Act 2 This Was No BEE-utiful Day!

To refresh your memory...

We flashed-back in time where dad had taken us on a celebratory trip to the Kings River.

After paddling around and splashing in the tame water of the shallow tributary where we had been camping for several days, we decided to head for a day trip on the big river below the dam.





  Here is our infamous "Dam Picture"


There we are to the left - unpacking - posing and melting in the sun anticipating fishing and splashing around in the swifter currents of the water just below the Pine Flats Dam.

Puke breath is in his full length cast from the accident at Saint Marks that was later billed as:

          The Dahlins verses The School Yard Fence.

                         The final decision: A Tie

We managed to bring the entire fence down, but the fence inflicted as much damage as possible in breaking poor Puke-Breaths leg in 8 places.

Previously, Dooh-Dooh Pants got caught in the strong current in the middle of the Kings and was carried downstream to a deadly waterfall on the paddle board, which was too big for him to handle.

Dad rushed... we followed...Puke Breath hobbled... Dad lowered a rope...over Dooh-Dooh Pants head it went... around his neck it ended...Dooh-Dooh Pants freaked out...paddle board spun... rope wrapped about board and Dooh-Dooh Pants...trapping him under water...
                                                 ... we had killed him before he even reached the bloody cow carcass that was being stripped of it leathery hide in flesh-shredding waterfall.

The board turned perpendicular to the shore and caught in some bushes just before the deadly falls... Dooh-Dooh Pants revived... and that was ACT 1... It could have been something right out of a Three Stooges movie - only the 10 Stooges!

We had almost lost one boy, now it was time for ACT 2:

Two of my dumb-courageous older brothers approach a trashcan swarming with Killer Bees from Africa; not really bees from Africa (they hadn't arrived yet in the United States) Meat Bees...AKA "yellowjackets" sometimes called "WASPS!"

I'm not talking about White Anglo Saxon Protestants - we were Catholic! 

These little critters are nasty because unlike bees... they craved meat to eat...and have been known to tear at the flesh of the inside of your eye. SO THEY CAN BITE AND THEY CAN STING! They are social and travel in colonies of up to 1500 bees.  I guess they like to travel in a social pack like my older brothers.

Anyway, the boys won the first round by approaching the trashcan and trapping a bunch of those yellow and black flying terrors in an old Styrofoam worm container.  I don't think the boys had a "Plan B" in mind yet. Had they, then this next part is premeditated.

Joining the rest of the crew, who were busy fishing, the boys opened the container and pretended as if nothing was out of the ordinary. 

HOW RUDE for those yellowjacket/wasps/flesh-eating-bees to be angry!  Well they were - imaging that.

We smelled like fish guts and the wasps began an aerial attack. Dad ordered all of us into the water.  Pushing, Pulling, Screaming, Yelling, (just about the same way we get into the van every time) we dove in and began splashing in hopes of  defending ourselves against the enemy air-force.

Most of us survived...we forgot one thing, however, "One Legged Limp Along" (that's what my dad called Puke Breath) had a full leg cast and couldn't join us in the water.

Gustav took a hit. One of the meat bees got a hold of the skin under this armpit. He freaked out and began running like a mad man!

THE DAHLINS HAD SHOWED UP. We had already put on a spectacular performance for everyone who had planned on spending a nice leisurely day by the river and now they were getting a glorious "TWO-FER"     It was like having two movies on one ticket, a veritable Three Stooges marathon.

Gustav deserved it...divine payback, a prank that finally stung him in the____________ !  Well anyway, he ran out of the water and on the beach he headed for low lying branch so he could swan-dive into the river and put an end to his nemesis.  Only...

ONLY, as he ran up the branch the bee fell off and straight down into the top of Puke-Breath's cast! (There really are no scientific explanations for these kinds of phenomenon - like hangers that tangle in the night -  socks that go missing in the dryer and the Lennons, 200 miles away sitting in the safety of their family room).

Up to this point, Puke Breath had done a decent job of defending himself by swinging his crutches at the aerial  onslaught.
 
But now, the universe had tilted against him and the angriest meat-bee/yellowjacket/wasp was caught in the cavernous darkness of this white thigh meat and pretty upset about it.

Throwing his crutches he leapt like that lame man who had gotten healed by Jesus.  He groaned and hobbled on his cast running back and forth on the shore as unintelligible language spewed from his lips - which needed translation if it were to be Biblical. He spun and threw himself back on the ground like the demonic in Mark's gospel!  

He wriggled and writhed on the ground, inserting a thin twig into his cast as he frantically tried to poke the demon bee.

It was no use, the pain was so great that he decided to give and die! Dad knew of only one thing. THE WATER.

In he went, cast and all!  The bee died!  The cast disintegrated over the course of the day... which ended up being a good thing... not just so mom could put pink calamine lotion on his bites and wasp sting...

BUT BECAUSE... it was only then, we discovered that the twig he had inserted into his cast was POISON OAK!

His leg swelled up with red and puss - three times it's natural size and "Quasimodo" the "Elephant-man" 
spent another week, quarantined, in that 'O hospital bed he had been so familiar with.

Since I'm still waiting to drop the "HALLOWEEN" video on you - which is in the works now...  Next time, I'll tell you about our 1963 cross country trip the following year - that ended up with naked Swedish bun-buns in a Detroit Convent full of Nuns.

REMEMBER

"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly."

~ Richard Bach
      

Of Bees and Men!

Even though the setting for my blog is fall of 1968 (where I am in the first couple months of 7^th grade), last time I took us back 6 years to August of 1962. It shouldn't surprise anybody that this Dahlin vacation turned into another high drama odyssey in the comedic rescue attempt of Dooh-Dooh Pants, which almost killed him while entertaining the throngs of spectators that lined the shore of the Kings River just below Pine Flats dam.    

 

  

Chewbacca was happy that the paddle board did not end up in a plastic tray in some restaurant as tooth picks (paddleboard pictured to the left).

 

The previously mocking teenagers went back to Rio Linda with “Mud on their face, a big disgrace” (Hey, those are fun words...someone should make that into a song someday).

I took the bag off my head and returned Puke-Breath’s crutches and spent the rest of the day fishing with the family below the dam. 

 

I didn’t like fishing like the rest of the boys, so I spent the greater part of the day climbing the low hanging trees that hung over the river…being careful not to fall into the swift current that would carry me into “The Cow Blender Falls" of death - that Dooh-Dooh Pants had barely escaped. 

BUT, as either fate would have it…or human nature; this day did not end without at least a little bit more excitement brought on by the mischievous schemes of the Wolf Pack.

In a decrepit rust-and-blue trashcan that had the remains of some camper’s dinner from yesterday and discarded remains of  this morning’s fishing exploits – guts and trout heads, were bees. Saying bees makes this scene sound too mundane and just too ordinary when in actuality it was buzzing with the industrious sounds of ten bazillion meat bees doing what meat-bees do.

That old trashcan drummed with the humming and buzzing of a tropical cyclone that could be heard some 200 feet away that gave me the willy-nillies. It was a veritable “cock eye Bobs” as they might say in Australia. Never-the-less, the dented metal can was almost no match for the force of those bees that seemed to have that rusted can spinning under a spell, as if it had floated down river (like Dooh-Dooh Pants had in my last episode) and without being rescued was caught in the turbulent cow shredding falls just below the bridge.

No one in their right mind was about to venture within 32 and a half feet of that thing. But then, we weren’t really in our right mind - were we? While dad was busy baiting hooks and helping to liberate lures that had gotten snagged on submerged logs, two of the conniving older boys warily, but courageously made their way to the trash-can-of-certain-death with an empty Styrofoam worm container.

They had the brilliant (or devious) idea of capturing a bunch of those bees in order to terrorize the rest of us who were happily climbing or intensely fishing. 

Managing to make it all the way to the tornado of bees without getting stung, Gustav must have been channeling Saint Francis. The bees didn’t seem to mind the ooey-gooey container of warm-worm ooze that had been let down into the center of their vortex - the eye of the hurricane!  As a matter of fact the easily agitated bees seemed well pleased as they delightfully swarmed the bountiful grossness that was offered to them as if a gift from the gods itself.     

       NECTAR FROM THE BEE GODS

Little did any of us imagine, at the time, just how much this trickery would upset the industrious little critters.  Snap went the lid, trapping a bunch of them inside, just like they had done to me in "The Hamper of Death" incident (blog post 6/5/2013). I, better than anybody, knew how they felt! All these poor buzzing little guys wanted was to feel important and included, only to discover that they had also been betrayed when seduced by a cunning plot of my older brothers.  Maybe they felt betrayed, hurt, or sad (I don't know exactly), but I can tell you this – The Bees trapped in that Styrofoam worm container WERE MAD! 

Let me put it this way...in the words of Robert Burns, "The best laid plans of mice of men oft go astray!"  or should I say, "The best laid plans of BEES and MEN!"

To wet your whistle, maybe I should just say this…poor, poor, poor…Puke Breath. This trip was to celebrate the fact that he was up and out of bed for the first time in months with his full-length walking cast. In retrospect, my advice would have been for him 'not to have wondered from that hospital bed in our dining room.'  This is the same counsel I would have told Goliath when he faced a ruddy little boy with five smooth stones.  "Goliath - don't get out of bed today. You're in for a heap of trouble." 

Dooh-Dooh Pants' rescue was ACT 1 and now Puke-Breath was about to star in ACT 2 of the show we put on at the Kings River.            Puke Breath had no idea what trouble lied ahead!