Words from the Wood: Fantastical Shepherd Pan Ewert-London Talks Booze and Activism
For the safety of my guest, I will not publish a photograph.
Shepherd (n.) - a human element aware of the fantastical. A protector, a chameleon, a messenger, a healer. A breathing book bound in the leather skin of knowledge.
One who straddles both worlds. A purveyor of shadows for the hunted. Masters of the Six Fields. Pyrotechnic connoiseurs. Drinker of heavy ales. Shepherd.
Sailors call them Lighthousers.
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Welcome.
Veteran, grizzled subscribers of Stomp Roams: I don’t want this series to get confused with the kick-ass artists who dedicated their time to be interviewed for Irreverently Vulnerable. This is Part One of a new, limited four-part interview series with humans entwined in the Fantastical world.
Something a little wilder.
Words of the Wood.
Part One: Fantastical Shepherd Pan Ewert-London
Getting an interview with a Shepherd wasn’t something I knew how to plan. They’re some of the most discreet, here-and-gone, ghostlike presences amongst the human race, and some of them aren’t even full-human. They have to be this way.
A Shepherd is the difference between a bull unicorn that ends up in a safehouse or stuffed in a museum. They’ll drink you into submission by night, awaken, plan a breakout, leave a dead drop, and harvest a basement crop of Wildgrown dynamite, all before breakfast. Some laud them as legendary chameleons of the wood. Some call them terrorists.
My apartment was miles from the city skyline, overlooking a suburban yard with a single barren winter oak. I thought of the Fantastical rights conflict every time I looked out toward the city, and the psych ward on 11teenth Street that held more than four hundred creatures detained for their magic.
I suspected that some Shepherds must be reading my stories. I’ve been exposing a lot of woodland lore and drawing attention. What I couldn’t anticipate was waking up one night with my window flung open and a crayon-scrawled message on the wall that said:
I WANT TO TALK. PUBLICLY.
- Pan Ewert-London
Underneath was a series of coordinates and what I knew to be a common Shepherd’s mark, the “Ship’s-wheel compass.”
This was phenomenal. Ewert-London was one of the most controversial names in the Fantastical conflicts. He’d smuggled werewolves up into the Yukon during the Pacific Coast skirmishes of the 90s, and Pinehusk Magazine once called him, “the treehugger who scares even the trees.” FONX NEWZ once claimed that he had impregnated a yeti.
I put on heavy boots and a raincoat, and packed granola bars, water, a blanket, a headlamp, a real hand compass, a notebook, a box of Poptarts (in case I needed to appease a large, hungry creature), and a knife blade I tucked into my boot. I sewed my recorder into my thermal undershirt. Then I left without telling anyone.
I drove four hours into wilderness with the compass on the passenger seat. I planned to use my phone to find the coordinates and the compass as a backup. Ten miles into state forest land, my fully-charged phone shut off. My Spotify cut out. The radio wouldn’t work. The compass needle started to spin around slowly, then picked up, and ran like a furious hamster in circles until it came to a dead stop and pointed at a wall of foliage.
I could not see a road.
I decided to trust. My tiny 2002 Hyundai Accent was stopped in the macadam of a state forest road. I inched it off the shoulder into gravel. Then my tires were in the crusted frost of the woodline. Branches scraped my windshield and doors. My tires spun in the snow and I shot forward over a loamy hump and dropped down into a glen. I looked in the rearview.
The state forest road was gone. The trees had closed shut.
I turned on the recorder in my shirt. Loosened the boot knife. I rumbled over roots and loam at three miles per hour. I lost track of time. The compass needle pointed me straight. Then the needle quivered, as if an ogre had gripped it with both hands and shook it, and the compass needle leaped up through its glass face and shot through the windshield. I ran my finger over the neat pinhole in the glass.
For the sake of dramatic immediacy, I will now move to present tense.
KNERK, KNERK. KNERK.
I look out, and a person in a mascot’s chicken suit taps on my window.
We’re in a hemlock grove, and an unconscionable pine, twelve feet in diameter, oozes sap. I take a deep breath, hope that I will not be pulled limb from limb, and I step out.
For the safety of my interview guest, I will not publish a photograph.
Hello.
The chicken-suited person looks me up and down with those vacant eyes.
You’re Pan Ewert-London? The Fantastical Shepherd?
He nods. And motions me toward the tree.
I look the mangle-limbed boughs up and down, the sap that clings bulbous and chunky to the bark, and the outline of a door carved into the trunk.
You want me to go inside there? Into the pine sap cave of no return inside the Bermuda forest triangle?
The chicken head nods.
Just so you know, I didn’t bring a camera. Just my phone, which is now dead.
The chicken man turns and leads me to the tree. Again, I trust. I follow him in.
The inside of the tree is a wizard’s delight. One continuous bookshelf wraps around the inside of the wall and spindles up into the cone. Chunks of beehive mounted in the walls glow with lantern honey light. A wooden knob bows inward like a flat shelf and is a table for a giant national forest map, the way you might see a half-completed 1,000-piece puzzle on a desk. A medieval battle axe hangs from the wall.
He pulls the mask from his head, a tangle of long hair falls down around a Sam Elliot mustache, and he—
Pabst or Keystone Light?
Huh-what?
That’s what I gart to drank. I gart Pabst and I gart Keystone. Or dewy-water. DEWY. WATER. Cheep cheep cheep.
Oh, dear. He’s 100% batshit.
I’d prefer not to drink while I work, but I’ve learned that you never turn down a drink in the wild. Especially trapped in a tree with a birdman.
Pabst, I guess. Your accent…what is that, like Texas Canadian-Fargo-Boston?
He reaches out a chicken wing and shakes my hand. I pull out my notebook. Then he flows beer into two bark mugs from a hand pump that looks like an upraised gnarled floor root. Cold, dark frothy beer pours from the spout.
I’m just messing with you. I’m from Montana. Sit down.
I accept the mug and hold it to my lips.
Mm. This is definitely not Pabst.
Bark beer. Root brew. 18% alcohol. Can you taste the hickory nut?
Yes. Welp. I’m drunk.
I sit in a chair melded into the tree wall, made of pure dried honeycomb. It crinkles under my butt like newspaper.
Did you make this furniture using the magic of the forest?
Naw. Thrift store.
So, you wanted to talk—
Hold on.
He unzips the back and strips from the chicken suit. His body is leaner than a mountain cat with chest hair like a bundle of straw in a blue jay’s nest.
He is totally naked.
Yes, I want to talk. Need to talk.
He pulls on jeans and a grandfatherly flannel.
Now I look pretty for my interview.
Of course.
He knocks a foot against the tree trunk and a folding chair falls out and busts open. He sits down and crosses a leg.
Let’s talk.
Punksquatch once called you “the thorn of the 90s.” Midnight Howl said that you made the word “agitator” a verb. That’s 30 years ago and you’re still here, wherever “here” is. What do you want to say to the world?
That we are not going away and the fight don’t stop. Two weeks ago, bounty hunters poached an albino werewolf in Helena. The rancher said the wolf was after his sheep. Investigators found a pair of homespun wool mittens on the body. The werewolf had walked up to the rancher’s property edge to bring a peace offering.
This story is regular. Every day. Our band has been protecting the woods for over 200 years, and I am still a student of the game.
You studied under Nautilus, the legendary Shepherd who started the Lighthouse network?
That’s right. He still carries the mission today. Educating, innovating. Intimidating.
You’ve been called an eco-terrorist. You also pledged a public mission of nonviolent protest. How do you reconcile that statement with your history of blowing the doors off Fantastical prisons and laboratories?
When the government kills Fantasticals, they’re champions of conservation. When the people save Fantasticals, they’re terrorists. You don’t know how I got started, do you?
I did my research but your records only go back to ’88.
That was the year I was dishonorably discharged from the NAFR (North American Fantastical Rangers) program. They threw me out because every time they brought in a “specimen” for academic study, I escaped them to the forest.
I’ve heard the NAFR actually does good. They pushed for Fantastical Rights legislation in the 60s. Their rangers arrest poachers and smugglers.
They are an idealistic pocket of a corrupt machine. The husk that shields them is poison, and therefore their mission is corroded.
Tell me about your training. Not the idealistic “Shepherds write romantic Fantastical poetry as they sit in sunswept lighthouses.” Give me the gritty.
Ewert-London crosses his legs and leans back. He takes a slug from his bark mug, then refills it with the handle made from gnarled root.
I trained in the Six Fields, like the rest of us. Not everyone who calls themselves a Shepherd is actually a Shepherd, but we tolerate it. They’re all doing good. It’s like a person who works at the reference desk of a library that doesn’t have a Master’s in Library Science, but we, the casual civilian, call them Librarian. Some of the biggest heroes in this world are auto mechanics and desk clerks. Airbnb hosts. The person next to you on the subway.
We all start in concealment. Learning the terrain, the alleys, the drainage ditches. The corridors traveled by paws and claws. We learned signals. Camouflage. Misinformation. Learning to move in plain sight.
It’s been compared to the Underground Railroad.
If the forest was CBGB’s and the Underground Railroad was the mosh pit, yes.
What did you learn after concealment?
We had basic training. How to escape. How to heal—friend or foe. How to grow this…
He lifts open a cedar chest and pulls out a dried husk of Wildgrown dynamite. Wildgrown dynamite (Dynamitus Nymphae) is a swamp-grown seedling that blooms into a knotted crop of boom-boom botany. Its pad resembles a common lilypad, but the roots produce walnut-like husks that grow with clay-like explosives. In the 1870s, the only natural ecosystem that had a greater market than buffalo was the Wildgrown dynamite. The federal government has now designated the crop as an invasive weed.
One of the six fields is Drink. How does drinking beer help you work more efficiently?
I ask this as I take another chug out of the bark mug.
What you’re drinking right now, it’s opening you up. It’s bringing us together. In the Revolutionary War, every rebel in New England gathered against the oaken beams and stone walls of a pub. You’ve heard of pubstumps, the underground taverns where wayfaring Fantasticals gather?
Only in myth.
They’re not myth.
Pubstumps are gathering places for Fantastical travelers, smugglers, and criminals. Murderers, jazz quartets, and fugitives. And simple woodland creatures. They are underground, usually entered through a hill burrow or hollowed tree. Like this one.
Aren’t you endangering their existence by talking about them openly?
Any bounty hunter or official dumb enough to climb down into the depths of a pubstump full of armed critters is asking for a new set of scars.
Fair. So, you didn’t answer the question about why you get drunk in a professional capacity.
It’s not about getting drunk. It’s a form of information and misinformation, telegraphs for a sprawling network. Walk into a bounty hunter bar in Chicago, someone is gonna get loose, someone is gonna talk about an upcoming ambush. We train to immerse ourselves in dark corners of suspect repute.
I stare into my notebook and hesitate. Then I ask the question that has hung from my mind like a heavy, wet limb.
What can you tell me about Stomp Freedomfoot? The fabled sasquatch bakery robber.
Next question.
You reached out to me specifically, and in dramatic fashion. What am I really here for?
And so. He looks me over hard. You’ve been writing stories for months with authority about things in which you should know nothing.
I’m a fiction writer.
Uh-huh. I needed to get a look at this fiction writer.
And what do you see?
I see someone that may or may not leave this tree.
I recognize that I’m in the middle of nowhere, with no phone, and no sense of direction, with a man who stripped naked from a bird suit just ten minutes ago. Damn this strong ale, you sly, crafty bird man.
I may also have a message of encouragement.
Oh?
The Friday dawn trembles with thunder, at 8 o’clock we plunder, the voices on 11teenth suppressed, soon will find their rest.
I don’t understand.
You will. Publish exactly that, please. Tonight.
I’m suspicious that I’m being used as some kind of discreet messaging vessel. But I feel light as a May breeze. I move on.
You live in your underwear in a lonely magic tree. Why do you still toil to change what seems like an immovable needle of progress?
He knocks his knuckles against the craggy, rough, interior bark. The tree replies with a deep hum that quakes my chest like the amplifiers at a concert. I can feel it in my feet, and the honeycomb lamps on the wall come alive with light.
The voice that lives in the forest? He points to the tree wall. We fight for its right to speak.
I slam my car door shut. I do what he told me—put my car in first gear and slam the accelerator. My car burst through a curtain of branches and I’m suddenly back on the shoulder of the scenic highway in the state forest.
In my apartment that night, I gaze out the window to the glimmer of the looming city skyline. I publish the interview and fall asleep with my head dented into my laptop keys. I wake and see the alarm blinking:
7:59 a.m.
At 8 the alarm blinks off and in the city, in the direction of the Fantastical Psychological Evaluation Center, see a series of muted flashes, like a heavy gate blown off hinges. Then I hear the rumble. I fling open my window and listen.
A wail of sirens crows in the gray January dawn. I strain my ears and hear it, a rising cacophony.
Howls and screeches echo across the snowy sky like a zoo has just been released into the streets. Below me in the yard, the branches of the barren oak burst forth with green shoots and tremble.
I’m so glad you came along for this wilderness interview. I honestly didn’t know if I’d make it out alive. If you’d like to support Stomp Roams, you can share the story or tap that little “subscribe” button.
How deep into this world do you want to go? Read Stomp’s last adventure, Stomp Bigfoot Learns Forgiveness at Pine-frosted Christmas, as Stomp finds himself with a loving family in Vermont in 1964…until his world collapses.