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On the last weekend of July, an amazing discovery was made in the area surrounding Big Sandy. In recent years several examples of prehistoric fossils have been uncovered in this area, but this massive influx of petrified specimens were all, apparently, alive and breathing. A total of twenty-one 1974 survivors appeared on or near Main Street over the weekend, all traceable through carbon dating back to the year 1974, when they were congregated as seniors at Big Sandy High School. A total of...
Someone once criticized me, telling me, everything with you is a story. And I think he was right – but I don't take it as a criticism, I see it as acknowledgement of a gift, to be shared. This is my story of Lawrence Green. Lawrence Green was nothing much, really. He was diminutive, he did not stand out in a crowd, unless the crowd happened to be a brawl, in which case, Lawrence was probably knocking the stuffing out of someone twice his size. Some would like that about Lawrence. But he did n...
Destruction is the most beautiful of cabarets. Grasshoppers caked to the grill of a collapsing Oldsmobile bloody as a buffalo jump. Locusts are a plague of reason, a systemic and measurable loss -- they flow like an ice cream symphony in a sky of marbled doom. They are no more than populated wind, and there is no farmer who does not manage wind. Grasshoppers are a disheveled horde, chaos miles wide, drooling brown, longing to jam themselves into open mouths, ride like surfers on wailing tongues. You cannot survive even half a grasshopper...
copyright 2017 by Steve Sibra (previously published in The Borfski Review) On my way to make a courier pick-up at the airport I saw a three-legged dog on the side of the road. He had a sign in his mouth. I put on the brakes so I could get a better look. “NEED RIDE TO THE AIRPORT”. Five words, written in large block style letters. Now I had seen some strange things. But a three-legged hitchhiking dog with a handmade sign? I pulled over. In the rear-view mirror, I saw the dog start my way. I noticed a man was stepping up alongside the dog – h...
THE CROWN OF CREATION We bounce in the backs of pickup trucks dirt road varnished by heat from the tires skeletons snore in the earth as we trundle by we relax, let our hair fly, shirt tails flap someone gets a nosebleed we put our hearts back into the soil prairie dogs and rattlers bask in the red glory of another day’s passing; we have not been this alive for a while. On the banks of the muddy Missouri our caravan coasts into silence; a prayer is delivered on the wind, it tells us “Life is different here; we let mouth and nose decide wha...
My mother, Arlene Geyer Sibra, was old school all the way. When I was a kid, I heard all manner of old sayings come from her, everything from Bible quotes to the Farmer's Almanac. I thought some of it was just nuts, like something out of the science fiction comic books that I loved so much – for example; she had all sorts of theories about the moon and its position in the sky causing this or that. If the crescent moon was tipped up straight, it was like a ladle dumping out water, which meant it...
I honestly don't know how to describe Tim Godfrey to those who may have never known the man. He was a Big Sandy mainstay in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, hilarious and unpredictable. He was brilliant in his field. He could talk a Zenith television into fixing itself. He was not from the land of milk and honey, but from the land of milk and ice cream instead. He was upbeat, wry, sardonic, clever, a little bit sinister in the fashion of the Tasmanian Devil on the old Bugs Bunny cartoons. And yet he...
When I was a lad, there were a few people around Big Sandy who always seemed to be somewhere nearby. On the one hand, they were like the buttons on an old coat, maybe a little bit frayed, maybe the stitching was a little loose, but if it got cold out, if you felt a chill, you could count on them to close the gap for you. On the other hand, they were kind of like the fleas on a dog's back – always there, totally reliable in a sense, but you also knew they might haul off and bite you. You just d...
Like a lot of people, I have fond and nostalgic memories of my high school days. Well, at least I have memories. I can't even estimate how many people I know these days who say they can't remember anything that went on in high school. And some of them graduated this century! For whatever reason, I have pretty clear memories of those days. That is not to say they are accurate, or fair and balanced. But I do remember. I graduated from BSHS in 1974. I didn't work as hard as I should have in...
Note: I wrote this story in 2018, as an homage to the memory of Buster Dunlap, a longtime family friend who was a cowboy from Circle, Montana. It was originally published in an online literary magazine titled Literally Stories, in a slightly altered form. I respectfully dedicate this story to the memory of Buster Dunlap, and to the memory of my father, Dana Sibra (1918-1993). I also want to dedicate it to the people of and from Big Sandy, in hopes that they remember that, in troubled times, there are those who have gone before, and they just...
The planet earth is a being made of land, water, and air. We all know this. Every living thing has its own perspective on what the earth is like. How we define our environment depends on whether we walk on the land, swim in the sea, or fly in the sky. It is easy at times to forget this simple fact. Christmas has come and gone, and I think I am always introspective at this time of year. Living in Seattle, we see a lot of cloudy skies, and it makes me think about the nature of clouds. We all spend our lives trying to see what is beyond the clouds...
I was born in 1956, so somebody cut my hair before George Ament and his wife Penny moved to town and took over the barbershop. Somebody cut it, but I don't remember who it was. My first memory of a haircut is my first memory of George. For me, he was the Big Sandy barber. I could look it up somewhere, but since I am more about anecdotes than accuracy, I am not going to bother: I think George came to Big Sandy in about 1962. I believe he came from Minnesota. He probably thought he was going to...
Welcome to another chapter in my recounting of the tales of Old Big Sandy (which means "old" by the standards of my lifetime, mostly the 1960s and early 1970s). This column is not meant to be a telling of Cliff Gullickson's life story; it is instead a summation of my observations about the man as I knew him during the time that we were both part of Big Sandy. People might not have thought about it at the time, but a small community is made up of people who play varying roles in the lives of...
Old-timers (and, let's face it, at age 63 I now qualify as such) will always tell you that things were "different" back in the old days – different meaning bigger, better, simpler, etc. Along those lines, I have to say that Main Street of Big Sandy, during the days of my youth (the late 1950s to mid-1970s) was a pretty interesting place, in ways that the modern version cannot quite live up to. But before I go about making my point, let me quickly acknowledge a few ways in which "modern Main Stre...
Cities and towns across America lay claim to landmarks as signatures of their identity. Most anywhere you travel, large or small, has a few. New York City has the Empire State Building (among others). San Francisco has the glorious Golden Gate (and Haight-Asbury). Seattle has the Space Needle. Flint, Michigan, has poisoned drinking water. You get the idea. Through its history Big Sandy has had its share of landmarks. For decades the town was watched over by the famous water tower (long gone...
