Ozblogging: The Road to Oz, Part 4

After escaping the Scoodlers, Dorothy and Company come to the end of the road, literally. It reaches the edge of the Deadly Desert, an expanse of gray sand which completely surrounds the Land of Oz.

In the course of the books the Deadly Desert becomes more and more Deadly. The first time we see it, in The Land of Oz, it's just a desert. Glinda chases Mombi out into the desert and gives her a magical beat-down there, but there's no indication the desert is anything more than a trackless barren wilderness. I guess Mr. Baum decided a garden-variety desert wasn't cool enough, because in Ozma of Oz we first see that the Deadly Desert is literally fatal to cross, unless you've got a Magic Carpet like Ozma's.

Now Dorothy encounters a helpful sign:

ALL PERSONS ARE WARNED NOT TO VENTURE UPON THIS DESERT
For the Deadly Sands will Turn Any Living Flesh
to Dust in an instant. Beyond This Barrier is the
LAND OF OZ
But no one can Reach that Beautiful Country
because of these Destroying Sands

Which means they're stuck. The Shaggy Man points out there's no use going back, and the Desert prevents any forward progress. So they camp for the night, and after the children are asleep the Shaggy Man sits up thinking. He finally figures out a solution to the problem and goes to bed himself.
   
In the morning he uses the power of the Love Magnet to call upon his "powerful friend" Johnny Dooit. (Apparently the Love Magnet doesn't just affect people near the Shaggy Man. Once you are exposed to it, you love him FOREVER. This proves Oz is not a roleplaying game setting, because I'm sure every gamer reading this is already thinking of ways to abuse the Magnet's power.)

Johnny Dooit is a "funny little man" with a beard so long he has to wrap it around his waist, and a huge chest of tools. He is a Heroic Mechanic who can do any job. As soon as the Shaggy Man explains their predicament, Johnny gets to work. In just a few minutes he fells trees, saws them into boards, and hammers the boards into a sand-boat, complete with sail and rigging. (Mysteriously, the sand-boat doesn't rate Capitalization.) As soon as the job is done he slams the lid of his tool chest down, and while Our Heroes are blinking from the noise, he vanishes.

I always thought Johnny Dooit was a pretty neat character, and it's too bad Baum never re-used him. He's omnipotent in a turn-of-the-century, Tom Swift sort of way. Apparently another Oz fan named Chris Dulabone agrees, because he wrote a self-published novel about Johnny; I haven't read it and can't vouch for the quality, but it's nice to see there are other Johnny Dooit admirers out there.

Even with Johnny Dooit's sand-boat, getting across the desert isn't easy. The wind is brisk, and Johnny's design turns out to be very fast, so that the Shaggy Man is hard-pressed to keep control of the sand-boat as it rips across the deadly gray sand. Several times they're in danger of tipping over, which would end the story right away.

The voyage ends in a tremendous crash as the Shaggy Man is unable to stop the boat in time and it slams full-speed into a line of rocks marking the Oz side of the desert. Johnny Dooit neglected to put air bags in his vehicle, but since Oz is a fairyland where no one ever dies, the worst that happens is that one of Dorothy's teeth is jarred loose by the impact.

Noting an abundance of yellow flowers and trees, Dorothy deduces they have crashed in the Winkie Country, one of the four component kingdoms of the Land of Oz. She tries to explain to her companions about the Tin Woodman, who is Emperor of the Winkies, but they are skeptical.

Let me repeat that: her friends the Shaggy Man (who owns a Love Magnet and currently has a donkey head), Button-Bright (who currently has a fox head), and Polychrome (who is a rainbow fairy) are skeptical about the idea of a Tin Man.

This is a plot element which comes up far too often in fantasy fiction for my taste: people in a completely fantastic setting nevertheless refuse to believe in fantastic explanations for things. There's even a page devoted to this in the ever-useful Tropes Wiki. My favorite example in fiction is in the middle books of the Harry Potter series, in which a whole society of wizards and witches refuse to believe in an evil sorcerer, insisting that warnings from Harry and Dumbledore (the greatest wizard in Britain, according to his trading card) are just them trying to get attention.

At this point, by an absolutely predictable coincidence, they stumble across the Truth Pond. It even has a helpful sign. The Shaggy Man and Button-Bright quickly get rid of their animal heads. The Shaggy Man has a player-character moment when he remarks how useful it would be if they could take the Truth Pond along with them, but a pond is pretty hard to carry. (And yet nobody thinks of the next best thing: taking some water from the pond in a bottle.)

Next time: things get metallic!

Comments

[Michael A. Burstein]

"Let me repeat that: her friends the Shaggy Man (who owns a Love Magnet and currently has a donkey head), Button-Bright (who currently has a fox head), and Polychrome (who is a rainbow fairy) are skeptical about the idea of a Tin Man."

You know, I never really thought of that until I read this...