*Swings by skating on a bacon rind* You coming? :D

Hello myth-makers!

How has your week been? What have you been up to?

Melbourne has been enjoying some gloriously sunny early-Spring weather, and it's wonderful to see how much more cheerful everyone naturally is because of it. 😆

Whenever I go to a new place now, I'm naturally on the look-out for legends from that place. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to find one in Minnesota, since most of my time was spent in the studio recording the musical. But stories are all around us, so if you spend time with anyone, anywhere, you're bound to bump into them. :)

Evangelyn's grandparents took us up to see Lake Superior just before I left, and as we drove, they told me about the land and the history of the lake. They told me about the shipwreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and even played me a song that was written about it.

"Have you heard of Paul Bunyan?" her grandpa asked me at one point.

"He's a local legend of the mid-west." Ooh, my favourite. "He's a huge lumberjack, and there are all these stories about him. He rescued an ox from a frozen lake, so he's often pictured with a blue ox." The rest of the family chimed in with a couple of stories about him. My favourite? "One time he found a road that was all windy, so he rolled it up and spread it out so that it was straight." As we looked around Duluth and the state parks, I found Paul Bunyans and blue oxen on tea towels and socks and shirts. (The ox is named Babe, and it confused me why all these tea towels had "Lake Babe" written on them. Got it now 😂)

When I got back to Australia, I did some of my own research so I could write to you and tell you about him :D. Everything about Paul Bunyan is big, fantastical, and the stories vividly transports me straight into the depths of the North American forests. And all the stories grew and grew around camps and fires. I love the image of big American men sitting around a bonfire at the end of a long day, surrounded by sky-high pine trees, each trying to top the other with stories starting with "Well I heard Paul Bunyan..." 😜

Before we get to hear some of them, let me introduce the two main characters:

Paul Bunyan was said to be seven feet tall and enormously strong, with a voice so powerful that it could level forests. He could do anything... except write. When he needed equipment, he would draw a picture of what he needed.

Bunyan rescued Babe the ox during a particularly cold winter: so cold the snow turned blue and people's words froze in the air before you could hear them. The calf was found in a lake, and though Bunyan pulled him out and worked hard to warm him up, he never lost his blue colour. Bunyan loved his animals, and looked after them so well that they all grew to be enormous. Babe's horns were seven feet across, and the stories say that he could carry anything that had two ends. (Including a road... hence he could roll up and carry the windy roads 😉.)

Okay, now we're ready for some stories!

Did you know that our Campfire is magical? It can connect and teleport us to any similar fire where stories are being told. Today, it will take us to a night, dark and just preparing for a bitterly cold winter. Can you smell the pine needles? They're just beginning to fall. The men around this new campfire are large and boisterous but welcoming. Don't worry about the whispers of the animals around us; the men know the land and its inhabitants well, and will look after us. Ooh--they're just starting to share their Paul Bunyan stories!

👨🏼‍🦳: When I knew Paul Bunyan, he would blow through a hollow tree to call his band of forty lumberjacks for dinner!

*whispers*: All the men will say they know Bunyan, even though he's not a real person. Just go with it.

👨🏼‍🌾: I heard that Paul Bunyan's griddle was so enormous, his cook would get the men to skate across it on bacon rinds before he put his pancake mix in!

👴🏼: Well, I worked with Bunyan one particularly humid summer. We were being harassed by mosquitos so big that they were carrying the men away! But Bunyan had heard of giant bees on the other side of the mountain. He sent someone to fetch them so they could fight the mosquitos. They did fight, but not for long. By the end of the summer, they'd bred together, and their offspring was worse than either parent. They were giant bee-mosquitoes, with stingers on either end!

🧔🏽‍♂️: Did you hear what happened to his dog Elmer?

👨🏼‍🦳 👨🏼‍🌾 👴🏼: No...?

🧔🏽‍♂️: One night, Bunyan thought he heard a rat in the cabin, and flung his axe to kill it. Instead, he cut Elmer in two! In the dark, he quickly grabbed his needle and thread, and sewed the dog up. In the morning he realised that he'd made a mistake in the dark--Elmer's back legs were on upside down! Elmer recovered, and found an upside (ha sorry 😂) to the situation: he could run on two legs until they got tired, then flip over and run on the other two! 😂

: There are plenty more stories for the finding, if you're up for more fun! If you're curious, here are the websites I took the above stories from:

​https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ah-paulbunyan/​

​https://www.americanfolklore.net/babe-the-blue-ox/​

And there are plenty more sites out there :).

Happy exploring! Let me know if you find a good one I haven't shared yet! :D And if you knew of Paul Bunyan before, I'd love to hear from you! Where did you hear of him? Did you learn any other stories, or where there differences?

I'd love to hear from you. I hope you bump into some fun stories this week. :)

PS the draft title for this email was "Babe can't pick up the roadworks because they have no end :')". When I came back a couple of weeks later to edit it, I made myself laugh. 😆

PPS I almost unsubscribed from my own newsletter trying to write that PS. I hope you realise the danger I put myself in for this lol