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Emergent Folklore 64 MIDWESTERN FOLKLORE 4 EMERGENT FOLKLORE In 1971, Fulk Lake, enlarged to ten acres, remained a sportsman’s paradise. Paul Haire, the owner, a complete skeptic concerning the Beast of ’Busco, still showed me the remnants of two thirty-five pound Fulk Lake turtles he had trapped the previous year. His son, Dan, sixteen years old and equally skeptical about monsters, told that he liked living on the farm mostly because of Fulk Lake and that his dad had “one of the best bass lakes in northern Indiana.” Dan rowed me around the murky, muddy lake, darkened and stilled by huge overhanging trees. During our circuit, I saw two turtle heads pop up from the water and began to realize the lake’s suggestive and imaginative potential. Dan rowed to a tree stump where he cut off a length of fishing line, “I caught a turtle with this test line. It’s a thirty-five pound test line, but the turtle broke the line.” With a gleam in his eyes and triumph in his voice Dan proclaimed, “This line is strong enough to hold Michigan Coho but not strong enough to hold a Fulk Lake turtle.”1 In the twenty-two years since the 1949 protofestival, Fulk Lake has marked an indelible stamp on the local imagination, as a specialized folklore continues to flourish. Personal experience stories, conversations, tall tales, practical jokes, folk poetry, folk speculation, and legend related to the “Beast o f ’Busco” theme now appear in a variety of contexts, through both oral and printed channels. All forms, save for legend, circulate freely and naturally in the area. Personal Experiences In relating personal experiences, an individual is likely to dwell on any number of topics, some o f which have been introduced in previous chapters. Jim Kirtley likes to te ll. about the circus of outside reporters at his newspaper office. Lew Geiger’s attention falls on the news people in Columbia City and the folks on Main Street in Churubusco. Local businessmen, even when they have participated in the hunt, may prefer to describe the carnival atmosphere in town. Others concentrate on the turtle quest, freely combining incidents that were separated in time. Or they focus upon one interesting subject such as what happened when the diver, sea turtle, or pump was brought in, how they almost caught the turtle, how the spectators wrecked Harris’ farm, or what their own personal involvement entailed. All fill their stories with specific allusions to these and other shared understandings between teller and audience.2 The most coherent, extensive, and animated personal experience narrations come from those who can verify the legitimacy of Harris’s quest because they were there and saw it with their own eyes. Helen Harris saw the turtle on four separate occasions. Helen anchored the life of family, home, and farm throughout the protofestive chaos. She dismissed the beast hunting activities as “just a bunch of men wanting to do something for sport.” She didn’t pay much attention to it because she had work to do. Still, she experienced four memorable close encounters with the reptilian source of local fascination. I saw the turtle. Three different times very distinctly. I actually saw it four times, but the fourth time I saw it under the water. That time we had got a rope on one of its hind legs, and we thought THE BEAST OF ’BUSCO 65 maybe we could gradually go towards shore and pull it along with us with this rope—get it up to the edge. We always felt if we could ever get it out of the water, we could then do something. But the turtle broke the rope. We got so close to shore, and that’s what happened every tim e.: Soon as we began to get close to shore, he would try to get away. So he would snap that rope. And so after that happened, I saw him underwater, and you could see this piece of rope was about three feet long, still tied to his back leg, and he was swimming around with it on. Then I saw him another time when I was up near the hen house talcing care o f the chickens. And I happened to look down at the lake, and I saw him stick his neck and head up. And it looked just like a stovepipe with an elbow on. That’s exactly what it looked like from where I was standing. And its head looked like it would be about the size o f a baby’s head, and its neck looked like it would be about the size of a stovepipe. From where I stood that’s the way it looked to me. And then I saw it another time when we thought we had it in a cage. But they failed to make the cage big enough to go over the whole turtle. And they had the one side all in there fine, but on the other side where the cage came, it was right on his back. Well, you know those hard shell backs. You don’t punch anything through them. And we had put rails around it close enough. We thought it would hold till morning. And they was a gonna make another cage larger to put over it, but the next morning, the rails were pushed aside. And the turtle was gone? Helen Harris’s ambivalence toward the sporting men’s amusement quickly recedes with the beginning of her personal narrative. Her voice shifts from first-person singular to the plural, indicating her participation and solidarity with her husband’s cohorts. Her voice also shifts to third person at the end to distance herself objectively from the men who have ineptly positioned the cage. When the time comes to describe the turtle, like most men, she must rely on figurative speech. Merl Leitch, the Churubusco butcher and grocer, had actively participated in the early turtle hunt while his wife tended the store. I asked if he were one of the original turtle hunters. I was out there about all the time. Yes. From early in the morning ’til late at night There were about ten or eleven of us had him in a wire fence and we had him a’ coinin’ in muck, you know. We knew we had him, in there because we could see him a little. And we pulled him pretty well to die edge. I think if they’d kept on, of course they was pullin’ a ton of muck along with it, you know. They was pullin’ hard, and somebody spoke, “Well, let’s let him go. We can’t never pull him out” Audi . think if they’d kept on, they probably would of. But he was a big turtle. I have a friend that dumb up a tree and took a picture, a movie of it, and I’ve often said that his head looked as big as a gallon crock and his back looked as big as the top of an old automobile.4 George Wakeman has lived in the area for sixty-one years. He owns a one hundred and . sixty acre farm near Fulk Lake. He saw the turtle when it had been corralled in the “young silo” alluded to by Helen Harris and Merl Leitch. Yeah, X saw the turtle. He was in about six feet of water, I should judge that the squares on his back were about four inches square. And he had a tail on him, oh, forty-two inches long. This turtle was over four feet across, close to five feet long. Pretty good sized turtle. They brought a seven-hundred pound sea turtle that was not as big as the turtle I seen. He easily ' would have weighed seven hundred pounds—more than that. I only seen him that one time. I was up there when they were building the cage. He was in the dormant stage. This thing they had built of pipe. It was eight feet across and that turtle, his head and tail were stickin’ out of that thing. You’d have to say this turtle was four feet wide maybe seven feet long. That’s my estimation. I seen him in the cage? 66 MIDWESTERN FOLKLORE Dick Zolman, retired farm worker, also saw It, hunted it, and has formulated his own opinion of the affair. Zolman: If you want to know all about it just ask somebody who was never out there. You get more bullshit from guys in town who never been there. JG: Were you there? Zolman: There was eight of us the first day. The next day about sixty-five were out there. JG; Did you see the turtle? Zolman: I seen it, I went out in the boat and I can’t swim. The turtle was out about ten feet from the shore. He was sunnm’ himself. I wanted to put an oar along side of him to see how long he was. But Harris, he didn’t want to; he thought I’d scare him away. Hell, we coulda lifted him outta there with hooks and pulleys, but he was aftaid to. A ten-year-old kid could of got it. He always had it in his head we were gonna hurt that turtle. JG: How big was the turtle? Zolman: I’d say about three and a half, four feet across, don’t know how long, if I coulda got that oar in there, oh, maybe six feet, six and a half.
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