Welcome to another adventure from the Thousand Acre Woods deep within Trollheim of the NJ Pine Belt! Tales Chronicled by Jonathan Hulton. That's me. This week Gramp tells me why there isn't any boulders in the Pines- but I still don't believe him, even though it cost me a lot!

 

"Did I ever tell you why we don't have any boulders in the forest?" Gramps asked me.

"Because the glaciers didn't come this far south." I answered him matter factly. Like I knew better than a four thousand year old Troll!

"No, it's Thor's fault."

"Pull the other one." At the same time I had learned never to question Bjorn, but I knew better than to believe Karl or even Gramps with a straight story. Sometimes they hid the truth in a metaphor, but most of the time they just made stuff up; it was always a fifty-fifty shot in the dark with those two.

"No boy, seriously Thor rode his chariot of goats across his rainbow to check on his Swedish and Finnish friends in New Sweden! Just shut up and listen here, you might just learn something," Gramps scolded this whippersnapper...

"Come on! Chariots pulled by goats? Were they powered by tin cans; across a rainbow no less. Was there a pot of gold waiting for him,"

"Shut up boy before I hang you from your shoelaces on top of the big bull pine there," Gramps warned me as he pointed at the top branch. "I doubt you will learn anything from the twigs after hanging there for nine nights, just try me! You won't feel your toes for a week afterward; just try me child..."

I once pushed him and Karl too far and they left me barefoot on top of Halfmoon hill at exactly twelve meridian.The top of the largest hill in the county, with no shade, at high noon, on white sand made up of silicone and quartz with a sixteenth of a mile journey to the bottom. It isn't a fond memory.

"OK, continue."

"You see his followers had a hell of a time pulling these boulders up to plough their fields-"

"So they called Thor to ride his magical rainbow..."

"Shut up, who is telling this yarn. You couldn't keep a barn owl awake at night!" Said Gramps dismissing me with a chuckle. "See this area was once at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean."

" Yes."

"Ain't there boulders on the ocean floor?"

"Yes."

"Where are they now?"

"I'm afraid you're going to tell me now."

"If you can keep quiet long enough I can tell you bog fart."

"I'm sorry," I said trying to hold back my laughter.

"It was bad enough there was no soil, but the sand here was very acidic, it made life very difficult. They were lucky to get even two inches of rotten pine needles with some scrub oak leaves, good tomatoes though."

I just gave him a look before he digressed further. He gave me back a stare, twenty yards wide back. No-I mean twenty yards wide from above the tree line!

I shut up.

"So Thor began tossing them into New Amsterdam."

"Into New Yor..." his look just shut me up again. "Most of them."

"Where did the others go."

"You know that boulder on the edge of The Thousand Acre Woods at the lake on the Tuckerton rail?"

"Yes..."

"He was playing fetch with his goat Tanngrisnir," Gramp told as he pretended to throw rock. "That was where that horny goat caught it, but instead of returning it, he went for a swim. Thor was three miles from the lake; Tanngrisnir didn't want to fly back in the sun. Would you?"

"No..."

"Did you know that Thor had sensitive hearing?"

"OK," I said with no idea where he was going with this story.

"He still had that piece of whetstone in his head from that Jotunn who kidnapped his daughter...."

"So..."

"He hated church bells. He could hear them from miles away! They gave him headaches as the ringing made the stone resound within his noggin."

"So what happened next?"

"He threw a boulder at the bell in Swedesboro and it bounced off and hit that old log cabin, dented the chimney it did!"

I was just silent. He gave me a look before continuing, "He finished throwing those boulders before Vespers for those damn Swedes and Finns."

"All in one night!"

"Weren't you listening? Did you trip into the turpentine vat and clog up your ears?"

"Damn Swedes? Aren't you" I didn't get a chance to finish before I was upside down doing the Odin jig." It was the Swedes who enslaved this Norwegian Nattroll.

I just had to get the last dig in...

 

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