WunderWoods River Logging – Just The Beginning, Or The End?

This past Saturday I took Mira, my 5 year-old daughter, to downtown St. Charles, MO for a girl scout outing at the Lewis and Clark Heritage Days Festival. I was sent because Chris, my lovely wife, was busy working on Mira’s birthday party scheduled for the following day and because she didn’t really think it was going to go that well. It was going to be hot (90ish) and we were going to do boring things, like milk cows, make candles, pet ducklings, learn how to make arrowheads, learn how to start a fire with flint and steel, drink authentic root beer, watch a juggler, watch a guy carve wooden signs and make wooden rings, learn how to make thread from wool, watch the drum and fife corp (much cooler than I thought it would be), make butter, pet a calf, shop for a tiki turtle necklace and pet horses. Needless to say, we were there for quite a while and would have stayed longer, but after almost four hours we were running out of energy and time. We had to get home – fresh cupcakes were waiting for us.

The last thing we did was see a juggler and headed in the direction of the car. We were close to the river (Missouri) and the water was low, so I said, “Let’s walk down to the river before we go and check it out.” Mira was starting to fade and didn’t really want to, but she said O.K. with the promise that we would head home after that. The river is big and muddy and isn’t very scenic, but for me it always holds the possibility of big catfish and big logs, so we headed down. There were lots of people in the park, but we only passed two guys walking along the river (it isn’t very scenic).

We weren’t down there very long and I found a big, burly maple log. Mira wanted to go. I looked to the right and saw another good-sized log. We checked it out and it was a walnut. Mira wanted to go. I was excited because I expect every log along the river to be a cottonwood, and so far I had found no cottonwoods. I started coming up with plans on how to get the logs out; boat here, truck there, wait a little for the water to come up. Mira wanted to go. I didn’t see any more logs to check out, so we headed up the bank.

We walked until we found an opening in the weeds that I thought was in line with the car. At the top of the bank I took a look around to see exactly where we were. Directly ahead I saw a fair number of gentlemen dressed in bright red British regalia. Behind them was a large crowd of people gathered around to see something. It was me and Mira, about to have our heads blown off by the British and their big fancy canon – and to think we didn’t even dress up. One of the soldiers saw us pop up like whack-a-moles and started flailing his arms and yelling, “Get Out Of There! MOVE!”

Luckily, they hadn’t lit the cannon yet and, more luckily, I am pretty sure they didn’t have a cannon ball in it. They kept yelling, we kept moving and people kept staring at the idiots that walked in front of the cannon, until finally we were out of the way enough to fire. By the way, that thing was loud.

Here are the logs we almost gave our lives for.