A Note to Visitors
Lake Woebegotten, Minnesota has changed a bit since the end of the world, of course, but in matters historical and geographical, and to some extent cultural, things are pretty much as they’ve always been. The town is situated near Gahan Hill on the eastern shore of the lake that lends the town its name, a lake that amounts to about 700 acres of water—depending on how you count some of the slushy marshy parts that are half land and half liquid around the southern side—and if you’re not from farm country and don’t know how much an acre is, 770 acres is a little over one square mile (though the lake is more blobby oval than square), and if you don’t know how much a square mile is, I’m not sure how much we can help you here, you might want to start with some other book instead.
The name of the town (altitude 1420, population 1,056 as of the 2000 census, though that’s not too accurate anymore, as you might imagine) comes from the mispronunciation and subsequent Anglicization of an Ojibwe phrase that means either “Well who would have thought?” or “Some weather we’re having, huh?” though the name as it stands now isn’t entirely inappropriate for most of the residents, even if “woebegotten” is a little too highfalutin’ and overdramatic a word for the descendants of Norwegian Lutherans and German Catholics, each group mostly a stoic and occasionally dour bunch in different ways.
(“Woebegotten” is a pretty woebegotten word itself, being a not-entirely-real word that people come out with when they mean to say “woebegone” or “misbegotten” or something similar instead. Still, like “irregardless” and “ain’t” and other such linguistic volunteers, the word seems to fill a niche, and most of the dictionaries in the schools hereabouts have the word scribbled in between “woebegone” and “woeful” just as a show of civic pride.)
Lake Woebegotten was first settled in the 1840s by members of a Utopian society that believed, among other things, that physical discomfort due to temperature, hunger, or sickness were indicative of spiritual shortcomings and best treated by fasting and contemplation of the infinite, so they were pretty much all dead by the middle of the first winter. They’d dug a few wells and tilled a few fields, though, which as existing infrastructure made the spot attractive to a couple of groups of weary settlers who found themselves daunted by the prospect of traversing all the vast prairie that started at the edge of town. The soil was stony but the fishing was good, and there was a lot of timber in the form of birch, alder, red oak, and miscellaneous scrub, so they mostly shrugged, said “Good enough,” and put down their roots, pastured out the cows, slopped the hogs, and started growing oats, alfalfa, corn, and wheat. White clapboard houses popped up, and shops on Main Street, and a couple of churches, and eventually a stoplight. A sand and gravel pit or two appeared, as did grain silos, a bandshell in the park, and a baseball field. Progress progressed, but only to a certain point, nothing to get too worked up about.
It’s still a one-stoplight town, and most of the kids who grew up here and moved away as soon as they were able agree that Lake Woebegotten is a nice enough place to be from.
Given what happened here, but happened even worse everywhere else, some of them probably wish they’d stayed.