Bonkers - Snap Classic

The Southern heat is turned up high as one man faces a filthy flock of sheep, a nonstop chatterbox, and an angry ram, all in a super explosive little shack. Plus, a story where an anarchist and an Amish family come together. STORIES Sheep Shearer The Southern heat is turned up high as one man faces a filthy flock of sheep, a nonstop chatterbox, and an angry ram, all in a super explosive little shack. Thank you, Brian Lee Knopp, for telling your story! Brian is a retired Private Investigator and sheep shearer. He’s currently working on a collection of personal essays. Produced by David Exumé, original score by Renzo Gorrio. Chaotic Good Malaclypse was part of a dangerous anarchist group. They stole, they killed, they escaped, until one day when Malaclypse could run no further… Dan has been playing and organizing LARPs for 20 years. He posts bad LARP advice on Twitter at LarpTips https://twitter.com/larptips/media. Produced by Jazmin Aguilera, original score by Renzo Gorrio. Snap Classic - Season 17 – Episode 50 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Glynn Washington?

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• 0:50Glynn Washington?

  Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Snap Judgment. It's the best way to support the show.

• 1:05Speaker 01

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• 1:49Glynn Washington?

  So I'm just walking down the street, minding my own business, bright sunny day. Then I feel something hit me on the back of the head. Hey! And my feet appears to be a chicken bone. What? I look around, behind me, to the side, to the front? Nobody. Nothing. What is happening? Who's out here chucking KFC at folk? Somebody's having a go. I don't know. I take another step and get tagged again. Pow! Hey!

• 2:30Glynn Washington?

  This time, I look up and I see him, it, her, looking down from the telephone wire. A crow cackling, waving its beak around in glee, finishing up the last of its scavenged chicken. Oh, oh, this is funny to you? Knock it off, stupid bird. But it doesn't knock it off. Even on, every single day or two, I get bombed. Chicken bones, rocks, buttons, it knows me, waits for me, targets me. Every time when I least expect it, something gross plops on me from the sky. Stop it!

• 3:12Glynn Washington?

  And then, then, then, then, then it tries to drop a steaming dump on me. Misses by just a hair and I lose it. No! No, you didn't. Come here, come here, come down here. Come down here right now. Come here! Of course, right then, the neighbor opens her door, looks, sees me screaming at the sky, and she shuts her door again. No, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not, I'm, it's this bird. I swear, the bird's out to get me.

• 3:54Glynn Washington?

  It's the bird, the bird, it's the bird. Today on Snap Judgment, bonkers. Making stories from people pushed too far. And what happens when the joke is on you? My name is from Washington. Riddle me this. Is a crow that eats Kentucky Fried Chicken a cannibal? I say yes. Yes. And you're listening. Listen, listen, listen. To Snap Judgment.

• 4:42Glynn Washington?

  Now, we begin May 1989. Riley Knopp is about 40 years old, living in North Carolina, and he's got a great side hustle going. And I should let you know that this is a real situation and the real people in this real story use real strong language. See, what folk do is they call Brian's home phone and they ask Brian to come and shear their sheep. And this is the story of one of those calls. Brian, take it away.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  I've been shearing professionally for four years. I always liked to work with animals. I've logged with mules and worked with draft horses. But the first time I smelled what a shorn sheep smelled like with that lan on. If you take much of the coconut smell away from Hawaiian Tropic and mix it with like a honey nut and a vanilla smell, that's what it smells like. I was hooked. I came home and heard all the phone calls and messages. It says, that's how you found out about your prospective clients. They left messages. And there was this guy. Hey, this is Dwayne Bagwell. I live in Harris. You probably don't even know where that is.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  I'm down here in Rutherford County, near the South Carolina border. And when I heard this voice, I first thought it was Ross Perot. Hell, we got sheep everywhere. They're just hard to spot because they're all wrapped up in kudzu. And it never stops. It goes on and on. I had two sheep fall into my pond. They soaked up every bit of water. That was the first message because you know those old machines, you had a limit? Yeah, he ran, he ran the limit on his first call. And then as soon as you press the next call, it's like. Hey, it's me again, the feller down in Rutherford County with the two ton sheep. And he said, shear 30 some sheep. Come on down. You're gonna have to catch them. Just shear them. It's an easy job.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  You get weird calls and if you bail on them, you're not gonna shear many sheep. Maybe he was just tired, maybe he was drunk. But I figured, what the hell? I'm shearing down that way anyway. So I called him back and set the shearing date and I went the next day. I sheared two farms before him, drove probably another 30 minutes and I went to his place. And the farms are getting less and less attractive and developed and you're starting to see broken down outbuildings. So I drive up this lone, hard, red clay road and all of a sudden you come to a big black

• 7:41Speaker 02

  mailbox that's crooked with white loopy letters that says Bagwell, his last name. There was this man standing by a Jeep. This guy was in his 60s. If you took a stocky John Denver and you hit him on the head with a baseball bat and shortened his head and then gave him a really deep sunburn and chrome aviator glasses and a little toothbrush mustache and put a John Deere hat on him, that's Dwayne Bagwell. I said, are you Mr. Dwayne, Mr. Bagwell? And he says, I am. And I bet dollars to donuts, you're the sheep shear. And I said, yes, sir.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  And he said, sir, sir, don't call me sir, I was a sergeant. He asked me, where are you from, boy? And since I moved to North Carolina in 87 from Texas, I said, Texas. Big mistake. Texas? You a Texan? That means you think you're pretty tough. Well, I'm pretty tough too and I'll kill the. And he pulls out a 38 pistol. He didn't point it at me, but it did irritate me. So I said, put that damn thing away or I'm gone. I mean, I'm not saying that I'm tough or cool, it's just living in the southeast, in particular, the mountains of western North Carolina, there's guns everywhere. It'd be like me getting upset if someone lit a cigarette in a city.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  So he put the gun away and he just, ha, ha, ha, yeah, I was just funning you. I thought Texans love guns. Guns, bad steak, jalapeno peppers and bars. I'll open the gates for you. And so he seemed to calm down a little bit. Then I saw it. I saw what the place where I was gonna be shearing. He'd used barbed wire, hog wire, old wooden pallets on their end tied together to make this little paddock that's about 100 by 100. This paddock had a little storage shed, about an area as big as a pickup truck. And that was the sheep barn where he wanted me to shear. And I just, I remember thinking, this is gonna hurt.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  These were big sheep and there's a condition of sheep called a scour, which is basically like a sheep diarrhea. So the sheep were green from like their stomach back over to their hindquarters and tail. And your imagination can now run wild what that would be like, shearing that animal. And it was very, very hot and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. And I'm like, they can't throw that wool off. They will overheat and they will die. They need to be shorn, even though they were nasty. You have to shear sheep or they die in the southeast. Can I swear on a podcast? I thought I'm.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  So I walked over to that little barn and I set up my equipment when he walked into the corral to start quote catching sheep. I told him to bring the ram first. You start with the ram because they're usually the biggest, toughest and the hardest to shear of a flock. So while you're fresh and strong and you've got all your combs and cutters in good shape, go bring me your worst case scenario. I'm busy setting up my gear and all of a sudden I hear

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Yee-haw! Yah! Yes, sheep!

• 11:12Speaker 02

  And I hear gunshots. And I turned and looked and there he was, running around this pen with a lasso and his pistol in the air. And he was panicking these sheep who began to run in different circles and tangents and smack into the fence and into each other and jump over farm implements and tractor discs while this lone guy is running after them. And he actually snared the ram. He snagged it with the rope. And the ram pulled him like a water skier is pulled by a boat.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  He was went sailing around kicking up dust all around them. In any other context, I would have pissed myself laughing. The ram doubled its body around and rammed that little ramshackle building and broke the planks of the siding. He ran at Dwayne Bagwell and knocked him down. It was smashing everything. It broke the fence, it broke into the side of this building, broke the siding down. I've sheared rams over 200 pounds, never one that enraged. But ultimately, he got close enough to it to shorten up on the rope.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  He brought the ram to me so I could take my thumb and make a ring of your thumb and your first finger, pass it through the sheep's mouth in that space between the teeth, hold the head and tuck my hand under the tail. And now I got him. Now it's up to me. I flipped the ram onto the ground and then the shearing was on, but he was still kicking and snorting and rolling around and, you know, it was like a ground fighting, an MMA or something.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  So, Dwayne Bagwell, I thought he would go and maybe get another sheep, right? But as I sheared the ram, he pulled this little chair from nowhere and sat on it and put his head right and lit a cigarette and then talked. Yeah, boy, that ram has a pair on him, don't he? Wish I had a set like that. By this time, I was in this almost non-verbal mode of get it done, survive this day. And that was pretty much my mantra. I was already soaked completely through and this was only the very first sheep. I had 29 more to go.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Hey Tex, tell me something, how come all the Texas boys but you got girly names? Sheep after sheep after sheep. Hey now, you ever hold the tip of your tongue and say cowboys, lasso? Try it. With that kind of voice, there's something about it. This man would talk in his sleep, talk in my sleep, talk inside his coffin, talk inside my coffin. And he kept that up for 29 more sheep. For a minute and he budded me good. If he'd had horns, I'd be singing the high parts in the church choir. Hell, I'd have his damn I was going down, dude. I got dehydrated, my muscles started to cramp. Because you're upside down in a way, your head is lower than your waist when you shear,

• 14:42Speaker 02

  your sweat runs into your eyes and then it has no place to go and it kind of cooks there. Your eyes are fiery red and the salt crystallizes so it looks like, you look like margarita glasses were put onto your eyes. And in fact, at one point, a vulture flew over me. I was kind of charmed like, hey, they really do know when you're gonna die. I mean, they said, that boy ain't gonna make it. And I don't fault him at all. When I finally shut off the machine, it's hyper quiet. Hell, even he shut up. And we just looked out and there they were. These beautiful white creatures that look like Dr.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Seuss creatures with the little whippy tails and they were all happy. And the ram was standing, looking majestic like, look at all my girls here. It was a pretty scene. This is why I did this. And then he goes, well, I'll go get your money. So then he just jumps in his Jeep and drives away. And I'm, I'm standing there like, is he gonna come back? Am I gonna get paid 90 bucks for four and a half hours? I was taking my equipment off and I couldn't unclench the nail that held that sort of gallows pole that hold my shearing.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  So that's when I went in the shed to see why it was held up. And I saw these like shelves and they had all these boxes and the boxes said DuPont. And they were all filled with dynamite with the nitroglycerin oozing out like the way you would squeeze a tube of glue. I was so tired and that day was bad enough. And then to realize that a ram had been battering this little ramshackle building, ram had been beaten on it, I had been beaten with a hammer and this guy had dynamite, I could have been blown to smithereens. And that's when my mind shut down. He did come back, gave me a hundred dollar bill at the end and said, yeah, I gave you

• 16:51Speaker 02

  a hundred because them sheep were tad dingy. I didn't say anything. He said, I'll see you next year. Nope. It was even hard for me to drive because I had a manual shift and my legs were starting to cramp and lock up and I pulled on through the gate. I felt like I just, why did you do that to yourself? Most people would have said, I'm gone, but I didn't. And sure, I could say, and the moral of that story is, you gotta ask for dynamite before, I mean, that would be false. I couldn't say that I learned something about myself other than a capacity for pain or abuse or whatever.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  I'm still not sure why it happened to me, but I accept it. I was in my car and the reports of my body were telling me, you need to hydrate and you need calories or you're gonna crash this car. The first grocery store I came to, I pulled in. There were kids there playing and there were teenagers, you know, pretending to fistfight and punch each other and they were flirting with a girl. When I stepped in, it all just came to complete stop. I mean, can you imagine a human being walking into a grocery store who has got blood and

• 18:18Speaker 02

  manure and dark stained stuff all around his crotch and his waist and he's sunburnt, looks like he has salty eyeglasses on and he smells like smell that you've never smelled in your life. I didn't even speak. I walked around the store. Hell, I lied. I ran through the store to find, trying to find sustenance. And so I went in the baby food aisle, twisted open like a lid and stuck my tongue in it and was like I now had like banana, honey, cracker, grout all over my face. I didn't care. I was just sucking that stuff out of the jars and eating it and then opening the next one. Of course I was gonna pay for it.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  So then I'm walking down the aisle, eating baby food jars out of my elbow and wondering why everyone was horrified and looking at me and pulling people out of the way as I walked up. And then when I went to the conveyor to pay, I just dropped all these empty bottles on the conveyor belt. And then that's when the manager stepped up and he just had his arms folded and looked me up and down. Hmm, son, now what have you been into? And I said, I'm a sheep shearer.

• 19:58Glynn Washington?

  Brian Lee Knopp, thank you for telling your story. Brian is a retired private investigator and sheepshearer. He's currently working on a collection of personal essays. The original score for that story was by Renzo Gorrio. It was produced by David Exley.

• 20:20Glynn Washington?

  Now, after the break, our first ever backflip. Stay tuned.

• 20:30Speaker 04

  At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

• 20:37Speaker 01

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  And hopefully make you see the world anew.

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  Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.

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  Wherever you get your podcasts.

• 21:01Glynn Washington?

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• 21:43Glynn Washington?

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• 22:46Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the bonkers episode. Now, I get to hand you off to comedy mastermind Chris Gethard. Chris, he's been on The Office and Broad City, but back in 2010, Chris taught at the UCB Theater in New York, and he called his class Parenthesis. And in addition to the class, his students would perform live shows for audiences. So tuck your knees, feel that low center of gravity, because from Snap Judgment, you're about to be flipped out.

• 23:24Speaker 05

  There are some improv nerds in the world who still ask me about this Parenthesis class. A lot of it is because of this one night where this one thing happened, and it probably should never have happened.

• 23:41Glynn Washington?

  Okay, close your eyes and imagine you're in a small, black box theater underneath a supermarket in downtown Manhattan. You and the rest of the audience have just paid a few bucks for a ticket and maybe a cup of wine to see an experimental improv show. No games, no scenes, no rules, no suggestions from the audience. Anything goes.

• 24:12Speaker 05

  Pretty early into it, Murph kind of calmly takes the stage, and he's got a lot of stage presence. He really commanded the energy and he just kind of plainly puts it out there.

• 24:25Speaker 06

  I tell the audience, I'm gonna try a standing backflip.

• 24:31Speaker 06

  I always thought a backflip was like a standing backflip was a cool thing that looked fun.

• 24:38Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Murph Meyer. I was a student in Gethard's Parenthesis class.

• 24:42Speaker 05

  And the catchphrase about Murph became he's got the mustache of a cowboy and the haircut of a samurai. He had like a samurai ponytail, a big mustache, and then dressed like one of the reservoir dogs, white shirt, black tie, black pants. Murph's outfit, which seemed crazy when I first saw it, had a real purpose behind it. The white shirt, the black tie, tucking it into the black pants, was a ritual he had developed for himself, where every day he would wake up, button that shirt, and tell himself, you are not going to do heroin today. Tuck the shirt into his pants and say, you are not going to go find opiates today. Tie the tie and say, you're not going to fall into your bad habits again.

• 25:29Speaker 06

  Listen, I was coming off of like, you know, I had no money. Like I said, I'd just been getting off heroin, got off my hepatitis C medication because I got Hep C from sharing needles when I was on heroin. So I was in a space where I was like, I got nothing to lose. Let me take this class. This will be fun. I don't know any of these people, or I don't know much about improv, you know, technically, but this seems like a class that might be for me.

• 25:49Speaker 05

  One of the things that we talked so much about in this class was the goal is not to have anarchy. The goal is to start with anarchy and be selective about what rules help us tonight.

• 25:59Speaker 06

  I've never tried a backflip. A lot of great people growing up, I've seen do a backflip, old friends of mine, some of my, I grew up with some wrestlers, high school wrestlers, not WWE stars. These are guys who could do backflips that I grew up with. Yeah, and I was like, oh, man, that looks like really cool, but I just never tried it, even, I never even attempted it. So I thought, you know, well, maybe, maybe now's a good time. It's like, how hard could it be? It might not look, you know, perfect. I wouldn't get scored at the Olympics well on this, but it's something I could do, I thought.

• 26:26Speaker 05

  And he just threw down the gauntlet in a clear way. I think tonight's the night that I nail my first standing backflip.

• 26:36Speaker 06

  The reaction from everyone is, is concern, which I, I'm not expecting.

• 26:45Speaker 06

  I think I was the only person in the group that had ever done a freestanding backflip, and I had just the tiniest amount of training. My name is Matt Mayer. I was a member of the Parenthesis class. And yeah, Murph just boldly walked out on stage and said that.

• 27:05Speaker 06

  Pretty quickly, you had 26 people getting up and going toward him like they're gonna flip him over with, like, pick him up and flip them over because that'll be easy. And he like, was like, no, no, you don't do that. He's there going, I'm gonna, no, I'm serious. I want to do this on my own.

• 27:24Speaker 06

  My thoughts on the chances that he would pull it off, at first thought, no way, and then was like, that's a thought you can't have because then he won't think he can do it. And I think the safest way is for you to think he can do it and try to get him to be able to do it.

• 27:40Speaker 05

  I was in the tech booth watching this as Murph was leading up to that backflip. I never had an experience where as the teacher of the class, I'm sitting there going, yes, this is a crystallized moment of everything we said that this could be. Yes, yes, yes. As a human being with empathy who doesn't want to witness tragedy, I was going, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And both of those voices were really loud in my head at the same exact time.

• 28:13Speaker 05

  The room gets tense. Some of that tension is the tension of, oh, this could end poorly. And some of the tension is this sort of immediate electricity, this immediate excitement of, how cool would it be?

• 28:30Speaker 05

  How cool would it be to hear someone say, I always wanted to do a backflip. I've never tried, and I'm gonna nail it tonight. If it works, how cool is that?

• 28:42Speaker 05

  So Murph starts kind of like stretching.

• 28:45Speaker 06

  Just, you know, a brief run of calisthenics there, just, you know, let's stretch the hammies out a little. It's, you know, I was doing a little bit of that, probably a little bit of the pumping myself up to try to really, you know, get that adrenaline. It's like, if I only need, I might only need one more inch here, so I'm gonna just, the adrenaline will carry me over. So I was getting pumping myself up a little bit.

• 29:08Speaker 05

  Matthew Mayer takes the stage with Murph and goes, I need to talk to you for a second.

• 29:12Speaker 06

  I'm saying stuff like, you know, you don't want to go backwards. You want to land where your feet were, so you got to remember to jump high and then rotate. A lot of people dump their back and they're gonna, then you just land on your head and...

• 29:23Speaker 05

  Matthew Mayer says to Murph, so the thing about doing a backflip is that your body does not want to be heading in that direction.

• 29:34Speaker 06

  I think it's like an instinctual reaction that you're... Your brain is like, don't do this and then just sort of stops.

• 29:39Speaker 05

  And that's where you get in trouble when you go halfway. So when you do a standing backflip, you go all the way or you don't go. And it was chilling to be in that room. The whole crowd is feeling it.

• 29:57Speaker 05

  It is not too long after that intervention by Matt Mayer that the stage clears. It's just Murph, no spotter.

• 30:05Speaker 06

  Because he doesn't want a spotter. He doesn't want one.

• 30:08Speaker 05

  He waves it off.

• 30:09Speaker 06

  Waves it off. It would be my instinct to do it and it's not, I'm not allowed.

• 30:13Speaker 05

  Nobody's standing by. It's just spotlight on Murph on the stage. And it becomes clear. He's going for it.

• 30:22Speaker 06

  I'm thinking I'm going to pull this off 100%.

• 30:25Speaker 05

  He squats down.

• 30:27Speaker 06

  Murph goes up.

• 30:28Speaker 05

  He gets height.

• 30:30Speaker 06

  I'm in the air, I'm flip, I'm moving. My vision, you know, I'm seeing a little bit of the like, the wheels turn in there. So I'm like, all right, here we go. And I'm thinking when I'm in that moment in midair, I'm doing it. Cause you know, I committed from my perspective, I think I made it like a full halfway around. So I was upside down.

• 30:51Speaker 06

  And then he comes down. Everything blurs and then I'm, it's a crash. It's a crash and burn scenario. Just slams on the ground from three feet in the air. Kind of landed on my head and my neck.

• 31:03Speaker 05

  The ground there is a very thin layer of plywood with cement under it. It's a basement theater.

• 31:09Speaker 06

  And it's this like big thud.

• 31:11Speaker 05

  The room is not silent, certainly not laughing or clapping or cheering. Almost a buzz of people talking, whispering to each other, gasps and then quiet. I am in the tech booth and I am pretty convinced that I just taught an improv class where someone paid money. And I watched them paralyze themselves as part of the improv class. I am just silent.

• 31:39Speaker 06

  There's that sense at first, I wasn't even sure how bad it had failed or what had happened. I would only be able to liken it from my own experience to like a car accident. I went not all the way through the windshield once, but I got in a terrible accident where I kind of went through the windshield. It felt like that, just getting your bell rung where it's like blackout for a second. Let me get my bearings, let me get, you know, everything's like, okay. And so that's kind of what it felt like then. So yeah, I think the adrenaline probably helped.

• 32:04Speaker 05

  And it was

• 32:07Speaker 05

  one of the most tense experiences I've ever had in a live performance. Most of the room thought they witnessed something medically really bad happen. Most of the room thought they saw someone get severely hurt, if not beyond that. You do that once and then I think you shut the door on that as a performance style. But Murph got up.

• 32:32Speaker 06

  I don't know what it is, but some strange instinct, instead of stopping the show and being like, call an ambulance, we continue the show. I just remember kind of sitting off to the, on the sidelines a little bit while people were kind of, you know, you're rubbing my shoulders a little, look at me in the eye, being like, are you okay?

• 32:47Speaker 05

  At some point it did end, the, the rest of the group lifting Murph up and physically putting him through the motion of a backflip so that he could feel the upside down nature and successfully do it.

• 32:59Speaker 06

  Like each person grabbed a limb and then I think Matt Mayer maybe guided the torso, the trunk around. And it was a slow mo, we weren't, we were no rush to get, to get this done. We just needed the physical act of me completing a rotation and coming down on my feet.

• 33:20Speaker 05

  And I think you can make an argument that him trying to do the backflip and waving off everybody who wanted to be a spotter was him going, I'm walking my own path. And then him finally letting them flip him over was them going, dude, you don't have to, you don't have to like doggedly insist on being alone in this anymore. Like we will help you.

• 33:46Speaker 05

  And then I don't know if it's because he actually accepted the help or if he was just honestly concussed. But we did get to see him finally accept the help of the community that he was, you know, he had shown up wanting to be a part of.

• 34:04Speaker 06

  So it was wonderful to find, find your tribe, find your people as, as they say a lot in there.

• 34:10Speaker 06

  Although the next day I am, I am very sore.

• 34:25Glynn Washington?

  Snapers do not try that at home. Thank you to Murph Mayer for not dying. To Matt Mayer for being a backflipping guru and to Chris Gethard for letting this whole sorry mess happen in the first place. We thank you. You can listen to Chris Gethard's beautiful anonymous and New Jersey is the world. Wherever you get your podcasts. The original score for this piece was by Renzo Gorrio. This story was produced by Zach Rosen with help from John Faseo.

• 35:13Glynn Washington?

  Now, after the break on the bonkers episode, we meet a dangerous anarchist group. Stay tuned.

• 35:34Speaker 07

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• 36:18Speaker 07

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• 36:35Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the bonkers episode.

• 36:40Glynn Washington?

  Okay. So fourth grade, the teacher's saying something, the eternity seconds click away once every eon, so hot. So bored. Carl leans over to me, whispers, hey, hey, this Saturday, I dare you to pee on the electric fence. I dare you to. I say right back. And I know right then, without a shadow of a doubt that both Carl and I will in fact pee on the electric fence running between our respective farms outside of Kingston, Michigan. This will happen. Carl never, ever backs down, never. And Carl will never, ever see me back down either. We're farm boys.

• 37:26Glynn Washington?

  We do what we say and say what we mean. But I don't want to pee on electric fence. It's just another one of Carl's stupid ideas. I can already hear my dad at the hospital, he did what? But there's no help for it. I gotta do it, I gotta, so I start thinking, what do I know about electric fences? What? And it turns out, big country that I am, I know quite a bit.

• 37:56Glynn Washington?

  See, here's the thing about electric fences. You urbanites might not understand. Electric fences are only on sometimes.

• 38:06Glynn Washington?

  Farmers want to pop it enough so that the cattle are scared to touch them. But you don't want to waste all your money pouring electricity into a fence after they get the message, see? So you turn it on every once in a while. And you can turn the fence up low or up high for the bad hombre cows that aren't making America great again. But we digress. I start thinking, I'm going to pee on the fence when it ain't on. But how to tell? I can't just ask farmer Ted, it's his fence, word will get back. So the afternoon I go home and I sit in front of the fence. If you stare long enough, it's like you can tell.

• 38:52Glynn Washington?

  There's a hum in the air, a crackle. You could almost see the magnetic energy field ready, waiting. And then it stops. The pop goes out of the air. For hours I watch until I know the rhythm of the fence, the dance of the fence master.

• 39:16Glynn Washington?

  Saturday comes, I'm going first, you go later. I tell Carl, he looks relieved. He won't be. I make a big show about how scared I am. I bend over and smell the angry wire. You gotta be crazy to pee on that. But there's nothing, no pitch, no hum, no magnetic field. It's gonna sting, Carl. I look back with fear in my eyes. Here I go, Carl.

• 39:50Glynn Washington?

  I pull trowel and let fly.

• 39:58Glynn Washington?

  And it's not just my willy that is electrocuted. A spasm of voltage sizzles my spine, the back of my brain, my liver, my kidneys. The shockage sends me 10 feet in the air, crashing down on my back, trembling, growing foam, leaking from my eyes, my mouth, my nose. Oh, man. You're something special. I ain't never seen nothing like that, man. Fry, that's what you got. I can't believe you did it. Can't believe it. I even asked Ted to turn it to 10.

• 40:37Glynn Washington?

  I said, there's nothing this kid won't do, and I was right, I'll tell you what. My brain hurt. Whatever bet this is, you win. Paul'd kill me if I did something crazy like that. I look over at the fence, and the fence grins right back at me. I don't know what happened. I still don't know what happened. Either I read it wrong, or it turned on right when I did my business, I don't know. But you can imagine my surprise.

• 41:20Glynn Washington?

  A few weeks ago, I turned on the TV to see two science guys announce that it's impossible to get zapped from peeing on a fence. I can prove otherwise. I can. But Carl, if you're listening right now, I think it's safe to say, it's your turn. Now then, get ready to unsheave your broadsword. We join a notorious anarchist organization in the midst of chaos. Snap judgment.

• 42:01Speaker 06

  So, we were at the edge of a gigantic national park in Pennsylvania. It's such a rustic place. We'd kind of planned on just making like a big explosion of violence and then leaving town.

• 42:14Speaker 07

  Mal Eclipse was part of this violent anarchist group. The group didn't have a name or a purpose, they just wanted to cause chaos. They went from place to place, usually in rural areas where they could easily rob people and escape into the forest. In the middle of one particular heist, they spotted an old wooden tavern at the edge of the woods, where they could hide and regroup.

• 42:36Speaker 06

  When we came into the tavern, there were two or three people in there, and it just so happened they're people that had looked at us funny earlier. We kind of had a feeling that there were people after us, and we realized that in the tavern right now is our group and these two people that don't like us, and that's it.

• 42:56Speaker 07

  Mal Eclipse and his group were on the run and carrying stolen goods. They were on high alert, and when other people inside shot them suspicious looks, everything went off the rails, fast.

• 43:07Speaker 06

  My friend Don, he just like looks at me and he's like, "Okay, now." And he just instantly starts throwing poison gases at people. Half of our group looked at him with shock, and the other half jumped in on it and immediately started attacking the other people in the tavern. When we left the tavern, two people had been robbed and one was dead. So we've got to kind of like kill our way out of town now before anybody realizes what's happening. It's getting dark, it's 5 o'clock in the evening at this point, it's snowing, and we're

• 43:51Speaker 06

  trying to keep our visibility really low. We made it to the edge of town, and we started hiking into the woods. And like most of our group is in this cluster, and we've got one person that's like 50 feet ahead of us, and one person that's like 50 feet behind us, and they're like our front and rear guard. And maybe like 40 minutes after we're into the woods, the guy behind us claps twice. They were chasing us. So Don gets this idea to leave like a false trail. He has us all like follow each other's footprints, step in each other's footprints as we go off in one direction. Meanwhile, he leaves footprints in a big circle, and then he cuts off a branch of a

• 44:32Speaker 06

  pine tree and walks backwards, covering his steps as he goes. We're like an hour and a half into this chase, and I'm like, "They haven't found us yet, they're not going to find us." At that moment, we see this guy emerge from the fog ahead of us, and he goes, "There they are." We just, we scattered, and I ran like a couple hundred feet, and I look over my shoulder and somebody has just hit my friend Sylvia in the back, and she falls down, and then all of a sudden, there's like six people around her. So I sprint, I sprint and I panic. If these guys find me, they're going to kill me. There's two of them, at least two of them, and there's only one of me, I don't stand a chance.

• 45:15Speaker 07

  So Mal Eclipse has this idea, if he can't run, maybe he can hide.

• 45:22Speaker 06

  I laid down on these rocks right next to the river, and I brushed a bunch of snow onto my back, and I let the snow fall on me, and I can hear their footsteps, and if I look to the side, I can see feet, but not much more. They had just been running, and they were kind of out of breath. I could hear talking about, "He was just here, where is he?" I just sit still in the snow. They eventually give up and go away. I look at my watch, and I realize two hours has passed, I can leave the game now.

• 45:58Speaker 07

  He put on a small white headband, and instantly, Mal Eclipse, the notorious anarchist and thief, changed back into being Dan Comstock, a lanky college sophomore with shoulder-length blonde hair and a big foam sword. Dan was a LARP'er, a live-action role player. He'd go on long weekend retreats where everyone played along in these big fantasy come-to-life games. He'd been so committed to it that he found himself alone in the snow in the middle of the night.

• 46:30Speaker 06

  And the gravity of the situation slowly sinks in, and now I'm just a 19-year-old kid lost in the mountains in Pennsylvania. I realize I'm like really lost. It's now past sunset, and the snow has been falling, so I've only got like 100 feet of footprints, and then it's gone. I shout, "Help!" I ran and I ran and I ran, I was just running and screaming. I just picked a direction and kept going. I start to lose hope. I'm going to use like my last bit of energy to like climb up this big hill and see if I could see anything from there. I push my way through these like thorn bushes, and I make it up to the top of this hill, and it's like a big, flat field.

• 47:15Speaker 06

  And on the far side of the field, I see a tiny farmhouse. I'm like, "Oh, civilization. I'm saved, I'm out of the woods." And so I walk over to this farmhouse. I was very conscious of that I'm dressed in this ridiculous fantasy outfit. I take off as much of my costume as I can without like shivering. I put my foam sword around the corner, and I take off my cloak, and then I took a big breath, and I knocked on the door. It was a Dutch door, and the top half of it opened, and I saw a woman in a very traditional-looking blue dress and bonnet, and she was holding a candle. It took me a little while to process what I was looking at, and the first thought in my head is like, "What?

• 48:00Speaker 06

  Did I wander into another LARP?" And then it hits me that I'm in Amish country. I was nervous. So I said, you know, "I'm lost, I'm staying at this campsite near here, and could you just like point me back to where I need to go?" She's like, "Oh my god, you were lost in the woods? That's terrible." She knew I was scared. "Let me wake up my, two of my sons, and they'll, they'll give you a ride back." So Steven and Levi, two strapping Amish lads about my age, get out of bed, they get on their clothes, they go out to the barn, they wake up the horse, they attach the buggy, they bring it out, and I get in the buggy with them, and we start to go back.

• 48:45Speaker 06

  It's like a little wooden cab with four wheels, they have rubber tires on them, and we were sitting side by side in the front of this buggy, all three of us. They were wearing brimmed hats, and I'm wearing a black cloak with a hood and leather armor with studs on it. The horse had just been woken up, so he was a little cranky. I think they could tell that I had never been in a horse and buggy before, and they thought that was adorable. They're like, they're really polite, and they didn't really let on that they were teasing me, but it was very, it was a little pointy. They're like, "I've never been lost in the woods before, were you scared?" And it was just, it was really surreal, you know? Because I'm trying to talk to these Amish people, they're like, "What were you doing in the woods?"

• 49:29Speaker 06

  And like, I couldn't really explain it, you know? I was like, "Have you ever heard of a Renaissance fair? No. Have you ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons? No." And I'm like trying not to say like, "Well, we pretend like we don't have technology." Like we live in a different time. It's funny, you know, people talk about Amish people like they're, you know, these bumpkins, and they talk about us the same way. You know, they're good at things that we're clueless about. Like, who am I to judge? You know, I just wandered through the woods with like a cape and like a foam sword. I wasn't really able to explain it to them, and so they just kind of stopped asking follow-up questions at a certain point.

• 50:12Speaker 06

  So we pulled up to the campsite into like a little fantasy village, and there are different groups of people. There are these dark elves, they have pointy ears and they have dark makeup. Wizards who are wearing robes or, you know, and funny hats. Rangers, you know, kind of dressed like Robin Hood a lot of the time with the kind of like pointed cap. As soon as I stepped in, my friend Don and my friend Alan, who was carrying the treasure chest, they were like, "There he is." And everybody kind of cheered, everybody was relieved, everybody was worried about where I had been. They said, "Where were you?" And I said, "Amish country." I thanked Steven and Levi very warmly, I gave them hugs.

• 50:57Speaker 06

  They seemed a little bit amused, they were looking around and weren't really sure what they were looking at, but they, they were happy I got to where I needed to go. I kind of got that sense too, like that the next day, they were going to be telling everybody, "We met the weirdest guy last night."

• 51:14Speaker 06

  My name is Mal Eclipse. I'm a madman, a revolutionary in the world of Tyra, on the continent of Avalon, in the Kingdom of Evendar, in the Duchy of Greyhorn. This is a, this is a land of order and chaos. There are liches, and death knights, vampires, werewolves. One of the werewolves is a baron, and he rules part of Greyhorn.

• 51:44Glynn Washington?

  Thank you, Dan Comstock, for the fantastical tale. Now, Dan's been organizing LARPing events for decades now. Even though Mal Eclipse the Anarchist is retired, Dan only plays the hero now. Don't get lost chasing anybody, Dan. The original score was by Renzo Gorrio, and that piece was produced by Jasmine Aguilera.

• 52:10Glynn Washington?

  What a show. If you missed even a moment, no, because the Snap Judgment Storytelling Podcast awakes your listening pleasure. More episodes than you can shake a stick at, or walk the Shadowlands, with our Evil Twin Podcast, spook stories about the things that go bump in the night, or amazing tales from the African continent, from Mind Your Own to Peter Nyongo, all available wherever you get your podcasts. Snap storytelling, rub it all over your body, it feels so good. KQUD in San Francisco is Snap's Orbiting Hall of Justice. Snap is brought to you by the team that has never, not once, had to hide

• 52:55Glynn Washington?

  on a window ledge like what happens in every single sitcom ever made, except of course, for the Uber producer, Mr. Mark Ristich, who was actually something of a window ledge connoisseur. Now, there's Nancy Lopez, Pat Massey Miller, Anna Sussman, Renzo Goryo, John Facile, Shana Shealy, Taylor Decot, Flo Wiley, Bo Walsh, Marissa Dodge, David Exame, and Regina Bediako. And this is not the news, no way is this the news. In fact, your neighborhood jerk crow could bully you for years on the slide, and your neighbors and friends could universally take the crow's side in your ongoing dispute, and you would

• 53:40Glynn Washington?

  still, still, not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is PRX.