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The Pinky Finger: A testament to the innocence of childhood, when we would use it to make solemn vows to each other and go “wee wee wee” all the way home (though that was actually its foot-brother).

Introduction

Perseus and Andromeda…the Tortoise and the Hare…the Legend of Lake Okeechobee…sound familiar? Not the last one, I’ll bet. While the first two are immediately recognizable by much of the Western world, the latter would most likely be greeted by a sea of confused faces if it were brought up in any high school English class, even here in the United States. Why do I find it so ironic that the typical American isn’t more familiar with the Legend of Lake Okeechobee? Because of the three stories I mentioned, it’s the most American. I’m not kidding. To be more specific, it’s a Seminole Indian legend that originated amongst the tribes of the Florida Everglades and has been passed down through the generations, surviving even the “century of dishonor” perpetrated by those of us whose ancestors came over on boats. But the point is, the story is with us today, and it’s a part of the American folk tradition whether the bulk of us know it or not.

Native American folklore and I have known each other well ever since my early childhood thanks to my mother, whose efforts to provide me with endless opportunities for cultural enrichment were a hallmark of my education. It’s only now that I realize the value of such opportunities; as an American, it’s important to recognize every bit of civilization that’s thrown into the proverbial melting pot, and I definitely can’t forsake the culture and mythology of the original Americans themselves. But as a young child I wasn’t capable of these kinds of “big picture” thoughts. To my simplistic six-or-so-year-old brain, the Legend of Lake Okeechobee (and the dozens of other Native American tales I heard) were merely entertaining stories with a moral, although I often paid more attention to the entertainment than to the moral.

You see, what’s intrigued me most about Native American legends is that different tribes can tell the same basic story in a hundred different ways…and make each variation just as intriguing as the others. Now I know I’m not a tribe, and I know I’m nowhere near as good a storyteller as the raconteurs of old, but I’ll at least try to demonstrate how one story can be cast into a completely new mold that on the surface resembles the first about as much as, well, Coyote resembles Eagle.

This is where the Legend of Lake Okeechobee comes in. That story goes something like this (and forgive me for rushing it):

Two brothers went out on a hunting trip in the Everglades and were forced to spend the night in a hollow log because of an unexpected rainstorm. The next day, these two boys — cold, wet, and hungry — discovered an odd-looking fish cruising around in a pretty good-sized puddle. The older brother, thinking with his stomach as most male human beings do, wanted to eat the fish. The younger brother, thinking with his brain (a miracle for someone his age), warned him not to touch the unfamiliar creature. Of course, the older brother didn’t listen to his snot-nosed little sibling and ate the fish anyway. A couple hours later, the older brother morphed into a giant snake and slithered off through the swamp, finally stopping and spinning his enormous scaly body down into the earth, which soon created a deep pit that eventually filled with rainwater and became Lake Okeechobee. All thanks to a creepy-looking fish.

What’s the moral of this story? Always listen to your kid brother, because he knows best? Well…yes and no. (I’m a middle child myself, so I’ve been on both sides of that fence.) My version of this legend has the exact same moral, although by the time you’ve finished reading it you’ll probably be wondering if I’ve been eating some strange-looking fish lately. So, with apologies to the venerable Seminole storytellers, here we go…

The Actual Story

Once upon a time…not so long ago…in fact, it could have been just yesterday for all I know…there lived two friends. These friends called themselves Buck and Bob. These fine fellows were pleasant enough. They said “please” and “thank you,” stood up whenever a woman entered the room, and even tipped their hats to passing horses. The problem was, most of these horses were imaginary, for though Buck and Bob fancied themselves as old-fashioned cowboys with lassos and boots and hats, neither of them had actually seen a real live horse.

Their home town, Dodge City (one of the many Dodge Cities that were sprinkled throughout the West at one time or another), was a very exciting place to live, I’m sure. Located smack in the middle of the Great American Desert — Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, or more likely, Our Collective Memory of the Mythologized and Romanticized Old West — this Dodge City suffered from a bad case of being ever-so-slightly behind the times. You see, they’d just recently built a gas station in the town limits. Dodge City was so boring that even truckers would drive through without stopping, and the residents who owned cars were too bored to drive them anywhere.

Sadly for our two unsung heroes, this meant that the cowboy, or at least the brand of cowboy they aspired to be, was a breed of human being that had gone the way of the dinosaur and the sabre-toothed tiger. You can’t honestly blame them, though; after all, in Dodge City news from the outside world trickled in about as fast as a bucketful of garden snails. Even when the news was worth noticing — wars, presidential elections, celebrity divorces — most people were too busy gambling, drinking, or cussing to bother paying attention. So Buck and Bob must be forgiven for being ignorant of the more modern trappings of civilization.

Anyhow, that was Dodge City. Not exactly the perfect place for two young, talented cowboys such as Buck and Bob. And eventually they realized that, too, but they couldn’t exactly do anything to improve their lot in life, for the closest town was another Dodge City two hundred miles away (a much cooler, hipper Dodge City…they had two gas stations). So like so many bold, big-dreaming men before them, Buck and Bob found their hopes shattered beneath bottles of tequila and dead diesel engines.

One dreary afternoon when the sun was making it downright suicidal to be found outside an air-conditioned building, Buck and Bob were sequestered in Dodge City’s saloon doing what they did best these days — slouching on stools with shot glasses glued to their lips, their eyes and faces drained of any sign of vitality, verve, or vivacity. Life could have progressed in the same dazed, drunken fashion if it hadn’t been for Big Bill the bartender. Big Bill (gifted that name by a local prostitute who’d just felt sorry for him) was the most eccentric man in Dodge City. His latest project involved erecting makeshift wooden wings on the sides of his truck for the sole purpose of intimidating passing birds and discouraging them from using it as a toilet.

Bill sidled up to our two forlorn heroes and plopped a pair of foaming beers down in front of them, which they accepted quite mechanically. Bill stood there for a moment, watching Buck and Bob further intoxicate themselves, and then laughed his booming, full-bellied laugh as he shook his beach ball-sized head.

“You two cowpokes spend too much cash at my place,” Bill told the drunks. “Normally I wouldn’t give a hoot, but I knew your dear departed Ma. And she wouldn’t’ve wanted you to blow all the money she left you on me and my merchandise. You fellas look like you could use a little somethin’ to do other than throw up in my men’s room.”

At this, Buck and Bob finally showed some signs of life. Bob actually blinked. Buck spoke up in his affected “cowboy drawl,” a speech pattern that he imagined real cowboys would use. The ones on T.V. did, at any rate.

“What’re you jabberin’ about, Bill?” he asked, not taking his eyes off the beer.

“Well…” Bill glanced around furtively to check for eavesdroppers. There were none; everyone else was too busy staring at their own beers and muttering about their own miserable lives to no one in particular. Confident that his words would not be overheard by those who probably would’ve liked to be overheard by someone, Bill leaned across the bar to his two prized patrons and dropped his voice to a whisper.

“I got a friend who likes takin’ trips overseas, and last summer he sent me this horse-lookin’ creature, except it’s a lot bigger and it’s got a big bump on its back. Says he got it from someplace called Sahara. Said I’d like it. Only problem is, I gotta keep it tied to the side of my house cuz it wants to kick the rear of everything that moves. Now, I got a bet for you boozehounds. If you take that animal out into the desert and he poops out before you do, then I’ll give you, say…hundred and fifty bucks. That’s uh, for both of you.”

You might as well have dropped a nuclear bomb on Big Bill’s doorstep. In a split second the looks on Buck and Bob’s faces changed from severely bloodshot to less severely bloodshot.

“You serious, Bill?” Buck hardly dared to breathe. Here was their chance, at long last, to prove to the world that they, Buck and Bob, were indeed the mightiest cowboys in the West, for they would certainly be able to outlast some wild hump-backed horse-lookin’ creature.

“I’m serious,” Bill said, his grin oozing trust me.

It was all too much for poor Buck. He expressed his excitement the only way he knew how, by flinging his half-empty beer glass directly into the patronage of the Dodge City saloon. They were still too busy muttering about their miserable lives to notice that glass shattering amongst them and drenching them with cheap alcohol. Besides, they were used to it by now.

“So where’s this horse-lookin’ creature?” Bob asked.

Things proceeded smoothly enough after that, for a little while. Big Bill led the cowboys out to his house, which hadn’t been painted since the Mexican-American War, and introduced them to his camel. Naturally, none of the town’s citizens had ever cared to learn much about camels, so they all assumed it was a horse that’d experienced some horrible accident. The camel kicked and spit and tugged at the rope securing it to a pole in the back of Bill’s house. Buck, Bob, and Bill chose to take refuge behind Bill’s winged truck, for none of them had the stones to approach the flailing beast from any angle. Eventually, Bill despaired of waiting for his pet to calm down and pulled a pistol from the depths of his voluminous belt pouches.

“As soon as I blast the rope off him he’ll start runnin’ into the desert!” he shouted over the racket. “You better move if you wanna keep up!”

With that, Bill began shooting at the rope. The Dodge City sheriff, rolling past the house in his car, paid absolutely no attention to this extended volley of poorly-aimed bullets; he assumed it was yet another barroom brawl that had “somehow” found its way into a private residence — a daily occurrence in Dodge City. With the attitude of Indiana Jones and the skill of a nearsighted three-year-old, Big Bill blasted at the rope for at least half an hour and succeeded in putting at least seventy bullet holes in the wall of his house before he finally got one through the rope. As soon as its restraint snapped, the camel was off, galloping at full speed into the endless desert sands, where the future holds much for camels but not much for anyone who claims to be a human being.

Yet off dashed Buck and Bob, hurtling across the blazing sands after the runaway hump-backed horse-lookin’ creature, bursting with an unfathomable jolt of energy injected into them by Bill’s once-in-a-lifetime wager (not to mention the plentiful quantities of alcohol they’d imbibed earlier in the day). Who said cowboys were an extinct species? What Jurassic Park did for dinosaurs, Bill’s bet was about to do for cowboys.

Unfortunately, Bill’s bet was about as real as velociraptors opening doors and chasing plucky kids through well-stocked kitchens. Poor Buck and Bob. If they hadn’t been drinking so much, they might have realized that Bill had been pulling their legs all along. He’d only wanted to get rid of the camel as fast as he could before the sheriff figured out that it was not, in fact, a deformed equine. What better way to do that — and have some fun in the process — than to make a wager with a pair of drunken idiots that they could outlast the animal in the desert? The camel would obviously leave them in the dust, but Buck and Bob, thirsty for glory of any kind, would march triumphantly back to Dodge City claiming victory over the camel and demanding their promised one hundred and fifty dollars. And Bill knew exactly where that money would end up. He might as well have paid himself.

So our luckless heroes had been duped by a bird-fearing bartender. Alas, as Bill had suspected, the camel outran the two hollering cowboys in a matter of seconds, but, since they were drunk both on booze and themselves, Buck and Bob continued pursuing it until it was a mere speck on the barren horizon. As it turned out, this pursuit quickly landed the two buddies in the middle of nowhere, and neither one of them had a map. Since they lacked built-in compasses, or actual compasses, or even a GPS, knowing that Dodge City lay to the north did not help matters at all.

Once they finally realized that the seemingly juiced-up camel would never be seen again, Buck and Bob collapsed onto the sand, exhausted and ready to puke. It was late afternoon, but the merciless sun still glared down on the two foolish trespassers, who, in their haste to win a hundred and fifty dollars, had neglected to bring water with them.

“Well, there goes our money,” Buck moaned, face down in the sand.

Bob pulled him roughly to his feet and slapped the grains of sand from his face. “Ah, quit whinin’, Buck,” he growled. “We never shoulda taken that dumb bet. We was probably drunk when we did it.”

Buck wiped beads of sweat off his forehead, staring at his friend as if life had no meaning anymore. “What do we do now?”

Bob grabbed the moaning cowboy by his shirt and started pulling him toward the setting sun. “We go back home, stupid,” Bob snapped. However reasonable this statement sounded, Bob neglected to notice one crucial feature of the landscape: their footprints ran in the opposite direction.

The cowboys continued walking for hours and hours, and the more they walked the farther away they got from Dodge City. Soon the unforgiving sun had descended below the horizon, and still human settlement was nowhere to be seen. A family of kangaroo rats out for an evening stroll was the closest that Buck and Bob came to encountering civilized life.

Then suddenly Buck spotted something that caused both their hearts to pulse with joy and relief: an abandoned hitch-hiker’s camp, consisting of a dilapidated makeshift tent constructed from tattered blankets and chewed-up yucca stems. An equally beat-up Buick, its tires shredded and the front hood nowhere to be seen, lay in the middle of this mess. Beside both of these sorry-looking objects was a puddle of purplish liquid.

Tired, parched, and totally devoid of logical thought, Buck ran forward, hollering at the top of his scratchy voice, “Water! Water! Water!”

Bob, though just as exhausted and dehydrated, called out a warning as Buck dropped gratefully to his knees beside the purple puddle.

“Hold on, Buck! You don’t know what that stuff is. I wouldn’t chance it!”

Buck merely made a rude gesture in Bob’s direction and submerged his head in the liquid anyway. Expecting Buck to pay as much attention to him as he would a sleeping tortoise, Bob settled for placing a well-aimed kick in his friend’s posterior. Buck pretended not to notice.

“So what do we do now, Bobby boy?” Buck asked, grinning like a demented jackalope.

“I think we been goin’ the wrong way,” Bob said reluctantly. He’d realized this about a mile ago, but his ego was as fragile as a glass vase, and he hadn’t wanted Buck to laugh at him. However, for the first time in their mutual existence, Buck didn’t care.

“Awright then,” Buck drawled happily, that goofy grin still plastered across his face. “Let’s turn ‘round.”

They began the arduous process of retracing their steps, which was made more difficult by the conspicuous lack of sunlight. Bob threw quizzical glances at his comrade every few seconds, wondering if that irritating grin would ever disappear.

They hadn’t been walking very long when, for no discernible reason whatsoever, Buck started skipping. Bob stared at him with a mixture of alarm and fear; the nearest insane asylum was hundreds of miles away, and he did not want to get stuck in the desert at night with a loony.

“What do you think you are, a jackrabbit?” Bob inquired of his bouncing buddy, trying to stay deceptively calm.

“That’s right! I’m a bunny! A big fat funny bunny rabbit!” Buck replied in a wildly fluctuating tenor voice, a marked departure from his usual monotone baritone. Before his shocked friend could say anything, Buck broke into a run…and began to yodel, more horribly out of tune that any human being ever in the history of everything.

In such a frenzied state, Buck was apt to become violent, and Bob would appear no different to him than a gecko. Bob felt sure by now that the “water” Buck had drunk had really been some kind of liquor, and this was the price that Buck —and Bob — had to pay for the former’s idiocy. An overwhelming desire to scream “I told you so!” overcame Bob’s fear of grisly murder at the hands of a hopelessly drunk cowboy wanna-be, and he charged after the prancing, yodeling Buck like he’d been targeted by a pack of ravenous dingos.

“Hey Buck, ya moron! Come back here!” Bob roared into the night.

The chase was not one to be soon forgotten. Lizards, snakes, rabbits, and even a feral cow fled before the madly gesticulating Buck. Bob had never seen tortoises move faster in his life. But no matter how fast Bob ran, no matter how much raw energy he forced into his leaden muscles, he could not close the gap between himself and his intoxicated friend. In the meantime, the two of them moved farther and farther away from Dodge City.

“Buck!” Bob yelled with the last of his strength. His legs and throat were on fire; he was about ready to forget Buck and strike on back to Dodge City by himself. Buck would find his way home whenever he came to his senses…after suffering through the world’s most epic hangover.

“Buck! Stop, will ya! BUCK!!”

Buck’s unmanly high-pitched yodel was abruptly cut off as if some giant had squashed him. Buck himself was nowhere to be seen. Gasping for breath, Bob pulled his protesting body to the spot where Buck had disappeared —

— and found himself standing on the edge of a five hundred-foot cliff. Of course, Bob had experienced so many surprises on this day that the absence of solid ground in front of him for nearly a fifth of a mile did not concern him one bit. And then the moonlight glinted off the sands way down at the base of the cliff, and Bob could clearly make out a deep, narrow pit in the earth…in the shape of a cowboy.

Miraculously, Bob made it back to Dodge City in one piece (exactly how he did this remains one of nature’s great mysteries). For generations afterward, a legend slowly began to take shape in the barrooms and backyards of Dodge City, a legend that has been retold many different times in many different ways by many different people:

The Legend of Buck’s Basin.

So the moral of this story is…well, it could be don’t try to outlast a camel in the desert. Or it could be don’t forget to bring water and a map and other essential supplies with you when, for whatever reason, you decide to go wandering out in the middle of nowhere. Or it could simply be don’t take bets from bartenders. But it should be obvious: don’t mess with something if you don’t know what it is. Oh, and also: don’t drink from funny-looking puddles. It might take you one step too far.