Once you've gone to all the trouble of getting the Sleeper started, he will set you up something like this: "So, that ol' sow b'ar shooshes her cubs up a tree, an' then she comes fer me. I can see she's got her heart set on turnin' my bride into a widder woman. Wall, I ups with my twenty-two single-shot ..."
"Yes, yes?" you say. "Go on."
"Snort, mimph, wheeze, snore," he says. Sleepers will drop off like that every time, and you want to avoid them like the plague.
The Drifter is just as bad as the Sleeper and maybe even worse. Keep in mind that most old men are masters of the art of digression. They will start off something like this: "I recollect the time a bobcat got loose in Poke Martin's plane. Funniest thing I ever seen! Poke, he was flyin' supplies into Pat Doyle's camp at Terrible Crick--Terrible Crick, that's whar I caught a twenty-pound char one time on a piece of bacon rind. Shorty Long an' me was runnin' a trapline that winter, about the coldest winter since I got my tongue stuck on the pump handle when I was a youngun. Back in those days ..." In this fashion the average old man will digress back to about the time the earth's crust was beginning to harden and then will work his way back to the original topic, touching every base as he goes. A brief anecdote is somehow transformed into the history of western civilization, but it is all entertaining and enlightening. The Drifter, however, just leaves you back there in the mists of time, the two of you looking about, wondering what it was you had come for.
"But what about the bobcat?" you ask, hoping to jog the Drifter's memory.
"Bobcat?" he says. "What bobcat?"
My own luck with old men over the years has been exceptionally good. I still keep a stable of them around to remind me of a time when men (and women, too) were measured not by whether their look was wet or dry but whether they possessed a mysterious quality called "grit." When I was a youngster, grit was the chief remedy for a variety of ailments.
"What that boy needs, an old man would prescribe, "is more grit." A deficiency in grit was considered more serious than a shortage of Vitamin B. It was generally felt that you couldn't live without it.
Grit, I've learned over the years, is one of the best things an old man has to offer a kid. That and fine lying, and maybe the proper use of the language.
Most of my early language training was attended to by old men. The first person to truly appreciate the value of this linguistic tutoring was my Freshman Composition teacher in college. He called me into his office and told me that my composition papers were filled with the most outrageous lies ever inflicted on the consciousness of a civilized and rational mind (meaning his) and that my spelling, grammar, and syntactical monstrosities approached the absolute in illiteracy. I was embarrassed. I just wasn't used to compliments like that. I thanked him, though, and said I realized I could write pretty good all right, but I reckoned I could do even better if I put my mind to it. Well, he was dumbfounded to hear that I might even surpass my previous literary efforts. As he gently shoved me out of his office, uttering over and over, "I don't believe it! I don't believe it! " I could tell he wasn't a man who knew anything about grit, or old men either.
For a long while when I was growing up, I didn't have an old man of my own, and had to borrow one belonging to a friend of mine. The old man was my friend's grandfather, which seemed to me like just about the most convenient arrangement a kid could ask for. Then my friend moved away and left the old man in his entirety to me alone. It was a fine stroke of luck. In the easy informality of the day, the old man called me "Bub" and I called him "Mr. Hooker." He didn't seem to mind the familiarity.
Mr. Hooker was a prime old man. One of the first things a kid learns about prime old men is that they don't put up with any kind of nonsense.
Included in the vast store of things that Mr. Hooker considered nonsense were complaints, all of which he defined as "whining" or maybe on occasion "bawling like a calf." Consequently, when Mr. Hooker would take me out on cold winter days to check his trapline along Sand Creek, I would keep my complaints corked up until I could stand it no longer. Then I would articulate them in the form of a scientific hypothesis.
"I wonder what happens when a person's toes freeze plumb solid?" I would say.
"Wall, when they gets warm again, they jist thaws out," Mr. Hooker would reply, splattering a square yard of snow with tobacco juice.
"Then they falls off."
I would respond to this news in a manner of appropriate indifference, as though I were unacquainted with anyone whose toes were at that moment in just such a predicament. Then Mr. Hooker would abruptly change the subject. "Say, Bub," he would ask me, "I ever show you how to build a fahr in the snow?"
"A couple of times," I would reply. "But I certainly wouldn't mind seeing it again."
Then Mr. Hooker would make a few magical motions with his feet and hands, and there would be a bare spot on the ground with a pile of sticks on it. He would snap the head of a kitchen match with his thumb nail, and before I knew what was happening we would be warming ourselves over a roaring fire, eating dried apricots, and talking of crows.
I couldn't begin to relate all the things I learned from Mr. Hooker, but maybe one will suffice. Even though he was in his late seventies and early eighties during the time that I knew him, he always insisted on climbing to the top of the mountain in back of our place to pick huckleberries. He taught me that the best huckleberries always grow on the top of the mountain. They weren't any bigger or sweeter or more plentiful up there than huckleberries growing at lower elevations.
They were the best because they grew on top of the mountain. Some people may not understand that. If they don't, it's because they never had an old man to teach it to them.
The winter I was a senior in high school, Mr. Hooker almost died. It made him pretty damn mad, too, because he still had some things he wanted to do. I could imagine Death coming timidly into Mr. Hooker's hospital room and the old man giving him a tongue lashing. "You gol-durn ol' fool, you've come too soon! I ain't even used it all up yet!" He lived to greet another spring run of cutthroat trout up Sand Creek.
I was away at college the following winter when I got word that Mr. Hooker had at last used it all up. By the time I got home, the funeral was over and the relatives had come and gone, paying their last respects and dividing up among themselves his meager belongings.
"It would have been nice if they could have given you one of his fishing rods or a knife or something," my mother said. "I know he would liked to have left you something."
I decided to snowshoe out into the woods for a while, just to get away from people and hear what the crows had to say about the passing of Mr. Hooker. My eight-year-old nephew, Delbert, wanted to go along and try out his Christmas skis. Since I didn't consider him a people, I said, "All right, come on."
After we had tracked nearly the full length of the old trapline, Delbert raised an interesting point. "What do you s'pose happens when a person's toes freeze plumb solid?" he said.
"Wall," I said, "they jist thaws out when they gets warm again. Then they falls off. Say, Bub, I ever show you how to build a fahr in the snow?"
The Two-Wheeled ATV
MY FIRST all-terrain vehicle was a one-wheel-drive, and it could take you anywhere you had nerve and guts enough to peddle it.
Most of the other kids around had decent, well-mannered bicycles of distinct makes and models. Mine was a balloon-tired monster born out of wedlock halfway between the junkyard and the secondhand store. Some local fiend had built it with his own three hands and sold it to my mother for about the price of a good milk cow.
For two cents or even a used jawbreaker, I would have beaten it to death with a baseball bat, but I needed it for transportation. And transportation, then as now, was the name of the game.
You could walk to some good fishing holes, all right, but when the guys you were with all rode bikes, you had to walk pretty fast.
Perhaps the worst thing about the Bike, as I called it within hearing range of my mother, was that
you simply could not ride it in a manner that allowed you to retain any sense of dignity let alone savoir-faire.
The chief reason for this was that the seat was permanently adjusted for a person about six-foot-four. I was a person about five-foot-four.
The proportions of the handlebars suggested strongly that they had been stolen from a tricycle belonging to a four-year-old midget. The result of this unhappy combination was that wherever I went on the Bike my rear was always about three inches higher than my shoulder blades.
I tried never to go any place on the Bike where girls from school might see me, since it was difficult if not impossible in that position to maintain the image I was cultivating among them of a dashing, carefree playboy.
The seat on the Bike was of the kind usually found on European racing bikes. The principle behind the design of this seat is that the rider goes to beat hell the sooner to get off of it. The idea for heel-and-toe walking races was conceived by someone watching the users of these particular seats footing it back home after a race.
To get the proper effect of one of these seats, you might spend a couple of hours sitting balanced on the end of a baseball bat--the small end. Put a doily on it for cushioning.
Whatever the other guys thought of my appearance on the Bike, they had respect for me. I was the fastest thing around on two wheels, thanks to that seat.
The Bike had a couple of little tricks it did with its chain that the Marquis de Sade would have envied. One was that it would wait until you had just started down a long, steep, curving hill and then reach up with its chain and wind your pant leg into the sprocket. This move was doubly ingenious, since the chain not only prevented you from putting on the coaster brakes, it also shackled you to a hurtling death-machine. Many was the time that a streamlined kid on a bike streaked silently past cars, trucks, and motorcycles on grades where a loose roller skate could break the sound barrier.
The Bike's other favorite trick was to throw the chain off when you needed it most. This usually happened when you were trying to outrun one of the timber wolves the neighbors kept for watchdogs. You would be standing up pedaling for all you were worth, leaving a trail of sweat and burned rubber two inches wide on the road behind you. The wolf would be a black snarl coming up fast to your rear. Then the chain would jump its sprocket and drop you with a crunch on the crossbar, the pedals still spinning furiously under your feet. The wolf gnawed on you until you got the chain back on the sprocket or until he got tired and went home.
The standard method for getting off the Bike was to spring clear and let it crash. If it got the chance, it would grab you by the pant leg at the moment of ejection and drag you along to grim destruction.
The Bike would sometimes go for weeks without the front wheel bouncing off. This was to lure you into a false sense of security. You would be rattling hellbent for home past the neighbors, and for a split second you would see the front wheel pulling away from you. Then the fork would hit the ground and whip you over the handlebars. Before you had your breath back, the wolf was standing on your belly reading the menu.
I spent half my waking moments repairing the Bike and the other half repairing myself. Until I was old enough to drive, I went around looking like a commercial for Band-Aids and mercurochrome. I hated to stop the Bike along the highway long enough to pick up an empty beer bottle for fear people would stop their cars and try to rush me to a doctor. Even on one of its good days, the Bike looked like an accident in which three people had been killed. Much as I hated to admit it the Bike was one of the truly great all-terrain vehicles. it could navigate streams, cross fallen logs, smash through brush, follow a mountain trail, and in general do just about anything but climb trees.
Several times it did try to climb trees but the damage to both of us was sufficient to make continued efforts in that direction seem impractical and unrewarding.
Our bicycles in those days were the chief mode of transportation for 10 percent of our camping trips. Occasionally even today I see people use bicycles for camping. They will be zipping along the road on ten-speed touring bikes, their ultralight camping gear a neat little package on the rear fender. When we went camping on our one-speed bikes, it looked as if we had a baby elephant on the handlebars and the mother on behind.
Loading a bicycle for a camping trip was not simply a remarkable feat of engineering, it was a blatant defiance of all the laws of physics.
First of all, there may have been ultralight camping gear in those days, but we didn't own any of it. Our skillet alone weighed more than one of today's touring bikes, and a bedroll in cold weather, even without the feather bed, was the weight and size of a bale of straw.
The tent was a tarp that worked winters as a haystack cover. A good portion of our food was carried in the quart jars our mothers had canned it in. Then there were all the axes, hatchets, saws, machetes, and World War II surplus bayonets without which no camping trip was complete. And, of course, I could never leave behind my jungle hammock, the pride of my life, just in case I happened to come across a jungle.
The standard packing procedure was to dump most of your stuff into the center of the tarp, roll the tarp up into a bundle, tie it together with half a mile of rope, and then find nine boys and a man to lift it to the back fender of the Bike. Anything left over was rolled up in the jungle hammock and tied to the diminutive handlebars. The hardware was distributed evenly around the outside of the two massive bundles, just in case you had sudden need for an ax or a bayonet.
Then you sprang onto the saddle and pedaled with all the fury you could generate from ninety-eight pounds of bone and muscle. The Bike would howl in rage, the twin humps of camp gear would shudder and sway like a sick camel, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, the whole catastrophe would move out of the yard and wobble off down the road on some incredible journey.
Sometimes during the winter now, when the cold awakens in my bones and flesh the ache of a thousand old injuries, I suddenly will recall in vivid detail the last few terrifying moments of the Bike's existence as a recognizable entity.
A ragged gypsy band of us had just begun another trip into the mountains on our camel-humped ATVS. As usual, I was far out in the lead, the hatchet-head bicycle seat urging me on.
There was a hill about three miles from my home called Sand Creek Hill, a name deceptive in its lack of color and description. By rights the hill should have been called Deadman's Drop or Say Goodby Hill.
Loggers drove their trucks down it with one foot on the running board and one hand clutching a rosary--even the atheists.
just as I crested the hill and started my descent, whom should I notice coming up it but one of our neighbors' wolves, apparently returning home after a hard night of killing elk in the mountains. From fifty yards away I could see his face brighten when he caught sight of me hurtling toward him like doom on two wheels. He crouched expectantly, his eyes happily agleam.
The chain, not to be outdone, chose that moment to eat my pant leg half way up to the knee. I expected to be abandoned by the front wheel any second.
The washboard road rattled my bones; axes, saws, and bayonets filled the air on all sides; and the great straining mass of the rear pack threatened to collapse on me. With one last great effort, I aimed a quick kick at the wolf, ripped the pant leg free and threw myself into space. I bounced four times to distribute the injuries evenly about my body, and finally, using my nose for a brake, slid to a stop.
The Bike apparently self-destructed shortly after my departure.
Probably the front wheel came off, and the two packs took it from there, ripping and tearing, mashing and grinding until there was nothing left but a streak of assorted rubble stretching off down the hill.
Even the wolf was somewhat shaken by the impact of the crash. He stared at the wreckage in silent awe, almost forgetting my one good leg he held in his slack jaws.
When I was up and around once more, my mother bought me a car, my second ATV. She got it from a local fiend, who had bui
lt it with his own three hands, but that's another story.
The Backyard Safari
City planners have shown beyond doubt that old orchards, meadows, and pine woods, which once threatened the outskirts of many of our towns and cities, can be successfully eradicated by constructing a housing development on top of them. To my knowledge there has not been a single recurrence of an old orchard, meadow, or pine woods after one application of a housing development.
Housing developments are a great boon to camping, since they make such fine places to get away from. At the same time, however, many of them are so designed that they are destroying one of the most exotic forms of camping known to man--the backyard safari.
The requirements for a backyard safari are few: a kid, a sleeping bag, and a backyard. The backyard is essential to the sport, and it saddens me that some developers have seen fit to phase it out.
I personally don't sleep out in the backyard much anymore. Oh, occasionally my wife will forget that I'm spending an evening out with the boys and, through some gross oversight, will remove the secret outside key from the geranium pot. An intimate association with slugs, night crawlers, and wandering dogs with terminal halitosis no longer holds the fascination for me it once did, and the ground has become much harder in recent years.
A Fine & Pleasant Misery Page 5