Video
Agate: Unexpected Parts of a Story
Transcript
Oh, hi. My name is Ranger AJ, and I'm one of the park rangers here at Agate Fossil Beds National Monument. We are proud to be the home of the James Cook Collection. The James Cook collection is a collection of Native American artifacts gifted to Rancher James Cook by Chief Red Cloud and others. It is fantastic. We have moccasins, shirts, arrows. We have war clubs. We have paintings. We've got dresses. We have all kinds of fabulous stuff in the collection. So, we invite you to come on out and check it on out.
One of the things that you won't be seeing in the collection is today's hidden story. Back in the 1960s, the Mead family donated what is now called the James Cook collection to the National Park Service. The National Park Service in 1968 went over to the ranch which is located about three miles behind me, and they went in the house and started putting tags on everything and anything that they thought would be great for the collection. They then returned later to get those items, and on the day of their return, one of the boys thought it'd be kind of funny and went outside and switched one of the item tags with something that he found out in the yard. He put it upstairs on a dresser put a little tag on it. Later on in the afternoon, everything was gone out of the house, so it wasn't that item.
Years later, 2008 to be exact, a number of items were returned to the family, pretty much deemed not necessary to be part of the James Cook collection. So the family was very happy to receive some of their items back. One of the items that they got is in this box.
Yup. It's what you think it is. It's poop. We refer to it as cow pie. It's about the size of a pie, and it comes from a cow. This is what one of the what one of the boys picked up out in the yard, and put in the house and up on that dresser. It stayed in storage for a couple of years after it left the ranch, and according to this paperwork it was given a catalog number. In fact actually I'm gonna put this up here, it was given a catalog number. I don't know if you can see it, but it says Cook 1177. So there's your one one seven seven. The paperwork that went with this: It was cataloged by a person named VK Riley back in September of 1972. According to this paper, this product is in a class of archeology. It's in a class of historic, and in a class of composite . It is an object that is described as excrement, bovine, and it even has the catalog number there. There's one of them, and here it's this description. It says dried, bovine excrement. Material is animal, vegetable, and mineral, dehydrated. The description color is buff. The form is irregularly circular. Grass protruding from surface, top, and bottom. Uneven whirls around the top. Its condition is good. Good, it's good poop. Its condition is good. It's well preserved although slight erosion has occurred, and it is 29.2 centimeters diameter by approximately 4.57 centimeters thick.
I can't imagine being the curator that had this come across their desk, and they did what they were tasked to do. They cataloged it, and it went back into storage. Years went by, and actually in 1986, it was decided to deaccession some items, and this was one of those items. I have no idea why it took so long to get back to the family, but in 2008, this again, is one of the items that went back to the family. One of the family members, not wanting to just throw it back out in the field, went ahead and gave it to us as, I don't know, a memento. And it literally sits on top of one of our shelves here in the Visitor Center as just a reminder that, of a hidden story that happened on that day back in 1968. This is a fun little piece, and as I said it is not officially part of the collection, but if you can't ever come by, you can ask about the infamous cow pie.
Thank you
Hello, uh we're here to talk about hidden stories, and writing poems. My name is Matt Mason. I'm the Nebraska state poet. I'm just standing here in some snow. Uh, thinking about writing funny poems, or using absurd stories or, or different things and how we can turn them into poems and maybe say even more than just that that initial bit. So, you know hopefully you can find something absurd. Hopefully there's something around you.
I mean here I'm just standing in snow there's maybe nothing absurd here, but what can you do?
So I'm going to read you a poem that I wrote because uh, when my wife was first pregnant. We kept having people coming up to us. seeing her pregnant belly. and telling us horrible things like: "You're never leaving the house again, ever" and unloading all of the bad things that happened on us, who are like expecting a child and hoping people will say good things to us. So um, I wrote. At first I was kind of angry and confused, but I I, decided to try to write about it and try to make it funny, to start. And here's my poem. It's called, The Baby that Ate Cincinnati.
It's one of my favorite poems of mine. Uh it's the title poem of my second book. I mean, see, uh so, The Baby that Ate Cincinnati.
Because way they say it, they say they "Baby," like a storm on the way.
They say, "baby," like that's the cue for the Thunderclap to interrupt the wolves long howl.
They say, "I got three and they're the best ever to happen to me." As they say, "Baby." like you'd say run. They shout, "BABY!" like our flames licking at the window frames
tell us how their lives didn't just change. Oh no, as they say, "Baby," like a hyena inside there coming out Fang's ablazin' and they say...
like it's standing right behind us. This tornado on the highway. Where they give that patronizing nod when we claim we're still gonna go see movies. Oh yeah, we're gonna call our friends. Oh, sure, right, we're gonna go out to see Carhenge in Alliance, Nebraska.
As they say, "Baby," like a bomb in the air. They say, "Baby," like already sitting in the shelter now which is AM radio and a can of pork and beans. You're so, lucky.
They then weep, sincerely. As I sit on the bed, knees held precious watching my wife's belly, bigger every day. Wondering, what's in there? We're gonna need a priest, a gun, silver bullets, wire cutters, seven million dollars in non-sequential unmarked bills Red Cross National Guard 16 gallons of hydrochloric acid.
When all of these warnings, gift wrapped like blessings. When I know, ain't gonna be the same around here. but baby, when we say baby, let's say it the same way we say, bread. like honey, like beautiful, like deer, like it's true.
So with that poem, I just I wanted to have some funny bits, some things going, on some kind of crazy weird absurd things, and but what really can, you can do with a poem like that though too, you get your reader laughing and then you hit him with something. Like that end, I wanted to end it with what I wanted people to actually be doing. I wanted kind of a a tender moment for the end. Um and a lot of poems that do that, uh some of the best political poems I know, are ones that make you laugh, and then sock you in the stomach.
So maybe you can find something inside the story of, you know, the cow pie with a government tag on it. Uh there's a lot in that story that you could write about. You could write a purely funny poem. And that could be wonderful. You could write a poem, uh, that's about politics. About treatment of uh Native American tribes. About Red Cloud. About all these different things um you could really do so much with just that one story, but we've got other stories too. Uh stories in our lives, or in our day of absurd, or strange or funny things that happen.That we could really take on and spend a few minutes writing about and see what happens.
So, your assignment is to choose something choose a funny story,and start writing about it and maybe take it in a different direction, maybe just tell the funny story. But see what happens. Tell the, what is your poetic interpretation of the cow pie story? Um, even though a hundred of us might write a poem with that idea. We're going to come up with a hundred very different poems, so don't worry about that.
Just write and have fun.
Description
This is the second of four videos for the 2023 Agate Writing Festival. Ranger AJ shares about an infamous donation to the park. Then, Nebraska State Poet, Matt Mason shares how to bring the unexpected and humorous into a story. He encourages individuals to create their own writing using this method.
Duration
10 minutes, 57 seconds
Credit
Nebraska Writing Project
Date Created
10/27/2023
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