Follow That... Huh???

My fiends, my friends, now that we have grown so close I thought this would be an appropriate time to share a personal story with you. A few people who read this blog have suggested that I am either weird or crazy (or both), and it has been suggested that the stories and my apparently bizarre personality couldn’t possibly be true. So to dispel any disbelief, I would like to share with you a story from my childhood. I want you to understand that for unexplainable reasons, weird things have happened to me, and odd circumstances have befallen me, throughout my entire life. This is why I have grown up to be the fiendy fiend you all so love and admire today. Back in the carefree and innocent days of the mid-1980s, when mullets were mainstream, big fluffy bangs were the height of fashion, and legwarmers were undeniably cool, I was a young lass happily engaged in the fairly recent pursuit of learning. My twin sister (yes, I have an identical fiend) and I attended an extremely small private school, and as it was nearing the end of the school year, we were preparing for an end-of-the-year field trip.

As I mentioned just a moment ago, our school was small; in fact there were only 18 students total, in grades one through six combined. So for the trip, our entire school including teachers (all two of them!), and most of the parents, headed into the mountains to spend the day at a remote cabin nestled in the mountains, by a beautiful lake. We drove for most of the trip until we reached the base of the mountain where we were going to leave the cars and hike the rest of the way. As we walked up the wide path, we naturally fell into three groups.

1. The “grown ups” (parents and teachers)
2. The “big kids” (grade 2 thorough 6)
3. The “stragglers” (me, my sister, and two boys, collectively known as the entire first grade at our school)

As the hike continued, we first graders, with our short stubby legs (as opposed to the second graders with their monstrously long ones) quickly fell far enough behind the other two groups that we lost them altogether and not one of them noticed. (Personally, I think the parents and teachers had started their end-of-the-year celebratory drinking a little early.)

Here is the place where I should probably mention that we were all considered "gifted" children, not one of us your average, ordinary, mediocre, future-disappointment of a child. So the four of us stopped to regroup and take stock of our situation. After much discussion and rationalization, we decided that the key to catching up to the group would be by taking a small disused side path that led off into the woods. We figured that since we had already lost the group, the only possible outcome of our actions would be the opposite - we would un-lose the group (i.e. find them).

So, smug in our overwhelming intellect, we set off up the abandoned path, knowing that we would soon rejoin our friends and family who would praise our cleverness by stuffing us full of candy. We walked. And walked. And walked. And... You get the point.

After about an hour of walking, with the trail growing increasingly faint, we concluded that there had been a flaw hidden somewhere in our plan and we were, in fact, lost. We called for another meeting of minds to discuss how best to resolve our situation but unfortunately could come to no consensus. Finally, one boy (let's just call him G, for genius. It has nothing to do with the fact that his name was George) said, "Look, there's a butterfly!"

He was correct, there was indeed a butterfly. However, G wasn't finished. "Let's follow the butterfly," he said. "It will lead us back to the group."

We put our heads together and could find no fault with his logic so it was decided. We would follow the butterfly, which would lead us straight to our parents. Of course, the first thing the butterfly did was fly off the path, and of course we all followed. In fact, we followed the butterfly for a good two hours, always walking up. At the end of the second hour the butterfly flew off and left us (this is why I never trust butterflies, even to this day). Before we could become worried, we noticed that the trees appeared to end a short distance ahead of us.

"See," said G. "I told we should follow that butterfly."

We headed up towards the clearing and broke through the trees. And came to a dead stop. Total silence.

We were standing on a ridge at the TOP of the mountain, looking down to the ground far below. Our parents were nowhere in sight, being that they were living it up at a lake house, and we were standing on the top of the bloody mountain.

This was not good.

So we conferred and determined that, while the plan had been a good one, at some point our butterfly must have slipped away and been replaced by an identical butterfly with a poor sense of direction. The only thing left for us to do was head back down the mountain until we reached the parking lot, where we could regroup and continue plotting.

For the most part, our trip down the mountain was unmemorable. We even managed to eventually find the main path. However, one small incident marred the general ease of our passage. While we were still on the side path, we noticed a small sign hanging from one of the trees. It read:


At the time, we all subscribed to the philosophy of literalism, so when we read that trespassers would be shot, we believed that trespassers, such as ourselves, would be shot. It didn't help that there were bullet holes in the sign either.

Aside from our short-lived panic over being shot, we eventually made our way back down to the parking lot. However, several cows from a nearby pasture had wandered into the lot, and were grazing between the cars. Although we were undoubtedly brilliant, we were still young and didn't know very much about cows. So we held an impromptu meeting and formed an ad-hoc cow committee to discuss the cows. We quickly came to the not unreasonable conclusion that cows were, in fact, quite dangerous. These deadly beasts would as soon kill you and eat your eyes, as graze on grass. Luckily, before that fate could befall us, we discovered that one of the cars was unlocked. We spent the next half hour huddled in the car, convinced we were about to die, until a group of parents emerged from the woods looking quite relieved (and a little tipsy) upon finding us.

And here the story ends, because it becomes quite boring. We made our way to the cabin and ended up having a great time swimming and playing and eating junk food. Blah blah blah.

So what was the point of this story? Oh yeah. Weird things have been happening to me for as long as I can remember. But that's not a bad thing. Imagine having a perfectly normal ordinary life. How boring. How utterly un-fiendish!