, laying well below his range of sight from his kitchen window.

     Wandering over, curious more than anything, Iclic was well aware Ula was on the township board and thought, maybe he had business there, the elected official he was, a fact Ula never got tired of spouting about, as he always proudly pointed out the embroidered Palmville Township Board member badge he had sewn directly over his heart on his one-of-a-kind Palmville Township jacket.

     Few board members anywhere in Minnesota felt as impassioned about their jobs on township boards as Ula, and then if that wasn’t enough, the subsequent addition of responsibility badges of “Chief Cook and Bottle-Washer,” earned him covetous recognition and free drinks on Wednesday afternoons from the boys down at the recently reconstituted ‘Palmville Pub,’ a quarter mile west of Solom Machine Shop.

    

     People in the know in Palmville, remember the raucous gatherings at the original Palmville Pub & Plate down on the Reed River/Marshall County line some twenty-five years ago now, when Iclic was its proprietor. Iclic couldn’t keep enough “Creamed Cur Cutlets” and “Roadkill Cuisine” on hand most days, but the off-sale beer business was always good aided in part by the two Johnson brothers, Elmer and Curtis, from NW Palmville. 

     Iclic heard tell PP&E really put a dent in the Sunday sales at the original ‘El-Kay’ Foss Skime Store, and might’ve even closed them down, if the D.E.A. hadn’t offed PP&E first. Seems Iclic hadn’t bought the proper licenses somehow, but it was fun while it lasted.

     Iclic could hear Ula laughing, looking directly at the ground. His phone was suspended on a selfie extension arm, his ballcap cocked to block the sun. Rising slowly from his elbows to his knees, his full attention riveted to the tiny grass and gravel knoll in front of him, Ula held his iPhone at ready, his trigger finger poised upon the shutter button, as peals of his laughter rode the hot waves of air reflecting off the white schoolhouse walls.

     Sneaking now to the backside of the building through the ditch south of the hall, Iclic dashed to the east side of the building, then threw himself prone, crawling north along the foundation as if inching toward an entrenched machine gun nest during W.W. I.

      A southbound car on County Road 8 slowed for the intersection then turned west toward the Hovorka swamp, accelerating quickly. A meadowlark resumed singing on the power line over the road, teetering there on the thin round wire. It tipped its head and peered at Ula  kneeling and reeling with laughter below, and saw a second man, laying on his stomach around the corner of the building edge closer, of whom the first man seemed totally unaware.

     Pushing himself upright with his free hand, settling heavily on his heels, his back briefly against the townhall, Ula pushed his ballcap up on his sweaty forehead, a great smile across his face. Hurriedly he sat down thrusting his long legs out in front of him and began scribbling notes onto a tablet, using his left hand, from the top of the sheet of paper downward, laughing a tired wheezy laugh as he wrote. He suddenly spoke to Iclic, completely astonishing him.

     “Dis is da funniest t’ing I’ve ever seen in Palmville, Iclic, and it’s absolutely true,” Ula whispered. “Prairie voles do just drink themselves silly! Sven should be here to see dis! Lord Almighty, I captured it all on video here, doncha know. You gotta vatch dis!” Then he leaned ‘way over to where Iclic still lay along the north side of the foundation, dumbfounded, and offered him the show on his phone. “I heard 'bout dis here on MPR.”

     The two men looked at the Ula’s iPhone and watched as two male Prairie voles, sitting at a tiny round table, threw down tiny shot glasses of alcohol-laced H20 and then laughed hysterically pounding the table, loudly squeaking Voletistic epitaphs and slapping one another on the backs.
   
     Appearing to order more, a smallish female vole carried four more shot glasses on a leaf to their table while motioning to unseen voles at other tables that she would be there soon. One obviously sloshed male tried to pat the female, who deftly dashed just beyond his reach, and squeaked back, disapprovingly,

“Paddy, you’re drunk!” the waitress said testily. “I’ll be callin’ yer wife to come and get the likes of you!”

https://www.newsweek.com/alcohol-prairie-voles-monogamy-relationships-cheating-drinking-711656