3 Shorties

3 shorties-

1) During my hitchhiking I was forced to call it quits one night and set my tent up at a campground because of the setting sun. I was woken at about 3am by the most terrifying sound I’ve ever heard. It sounded like before the “thing” went off it first had the time and patience to set up a perfectly equalized Bose surround sound system in my tent without me knowing. The best way I can describe the sound was a long drawn out deep inhale like the distorted scene from the movie The Fourth Kind when the lady gets her body taken over my alien invaders. Followed by a broken and inconsistent gulping noise that faintly resembled a dying frogs ribbet. It wasn’t off in the distance in was right in my ear. On top of me… I waited, it happened again. 30 seconds go by and it goes again! It’s to the point where the absolute terror becomes almost funny to me. I say out loud “what the fuck”?!? It sounds like it’s inside my tent, but is so loud I’m confident it has awaken the other tents and camper vans in the nearby area. I reach for the only defense I have. A 2 inch pocket knife and headlamp. A few more seconds and it goes again. I turn on my light, bang on my tent rain fly furiously and try to scare “it” away. The sound stops. I have absolutely zero idea what kind of warped creature in the animal kingdom could have made that sound. My BEST guess WOULD have been some type of large exotic war bird with a deep bellowing gizzard type throat except when I shook the tent and the sound stopped I heard the weight of its footsteps as it walk away. By the retreating thumps it was AT LEAST 50-60 pounds. I only heard 3 steps and it was gone. I thought about asking the other campers in the morning if they heard it, but how the hell was I supposed to describe that without sounding like a complete lunatic.

2) The tour bus drops me and 2 others off on the outskirts of a small town to try our hand at bone carving. We are met on the side of the road by an awesome hippie lady named Karen. We jump in her 5 tone minivan that she affectionately refers to as “The Van-tastic”. She drives us down a grass driveway behind some sheds to her little house completely off the electrical grid. We walk past a goat, hand full of chickens and 2 ornery geese that weren’t expecting visitors. Down through the trees, over a creek and onto her workshop area where she lights up some incense and winds the generator to get power running to her table saws and sanders. She unhooks her excited dog from his leash and he goes wild. I love him. He’s a border collie/greyhound mix named Baxter that plays with rocks. I don’t mean little pebbles or baseball size rocks I mean full, overgrown pumpkin size rocks. He has a favorite that he barks at, licks, runs circles around and, standing on his hind legs, pulls and rolls toppling towards himself over and over again. When there is a break from bone carving he abandons the rock and brings me over a tennis ball to play catch with. Calling it a tennis ball is actually a stretch. This is a tiny shard of what once resembled a tennis ball in a former lifetime, but looks now more like a piece of beef jerky. He drops it at my feet and won’t take no for an answer. Not that I was saying no anyway. I miss my dogs and playing with Baxter is the closest consolation prize I get to seeing them. When I go back to carving he goes back to tumbling his boulder… Dog A.D.D I guess. When my carving is finished I ask where there is a sink to wash the bone dust off my hands before jumping back in the Vantastic. No running water, she says. Just go down to the creek, there is a bar of soap down there. Just make sure you don’t put your hand on top on an eel.

3) There’s a tiny old mining town called Blackball that the bus I was on stopped at overnight. It’s the quintessential town of the old west. Almost Epcot Center like in its perfectness. By squinting you can see wooden shutter doors swinging and tumbleweed rolling along while 2 men face each other in a Mexican standoff on the 1 street in town. The entire towns main claim to fame is something that ONCE was and the place we stayed. The sign on the door said with pride “Formerly the Blackball Hilton”. They wore this “formerly” distinction with honor. T-shirts, hats, coasters, you name it. The official name of the place was formerly something else. Perfect, I thought. While sitting at the bar in the Formerly Blackball Hilton and the night is progressing I’m a good 7/10 on the shitty scale and chatting it up with some locals, and 3 middle aged bikers also staying there, when the popular bus scene from the movie Almost Famous goes down at the bar, but instead of Tiny Dancer its in the form of Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler… The cook directly to my left who’s still in grease splattered uniform, but managing the juke box full time now starts out singing in an attempt to gain the bars acceptance on his song selection. Into the second verse the biker directly to my right starts in and I’m sandwiched between 2 men signing. Only vaguely knowing the words to the third verse I jump in, but only to a low bumble, so I make up for it with a little bar top percussion. By the time the end of the third verse rolls around “If you’re gonna play the game, boy, ya gotta learn to play it right”… Bedlam breaks out and the entire bar which consists of the cook, 3 bikers, bartender, my bus driver, Karen the bone carver, a local named Shorty, Me and 2 other girls from my bus all join in with full volume- “You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run, You never count your money when you’re sitting at the table. There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealings done.” Next morning I was telling someone from the bus about it and she goes yeah it was 1am, I heard you, we all heard you guys. The Formerly Blackball Hilton was the funnest night out I’ve had traveling so far.

Bob