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Dancing Carl
by
Gary Paulsen
In the summer, in McKinley, Minnesota, when you are twelve here is so much
to do that almost none of it gets done except fishing.
It isn’t that McKinley is big, or busy. It’s only got twelve hundred
people – not much more than when my great-grandfather Marshall Knuteson
homesteaded the town site. I was named after him and everybody calls me Marsh
except Willy who is my best friend and always just says hey when he wants
me. He also says there are only nine hundred people in town but Kayo Morgan
who owns the grocery says there are more to attract tourists.
I have never figured out why having more people would bring
tourists in but I don’t own a grocery, either, so there it is. Bit it’s
not a big town.
And there’s no real business either except some logging in the winter
when the swamps are frozen enough to skid the big logs out of the woods. Also
there are a few farms but they’re small because of the dampness in the
soil which turns to mud in the spring during planting. The mud sticks the
tractors so bad they have to use work teams of horses to pull them out and
what with running back and forth with horses to pull tractors out you really
couldn’t call it farming…
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