What makes a beach book? It’s a crucial question for publishers — not
to mention readers — this month. Thrillers and police procedurals top
many lists. But a novel of manners can slip in. Or perhaps a book of
short stories, so easy to dip in and out of between dips. The only
rule: No doorstops — they’re too hard to read in a beach chair.

1. Plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when I had to build the
   ark.

2. Stay fit. When you’re 600 years old, someone might ask
   you to do something REALLY big.

3. Don’t listen to critics — do what has to be done.

4. Build on high ground.

5. For safety’s sake, travel in pairs.

6. Two heads are better than one.

7. Speed isn’t always an advantage. The cheetahs were on
   board, but so were the snails.

8. If you can’t fight or flee — float!

9. Take care of your animals as if they were the last ones
   on earth.

10. Don’t forget that we’re all in the same boat.

11. When the doo-doo gets really deep, don’t sit there and
    complain — shovel!!!

12. Stay below deck during the storm.

13. Remember that the ark was built by amateurs and the
    Titanic was built by professionals.

14. If you have to start over, have a friend by your side.

15. Remember that the woodpeckers INSIDE are often a bigger
    threat than the storm outside.

16. Don’t miss the boat.

17. No matter how bleak it looks, there’s always a rainbow
    on the other side.

1. Although I can accept talking scarecrows, lions and great wizards of
   emerald cities, I find it hard to believe there is no paperwork
   involved when your house lands on a witch. –Dave James
2. Let face facts, shall we? There is a very real possibility that this
   could also be the *last* day of the rest of your life. –Dave Henry
3. Sometimes I think astronauts are the luckiest people on earth, but
   only when they’re in space. –Alan Smithee
4. I think it says a lot about our nation’s skewed priorities that we
   give the President the unbridled authority to preempt any television
   program, even during prime-time. –Matt Diamond
5. If at first, you don’t succeed, does it depress you that no one is
   surprised? –Jim Lockwood
6. I’m glad the electric chair is the only method of capital punishment
   that involves powered furniture. Just imagine being executed by an
   adjustable bed. –Paul Paternoster
7. Whenever someone asks me what two plus two equals, I just shake my
   head and laugh at them for asking such a dumb question, even though I
   really don’t know the answer. What gullible fools. –Will Gillespie
8. I think gods don’t smite people anymore because people of many
   different religions now live in the same town. No god wants to
   accidentally smite the wrong person and get sued by another god.
   –David James
9. Sometimes when I’m sitting in my car at a stop light, I imagine
   myself as Luke Skywalker, and I close my eyes and concentrate on
   using The Force. Sometimes I have to concentrate longer than others,
   but I know it works, ’cause the light always turns green. –Troy
   Peterson
10. If I had a dollar for every casino in the world, I’d probably lose it
    all gambling. –Paul Bartunek
11. I’ve heard people say the electric chair is “cruel and unusual”, but
    I think it’s a lot quicker and more humane than its predecessor, the
    steam chair. –Claire Voltaire, inspired by Paul Paternoster
12. One day, I’m gonna finally get up enough courage to actually go
    skydiving, rather than just being thrown out of the plane like last
    time. –LeMel Hebert-Williams
13. I think a secure profession for young people is history teacher,
    because in the future, there will be so much more of it to teach.
    –Bill Muse
14. They say potato chips can be fattening. But then again, so is eating
    fat, and you don’t see me eating fat. So get off my back about the
    potato chips, man. –Brian Auten

The Lion, the Witchand the Wardrobe
C.S. LEWIS: Finally, a utopia ruled by children and populated by talking animals.
THE WITCH: Hi, I’m a sexually mature woman of power and confidence.
C.S. LEWIS: Ah! Kill it, lion Jesus!

Paradise Lost
ADAM: Paradise has arbitrary dietary restrictions?
DEVIL: They’re really more like guidelines.
GOD: Incorrect.

Moby-Dick
ISHMAEL: I’m existential.
AHAB: Really? Try vengeance.
ISHMAEL: I dig this dynamic. Can we drag it out for 600 pages?

The Great Gatsby
NICK: I love being rich and white.
GATSBY: Me, too, but I’d kill for the love of a woman.
DAISY: We can work with that.

Eighty-six percent of the American people believe the price of gasoline will climb to five bucks a gallon this year, a big shift in public opinion from a year ago when most people felt that oil prices were spiking high and would soon return to normal—which is 35 cents a gallon, same as a pack of smokes—and we’d be able to head west in our Winnebagos for a nice summer vacation.

This does not appear to be in the cards and Winnebago stock has fallen about fifty percent in the past year. If you are selling a big box on a truck chassis for as much as a quarter-million dollars when gas is at four dollars and rising, you are aiming at a rather select clientele indeed, folks who might rather buy a beach house in Costa Rica than go cruising the Interstate.

Nonetheless it’s sad to see the motor home fade into the sunset. I used to despise them when I was a canoeist, of course. You paddle up to a campground at the end of a hard day and see a few RVs parked there, the air conditioners rumbling, the flickering blue light of the TVs in the windows, and as you set up your tent as far from them as possible, you feel a moral grandeur purer than you will ever feel again. A holy Christian pilgrim among the piggish heathen.

The fantasy of comfortable vagabondage lies deep within each one of us, though, and once, thirty years ago, driving a GMC motor home around western Minnesota, I fell under the spell. To have the freedom of the road and the comforts of home—your own books on the shelf, your clothes in a drawer, your brand of beer in the fridge—is an aristocratic privilege and I was happy to give up moral grandeur for a couple weeks and enjoy it.

Five-dollar gasoline is pushing that fantasy to the wall, and it’s also showing most of us that we live in communities whose design is based on the assumption of cheap gasoline—big lots with backyard privacy make for a long drive to the grocery store. In the big old-fashioned city neighborhood, if you’re bored in the evening you just stroll out the door and there, within five or ten minutes, are a newsstand, a diner, a movie theater, a palm reader, a tavern with a bartender named Joe, whatever you’re looking for.

But in the sort of neighborhood most Americans prefer, there are only a lot of houses like yours and residents who give evening pedestrians the hairy eyeball. The mall is a long hike away and it’s an amalgam of chain outlets, with a vast parking lot around it. To a person approaching on foot, it feels like an enemy fortress.

So we will need to amuse ourselves in new ways. I predict that banjo sales will pick up. The screened porch will come back in style. And the art of storytelling will burgeon along with it. Stories are common currency in life but only to people on foot. Nobody ever told a story to a clerk at a drive-up window, but you can walk up to the lady at the check-out counter and make small talk and she might tell you, as a woman told me the other day as she rang up my groceries, that she had gotten a puppy that day to replace the old dog who had to be put down a month ago, and right there was a little exchange of humanity. Her willingness to tell me that made her real to me. People who aren’t real to each other are dangerous to each other. Stories give us the simple empathy that is the basis of the Golden Rule, which is the basis of civilized society.

So when gas passes five dollars and heads for eight and ten, we will learn to sit in dim light with our loved ones and talk about hunting and fishing adventures, about war and romance and times of consummate foolishness when we threw caution to the wind and flung ourselves over the Cliffs of Desire and did not land on the Sharp Rocks of Regret.

I’ll tell you about the motor home trip and how lovely it was, cruising the prairie at night and drinking beer, stopping by a little creek and grilling fish on a Coleman stove, listening to coyotes. The vanishing of the RV only makes your story more interesting. One thing lost, something else gained. Life is like that.

© 2008 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, INC.