How Not to Haul Your Canoe

By Mike Sherack

"Sven & Ole" humor is a staple of Upper Midwest culture, a product of Scandinavian settlement. Sven and Ole are not simple to a fault, they are simple to a dangerous level. In this collection of short stories, they navigate life in our complicated world. Whether it's little known things about snowshoe hares or geese migration, keeping the Great Lakes straight, getting rich off aluminum cans, using time zone boundaries to fish longer, or the unappreciated dangers of crock pots, they keep things really simple.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Sherack
• Release date: Aug 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393976684

Book preview

HOW NOT TO HAUL YOUR CANOE

(and Other Sven & Ole Stories)

MIKE SHERACK

HOW NOT TO HAUL YOUR CANOE

(AND OTHER SVEN & OLE STORIES)

Copyright © 2020 by Mike Sherack. All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

For the hardy people who call the Upper Midwest home

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Tom L’Allier, Ted Kunz (who read a draft on his phone while in Africa), Jane Sherack (my mother), and Chuck Castlewood for their review and help with the stories. I also appreciate the insights of Eric Hill and the special assistance of Trevor Sund.

INTRODUCTION

If you didn’t grow up in the Upper Midwest, be glad you didn’t have to endure long winters. Whether it’s bitter cold, summer mosquitos, or Viking Superbowl losses, people there know how to endure. However, you missed out on the humor of Sven and Ole, the origins of which go back to the region being settled by many Scandinavians. This book is a collection of Sven and Ole stories, most short, some longer.

A benefit of the cold climate hardship is I believe you have more ability to enjoy life’s simple pleasures. It’s a little windy out on the lake today, comes out in a way that you’re trying to minimize how windy it really is (it’s pretty windy), and it can immediately be countered with witty replies like: It does keep the mosquitos away, or At least the rain stopped for a while, or I don’t think it’s cold enough to snow. The same with cold weather: We’re freezing our backsides, but at least we don’t have to worry about bugs or snakes.

A Sven and Ole joke can be something you tell a friend, to get a laugh and pass the time, when you’re walking home in the winter cold, uphill and against the wind, and you’ve still got a ways to go. Some cold weather humor makes things a little easier and gets your mind off the cold. It also helps get your mind off whatever stressful things ail you, like work, that you’ll have to shovel when you get home, or that your kid brother is sick and will probably greet you by coughing in your face. Cold is not fun, but it makes your mettle stronger and tends to redirect stress because your focus is on getting someplace warm.

Sven and Ole jokes revolve around two guys of Scandinavian descent, and often a woman, Lena, who are a little – or a lot–out of the mainstream. Sven and Ole are not simple to a fault, they are simple to a dangerous level. A typical joke involves one saying something stupid, and the other tending not to even notice. Ignorance is bliss applies. The best jokes involve one saying something stupid, then the other responding with something equally or more stupid, and neither realizing anything is wrong. The humor can immediately put you in a silly mood where you’ll laugh at most anything, like you did when you were a kid. It’s a bit of lightheartedness to brighten the moment. That many of the jokes are farfetched does not matter–there is a lot of leeway with plausibility, especially when you’re telling a joke in the dark at ten below. Even if it’s really dumb, you will still laugh.

A Sven and Ole joke could go something like this:

Sven, we’re invited over to Lena’s for Thanksgiving next month. Do you want to go?

Sure, Sven replies. What day is it?

Well, Thanksgiving was on a Thursday last year so this year it will be on a Friday.

Wait, Sven replies. This is a leap year, so this year it will be on a Saturday.

Oh, good point.

Nord Nordland, Professor of Northern Studies at Northern Upper Midwest University, describes Sven and Ole humor this way:

The foundations of Sven and Ole humor are poor judgment and failed logic. Erroneous or illogical extensions of bad logic build on this, due to inaccurate perceptions, misuse of suppositions, or wrong conclusions. The bad logic tends to increase in severity as the story goes, without either party realizing that any erroneous conclusions or inaccurate perceptions are even present. There is a void of critical thinking. Without another sentient being present to arrest these intellectual failures, it may appear to an uninformed observer that Sven and Ole are intentionally trying to be more stupid than the other. But they’re not. While an overeducated outsider may roll his or her eyes at this seemingly lowbrow humor, such people often don’t appreciate that good Sven and Ole humor is in fact mastery of faulty logic. In its highest form, which is hard to achieve and even harder to sustain, the second will say something profoundly more stupid before you can fully process the stupidity of what the first one said. It hits you so low that you may not realize it is in fact sophisticated. When your brain gets through processing it, you can only laugh. An inconclusive study suggested it could be good therapy for people who have lost their sense of humor.

On top of this, Nordland adds, their failure to learn make Sven and Ole unable to advance their understanding of the world around them. While their stupidity is shocking, there is no evidence that anyone ever bothers to try to educate them. They are allowed to be the village idiots for the entire region.

Sven and Ole persist as part of the culture, which is a good thing given our increasing urbanization and reliance on technology. Life is more and more complicated, and increasingly I wonder how much better it really is. We have a constant stream of new technology that few of us can keep up with, and many days I feel it’s not that helpful or necessary. By the time you get something working well on a computer, something with it changes. Or a website saves you a few minutes, but resetting the password or updating the software robs you of twenty minutes. Contrast that with Sven and Ole’s world, where any technology more advanced than a shovel could be misused, and the shovel has a nice certainty to it.

Growing up rural, I saw and did many things most city dwellers don’t see or do, like picking sweet corn out in a field, going to a tractor pull, stacking hay bales, having a mother cat birth kittens in your closet, having your dog roll in cowpies, feeding worms to baby ducks, or ripping the crotch of your jeans crossing a barbed wire fence. I’ve walked an orphaned deer fawn on a leash, skied behind a snowmobile, and driven a Trans Am on a frozen lake to go ice fishing. What seemed normal growing up in outstate Minnesota was rather unique, and you don’t realize this until you meet city people who can hardly believe what you experienced growing up.

My grandparents lived through the Great Depression and then worked a small farm in northern Minnesota. They raised and grew most everything they needed. They milked cows by hand and had barn cats able to catch a spray of fresh milk (as in right out of the cow) in their mouths. They made homemade root beer, homemade ice cream, and canned various things at harvest time. I also remember an old timer from Wisconsin who canned brook trout fillets, as well as homemade horseradish that was so strong the smell almost knocked you over. He even canned homemade grape juice that was very good. To my grandfather, a tough German farmer who stood five-two and lived to be almost ninety-four, catch-and-release only applied if fish were very small; he’d even keep bullheads. There were minnows in the farm’s stock tank and a runt piglet that got to live in the house for a few weeks. It was hilarious watching that piglet, named Susie, race around the house, and yes, she peed on the floor. Even in his eighties, my grandfather would do strenuous work. He would clean spark plugs rather than replace them, and tell me when the sixth cylinder started working about a mile down the road. I once watched him hook up a huge circular saw blade, attached by a belt to an old idling tractor, and cut down lengths of wood for the stove (that exposed saw blade could make an OSHA inspector’s jaw drop). And when I was young, if the party line phone rang once it was a call for the neighbors down the road, if it rang twice it was for grandma and grandpa’s house. Contrast that with what we have today, and all the stresses that modern life bring, and I’m not sure it’s all good even though our standard of living is higher now. Those rural ways underlie my ties to nature and the outdoors. Like most people, nowadays I spend a lot of time sitting in an