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Fragments From the Memory Log, Entry Seven

What are the key ingredients for making a bad myth? I ask because I came into contact with many as a child. Some must have been devised by fellow children, either to amuse ourselves, scare our peers, or explain away something we were unwilling to ask an adult about. But many seem rather advanced to have emerged from the imagination and guess work of the uncomplicated minds of youth. Or perhaps I’m too naive for our own good.

For a time, I lived in walking distance to the banks of the Wabash river. It is my archetype for rivers. Where it comes into relation with the memory of my past, it’s no deeper than a four year old boy on tiptoe, no wider than a soda can throw across, and no faster than a meandering rat. There’s lots of tales moored along the Wabash, but the one that affects me is of an old headstone my friends and brothers and I would pass on the way to the river, or to our favorite frogging hole. (For those who grew up in the city or in other ways avoided the folksy rural life, I guarantee such holes exist).

Naturally we questioned how a grave marker came to be a mere few dozen yards from the riverbank. There were no churches or such nearby, nor signs of other graves. It sat alone along a foot path, a thin dark stone, broken and askew, any engravings it displayed long ago weathered away. We probably bothered a parent or two about it, but I don’t recall receiving useful data that way, nor should we have expected any. A grave in the middle of nowhere, along a trail few traveled. Not a topic of intense research in a low-rent working community. However, someone (no doubt a kid) figured the grave must be for an individual our town wouldn’t risk burying in a local cemetery, making it (obviously!) a witch. Forget that witches weren’t an issue in our area, or anywhere in the Midwest when the stone was laid. We could have fingered Mormons, but had yet to learn that level of intolerance from our elders. In any case, we didn’t consider the subject closely; doing so would have ruined the “facts”.

Still, having a witch buried near our homes wasn’t the full package. As the story goes, anyone who walks around the headstone three times at the strike of midnight brings down the standard allotment of doom and gloom. The “I know someone who knows someone who’s third cousin met a guy who tried it and woke the next day with a goat’s head sticking out of his shoulder” story never came by my ears. Then again, I only required the threat of such a curse to accept it. For a while.

A self-inflicted jinx was no match for the watery depths of the Bottomless Pit (appropriately capitalized). We’d often drive by the Pit, so it offered a more immediate hazard. It’s a simple thing for a kid to fall into a hole (in opposition to sneaking out at night, locating a grave stone in the pitch black, and still have the nerve to begin circling). That the Pit was surrounded by an eight-foot tall wire fence was not much of an impediment in my mind. Young children love a healthy climb before an endless tumble. And for danger totally outside of ones control, I recount how our town — built in the shallow depression of the Wabash Valley — when hit by a tornado (not if), will see it bounce back and forth through the valley, a twisting crisscrossing destructive nightmare until it runs out of steam some days later.

Forget logic, or a knowledge of meteorological science, and maybe even the laws of physics. Kids prefer to keep good sense from getting in the way of a bad myth. So do most adults. The scary things in life that are also real just aren’t as fun.