The Tourist and The Tree

            (This story is not related to The Princess and the Pea)

                                                                   ~ Francis R Graber~

I love Wisconsin but I have a couple terrible problems with it. For instance, everywhere you look there are trees, dogs, and cows. It’s bad, very bad.

   I was walking along reading my newspaper this morning, “Loose cow on 42”nd street was chased by neighborhood dogs.”, and BOOM, I ran into a tree!

  Not only do you have tree’s, you have sneaky little tree’s, the kind that you run into and get slapped in the face with. You turn around, fist flying, ready to defeat the foe, and discover a what? A tree!

  I really think that native northerners have some sort of tree radar built into them.

You know, “beep, beep, beep, BEEP”.

 None of you bother to tell the tourist where they could get one though. You’re full of information about the latest bear invasion, who shot the biggest white tailed deer, and who caught the latest whopper of a musky on Lac Courte Oreilles. But do you tell us about getting a tree radar? Na, you think, let ‘em die.

  I walked into a tourist shop the other day. “Voices of the North” or something like that was the name. Guess what hit me in the face, (figuratively this time, good thing too, I’d probably have sued).  A post card with “If it’s tourist season, why can’t we shoot them?” written across it in big bold letters. These things hurt my feelings!

   How would you like if you’d visit Hawaii and walk into your first tourist shop and see something like that? No, never mind, you don’t have feelings.

   I take that back, you all seem to have a thing about dogs. Little tiny dogs, big dogs, ugly dogs, dog’s that you look at twice to decide if you know what species they’re from, yeah, all kinds of dogs. You also have a thing with letting them run loose.

   I jumped out of my car the other morning at an old farm house to ask if I could take a picture of their back pasture. And I declare I heard someone sneeze, “sic ‘em”, loud and clear, don’t ask me why they didn’t bother to call off their dog.  Then suddenly this dog, this HUGE dog, came galloping around the corner of the porch. I saw that he was headed in for the kill and I took off for my car.

   It was a long lane and there was a huge mud puddle in the middle of it so I’d parked my car and walked the rest of the way in. As I was running I suddenly remembered this puddle and veered to the left to avoid ruining my 300$, specially bought for WI, hiking boots.   

   I have a word of warning to all tourists, never, ever, veer.

 Remember those trees? Well the granddaddy of all trees was watching this whole display and decided to come get a closer look. And we both happened to be going in the same direction.

 I now have a brand new nose and a cast on my left arm for everybody here to sign. I also have a new pair of pants. That dog must have been pretty hungry.

 I do not have a thing for dogs. I hate trees.

And you have snow! The kind that is cold! I’m not a very big fan of snow. I like when it’s in its proper places, on the north and south poles where I can look at pictures of penguins and polar bears serenely playing in it. But if you ask me it does NOT belong in the USA.

 Neither do I like to step out of my nice warm house into that freezing stuff.

The other day I went outside and suddenly my flip-flop shod feet were frozen solid, rock hard solid. And as if that wasn’t enough I slipped on the icy doorstep and went flying lickety-split down the street.

 I do NOT like redheaded boys. They laugh at tourists who are flying down icy, snow covered streets in Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops. I DO like redheaded little girls. They beat merrily on little boys heads with hockey sticks. I find this to be very, very funny.

It makes me happy.

 When I have kids of my own I’m going to bring them up here sometime and have them show you how to properly treat a tourist and a new comer.

  One time when I was a little boy my folks decided to take me up to MN for a year. I tried to convince them that I was happy right where I was but they must have decided that a year of sheer torture would be good for me because we left three days later.

 I’m afraid they didn’t realize what a dark and horrible memory that year would be for me.  Neither did they have any suspicion as to how much money they would end up paying for my psychological help for the next few years. On the other hand they probably knew about the doctor’s bill’s they would have for my broken limbs. They always did say that I was the clumsiest kid around.

  The neighbor hood children were husky Norwegians who liked nothing better than picking on poor unsuspecting little new comers. Unless it was putting tacks in the teachers chairs, or watching their younger siblings lick the silo ladder at 20 below zero.

  My first introduction to their type of humor was Hans asking me if I’d ever been cow tipping. Considering the fact that I’d never even seen a real live cow, let alone “tipped” one, I had to admit that I had not. 

 He invited me over night the next night and told me to bring a sleeping bag and flashlight with. When I asked him if I should bring a tent too he smirked at me and said “what, think you can fit a cow in it?”.  I turned beet red and hightailed it home.

 The next day I came to school trembling with fear and feeling slightly nauseated. The nausea part got worse when I found out that he’d invited half the school to come see the new kid go cow tipping.

 That night after supper the boys all dug out their sleeping backs and flashlights and headed out to the back pasture. Hans’ Dad had built a campfire out there and we sat around telling spooky stories till about midnight…  A lil’ after that one of the boys said, “hey Hans, there's a cow over there”. I looked up with big eye’s to behold not a docile cow like the pictures showed, but a hippo, a very large hippo. 

 This hippo was standing chewing her cud quietly and she looked as if let alone, she would stay on her side of the pasture. My nausea came very close to causing me to throw up when I heard that cow tipping was meant literally. I was to walk up to the hippo, and push her over. “Only takes a little shove”.

 I took my flashlight bravely in hand and headed out across the field, the other boy’s lights following me as I went. I’m proud to say that I did not scream loud enough for the boys to hear when I stepped in the first “cow pie”, I’m afraid I did scream pretty loudly though when I stepped in the thistle, and then again when I shone my light over towards the hippo and discovered that there was not only one, but millions of hippos watching me as I made my long and painful journey across that field.

  Hippos do not tip over easily. It took a very hard shove to get any sort of reaction other than an unhappy moo from her… When she finally did react it was by slapping her tail in my face and giving me a hard kick at the same time.

 I toppled on the ground with a howl, leaped to my feet, and began flying across the field towards the distant fire. Cows can fly. They can fly very fast, and they prefer traveling in herds. 

 The boys by the fire had commenced a sort of shrieking laughter that reminded me horribly of the laughter they were describing in the spooky stories. That and the Indian war jig they were dancing around the fire combined with the flying hippos was enough to send me into a state of complete hysteria. 

 Mom and Dad had a hard time talking the psychiatrist out of enrolling them as well when they told him the story a few months later.

 However, the point of this meeting isn't to discuss my dark and miserable youth. 

 It’s to discuss you, ahem. (Drum roll please!)

 How many of you read blogs and don’t comment? Okay, let me re-word that.

I’d like everyone to please close your eyes. Now. I wanna see a show of hands.

Ah, I thought so… Bother. This is going to call for several more evenings worth of meetings.