Stuff in the Basement: The haunting at Ponca

Thursday, October 27, 2022

The haunting at Ponca

You can't help but wonder what on earth eventually happens to all the left-overs. Right now, they're everywhere; every store has a stockpile because in three days it'll be Halloween, and, for years now, Halloween has been a kids' thing. Some moms go bonkers with decorations, turning front yards into actual sets for horror movies. Down the road at the Hy-Vee, one of the pumpkins is so big you'd need to pull up in a skid loader to get the monster into the pick up.

Up and down the roads last Saturday, Ponca State Park went all Halloween bezonkers. Slips of white cloth, ghostly spirits, hung from from burr oaks already shedding leaves. Wherever you went, you ran into something ghoulish. Boo!!!

But I didn't need bizarre decorations or fake cemeteries. For me at least, stuck as I have been in Missouri River lore, the hills up and down old Muddy somehow are still peopled by the Omahas moving along its shorelines. Here and there, some rumpled and disheveled trapper, followed by his mule and maybe a Native wife, looks for a place to put in a few traps because there's beaver here, and as long as Europe's tastes for proper hats is what it is, a feller can turn a buck or two.

So a path like this, pretty standard stuff, isn't just a feature of the park, it's a regular museum.

If you look out and over the river, follow its wandering path as far as the eye can see, there's a pirogue out there, on the blue horizon, and a crew of men in uniform, of all things, coming up river, on their way west. In search of most anything they can find.

Look for yourself. They're up there all right.

I tried to get 'em in the camera while they were out there, but you have to strain hard to see 'em at all.

The thing is, on those paths along those banks, occasionally you'd hear some kind of odd bird call and just know, just know, that there were handfuls of Kaw or Omaha or Osage, maybe Otoe, even maybe a few Dakota watching too. I swear.