Weird things from around here.

Couple years back I sat around and asked about weird things from around here. Here's a couple.

Howdy,

On another blog I tried writing this entry, but it was all erased. Which might have turned out to be a good thing since I went and asked mom about a few things. Now I have a few more things that I will add later. I forget what I was doing when this came up. I think I was watching something on TV and I thought I should write a little bit about life up here. The things that I found weird.

I used to do the odds and ends back when I was logger. One of which was limbing trees. We used a line skidder, an old red war machine, no high technology for us. Anyway, one day I was out limbing some trees by this swamp area and the faller dropped it out into where it would be wet. I had to limb to the top and cut it off at 4 inches. So there I was, I hopped on the log and started cutting away. The further along I got, the narrower the tree got. By the time I reached the top I was using only my right hand on my saw, while flailing around my left trying to keep my balance.

I saw that there was this ditch there and thought I should get out of there before I just fell in. It didn't look that wide, but it looked pretty deep. Come lunch time, I walk out to the landing and I'm sitting there in the truck with dad. I tell him about my little adventure and he tells me that cows drown in those things. Good to know. Weird thing is, it wasn't that far away from the edge of the swamp. Maybe 15 feet or so. I just thought it was weird that a little ditch could be that dangerous.

Another story I heard about was about down from Gang Ranch area. One of my parents good buddies down the ranch used to cowboy down that way I guess. They were all telling stories of ghosts and such. He tells us that when we're down that way, you always stay on the cow trails. If you stray too far off them you could disappear. Down that way there's deep gorges in the ground. Guess the cows had to find them the hard way.

Also, somewhere down that way there's a place that had some pretty weird things go on. There's a place where a few trees grow in a straight line and you don't camp there. I wrote all this out before way back in the 90s. I think I lost it when my old hard drive went on the fritz. Anyway, there's that place you don't camp because some weird stuff happens at that spot. One night three cowboys camped there and in the middle of the night everybody was woken up by one of the cowboy yelling for help. The other cowboys woke up and saw that the other was hanging in midair by his feet.

In the same area, there's a place where cows avoid sleeping there. Because if they do lay down there, they can't get back up. They fall asleep and die in their sleep. A large flat area that I heard looks like a crater. I heard that something in the earth will, I can't think of another way to say, suck you to the earth if you stay there too long. You lay down, fall asleep, and die after a while.

A couple years ago, they were digging ditchs up towards our meadow and they found an antler in the ground. We still have it over the other place, it looks like a elk horn. I never knew elk to live around here. Just a little while ago, mom was telling me that moose are actually pretty new around here too.

While I'm on the subject of weird thing found on the ground. My little buddy found a rock laying around. I guess it was weird enough for him to show somebody. They were having a cookout and I went out and saw this weird looking rock laying on the picnic table. They told me that Rowen found it somewhere. I pick it up and take a look. It was piece of a petrified tree. You can still see the rings on it with xylem and phloem. I think that's what it's called. I remember from my biology tests. It was falling apart and a piece broke off. It's still sitting over my folks' place on the microwave. Nobody really knows where he found it either.

There's a bunch more little stories like this and I think I'll write them down after getting more details from mom and dad. Like the little people that live in a lake not far from here. The little piece of glow-in -the-dark wood that mom's dad brought home for her one day when she was a little girl. The story of a guy who was on the run from the RCMP and he somehow got his horse out of a locked barn without opening the lock. The unmarked burial ground down towards the river. The crater on top of a mountain not for from here. The weird 'object' or 'artifact' that my dad's brother found in the mountains, when weird stuff started to happen, he had to go and put it back. The weird story of how the old time natives got a river to flow up hill and why they stopped because the government told them to.

One more weird thing. Buddy is one of the family. He's been around here for maybe 10 or so years and there's one really weird thing about him. Nobody in our family has EVER seen him take a dump. How's that for weird?

Reviews

[Norma M Sutton]

Interesting. We see some odd things in the woods here too.

What is a war machine? I'm familiar with skidders as my brothers use to run a sawmill and there use to be one up the road from us a piece. I've seen them in action since I was tiny. But this is a new one lol.