Hot coffee sprayed out of my trap Friday morning when I took a look at the front page of the paper. For a scary moment I couldn't breathe. I slammed my hand on the table.
"What the @*?*! is this?"
I still couldn't talk. I gibbered. It was either send out a big geyser of the java or choke to death.
"Look at this!"
The treasure hunt this year is worth $10,000. In the headline it said "whopping," a "whopping $10,000."
"Yes, well, you're not eligible so why get all worked up?"
"Because that's real money, that's why. The pros might come in for that kind of money. This thing has never been worth real money, not like this."
My mind flashed back to all the mukluk-wearing, overcoated citizens who grimly trudged through Como and Phalen and Highland all those years, every year since 1952, trudging and poking at the snow with a stick. And all for a lousy $500, maybe a grand if you had the button. In newspaper photographs the hunters always looked like Eastern Europeans hoping to discover a morsel of food on their evacuation from Transfluvia.
One year I lost my eyeglasses during a hunt at Como. Instead of trudging around grimly looking for the medallion, we had to trudge around and poke the snow for my glasses.
"We found them!" my mother shouted, quickly holding them up against an advancing gang of prospectors who might have clubbed her over the head for that piece of gold.
"His glasses," she said, nodding at me. "We found his glasses."
They grumbled in disgust and resumed poking at clumps of slush.
For as long as most of us can remember, the treasure hunt plugged along with a kind of church-picnic attendance. And now they come along and tell us that this year they are spiking the punch and maybe even throwing a dancing girl or two into action out behind the rectory.
To think that my beloved newspaper is behind this. I can't believe it. I don't mean to imply that we operate on a budget around here, but on the same day the big treasure hunt story appeared, they were telling us to turn off the lights and shut down the television sets.
"All three of them?" we wondered.
It seems that the increased bounty is due in part to the paper's 150th anniversary celebration, although it strikes me that when you are celebrating an anniversary of that significance you go back in time, not go rocketing into the unknown. Nobody asked me, but I would have run a treasure hunt this year that precisely captured the spirit of the early travails, maybe $1,000 at stake and a week's worth of clues, not two weeks.
We have lost sight of our heritage is what happened. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that there was a time when you looked for the treasure out of a sense of duty. That's why newspaper cutlines said things like "Edna Shlumper and her neighbor, Dorothy Zotslo, trudged through the snow at Como Wednesday. The two friends say they always take their vacation week from Montgomery Wards during the Carnival."
Duty is why kids got dragged along only to lose their glasses. It was a duty to the Carnival itself, the great winter celebration that was invented, remember, to show eastern merchants that we could survive out here in the winter. It was fun to a certain extent, but not fun the way the modernists see it.
Now, with $10,000 at stake, somebody with global position satellite imaging will win the thing, and there goes Edna and Dorothy. Mark my words, a change is coming, and not just the obvious, which might include rules requiring helmets, safety-approved cold-weather wear and laboratory-tested non-skid soles on the approved hiking boots.
No, worse than that might be the inevitability of self-esteem entering into the equation. Why, the Carnival of the future might provide for roving teams of grief counselors to pat the losers on the back. Only they won't be called losers, they will be called participants, each of whom will receive a ticket good for something free, so that they might all believe themselves to be winners.
It might not have been worth as much, but it meant more when you thought the other guy might club you over the head and make a run for it.
Copyright 1999 Pioneer Press.
