One of the great recreations and pleasures of life is scaring the bejeebers out of friends and family.  Some might consider this a perverted way to get one's jollies; but the challenge and anticipation of inventing a really good scare, and the satisfaction and hilarious recountings of successful escapades can only be fully appreciated by true aficionados.

There are many aficionados in the Kerns family.  The tradition may have had its origin in the efforts of two little boys who tried for years to surprise their iron-willed mother.

At some point in our early lives, Tim and I noticed that our mother had an unusually high degree of self control over her central nervous system.  The woman simply couldn't be startled.  Many a plan was devised to break through her defenses, but each sortie was calmly, serenely, and disappointingly rebuffed.

Her control was amply demonstrated the day that I noticed Tim coming up through the field from the pond.  Dangling by its tail, Tim was gingerly carrying a writhing garter snake.  It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out his intentions.  They were plainly evident in every step he took.

I did the only prudent thing there was to do.  I fled to my bedroom closet where I hid in its deepest recesses.  There I breathlessly trembled while all sorts of terrible visions went through my head of the things that would happen if my hiding place was discovered.

It was a warm, quiet summer day.  The front door stood open.  Mom sat in her chair, just inside the door, mending clothes.  Her back was to the doorway which Tim stealthily entered.  His intended victim had probably been his little brother, but little brother was nowhere in sight.  Mother was.  Quietly, carefully, Tim reached up over the back of her chair and lowered the snake, its tongue flicking in and out, until its head was just inches from her face.

She couldn't have seen him coming nor anticipated his diabolical act, yet without a flinch she simply said, "Go put it back where you got it."  She never looked up, and she never missed a stitch.

Tim's pleasant anticipations rushed out of him like air from a balloon.  I waited in terror, all ears, fully expecting a search for my whereabouts.  But Tim had been defeated and deflated by his mother's defenses, and obediently retraced his steps to release his reptilian captive.

Most memorable to us both was the can't-fail plot we hatched which would finally reveal our mother to be human.

It was the summer of 1962.  The family was building our new block house.  It was located down through the field from the old house where we were living.  It was nearer the county road than the old house, and Mom was afraid someone would drive in the driveway of the new house at night and steal tools.  Therefore, each evening she made it a habit to walk down to the new house and out the driveway to shut the front gate.

The house and driveway were being constructed in an alfalfa field.  The alfalfa was thick and tall, ready to be harvested.  It lined the entire length of the driveway.

Wouldn't it be great, we reasoned, to sneak down ahead of our unsuspecting mother and hide in the alfalfa at the edge of the driveway?  The gloom of dusk would be settling—the perfect, spooky time.  She'd come strolling along the driveway, and we'd suddenly leap out at her.  She'd jump big time.  She'd probably even scream.

Two giggling, gleeful boys waited eagerly for the big moment.  We crouched, ready to spring, as the sound of her footsteps came nearer and nearer.  Now!  We leaped from our hiding places with a terrific roar.

Our mother, in a quiet voice we'd remember with amazement all our lives, simply said, "Hello, boys," and kept walking.  Her feet never skipped a step, and her heart never missed a beat.

The disappointment at our failure remained with us all our lives.  Never once did we ever succeed in startling our mother.  Perhaps it was this failure that bred in us the need to succeed in future efforts.

Milk parlors would seem to be the epitome of peace and calm.  Gentle cows enter and placidly eat their grain to the rhythmic sounds of the vacuum pump relieving them of their milk.  The single milkman or woman moves purposely back and forth attaching milkers, removing milkers, putting cows out and letting cows in.  The routine has been done so many times that thought isn't even necessary.  All is calm, purposeful and routine.

It is those peaceful qualities that make milk parlors particularly fertile ground for scares.  Any sudden introduction of something foreign into such a serene atmosphere is sufficient to unnerve the steadiest person.

This quality about milk parlors was discovered the day that our father walked in on our neighbor, Shirley, as she was milking their cows.  Shirley was a big, jolly woman.  Her back was to the door as Dad entered.  She was expecting no one, and hadn't seen Dad approach.  He stood irresolutely for a moment not knowing how to announce his presence.  Tapping her on the shoulder wouldn't be good.  Waiting until she turned and noticed him would probably startle her.  It would be best, he reasoned, to vocally announce his presence.

"Shirley?" he inquired.  With a scream that would have gladdened other hearts, Shirley's buckets flew into the air, even as her portly body did its best to follow.

Not being into scaring people, Dad felt badly.  But in his telling of the story were born other ideas in other minds.

My brothers each started dairies later, and operated them with their sons.  Each milker in turn fell victim to scare plots.  My brother Mac's son, Wes, was a particularly good victim.

I was uninvolved in either the dairies or the scares, but heard reports about the nervous milkers.  They were doubly jumpy by virtue of the fact that they already knew they were going to be startled.  They just didn't know when.

That's when I came into possession of a particularly large, ugly rubber snake.  It was brown, long, as big around as my arm, and venomous looking.

"Wouldn't that look nice slithering out from under Tim's milk tank?" I thought to myself.

Milking schedules were checked, and the snake was installed on an afternoon before Tim was due to take the evening shift.  A hidden video camera to record ensuing events would have made high entertainment.  Unfortunately, this event had no eyewitnesses other than Tim and the snake.  Tim claims that he screamed, ran out of the milkhouse, and told everyone not to go in because there was a poisonous snake in there.

Tim accused Wes of the dastardly deed.  Wes, however, denied having any knowledge of the plot, but wished he had.  When Tim found out that I was the perpetrator, his reaction was, "Darn it.  Now I can't do it to Wes."

What became of the snake is not known.  It was passed around until it was lost from history.  It was a handsome snake, the best ever employed by scare mongers.  Its loss was much regretted.

The snake's descendants have been employed in a wide variety of scare tactics.  Tim's own favorite was to place one on the conveyor of the potato digger.  The snake jiggled along on the moving potatoes until the flying hand of one of Tim's employees reached for the jetsam to eject it.  The hand invariably tripped over itself in midair, and was followed by a scream and Tim's gleeful guffaws.  Each potato crew came to recognize the signs of an approaching snake by the eager anticipation on the face of their employer as he walked beside the digger checking the working of the machine.

Snakes were tied to the inside door handles of potato trucks, placed in mailboxes, and tied so they'd leap from the mailbox with the opening of the door.  My sister, Ellen, reportedly sat with one unnoticed in her lap for some time, and went ballistic when she discovered its presence.

Wes had a very memorable, real-life experience when he stopped along a road one day to pick up a lidded bucket that had been lost from the back of some other pickup.  It looked like a good, useable bucket, so he stopped and threw it into the back of his truck.  There it stayed for several days, until noticing it several days later, he decided to open the bucket and see what was inside.  He pried the lid off and removed it.  A live rattlesnake leaped from the bucket and grabbed the front of his coat!

That true story made me tremble for days.  Wes later learned the reason for the snake in the bucket.  An acquaintance told him that he'd found the snake, and scooped it up in the bucket with the intention of giving it to his friend in Portland.  Unfortunately, on the trip back to town, the bucket had blown out of the back of his pickup.

Nathan's dedicated scout leader, Blaine, decided to give his boys a real adventure, and arranged a float trip on rafts down the Salmon River.  He had only one big worry which he made the mistake of voicing several times to the boys.

"I just hope we don't see any snakes.  I hate snakes.  I'm always afraid one might crawl into my sleeping bag."

One learns when working with youth that their imaginations are very capable of devising ideas without suggestions being planted in their heads.  One learns to think before speaking.

"What happened to the snake?" Nathan was asked years later after recounting the tale.

"I don't know for sure.  I suppose it's at the bottom of the Salmon River."

Tim has a natural (or unnatural) fear of bats.  Its origin is probably lost in some obscure childhood experience.  Perhaps it was born from the experience of red-tail hawks swooping at him to protect their nest.  Tim never liked flying things that swooped at him.

But of all flying things, bats were the worst.  He feared them so much that he once even had a premonition of an encounter with one.

He and his wife were driving home from La Grande one night when a vision came into his head of a bat in their house.  He informed his wife of the fact.  Upon their arrival home he timorously opened the front door and reached one hand around the corner to flip on the light switch.  He cautiously peered into the room searching for the bat that he knew was there.

Then he saw it!  It was perched at the top of the drapes staring straight at him.  As they debated what to do next, the "bat" suddenly scurried down the curtain and off to its mouse hole.

While building the potato cellar, the subject of bats came up.  Was it a coincidence that a brown leaf floated by a short time later, or could it have been launched by Tim's nephew, Brent?  However questionable the source, the effect was sure.  In his haste to get down, Tim nearly fell from the 20-foot high beam that he was perched upon.  He went straight to little Nathan and his own little boy, Tommy, who were playing nearby, and delivered a lecture to the puzzled boys about the dangers of rabies and crazy bats that fly around in the daytime.

Nighttime scare-mongering is by far the most effective.  Perhaps that's because the daylights have already been removed naturally and needn't be scared out of a person.

Effective scare-mongering requires alertness.  Opportunities pass quickly.  They must be instantly recognized and acted upon.

Scare-mongering also necessitates a willingness to go to great extremes, sometimes to even expend great physical energy.  No effort is too great a sacrifice to pay for an instant of total terror on the face of a hapless victim.

A case in point is the gate-locking incident involving me, the victim, and Matt, the scare-monger.  The problem was hunters.  The solution was to lock the gate to keep them out.  The time chosen to do so was 9:00 p.m.  Dark.  Very dark.

I got in my car to drive 3/4 of a mile up the hill to the gate.  Matt recognized an opportunity, and took off running the 1/2 mile through the fields to be at the gate at the same time as I.

So it was that I was intently installing my new padlock on a gatepost at the edge of the dark woods when a madman came bursting out of the same.

This incident is an excellent illustration of all of the elements of dark, recognized opportunity, physical exertion, and, most of all, surprise coming together perfectly.  Nothing needs to be said of the results.

Another fine example of scare-mongering elements nicely coming together involved Nathan and Amy at 3:00 a.m.  The stage was set as Amy got out of bed to go to the kitchen for a drink.  Nathan alertly recognized his opportunity and came crawling rapidly on all fours at the hapless, sleepy girl.  One does not expect 4-legged creatures to come bounding into darkened kitchens directly at one.  Surprise was evident in her every feature and action.

Some people make better victims than others.  Some people are naturally more jumpy.  Once this trait is discovered in a person, he is marked for life as fair game.

Tom Brock was fair game.  I called Tom to artificially inseminate my Jersey cows whenever one came into heat.  Tom was a busy person, and often couldn't come until after dark.  Light or dark actually didn't seem to make much difference in Tom's case, however.

Adam discovered Tom's susceptibilities by hiding in the grass one evening as Tom returned to his pickup from our barn.  The results were so gratifying that Adam met Tom on successive trips by the pond, by his truck, in his truck and under his truck.  Tom was constantly on his guard (which probably only heightened his response).  Each time he thought he had successfully run the gauntlet only to be surprised at the last unexpected moment.  He never failed to jump and yell, and once almost fell off the gate he was climbing over.

Scare-mongering opportunities can be created as well as recognized.  Created opportunities require observation and patience.  Adam is good at that.

Adam observed the start that his mother gave me.  Adam's mother has never been into scare-mongering, and even looks upon it disapprovingly.  Even so, she was the inadvertent perpetrator of my biggest fright, and provided the seedbed for other ideas in the mind of our son.

Margie is a heat-seeker.  Having a cool metabolism, Margie gravitates to warm things.  Margie also has the ability to wander about the house without drooling while brushing her teeth, a feat I find impossible since I'm a drooler.

Thus it was that one cold winter night after the kids had all gone to bed, I jerked open the furnace room door to get my boots or my coat.  I ran smack into my wife who was standing there in the dark smiling innocently at me with a toothbrush in her mouth.

I went violently reeling backward.  A spectral toothbrusher standing in the dark was more than my senses had been prepared to meet.  Recovery and explanations took some time.  Margie simply explained that she had just been getting warm.  What could be more natural?

Years later in an obvious imitation of Margie's scare discovery, Adam rigged a trap.  He erected my coveralls in an upright position in the furnace room and stuffed the legs into a pair of boots.  He installed a teddy bear in the neck of the coveralls, and placed a cap on the bear's head.  Then he awaited results.

The outcome was all that he had hoped, as I again recoiled down the hallway.

His next escapade involved hiding in my closet.  He waited patiently until I came to get my bathrobe.  As I reached into the dark closet, a hand closed around my arm.

Warning:  Such acts should not be attempted with anyone having a history of heart problems.

But no matter how carefully contrived, planned scares cannot be beaten in effectiveness by the naturally-occurring kind.  In contrived scares one's reflexes are quicker than one's mind.  But the mind quickly catches up, pieces the situation together, and tells the heart to slow down and the adrenal glands to stop secreting.

In natural scares the mind is unsure what will happen next.  The heart, therefore continues to pound, and the adrenalin to flow until the danger is past.

Margie fell victim to one of the worst natural scares.  It involved Matt's pigs.

Matt's pigs became quite creative escape artists, much to Margie's disgust.  Most farm animals, when they get out of their pens a quarter of a mile from the house have 360 degrees in which to scatter.  Experience shows, however, that pigs and goats have homing instincts which send them unerringly to the house.  Goats head for the front porch.  Pigs head for the tulip bed.

One dark night Margie was in the yard.  Matt's pigs were also in the yard.  Neither knew of the other's presence.  Margie and a hog were each rounding a corner of the house when they met head on.  It would be difficult to know which was the more surprised.  Margie thought she was alone.  The hog thought it was safe to perform its depredations under cover of darkness.

The pig was first to speak.  It barked in surprise, "Woof, Woof!"

The pig was the only witness to Margie's reaction.  It's probably safe to say that she didn't scream, since her vocal cords have never been able to work that way.  But it's also safe to say that every other organ and muscle in her body screamed long and loudly.

Thereafter Margie had no tolerance for escaped pigs.  She simply called the high school to have a message delivered to Matt to have him come home and solve the problem.  The secretary delivered the message via the intercom system for all to hear:  "Matt Kerns, your pigs are out!"