“He was buck-rut loco; I tell you Don! Buck-rut loco! And he ruined everything too!”
I was speaking to one of my friends from the class of 73 who lived across the street. We were both 18 at the time. The conversation centered around his younger brother, Stanley.
“Ok, explain it again, but it does sound like a bad case of buck-rut loco,” Don said, trying to calm me down.
Don and Stanley lived in a large attractive home with a golf course manicured lawn. The BN Railroad had a set of mainline tracks on the south side of their property and just beyond the tracks were the cliffs which dropped off into Bellingham Bay.
“Well, it was like I was saying; the temperature was so stinking hot today. Stan and I were sitting on the lawn under the crabapple tree drinking lemonade which your mom had in the fridge. Suddenly, we heard girls’ voices. Well, I looked at Stan and he looked at me. It was like the Song of the Sirens.”
“We got up and walked the length of the back hedge. The voices seemed to be somewhere in the area of the cliffs, so we dropped down through the hole in the hedge and crossed the BN tracks. We crept slowly to the edge and peered over the tall grass to the beach below, and there they were.”
“All of them?” Don asked.
“Every last one of them. All the upcoming cheerleaders from Stan’s class. Some tanning on the beach. Some floating on logs out in the surf! They were on that deserted stretch of beach that nobody but us ever goes to.”
“Well, I looked at Stan and he looked at me. We ducked down into the tall grass and camouflaged ourselves as we peered over the cliff edge. I, of course, am thinking that girls in swimsuits beat lemonade any day, so I whisper to Stan, ‘Don is sure going to be mad when he finds out he missed this.’ I mean, I figured we could have spied on them for at least an hour. But Stan didn’t respond back to me. I whispered, ‘Stan, Stan,’ and got no response so I stood up to look where he had been hiding and he was gone!”
“The next thing I see is dust blowing up the cliff, so I look over the edge. Stan is bounding down the cliff face like a high mountain buck and when he reaches the beach, he runs past the girls tanning on the sand and charges right out into the bay to the girls floating on the logs.”
“Well, two things happened. 1) The girls, of course, started screaming because of the unwanted intrusion of a boy at their tanning beach and 2) the shock of hitting the water wore off the spell of the buck-rut fever. Now, Stan was standing in a swarm of angry girls with no plan “B.””
“Naturally exasperated, I could only mutter, ‘Oh Stanley!'”
“You’re going to have to talk to him, Don. It was a mortifying hike back up the cliff for him. He says he will have to go to the other high school now. I think he locked himself in his bedroom.”
“You’re right,” Don said, pondering the phenomena. “It could be buck-rut loco, but have you considered skunk-butt crazy? They often look the same.”
“Perhaps,” I agreed. “Perhaps.”
Walking home through their backyard, I could hear Stanley’s muffled cry through his upper bedroom window, “Why, why, why, why me?”
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