Sweet and Sour Pie: A Wisconsin Boyhood

by Dave Crehore

  “Two-thirds of the way where?” I asked. “To the century run,”

  Dad said. “That’s what you call it when you get a hundred species in a day. I never thought we could do it, but now we have a chance to make the century run by noon. We’ve got almost three hours to pick up another thirty-four birds. And we haven’t even been to a good warbler spot yet. Let’s get going!”

  Now that we had a goal to shoot for, our birding took on a fresh intensity. The nearest good warbler spot was Evergreen Cemetery, on the outskirts of Manitowoc about a mile away. Dad let the Studie coast to a stop at the edge of the cemetery, which was bounded on the west by a stand of box elder trees and honeysuckle bushes that attracted migrating warblers every year. As we got out of the car, we could see small birds flitting from branch to branch, never spending more than a few seconds in one place. Warblers were there in droves.

  But the mild weather that had pushed the warblers north had

  also sped up the growth of leaves. The box elders already had leaves the size of squirrels’ ears, and the honeysuckles were partially leafed out, making the birds hard to see. We spotted a chestnut-sided and a magnolia, but the rest of the warblers were hidden by foliage.

  Dad put his pipe in his mouth and blew through it before filling it.

  “Drat,” he said, “it’s plugged up.” He blew through it again, but the 88

  The Century Run

  shred of tobacco stayed put. He pursed his lips and sucked on the end of the stem, and the pipe made a kissing sound ending in a smack. He sucked again and made another smack. I looked back at the honeysuckles and saw a half-dozen myrtle warblers flutter to the outside edge of the bushes, followed by a Cape May and a Blackburnian.

  “Do that again, Dad!” I exclaimed. “It’s attracting them!” In

  about a hundred yards of walking and smacking, we saw six more

  species of warblers—bay-breasted, blackpoll, black and white, red-start, a very early Canada, and a Wilson’s—plus a rose-breasted gros-beak and a Baltimore oriole, all brought out of the shrubbery by Dad’s pipe.

  “The next time I buy a pipe and your mother complains, I’ll

  tell her it’s a bird call,” Dad said. “That makes seventy-nine—we’re getting close. Let’s go to the park.”

  Lincoln Park was on the east side of Manitowoc near the lake-

  shore. In its center was a stand of big oaks and pines crisscrossed with cinder paths. We walked fast, looking at our watches every couple of minutes, and saw eight new species: a pewee, a great crested

  flycatcher, three kinds of vireos, a red-breasted nuthatch, a ruby-crowned kinglet, and a common yellowthroat. We circled back to the car. Suddenly Dad stopped in midstride and raised his binoculars.

  “On the trunk of that big white pine,” he said. “See it? A little greenish bird, no wing bars. I think it’s an orange-crowned warbler, but I can’t be sure. Oh hell, it flew.”

  “Should I count it?” I asked. “No,” Dad said. “I’m not really sure what it was. Let’s save it for an emergency.”

  “Well, that makes eighty-seven,” I said, “not counting the little green bird.”

  Our last stop was an estuary where the Little Manitowoc River

  flowed into Lake Michigan. It was alive with waterfowl; the problem was finding birds we had not already seen. We managed to sort out 89

  The Century Run

  twelve new species—red-breasted and common mergansers, ring-

  billed and herring gulls, blue-winged and green-winged teal, a pied-billed grebe, a coot, a Canada goose, and a common goldeneye, plus a Caspian tern and a kingfisher.

  I totaled my check marks, counting under my breath from the

  top of the list. “Ninety-nine, one hundred!” I yelled. “We did it. The century run!”

  Dad looked at me with a broad grin. He was not a demonstrative

  man, but he grabbed me in a bear hug, and then quickly let go when our binoculars ground together. Dad looked at his watch. “A hundred species with forty minutes to spare—let’s head for the barn,” he said.

  We were a couple of happy birders as we drove out River Road

  to our house. A cold east wind had begun to blow off the lake, and the crowd had thinned a bit when we got home at twenty to twelve.

  I headed up to my bedroom to get my jacket, and as I put it on I realized I still had the bird list in my shirt pocket. I sat down at my desk, picked up a pencil, and quickly recounted my check marks,

  subtotaling at the bottom of each page.

  I added up the column of figures. The total was ninety-nine. Fear clutched at my heart. I counted and added again. The total was still ninety-nine. It was ten minutes to twelve. My brain began to churn.

  Of all the birds we had not seen, which one could we find in the next ten minutes?

  I glanced over at a group of bird pictures that Mom had hung

  on my bedroom wall. At the bottom was a woodcut of a sparrow

  bathing in a puddle, with a little poem:

  The muddy sparrow,

  Mean and small,

  I like by far

  The best of all.

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  House sparrow! I looked at the checklist. I had not marked the house sparrow. Of course, we had seen house sparrows that morning; they were everywhere, like avian wallpaper. But we had not specifically identified one.

  I ran outside and found Dad. “I miscounted,” I said. “We’ve only got ninety-nine. We have to find something right away, or otherwise count that little green bird from Lincoln Park.”

  “It’s tempting,” Dad said, “but it would be cheating.”

  Then I remembered something I had read about horses and

  house sparrows: Horses eat oats, and house sparrows feed on the

  undigested oats in horse manure. I had no idea where to find a horse, but there were cows aplenty right across the road. They would have to do.

  “Come on!” I shouted, and started down the steep path from our

  yard to the farm driveway. We squeezed through the big wooden

  gate and ran out into the pasture. Not fifty feet away was a pile of cow manure, and perched on it was a male house sparrow picking at seeds, his feathers ruffled in the wind. We looked at him through our binoculars, to be sure, and we looked at our watches—11:58. I made the hundredth check on the list. We had done the century run in eight hours.

  Dad took his pipe from his pocket and tapped the bowl on his

  palm.

  “Good old Wisconsin,” he said. “There’s always some cow shit

  around when you need it.”

  l

  A uthor’s Note: Birders who wonder about the names of some of the species mentioned in this story should be aware that over the years, the names of many birds have been changed to confuse the

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  innocent. In 1954 we were using the second edition of Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds, and I have adhered to the names in use back then. In the meantime, for example, the fulvous tree duck has become the fulvous whistling duck, the olive-backed thrush has become the Swainson’s thrush, the marsh hawk has become the

  northern harrier, the Wilson’s snipe has become the common snipe, and the sparrow hawk has become the kestrel.

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  Sacrificing Sweet Sixteen

  O ut in the woods, a bird hunter lives in the past, the present, and the future at the same time. In the thick of a cover, he lives for the moment. But when he stops for a breather, he thinks of old times and old dogs and looks forward to puppies and seasons to come.

  And when he has a minute to dream, he dreams of shotguns, because he always could use a better one.

  Back in the late 1940s, my dad dreamed of a Sweet Sixteen, the

  sixteen-gauge version of John Browning’s venerable semiautomatic shotgun.

  What Dad saw in the Sweet Sixteen was hard to unders
tand. He

  was used to side-by-sides. As a boy, he learned to shoot with an old Baker twelve-gauge that his father, a county sheriff at the time, had taken away from a man who had shot someone with it. The Baker’s

  barrels had no choke whatsoever, and it was a bird killer as lithe and 93

  Sacrificing Sweet Sixteen

  pitiless as a goshawk. By the late twenties, though, when Dad was in his teens, the Baker had shot loose. Grandpa gave Dad a D. M.

  Lefever to take its place.

  Dad and the Lefever hunted together through the Depression

  years. Then came 1941, and hunting was largely canceled for the

  duration. But when the war was over and things had settled down, Dad scraped together enough money to buy a Sweet Sixteen, and

  the Lefever was moved to the back of the gun rack.

  I suppose Dad loved his Sweet Sixteen because it was the first

  new gun he had ever owned and the first he had ever bought with his own money. And after we moved to Wisconsin, it didn’t take long

  for Dad and the Sweet Sixteen to become a team.

  Sunday afternoons in October and November were grouse-

  hunting time for Dad, and his posthunt rituals are among my

  fondest memories of him. First, there would be a heavy clumping on the back porch as he kicked the clay out of the cleats on his boot soles. I would run to meet him in the back hall. He’d stand the cased Sweet Sixteen against the wall behind the door and show me the

  grouse. There always seemed to be two.

  He would put the birds in a grocery bag and tuck them in the icebox to cool, so they would be easier to skin and dress. After supper he would clean the grouse on the back porch, carefully fanning out the tail feathers so I could add them to my collection. Then he’d take the Sixteen down to the basement workshop, put a strip of old carpet on the workbench, carefully disassemble the gun, and clean it.

  The smells of those grouse-hunting Sunday nights were as

  memorable as the sights. There would be the mingled scents of

  muck, sweetfern, and juniper on Dad’s boots, the aroma of his pipe tobacco—Walnut if he had some extra money, Kentucky Club if he

  didn’t—the supper smell of Swiss steak and stewed tomatoes from the kitchen, and the odor of gunpowder solvent down in the workshop.

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  Through all this, childhood was waning. Before long a milestone

  was reached: I turned twelve and was judged reliable enough to start hunting.

  A “first” is always memorable: first kiss, first car, first punch in the nose, first shotgun. After supper on Christmas Eve 1954, Dad headed down the basement stairs and motioned for me to follow. In the workshop was a cabinet where the Sweet Sixteen, the old Baker, the Lefever, and my Savage single-shot .22 rifle were stored. Dad opened the cabinet and took out a slender wand of a shotgun. He

  pivoted its top lever, swung the barrels down, and handed it to me.

  “There you go,” he said. “Take care of it. It’s a Fox.”

  I had heard enough shotgun talk to know that a D-grade Ansley

  H. Fox twenty-gauge ejector double like this one, with a sweeping flame in its oil-finished walnut and deep engraving on its frame, wasn’t just any old bird-banger; it was one of the finest shotguns ever made in the United States. And it lay there in my hands like a steel Stradivarius.

  Dad smiled. I babbled. I looked down the Fox’s gleaming bores,

  closed its action, and tentatively raised the little gun to my shoulder.

  And then I looked into the cabinet and realized that the Sweet Sixteen was gone. Dad had traded it, and God only knows how much

  cash, for the Fox.

  “But what about the Browning?” I asked, pointing to the cabinet.

  “Oh,” Dad said, “that Browning was just a machine. What

  you’ve got there is a gun. And besides, I still have the Lefever, and there’s about a hundred years of wear left in it.”

  Brave talk, intended to make me feel better. But I realized, a little bit then and a lot more later, what Dad had given up. For better or for worse, the Sweet Sixteen had been his dream, and Dad had

  moved his dream aside for me.

  Well, you’re probably thinking, big deal. Parents sacrifice for

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  their kids’ sakes all the time, and usually the kids aren’t even aware of it. But on that evening when I was twelve, I tried to understand; I could see that Dad had given up something he wanted very much so that I could have something even better.

  There are a lot of ways to show love: a smile, a touch, an apology, a good meal. But giving by giving up is the truest way.

  And if you’re wondering, there is an immediate reward: you get

  to feel like Dad did when he handed me the Fox. That’s if you’re lucky.

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  The Fine Art of Forgetting

  W e all do dumb things.

  What matters is what we do afterward.

  The temptation to be stupid keeps coming around; eventually

  most of us learn to resist it about half the time, and that’s what’s known as growing up.

  The trouble is, growing up takes a while. Chances are you’ll be a full-fledged adult, and more than likely a parent, before you accom-plish it. Then the fun starts. You have to avoid being dumb yourself, to set a good example for your kids. But the hardest part is deciding what to do when your kids do dumb things.

  If you have too much to say, they’ll quit listening to you. If you don’t say enough, they won’t learn anything from you. The best you can do is to set some standards for them, be there to help, and then 97

  The Fine Art of Forgetting

  try to keep your mouth shut as your kids learn to deal with the

  stupidity they inherited from you.

  Here’s how I found some of that out.

  When winter finally let go of our little Wisconsin town in

  May 1955, Dad brought home a station wagon load of twenty-gauge

  shells and Blue Rock clay pigeons. Every Saturday afternoon that we weren’t fishing, we’d put a box of pigeons and five or six boxes of shells into my old Radio Flyer coaster wagon and haul them to the big field behind our house. Dad would sail the clays out with a hand trap, and I’d bang away at them with the Fox shotgun he’d given me for Christmas.

  Dad taught me to raise my right elbow and form the shoulder

  pocket that God created for shotgun stocks. He taught me to lift the gun gently to my cheek and swing it ahead of the target. In time, I was hitting three targets out of four, some days even more.

  Once in a while, Dad would bring his twelve-gauge Lefever out

  to the big field and execute a few targets. He’d pivot from the knees, shoulder his shotgun with exasperating slowness, and turn those

  Blue Rocks into little clouds of black dust that would drift away on the breeze.

  “Just take your time and don’t worry about missing a few,” he

  would say. “What matters is being safe and showing some good

  manners.”

  Yeah, yeah—I knew all that. But I was a twelve-year-old grouse

  hunter who had never killed a grouse. I wanted a bird.

  There were plenty of grouse in Manitowoc County that fall, and

  as we hunted our way through October, Dad was getting one about

  every third time he pulled a trigger.

  But the grouse didn’t know how good a shot I was. About half the birds I flushed were either out of range, invisible, or on the wrong 98

  The Fine Art of Forgetting

  side of a tree. The other half I missed. I was nothing for five, then nothing for ten. By the time we got into November, the empty shells in the game pocket of my hunting vest had begun to rattle.

  One Saturday morning, as we walked down a trail into a cover we
/>
  called the Sandhill, I spotted a grouse on the ground ahead of us. I stopped and slowly began to raise my shotgun.

  “Don’t shoot a sitting bird,” Dad said quietly. “You won’t enjoy it. Just walk toward him and take your chances when he flies.”

  I tiptoed down the trail. My heart hammered in my ears. Thirty

  yards, twenty-five, twenty. The grouse cocked its head and stared at me. It froze. I froze.

  “G’wan, shoo!” I said.

  The grouse flushed with a roar and flew straight down the trail. I missed twice; the bird topped out over some tall popples, banked hard left, and glided out of sight.

  Dad lit his pipe. “That’s the way they are sometimes,” he said.

  “Every now and then you’ll run across one that sits there like a chicken. And it’s no fun shooting chickens.”

  The Sandhill cover was a low, overgrown dune running north

  and south with a thick cedar swamp on both sides. The dune was

  growing up in aspen and spruce and brambles, and it was grouse

  heaven. The birds roosted in the cedars and came out on the dune to eat buds and bugs and blackberries.

  Dad sent me down the middle of the dune and walked parallel

  to me along the edge of the cedars. We hadn’t gone more than a

  hundred yards when a grouse flushed in front of Dad and cut into the swamp. He fired almost instantly.

  “Did you get it?” I yelled.

  “I don’t think so,” Dad hollered back. “Wait there and I’ll go

  look.”

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  It was a cool, windless day with a high, gray sky, so quiet that I could hear the confidential “dee, dee, dee” of the chickadees, and the whirrs of their wingbeats as they danced around in the trees.

  Then I saw something move in the top of a big spruce ahead of

  me. It was a grouse, at least thirty feet off the ground, staring at me nervously as it perched on one of the short upper branches. I raised my gun, then lowered it partway. I looked around to my left, where Dad had disappeared into the cedars. I couldn’t see him.

  I raised the gun again and pointed its slender barrels at the

  grouse. OK, I thought, maybe I won’t enjoy it but by God I’ll have a bird. And I pulled the back trigger. The gun cracked and the spruce needles jumped. The grouse toppled from its perch, dead. It fell a couple of feet through the dense branches and got stuck. I hadn’t expected that.