I went looking for one thing and found something quite different. There’s a word for that. I just read an article on it here recently. I forget what it’s called but it sounds like Sarah-dipped-her-knee-in-tea. Anyway, I located a tribe of ancient native Americans that should have been extinct or centuries and I’m about to become rich and famous.
image via wikipedia
My mind was racing a mile a minute as I left the ancient compound and headed back to town. I was making a list in my head of things to do–things to get. There would be no sleep tonight. The first thing I did was stop off and pick up two six packs of VHS tapes for my RCA recorder, a behemoth of a camera but state of the art at the time. I also got a case of 35mm Kodachrome fillm for my Mamiya 500 SLR and a half dozen tapes for the cassette recorder. At home I fixed myself a relaxing cup of hot mushroom tea…much more satisfying than eating it raw as I had the day I discovered the encampment. I hastily wrote exploratory letters to the Smithsonian, the National Geographic Society and the University of Florida without giving away too many details. I didn’t want a lot of erstwile Margaret Meads snooping around playing anthropologists on my dime.
The next morning dawned dreary–typical of a Florida December–mid-80s one day, barely reaching 70 degrees the next. I called in sick, loaded my gear into a backpack, piled it onto the four-wheeler which was already loaded onto the pickup and off I went heading for my destiny.
I off-loaded the four-wheeler at the grove road and, heart racing, headed for the encampment trying to think of some way to convince Jacob to help me talk the old man into allowing me to document the camp’s activities. My landmarks were fuzzing out on me somehow. I wasn’t lost; things just didn’t look the same under the scudding clouds. Soon I came upon the grove where pickers were busy picking the first oranges of the season the day before. What the hell! It’s the right grove. I was not lost but the grove had not been tended in years. What pitiful fruit there was looked to be suffering from canker or fruit fly damage and the trees were covered with maypop vines and spider webs.
Soon I came up to the Langley Ranch property, parked the four-wheeler, tossed the backpack over my shoulder and climbed the fence. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The day before this place was all grown up in weeds and palmetto–hadn’t been grazed in years. Now, the grass was closely cropped, cattle everywhere and, oh,oh, two outriders headed my way at full gallop. One of the cowboys dismounted and unsheathed a shiny Bowie knife.
Ha, ha – I was beginning to think you may be pulling our leg with the second installment, it didn’t quite seem right and I noticed you were listing this under short stories. Fantastic tale Ken, you deserve double the friends for being able to make us all look silly 
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