Prompted by the Poets & Storytellers United...
Big Jimmy Boolahan
Lived in the woods,
Without any clothing
Or worldly goods,
In the 1880s,
Or so they say.
Didn't live very long,
Anyway.
A hundred years later
Children were told
"A Wild Man might still be there!
Don't be too bold!"
That's when the stories
Began to get
Bigger and hairier,
From the Internet.
The most tiresome tourists
Ever seen
Camped in the park
Where the Wild Man had been.
The seven Jones brothers
Liked their fun.
Two went out piggy-back
In a bearskin coat--one.
They hooted and hollered.
They pounded on trees.
They threw rocks at the camper-van,
Just to tease.
They kept up their shivaree
All night long.
All seven brothers
Were young and strong.
A storm had knocked over
A tall poplar tree.
With muscles and leverage,
Soon you could see
The tree upside down in
The tourists' sun-roof car.
Sasquatch believers
Those tourists now are.
Sasquatch believers come,
See how they fly,
Bring in good money...
Is the story a lie?
HISTORICAL NOTES:
There really was a legend about a "Wild Man" who, apparently after suffering some brain damage, lived a feral life in the woods for a few years. He was born into a human family and brought up in a house. At some point, some say after his parents died, he left the house. The last few times he was seen alive, he was said to be covered only in the kind of heavy body hair a few White men have. He was said to reject offers of adoption by roaring and making threatening gestures. He was said to be big and strong enough that, when he made threatening gestures, people backed off. I have read credible accounts that gave him a name, but I've forgotten the name. "Boolahan" is not the name of any real family I ever heard of. If there is a family who use that name, I apologize.
"Bigfoot" jokes and stories started circulating in the 1970s. They were about the Cascades or the Himalayan mountains, never supposed to be local. Then the stories got mixed up with the mostly forgotten story of a feral young man who lived in the woods, and now Sasquatch believers seriously look for the cryptid in the National Forest. They hold conventions in Gatlinburg!
Well...it's like the quarry being 400 feet deep and inhabited by six-foot-long man-eating catfish. More reliable sources say the quarry is 180 feet deep and may contain a few fish big enough to be legally cooked. Most towns have legends like that about local attractions. Often the stories are propagated by emergency responders, and serve the purpose of keeping the emergency responders from having to rescue local idjit boys from the local attraction.
I know for a fact that what I've heard about any local "Bigfoots" has been jokes, pranks, and outright lies. But I don't know for a fact that there may not be cryptids. Anyone who climbs the High Knob is guaranteed to see a Bigfoot--the statue--and there's no proof that no one will ever see more.
PK, this reminds me of Scotland's Loch Ness Monster (Nessie). We followed her path, a miles long and wide stream a couple of times. Never saw her, of course.
ReplyDeleteForgot to say I liked your write a lot, plus your blurb of the mysterious history.
DeleteJust following Nessie's path must have been fun, whether the Monster exists or not! Thank you for visiting.
DeleteWell told, kept me engaged all the way through. Yes, I suppose this myth could well be a blend of once-upon-a-time fact and legends from elsewhere. They have to start somewhere, I suppose. If a poor lad survived so long in the wild, maybe he was better off there than in some institution.
ReplyDeleteLikely. There weren't many insititutions back then, and what there were sound fairly horrible.
DeleteMy town used to have a Poor Farm where residents had to work the fields all day. When I was told where it used to be, the startling part of the story was how *small* the farm was, but I've never verified the exact amount of land that was supposed to feed the poorest two dozen people.
PK
A poem culled out of folklore ?
ReplyDeleteYes. Bigfoot, the giant skunk ape, was originally folklore from the far end of the continent...but now there's a statue of him in a local National Park, because cryptid watchers have brought in so much revenue!
DeletePK
Many things on the Pacific coast really do seem to have been built to a larger scale than the rest of the world. Redwood trees. Whales. Condors. Walruses, as compared to otters. There aren't fossils of giant apes out there but it seems logical that there might be.
DeleteIt's amusing, though, that my part of the world had NO "Bigfoot" legend even when I was a child. "Bigfoot" is the "nature name" of a friend's daughter who took some photos for this web site. Apparently she had the biggest feet in her cabin at summer camp one year. She grew into her feet and is now usually described as "pretty" rather than even "tall," and prefers to be called by the name I've called her on the site. But she had several older siblings, the girls as tall as she is, the boys taller. Nobody ever called them "Bigfoot." The name and concept weren't part of our culture before the 1990s when the youngest of that family was in school. The whole Sasquatch legend grew out of an article in a magazine in the early 1970s.
Before that time the National Park was dedicated to the memory of a duel fought between a local Anglo-American and a guerrilla fighter who claimed to represent the Cherokee Nation (despite having no Cherokee ancestry). Supposedly they fought on a big flat-topped rock and "our" hero, Hobbs, sent the red-haired scalp of the terrorist, Benge, to Washington as proof that he'd won the fight.
Maybe people prefer to think of the deliciously spooky "Benge's Scalp Trail" as a place where Bigfoot might lurk, rather than a place where a duel was fought...
PK
You have such an interesting way of putting things
ReplyDeleteThank you!
DeletePK
Love your rhyming ditty and story of the seven brothers you bring to life. Fun to read. Stories of Sasquatch abound in the Michigan woods. Who knows.
ReplyDelete