October is passing us by quickly this year, and before you know it, the 31st will roll around - and Halloween will be here. Halloween is something of an American holiday, although it's celebrated in other places. Japanese kids even observe the creepy holiday, although they don't go in for trick-or-treating. In the Land of the Rising Sun, it's more of a cosplay holiday, with teenagers dressing up in spooky costumes and congregating in places like Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, and Shibuya. But in the United States, of course, a big deal is kids from toddler age through high school, going door to door, begging for candy.
There is, of course, the traditional demand: "Trick or treat!" That is mild extortion, if you look at it literally; these kids are basically threatening some kind of trick should the homeowner fail to supply the treat. And that trick might take the form of trees covered with toilet paper - or smashed jack-o-lanterns. But that's for the kids that, when I was young, we referred to as "townies." The logistics of trick-or-treating when you live way out in the boonies is considerably more complicated.
Halloween, of course, involves creepy costumes, spooky surroundings, and scary stuff in general. Most of it's more silly than scary, but I remember one Halloween when my second cousin Bill and I got a taste of the real thing.
The Allamakee County, Iowa homestead I grew up in was pretty isolated. Oh, most of the local farmers still had yard lights on and would have some treats ready for the few kids that would show up demanding candy, and some parents would drive their kids around the hills to drop in on friends and families to show off the little ones' costumes.
But when my second cousin and I were 12-13, we would walk through the usually frigid night, and with the hills and winding roads of northeast Iowa to contend with, it was easier to walk through the woods and meadows from farm to farm, rather than walking the roads. So that's what we did, and on the Halloween in question we had finished up the night's begging at the house of the local Girl Scout camp's caretaker and, with bags bulging with sweets, were making our way through the pitch-dark, cold woods back to my parent's house.
We hadn't counted on the owl. Those woods are home to the Barred Owl, known locally as hoot owls for their typical call - but any disturbance in the woods at night would often result in a couple of owls floating silently in to see what's up. The problem with that is that, when two owls detect each other, they can get aggressive. And when they get aggressive, forget hoots - the blood-curdling shrieks, gibbers, and wails they emit when confronting another owl is, when you're a 12-year-old boy, more terrifying than anything Hollywood has ever produced.
Owls, you see, can fly in complete silence, due to soft downy edges on their flight feathers. This feature enables them to float softly up on an unsuspecting rabbit or mouse; it also enables them to drift in on a disturbance on the edge of their hunting range. They will do this even if the strange rival is really a twelve-year-old boy.
As much as I can reconstruct from the awful moments that followed, three owls drifted in on silent wings, each expecting a rival, and each finding one. The first owl to sense the others must have reacted in a typical fashion.
One moment Bill and I were moving quietly through the giant oaks at the top of the hill, listening carefully to a night where we seemed to be the only living things about. The next, a horrifying sound split the night wide; a cross between the wailing of a lost soul, and the enraged screech of a wildcat attacking to defend her young, cast forth at the decibel level of a train whistle. The other two owls responded in kind.
The scream of an enraged hoot owl facing an adversary would cause an axe murderer to cringe in terror. We were two twelve-year-old boys with three of them sending horrifying challenges ringing back and forth in the trees above our heads. Only one course of action was open to us.
“RUN!” Bill shouted.
“FOLLOW ME!” I shouted back, already shifting into high gear.
A rock-hard object hit me in the face, and an explosion of light resolved slowly into a constellation of stars, wheeling slowly in front of my face. “Funny, I thought the trees were too thick to see the stars here, and why are they spinning?” Then I realized I was lying on my back. I’d run headlong into a white oak tree.
The shrieks of three maddened banshee owls rang through the night; faintly, I could hear the crashing of Bill’s fleeing tennis shoes. Then, WHACK! Bill charged into a shagbark hickory with enough force to drive bits of bark into his forehead.
I managed to get to my feet, the terror of the horrible wailing driving me on. I’d gone perhaps ten feet when I clipped another tree trunk in the pitch dark and went spinning to the ground again. A few feet away, I heard Bill using language that would have caused his mother to run for a stout switch, as he proceeded to slam into tree trunk after tree trunk like a small, frightened ball in a giant, darkened pinball machine.
Somehow, slamming from tree to tree in the pitch dark, we managed to make it back down the creek bottom to my parent’s house. In the dim light shining from the porch, we splashed across the creek to collapse gasping in the front yard. The owls still screeched faintly in the background.
The candy we'd gleaned was scattered through the woods. Somewhere in our headlong flight, we had torn the bottoms of the paper grocery bags we used to carry out booty.
Nowadays, things are a lot different. The most terrifying things we hear in October these days are promises from politicians.
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In our Susitna Valley digs, there are neighbors closer by, but none of them have kids, and since late October may already see single-digit temperatures and a foot of snow on the ground, truck-or-treating is replaced by "trunk-or-treating." In this, locals can set up with bags of treats at the parking lot in our local community center, so kids can go from car to truck to get their candy. It's a very Alaskan solution. But somehow I wonder if they're missing something; no wandering through cold, dark woods at night, and no frantic flights through the forest.
Honestly, what great stories are these kids going to get from that?
This seems appropriate.
