It all started one Saturday morning after Ben and I had finished watching Bugs Bunny, Ark II and
the Shazam!/Isis Action Hour. Mounting our banana-seated bicycles we pushed across the road and
into the far, deep wilds of the neighboring peat farm.
We were hunting. But not for wild game. What we were after was more precious: Arrowheads and
cow bones. Abandoned gas pump handles, wooden wire spools and rusty Chevron signs. You know, the
good stuff.
We planned to wander far to the other side of the farm -- so we would be well out of earshot when
it came time for Mama to call us home with the car horn.
Little did we realize what true treasure awaited us in the bogs across the road! As Bugs might say,
"And oh, what heights we hit! On with the show, this is it!"
We couldn’t have picked a better time to go exploring. Crews had gone in and stripped the peat right
down to the muck and even the pond was drawn down completely, revealing tons of small animal
bones. There were even complete cow skeletons seemingly fossilized into slabs of hardened earth.
Dugout canoes, crafted hundreds of years ago, stuck up from the bottomland like petrified tree
stumps. Arrowheads and spear points verily littered the rows of churned up earth. The tips of
Mammoth tusks stuck out from the sides of deep, twisting canals. Every now and then we’d stumble
over the leg bone of some enormous, Ice Age animal.
Because of my little legs (and the fact I had to stop every five steps to pull a sneaker from the
bottomless muck), Ben (who was wearing boots) had pushed out far ahead of me and as a result was
the first to make the discovery of the day. As I struggled in the muck with my bicycle (I was
pushing it by this time), he hailed me with one of our "Star Trek Communicator" walkie-talkies.
"Hey, leave your bike and come on up here!" he said.
I dropped the swept-back handlebars in the mud and tromped up to him. He was pointing at
something down in a ravine.
I looked and lo and behold, encrusted in the wall of the chasm, was the ghastly, leathery,
mummified remains of a human being.
Then there was a horrible, high-pitched screeching sound that stopped only when Ben slapped me
upside the head.
"Stop that!" he commanded. "Now go down there and dig it out."
"Why me?"
"Because if you don’t, I’ll tell Mama about the lingerie ad clippings you keep stashed in the sock
drawer." (Brothers can be so cruel.)
"Hah!" I replied, "For your information, I don’t keep them in the sock drawer."
"Whatever. Dig!" he said as he flung me down.
Grumbling and embarrassed, I started working my bare fingertips into the cold wet muck surrounding
the icky mummy.
As I worked, I noticed that the skeleton lay preserved beneath a thick layer of peat, and
surrounding it were ancient Celtic runes which, thanks to our higher Oxford (Elementary) School
education, we were able to decipher quite readily.
We learned that the mummy’s name was S’ven of V’ine. Judging by his size (6 feet, 2 inches) and
the wispy blond strands of what used to be ponytails hanging off the mummified, leathery skull, we
surmised our find could be but one thing: An ancient Florida Viking!
Digging around further, I found bits of cloth, more hair, the remains of an iron helmet,
breastplates, and ... Armazilla!
"What the hell is that?" Ben said.
"It appears to be a horned helmet made of armadillo hide," I said, and pulled it from its tomb with
a yank.
Ben hopped down beside me.
"There’s writing inside. What’s it say?"
"It says, ‘Here lies the Celebrated Headdress of S’ven of V’ine, known to all as the Great
Armazilla. He Who wears this Great Helm shall Possess the Fertile Endowments of Nature’ --
whatever that means -- ‘And when passed to Others shall portend Great Stories of Courage and
Valor. I am S’ven of V’ine, of the Land of Northmen."
Now the question you are probably asking by now is, how did a Viking wind up in Florida?
Well, as it turns out, the Hard Way. Found inside a bag along the corpse we found the Journal of
S’ven of V’ine, which took us back to the year 800 A.D. While exploring off the coast of
Newfoundland, Ol’ S’ven’s boat was caught up in a monstrous whirlpool that sucked him down into the
depths of the Gulf Stream. Holding his breath, S’ven managed to hang on to his boat while his crew
was swept away by the swirling ocean. After landing on the bottom of the ocean, and fighting off
hordes of Grendels, S’ven managed to catch a passing dolphin, which dropped him off near the mouth
of what would later be called the St. John’s River.
S’ven found Florida to be a paradise, and the indigenous people looked upon him as sort of a god. So
much so that they sacrificed a giant armadillo in his honor, and from its hide they made the Great
Helm called Armazilla.
Unable to get home again, S’ven spent his remaining days tramping through the heart of Florida’s
virgin, pre-Yankee wilderness.
One day, while roaming through what would become our neck of the woods, he came to a massive
village populated by the ancestors of Timucuan Indians. Awed by his imposing stature and by the
great Horned Armazilla, the tribe made him a god -- for the second time in his life.
Although carried high by the villagers as a Living God, S’ven got careless one day while knapping
some flint. Bleeding profusely, he went to the elders for help, only to find them less than
enthusiastic to learn their god bled like a man. So he was stoned, then cast into the lake where his
remains remained for hundreds of years, until we found him -- and Armazilla.
We covered up S’ven’s remains and took the helmet home. It was a great hit at show-and-tell,
where we learned of one great power unknown to S’ven -- that of forcing homeroom teachers into
early retirement.
Today, Armazilla’s power to fill a man with all the endowments of nature has changed somewhat
(from sexual virility to excessive flatulence--as we found out with great dismay). But the Great
Helm still has a high place of honor among those who share S’ven’s love of the Deep Woods. And
wherever manly merry men meet to raise their tankards in spirited toasts around a campfire,
somewhere in the background you may just catch a glimpse of ol’ S’ven of V’ine, curling his long blond
beard and laughing in the firelight.
