Wilderness Park on the outskirts of Lincoln consists of 14 miles of hiker/biker trails on either side of meandering Salt creek (or as I call it, the crick).

For the many kids who have passed through my life, Wilderness was a great place of entertainment. In the winter, we used to cross-country ski out there, and when the crick was frozen solid, we often went ice-skating up and down the winding ice way. In my time, I have rode horses through there, canoed down Salt Creek during spring flooding, and spent many winter nights hunkered down beside a fire out in the middle of those woods.

One spring day while hiking out there to a fort we’d built out of branches, my foster son, Chad, and I heard a high-pitched yelping coming form some distance ahead of us. We took off running down the trail and soon came to the old railroad bridge spanning the creek. There, just on the other side, were two men who appeared to be beating on a poor dog sprawled at their feet.

The poor dog was yelping and thrashing around, his leg trapped in a steel trap as the two men were frantically trying to free it from its jaws.

Chad and I ran across the old railroad bridge and went to help the two guys. Both were crying and totally out of control. I told them to calm down and to back away from the dog so it could settle down. I then tossed Chad my gloves and said, “Put these on and try not to get bit when you grab the dog!”

Chad nodded at me and slipped on my rather thick gloves. He then kneeled down and grabbed the dog by his shoulders, pinning it to the ground. I kneeled down, studied the poor dog’s leg, and reached down to pry the trap open. Chad immediately pulled the dog’s leg out from between the pincer-like jaws of the now opened trap. The dog stopped yelping and went limp in his grasp. One of the men scooped up the bleeding dog, while the other wrapped its leg with his shirt. They then both ran off down the trail, without even glancing back to say, “Thanks for your help.”

Chad grinned and said, “Well how do you like that? We just saved their dog and they didn’t say one word to us!”

“I bet the dog would have,” I said. “He probably had better manners than his masters.”

We walked on to the fort where we had a fire and I shared a new story with Chad. Long after dark, we poured our thermos bottles filled with water on the dying fire, and proceeded to walk out of the woods.

As we neared the old railroad bridge, a strange, high-pitched screaming came from the deep woods behind us. Both of us being armed with walking sticks, spun around and brought our sticks up into defensive positions.

It then came again, sounding closer this time.

I whispered, “What the hell is that?”

“A lady,” Chad gasped. “Sounds like a lady screaming!”

It came again, over to our left and definitely closer this time. Chad moved behind me. I glanced back and smirked, “O, Brave One, who will stand in the gap beside me, right?”

Chad wasn’t smiling. He was peering hard into the darkness. He took two steps closer to me, but did not join me on the trail, leaving me to face whatever was coming first. I raised my stick and prepared to launch an attack on whatever came charging out of the darkness.

We waited. Our hearts beating wildly. Vapor trails leaked from our lips. The night air was nippy. A low wind had picked up, and then the sound came again. Closer this time, and definitely closing the gap between us. I forced myself to say, “Chad, stay behind me and whatever happens, don’t run!”

Chad reached out and silently placed a hand on my shoulder. He squeezed hard to acknowledge my sound advice, and stayed glued to the spot directly behind me.

I let out my breath in an explosion of slight relief as the scream came again, farther away instead of closer to us. It was then gone.

We must have stood there for another ten minutes, trying to decide if we should take to the railroad tracks to get out of there, or if we should cross the tracks and cut through the old archery range to take a short-cut back to the truck. It took a while for us to move.

We were both shaken by the mysterious noise, and we still had no clue what it had been.

Only after we reached the safety of the truck, did I share with Chad what I thought it was. ”Remember last year up in North Omaha,” I said as we peered out through the windshield into the dark trees beyond the truck. “State troopers shot and killed two mountain lions that had walked right into the city. They say mountain lions scream like that, although what a mountain lion was doing this close to Lincoln, I have no idea.”

“Maybe,” Chad said, “it was someone’s pet that escaped from its pen. I heard some guy had a mountain lion in a cage out by Pioneer’s Park. Maybe it escaped and was looking for a meal.”

“Well,” I said as I started up the truck, “at least we ain’t gonna be its dinner tonight. But that was sure creepy.”

Another creepy experience happened a few months later out there at Wilderness.

Chad and I had hiked all the way down to Saltillo Road, which is where Wilderness Park begins. As we rounded the bend, some guy dressed in blue clothing came stumbling out of the woods, soaking wet from his neck down to this toes.

He was a big, burly guy and he joined us on the trail, winded from what had obviously been a long run or a long swim. He grinned at us and said, “Ah, the water is great! I just had me a swim in that creek!”

I knew he was an escaped con from the prison 14 miles down the trail, but I wasn’t letting on that I knew that, and then Chad asked, “You were swimming in Salt Creek? Where did you start from?”

Now I knew where the guy had started from and he knew that I knew that, but rather than demand that I hand over my keys so that he could complete his escape, he shrugged and said, “Hot day. A good day to go swimming in the creek. See you around.”

He then faded off into the woods, leaving Chad and I to stare at the place he’d just been.

A few minutes later, I drove us to the Acreage, a small country store at the edge of Wilderness Park. There I phoned the State Pen. and I talked to a captain there to report his missing convict.

An hour later when I called back to check the status of the escaped con, the captain laughed and said, “Yeah, thanks to you we caught that sum bitch!”

Two months later, we were crossing at the Horse Crossing, a regular spot for horses to cross the creek, when out of the woods came four guards and two dogs. The four men looked at us, then one of them used his walkie-talkie and said, “False alarm! It’s not him! Just two other people walking through the woods!”

The guards and their two dogs then went rushing off into the woods, leaving us wondering who they were after this time.

That next fall, we made another trip deep into Wilderness long after dark.

Chad and I had invited my biker friend, Ben, along that night. Earlier that day, I had heard that two escapees had jumped fourteen feet to the ground on the far side of a razor-wire fence out at the State Pen. One guy had broken his ankle and been caught right away, the other guy was still at large.

As we neared the old railroad bridge, we heard a moan of pain on the trail above us. Like soldiers out of an old war movie, the three of us immediately fell into position. Chad drifted back behind me, his wide eyes on the moonlit trail above us. Ben took up his walking stick and faced behind us, while I took point, my own walking stick raised as I faced the trail winding down to us from the rise of the old railroad bridge.

We were freaked out but ready to fight if the need arose.

The pain-filled groan came again. It was a sound that caused the hair on my neck to rise. My gut clenched up. I couldn’t believe I had walked us into yet another dangerous encounter at Wilderness Park. As I stood there, I vowed to never travel into the park again after dark.

We waited for a long while, all the time listening to this guy’s pain-filled moans of anguish, and we froze. For he seemed to be moving directly down the trail where we stood.

Ben took point with me. Chad faded into the shadows directly behind me. “Should we run?” he whispered. “Should we just get out of here?”

I simply shook my head and said, “No, we face whoever comes down this trail!”

It was those words that caused the unseen phantom to stop. Gravel scurried down the trail toward us. We knew he stood in the darkness directly above us. He knew we were there below him, planted on the trail. We were at an impasse.

He had to go through us to continue down the trail. We either had to turn tail and run, or stand our ground and face him as he approached us from the upper trail.

He then shuffled about, sending more gravel down our way. He then let out a moan and started back up the trail.

I glanced back at Chad, then looked to Ben and said, “Time to go.”

We then backed down the trail, our walking sticks held before us.

One more encounter like that did I have on my many trips to Wilderness Park.

And this by far, was the spookiest yet.

I was out there all alone, walking down the trail, walking stick in my hand.  It was bright daylight and I was leaving for the day when this ape-like figure appeared about fifty yards away from me out of the trees.

He had long blond hair and a beard and he was solidly built. He looked at me. I looked at him. And he made a threatening gesture with both massive fists.

For a moment, I froze, not knowing what he intended. I knew immediately he was an escaped con from the State Pen. What I didn’t know is, what he intended to do.

He actually growled at me, his long arms hanging to his sides. He then took two steps forward.

I swung my walking stick up and over my head as if it were a sword. I then brought it down, whooshing through the air, and completed a stroke meant to hack off his head.

It stopped him in his tracks, and he stared coldly at me and then slowly backed away. I stood there, my walking stick held before me like a sword, and watched him skulking back into the thick tree line until he disappeared.

I walked out there, feeling his cold, dead eyes on me all the way, and as I reached the edge of the meadow where he’d first appeared, I raised my walking stick and made a triumphant gesture.

I then walked swiftly back to my truck and drove away, wondering what that encounter had been all about.

Even as I write this, I want to say, “Believe it or not,” but I know this actually happened.

Every one of my most recent stories have been a part of my life, and I can only wonder what will top them.

As wild as my imagination is, I can’t make this stuff up.

I’ve met some cantankerous folks in my time, but when I met Mrs. B, the librarian at the middle school I once worked at, I knew what the word curmudgeon truly meant.  As a Gifted Mentor , I constantly asked the principal, Ross Dirks, for a private room with a computer to work with my students on writing projects. Ross consistently put me off, and shuffled me off to the library where we had all kinds of distractions. Little did I know, the prank I was compelled to pull, would lead to me and my students getting our own room complete with a computer.

As it was, Joey Mason, a mouthy little kid suspended for a number of reasons from several classes, was my one kid I volunteered with each day in the library.  My other students were on the clock so to speak, but Ross had asked me to work for an hour each day with Joey, the mouth of the south.

One day before I arrived to work with him, Mrs. B spotted Joey seated in the library waiting for me, so she asserted her authority by demanding, “Joey Mason? Where is your pass?”

Joey smugly responded, “Tom Frye is my pass!”

At which point Mrs. B came unglued and proceeded to send him to the office. When I walked in the door she was fuming and demanding an apology.

It took me 30 minutes to coax Joey to tell her he was sorry for mouthing off. When he finally approached her, Joey said, “Mrs B? I am sorry for acting like an A–S–S!”

To which Mrs. B rolled her eyes and snapped, “I do not accept that!”

Standing close by, I said, “Give him some slack, Mrs. B. At least he spelled it right.”

And so this power struggle continued, and Mrs. B began to pick a fight with each of my students when they appeared to their “assigned” classroom there in the library, demanding that they each have a pass when they came to me each day. Which was ridiculous to say the least. The final straw came one day when she jumped my foster son, Justin, when he came to see me, crying because he’d had a meltdown in class. Most teachers knew of Justin’s relationship to me and they understood when he was in crisis he was allowed to hook up with me throughout the day. Mrs. B certainly knew this as she and Justin had become friends. But for some reason that day, Mrs. B demanded a pass from him, and sent him from the library bawling his eyes out.

Later, when I found out about her rude behavior, I approached Ross Dirks and pleaded with him once more to get us a room, so my students would no longer be subject to Mrs. B’s frequent “control” issues. Once again, Ross assured me the library would work out and asked me to keep plugging away and work with Mrs. B.

The final straw came the next day. Mr. Murphy, the frequent recipient to some of my most bawdy jokes (and a friend of mine) walked into the library with a late book. Mrs. B proceeded to give him the fifth degree, and Murphy walked over to me, shaking his head and saying, “Was she serious?”

I said, “Oh, yeah. don’t you know this is the Queen of Means Kingdom? And violators will be flayed!”

I then stuck my hands in my pocket only to discover that I still had flash paper and a lighter stuffed in there from my storytelling performance from the night before at a YMCA summer camp. For those who don’t know, flash paper is what all magicians use as the moment you touch it with flame it will flare up into a brilliant fireball. I used it on all my swords and during most performances. I thought it was just my luck to still have some of it on me that day there in the library.

Dayton, my student, looked at me with wide eyes as I turned to him and Mr. Murphy and said, “Watch this.”

Now I know hind sight is 20/20, but if I had to do again what I did that day, I would definitely say, “Yes, I would!” Because the results were classic.

I cupped the flash paper and lighter in my hands and approached Mrs. B seated at her computer. I simply said, “Mrs. B? I think you have a loose wire on your computer.” I then ignited that flash paper and tossed the fireball up in the air between us.

Mrs. B let out a riotous whoop! and sprang straight up out of her chair like she had a rocket launcher beneath her. The fireball, of couse, had went out with a brilliant six-inch in diameter flash, and the crazed look on her face said it all. She spun around and fled!

When she got to the library door, she skidded to a stop, spun around, and snarled, “Whatever that was, it wasn’t funny!”

She then hightailed it down the hallway, past the main office, and scurried like the hounds of hell were nipping at her heels, into the nurse’s office. Where she stayed for the next half hour.

Marty, the school nurse, came to find me, and smirking and trying not to laugh, she said, “Tom? Whatever you did to Mrs. B, I think she wet her pants!”

Murphy, Marty and I laughed at this, but my student, Dayton, looked at me with wide eyes and asked, “Could you get fired for doing that?”

“Fired?” I said. “Nice play on words, Dayton. But what is she going to tell Mr. Dirks? Oh my God, Tom flashed me?”

The news spread through the school (pardon the pun) like wildfire, and before long teachers were passing me in the hall and either shaking their heads and chuckling or making little explosive noises with their mouths and little flourishes with their hands, reenacting the come-uppance of Mrs. B. She wasn’t well-loved by most staff, and two teachers actually asked why I hadn’t waited for them to see the fireworks.

The next day, Ross Dirks, shaking his head and trying not to grin, headed me off before I stepped into the library. “Tom,” he said, “in light of yesterday’s fireball, Mrs. B no longer wants you or your students in ‘her’ library, so I have found a solution. You now have your own room and your own computer.”

In the end, as far as pranks go, that was a flash in the pan, but it sure accomplished a lot. My students and I went on to produce 2 plays, 3 board games, and a publishing press for the school’s students to present their writing through booklets we created.

And as to Mrs. B? Well, by the end of that week, I sent her an offering of flowers complete with a man kneeling inside a doghouse on an apology card. I even drew long hair and a beard on the man to indicate it was me in the doghouse. I later found out, Mrs. B simply snorted when the guy delivered the flowers and  . . . tossed them into the nearby trash can.

Oh well, can’t say I didn’t try.

One day while driving down Normal Blvd. I spotted two Irish Setters weaving in and out of traffic. The poor, frantic dogs were dodging fast-moving cars. Drivers were honking and swerving to avoid a collision with the desperate hounds.

Chad, the 13-year-old kid who was there with me to work on my anti-drug slide presentation, was puzzled as to why I stopped right in the middle of the busy street. “What are you doing?” he shouted as I climbed out of the truck and took off across the street.

Dodging in out of swerving cars, I shouted back, “Doing something, because all of these other fools don’t have sense enough to stop!”

After nearly getting hit myself by said fools, I managed to snag onto the collar of one of the distressed dogs, who willingly allowed me to gently lead him back over to my truck. As I was placing him in the back end of the fiberglass shell, Chad came running up, the female dog in tow.

We grinned at each other as cars went whizzing past us, for we knew we had saved those two dogs from a definite collision with fast-moving motorists.

We drove them to the nearest pay phone where I used the number on one dog’s tags to call the owner. We made contact with the much-relieved owner and drove his Irish Setters home to him.

A happy ending on what could have been a real tragedy.

Chad was quiet all the way home. Just before dropping him off, he said, “I think I need to go out and get into trouble so I can be put on probation.”

A little surprised by such a comment, I asked, “Why in the hell would you say that?”

Chad, with tears in his eyes, said, “So you could work with me like you’ve worked with all these other kids. If I was on probation you would work with me, right?”

Granted, our time shooting the slide presentation was up, and like the other six kids involved in the project, I was dropping him off for our last time meeting together for any more shots. Chad was asking me in his own way to stay involved with his life.

He had a wonderful mom, but an alcoholic step-dad and an older brother who was always getting into trouble, and so he was seeking a way to stop from sinking beneath the waves.

“You know those dogs we saved?” he said as I parked in front of his house to let him out. “You could save me just you did those dogs.”

He had me. And he knew it, too. I looked back at him and said, “How about this? I will continue to see you only until you get into trouble, because the day you get placed on probation, will be the day I walk out of your life.”

Chad never did get placed on probation. And hitting a mail box when I was first teaching him how to drive, was the only kind of trouble he got into. No, for once, I had a good kid to work with. A positive experience after having nearly 50 really bad experiences working with dead-end kids.

We shared many fires together out at Wilderness Park on the southern edge of Lincoln. One of the best and most memorable times was the New Year’s Eve just after it had rained. All the drizzle froze on the branches of the trees and we lit off an entire gross of pop bottle rockets and sent them sailing off the old railroad bridge and out over the frosty, icy trees. It was like magic, as the sizzling red rockets soared over the trees, their bright reflections illuminating their branches in a spectacular way.

Another memorable trip was taking canoe trips down the Platte River and camping out on a sandbar or trolling up into a farmer’s pasture from one of the spillways. We used two car batteries to power the trolling motor attached to the stern, and with dog, sleeping bags, and two coolers, we had that canoe packed to the gills.

One winter night, coming around the bend out near the Fish Hatchery along the Platte we spotted four coyotes crossing the road directly in front of us. They stopped, too, at the top of a small rise, and Chad and I climbed out of the car, watching their breath floating in vapor clouds through the air as they stood there watching us.

Once when taking the canoe down flooded Salt Creek through the 14 miles of Wilderness Park, we saw a hawk perched in a tree directly overhead. As he took flight, he swooped down over us and flew away, leaving behind two mallard ducks calmly paddling along, unaware that the hawk had been stalking them. While the ducks continued on ahead of us, leaving a V formation in the water, a beaver launched himself off the nearby bank and swam directly under the canoe. Around the next bend, three deer sprang up from a nearby sandbar and sprang up the creek bank, disappearing into the woods. The whole trip ended with the sun slowly sinking in the west and a great horned owl drifted over us, and finished out our day with a grand finale as he soared off into dusk settling on the woods.

One winter night, while hiking through Wilderness Park, we went to meet a friend of mine who had built a fort out of tree branches and invited us out to share a fire with him. It was snowing and blowing, and Chad and I were looking forward to a sit-down before my friend’s warm fire. And yet as we came around the bend in the trail, we stopped and froze. There as silent as ghosts, we spotted three white-hooded figures walking down the trail less than sixty feet away. “Elves?” Chad whispered in awe. And I had to agree, these three strange white-hooded figures indeed reminded me of Elves from The Lord of the Rings. We watched them treading silently away and wondered who they were and what they were doing in the middle of a snow storm out at Wilderness. We never did find out.

For nearly two years, every Friday night, Chad and I would get together with three of my friends and one of my friend’s son, and we would play Dungeons and Dragons until the wee hours of the morning. When we would wake late the next day, Chad and I would drive to some new forest to have a fire, drink some tea, and I would tell him some of my stories that later became several of my books.

So, there I was in essence, like saving those dogs that day out there on Normal Blvd., saving a kid. Only this kid would grow up to be someone one day and he would never go through the juvenile justice system nor end up at the end of the line, in YDC at Kearney. No, this kid was different, one might say a once in a lifetime kid to come my way after dealing with so many bad and heartless kids.

I remember, too the night he came of his age in his own way. He had just turned 16 and I had taught him how to drive, landed him a job, and made sure he had insurance. All the things a real dad would have done for him. I moved him back home shortly after this, and I asked both neighbors on either side of him to keep an eye on the drunken step-dad. Both neighbors happened to be Lincoln police officers. But then one night, step-dad flew into a drunken rage and started punching on Chad.

Having put up with four years of this kind of abuse from the guy, Chad finally snapped that night. He ran to his room to avoid a fight, but the raging step-dad broke down his door and invaded his room. Chad snatched up his baseball bat and sent the guy to the hospital with a fractured wrist and a concussion. He never touched Chad or his mom again.

Later, no charges were filed because both police officers claimed Chad had acted in self-defense.

The sad part for me was a bitter-sweet twist of irony. The week he moved back home was the same week my first book, Scratchin’ on the Eight Ball, was published. There I had 5,000 copies of my first book in hand, and yet I was losing such an important person in my life.

Later, I wrote a poem about it.

Fireflies and fairy gems,

beneath a ghostly moon.

Pathways through woodlands,

that ended much too soon.

Wounded bird.

Broken wing.

Lost, but found

by me.

And when your wing mended,

I set you free.

So yes there have been many

who passed through my life.

But only one kid,

who showed his true light.

And when the sun sets

at the end of my days.

I will thank God,

that he sent him my way.