Blue Fog

Ralph and I have done many things over the course of years and have had many jobs to support ourselves and our families in that time. Within the last five years however we have both become Greyhound coach operators and, just to suggest that there might be some weird psychic inbreeding goin on, in actual fact our oldest brother is a retired Greyhound driver as well.

Anyway, because it's what we both do now, elements of the job have literally again entered the picture. That explains the flipped Greyhound bus.

The story here got encredibly wordy and just about completely filled up the brochure. The story goes:

The Campbell Brothers Winery Presents

Blue Fog

...and the discovery of the ancient civilization of Atlantis.

Running was a word the Campbell brothers, Ralph and Colin, understood. So were the words fleeing, jurisdiction, and jail. It seemed that most of the police forces that they had contact with also know some words, like apprehend, arrest, and excessive force. It’s amazing how many people share vocabulary. It’s also amazing just how many people the Campbell brothers have outraged in their career as entrepreneurial providers of illegal fermented beverages, which meant that they were running out of places to run.

They decided that they were frankly tired of all this fleeing and needed a rest. In fact what they really wanted was a vacation, “And why not drive to Europe?” one of them suggested. The other nodded in agreement, “They don’t know us yet.”

They realized that it might be a long drive and so decided to get a vehicle that was used to covering long distances. They stole a bus, just drove it off a platform at the local terminal while nobody was looking. They stashed in it a couple barrels of home brewed wine and a bunch of baggies of their homemade chili. They then drove to the lakeshore where they realized a fundamental flaw in their plan. Colin said to Ralph, “Hey, you know if we drive this thing into the water it’s just going to sink and then we’re out of a bus and no European vacation.”

Ralph replied, “Well we’re not going to drive it into the water, that would be nuts. We’ll go off the end of a dock instead.”

Colin agrees, “That makes it different.”

So the brothers drove the bus off a dock. The bus hit the water nose first, flipped on its back and started floating away from shore, out across Lake Ontario, starting the long journey down the St. Lawrence. There was a sort of peace for the time because the Campbells had knocked themselves out.

Later on, when the Campbells were, for the lack of a better word, conscious, they floated over a yacht club and in the resulting splintering, cracking, snapping and screaming managed to snag a mast, some rope, and a couple of oars from the debris, so they rigged the bus into something like a primitive galley.

They floated out into the Atlantic Ocean and hung a right. Colin, who was now doing most of the rowing (and complaining about it often and loudly), said that they needed to get some help, and some different food because the chili was starting to eat through the plastic.

The chili by this time was well beyond the acceptable and safe limits for human consumption. It had taken on several lives of its own. The Campbells recognized this fact and so at the next island they bumped into they waded ashore in order to restock, and to find crew if they could. The only thing that they could find that looked strong and didn’t seem to mind the Campbells, at least Colin, very much was a rather large orangutan that wandered out of the jungle onto the beach. The Campbells thought they had it made and could now relax.




What the brothers didn’t notice was that a couple of rats also snuck on board.

Ralph ordered the orangutan, which he’d named Fred, to lay in supplies. These ended up consisting of several bunches of bananananas (a word easy to start writing but sometimes difficult to tell where it should end), coconuts, and assorted greenery. Ralph then tried to boss Fred around, like he did his brother, to find them some more people food too. Fred grabbed hold of Ralph and hoisted him up by an ankle. He then shook him while waggling his finger in Ralph’s upside down face, until that idea went away. He then tossed Ralph aside, and started loading leaves to build himself a nest.

The stowaway rats made themselves right at home. They moved into a now empty wine barrel and dragged in all sorts of rags and stuff to make themselves comfortable. They also discovered the several baggies of chili. After eating some of this, and lapping at some wine leaking from the other barrel, they fell into a contented coma.

Over the next few days their home, the barrel, started to give off a strange blue luminous fog, and every now and then little balls of blue fire would shoot from the mouth and explode in the air. This made it somewhat difficult for either of the brothers to approach. They had to go without booze for a whole week.

In the night, in addition to explosions, there were also noises of a different nature coming from the barrel. It sounded like tiny little party favours and giggles, and little rat bongos that kept the brothers from getting any sleep.

Colin asked his big brother what they should do.

Ralph thought a moment and then said, “I think we should name the rats.”

“Name the rats what?”

“How about Spark and Plug.” And so it was.




They set off again, this time to cross the ocean. Ralph avoided Fred now because he was frankly afraid of him. He spent most of his time driving the bus from the top of the makeshift mast. Colin and Fred seem to get along fine and when Colin took breaks from rowing (Fred refused to do it) they would sit together and pick lice off one another, or play checkers. Fred also shared food with him.

After a couple of days up the mast Ralph decided he needed something in his diet, like food: fish, seaweed, anything. He shinnied down the mast, snuck past the napping orangutan and down into the cabin of the bus. There he took out a line, put a hook on the other end and baited it with one of the dead bugs that had been asphyxiated by the blue fog. He then opened one of the roof hatches of the bus, now the hull, in order to fish. Water started pouring in.

Colin came running in and said, “You idiot, you have to open the other hatch as well so that the water can run out too.” He does. The bus sinks faster. When the main cabin fills with water Colin, Ralph, Fred, Spark and Plug all fight over gulps of air by sticking their heads up into the hole of the toilet at the rear of the bus. They all end up coated in blue.

Now even though bus is sub spelled backwards they are not one in the same thing. The vehicle they were now trapped in had more in common with a cement block than an underwater craft. Everything looked dark for the adventurers and if they could have seen it would have looked like the end.

Fate, karma, or something even nastier, played a hand. The Campbells didn’t die. No living creature was harmed during the sinking of this bus. Just before the last of the air gave out, the bus met some sort of a force field and slipped through like a hot dildo through jello. The nose of the bus touched ground, the rear jutted through the force field so the bus was at something like a 45 degree angle. The door opened and out gushed water, two brothers, two rats, and an orangutan.

Slowly getting to their feet the brothers think that they must have died and were now in heaven. They looked around to see soft glowing light, the green of many living things, beautiful architecture, and beside the bus an incredibly large gold statue of what must have been a god or something, with a pitchfork held in one regal hand.

There was also a crowd of people now gathering around them, beautiful babes and serene and stately men apparently happy to see them. Odd.

What the Campbells didn’t realize, because they had never read that particular comic book, was that these were the people of the lost civilization of Atlantis, which according to legend had sunk below the waters some five thousand years ago.

The rats took one quick look at everything and then scampered back aboard the bus to rearrange their now freshly rinsed home and to get down to some serious eating, drinking and bongoing.

The Atlantians, for their part, looked at the strange craft, and then regarded the crew, the two blue hominids, and the blue tinted hairy creature (that must be the officer and leader of this expedition). They could come up with only one explanation, the craft and crew were from another world, and these were alien visitors. They wouldn’t understand just how wrong they were but still how alien the two brothers really were until it was much too late. Then the Atlantians made the biggest mistake of all by welcoming them to their city. They began to prepare a banquet and declared a holiday in their honour.

Of course neither group could understand the other. For the Campbells the language sounded not only like Greek to them, but early Greek at that. In an effort to be understood there was much repeating of words and pointing and pantomiming by both parties which, lets face it, leaves lots of room for misunderstanding, which the Campbells are notoriously good at.

They were guided into a large domed building nearby where many types of food and drink were arrayed on a large table. Ralph and Colin, once they checked out the spread and tasted one or two items (Colin said they tasted like bait) decided to ignore all that and spent the next few hours nodding a lot at the Atlantians as they talked and determinedly getting swacked on some really primo hooch that they found.

Suddenly from outside there was an explosion that rocked the building. Everyone rushed outside, although the brothers were moving quite a bit slower than the others by then. What they saw when the foul smelling smoke finally cleared (causing much gagging and vomiting) was a charred piece of ground around the bus that was even now filling up with an evil looking and smelling blue fog. Something like a small angry comet arced from the doorway, hit the fog, which then exploded with incredible force and noise.

From the inside of the bus could be heard hiccups and a laughter so high it was almost inaudible, and the sound of tiny drums. The Atlantians fell back in fear thinking, ‘What demon is this, what vengeful god have we awoken’?

An extremely drunk Ralph steps forward and made ‘it’s O.K.’ signs with his hands, then motions the Atlantians to wait just a second. He approaches the bus and waits just to one side of the door for one of the explosions to occur and then quickly (for him) steps inside. After a few seconds he comes triumphantly out carrying two rats, one in each hand, a jug under one arm, a baggie under the other. The people start to cluster around him as he introduces everyone to Spark and Plug.

Colin takes the two rats from him and then, grinning like a drunk showing off a party trick, he strokes the two which start giving off sparks. Ralph takes a bit of food from the baggie and feeds each one, then gives them a bit of wine to drink, and then stands back. Colin holds the rats up and bows to the people, then starts to rub the two together vigorously, to the Atlantian’s horror, until sparks started showering off their fur. Then the two rats farted a long stream of blue fog. The sparks ignited the gas, which then burned everything in its path like a berserk welding torch, singeing the beards of many Atlantians who were standing too close. The beautiful golden statue of the patron god of the city got a face full of ignited blue fog and melted. It ended up looking like the figure had spent considerable time bobbing for french-fries.

Although the rats seemed to be unhurt, and rather relieved by the looks on their tiny rodent faces, the Atlanteans themselves were not amused. They considered what they had witnessed to be rude, vulgar, dangerous, and downright inhumane to the rats.

Now the brothers might have gotten away with all this even then (for the people had no real understanding of crime and punishment), were it not for the damage done to the golden statue of Poseidon, the god and protector of Atlantis. The defilement required sacrifice, human, well nearly human, anyway the Campbells would have to do.

They decide to give the brothers a taste of their own medicine. They wedge them into two empty wine barrels, lash them together by a short lead, and then force the brothers to eat their own concoctions, the remaining chili and last of the wine. The Atlantians quickly retreat when Colin and Ralph’s stomachs start to grumble and they begin to fart filling the bus with a most obnoxious blue fog.

Fred, standing nearby holding the rats, rubs them together rather idly. SparkPlug ignites, the blue fog ignites, and Colin and Ralph are blasted through the bus like a cannon. They shoot through the water and are eaten by a vortex that has mysteriously appeared and centered over the rear of the bus.

Fred could swear that just before the moment of combustion the statue of the melted face god had come to life and had waved its trident in a motion above the bus. Then, in the vortex, there appeared to him a cheesy montage of old newspaper headlines spinning into view, each dated progressively earlier in time. He had a good guess as to why. The brothers had been blasted through time so they couldn’t reveal the secret of Atlantis. He was going to tell the others but thought better of it and just said, “Oook” to himself and shrugged.

The Atlantians, who had been thinking about finally revealing themselves to the world above, swore to stay hidden for another 5,000 years. The orangutan and rats were of course allowed to stay. At least they had gotten rid of the vermin.

Colin and Ralph end up alive, bobbing on the sea like a couple of corks, connected by the short tether. Their farts make the sea toxic, keeping sharks away, and propels their barrels in little circles around one another. They spend most of a day and a night bobbing alone on the waves, constantly swearing at and blaming each other for their misfortune. Then, shortly before dark on the second day they are spied and eventually picked up by an old wooden ship as it happens to be sailing past, the Dry Heaves.

The brochure also had this disclaimer:

Blue Fog
like Blue Nun, only not…
but after you drink it you wish
you'd had nun.

Brought to you and then dropped in a hurry by
The Campbell Brothers.
Now that you have it, it’s your problem.

Ralph and Colin Campbell
Two men who have spent over a century
Drunk.