Reading Gulliver in Gulliver, Michigan

A strange coincidence, too wonderful to call a mere accident: on Jim and my recent trip from Chicago to Moose Maple Cottage, I started to read Gulliver's Travels in Gulliver, Michigan. In the late evening light, as Jim and I drove along US 2, a cross-peninsula highway that winds through forest and along rivers, I pulled out my laptop and loaded chapter 1. Gulliver in Gulliver: the little town shelters 200 people, along two streets that run along the shores of Lake Gulliver. Somewhere in the lake, as we slowed for the yellow caution light, a loon voiced its haunting cry; along Minneapolis Street, a few shoppers, strangely diminutive North Woods denizens, furtively slipped in and out of stores. Indeed, as Jim remarked, the whole town appeared to be a tiny replica of a village, with traffic signs so small that we couldn't read the print and streets so narrow that we had to drive across town with the left tires on US 2 and the right on Minneapolis St. Jim glanced at the gas gauge to confirm that we needed fuel; he pulled into a BP station, but only after I had gotten out of the car to read the sign by kneeling down and peering closely. As we drove up, Jim asked me to get out and guide him to the gas pump. Since we couldn't fit under the canopy, Jim simply straddled the station. At first the attendant ran into the nearby woods, but I coaxed him back to the station by waving my Visa card high above my head, to show that we meant no harm and only sought peaceful commerce. At first puzzled about how we would get gas from the tiny pump. so larger than a thimble, into the towering car, the attendant soon solved the problem by the most ingenious solution. He had noticed that the Big Gulps that Jim and I had bought in Escanaba had straws that would neatly fit onto the gas nozzle and extend the hose far enough to reach the gas tank. But in order to lift the two giant straws into place, he had to move his wrecker alongside the car and raise the knuckle boom to its full 36" height in order to fill the tank. After he turned on the pump, he emptied his station's four tanks into Jim's Toyota, each tank adding a gallon to the car's fuel. After an hour's pumping, he disassembled the extension straws and asked for my Visa card. Since my card weighed nearly two ounces, enough to crush the attendant, I helped him by reading the numbers as he punched them into his keyboard. But then we confronted the most difficult problem of all. How was I to sign the receipt, which was smaller than my fingernail? In this instance, again, the attendant demonstrated that the little people of Gulliver possessed the greatest ingenuity. Ducking out of the station, he walked quickly to a tiny cage by the side of his house, and opened it to reveal a miniature porcupine. Working quickly so as to avoid the animal's sharp spines, he extracted a quill. Under the overhead light of the station, I dipped the quill into a tiny can of red touch-up paint, then, in my best microscopic script, I signed the receipt. And, with a hearth farewell, the attendant sent us spinning off into the night.

"Well," said Jim, "small world! Imagine the chances of your opening Gulliver's Travels to the first chapter and finding yourself in Gulliver.!"

Shipping out!

Here on the Western Slope, on the skirts of the world's largest flattop mountain, the Grand Mesa, all voyages -- even a ten-minute trip to the Post Office -- happen in a fantastic landscape. Living and visiting on such a terrain inspired Theo and Joe to ask a question: How have authors of voyages in imaginary worlds mapped their ways? We propose to begin our own journey with reading Jonathan Swift's Gullver's Travels. As we read, we'll comment, upload maps of Gulliver's voyages, deposit images of his adventures, and discover the past and present meaning of this "most desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous regions." Some may think that imaginary voyages are the idle play of people with too much time on their hands. We think otherwise. Here's Jonathan Swift's take on books about imaginary trips to far-off places: "I considered it a narrative of facts, and discovered in it a vein of interest deeper than what I found in fairy tales: for as to the elves, having sought them in vain among foxglove leaves and bells, under mushrooms and beneath the ground-ivy mantling old wall-nooks, I had at length made up my mind to the sad truth, that they were all gone out of England to some savage country where the woods were wilder and thicker, and the population more scant; whereas, Lilliput and Brobdignag being, in my creed, solid parts of the earth's surface, I doubted not that I might one day, by taking a long voyage, see with my own eyes the little fields, houses, and trees, the diminutive people, the tiny cows, sheep, and birds of the one realm; and the corn-fields forest-high, the mighty mastiffs, the monster cats, the tower-like men and women, of the other." So put aside Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Lessing's Shikasta and ship out with us.