On our recent cross-country trip, my wife Micki and I stopped at Dodge City, Kansas, and after some adventures finally found the Boot Hill Museum, including the famous and accurate Front Street reproduction. While perusing the Indian exhibit, I came upon the buffalo room. At center front stands a complete, stuffed buffalo. On the wall to the right hangs a buffalo hide, for you to feel what a buffalo actually feels like. And above the stuffed buffalo is a row of video screens telling about the great beast and its past. Then it shows a buffalo stampede. It's tremendous! On all screens the animals are running, and Indians are shown riding horses among them and shooting arrows. Speakers rumble with the sound, and the floor literally shakes! Thanks to some motor in the floor, it feels like you're really standing in the midst of a huge, buffalo stampede! It's awesome!
I ran and got Micki and practically pulled her to the buffalo room, where we waited for the next simulated stampede. Then it came, and Micki was indeed impressed, and we stood there sharing the experience.
While we stood there, a family approached, looking at other exhibits. They could of course hear the rumbling of the stampede, but they didn't know about the great effect of the shaking floor. I didn't want them to miss it; in a couple minutes it would stop. Only their young son noticed me looking at them, and so I motioned for him to come and then pointed at the floor beside me. Under the circumstances it seemed a perfectly normal thing for me to do, but the boy gave me a very strange look. Nevertheless I did it again, beckoned him to come stand next to me. Then it dawned on me how, without knowing about the floor shaking, this must have looked to him! Some strange man was trying to get a little boy to come stand beside him. Fortunately his father didn't notice.
Before the stampede effects stopped, the family did wander into the buffalo room and felt the floor and got excited and the boy (hopefully) realized I wasn't a pervert.
Later when I told Micki what I did, she said, "It's good you didn't also say, 'Feel this.'"
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For the complete contents of the Butter Rum Cartoon, click here.
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