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Blogs by Joel Arnold
Mississippi Pearls and a Car Biding Its Time on the Ice 'til Spring
12/29/2011 9:24:01 AM
My grandparents Laura and Walter Arnold lived in Wabasha, MN while I was a child in the 70s. Their house was made of brick and was over a hundred years old. It was huge to my young eyes, with high ceilings and a wide stairway with a wooden banister, which I loved to slide down on my stomach (the steps, not the banister). This house was (still is, actually) located about a block away from the Mississippi River, and I’d often take walks down to the shore and collect agates and other interesting rocks. My favorite finds were always the hole-punched clam shells along the shore, which had been used and long since discarded by button-making factories upriver. In fact, this particular industry only lasted ‘til the 1930s, when plastic buttons became all the rage...or at least cheaper to make. I collected shoe-boxes full of these shells with the neat button-sized holes punched out. Not sure what I ever did with them.
Anyway, it was many years later that I was doing some online research, trying to find if there was info about the source of these discarded shells; what companies had used them, where they were located, etc. I don’t think I found any direct info about them*, but that internet search led me to info about Mississippi pearls. I’d never heard of these before, and had always thought pearls were something that came from the sea. But nope, people used to harvest the freshwater clams of the Great River for the pearls inside them, as well as for the shells.
At about the same time I found out about the Mississippi pearl, I was trying to recall something from childhood. I remembered that there was a lake we’d often drive by in the winter between Lake City and Wabasha, and sitting on top of the ice would be an empty car. People could bet on the date when they felt the vehicle would finally crash through the thawing ice into the water. It was one of those memories where I wasn’t quite sure if it was something real I had seen or had merely dreamt about it. So I called the Wabasha County Historical Society. No one seemed to have heard about this until they put me in touch with an old-timer whose name I can’t recall. He said, yeah, they used to do that on Russian Lake**, and they secured a cable to it so that it would be easy to retrieve come spring.
It was that combination of things – the pearls and the car on ice – that sparked my story Mississippi Pearl. It’s one of my favorite stories, and it won Oceanview Publishing’s first annual short story contest. I also used it as my writing sample for the 2010 MN Artist Initiative Grant which I received in – um – 2010. It is part mystery, part horror, part family drama, and is also part of my collection Bait & Other Stories. I hope you’ll get a chance to read it sometime.
* Now a Google search leads me to a bunch of sites that talk about the Mississippi pearl button industry. There’s even a museum dedicated to it in Muscatine, Iowa.
** Can’t find any mention of a Russian Lake online, so not sure if the name has since been changed, or it’s too small to bother listing. In my memory the lake was quite small.
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More Blogs by Joel Arnold
• The Sucking Suckathon of Suckiness - Monday, May 21, 2012
• Mississippi Pearls and a Car Biding Its Time on the Ice 'til Spring - Thursday, December 29, 2011
• One Decade, One Story - or how One Thing Leads to Another - Wednesday, December 28, 2011
• Racing Minnesota-style! - Wednesday, December 28, 2011
• This Here Minnesota Horror Author was a Big Old Scaredy-Cat - Thursday, December 22, 2011
• Jack the Blob Killer - Monday, December 19, 2011
• Death Rhythm - Tuesday, September 20, 2011
• More Writing What You Know - Monday, September 19, 2011
• How I Interpret 'Write What You Know' - Wednesday, August 03, 2011
• Blessings - or - What I write after having one too many... - Wednesday, August 03, 2011
• 120 Miles in a Canoe - Monday, June 27, 2011
• On Stephen King - Thursday, June 23, 2011
• Why Horror? - Wednesday, June 22, 2011
• Zen & the Art of Swearing - Friday, June 10, 2011
• If Coffee Shops were Run by Airlines - Thursday, May 12, 2011
• Trying to Figure Out What Scares Me - Monday, March 21, 2011
• My Confession - Tuesday, March 08, 2011
• Going Indie with my novel Northwoods Deep - Friday, March 04, 2011
• How I Envision Conflict When Writing - Thursday, March 03, 2011
• Wall Drug - why it's one of my favorite places - Wednesday, February 02, 2011
• Jonesing for a Road Trip - Wednesday, February 02, 2011
• Snowmapocalyptopalooza - Tuesday, February 01, 2011
• How Do You Remember? - Thursday, January 20, 2011
• When your parents are librarians... - Tuesday, January 18, 2011
• The genesis of a novel - the first 6 days - Tuesday, January 04, 2011
• Searching for Truth - Characterization - Thursday, December 16, 2010
• Control - and a little more about Northwoods Deep - Monday, December 13, 2010
• Bukowski - Wednesday, December 08, 2010
• Flies, Flies, Spam, and Flies - Friday, December 03, 2010
• Naivete and the Young Writer - Thursday, December 02, 2010
• For Writers looking for some Adventure - Wednesday, December 01, 2010
• My usual rider for family/friend appearances - Tuesday, November 23, 2010
• Writing and Me - a dramatization - Wednesday, November 17, 2010
• Writing Tip o' the Day (now with vitamin C!) - Tuesday, November 16, 2010
• The Power of Music - Tuesday, November 16, 2010
• To All the Bookstores I've Loved Before - Monday, November 15, 2010
• The Care and Feeding of Writers - Sunday, November 14, 2010
• Rudiments - Thursday, November 11, 2010
• Writing Tip o' the Day - Wednesday, November 10, 2010
• Tragedy - now with 50% more pathos! - Tuesday, November 09, 2010
• Perspective - Monday, November 08, 2010
• The Daunting Dauntiness of Tweeting on Twitter - Saturday, November 06, 2010
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