FoxCraft

Mispronouncing History

El Dorado. The city of gold. Like so many other explorers, we came close but just missed it.

The name actually translates as "the golden one." According to early Spanish writings, it came from a ritual among a South American Indian tribe where a chief covered in gold dust made offerings of gold objects to the gods.

This got the wealth-seeking Spanish conquistadores all excited, of course, and eventually "el dorado" came to be associated with any lost or rumored place of fabulous wealth. The Spanish never quite found it in South America, which didn't stop Coronado from trekking across a good portion of the American Southwest after it. He made it to central Kansas without finding any cities of gold.

Too bad he didn't have a chance to stop at his local AAA office and pick up a map, because there it was, plain as day. El Dorado, right there on Highways 54 and 77. Even with the map, though, we didn't quite reach it. We just saw the sign as we breezed past at 65 miles an hour, traveling in luxury Coronado could scarcely have imagined.

Of course, Coronado did have the disadvantage of being consistently misled by local people who kept telling him the city of gold was just a little farther down the road. They were smart enough to encourage the demanding and militant Spaniards to move along and become somebody else's problem.

In a way, the locals are still misleading travelers. Not with any inhospitable intent, I'm sure. But we might have had trouble finding El Dorado had we relied on the waitress in Wichita who mentioned it. According to her, it was "El Do-RAY-do."

This regional pronunciation shouldn't really have come as a surprise. The previous day we had breakfasted in Beatrice, Nebraska, which everyone in the state knows is "Be-AH-trice" rather than the conventional "BEE-a-tris" or the pretentious Italianate "Bey-a-TRAY-chay."

Later in our trip we encountered Chickasha, Oklahoma, which an unaware northern traveler might assume to be pronounced "Chick-a-shaw," had she not been informed by someone more familiar with the region that it was "Chick-a-shay." Come to think of it, given the spelling, that makes more sense anyway.

We also spent a day in Lamesa, Texas, presumably named for the "mesa" or flat tableland on which it's located. Nevertheless, it's pronounced "La-mee-sa" with fine disregard for the original Spanish that would have it "La-may-sa."

In the end, the joke was on Coronado, who trekked across this country without ever knowing that it was indeed full of gold. It was just black gold rather than yellow, the kind that's now being taken out of the ground by hundreds of pump jacks.

It is interesting to speculate on how history may have been different had the Spanish made it far enough north to discover gold in the Black Hills. If they had, the capitol of South Dakota might be pronounced "Cor-a-nay-do" instead of "Peer."

Driving Across Flyover Country

Traveling from the western end of South Dakota to the eastern end of Nebraska requires a long day's drive across a lot of prairie. After a few hours, it's the kind of trip that can make you start to reconsider the price of airline tickets.

I've made a lot of trips across this land, most of them driving, but a few in a small plane as well. It's fascinating to see the subtle beauty of the land from the air, whether it's the open spaces of West River ranch land or the patchwork fields of East River farm land. That beauty is easy to miss if you're traveling in a jet at 30,000-something feet. I suppose it's understandable that this part of the world is so easily dismissed as "flyover country."

A lot of people were flying over it too. Driving south in the late afternoon, we watched a sky filled with contrails, clear evidence of the amount of east-west traffic. At one point we saw two jets going east and two others going west on what looked almost like collision courses. They sped past each other, two of them crossing each other's trails to temporarily mark the spot with an X. A short time later, a single nonconformist bisected their fading paths from north to south.

As the sun set, a third of the vast prairie sky glowed with orange, violet, and turquoise, giving us an evolving light show for half an hour. More contrails stitched rows of white and deep purple across the layers of high, streaky clouds.

None of the travelers in the jets tracking so temporarily through the sky could have seen us so far below. They wouldn't have noticed, either, the new motel being built in the tiny town of Dallas that a recent article at SmartMoney.com dismissed as a place "two hours from the nearest major airport" where you can't even "get a decent bite to eat." They wouldn't have seen that the new motel was right beside a thriving steakhouse. Nor would they have seen the giant towers of the grain elevator that makes Dallas so important to the local farm economy.

They wouldn't have seen the birds, either. A long-dead cottonwood tree beside a stock dam provided the perfect perch for a bald eagle to pose in a stately manner befitting its status as our national symbol. A lake bed filled with dried grass and milo stubble must have been a prime hunting ground, because half a dozen hawks and golden eagles were circling it.

A rooster pheasant erupted out of the grass as we drove by. He must have seen the predators in their lunchtime holding pattern, because he dived back into the cover even faster than he had started out. He wasn't going to become someone's meal this day. He knew the dangers of living in flyover country.

Just Follow the Cookie

Well, it's certainly a relief to have that figured out. My path is now clear. The choices are laid out before me in an orderly fashion. The rest of my life is going to be a piece of cake—chocolate, presumably.

More accurately, it's going to be a fortune cookie.

Ordinarily, I don't pay a lot of attention to fortune cookies. They're fodder for a moment's amusement, a moment's thought, or an entertaining after-dinner conversation. Once in a while, though, a fortune comes along that makes more of an impact.

Like the one that stated enigmatically, "You will receive all the wealth that you deserve." That's been several years ago, and the millions have yet to start rolling in. Apparently the fortune isn't coming true. Oh, wait a minute. Maybe it is.

My most memorable fortune came years ago, when my boss had ordered lunch for all of us from the Chinese restaurant down the street. The slip of paper in my cookie informed me, "You will soon receive a promotion."

The next week, after a disagreement with that same boss over how to handle an employee problem, I got fired. Somewhere in my old files, I probably still have my copy of the "resignation" letter she asked me to write—with the fortune cookie taped to it.

Actually, losing that job did turn out to be a promotion, just in a different way. I've been self-employed ever since. And if my current boss ever tries to fire me, I'll show her. I'll just quit.

The fortune that is going to change my life, though, came with my cashew chicken the other day. It read, "When the moment comes, take the last one from the left."

Wow. Imagine the time and effort this could save. Just look how much it simplifies every decision. Which sweater to choose off the clearance rack. Which book to take off the library shelf. Which guy to accept out of the hordes of eager two-steppers lined up to ask me to dance. Which brownie to take off the plate. (If you take the last one from the left, then the next one in line becomes the new last one on the left, so you take that one, too, and then the next one in line—you see where this could go?)

There is still a bit of room for creativity, as well. For example, take the salad bar at one restaurant we go to. If you approach it from one direction, the last item on the left is the ham and bean soup. From the other side, it's the bread pudding. If you sidle up to it at an angle, though, and stand in just the right spot with your back half turned, the last item on the left—at least the last one you can see—is the chocolate mousse.

Perspective is so important.

It feels as if a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. From now on, no more worrying about making decisions. No more time-consuming consideration of pros and cons. No more thinking. Just follow the fortune cookie. The last one from the left, and bingo. It's the right—er, correct—choice.

Now, all I have to worry about is knowing "when the moment comes."

Machine Gun Kelly Goes to the Library

I was about 9 or 10 years old. My school (not my class, the whole school—all five of us, and that included the teacher) were on a field trip. One of our stops was the Tripp County Library.

The library was on the second or third floor of the county courthouse. In my memory, getting to the library meant going past the sheriff's office and the jail, though I may be wrong about the jail part.

Anyway, the courthouse was and is a traditional three-story stone building occupying its own city block, with lawn on either side. On this particular visit, the teacher parked at one end of the block. Eager to show off my scrawny fourth-grade muscles, I offered to carry the box of library books. After a few steps, I realized the box was heavier than I had expected. Pride wouldn't let me change my mind about carrying it, so my next best choice was to take the shortest possible route to the front door. Instead of following the sidewalk, I made a wobbly beeline diagonally across the grass.

As I approached the grand front entrance of the courthouse, I noticed two things. One was a girl about my own age, standing on the steps. The second was a sign that read "Keep Off The Grass."

I staggered up the steps with my box of books, and the girl informed me, "You're not supposed to walk on the grass."

Too embarrassed to admit I hadn't seen any sign until it was too late, I told her, "I know."

"So how come you did?"

"Because it was shorter."

She looked shocked. I went on past her, trying to look as if such deliberate disregard for the rules was second nature to me. Between the box of books getting heavier by the moment, and my uncomfortable awareness of the proximity of the library to the sheriff's office, achieving an air of nonchalance wasn't easy.

Fortunately, by then the rest of the group had caught up with me. I gladly relinquished my burden—at least the physical part of it—to let one of the older kids carry the books. All the way up the flights of marble steps, though, I worried about what that other girl must think of me. In her eyes, I was sure, I must seem like a reckless lawbreaker who had, willfully and with malice aforethought, walked across the grass in defiance of the forces of law and order.

Yet letting her believe in my evil nature seemed better, if only slightly, than the other available choice—admitting I hadn't see the sign and I had made a mistake. Better to be thought crooked than clueless.

Perfectionism? Yes, I've heard of it. Why would you ask?

"Beam It Out of Here, Scotty"

You'd never guess it from looking at my office or the guest room (it's really time to invite some overnight guests so I have some incentive to get the leftover Christmas wrap and other clutter out of there), but we've been getting rid of stuff. It's time for some end-of-year sorting and clearing out. Okay, make that end-of-years, plural, starting with, oh, about 1992.

We've found the occasional almost-forgotten treasure and a certain amount of just plain junk. Most of the stuff, though, falls into that troublesome category of things that are obsolete or unused, but that are still too good to throw out. We have no need for them whatsoever, but theoretically at least, we might—someday. Or someone might. We just don't know when, how, or why we might ever use them.

Of course, that theoretical potential is exactly why they've been sitting around all this time gathering dust.

Why doesn't somebody hurry up and invent a recycling/transmogrifying machine? It would operate somewhat like the transporters from Star Trek. The machine would disassemble something down to its very atoms, but instead of putting it back together the way it was, it would reassemble those atoms into something new.

You'd put your old stuff—an IBM Selectric typewriter from 1979, say—into the machine, program the right settings, and press "start." After some whirring and beeping and a few flashing lights, out the other end would come a new laptop, a couple of e-readers, and a set of stainless steel tableware for eight. Oh, and that nine-sixteenths wrench that's missing from the socket set.

Just think of the possibilities. Outgrown jeans and old tee-shirts could be transformed into this year's fashion, or maybe a new pair of Carhartts coveralls. An old bicycle could become a new skateboard. Unwanted Christmas gifts could be transformed into just the thing you'd have bought for yourself. The lighted plastic "pig driveway markers" I got in a white elephant exchange could become a new pair of dress shoes that didn't pinch my toes. Fruitcake or gingersnaps could be transformed into dark chocolate.

Now, that would be regifting.

Of course, there are still a few technical details to iron out before such a machine could ever be perfected. And if it were ever to be made workable on a practical scale, it would completely disrupt the world's economic systems. We certainly wouldn't want to do that, given how perfectly everything seems to be working right now.

So it may be a while before the "Atomic Recyler" is on the market. In the meantime, does anyone out there want a perfectly good Selectric typewriter?