Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

Evel Knievel At the Pearly Gates

By Carol Mell, 1-18-08

We lost some interesting people last year. On the evangelical side Reverend Jerry Falwell and Tammy Faye went to meet their maker. On behalf of the silent, the great French mime Marcel Marceau climbed his imaginary ladder for the last time while Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti left in a fanfare worthy of a pope. Beverly Sills, the American opera singer, joined her Italian friend on the other side. 

I once got a student ticket to watch Sills run a dress rehearsal of Verdi’s “Otello” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York The script required that a great ship sail into the onstage harbor. Every time the ship came in, it would catch making the onboard Otello lurch in the middle of his aria. Sills, waving her clipboard, strode about the stage barking irritated commands. I sat in the balcony trying not to laugh out loud.

Though I “knew” Sills, it was the death of Evel Knievel, the bunged up daredevil in the confederate-flag suit that hit closest to home. That would be Granite, Oregon, the ghost town my father still inhabits, where the only person that might have heard of Sills was Adaline, the old crazy known for her midnight organ concerts of eerie, vampire movie music which, I believe, would qualify as “classical music.”

Across the road Sheriff Bud Morrow lived in his A-frame. He wasn’t a sheriff really but everybody treated him like one on account of his silver star and pearl-handled revolver. Bud was slow in the head but he watched over the town, a fact people appreciated since only my folks, Adaline and Bud lived there year round.

I was home from college after Evel’s famous jump over the Snake River in Twin Falls, Idaho, not far away. I thought he was cheating by claiming to jump the “Snake River Canyon.” He knew darned well that we’d all imagine Hell’s Canyon, a huge chasm deeper than the Grand Canyon but then, Evel was always one for exaggeration.

Even with a launching platform and motorcycle rockets he never made the other side. His parachutes kept him from getting killed when he hit bottom. The fact that Evel often got injured, bad, made him a bigger hero to Bud than the most busted up buckin’ bronc rider. 

I was standing in the road chatting with the sheriff whom I had known since I was little. I had just realized that I was smarter. After a little college I figured I was smarter than just about everybody.

“You hear about Evel Knievel?” asked Bud.

“Yeah,” I said, though he was hardly the talk of my snooty college crowd. They preferred Marx and Mao. “I heard he didn’t make it.”

“Yeah, but he hardly broke nuthin’ neither,” Bud said. Evel had a reputation for broken bones, 35, that still stands as a Guinness World Record.

“I hear Evel’s got a brother, Awful Knawful, who’s even better than he is,” Bud said confidentially.

“There is no such person, Bud.”

“Everybody knows about Awful Knawful.”

“Awful Knawful is a fake.”

“I’d still like to see him.”

There never was much point in arguing with Bud.


Bud died a few years later, murdered by Adaline, her daughter and some drifter and even though I’d have had more respect for Evel if he’d made the Snake, I found myself on the Internet looking for Awful Knawful. Turns out he existed in the minds of some British comedians. How Bud heard about their parody I can only imagine but as I was in the imagination department already, I had a vision of Bud meeting Evel and other recent arrivals at the pearly gates.

(Pavorotti arrives huffing and puffing at the gates of St. Peter as Evel Knievel strolls
up. An “Out to Lunch” sign hangs on the gate.)

“That sure was some hill,” Pavorotti remarks.

“That was nothing,” Evel says, “I once jumped over 10 buses on a motorcycle.”

“Is that how you landed here?”

“Nah. This last jump was easy.”

Beverly Sills comes along, kissing Pavorotti on his hairy cheek. “How’s
heaven? she asks.

“The conversation is disappointing,” he says looking at Evel, “but I’m waiting to see the wine cellar.”

“Everybody knows there’s no cellars in Heaven,” pipes up Evel.

Marcel Marceau comes up.

“How come he don’t say nuthin,” asks Evel. “He dumb?”

But Marceau traces a doorway in the clouds with his delicate white gloves and there, just there a door appears. Our friends walk their bones, the broken and the whole, through that door never to be seen again alive on this earth.

When Evel reaches the other side, Bud is there.

“Say,” Bud says, “ain’t you got a brother, name of Awful Knawful?”

Even when you are dead and find yourself on the heavenly Humbug Mountain, you are danged if you do and danged if you don’t so you might just as well.

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