Glibertarians.com 2019 Archive

Category: Outdoors

  • Allamakee County Chronicles VII: Fish Hooks

    Note:  A preview from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)

    In the Beginning…

    Young boys and fishing seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly.  The problem is that fishing also goes along with fishhooks, like bologna and cheese.  Worse still, fishhooks and perforated skin also seem to go together, like bulls and china shops.

    My twelfth summer was the first in which I spent a lot of time out on the trout streams by myself, or with companions nearer my own age; always before that I had the benefit of a wise and beneficent father, who kept me from getting tangled up too badly in barbed, pointy objects of recurved steel.  This summer, however, my main fishing companion became the thirteen-year old local miscreant and walking disaster, a fellow named Jon.  Jon had recently attained the magic age of thirteen, and now possessed the assured wisdom of being, officially, a Teenager.  His wisdom did not extend to extracting fishhooks, or even to preventing fishhooks from being emplaced in his (or my) anatomy.

    Problem was that Jon was a bit clumsy; turning thirteen had come hand in hand with a growth spurt of vast proportions.  Seemingly overnight he shot from four feet eleven to five feet ten, with hands and feet expanding to the size of canoe paddles.  This was a recipe for awkwardness unlike anything we’d seen before.

    Bad Snags

    A bright June morning found us making a three-mile hike through the hills to a favored spot on Bear Creek a mile short of the Upper Iowa River; smallmouth bass found their way up the large, slow creek from time to time, and fat trout lounged in the deep pools.  Several of the large pools were favored fishing spots; we set up on the bank of one large, deep, still stretch, across from a limestone cliff face alive with chittering cliff swallows.  Trout were rising in the early sunshine, and all was well with our world.

    “I know just what to use,” Jon assured me, tying a #2 spinner to his line.  This spinner had a triple hook on the tail and another right behind the spinner blade; Jon promptly got one hook in his thumb, and another in his index finger.

    “Ow!  Hey, help me out here!”

    Jon wasn’t the sort to suffer in silence.  A series of yelps, barks and shouts accompanied my efforts to extract the spinner from Jon’s flesh.  As the positioning of the hook made it necessary to lean over Jon’s hand, all of the various epithets were directed into my left ear at the range of about twelve inches.  What’s worse, Jon had a set of lungs that enabled people to hear him a good mile downwind; I was subjected to the approximate noise level of a jet airliner on takeoff.

    “HEY!”

    “OOOOWWW!!!”

    “WATCH THAT!”

    “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?!?”

    “AAAYYOOOOOOO!!!”

    When I finally started to actually try to get the hooks out, things got worse.

    A typical fish hook.

    The yelping, barking and shouting was heard at incredible distances.  The caretaker at the Girl Scout camp about a mile off later reported hearing horrible sounds, as though someone was skinning a pack of wildcats, live.  Old Amos Shepherd was tending a sick heifer when the caterwauling reached his farm three-quarters of a mile upstream.  His dairy herd of Jerseys stampeded, no doubt thinking a pack of freshly skinned wildcats was closing in; the only way Amos saw to avoid being trampled was to grab a passing cow’s tail and hang on for dear life.  Unfortunately for Amos, the Jerseys’ could run much faster than his 72-year old frame was equipped to keep up with; this resulted in his being practically airborne for the duration of the stampede.  Folks living on the lower Bear Creek road were treated to the sight of a herd of Jerseys charging flat-out down the road, with a skinny old man joining in on the stampede, clinging on to one cow’s tail for dear life and running in incredible ten and twelve foot bounds.

    After about fifteen seconds, during which we were unknowingly surrounded by panic and chaos, I finally worked the hooks loose and handed Jon back his spinner.

    “Try to be a little more careful!”  I admonished him.  Jon rubbed his bleeding hand, wincing.  “Don’t worry, I’ll get it” he assured me.

    To his credit, Jon managed to get this spinner tied on without further incident.  Stepping to the bank overlooking the pool, he let out a little line, drew his old spinning rod back, flicked it forward with a practiced flip of the wrist – and sunk the hook in the back of his head.

    “AAAYYOWWP!”

    Jon wasn’t the only kid to have difficulties wish needle-sharp fishhooks.  We all faced the necessity of extracting a barb from one portion of our anatomies or another, sooner or later.  And the worst of all fishhook injuries were, of course, not self-inflicted.  No, for when you feel the hook sink into your own flesh, you can stop its progress; when someone else sinks it into your cringing soft tissue, you have no control over their mistaken belief that they’ve just tied into a four-pound trout.

    And that brings me to Wimpy Neidert.

    There’s Always A Townie.

    Every school seems to have a kid like Wimpy.  Our version was, at twelve years of age, roughly five foot three, and just about as wide as he was tall.  Topping the roly-poly frame was a pudgy, freckled, amiable face with Coke-bottle glasses, topped by a tangle of blistering red hair.  Wimpy wasn’t often found along on our outdoor excursions; couches and television were more his forte, usually accompanied by a large bag of cheese puffs and a dozen or so cans of pop.  In fact, Wimpy had difficulty walking farther than the distance from his parent’s house in town to the bus stop; he arrived at the stop red-faced and wheezing.

    In other words, Wimpy wasn’t material for the Presidential Physical Fitness Program.  Needless to say, Jon and I were a bit surprised to find Wimpy accompanying us on our annual trip to the Upper Iowa River for the early summer sucker run.  Wimpy would have preferred to stay home, in fact, and eat cheese puffs while watching television; but a trick of history intervened.

    Wimpy’s father and Jon’s dad were best friends.  They had gone to school together, joined the Army together, went to Vietnam together, and were to that day frequently seen together imbibing cold beers in various local watering holes.  Wimpy’s father wasn’t pleased with his son’s rotund frame and slothful outlook; as we discovered later to our chagrin, Jon’s Dad volunteered our services to take Wimpy out fishing, “to get him out in the fresh air.”  Both Dads agreed it would do Wimpy good to tag along with us; we weren’t so sure.  The sucker run was beginning, though; we had a nighttime outing planned to go snag suckers; it was too late to back out now.

    And so it came to pass that late one Friday evening Jon and I were pushing our old bikes along the lower Bear Creek road towards the Upper Iowa, ambling along in the growing darkness as Wimpy puffed along behind us, astride his ancient coaster bike, accompanied by a host of groaning, creaking and squeaking sounds.  Wimpy’s bike was making some noise as well.

    It was close to ten o’clock by the time we arrived at the river.  Jon and I were disgusted at the delay, but we waited patiently as Wimpy, gasping, parked his bike, arranged his fishing gear, and finally followed us down a fifty-yard trail, over a wooden style spanning a barbed-wire fence, and across a cow pasture to the river.

    The surface of the river was as smooth as glass in the moonlight, the mirror-like surface broken here and there with the ripples caused by large white suckers cruising just below the surface.

    The sucker run was an annual tradition.  Every year, in spring and early summer, white suckers ascended smaller streams from the Mississippi to spawn.  Living in the rich, silty Mississippi enabled some of the suckers to grow to prodigious size; ten-pounders were routine, twenty-pounders not unheard of.  Since the single-minded fish didn’t feed much while spawning, we pursued them with snagging gear, heavy bait-casting rods with twenty-pound line, tipped with huge treble hooks cast inside lead weights.  The trick was to cast past the ripples in the river, and bring in the hook in jerks, bouncing it along the bottom, hopefully to snag in the sides of a large sucker.

    This, of course, was a recipe for disaster with Wimpy along.

    We split up there on the bank of the river.  Wimpy, still red-faced and wheezy, stayed put; I went upstream a hundred yards or so, and Jon opted to try his chances downstream an equal distance.  Silently, in the darkness, we made our way to our fishing spots.

    The night was cool, the stars twinkled overhead in the velvet-black sky, from the hill above the river a hoot owl called once, twice, and then dropped down the hillside to whisshhh by ten feet over my head.  Magical evening.  I cast and yanked, cast and yanked, and on my third try hooked into a reasonable sucker; in a few moments I had the six-pound fish flopping on the bank.

    An actual portion of the actual river.

    Downstream, Jon was having less luck.  Repeated efforts yielded not one fish; at his chosen spot the water was a bit deeper, and the bottom-hugging fish left no revealing ripples on the surface.  Not one to be defeated by a primordial fish with the brain the size of a chick-pea, Jon redoubled his efforts, yanking the hook vigorously along the bottom.  A small crowd of cows started to gather behind him on the bank, their curiosity piqued by the spectacle.

    In between, unknown to either Jon or me, Wimpy was finally beginning to enjoy the evening.  His tackle box contained no fishing gear.   Wimpy settled himself on the steep dirt bank, feet dangling over the water, and extracted from his box a bag of cheese puffs, a bottle of pop, a flashlight, and the latest Captain America.  He had just settled in for a nice read when the bank gave way, landing him with a loud splash in the river.

    Upstream, I heard the splash, and thought little of it.  Cattle were grazing up and downstream from us; loud splashes are not uncommon when cattle are near water.  Downstream, Jon heard the splash, thought, “beaver,” and noted the location in order to return with a few traps the coming fall.  Wimpy landed in about three feet of water and came up spluttering.  Then, with a panicked start, he noticed his cheese puffs bag floating away downstream on the current.  Grunting his annoyance, Wimpy splashed away in pursuit.

    As it would happen, Jon chose that moment to try another spot, a few yards upstream at the top of a steep bank where the river undercut the shore.  The cows followed; cows rarely get any sort of entertainment, and so are easily amused, even at the sight of a boy trying to snag a sucker.

    They were about to get the show of their lives.

    Jon, on the high bank, couldn’t see the river well in the darkness.  He hadn’t been able to see any telltale ripples before anyway, so nothing lost; he began anew his routine of casting and yanking, casting and yanking.  A splashing sound intruded on his senses; he wrote it off as a cow.  He wasn’t far off in that assessment.

    Wimpy had pursued his cheese puffs bag downstream, finally catching up to it in a swirl of water where the river undercut a high bank.  Reaching out a pudgy hand, he snagged the fugitive snack.  An odd sensation then; something slowly slid up his left leg, feeling oddly like…  like…  twenty-pound fish line.

    On the bank, Jon was bringing in his triple hook again, rod tip bouncing up and down in vigorous, slightly annoyed jerks.

    Wimpy felt the line riding up higher, now past the knee.  The full implications hadn’t sunk in yet; he froze in indecision.

    Jon felt a slight resistance on his line.  He lowered the rod tip, gave a slight yank, felt the resistance again.

    Wimpy felt the line now past the thigh; he still hadn’t quite figured out what was going on.  He was about to find out.

    Jon grinned to himself in the darkness; visions of ten-pound suckers filled his head.  He lowered the rod tip, took in a little slack with the reel, braced his thumb tight against the spool, and gave,

    one …

    mighty…

    YANK!

    This is what they feel like when they are embedded in your anatomy.

    The huge, lead-weighted triple hook leaped clear of the bottom of the river, gaining speed, propelled by the springy tip of Jon’s fishing rod, sped on its way by Jon’s young, strong arms, his muscles hardened by a youth spent tossing hay bales and wrestling dairy cattle.  The line sang as it ripped clear of the water; the hook, still gaining speed, rose, sped towards its unintended target, to sink itself not in a ten-pound white sucker, but directly into the crotch of Wimpy’s cut-off painter’s pants.

    Jon, feeling the hook hit something solid yet slightly yielding, leaned his weight into the rod to set the hook deep.  And set the hook he did; two prongs penetrated deep indeed, ripping through denim and cotton to find the most sensitive portion of Wimpy’s anatomy, while the third ripped through to sink itself in the bottom end of Wimpy’s zipper, and to anchor itself there as though set in concrete.

    No breaching whale ever rose from the water more impressively than Wimpy broaching from the Upper Iowa that night, propelled by the agony of the two needle-sharp prongs impaling the Neidert family legacy.  On the bank above, Jon recoiled in horror, faced with what was either a red-haired, screeching whale broaching unaccountably from the shallow river, or a red-tipped missile fired from an unseen enemy submarine somehow concealed in the river.  Jon engaged reverse gear and hit the gas; he proceeded exactly three feet before colliding with a curious Holstein.

    The cow reacted as cows do, butting Jon in the small of the back with some force, sending him stumbling forward, over the bank, into the river; he went down the bank as Wimpy went up.  Somehow, he had the presence of mind to hang onto his fishing rod.  He landed in the river with a loud splash and surfaced just in time to be yanked back up the dirt bank face-first.

    Wimpy had cleared the high bank in one phenomenal surge, and set off across the pasture, wailing in agony, trying to flee the impaling points.  Before Jon could react, the line went taut, yanking him over the bank and dragging him through a thin line of trees into the open pasture.

    Upstream, I heard the initial scream, followed by a series of splashes; I reeled my hook in and made for the open pasture myself.  There I was greeted by an incredible sight.

    Wimpy was charging across the pasture, screeching like a banshee; about twenty feet behind him was Jon, skidding face down through the pasture, hands clenched on his fishing rod.  Wimpy hit the fence at the end of the pasture, rebounded with an audible TWANG from the barbed wire, and reversed course.  Jon was carried along, airborne briefly in a half-loop as Wimpy set off for the opposite end of the pasture.  Fascinated, the cows clumped along behind.  I winced as I saw Jon dragged face down through a series of fresh cowpats.  I had to do something.

    “JON!”  I shouted.  “STOP HIM!”

    Summoning a terrible strength from somewhere deep within, Jon managed to flip himself over, get his feet under him, and haul back on the rod.  Wimpy fought like the lunker he was, but in the end a final yank from Jon stopped him, cringing and sobbing, in his tracks.  Wimpy dropped like a poleaxed steer.

    I approached cautiously.  Wimpy was on the ground, moaning, both hands clasped over his nether regions.  Jon was muttering words that would have earned him a clout from his mother as he knelt next to Wimpy; at first I thought he was examining Wimpy in concern for his injuries, but as I drew closer I saw that Jon was using Wimpy’s shirttail to clean cowpat off his face.

    “Think he’ll be OK?”  I asked Jon.

    “If he has any kids, they’ll be stupid.”  Jon replied.

    “Big surprise there, huh?”  I grinned at Jon.  He flicked a bit off cowpat off his ear.  The Holsteins gathered around, their eyes wide.  They hadn’t had this much fun in years.

    The journey home was less than pleasant.  In the lead, Wimpy walked, or rather waddled, with shrieks of agony at regular intervals; neither Jon nor I professed the expertise to perform the necessary extraction.  Jon followed, answering every shriek with a shouted imprecation.  I brought up the rear, a good twenty yards back, the better to avoid Jon’s rather strong barnyard odor.

    And then…

    It took a long drive to town to the local Emergency Room to finally extract the hook and thus ensure the continuity of the Neidert line, but Jon and I weren’t there to see it.  Breaking free as soon as we delivered Wimpy to his father at Jon’s house, we headed off to an upper stretch of Waterloo Creek near the Hooper farm for a bit of nice relaxing midnight trout fishing.

    There, on the moonlit creek bank, all was peaceful.  Jon looked over at me, grinned, and drew his rod back to cast.  He flicked the rod tip forward briskly, lodging his spinner’s hook firmly in his left ear.

    “OWWWW!!”  Jon yelped.  “Hey!  Help me out here!”

    I was already half-way home.

  • Allamakee County Chronicles VI: Bull!

    Note:  A preview from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)

    Bull!

    Can you tell which ones are mean? Me neither.

    Most folks these days don’t think about cattle much.  Our increasingly urbanized populace knows, vaguely, that beef and dairy products come from cattle.  They may have a half-way decent mental image of what most cattle look like – big, boxy critters, basically a perambulating digestive system with beef mounted around the periphery, a head on one end and a big bag for producing milk and cheeses on the other.  There are other things that go on at the end across from the head, things which are best not discussed in polite company.  That will not, of course, prevent me from discussing them here.

    But what these urban and suburban dwellers don’t understand is the bovine species’ largely unsuspected and malicious intelligence, nor how quickly they can turn that malice into action.  But when I was a young fellow, back in Allamakee County, in the heart of northeast Iowa’s dairy country, we understood it all too well.

    As for the city-dweller’s misconceptions of the nature of cows, this is something I learned from the first good friend I ever had who hailed from a big city – something that had to wait until I joined the Army.

    Fort Dix, New Jersey – sometime in the early Eighties

    It was a hot, sweaty, humid day at Fort Dix, New Jersey – the exact wrong sort of day to be suffering through an Army Basic Training field exercise.

    Not that there is a right sort of day to be suffering through an Army Basic Training field exercise.

    At the end of a “lane” that featured lots of pyrotechnics and tear gas, we were given five minutes to rest and recover before the next bit of training.  The moment the Drill Sergeant yelled “Fall out,” I staggered to a tree and crashed to the ground under the shading branches.

    My buddy, a skinny city kid from Philadelphia, dropped down to the sandy ground beside me, groaning.  “I think I cracked a rib,” he complained.  “Damn grenade simulator went off right behind me.  Knocked me right over.  Think I hit a rock when I went down.”  He rubbed his ribs.  “Man, imagine if this was real.  I mean, real people shooting real shit at us.  Can you imagine that?  Scare the crap out of me, I tell you that.”

    “Oh, I don’t know,” I replied, with big-tough-country-kid nonchalance.  “I’ve faced stuff more frightening that bullets and grenades.”

    “The hell you say,” my buddy said.  “What’s scarier than bullets and grenades?”

    “Cows.”

    Back in Allamakee County

    Back The F*** Off.

    The Old Man had raised Black Angus cattle for many years but had mostly foregone farming by the time I was old enough to wander around much on my own.  Black Angus cattle are compact, even-tempered beasts, but are still big enough and unpredictable enough to cause problems, but all in all, Dad didn’t have too much trouble with them.

    Later, though, his timbered acreage in Allamakee County was surrounded by dairy farms, the favored breed for which in those days were Holsteins – big cattle, heavy, sometimes bad-tempered.  Most of my friends’ families were involved in the dairy business to some extent or another, and the neighbor’s cattle had the uncanny ability to break fences and would frequently wander onto our property, at which point it became my job to run them off.

    I once broached the subject of using my .30-30 to run them instead into the big freezer in the workshop but was rebuffed with a loud roar.

    Instead, I experimented with a few other means of chasing errant bovines off the Clark property.  One of my early efforts involved an old fiberglass recurve bow and blunt arrows, which I bounced off bovine rib cages and hindquarters.  This had less than positive results, either merely annoying the cattle or angering them.  After spending half an hour about twenty feet up a big box-elder tree one afternoon with four or five angry cows milling about beneath, I gave up on the archery solution.

    We finally settled on light skeet loads of #9 shot from a 12 gauge, delivered from about 20-30 yards.  The light shot warmed the cows’ hindquarters without penetrating the skin, and that usually moved the cows along – except for the odd instance that saw the Old Man or myself running around the flat ground across the creek with a few cows in pursuit.

    Holsteins were cows to watch out for.  But there was one local bovine, not a cow as such but most emphatically a bull, the very thought of whom struck terror into the hearts of all the local kids.

    A Local Legend

    This huge Holstein bull lived on one of the farms belonging to the expansive Duffy clan.  Unfortunately, the farm in question lay in a pleasant little valley through which ran the pleasant little waterway of Waterloo Creek, in which swam a pleasant little population of pleasant little trout.  The bull maintained a constant vigil of what he thought of as his personal stretch of Waterloo Creek.  His zeal in pursuing trespassers made him a constant problem for those of us with a passion for fishing; his evil disposition, vast size and uncanny deviousness made him dangerous for even his owner.  The bull was a killer, and only the board full of blue ribbons and large sums he earned his owner in stud fees had preserved him to this point.  His back was as broad as a ’69 Cadillac, his head larger than a twenty-gallon washtub topped by needle-tipped horns.  His eyes glittered red and angry, full of hate for any moving object that was not one of his cows.

    This bull was notorious enough, in fact, that all the local folk had unanimously given him a name.  He had some long, fancy pedigree name that nobody knew or cared about; instead, he was known locally as The Antichrist.

    The actual Waterloo Creek. Really.

    My first encounter with The Antichrist occurred when I was about fifteen.  I was mooching around in the Waterloo Creek valley looking over some favored fishing spots.  There was a beautiful big pool in a pasture on the back reaches of one of the Duffy farms that always held fat brown trout.

    I was just climbing over the fence when I heard a strangled bellow.  I froze in place, the top strand of barbed wire uncomfortably close to some delicate real estate and looked over to the trees along the creek.

    There stood The Antichrist, a massive, menacing presence.  He lifted a front hoof and dropped it.  He let out a snort that could as easily come from some massive, primeval monster.

    I disengaged from the fence and stole quietly away.  No amount of trout was worth chancing The Antichrist.  Several of my friends had already had close calls with him, and I had no desire to repeat their experiences.

    But the closest call we ever had with The Antichrist happened two or three years later and involved my friend Jon’s big-city cousin Albert and a time-honored country kid tradition:  A snipe hunt.

    Now most folks nowadays wouldn’t fall for this stunt.  Even the most urbane of urban dwellers have heard of this old trick, I suspect in part because of this Internet thing all the kids are doing these days.  But back in the late Seventies, the Internets weren’t even a gleam in Al Gore’s eyes yet, and precautionary information traveled more slowly.

    So, when my buddy Jon’s cousin Albert was coming to visit from Chicago, we had no trouble selling him on the exciting adventure of a nighttime snipe hunt.  Albert’s family were staying with Jon’s aunt and uncle in town, but Albert had spent quite a bit of time hanging out with us out in the boonies, and was taking rather enthusiastically to fishing, camping and woods-bumming; in other words, a typical summer.

    We set the date for our snipe hunt on a warm July weekend.  Albert’s folks dropped him off at the Hooper place that Saturday afternoon.  I was already in residence; Jon and I had been plotting for two hours before Albert showed up.  All was in readiness.

    Jon had through mysterious means obtained a large burlap sack, big enough to contain a small elephant.  I had a small, cheap plastic flashlight.  The hill we chose for the exercise contained some of the nastiest brush to be found in northeast Iowa – acres of blackberry brambles, sumac thickets, and towering oaks that blocked out the sun even on the brightest of days; the evening coming promised only the thinnest of sliver moons to light the forest.  Perfect!

    The day ended, and after supper the three of us were standing in the Hooper barnyard planning strategy.

    “OK, since you’re new, Albert,” Jon was saying, “You’ll have to stand in the brush and hold the sack.  The thing is, you can’t shoot at night, so what we’ll do is to loop around up to the top of the hill and sort of drive the snipe down to you.  You stand and hold the sack and catch the snipe as they come a-runnin’ down the hill.”

    “Won’t they fly?”  Albert wanted to know.

    “Nope.”  I assured him.  “Snipes only fly in daylight.  They’d rather run after dark, that way they don’t run into trees and such.”

    Albert looked around at the gathering gloom.

    “Are you sure?” he quavered.

    “Hey!”  Jon protested, using a phrase that foretold unspeakable horror to anyone who knew Jon and I better.  “Trust us!”

    We drove out to a quiet stretch of country road.  “Up there,” Jon indicated one particularly large, dark hillside covered with hardwood timber.  “That’s where were going.”

    We climbed out of The Van, hopped a barbed wire fence, and headed up the hill.  It was a good mile from the road that we placed Albert, holding his sack, on the edge of a blackberry thicket.

    “We’ll have to take the flashlight, Albert.”  Jon informed our victim.  “We’ll need it to see our way up to the top.”

    “Uh, ok….” Albert sounded doubtful.  There under the trees it was darker than a crow’s wing in a pile of coal on a dark night.  We left Albert holding the bag, and aided by the anemic flashlight beam, trooped on up the hill.

    Jon and I had forgotten one crucial detail about this hillside, where this evening there grazed a herd of Holstein cattle.  We had neglected to consider who owned this hill overlooking the Waterloo Creek valley.

    Once we were out of earshot of Albert’s stand, we could no longer contain our glee at his predicament.

    “Now,” Jon was telling me, “we can loop around over the top of the hill and down the other side, and then we’ll follow the road back to The Van.  We can go into town and have something to eat.  We’ll go back and get old Albert about 2AM, hawhawhawhaw!!”

    “Hawhawhawhaw!!”  I replied.  “I can’t wait to see the look on his face after four hours in those woods!!  This is gonna be great!!”

    We’d forgotten about the lynchpin of the Duffy dairy herd.

    “Hawhawhawhaw!” Jon and I laughed our way through the woods, up the hill to the meadow on the top.

    As Jon and I entered the open meadow at the top of the hill, we were still filled with mirth.  We had forgotten that his father was grazing his cattle in the high meadow.

    A deep, rolling snort echoed across the dark meadow.  We strained to see the source of the sound; even in the open it was too dark to see much of anything.

    “Haw?”  Jon querulously asked the darkness.

    Somewhere out in the darkness, The Antichrist stomped one foot.  A tremor went through the ground beneath our feet; several branches fell from the trees behind us.  Jon looked at me, his eyes wide with terror.

    He was like this, but with more horns.

    “It’s The Antichrist!”  Jon shouted at me.  “I forgot about him!”

    “What should we do?”  I shouted back.

    “RUN!!!”  Jon screeched.

    The thunder of hoofbeats was already drumming in the dark, getting louder by the second.

    To say that we ran for our lives is the grossest of understatements.  We flew down that hill.  We crashed through thickets in which a bulldozer would have helplessly bogged down.  We ran over and snapped off saplings four and five inches thick, without notice.  About one-third of the way down was a ravine; on the way up we’d been required to climb carefully down one side and scramble up the other.  On the way down, both of us leaped the 20-foot chasm without missing a stride.  Behind us was the ever-present thunder of hooves, slowly gaining on us; The Antichrist plowed a 6-foot wide swath through the trees; the farmer who owned the place in fact gained a full winter’s worth of firewood from the felled timber.

    At one point during our headlong flight, dimly in the recesses of my subconscious, I recalled that we’d left Albert on the edge of a thicket nearby.  He must have heard our headlong rush to escape a ton of pounding, snorting death; he called out to us.

    “Are there any snipe, guys?  Are the snipe coming?”  I had a sudden flashed mental image of Albert standing, holding his sack, unaware of the onrushing Death in the darkness.

    “RUN!”  I shouted at Albert.

    “What?  Why?” he shouted back.

    “BULL!” both Jon and I bellowed at once.

    Albert had been wearing new white sneakers.  As I flashed past Albert’s stand, I saw only a glimpse of two white sneakers and two huge, white eyes staring.  The hoofbeats were getting closer; I reached deep inside myself, pulled out a little bit of extra energy from some unknown place, and put on some speed.

    The pounding behind me had doubled somehow; then, suddenly, I was passed in the dark by a flying pair of white sneakers.

    It seems Albert had been a varsity sprinter on his Chicago school’s track team.  In his big-city ignorance of country ways, he didn’t realize how the ability to run like the very wind was frequently of great use in our hunting, fishing and camping adventures.  At least not until the thundering sound of The Antichrist’s charge reached his ears.  The very air crackled as Albert ran past us; a faint smell of ozone followed his flight.  Jon and I homed in on the trail of acrid odor and followed it all the way back to the road where Jon’s van was parked, where we easily cleared the 3-strand barbed wire with single, effortless arching leaps.

    The Antichrist skidded to a stop, frustrated by the barbed wire, his intent of reducing us to minor portions of the landscape deterred.  We managed to halt our flight about 50 feet from the fence; the three of us turned to see The Antichrists’ beady, hateful eyes glittering at us in the faint glow of the moonlight.  The bull casually lowered his head, scored out a foot-long sliver from a wooden fencepost with one horn, and let out one more mighty snort which blew Albert’s hat off; then he slowly turned, and ponderously made his way off into the darkness, towards his waiting cows.

    Albert bent over suddenly.  Jon grabbed for his arm, fearing he was fainting from terror.  I grabbed his other arm; Albert was shaking uncontrollably.  We both shook him, hoping to break him loose from whatever horror assailed him.

    “Ha!  Ha!  HAHAHAHAHAA!!!!  Albert was laughing!  Not just laughing but laughing uproariously!  Not a terrified, hysterical laugh, but a wild, carefree laugh, as one who’s just witnessed what was very possibly the greatest act of comedy he’d ever see in his life.

    “You guys…” he panted, when he finally regained the ability to speak, “you guys, you told me…”

    “What?”  Jon demanded.  “What did we tell you?”

    “You told me it was the most exciting hunting there was!” Albert giggled.  “I guess you sure showed me!  It was sure exciting after all, it sure was!”  Albert collapsed into the dust of the graveled road, clutching his sides.

    Over Albert’s convulsing form, Jon and I looked at each other.  We were witnesses to a Phenomenon; one we’d never expected.  Despite all his citified manners, despite his pitiful lack of knowledge of fishing, shooting, hunting, tanning hides, running a trapline, or pretty much anything useful, Albert had the one quality that would gain him acceptance faster than any.

    Albert was a good sport.

    In time, he learned the rest.

    Back at Fort Dix

    Yeah, it’s best to stay away.

    “Cows,” my old Army buddy scoffed.  “The hell you say.  Ain’t nobody afraid of cows.”

    Nearby, a kid from upstate New York suddenly popped upright.  “Cows? Where?”

    Another guy, this one from rural Wyoming, snapped out of a doze.  “Cows?  I don’t want to get mixed up with cows.  They’ll have calves this time of year.  They get mean when they have calves.”

    A third kid, this one from central Missouri, chimed in.  “Cows, oh, man, this is bad enough already without a bunch of damn cows wandering around.”

    “Come on,” my big-city buddy replied to us all.  “You’re all a bunch of big corn-fed farm boys, and you’re telling me you’re afraid of cows?”

    “Not afraid, so much,” the guy from Wyoming said.  We all knew he came from a long line of ranchers.  “Just real, real cautious.”

    I could tell my big-city buddy didn’t believe us.  Most folks these days don’t think about cattle much. But even at the thought, my head came up automatically, scanning the open woods around us, not for Soviet soldiers, armored vehicle or even drill sergeants, but for cows.

    As It Stands Today…

    I’m still cautious around cows.

    The stretches of Colorado landscape where I do my woods-bumming these days is frequently shared with cattle.  These are beef cattle, usually Herefords or the Hereford-Angus crosses known as black baldies.  These are reasonably tolerant cattle, and the fact that they spend summers on open range makes them cautious themselves and prone to staying away from people.

    Also, bulls these days are mostly kept confined; AI (no, not that AI – Artificial Insemination) has replaced the need for most ranchers and farmers to herd a bull with their cows.  But occasionally, usually in the distance, I can hear the ringing bellow of a bull.  It’s a weirdly primal sound, one that still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

    Most of the folks hereabouts, though, fish and hike unmolested by cows, and so miss out on the chance to amass tales of adventure.  They really don’t know what they’re missing.

  • Gold Standards I – The Model 12 Winchester

    The Perfect Repeater

    Resolved:  The pre-64 Model 12 Winchester is the standard by which all pump shotguns must be judged.  Now that that’s established, I’ll proceed to tell you about this magnificent shotgun and how it came to be the gold standard of pump shotguns.

    My Black Diamond Trap Gun.

    Full disclosure:  I’m not impartial.  I own three Model 12s – a 1940 12-gauge field gun, a 1941 16-gauge field gun, and a 1942 12-gauge Black Diamond trap gun.  The sequential years are nothing more than a happy coincidence.

    John Browning

    It should come as no surprise that the DaVinci of firearms was involved in the genesis of the Model 12, as he was with so many American sporting and martial arms.  But his involvement in this case is limited to a precursor of the Model 12.

    The story begins in 1887.  In that year, Winchester determined to build and sell a repeating shotgun.  They turned to John Browning, who had developed the company’s outstanding 1886 lever rifle the year before, along with the Winchester 1885 falling-block single-shot rifle.

    Browning had already produced a successful lever-action rifle for Winchester, and while he advocated a pump-action for a shotgun, Winchester’s official position at that time was that they were a lever gun company, and by God they’d have a lever-action shotgun.  Browning came through, producing the 1887 lever gun, the first mass-produced repeating shotgun by a major manufacturer.

    But the 1887 lever gun was big, clunky, and it’s drop-block lever action required a long throw.  It was offered in 10 and 12 gauge but was only strong enough for black-powder shells, at a time when higher-performance smokeless powder loads were just beginning to become available.

    Sales were lackluster.  Double guns still handled better than the heavy lever gun and offered much faster second shots and quick reloads.  Browning politely reminded Winchester of his stated position on the pump-action for shotguns.  Winchester finally agreed that the brilliant designer may have had a point.

    The Model 93/97

    John Browning Winchester Model 1893 1897 US Patent 441390

    In response, Browning designed the black-powder-only 1893 pump shotgun, which was quickly refined into the 12- and 16-gauge, smokeless-powder-capable Model 1897.  The first variant of the ’97 offered in 1897 was a solid-frame 12 gauge, followed in 1898 by the takedown version in 12-gauge and the takedown 16 gauge in 1900.

    Sales of the new gun were brisk, which probably earned Winchester’s management a “told you so” or two from John Browning.  In fact, Browning liked the new shotgun enough that he retained one as his personal shotgun, using it on ranges and in the game fields until he died in 1926.

    The 1897 had a few interesting features.  The six-shot tubular magazine remains pretty typical for pump-guns made today, but the external hammer and lack of an additional safety probably wouldn’t fare well in today’s market – although I would opine, as I have repeatedly, that a gun with an external hammer doesn’t require an additional safety.

    Another feature the 97 had was the lack of a trigger disconnect.  This device disconnects the trigger when the action is cycled, thus requiring the trigger to be released and pressed again for follow-up shots.  The 97, like most pump-guns designed in the early 20th century, was a “slam-fire” gun – one could hold the trigger down and cycle the action, firing a new round ever time the slide slammed home.  This isn’t a terribly accurate way to fire a shotgun, but I will admit if can be great fun; when I was a young fellow, I used to experiment in this technique with my Dad’s old Stevens pump, which had the same capacity.  I never learned to hit much that way but burned up a fair amount of shells until the Old Man saw me dumping magazines of cheap field loads into the dirt bank we used as a backstop and, fearing damage to his gun by the rough use, put a stop to my experimenting.

    The ’97 was in production until 1957, a sixty-year run.  During both World Wars, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps used 97s to good effect in combat, the old guns with their slam-fire ability, six-shot magazines, 18” barrels, heat shrouds and bayonet lugs making good “trench brooms” in Great War France as well as good last-ditch jungle weapons in such places as Guadalcanal and Bougainville in the Pacific during Great War Part Two.

    Today Chinese manufacturer Norinco makes a copy of the 1897 Winchester, supposedly made exactly to original specs but, based on examples I’ve examined, certainly not to original standards.  My estimation of these guns is that one might make a decent tent pole or boat anchor, but they are not stout enough to make a decent pry bar.  If you’re looking for an external-hammer pump shotgun, skip the Chinese knockoffs and find an old Winchester.

    In the grand scheme of things, however fine and successful a gun as the 97 was, was only the prequel to the Perfect Repeater.

    Winchester’s T.C. Johnson

    The Model 12, exploded.

    There are few cases in which another designer has taken one of John Browning’s designs and improved it, but in 1912, Winchester engineer Thomas Crossley (T.C.) Johnson pulled it off.

    Starting with the 1897, Johnson retained the take-down action mechanism, the six-round tubular magazine and the slam-fire capacity.  The changes were primarily to the receiver.  Johnson designed an enclosed receiver with an internal hammer, with the magazine loading from the bottom of the receiver and spent shells ejected through a port on the right side of the receiver.  The feed system was also redesigned; where the 97 had used a big, heavy lifter to not only feed new rounds into the chamber but to also lock the bolt closed, the new gun used a much lighter shell lifter and instead locked the bolt closed with a lug that locked solidly into the top of the receiver.  The receiver itself was machined from a billet of forged steel, making for a gun of immense strength for the time, perfectly capable of handling the new smokeless powder ammo.

    Thus, was born the final configuration of the pump-action shotgun, which form persists even today.

    Perhaps because the Model 97 was already being produced in 12 and 16 gauge, the Model 1912, as it was then known, was initially introduced only in 20 gauge, with 12- and 16-gauge versions being introduced in late 1913.  The 16-gauge guns were built on the 20-gauge frame, making them an ideal compromise between “thump” and handling; my own 16-gauge is light, fast, a joy to handle, but with standard 2 ¾” shells puts out an appreciably larger shot charge than a 20.

    Winchester’s marketing department were quick to promote the new pump-gun, labeling it “The Perfect Repeater,” which to my estimation is a pretty accurate description.  A variety of Model 12s were produced, including lightweight versions and “Heavy Duck” guns that fired the very first 3” 12-gauge shells.  Trap and Skeet versions were also produced, as were the fancy Pigeon Grade guns, featuring engraving, silver and/or gold inlays, and AAA+ walnut stocks and fore ends.

    Like the 97 before it, the Model 12 also went to war, in trench gun trim, serving alongside the 1897 Winchester as well as the Stevens 520A and the Ithaca 37 in both World Wars as well as Korea and Vietnam.  The government also bought standard versions for marksmanship training; those guns were fitted with big, ugly Cutts Compensators.  The Old Man, when he ran a skeet range on an Army airfield in Victorville, California in late 1945 and early 1946, ran a lot of rounds through the range’s Model 12s and the accompanying Remington 11as.

    It was in the game fields, though, that the Model 12 really shone.  The combination of the enclosed, forged and machined receiver, the take-down action and the magazine capacity made the Model 12 very popular among bird and small-game hunters.  The gun was well-made, reliable, strong enough to handle heavy loads and tough enough to withstand bad weather, rain, damp, snow, you name it.

    A 1942 Winchester shotgun ad.

    By the mid-20th century, though, the very success of the Model 12 had resulted in some competition.  One notable pump-gun of mid-century, the Stevens 520/520A, also came from the mind of John Browning, but those guns were primarily aimed at the economy market and almost all were built in private-label trim for such outlets as Sears-Roebuck and Montgomery Wards.  As such, they didn’t make many inroads into Winchester’s sales of Model 12s.

    All that changed in 1950, with the introduction of the Remington 870, and a near-immortal pump-gun in its own right.  But the 870, while also tough and reliable, was cheaper to produce and sold at a lower price than the Model 12.  The 870 was a bargain for shooters, while the Model 12, with its forged, milled receiver and considerable hand-fitting, was becoming too expensive to produce.  The introduction of more economical yet still reliable and tough pump-guns like the aluminum-framed Mossberg 500 furthered the trend; hand-fitted guns like the Model 12 were becoming too costly for most shooters.

    In 1964, during the infamous Winchester reorganization, the company’s management decided that the Model 12 cost too much to build; the grand old gun was not a good gamble for the modern market.  Production of the Model 12 ceased that year, although a few guns still made their way out of Winchester’s Custom Shop.  Mikoru in Japan made a few guns on the Model 12 specifications bearing the U.S. Repeating Arms and Browning labels, but after 1964, mass production of the original Winchester Model 12 ended.

    Today

    If you’re looking to pick up an original pre-64 Model 12 today, there are plenty available, but you should be aware of a few precautionary notes:

    1. Early guns had short chambers. In the first few years, 12-gauge guns had 2 5/8” receivers, while 16-gauge models had 2 9/16” chambers. It can be harmful to gun and shooter to fire 2 ¾” shells in these guns.
    2. In the 1920s many Model 12s were produced with nickel steel barrels. These guns are all clearly marked on the barrel, “NICKEL STEEL,” and are still very fine guns; but be advised, if the finish is badly worn, these guns don’t reblue easily.  There was a very specific process involved; back when Winchester was still Winchester, one could send nickel steel guns in for refinishing and the company would do a very fine job.  The attempts I’ve seen since then, done by third parties, have had… well, mixed results.
    3. Both the 1897 and Model 12 Winchester shotguns have notoriously thin barrel walls. This will not be an issue unless your desire to have a gun cut for choke tubes.  Most outfits simply won’t touch an old Model 12; Carlson, for example, will tell you to not even send the gun in for evaluation.  I have had two Model 12s cut for tubes by Briley, the only outfit I’m aware of that will touch this job; the tubes provided are frighteningly thin.  I bet I could crush one flat between thumb and forefinger, although I won’t try; I have fired quite a few rounds through both 12 and 16 with these tubes, however, with no issues whatsoever.

    The market in pump shotguns today is an embarrassment of riches.  But you have to wonder, every time a gun company engineer comes up with a new pump-gun design, has to ask himself, somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, “How will this compare to the Model 12?”

    For longevity, for fit and finish, for reliability, for flawless function, and, yes, for beauty, the Model 12 Winchester remains The Perfect Repeater – the gold standard, the gun by which all other pump shotguns are measured.  I don’t see that fact changing any time soon.

  • Allamakee County Chonicles V – The Goat Tree

    Note:  A preview from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)

    The Goat Tree

    Goats have a sort of, well, aura.

    Some folks refer to it as a stench.  Personally, I don’t think that word quite covers it.  Goats are worse than skunks by almost any measure.

    The really unique thing about goats is that, unlike skunks, have a predilection to spread their aura across the countryside, on the wings of the breeze.  They do this by climbing – barns, trees, fence posts, rocks, almost anything higher than their natural stance.  The purpose of this is to spread the cloying smell of goat as far as possible across the countryside.

    In the Beginning…

    When I was a small and innocent boy, the route my parents took to get to town passed by a small farm that was home to several goats, including one old Billy known locally as “Old Stinky.”  That any goat, of all goats, was sufficiently rank to gain such an appellation as “Old Stinky” speaks volumes; in fact, there was muttering around the neighborhood about the owner of said farm, old man Andresen, conducting chemical warfare to drive down property values.  The fact that old man Andresen bought up a couple neighboring farms at bargain-basement prices seemed to bear that view out; at least that gave him room to run a few more goats, over which Old Stinky presided as uncontested patriarch.  Old Stinky took an inordinate amount of pride in his ability to drive away all manner of animals, insects, trespassers, and to turn green plants brown for twenty yards downwind.  He sure seemed to enjoy himself; nobody was certain how old man Andresen was able to take it.  Perhaps having the only fly and mosquito-free farm in northern Iowa was some compensation; flying insects of all sorts steered well clear of the Andresen place.  Not even horseflies braved Old Stinky’s presence.

    The road to town, as it passed the Andresen place, first dropped into the Canoe Creek valley and then made a sharp turn right at the driveway to the farm house.  At the end of the driveway, right next to the road, was the Goat Tree.  It was in this giant old oak tree that Old Stinky preferred to climb to announce his odiferous presence to the land.  To get past the Andresen place to town, you had to drive down into the valley, slow down to make the sharp turn, cross the bridge and then race up the steep hill on the other side of Canoe Creek to get away from Old Stinky’s presence.  The speed required to negotiate this obstacle was determined by how long the individual driver could hold his/her breath.

    The actual Canoe Creek, taken from that actual bridge. Really.

    Odoriferous things.

    Anyone who was blessed in having a rural upbringing gets pretty used to some nasty smells.  Some of my friends had parents who kept hogs, for example, and the domestic swine can make eyes water for several hundred yards downwind, even in the cleanest and best-kept of farms.  There are also skunks, the stuff of legend as far and nasty smells; skunks of course combine one of Nature’s foulest odors with the capacity to project that odor in a form that sticks with you for weeks.

    On one memorable occasion, my father found an injured turkey vulture.  The bird had a broken wing, and we determined that the right thing to do would be to catch it in Dad’s jacket, wrap it up and transport it some 40 miles to Elkader, where the Iowa Department of Natural Resources ran a rehab facility.

    The capture went fairly smoothly, and we were relieved when the bird didn’t smell too badly.  We placed him, wrapped tightly in Dad’s jacket to prevent injury (to him and us) placed him in the back of Dad’s station wagon, and set off southward.

    It seems incredible that a bird, accustomed to riding wind currents so gracefully hundreds of feet above the ground as turkey vultures do, would be subject to carsickness.

    We hadn’t covered one mile of the journey when our rescued vulture began to vomit.  And, dear reader, I ask you to contemplate the items that constitute fine dining to a vulture; throw in a few hours of digestion, and you still couldn’t possibly imagine the havoc this resulted in.  Prodigious quantities of partially processed vulture foodstuff were quickly deposited in the back of the car, until it seemed that surely there was more of it than bird.

    Tempting as it was to abandon car, bird and all, we stuck it out; Dad driving with his head out the window, eyes squinted against the wind, Mom hanging out the passenger side window, gulping in fresh air; and myself, gagging in the back seat, threatening to join the bird at any moment.

    Turkey Vulture. They stink, too.

    It seemed things couldn’t possibly get any worse, but then we turned the bend and began the descent into the Canoe Creek valley.

    As we approached the Goat Tree, Dad let out a yelp and pulled his head in.  Mom did likewise; even in a car filled with vulture vomit, the presence of Old Stinky pervaded the auto, seeping in even as we frantically rolled up the windows. Old Stinky was in place; sensing a challenge, he had climbed out on a stout limb overhanging the road where he stood proudly, head thrown back in a victorious bleat.

    On a hunch, I risked a look over the back of my seat.  The vulture was trying to get his head stuck under a wing, and his normally red head was showing a distinct green tinge.  Somehow I don’t think the ride was responsible.  Old Stinky had written another chapter in his legend; no other animal could make even a vulture gag.

    His Greatest Coup

    Old Stinky lived for many a year, and it was not until I had reached the age of 17 that the final episode in his legend took place.  Old Stinky went out in style, though; his demise involved a pretty brunette from town, a halter-top, a convertible, and a steep ditch.

    The story began a few weeks before my 17th birthday, when I took to keeping company with a cute little dark-haired girl from town.  Rhonda had a trim figure, long legs, dark hair, dark eyes, and parts that protruded and curved in all the right places, in all the right ways.

    Rhonda’s father, Mr. Walters, (“but you best call me ‘Sir,’ boy”) was less than enchanted with the liaison; Rhonda came from a town family with money, and her Dad wasn’t too pleased with his baby girl taking up with a long-haired, slightly bedraggled woods bum who earned extra money by trapping muskrats, ate with his Buck knife and dressed up for company by putting on a clean black t-shirt and knocking the dirt off his steel-toed engineer boots.  I never did figure out why Mr. Walters could never seem to remember my name, and made up for his memory lapse by referring to me as “Worthless.”

    Still, Rhonda and I went out for several weeks, and enjoyed each other’s company a great deal.  Things had progressed to the point of exchanging smooches in the front seat of my ancient Ford when Rhonda’s Dad presented her with the gift of a nicely restored 1966 Mustang convertible.  This was too good to be believed; on the great day that Rhonda took delivery of the Mustang, she called me to announce the great news, and offer me a spin around the countryside.

    Early October in Northeast Iowa brings some of the most beautiful Indian summer days you’ll see anywhere.  The day that saw Rhonda pull into my folk’s driveway in her new Mustang, the sun was shining, the thermometer was in the eighties, the Mustang’s top was down, and Rhonda was enchantingly dressed in cut-off shorts and a white halter top.  I was decked out in my finest; jeans that still had knees, a black t-shirt with no holes, and I even stopped to knock the mud off my engineer boots before vaulting over the door into the passenger seat.  And away we went!

    The day was indeed wondrous; occasional stops for a bit of cuddling made it more wondrous still.

    Not Rhonda, but much the same.

    I guess it was the halter-top that was to blame.  For those of you who don’t remember, halter-tops in the late Seventies generally consisted of a small triangle of cloth with four strings; the cloth was just large enough to cover the strategic portions of a girl’s chest, and two ties at the nape of the neck and two at the mid-back secured the whole thing in place.  It was probably due to Rhonda’s halter-top commanding my entire attention (to be honest, it was the bow-knotted string ties I found particularly intriguing) that I didn’t notice her taking the turn down into the Canoe Creek valley.

    The nose of the Mustang dipped as the road took the first turn down towards the Andresen place, and I noticed the aura…  ever so faintly, the aura, of…

    Old Stinky.

    Rhonda seemed oblivious as we rounded the last bend, chatting happily away, one arm on the top of the door, one on the steering wheel, her left knee raised in a manner to take the breath away from a young man.

    But it wasn’t the sight of Rhonda’s thigh that was taking my breath away.  It was the sight of Old Stinky, out on his favored limb on the Goat Tree, casting his evil gaze at the oncoming Mustang.

    Old Stinky was wise in the ways of cars.  Old Stinky knew that, in a convertible with the top down, there was no escape.  Old Stinky was ready.  Out on the end of his favored limb, right over the road, Old Stinky threw back his head and bleated his triumph once more to the world.  His miasma descended to cover the road to our immediate front.

    “Say,” Rhonda asked, “Do you smell something?”

    “HIT THE GAS!”  I shouted.  Rhonda turned to me, a concerned look on her face, and then we both looked upwards.  As we passed under the Goat Tree, we heard the sound; the awful sound, the horrifying sound.  The sound of Old Stinky’s limb breaking.

    It seems Old Stinky had been putting on some weight as he got on in years.  The limb that safely supported him in his prime was dangerously fragile now.  I was told some time later by a saddened old man Andresen that Old Stinky hadn’t been out on his perch in a year or more.  It was only the irresistible sight of an oncoming convertible that drove Stinky, in spite of his advanced age, to one last feat of stenching.

    With a loud crack, the limb gave way, pitching Old Stinky into the Mustang’s back seat.

    Rhonda let out a screech that would have made a wildcat green with envy.  She yanked the Mustang to the left, then to the right.  Old Stinky staggered to his feet on the back seat, and fighting to keep his balance, grabbed in his long, snaggled teeth the only thing that presented itself, that being the top ties to Rhonda’s halter.

    Rhonda screeched louder still.  In what I imagined to be a chivalrous move, I started hammering Old Stinky’s head with my left fist; it was then I learned that an aged Billy goat’s skull is the approximate hardness of marble.  The only result was a badly bruised fist.  I had to some up with another course of action, fast; my vision was starting to get blurry, and Rhonda was starting the dry heaves.  A plan came to mind, and I shouted it at her.

    “STOP THE CAR!”

    Rhonda’s right foot came down hard on the brake pedal, and the Mustang’s wheels locked, sending the car careening into the steep ditch on the opposite side of the road.  The Mustang slammed hard against the side of the ditch; Rhonda’s seat belt held, and she only bounced off the steering wheel enough to give her a slight bruise on her forehead.  As for myself, in a display of teenage machismo I hadn’t fastened my seat belt, and so was slammed against the dashboard with rib-cracking force.

    Old Stinky, though, fared least well of all.  Still gripping the top ties to Rhonda’s halter, he was catapulted upwards, over Rhonda’s head, over the windshield, and a good fifty feet into the cornfield just ahead.  A trail of stench followed Old Stinky overhead, much like the wake of a boat; as he passed, he kept his grip on Rhonda’s halter ties.  The top ties held, but the bottom ties gave way; my last sight of Old Stinky was of his airborne figure, trailing Rhonda’s detached halter top, sailing into the rows of golden cornstalks.

    Not Old Stinky, but much the same.

    I’m saddened to report that Old Stinky didn’t survive his first experience with unassisted flight.  After all his malign intent, after all his evil smell, Old Stinky was a local institution, and it’s always sad to see a legend pass on.

    I’m still more saddened to report that, while we didn’t dare follow Old Stinky into the corn in search of Rhonda’s halter, she did have a blanket in the trunk of the Mustang, in which she wrapped herself up tightly and drove me in silence back to my parent’s house.  The thoughts of what the original intent Rhonda had in placing a blanket in the back of her car frustrated me for years afterwards.

    I didn’t see Rhonda again after that.  I guess the initial attraction was overcome by the association with the trauma of her banged-up Mustang and the odoriferous presence of Old Stinky, which never did come out of the upholstery.  Rhonda instead took up with a boy from town, a boy from a family with money.  I’m told that Mr. Walters (“I always told you he was worthless”) was pleased with the way things turned out.

    And Then…

    It turned out that Old Stinky left a legacy, after all.  A genetic legacy, one that curses the Canoe Creek valley to this day.  It was many years later, on a visit to my parents at my childhood home with my own family, that I learned that Old Stinky’s name is not forgotten.  During the course of a pleasant vacation at my Mom and Dad’s home, with my wife and two little girls, we decided one afternoon to take a drive to town.  As we turned our truck into the Canoe Creek valley, my wife turned to me.

    “Honey,” she asked, “Do you smell something?”

    “It stinks, Daddy!” our little girls chirped from the back seat.

    I looked up, and there, on the Goat Tree, stood a younger version of Old Stinky, on another limb overhanging the road, head thrown back, a victorious bleat ringing forth from a young and healthy set of lungs.

    A strange feeling came over me, and not just because of the smell.  It was a feeling that combined nausea, nostalgia, and an overall warm, fuzzy feeling that some things, some legends, can never die.

    My wife didn’t understand my expression, even as we drove through the clinging cloud of stench Young Stinky let loose to waft down onto the road, even as we all were gagging and our eyes watering…

    I was smiling.

  • Guns For The Country Home

    Guns for The Country Home

    Some time back I stumbled across an interesting discussion on the appropriate firearm for the farm or country home, much like the country home my folks maintained for many decades.

    The Old Man was, of course, a farmer for much of his life, and an old school country gentleman.  His attitude towards firearms reflected most of his type and his generation; firearms were tools essential to the maintenance and protection of homestead and crops, in the same order as a chainsaw, a scythe, or a tractor.  They were selected and maintained as such, with strictly utilitarian considerations.  Childhood in the Great Depression and young adulthood during WW2 made most of the Old Man’s generation practically minded people.

    That being the case, the Old Man maintained three firearms on and about the place.  They were a 12-gauge pump shotgun, a .22 rimfire rifle, and a .22 handgun.  The shotgun was his first purchase with his demobilization pay when he returned from the Army in 1946, the .22 rifle was a third anniversary present from my mother in 1950, and the .22 pistol he bought for recreational shooting sometime in the mid-1960s.  I still have all three firearms, and no amount of money could persuade me to part with them, so don’t ask.  And, in what should come as a surprise to no one, these are the three types of guns I think are most useful around your typical country home.

    If You Can Have Only One Gun

    Winchester Model 12 and Stevens 520A.

    Now, on to the country home:  If a family can only maintain one firearm on a country homestead, one would be wise to pick up something along the lines of the Old Man’s first post-war purchase, a simple 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.  The Old Man’s Stevens pump-gun hasn’t been manufactured for many years, although used examples are sometimes available at bargain prices.  The old Stevens 520/620 series are great guns, John Browning designed take-down pump guns with solid steel receivers.  They’re reliable and brutally tough, and if you can find them around, come pretty cheap.

    The Mossberg 500 series or the Remington 870 are likewise solid guns that will give long service; my own pair of Mossbergs, a 12 and a 20, have been functioning flawlessly in the game fields for 35 and 40 years now.  There are plenty of others on the market, but were I equipping an outpost myself, I’d probably go for a Mossberg or a Remington, for the primary reason that parts will be easy to find.

    The advantages of the 12 gauge are many.  Ammo is readily available anywhere and various loads/shot sizes can handle anything from garden pests to turkeys, while a slug will dispatch a deer or even a bear.  Pump guns are solid, reliable and easy to operate.  Most hold five or six rounds in the magazine, which should be enough ammo for most chores.

    I’m a big fan of old shotguns, particularly the pre-64 Winchester Model 12 and the Belgian Browning Auto-5s.  I have a fair stable of those pieces and over time will probably buy more.  But these are collector’s pieces, and while I shoot them and hunt with them, I would not necessarily drag them through mud and bad weather.  For that, a rougher piece is in order – a utility shotgun, suitable for the only gun on a country homestead.

    Even though I will always love my old Brownings and Winchesters, I will always keep the old Mossbergs around as utility shotguns, especially after our move north.  Of course, my attitudes towards firearms are somewhat different than the Old Man’s, and so the Mossbergs will still have plenty of company in the rack.

    I’ve seen some great shooting done with simple 12-gauge pumps, too.  Despite his utilitarian attitude towards shotguns, the Old Man was nevertheless as artist with his old Stevens.  He was known to go 100 straight on the skeet range in his Army days, and he was highly skilled at making a shot charge arrive in the same location as a fleeing pheasant or grouse.  In his early 80s he cut off the tip of his trigger finger in a jointer, and since that time firing a gun with any recoil caused a stab of pain through his shooting hand, but before moving to town he capped his hunting career in a blaze of glory by stalking and killing four wild turkeys with a bolt-action .410, causing our old friend Dave to comment, “if anyone but your Dad told me that, I’d call him a damned liar.”  I was always disappointed by my failure to catch up to Dad on the trap range, although he would have admitted I was better than he with a rifle.

    Which brings us to…

    If You Can Have Only Two Guns

    Mossberg 44US. Not the one I had but one just like it.

    But let’s say you can have two guns around your place.  I’d recommend the second be a .22 rifle.

    Oddly enough, while my gun rack contains several .22LR semi-autos, if you were to keep a .22 rifle in a rural setting, I’d recommend a bolt gun.  Why?  Several reasons:

    • Bolt guns are simple, they generally break down easily and are easy to clean and repair.
    • Even in a .22LR, bolt guns are accurate.  Not that semi-autos can’t be accurate – but bolt guns are generally a hair ahead.
    • Simplicity leads to reliability.  Fewer moving parts means less wear, although any well-maintained firearm should last a lifetime.
    • Some semi-autos, like my own slicked-up Ruger 10/22, can be finicky about ammo.  Bolt guns generally digest any ammo with aplomb, and generally give you the option to run quiet .22 Shorts if you are shooting at close quarters.  A subsonic .22 Short round fired from a rifle isn’t much louder than a finger-snap, and that can come in downright handy.

    The other advantage to a .22LR bolt gun is price.  There are literally millions of inexpensive and yet reliable and accurate .22 bolt guns around.  You don’t need high polish or fancy walnut for accuracy in a .22 (although those things sure are nice).  Anyone who has handled an old Mossberg or Marlin bolt .22 should be able to attest to that.  Back in the day I bought a Mossberg bolt-action .22 with US Government markings for the grand sum of ten dollars, and I could shoot pop-bottle caps off fence posts at 25 yards with it – with iron sights.  That Mossberg today would cost you more than that, even adjusted for inflation, but not all that much more.  In fact, the same gun without the US Government markings, for some reason, will cost you a lot less.

    A lot of the comments above will apply to a lever gun as well, except that .22LR lever guns are generally pricier and more complicated to maintain.

    If You Can Have Only Three Guns

    For your third gun, I’d recommend a medium-to-major power handgun, one you can carry in a belt holster and shoot accurately.  Anything from a 9mm auto to a .44 Magnum will work; it’s far more important that you can handle the sidearm well.  Revolvers, though, are generally simpler, easier to maintain and less fussy about ammo than autos.  Revolvers also have the capability of handling more powerful loads in a reasonably sized piece.  Bear in mind that if you’re in a remote location, you may have to repair the thing yourself.  Some of us are better tinkerers than others.

    With the above in mind, though, take into consideration any possible uses you might be putting that sidearm to – caliber considerations in Georgia may be quite different than those in Alaska.

    Most people find handguns more difficult to handle well than a rifle or shotgun, so be prepared to spend some money on practice ammo.

    Parts Is Parts

    In a rural home, it’s a good idea to keep some parts on hand.  Firing pins, springs, screws and action pins, all good things to keep a supply of.  You’ll also need tools, as gunsmithing tools are somewhat specialized; Brownell’s Basic Gunsmith Tool Kit contains a good assortment of tools, gauges and so on to keep your shooting irons shooting.  Keep a good supply of cleaning solvents and lubricant on hand.

    If your pump shotgun has a barrel that can be swapped out easily, as does the Remington 870 and the Mossberg 500, an extra barrel isn’t a bad idea.  And speaking of barrels, while I’m fond of Briley choke tubes and run them on a lot of my shotguns, an ugly but solid Poly-Choke type collet choke may be a better idea for a country-homestead gun; you can lose choke tubes, but that Poly-Choke is there for keeps.

    Last-Ditch

    No, I’m not kidding.

    If “prepping” is your thing, or you’re just very remote and are worried about supplies being hard to get, here’s something to think about:  What would you do if cut off from a supply of ammo?

    The answer may be to scale your technology back some – say, to about 1800.  A smooth bore flintlock musket is versatile, will kill birds with shot or moose with round balls, and if you have bar lead, a mold, flint and a supply of sulfur you can make everything else you’ll need to keep shooting.  Charcoal isn’t hard to come by, and if you have a latrine, you can make saltpeter.  You’ll need a fair amount, as the recipe is generally 75% saltpeter, 15% charcoal and 10% sulfur.

    That’s something to think about, anyway.

    And So…

    A country home requires a lot of tools to keep the place maintained, safe and tidy.  Even if you’re not a hobby shooter or (like me) a collector, a firearm is one of those essential tools.  Whether your immediate need is rabbit stew, pest control, dissuading something big and toothy or something two-legged and belligerent, sometimes a firearm is the only thing that will work.

  • Allamakee County Chronicles III – The Van

    Note:  A preview from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)

    The First Longings

    When I was a young man, facing the first hints of adulthood at the ripe age of 15, it dawned on me that I had the urge for independence.  This urge was somewhat hampered by my lack of a driver’s license, and that the areas I wished to be independent in were separated from my Northeast Iowa childhood home by twenty or thirty miles, minimum.

    To every problem, however, there is a solution, if only one is willing to search for it; in my case, the solution was my hunting partner Del.  Del had the distinction of being 16 and possessing that great prize of 16-year-oldness, a driver’s license.

    To every solution, though, there is generally an underlying problem.  In Del’s case, it was the vehicle in which we made our teenage journeys, questing after ducks, squirrels, grouse, and teenage girls with similar longings for independence.  (Of course, we always hoped to meet girls with other longings as well, longings that sort of corresponded with certain of our own.  That sort of luck rarely materialized until I was in college.  But I digress.)  Every silver lining has a big fat cloud, and the cloud behind the silver lining of Del’s driver’s license was The Van.

    Every Problem Has a Solution

    It looked something like this, but more beat-up.

    The Van was an ancient, asthmatic, arthritic Dodge, of indeterminate age, rusted fenders, flat front, and a slant-six engine that produced slightly less horsepower than a treadmill run by an aged gerbil with a bad heart murmur.  The Van’s muffler was a masterpiece of coat hangers and duct tape; the transmission, a three-speed manual so full of ancient, stiffened grease that it required using both hands to shift gears.  This made driving The Van on steep and winding roads somewhat of an exercise in contortion.

    Northeast Iowa is, of course, full of steep and winding roads.

    On the plus side, The Van had four tires that held air for several days, and enough room behind the two bucket seats and engine cover for a case of cheap motor oil, a set of jumper cables, a spare tire and a week’s worth of camping gear.

    Del, being a teenager possessed of greater imagination than means, spent considerable time planning the dramatic conversion of The Van.  This was in the late Seventies, when conversion vans first became popular, and “If This Van’s a-Rockin’” bumper stickers became de rigueur.  Del’s plans included wood paneling, foldaway beds, murals, and megabuck sounds systems based on eight-track tape players.  It probably would have been better if Del’s plans had included a new engine, a new transmission, a new exhaust system, and several thousand dollars of bodywork.

    Of course, Del’s plans would have been better served by the purchase of a less ancient vehicle, and indeed that was eventually what happened; but in our teenage years, a newer vehicle, say, one manufactured at any point more recent than the Upper Cretaceous, wasn’t practical financially.  For us, purchasing enough gas to drive from the house to the barn was frequently impractical financially.

    So, we bravely made do with The Van, and of such stuff are legends born.

    As pointed out earlier, Northeast Iowa is full of steep, winding roads.  Along the Mississippi River, they frequently run along some pretty spectacular drop-offs.  Navigating these roads in The Van frequently involved Del steering with his right knee, pushing the clutch pedal with his left foot and using both hands to drag the reluctant shift lever from first gear to second.  We did this frequently enough that Del even became pretty accomplished at adjusting the drivers’ door mirror with his forehead.

    It was on just such a trip that a large, short-tempered bumblebee somehow blundered in through the driver’s side window of The Van, just as we were approaching a particularly nasty turn.  The bee caught Del just as he was attempting to downshift from second to first.

    Bumblebee behavior may just make a young biologist’s fortune some day.  I, for one, would love to hear speculation from one such learned person, as to what motivation drove this bee to fly in the sleeve of Del’s t-shirt, and proceed from there to the approximate location of his left pectoral muscle.  The bee, after some contemplation, decided then to plant one of the most excruciating stings ever in the history of teenage boys and bumblebees.

    Del let out a whoop and let go of the shift lever, then stuck partway between second and first.  The Van responded by freewheeling towards the curve, and thence towards the Mississippi River some forty feet below.

    Yes, Iowa has hills. Like this.

    The fact that a similar drop-off awaited on the right side of the van persuaded me away from my first instinctive choice of action, which involved my bailing out the door and going it alone.  In most circumstances, I’d have preferred the odds of my not being a passenger in The Van at that point, but the fact that the right-side wheels were pinging bits of gravel into space dissuaded me.

    At this point, it had sunk in that my fate was irretrievably interlaced with Del and The Van, so I began to consider my options.  Option One, a bloodcurdling shriek, made the most sense as a first course of action, and since Del was likewise engaged in a scream that reached the approximate decibel level of a jet on takeoff, I followed my instincts as well.  Option Two, grabbing the steering wheel, seemed impractical, as Del’s right knee was still there, and wise people of all ages and genders kept their hands well away from any portions of Del’s anatomy at the best of times anyway.

    But the fact that The Van was rolling towards a forty-foot drop into the Mississippi caused me to disregard that rule.  Even though Del’s feet, the most dangerous part of his anatomy for reasons I won’t go into in case any readers have just eaten, were perched near the brake pedal, Option Three involved diving for the brakes.

    Exercising Option Three probably saved our lives, but unfortunately it involved a quick dive over the engine cover and under the dash, where I slammed my hand down on the brake pedal.  While I managed to bring The Van to a halt, having my face in close proximity to Del’s feet caused migraine headaches and hallucinations for weeks afterwards.  Had I known of the serious consequences of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder I might have been inclined to seek psychiatric help.

    That event paled in significance in short order, however, as traveling in The Van was a constant stream of near-death experiences.  Even in such times of peril, some episodes stand out with unnatural clarity as truly terrifying.

    Sometimes the Solution is Worse Than the Problem.

    The Van’s electrical system, such as it was, had the unique property of reducing brand-new batteries to junk in a matter of months.  In the instance a battery failed, and finances disallowed a new one, The Van was started by the simple expedient of the “Pop-Start.”  This, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, involved rolling The Van forward until the speed reached approximately five miles per hour, and “popping” the clutch to start the engine.  Unfortunately, this frequently caused several backfires before the engine caught.

    On one bright Iowa summer Saturday, Del stopped by in his father’s pickup with a question.

    “Hey, The Van’s carburetor linkage is busted.  Come on help me fix it.  I need you to help me get the coat hanger wired up right from the gas pedal.”  It’s a testament to teenage bravery – or perhaps stupidity – that this request didn’t send me screaming for the hills.  Instead, I accompanied Del to where The Van sat at the top of his parent’s long, steep drive awaiting repair.

    Something like an hour was spent in the creative fabrication of a coat-hanger repair to the fragmented remains of the carburetor linkage.  It was then that the excitement began.  Repairs supposedly complete, The Van was ready to be fired up.

    “Let’s leave the engine cover off,” Del said.  “That way you’ll be able to watch the linkage to make sure it’s not bending or anything.”  Resisting the urge to sprint for the treeline, I agreed.

    Unfortunately, all my bad premonitions about the upcoming event were about to be proved out, in spades.

    Del hopped behind the wheel of The Van and turned the key in the ignition.  Only a buzzing from the direction of the starter motor rewarded him.

    “Dang.  Guess the battery’s dead.  We’ll have to pop-start it.”  Fortunately, The Van was located nicely at the top of Del’s family’s driveway, known locally as Suicide Hill.  The Van’s recurring electrical problems left Del inclined to park The Van on a slope whenever possible, and the driveway in question provided a slope that would make mountain goats shudder in terror just from looking at it in a photograph.

    “Del,” I warned, “The Van’s facing up the hill.  Shouldn’t we try to turn it around?”

    “Naw,” Del replied.  “I’ll only have to roll a few feet, I’ll just pop start it in reverse.”

    The sense of foreboding had now drawn around me, like a dark, dark cloud.  All my fight-or-flight instincts were screaming at me to run, run, RUN!

    These guys would have been terrified.

    We don’t always listen to our better judgment.  Teenage boys almost never do.  I remained in the passenger seat of The Van as Del struggled the shift lever into reverse, left the key on, and released the brake.  The Van began the roll.

    About ten feet into the roll, at a speed of roughly ten miles per hour, Del stepped down on the gas pedal and popped the clutch.  The Van, ever a seemingly sentient construct, chose this moment to let the games begin.

    A hearty backfire began the trauma, accompanied by a jet of flame a good three feet from the exposed carburetor.  Since I was sitting about eighteen inches from the flame, which was approximately the temperature of a thermonuclear device at ground zero, I leaned away against the door, which popped open.  In a moment, I was suspended between my right hand on the window frame of the open door, and my buttocks, which were still on the seat.  My left hand had nowhere to go that wasn’t near the carburetor/flame thrower.  That being the case, I held on to the door with a grip that left permanent finger marks in the sheet metal and tried as best as I could to maintain a grip on the seat with my rear.

    The engine sputtered to life, but the situation had not yet begun to deteriorate.  At that moment, Del’s heroic fabrication of coat hanger wire gave way, and the gas pedal went to the floor with no effect.

    We were now encased in a van, rolling backwards down a steep slope towards the highway, with a volcano erupting in between the front seats.  Del stomped down hard on the brakes – too hard, in fact, as a brake line that was originally installed using tools chipped from flint gave way and the brake pedal slammed uselessly down, much like the gas pedal, to the floor.  The Van picked up speed.

    “I’m gonna shift gears, you’ll have to hit the gas!”  Del shouted.  I carefully considered my reply, and calmly opined, “WWWAAAUUGGHHH!” or some such.

    Del got a firm grip on the steering wheel with his right knee, shoved his left foot down on the clutch, and began the torturous process of hauling the shift lever into first gear.

    The shift lever broke off in his hand.

    The Van was now hurtling backwards down the slope at forty miles an hour.  The screams emanating from within The Van cause dogs to howl in agony for miles around.

    With a strength borne of desperation, Del grabbed the stub of the shift lever and managed to haul it into first gear.  Del began to slip the clutch.

    “Hit the gas!!” Del shouted at me.

    “WWWAAAUUGGHHH!” I shouted back.  My left hand was still free, and so I grabbed the carburetor linkage remnant and hauled the gas open.

    The Van’s rear tires began to bite into the dirt of the drive.  However, since we were at this point rolling backwards down a steep slope at over forty miles per hour, this had a predictable effect.  The Van began to tip over backwards.  The front wheels left the ground, and the view through the windshield changed from dirt driveway, grass and trees to sky, sky, and nothing but sky.

    “WWWAAAUUGGHHH!”  I shouted at Del.

    “WWWAAAUUGGHHH!” Del shouted back.

    The carburetor, unperturbed, continued its impersonation of Mt. St. Helens.

    At the ultimate point, during which Del and I both came very close to an involuntary physical reaction that would have led to the embarrassing necessity of clean underwear, The Van stopped, upright at approximately a forty-five-degree angle.  Then, with the grinding slowness of a glacier, it began to tip, slowly…  forwards.

    The Van’s front wheels slammed back down on the dirt drive.  My hand, by now fused to the red-hot metal of the carburetor linkage, yanked down hard, racing the engine, and putting out the fire.  Del held the clutch in against the engine until I could bail out the door and, resisting the urge to run screaming for home, brace a large rock under a rear tire.  Del then shut off the engine, and we both collapsed in the grass, hearts pounding like a herd of stampeding bison.

    “Well.”  Del gasped.  “Guess I’ll have to get another coat hanger.  Can you help me push The Van back up to the house?”

    I may have over-reacted, but I don’t really think so.  After all, Del was back on solid food again only two weeks later.

    But Then…

    Eventually, (and perhaps amazingly) I myself reached the ripe old age of 16 and was duly awarded with the coveted driver’s license.  This enabled me to drive legally on my own, something I had been doing for several years on farm equipment and the Old Man’s dump truck.  A year earlier I had already completed the purchase of my own car, for the considerable sum of fifty dollars.  It was an ancient, asthmatic, arthritic Ford, of indeterminate age, rusted fenders, badly dented front end, and a straight-six engine that produced slightly less horsepower than a treadmill run by an aged gerbil with a bad heart murmur…  But, surely that’s a story for another day.

  • Allamakee County Chronicles II – Hoot Owls

    Note:  A preview from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)

    Modern Wildlife

    Modern “wildlife watchers” are amazing.

    Urban Wildlife.

    We used to call such folks “birdwatchers,” but now they watch all manner of wildlife.  In the stretch of mountains where I regularly spend days and long weekends loafing around, (I disguise my loafing by calling it ‘fishing’ or ‘elk hunting’) even the skunks are beginning to complain about the retinues of binocular-wielding humans that follow them around all day.

    Not even urban wildlife is safe from the prying eyes of humans.  I recently saw a couple engaging in some wildlife watching in the urban environs of Denver:

    “See, just to the left of that dumpster.  It’s a Bearded Wino.”

    “No, honey, check your Field Guide.  That’s a Mustachioed Dumpster Crawler.”

    I quickly stepped in to correct the wildlife watching couple.  “You’ve got the older edition of Urban Wildlife of the Western United States,” I told them.  “You should check the new politically-sanitized edition.  What you have there is a Facial-Hair Enhanced Residentially Challenged Person.”

    In the Beginning

    My own bird and wildlife watching began at an early age, at least in part because I was surrounded most of the time by various birds and critters; it was hard not to watch them.  In fact, sometimes the wildlife would watch you, which could get downright unnerving.

    At the tender age of twelve, a youth spent mostly in the hardwood forests of Northeast Iowa had taught me about most of the local flora and fauna, including the ubiquitous Barred Owl. These birds were known locally as “hoot owls” after one of their calls, a characteristic series of deep hoots, boomed out in a ringing, “Who cooks for you – who cooks for you-ALL.”

    I’m not sure why the locals chose that name, though, because no other bird alive today is capable of the cacophony of screeches, wails and howls as the Barred Owl of the upper Midwest. The very presence of this virtuoso of the nighttime woods was the source our terror that dark night, as it was on many other nights in the deep forest.

    I don’t know what possesses young boys to wander around in the woods at night. A nighttime forest can be a rather friendly place at times. In winter, when the leafless trees allow the moonlight in to reflect off the snow, the light will be bright enough to cast sharp shadows against the snow. But, in the late summer, when the trees have grown thick canopies of leaves that block out all but glimpses of the stars and the moon is new, the woods can be so deeply pitch black that navigation gets hazardous.

    It was on just such a pitch-black night that my cousin, childhood friend, fishing buddy and partner in various mischief Bill and I decided to take a short cut through the woods, up a steep hill and across a meadow belonging to the Girl Scouts of America. The reason we decided to take this hike was simple, we had been fishing on the lower reaches of Bear Creek and my parent’s house was a good three miles if we followed the road back, but only a mile if we cut over a ridgeline, across the Girl Scout camp land and through my parent’s woods down to the house. Simple, right?

    Twelve-year-old boys never undertake anything simple.

    Whippoorwill.

    The hike started out great. In the relatively open ground of the creek bottom and the power line cut leading up to the Girl Scout land, starlight provided enough light even in the new moon. We couldn’t see much, but it was enough, and the friendly calls of whippoorwills accompanied us.

    Not many people these days get to hear whippoorwills, their numbers have sadly diminished, due in large part to agricultural chemicals and habitat loss. In our youth they were legion, and the endless repetition of their namesake call rang through the woods at night all summer long. They called back and forth across the meadows on the hilltops, “whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will” and if you got close enough, you could hear the faint “chuck” at the end of each call. You might even catch a glimpse of the cigar-shaped body and rounded wings of the birds as it fluttered to a new calling spot.

    Bill and I had a great time walking across the open ground leading up to my folk’s upper meadow, trying to locate each whippoorwill as it flushed. But that changed when we entered my parent’s woods, under the great overhanging oaks and hickories. The whippoorwills stayed out on the edges and didn’t venture far into the thick forest. In the tall trees our vision was useless as even the faint starlight was blocked out. The darkness was a tangible presence as we slipped silently through the forest night. Our eyesight was useless, but we knew danger was everywhere. Strange sounds echoed through the trees, eerie presences whisked by overhead, and small things scuttled past underfoot. A cold breeze rattled through the tree branches.

    “I can’t see a dang thing!” Bill exclaimed.

    I was waving my hands out front, feeling my way from tree to tree. “Don’t worry about it, I know every tree in these woods.”

    Bill wasn’t too comforted by my show of confidence.

    But Then…

    The Barred Owl.

    The silence of the forest was broken by a series of eight deep, booming hoots from the hillside above and behind us.

    “Hoooo-hoo-hoo-hoo. Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-awww.”

    “Hoot owl!” I told Bill. “I ever show you how I can call hoot owls?”

    “No,” Bill replied, “But right now I’d rather you show me the way back down to your house.”

    “Aw, c’mon.” I insisted. “Watch this, it’s great.” I tipped back my head and howled back at the owl: “Hoooo-hoo-hoo-hoo. Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-awww.”

    Three answering series of hoots sounded from varying directions. “Geez, Bill, I got three of ‘em answering! This will be great!” In the silent darkness, I somehow got the impression Bill was adopting a skeptical expression.

    “Hoooo-hoo-hoo-hoo. Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-awww.” I howled again at the birds. Three answering series of hoots rang out, closer now.

    “See, they’re coming right in! Watch this, I’ll call them right in on top of us.”

    “I don’t think I like this. Maybe you oughtta leave the owls alone.” Bill advised. Despising Bill’s sudden display of the better part of valor, I belted out another owl call.

    “Hoooo-hoo-hoo-hoo. Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-awww.”

    Silence.

    “Maybe we better head on back now.” Bill whispered. An ominous presence seemed to be gathering around us.

    Owls, you see, can fly in complete silence, due to soft downy edges on their flight feathers. This feature enables them to float softly up on an unsuspecting rabbit or mouse; it also enables them to drift in on what seems to be a strange, rival owl calling threateningly on the edge of their hunting range. They will do this even if the strange rival is really a twelve-year old boy.

    As much as I can reconstruct from the awful moments that followed, three owls drifted in on silent wings, each expecting a rival, and each finding one – the other two owls, in fact, that I’d likewise tolled in with my patented owl call. The first owl to sense the others must have reacted in typical hoot-owl fashion.

    One moment Bill and I were crouched silently under the giant oaks, listening carefully to a night where a few insects seemed to be the only other living things about. The next, a horrifying sound split the night wide; a cross between the wailing of a lost soul, and the enraged screech of a wildcat attacking to defend her young, cast forth at the decibel level of a train whistle. The other two owls responded in kind.

    The scream of an enraged hoot owl facing an adversary would cause an axe murderer to cringe in terror. We were two twelve-year old boys with three of them sending horrifying challenges ringing back and forth in the trees above our heads. Only one course of action lay open to us.

    “RUN!” Bill shouted.

    “FOLLOW ME!” I shouted back, already shifting into high gear. “I KNOW EVERY TREE IN THESE…”

    WHAMM!!!

    A rock-hard object hit me in the face, an explosion of light resolved slowly into a constellation of stars, wheeling slowly in front of my face. “Funny, I thought the trees were too thick to see the stars here, and why are they spinning?” Then I realized I was laying on my back. I’d run headlong into a white oak tree.

    The shrieks of three maddened banshee owls rang through the night; faintly, I could hear the crashing of Bill’s fleeing tennis shoes. Then, WHACK! Bill charged into a shagbark hickory with enough force to drive bits of bark into his forehead.

    I managed to get to my feet, terror of the horrible wailing driving me on. I’d gone perhaps ten feet when I clipped another tree trunk in the pitch dark and went spinning to the ground again. A few feet away, I heard Bill using language that would have caused his mother to run for a stout switch, as he proceeded to slam into tree trunk after tree trunk like a small, frightened ball in a giant, darkened pinball machine.

    Somehow, slamming from tree to tree in the pitch dark, we managed to make it back down the creek bottom to my parent’s house. In the dim light shining from the porch, we splashed across the creek to collapse gasping in the front yard. The owls still screeched faintly in the background.

    “Well,” I informed Bill, in between gasps, “I told you I knew where every tree was.”

    I’m amazed to this day that Bill had the strength to attack me after our ordeal, but attack he did, and I fought him off at the cost of a black eye and two badly bruised fists.

    As It Stands

    In years following, I spent many a night in the woods, listening with great enjoyment to the wailing of hoot owls in their nocturnal battles, and I even called a few more in by mimicking their eight-hoot call. I exchanged a few conversations with owls perched in trees right overhead, their sudden challenges never frightened me again the way they did that first time. To this day, the call of a hoot owl fills me with nostalgia. Deep inside, though, somewhere down in the recesses of my psyche, there remains a twelve-year old boy who will always know a few moments of panic, recalling that night. I generally get over that moment of dread. Of course, I do have my confident knowledge of the northeast Iowa forests to my advantage.

    After all, I know every tree in those woods.

  • A GlibFit Special: Tonio’s Rough Guide to Kayaking

    Kayaking is a fun and safe recreational activity enjoyed by people at all levels of fitness and mobility. Kayaking can be done on almost any body of liquid water, but I’m going to focus on flatwater and stillwater paddling since that is the entry point and maximum level of attainment for most people. Kayaking is a good low-impact exercise and enables fishing, nature photography, and camping. Nothing beats the relaxation of a day on the water.

    The most frequent question I get from people who have never kayaked is: “Do I have to learn how to flip the boat back up?” No. Ideally you won’t turn over, but if you do you swim free. Which inevitably leads to domanda numero due: “Do I have to be strapped in?” Again, the answer is “no.” Recreational kayaks are designed for easy exit – they have large cockpit openings and ample, unobstructed under-deck space. Plus, there is a new class of sit-on-top, self-draining kayak where no part of you is enclosed at all. To complete the trifecta of answers to questions I am frequently asked by non-boaters – no, they are not as tippy as you probably think; kayaks are designed to keep your center of gravity low which stabilizes things nicely.

    “The kayak was first used by the indigenous Aleut, Inuit, Yupik and possibly Ainu hunters in subarctic regions of the world.” And those dudes were totally badass hunting seals and contending with orcas in frigid waters in boats made of hide and bones. Modern kayaks are almost exclusively made of rotomolded polyethylene plastic, with a small number of specialty boats made of fiberglass or wood.

    Kayakers sit with their legs stretched out ahead of them and use a two-bladed paddle; as opposed to canoeists who kneel, or sit with legs tucked under, and use a one-bladed paddle.

    Equipment, gear and outfit all tastefully coordinated.
    The author in a sit-on-top boat designed for whitewater use, hence the straps and helmet.

    Ideally your first kayak experience should be in the company of two or more experienced paddlers. Kayak enthusiasts often have extra boats and gear and will outfit you for your first trip. Etiquette tip – spring for beers afterwards for your guides and outfitters. Offer to serve as a shuttle monkey or lunch bunny if you want a second invite.

    There are kayak rental concessions at/near various lakes and rivers, some of which offer guided trips. These people are very conscious of their liability and will not put their customers in harm’s way. If your first kayaking experience is with other inexperienced paddlers, start with a one or two hour rental on a quiet lake in a party of three or more people all of whom should know how to swim even though you will use the PFD (life vest) you are issued.

    So, you do a trip and you have fun and decide to buy your own kayak. The type of kayak you should purchase depends on the type of kayaking you’ll be doing. If you’re going to be paddling on ponds and smaller lakes (collectively, stillwater) then you can get by with a cheap department store boat for around two hundred dollars. Inexpensive recreational kayaks can also be safely used on rivers with no rapids (flatwater), or on Class I-II whitewater – caution or instruction recommended for the latter.

    At the absolute minimum you will also need: a PFD (aka life vest, and yes you really, really need one), paddle (you notice I put this behind PFD on the list, right?), whistle or air horn, and a broad-brimmed hat. Appropriate footwear is sandals with ankle straps (no flip-flops), water shoes such as Nike Aquasock, or wetsuit booties. Always have with you water, sunscreen and a snack. Usual outdoor safety and first aid equipment, but Glibs know this already.

    Please don’t buy a cheap polyvinyl inflatable kayak, aka pool toy. These things are truly POS, puncture easily and are not durable. There is a better class of inflatable made of rubberized fabric, but those cost as much as a rigid boat; they do have the advantage of portability and compact storage.

    If you want to do bigger water, want to take long trips, or haul lots of gear then you’re going to need a bigger, more durable boat than they sell at department stores.

    Great for kids, but you'll fight with your spouse or sweetie.
    A Tarpon model 130T (thirteen-foot, tandem) sit-on-top recreational boat. Two drain pipes in the rear cargo compartment, four in the front of the cockpit. The ridges are molded-in footbraces to accommodate various leg lengths.

    If you want to do long downriver trips, or haul lots of gear then I recommend a sit-on-top, self-draining recreational kayak such as Wilderness Systems’ Tarpon line of boats. These boats are sturdy, stable and durable. Recently Wilderness replaced the rubber cargo hatches with hard plastic hinged hatches – much more durable and reliable. The drain pipes go all the way through from the top deck to the bottom deck without letting water into the space between decks. Perhaps counterintuitively, the drain pipes add a huge amount of structural integrity to the hull. These boats can do up to Class III whitewater, and can even surf a bit, but they are not nimble.

    Obligatory Stirring Kayak Anecdote: During rescue operations in chilly whitewater I had two men in a one-person, sit-on-top boat, exceeding the rated cargo capacity by over one hundred pounds. Although the boat sat low in the water and the cockpit was partially flooded, the kayak remained floatworthy and maneuverable; when the extra man got out of the boat the water drained out within ten seconds and full floatworthiness was regained.

    The only disadvantage to self-draining kayaks is that they are slower than traditional kayaks – the drain holes add drag. And while you sit higher in the water in a sit-on-top than in a conventional kayak, the designers compensate for that by making these boats extra-wide for added stability. The drain pipes also provide an easy way to secure the kayak against casual theft using a chain or cable lock.

    Another Anecdote: One of the recreational boaters I’m trying to get to level-up has long been wary of trying my sit-on-top. Once she finally tried it she was impressed by the stability generally solid character of the craft to the point of jealousy.

    If you want to do Class III+ whitewater and be able to surf (including ocean waves) and do tricks then you will need a whitewater kayak – these are made of thicker plastic than cheap recreational boats and have internal supports to keep them from being crushed like a soda can in rough water. You will need to learn to roll – contact your local paddling club, Parks and Rec (SLD), or YMCA about rolling classes which are often conducted in pools. Expect to spend $1,200-$1,600 for all new whitewater kayak, PFD, paddle, skirt and helmet. Whitewater boats are short, and by design easily tip and spin.

    If you are going to do long treks on open water (ocean, sea, bay, sound, great lakes, etc) you will probably want a sea kayak. These boats are long and narrow, relatively stable, but don’t turn well. Many deepwater paddlers learn to roll in case they are swamped by waves or wakes. Some sea kayaks are equipped with sailing rigs, retractable keels for speed and tracking, and outriggers for stability.

    There are also a few pedal-powered kayaks on the market where the pedal rotation powers underwater flaps which help propel the boat; paddles are used for turning and maneuvering, and for additional propulsion. Pedal drive boats are not recommended for water with lots of vegetation, underwater obstructions, etc. Some of those pedal units are removable.

    Fiberglass boats are great if you are a competitive whitewater kayaker, competitive flatwater racer, squirt boater, or want to make your own boat. They are certainly light, but break in situations where a polyethylene boat would bend or dent.

    Wooden boats are so very pretty, but they are heavy and expensive. You don’t see many of them in river kayaking as the owners tend to avoid anything that might scrape them up, like rocks.

    Buying a used boat is often a good way to break into the sport on the cheap without sacrificing equipment quality. Scrapes and scratches consistent with normal use are fine. Beware of dents, folds, creases, cracks, brittle plastic, dry rotted rubber, etc. Generic replacement nylon carry handles are readily available, but rotted handles are indicative of poor kayak storage. Best time to find a used boat is December through March as people get new boats for Christmas or for Spring.

    A single short boat will fit inside a hatchback vehicle with the front seat folded forward. For longer or multiple boats you will need a roof rack, or a pickup truck. A Subaru Outback wagon can easily haul four kayakers with boats and gear for a day trip.

    Tonio has been a canoeist since 1985, and a kayaker since 1990. Tonio’s maximum level of attainment was solid Class IV whitewater paddling skills, but he has dialed things back to Class III now that he is older. Tonio loves practicing kayak safety and rescue techniques. Tonio is not a real Italian.

  • Profiles in Toxic Masculinity II: John Jeremiah Garrison Johnston

    Appearances Can Be Deceiving

    See that handsome, rugged fellow to the right?  Looks like the very picture of an old-time mountain man, doesn’t he?  Hirsute and tough, yet still ruggedly good-looking; no doubt a wilderness gentleman, a man of good breeding and manners.

    Of course, he’s nothing of the sort.  That is, of course, Robert Redford, in his role as Jeremiah Johnson, from the movie of the same name.  His character was based on a man who was none of the things described above, save perhaps hirsute and tough.  He was John Jeremiah Garrison “Liver-Eating” Johnston, and his story is quite different than the movie version – and a lot more interesting.  Johnston was no heroic figure; in today’s world he probably would have landed in prison.  But it’s an interesting contrast, between Redford’s noble character and the unsavory, drunken, violent lout on whom Redford’s character was based.

    His Maculate Origin

    Johnston was born John Jeremiah Garrison.  He emerged into the world in Little York, New Jersey, in 1824, and if anyone could be said to be living proof of the maxim “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”, it is the young Johnston.  His father, one Isaac Garrison, was a violent, abusive alcoholic who sent his young sons to neighboring farms to labor to pay off his drinking and gambling debts.

    It didn’t take long for the young John Jeremiah to tire of this treatment.  At age twelve or thirteen – the record is unclear – he signed up to be a crewman aboard a whaler, which occupation he followed until the outbreak of the Mexican War, when he signed up with the U.S. Navy.

    It was during this tenure that the course of young John Jeremiah’s life changed.  He had matured into a massive, intimidating figure; six foot two inches tall, heavily bearded, two hundred and sixty pounds of solid muscle.  His Navy service ended when an officer reprimanded a friend of John Jeremiah’s with the flat of his sword; Garrison knocked the lieutenant ass over teakettle and, facing court-martial, fled ashore.

    Now he faced a crossroads.  Twenty-two years old, with his only skills being sailing and fighting, he decided to head inland, making the obvious choice for a youth in his position:  To make a living in the Rockies.  He adopted the surname “Johnston,” because why not, and struck out for the West.

    His Adventurous Career

    The Real Deal.

    Johnston surfaced in 1846 in Alder Gulch, Montana Territory, working as a woodcutter supplying the steamboats on that Missouri River port.  One story of Johnston from around this period describes him lounging on the Missouri River dock with a partner.  Johston was wearing only mule-ear trooper boots and “a filthy red woolen union suit that he had apparently been living and sleeping in for several years.”  While he was thus occupied, a riverboat arrived bearing wealthy tourists from St. Louis who were taking in the sights, of which Johnston and his partner were not the least.  Several prominent ladies of that city found Johnston and his unnamed partner fascinating, and invited him into the steamboat’s parlor for luncheon, with the understanding that he put on some trousers first.

    Johnston and his partner were nonplussed by the luxurious dining salon, and their confusion was heightened at the end of the meal, when dishes of ice cream were passed out.

    “John, what is this stuff?” the partner asked.

    “Don’t look ignorant,” Johnston told him.  “It comes in cans.”

    1863 found him signing up with the Second Colorado Cavalry, to serve as a scout.  He was with the cavalry for only a few days before going AWOL to spend his enlistment bonus on a drinking binge, but eventually returned to the regiment in time to ride east, where he took part in the battles of Westport and Newtonia.  Johnston was shot in the leg but recovered and continued to ride with the Second until his discharge in September 1965.

    Set at liberty again, Johnston returned to the Montana Territory, where he worked at almost any occupation that would make money:  Trapper, fur trader, woodcutter, carpenter, whiskey trader.  He viewed the law as only a set of mild suggestions, engaging in running liquor to the various Indian tribes and selling Indian skulls to tourists.  In 1868 Johnston formed a partnership with one J.X. Biedler to run liquor to the Indians in an extremely hostile area known as the Whoop Up Territory, which had the reputation of being extremely dangerous for white men; that information bothered Johnston not a jot, and he continued in the illegal whiskey trade until 1873, when he executed an adroit 180-degree turn and got himself appointed as Sheriff in Coulson (now Billings) Montana.  Johnston worked as a lawman more or less consistently – again, the record is not complete – until he retired in 1894 at age 70.

    Incidentally there is no record of Johnston’s preferring the Hawken rifle.  The movie not only got that wrong, they got it badly wrong; a “.30 caliber Hawken gun,” as referenced in the film, would be suitable only for rabbits and squirrels.  The only armed photos of Johnston I have found shows him with what appears to be a Sharps rifle and, later, an 1876 Winchester.

    As to the source of those Indian skulls, that is the part of Johnston’s legend that is best known.

    His One-Man War

    Legend has it that, in 1847, Johnston took a woman of the Flathead tribe to wife, only to have her killed by a man of the Crow nation; in this respect, the story is much like the one in that movie.  But Johnston’s revenge on the Crow was far more brutal than Hollywood’s imaginings.

    According to the book Crow Killer: the Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson, taken from the accounts of people who knew Johnston, this one-man vendetta claimed the lives of over three hundred Crow Indians over the course of twenty-five years.

    One account has it that Johnston was captured by the Crow.  Held prisoner in winter in the norther Rockies, stripped to the waist, tied with thongs and left in a tepee with a single guard, Johnston managed to work himself free of his bonds.  He knocked his guard senseless with a kick, took the brave’s knife, scalped him, then proceeded to cut off one of his legs.  Taking the guard’s leg with him, he fled shirtless into the winter wilderness with only the Indian’s leg for provisions; he lived by this act of cannibalism to reach his partner Del Gue’s cabin, some two hundred miles away.

    The appellation “Liver-Eating Johnston” derives from this vendetta, during which Johnston was said to have eaten the livers of the Crow he killed.  He may have fostered this reputation, as to the Crow it was a deadly insult, as they could not go to the afterlife without their livers; but reportedly the incident dates to the early days of the quarter-century conflict when Johnston and several other men fought a Crow war party.  Johnston later claimed to have shot an Indian, and then ran his knife into the brave to finish him.  When he withdrew the knife, there was a bit of the Indian’s liver stuck to the blade; Johnston noticed a young tenderfoot watching, so he pretended to nibble at the liver, then extended it to the young man, asking if he wanted a bite.  The tenderfoot, as Johnston put it, proceeded to “sick up his guts,” to the amusement of the other members of the party.  However, other than this account, there is no actual record of any acts of liver-eating.

    Johnston’s taste for revenge (and human legs) ran out in the early 1870s, when he formally made peace with the Crow, referring to them thereafter as his brothers.  After that he limited his killing to members of the Sioux and Blackfoot nations.

    His Golden Years

    The Older Johnston.

    Johnston’s health declined after his retirement.  His former great strength was eroded by alcoholism and the several wounds he had received in the Civil War and his years of fighting Indians.  He moved into a veteran’s hospital in Los Angeles in 1899, at age 74, and died a year later.

    John Jeremiah Garrison Johnston was a much more interesting sort than Redford’s far less colorful depiction.  He was a product of his times, as are we all, but even for his times, he was a violent, profane man.  A thoroughly unsavory character, he did nevertheless possess determination and great tenacity, traits of which we should all study up on.  And again, even for his times, his career of adventuring seems like one big caper across the most dangerous areas of the West, where he fearlessly engaged in the most dangerous occupations around.

    We should not overlook the contemptible parts of Johnston’s personality.  He was not a man to be respected or held up as a role model.  But we shouldn’t overlook his courage and tenacity, either.  Maybe, one day, some Hollywood producer will make a movie that more accurately depicts Johnston as he was, one of the toughest, roughest, shootin’est, most colorful characters our nation has ever produced.

  • Grandpa’s Watch

    An Old Watch

    On a small wooden stand in my office, there is an old watch.  It’s nothing special and has no value to anyone but me.  It’s an old Westclox Pocket Ben, which probably cost a couple of bucks back in the 1930s; an old windup tin case watch with a little second hand and a fob hand-braided out of nylon string.  The crystal is cracked, and the watch will run when wound but only for an hour or so.

    It’s an old, cheap, busted watch, with a market value of zero.  But Bill Gates couldn’t buy that watch from me.  It was my grandfather’s watch, and aside from a few old letters and postcards my mother saved, it’s the only tangible thing I have from him.

    Back in The Day…

    When I was a little tad, there were several figures that loomed large in my young life.  My Dad, of course, and his father, my Grandpa Clark; our neighbor, who had the farmstead down the road, Brownie, a WW1 veteran who was a great surrogate grandfather.  But my Grandpa Baty figured very high among that lot.

    Grandpa in 1915.

    It is no understatement to say that Grandpa was, as they put it in those days, “a bit of a character.”  Born in 1896, he had attended college and obtained a degree (exactly at what level, I never have known) in business, and worked in a bank in Waterloo for a few months around the time of the Great War.  But he found he hated being indoors all day, and so went back to the family farm and ended up taking it over from his father; he was a farmer and carpenter for the rest of his life.  He was widely known around northern Lynn County for his dry wit, his skill at shoring up old barns, and his uncanny ability to pull harvests of corn and soybeans out of the dry, sandy soil of the old farm.

    The Baty family farm was a century farm, having been homesteaded by my great-great-great-grandfather, one William Baty, in the 1830s.  It was passed on in turn to his son Thomas Jefferson Baty, who served in the Civil War; then to my great-grandfather, Andrew Jackson Baty, and thence to Grandpa.  My mother was fond of pointing out that when she was growing up during the Depression, that farm families may not have had much money but they always had enough to eat; she was also fond of paraphrasing a Patrick McManus quote, pointing out that her family was among “…the landed gentry of eastern Iowa during the Depression; we owned the wall we had our backs to.”  During those hard years Grandpa kept a bunch of laying hens, a milk cow and a few pigs, and they got along just fine.

    The farm was fifty acres of sandy bottomland along the Wapsipinicon River in northern Lynn County, Iowa.  I spent a good part of my youth wandering around that old farmstead.

    When I was a little kid, I remember watching Grandpa shave, which he did every day, even if he was just choring around the farm.  I’d watched my Dad shave with a safety razor, but Grandpa used shaving soap with a badger-hair brush and a straight razor, which he touched up on a leather strop before each use.  I thought that was pretty cool.  Grandpa always wore his old hickory Key bib overalls, and he always had his old pocket watch stuck in the bib pocket, secured with a fob he had tied up out of coarse nylon string.  Whenever I remember my Grandpa, I remember the smell of his shaving soap and the sound of that watch ticking.

    The Great Outdoors

    A string of Minnesoda fish, 1968.  Grandpa, Mom, Dad and me.

    Like most of my family, Grandpa didn’t care much for hanging around the house.  With a good fishing river only a ten-minute walk from the house, there just wasn’t any reason not to go try to catch a mess of smallmouths for supper.

    Not content with his friendly little stretch of the Wapsi, Grandpa accompanied my Mom, Dad and I on adventures fishing in Minnesota and Wisconsin.  A family friend had a cabin on the edge of the Red Lake Indian reservation, and it was a favorite destination.  While he was a better-than-average angler, Grandpa always opined that the best part of fishing was just being outdoors, along the river, on a nice day, with his family.

    Grandpa taught me how to roll cornmeal and strawberry jam doughballs for carp bait.  He taught me that those same doughballs made decent snacks.  He taught me how to cook up corn dodgers to pack along for solid fare in a cold camp.  He taught me how to start a fire with two sticks, as long as both were matches.  He taught me the importance of dry socks before even the Army did.  He taught me more outdoor lore than anyone except my Dad, and I’m happy to say that the most important lesson, just how great it was to be outdoors and not mucking about inside, has stuck with me better than all the others combined.

    Spinning a Yarn or Two

    Ever heard of flying snakes?  Grandpa had them on his farm, or so he told me when I was seven or eight years old.  One summer day we spent the better part of the afternoon tramping around the place looking for flying snakes, which he had convinced me really existed.  We didn’t find any.  When we returned to the house, my Mom called me away for a moment, explaining, “Grandma wants to talk to Grandpa for a minute.”  I remember not being quite able to make out words, but I had the distinct impression that Grandma, a tough old farm wife, was giving Grandpa a damn good piece of her mind.

    But his wife’s disapproval would never stand in the way of a good yarn.

    On one visit Grandpa handed me a badly worn chunk of what appeared to be hard black rubber.  “I was out working on the tractor,” he explained, “and this fell out of the sky and hit me on the head.  I saw on the news last night that one of the Apollo spaceships flew over yesterday.  I think this fell off its steering wheel when they went by.”  This was a stretch too far for me to quite believe, even coming from my Grandpa to the eight-year-old me, especially when I noticed later that Grandpa’s ancient John Deere was missing a chunk of the hard rubber coating for its steering wheel that was suspiciously the same size as the chunk off “the Apollo spaceship.”

    Endless were the tales of Grandpa’s adventures.  Fish would poke their heads out of the river and talk to him.  Once a raccoon woke him up and warned him that the neighbor’s cows were in his cornfield.  He was on a first-name basis with every squirrel on the farm and conversed with them all regularly.  In that case I suspect he may have been telling some sort of truth, as after I started hunting in earnest, he reminded me of the rule that all my cousins and I had to follow, namely that no squirrels were to be harmed on his place.

    A Work Ethic

    But most of all, Grandpa was a man who couldn’t abide other people butting into his business, whether those people carried a government-issued title or not.  He was an old-fashioned sort of man who minded his yard, his farm and his family, and didn’t bother anyone if they just left him alone.

    Watching Grandpa fish, 1970

    My first paying job came along when I was about ten years old.  I had a brand-new pellet gun and took it along when we were down at the farm visiting the grandparents for the weekend.  Grandpa eyed the pellet gun and asked me if I was a good shot.

    “Pretty good,” I bragged, full of ten-year-old bravado.

    “Good,” Grandpa grinned at me.  “Come on.”

    We walked across the barnyard to where Grandpa’s corncrib sat, full of the recent harvest.  “I’ve got some problems with rats,” he told me.  “Sit quiet here on this old tractor tire and watch for a while, and you’ll see them.  I’ll give you, oh, a dime for every dead rat you can pile up.”

    “OK,” I said, “I’ll get a bunch.”

    I made five dollars that weekend, my first foray into the gig economy.  This would have been around 1971, when five dollars would keep a kid in pop and candy bars for quite a spell.  I was happy to have the cash, Grandpa was pleased with the pile of dead rats (although not so pleased that he didn’t leave it to me to bury them out in the cornfield) and my folks were pleased that I had learned a lesson in exchange of value.

    A few years later, I was about thirteen, and Grandpa offered to buy me a bottle of pop in town if I’d help him rig up the galvanized metal chutes in that same corncrib; the corncrib had two sides, and Grandpa’s little PTO-driven elevator would dump the corn in through a hatch in the roof, through the chutes to one side or the other for storage.  We spent about an hour rigging the Rube Goldberg contraption up; when we finished, Grandpa flashed his characteristic grin at me and said, “those cobs will go through that like shit through a tin horn.”

    I realized then and there that I must be growing up, as Grandpa would never swear in front of a woman or a child.

    Grandpa put in his last corn crop the year before he died at 78.  He worked, always, well past the age that people nowadays think of retirement; but I honestly don’t think the idea ever occurred to him.  He gave up carpentry for hire about the time he turned 70, but he honestly loved farming and saw no reason to quit; he loved muddling around the place, plotting next year’s allocation of land to field corn and popcorn for the popcorn works at Vinton.  He enjoyed fiddling with his ancient John Deere Model A, patching up the fences and occasionally sneaking down to the Wapsi for a spot of fishing.  He had a simple life but a great life.  He taught me more than I have time to tell you here, but all of that is paying off now that I’m the Grandpa.

    And Then…

    Grandpa’s Watch

    The summer I was fourteen, in 1975, Grandpa died, of complications of diabetes.  It’s useless to think about how these days, improvements in treatment may have resulted in a longer life for this man I loved and admired; that was then, he died, and that was that.

    But for the fourteen-year-old me, it was a hell of a bad time.  It was the first time I lost anyone I loved.  Since then, that instance has come along more often, but that was the first time.

    A few months after the funeral, Dad and I were out fishing.  We walked down a favorite northeast Iowa trout stream, fishing as we went, until we came across a spot Grandpa had called a favorite.  It made me feel bad, and I said so.  But Dad, with wisdom typical of him, said I shouldn’t feel bad.  He had, after all, loved and admired his father-in-law, as so many people did, but he also knew the way to see things.  “We should feel glad,” he said, “that your Grandpa was here to enjoy these days with us.  He’d want us to keep doing that.”

    So, we did.

    That’s how Grandpa left us.  Last year, after my Dad passed, Mom dug out Grandpa’s old pocket watch, which she had put away all those years for this moment.  “I want you to have Daddy’s watch,” she told me.  “Take care of it.”  I promised her I would; now Mom is gone too, but my promise to her holds.

    Now, once in a while, I take the old Pocket Ben off the stand, wind it up, put it to my ear and listen to it ticking for a few minutes…  And suddenly, I’m a little kid again, sitting on my Grandpa’s lap at the kitchen table, hearing his watch, smelling his shaving soap, and listening to one of his tall tales.

    That’s a great feeling.