The Santa Dimension

When I was about five years old, I was excited to learn that Santa Claus was going to appear at my house early on Christmas Eve to personally hand Christmas gifts to my little brother and me. My parents explained that Santa was doing this as a special treat for us since we didn't have a chimney. Sure enough, Santa showed up. Although he was an hour late, according to my mother, I was thrilled to see him. I quickly rushed outside into the cold Wisconsin night but stopped several feet short. Something wasn't right. Santa was clearly wearing a mask on his face. I asked him why he was wearing a mask and he told me it was to keep warm. Later that holiday season, I overheard a conversation between my parents whereby I learned it was my grandfather pretending to be Santa and that my mother was very upset with him for showing up late and drunk. When my mother realized I had discovered the great Santa deception, she explained that Santa had so many houses to visit that evening that he didn't have time to make special stops and that my grandfather was just pretending to be Santa to make us happy. Once again, being a young innocent squirt, I bought the explanation. My grandfather was always a great guy, drunk or sober, and I appreciated him for stopping by on such a cold night just to please my brother and me. A few years later, in the second grade, I was hanging out with a couple of my buddies during recess. Usually we would shoot marbles behind a big oak tree so our teacher couldn't see us. Mrs. Henderson didn't like it when her boys would participate in games of chance, especially when marbles would change hands. Instead of playing marbles, we got into a discussion about Santa Claus. There had been some speculation that Santa Claus didn't really exist so the three of us tried to figure it out logically. Duncan Jones was the brains of the group, Vinny Gagliardi was ever so inquisitive, while I was more action oriented, preferring to play games of chance (marbles) rather than attempting to fathom the unfathomable. It all started when curious Vinny came up with a series of intriguing questions. • How does Santa visit so many houses on a single night? • How can he get all those presents in his sleigh? • How can reindeer fly? • How does a hefty guy like Santa manage to slip down a chimney and get back to the roof? • What does Santa do when there is no chimney? • How does Santa know whether you were naughty or nice? • And so on and so on. Duncan made some quick calculations. He figured if there were a billion houses and Santa took only a minute per house, or 60 houses per hour, it would take about 17 million hours, not counting flying time. Then there was the flying reindeer problem. Duncan and I were fairly certain reindeer couldn't actually fly, but Vinny wasn't so sure. He had seen an elephant fly in a Disney cartoon and it looked feasible to him. Soon a light bulb went off just above Duncan's head. Suppose there was a parallel universe. Santa could pop in and out of our reality almost instantaneously while doing most of his work in a parallel dimension. This would impose an anomaly in the continuum of time and space whereby a few seconds of our reality could be a year of Santa reality. This could also explain the reindeer problem. They don't actually fly -- there're merely transported to our reality directly onto the roof and disappear the same way. Santa makes his way into the house in the same manner. Apparently, according to Duncan, it's simply a matter of hyper-dimensional travel between simultaneous planes of existence. The bell rang and we had to go back inside where Mrs. Henderson made us print the alphabet all afternoon. She wanted to make sure we slanted our letters at the proper angle. Mrs. Henderson always emphasized penmanship and seating posture, but had a phobia about teaching math. Numbers greater than 20 made her nose bleed. It's strange how so many parents are unaware of parallel dimensions. They tell their kids the most ridiculous tales to make up for their lack of knowledge about the anomalies of the continuum of time and space. Merry Christmas y'all. ___________ Quote for the Day – "I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked me for my autograph." Shirley Temple ___________ Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a couple of dogs and many fond memories of Christmas Past. ___________ - -

The Search for Adventure

There are two kinds of adventurers -- those who go hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won’t On July 17, 1930, two high school buddies from Minneapolis, Eric Sevareid and Walter Port, boarded their canoe on the Mississippi River, near Minneapolis, and headed south. Soon, they turned right on the Minnesota River and traveled north-northwest, all the way to Big Stone Lake in South Dakota, the source of the river. They navigated onto Lake Traverse and followed the Red River north, eventually reaching Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba. Then they went northeast through uncharted territory of rivers, lakes and hostile (sparsely inhabited) terrain, and ended up on the shore of Hudson Bay. The entire journey took 14 weeks and covered 2,200 miles. The following year, Eric Sevareid enrolled at the University of Minnesota and received his B.A. degree in 1935. He wrote a book titled CANOEING WITH THE CREE, recounting the trip, and later became a TV broadcaster, alongside Walter Cronkite, on the CBS Evening News, where he earned two Emmy Awards. He died in 1992. Sevareid's account of the journey is filled with peril and misery, including constant rain, dangerous rapids and lengthy portages where they had to haul their canoe and provisions over soggy tundra to the next body of water. "Day and night, the drizzle did not cease for so much as an hour. The woods oozed with water, every leaf held a pond, every dead twig and log was rotten with wetness. We had paddled a canoe twenty-two hundred miles, had survived, and had proved nothing except we could paddle a canoe twenty-two hundred miles." Maybe they didn't prove anything to the rest of the world, but they probably proved something to themselves. In 1970, I was in graduate school at the University of Minnesota and had five weeks to kill between summer school and fall quarter. So a friend of mine, named Kent, and I decided to take a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota and Ontario, Canada. We were just a couple of restless pool hall fixtures in search of an adventure. I was bored and Kent’s train of thought was missing a caboose. I figured we’d make a good team. We started out on Gunflint Lake, on the border of Minnesota and Ontario. After two full days of paddling upstream on a river system connecting a string of small lakes, we made it to a tiny island in the middle of Big Saganaga Lake where we were stuck for three more days because of heavy winds and turbulent waters. When we finally got off the huge windy lake, we headed west along the Rainy River to Knife Lake where we made a wide loop up into Canada for nine days, then came back down across the U.S. border into a laborious grind from lake to lake and over difficult portages, some of which were several miles across rugged ground. During our entire trip, which started after Labor Day when summer vacationers were scarce, we only ran into another party of voyageurs on one occasion. We met them in the middle of a lake as they were traveling in the opposite direction. Basically, the two of us were alone in the wilderness, far from the troubles of the world. All in all, we covered a few hundred miles and it took 26 days to return to civilization. It was a grand experience, but not one Kent or I wanted to repeat soon. Besides the physical challenge of hauling a large, heavy canoe and well over two hundred pounds of provisions (tent, sleeping bags, spare clothes, food, etc.) over rough footing between lakes, there was also the challenge of getting along and pulling together. Sevareid reported that he and Port had gotten into a campfire wrestling tussle over their differences, no doubt prompted by the stress of the journey and the lack of a way out of the situation without completing the trip. Kent and I had plenty of disputes, but were too exhausted to get into a physical altercation. Instead, we alternated between teamwork and bickering. We were stuck with each other and needed to finish what we started before we ran out of food, so we kept plugging away across water and land until we eventually made it back to square one. In the end, we proved nothing, except we could paddle a canoe a few hundred miles. We also learned that mosquitoes never sleep, Kent couldn't read a map, and neither one of us was very easy to live with. A life without adventure is like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, without the peanut butter and jelly. If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space. ___________ Quote for the Day -- “Tenacity is a pretty fair substitute for bravery.” Eric Sevareid ___________ Bret Burquest is author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a dog named Donner and has many fond memories of adventure in his earlier years. ___________ - -