Passing time while on tour is a challenge. There are only so many cassette tapes you can go through before your Walkman’s motor burns out and renders all your music with a surreal Gates-of-Hell-Creaking-Open effect; and inevitably, all that time cooped up in a van leads to the telling of stories.
Since time immemorial humans have gathered around the campfire and told stories: stories of gods and goddesses, men and monsters, adversity and victory. They carry forward the lessons learned by the ancients and inform the future generations of the pitfalls and paths to success.
This is not one of those stories. This is a story you tell at 4AM while you’re on the back roads in Alabama, wending your way towards a gig in some backwater town that would really rather hear Freebird.
I had a buddy – let’s call him Marvin – whose family had a fairly large plot of land in Little Rock. It was mostly undeveloped forest and “bottoms” (swampy areas). Marvin had a predilection for the bucolic, and had taken to the fine and illegal art of trapping. We sloshed out though the bottoms to lay a “trap line” – a series of traps, in this case beaver traps, over about a quarter of a mile. Marvin dreamed of all the cool things he could make with the pelts. A hat, for example. Or maybe hide armor. Or really big house shoes.
We checked the trap line every day, hopeful for what purchase they might bring, but day after day, they came up empty. Until one day when we’d been absent for a while. As we got closer to the trap, we could see it – a huge-ass beaver. When we arrived, however, we realized that this particular beaver was an ex-beaver – it had “gone on”, though this was not a kill trap. We also noted that it had a really big belly, and my immediate thought was, “oh no, we killed a pregnant beaver!”
What happened next replays in my mind in slow motion. I remember seeing Marvin’s hand go down to his skinning knife, and him pulling it out of the sheath. Like bullet-time in the Matrix, I watched as he put the point of the knife into the beaver’s belly.
The beaver’s gut was distended from gas released by decomposition. It exploded, and rotting beaver guts splayed all around, splashing into the water. It was the worst smell I had ever experienced, and still claims that disSTINKtion to this day.
There are a lot of morals to this story.
- Don’t stab dead animals
- Don’t leave traps unchecked
- Maybe just go buy a hat at the store instead
- Exploding beaver stories tend to create vegetarians
- Kids are nuts
- Listen to more TSEP