Owloween
I
OCTOBER 23
I’m not going to lie to you, but what happened in my town last fall was just plain crazy. It wasn’t on cnn.com, foxnews.com or msnbc.com – it wasn’t even picked up by Wikileaks. A few kids tweeted about it, but it went unnoticed. Most of us kept our mouths shut. I guess we’re pretty isolated up here in Northern Wisconsin. But you’d think with all the technology nowadays that it would have gotten out. Maybe they swept it under the rug because they didn’t want to cause a panic. I was thinking maybe they were embarrassed by the way they handled it. I mean, a lot of homes went up in flames. But the more I’ve thought about it since, I’d have to say that it’s possible they didn’t advertise what happened because it was so supernatural and surreal, and because they had to pay a lot of people reparations for it, they were worried people would create extreme crazy ideas in order to extort the government.
The tragic thing was, a lot of people died up here last year. A lot of my friends died. Since I was kind of right in the middle of it, I figure I should write down everything that happened. I may not get every conversation exactly right, but you’ll get the gist. It was wild to say the least.
I actually don’t really care if you believe me or not, but it’s more that I need to get it off my chest. My town, Lake Bawshkinaway, was completely destroyed by the event – we’re farmers west of town, and by ‘we’ I mean my Grandpa Joseph and me.
It all started on the 23rd of October. I remember this because we were talking about the great depression in my history class. And that the next day was called ‘Black Tuesday.’ And October 23rd is a special day for me because it was October 23rd 7 years previously that propelled my mother to send me a postcard from Thailand. I was twelve years old, and dressed as an elephant for Halloween and we were about to go into town to go trick or treating when the mailman drove up and delivered the postcard. In Thailand, October 23rd is Chulalongkorn Day. I didn’t know anything about it when I received that postcard on Halloween, but I loved the way it rolled off my tongue. Chulalongkorn Day. It is a commemoration of the death of King Chulalongkorn. He was the most famous king of Siam around the turn of the 20th century. He was the most beloved king. He was a patron of the arts and literature and tried to maintain independence in the face of western expansion until he died in 1910. They still celebrate his life like he was alive yesterday. As my Grandpa Joseph always says, the only two things we know that are relative are time and space. He says this when I want to know about my parents. I suppose I haven’t asked him about them for a while. Grandpa Joseph says a lot of other things too. The wind carved his face like stone, and left a permanent expression of whimsy. When he opens his mouth it keeps my mind busy for days.
Before you think I’m some sort of self-centered attention hog for writing all this down about myself, I want the record to state that I’m really not one to talk about myself, but I’m guessing you might want to know a little about me before I get too deep into this story. My name is Buffalo Johansen.
Grandpa Joseph like music and my mind thinks with pictures. I’ve never been good with words, and this is a difficult thing, writing these thoughts down. I’ve been reading a lot lately though, and love the craziest books, but when I’m reading them a video rolls in my head. Words blow up those pictures, like a balloon, and they pop pop pop all over my brain. Other than that, there’s one thing that doesn’t really define me, but must be said because you may be thinking when you’re reading this, ‘where the heck are this kid’s parents?’ My parents left when I was a baby – they were liberal lovers I guess you could say. But now I think my mom is living somewhere in California and my dad is living somewhere in Europe. I haven’t heard from them since my mom sent that postcard from Thailand. Inside the card, it said, -
Buffalo – See what you love and blow your own horn, in the name of the great king Chulalongkorn
- Mom
I hadn’t heard from dad since even before that. Dad was a little harder to pin down. I’m guessing Europe because the last I had heard of him he was probably headed that way. He visited me when I was in the first grade and he spent a lot of time talking to Grandpa Joseph that day. When he came into the room to talk to me I remember that his jeans were dirty and his sweatshirt was ripped up. His sweatshirt was dark green and in blue writing it said, ‘Pacific Beach, California’ on it, with a little blue and white wave underneath to accentuate the writing. He showed me a picture that he had in his pocket from a magazine. It was an aerial view of Dubrovnik, Croatia. The town sat on a peninsula like a sacred rock or some jeweled maze. I figure he’s taking tourists out on a boat to fish in the Adriatic sea, telling them stories of his travels all over the world: battling a yellow fin in San Diego, shark fishing off the coast of Brazil, or a lazy day with the pike up here in the northwoods of Wisconsin. See, my mom was my Grandpa Joseph’s daughter, but my dad had left school and was just working up here looking for peace and quiet when he met my mom. And I knew Europe was the place for him. He could get in touch with his roots and find out exactly who he was. And I bet the people are very friendly there. I’d like to go there myself someday too.
I hadn’t heard from them after this whole affair I’m about to get into in a second. That doesn’t bother me like you’d think it might. They probably didn’t even know it happened since it wasn’t on the news.
They had me when they were 17. That is not something I intend to repeat myself. My dad had a lot of fun things to say to me when he visited. He seemed very wise. But now I know he probably knew very little because I’m 17, and I know that I don’t even know about 1/100 of what Grandpa Joe knows and don’t know how I’d ever get to know that much in 6 years when I’m 23 - the same age my dad was when he visited. But I spend a lot of time learning as much as I can. I think it helps me play music and I know it helps make better mind pictures.
Anyhow, life is what you make out of it not what you were given. And that’s what Grandpa Joseph always says. That’s all that matters. To me it is cool my parents are out doing interesting things. And I’ve never told my best friend Noah where they are and he’s never asked.
That night on October 23rd, I was in my room listening to Bob Dylan. I was obsessed with his Oh Mercy record last fall because I read that book he wrote. In particular I was obsessed with the song Man in the Long Black Coat. I remember that was the exact song I was listening to because I wanted to try playing that walking bass line on my trombone. I went up into the crow’s nest above my room to play because I always played up there. The crow’s nest is fantastic – our house is an old farmhouse on a hill northwest of town. They call it Victorian. But it’s a big white house with a large front porch. And the turret or crow’s nest is right above my bedroom. A winding metal staircase leads up to it. It’s a sanctuary for me. And up there I can see for miles around in every direction. I can already hear you laughing about the trombone. I'll admit that it’s not the sexiest instrument on the planet. Back in 5th grade when I signed up for band I wanted to be a drummer but I showed up too late and all the spots for drums were taken. So then I said I wanted to play saxophone, but all the spots for saxophone were taken. The next options were basically flute, clarinet, trumpet and trombone. When I was in 5th grade, the trombone was 100 times better than the little trumpet and they were only giving the clarinet and flute to girls, although I was secretly attracted to the flute because of Jethro Tull.
Up in that crow’s nest that night, I turned off the Bob Dylan music and let the peacefulness sink in before trying to play the bass line from memory. It was so still and silent that I felt like I was inside a coffin.
It was raining that night too. The rain in the dark made me feel like I was on of those forlorn extraterrestrial planets you see in those old movies. The planet is covered in vegetation and it rains all the time. But it’s always dark. I asked my biology teacher once if a planet like that could exist and he said that it probably wouldn’t because the plants would need sunlight. But what if these plants were the types of plants that could grow without sunlight. And he explained that life requires the sun. And I said, well, life here requires the sun but it might not require it elsewhere. And then he said, that yeah, he supposed that it was true then that the planet I described could exist. He sure as hell didn’t put up too much of a fight about it for being a biology expert.
After I started playing, the weirdest thing happened. I heard a light thud and noticed two yellow orbs in front of me. They swayed back and forth. I kept playing while I stared back, and then the image formed in front of me in the dark. It was a silhouette of a bird. It was unmistakably a large owl. It peered down through the window, watching me play. The bird was massive, I’d never seen an owl that big. It was extraordinary. Much bigger than an eagle or a hawk. It was bigger than a car. You know when you are driving out in the country and an eagle flies over the road ahead of you, and you realize how big their wingspan really is, because it’s almost wider than the road? Well, this bird wasn’t just big in the wings. It’s head seemed 10 times bigger than my head and it seemed twice as tall as me. It looked down at my face like a 10-foot tall cloaked eunuch guarding some ancient castle. Its massive yellow saucer eyes bored holes like laser light beams in my face. It was like I had a spotlight on me. It made me queasy, and tilted my mind all top heavy, like cottage cheese on a toothpick. I figured this particular owl’s wingspan would cover 10 roads. I had instinctively kept playing my trombone, when he turned his head. I stopped playing to press my head against the glass to get a better look because the light was filtering up from my bedroom and making it difficult to see anything outside...when it vanished. And I strained my eyes to see through the window, It peered down through the window rubbing away the fog from my breath.
It peered down through the window
Then I saw its massive majestic body flying over our field. It swooped down, with its talons hanging low, like some gigantic looming wasp. Then the real power of the beast was revealed as it snatched a cow and flew up into the sky off to the northeast with that large beast dangling underneath it like a ragdoll.
At the time I wasn’t sure it was real, or some change of perspective, or trick of the mind’s eye, or if I dreamed it. It was just so extraordinary. But Grandpa Joseph told me to never discount the extraordinary. But it didn’t seem possible. But like my dark vegetative planet, anything was possible. And Grandpa Joseph always said to me, ‘The answer to any question that begins, ‘is it possible….?’ is always ‘yes.’
The novel Owloween with illustrations by John Selburg originally appeared in Three Bones
