Question

Twas ’64 or ’65
We drove1 the great Round River Drive;
’Twas ’65 or ’64—​​
Yes, it was durin’ of the war,
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Or it was after or before.
Those were the days in Michigan,
The good old days, when any man
Could cut and skid2 and log and haul,
And there was pine enough for all. . . .

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Paul Bunyan and his fightin’ crew,
In ’64 or ’5 or ’2,
They started out to find the pines
Without much thought of section lines.
So west by north they made their way
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One hundred miles until one day
They found good timber, level land,
And roarin’ water close at hand. . . .

We put one hundred million feet
On skids that winter. Hard to beat,
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You say it was? It was some crew.
We took it off one forty, too.
A hundred million feet we skid—
That forty was a pyramid;
It runs up skyward to a peak—
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To see the top would take a week. . . .

At last, a hundred million in,
’Twas time for drivin’ to begin.
We broke our rollways in a rush
And started through the rain and slush
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To drive the hundred million down
Until we reached some sawmill town.
We didn’t know the river’s name,
Nor where to someone’s mill it came,
But figured that, without a doubt,
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To some good town ’twould fetch us out
If we observed the usual plan
And drove the way the current ran. . . .

Some two weeks more and then we passed
A camp that looked just like the last.
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Two weeks again another, too,
That looked like our camp, come in view.

Then Bunyan called us all ashore
And held a council-like of war.
He said, with all this lumbering,
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Our logs would never fetch a thing. . . .

And then we realized at last
That ev’ry camp that we had passed
Was ours. Yes, it was then we found
The river we was on was round.
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And, though we’d driven many a mile,
We drove a circle all the while!
And that’s the truth, as I’m alive,
About the great Round River driveSelect two themes developed in Passage 2.
Working hard can be unnecessary.
Traveling to unfamiliar places is risky.
口
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Situations can be different than they seem.
Leaders need help from their team members.
• Paying attention to surroundings is important.

Answer 1

- Working hard can be unnecessary.
- The crew labored to skid and drive "a hundred million feet" of logs only to discover they'd been going in a circle and made no real progress.

- Paying attention to surroundings is important.
- They passed the same camps repeatedly and didn't notice until Bunyan pointed it out, showing their failure to observe their environment.