DEAD ANTELOPE DAYS [SAT, 11-14-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminisces of a Fuzzy-Edged Preacher—DEAD ANTELOPE DAYS [SAT, 11-14-26]

 

The deer hunting season starts tomorrow in the Upper Peninsula [UP] of Michigan, where we lived before bloomaranging. That means there is no school today or tomorrow. In the school calendar these two days are designated as Deer Days. School is dismissed so that teachers and students alike, along with most other citizens of the UP, can go out and shoot Bambi’s mother, and one another.

These are also Dead Antelope Jubilee Festival Days, Dead Antelope being the model railroad layout that grandson Joe and I oversaw in our basement when we lived in the UP. It consisted of Independence Hall; a Chew Mail Pouch barn; a somewhat garish and rather expensive foam mountain; five hoboes who are roasting one hotdog; a cow; some light posts and telephone poles that won’t stand up; a rather nice Grandma’s house, which Joe made while Grandma watched; a blacksmith shop, a gift of Joe’s mother, constructed by the same duo in the same way; quite a lot of eclectic extra track; a rather nice circus train, featuring a polar bear, stranded here because its engine won’t run; a Christmas train, likewise non mobile; an off-again, off-again modern Santa Fe engine; plus the Little Engine that Can. Most of these are HO scale, but some are scales no one recognizes. It got its name because eight-year-old Joe looked at it one day and said, “It just looks like a Dead Antelope sort of place.”

Since nobody in our family wanted to hunt deer, and since the grandchildren needed something else to do on Deer Days, we decreed the Dead Antelope Festival. Here is the handout from 2011:

 

DEAD ANTELOPE

                                                                      JUBILEE        

FESTIVAL DAYS

Special Celebration Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011

 

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS 

BANQUET, Catered by Sweaty Betty’s Café

            Gnu Stew, Powdermilk Biscuits, I Can’t Believe It’s Gnu™ Butter, Rhu-the-day Barbara Pie®, Tyn Kan Kauphy, Never-T-Off-a-Hobo Tea, Bottom-of-the-Tower™ Dead Antelope Railroad Water, and Apples a la Bonfire.

MUSICAL INTERLUDE: The 12 Days of Dead Antelope Jubilee Festival Days song©, by The Hobo Chorus of Dead Antelope

PRESENTATION OF TRIBUTE BY GUESTS

A TOUR OF DEAD ANTELOPE, Conducted by Hobo Joe and Sadsack Mac

As you can see, the reason the Development Committee of Dead Antelope is conducting Jubilee Festival Days is to garner gifts of buildings, that require further construction, plus more citizens, who usually come in packages of about half a dozen. The invited guests have all been given lists of necessary buildings and personnel.

It’s not surprising that I live in Dead Antelope, for as a pastor/preacher, I was a Dead Antelope kind of guy, not always to scale. There are smooth-edged preachers and fuzzy-edged preachers. Fuzzy preachers are not necessarily more trustworthy, but they are more trusted. There is something about a parson who is too smooth that just makes us a little uneasy. The same is true of pies and politicians. I think that’s Mitt Romney’s problem [in addition to having no goal or principle beyond getting elected]. He is not trusted because his edges are too smooth. [Remember, this was 2011.]

Once again I’ll tell the story of Ernest Gordon, who was a POW in the infamous River Kwai camp during WWII. They were not allowed to have a church, so they just worshipped in the middle of the compound, while everything else was going on around them. Prisoners would come and go from the church circle. Somebody might tell a story from the Bible. Some sat there and darned socks. Others sat farther out and smoked. Gordon said, “You never knew for sure who was inside the church and who was out.”

The train layout in our basement, the village of Dead Antelope, didn’t have a church building. But maybe it had a church. We just didn’t know who was in it and who was out.

John Robert McFarland