I recently attended a 50th class reunion. I declined to attend my 10-, 20-, or 30-year reunions because I feared that there would be the same high school cliques, the same arrogant scholars who would drone on and on about how they left university to become self-made millionaires, and of course the same mocking football players who would again tie me up in a laundry bag of unwashed game socks and jockstraps. I did attend my first reunion for year 40 and found, to my surprise that my fears were quite unfounded.
I have the same routine every morning, as does my wife. She puts conditioner in her thick platinum blonde hair, fluffing the back and adjusting the curls in the front. Sometimes it can take her ten minutes. In contrast, I slap Lectric Shave on my face and head, sit on the edge of the bathtub with my Norelco battery powered razor in hand and in three minutes have my whole head shaved clean. It is not uncommon, on groggy mornings, for me to unconsciously remove an eyebrow or two also.
Besides the obvious reasons like blackberry thorns, stinging nettles, and devil’s club, running bear in the woods was an experience that causes me to consider the consequences of returning to the hills of Whatcom County.
My wife and I were lying in bed one Saturday morning with the blackout curtains drawn. We were trying to coax one more hour of sleep off the clock before starting the day. It had been an exhausting week. Down the street I heard a car engine start and the engine rev. Then I heard the sound which has frustrated every dad who has ever taught a child to drive since the first car came off Henry Ford’s production line: grind, grind, grind!
How many kids can say that their dad was an ice cream delivery man? Well, my dad was a Good Humor man of sorts.
I mean, he had a really great sense of humor too. He was an awesome storyteller and always had the room howling with his animated preposterous stories and one of his stories revolved around the three times he was a Good Humor ice cream man.
Batteries locked in place, head and taillights charged, gloves worn, Bluetooth Sena helmets working and communicating, earbuds in, bladders empty — and the Mitchells are ready for an e-bike ride.
“Do you know what this is?” I asked, holding a five inch long, ¾” diameter cardboard tube into the face of my friend Rex. It had two 6″ long wires exiting one end.
“It looks like a stick of dynamite,” he said with wide eyes.
He stood outside in the setting afternoon sun staring up at the rack of deer antlers attached to the outside wall off my shed. He must have been there for fifteen minutes. I walked up behind him.
“What are you doing,” I asked.
“Admiring your trophy rack,” he said.
“Thanks for saying that, but actually, a four-point Blacktail deer rack is nothing to boast about,” I admitted. “It’s not like the rack of a bull elk, or a trophy mule or whitetail. It’s just something to show that I got one.”
“How many have you shot?” he asked.
“I shot five but killed one just by startling and jumping it. I think it had a weak heart.” I watched his face to see if he was impressed. I don’t think he heard what I said which means I wasted one of my patented snarks.
“I want to go hunting. Will you take me?” he asked.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I answered him. “There are many reasons.”
##
It just so happened, that when I was his age, the call of the wild lured me into its seductive arms also. One day, I had no desire at all to hunt for deer, and the next day, that was all that I could think about.
It started with the widower, Swede, the old, retired outdoorsman who lived in a small house behind ours. Swede knew everything about hunting, fishing, and blowing up stumps. He had guns and fishing gear hidden all over his house. Scattered around the path through his living room, were piles of old Field and Stream, and Outdoor Life magazines.
As he lay in his bed in the evening watching Gunsmoke and sipping on a glass of Canadian Mist, I would leaf through the magazines, reading each story on techniques for stalking, shooting, and dressing a deer. Then I would ask him how he would have done it, and he would recount a story from 50 years earlier when he hunted as a young man.
“I want to go hunting,” I said to him one evening.
“Deer or ducks?” he asked.
“Well, let’s start out with both,” I suggested confidently.
You see, Swede not only had a 12-gauge pump shotgun, but he also had a 10-gauge Marlin Goose gun, and a 30-06 Springfield rifle.
“You want me to go with you?” he asked in his evening slurred speech.
“No, that’s okay. You’re too stove-up to walk in the woods anymore. You just let me borrow your truck and a few guns and I’ll figure the rest out. I think that I am well self-taught from these magazines.
He looked at me with a doubtful look on his face, but then turned back to watch the TV.
“Take what you need out of the rack,” he said, “but buy your own ammo and decoys. I don’t want mine all shot full of holes.”
##
Back then, ammo was cheap. Hunters could dress in any outer clothes they wanted. There were many meat processors to take your game for cutting and wrapping, and all the mountain logging roads were ungated, giving access to hundreds of miles of hunting.
“Now days,” I said to the boy, “a box of shells are $40.00. You have to sneak through the woods with that florescent orange vest on. If you got a deer, there is no place to take it to get it processed, and because people drive up into the hills to dump their garbage and leave their junk cars, the log roads are all gated closed. The enticing lure of deer hunting is gone.”
“I want to go deer hunting,” he repeated.
“Do you have a rifle?” I asked.
“I’ve got a Swede Mauser 6.5×55 that my grandfather left me.”
“Does it have a scope?” I asked.
“Do I need one?” he asked.
“Not if the deer aren’t standing more than 50 feet away, I guess.”
“Look, I know you kid. You will hate yourself after you’ve killed a deer. A deer isn’t just a target. It’s a living being and if you don’t kill it on the first shot, you are going to have to kill it up close when it is writhing on the ground. Deer are just like dogs. They have personalities; they raise families; they are smart.”
The call of the wild had him locked in its tight grip. He needed to go through the rite of passage.
“I want to go deer hunting.”
Obviously, he had not heard a thing I had just said.
“Okay. Get a hunting license and I’ll pick you up at 5:30 in the morning on Saturday.” Even that didn’t deter him.
##
Saturday morning, I drove up to his house at 5:30 only to find all the lights in the house were off.
“That little weasel slept in,” I muttered. “If I try to wake him, it will also wake the rest of the family.”
I was especially irked because I had to get up at 4:00 to get to his house. Suddenly, the light came on in his SUV and he climbed out. He waved and brought out a backpack and his Mauser. The gun was a relic with adjustable iron sights on the back. Most likely used as a sniper rifle back in some distant war. I hadn’t really thought about what he would wear, and I was surprised to see him in a pair of ski pants with an old lift ticket still attached. The legs made a swishing sound with every step he took. Well, who was I to judge – I walked through the woods wearing a hard hat that I had spray painted florescent orange. It gave off the sound of a rim-shot on a snare drum every time a tree limb slapped it.
“Ready to do it?” I asked as he climbed into my Explorer.
“Let’s do it,” he answered.
“By the way, pull open the bolt on your Mauser.”
He did and ejected a shell.
“Did you happen to read the hunting guidebook? There is a section about transporting a loaded gun in your vehicle. Not only will we be deafened if it goes off, but I will have to repair the hole in my roof.”
An hour later, we had pulled off the highway onto an ungated logging road which we drove on for another seven miles. It was just starting to get light. I pulled off the road and we parked at a favorite spot where I had bagged a deer before. I didn’t think that I would be excited about hunting again, but having a fledgling hunter who I could show the ropes to, relapsed me right back into the days when I learned from Swede.
“I’ve got something for you,” I said. Reaching into my backpack, I gave him a walkie talkie. “If we get separated in the woods, I want you to be able to call me.” He placed the unit in his shirt pocket and with a swish, swish, swish, and the occasional rim shot, we headed up the hill.
This was a hillside that I had come across by accident earlier in my hunting career. I had harvested one of my larger bucks in this same spot. It was steep, covered with moss and ferns and had many wind-fallen trees which we had to navigate under, or over. I watched him as we came to one group of windfalls. He tried to go over the top. As he climbed up the pile, he threw a leg over the top of a log and pulled himself up on top, but the backpack and his rifle caused him to lose balance and he went off the log backwards. Hooking his leg around the trunk, he did a complete playground revolution, minus the cherry drop. I was impressed.
I taught him to look for hoof prints in the moss and keep his eyes uphill for any movement in the trees. I, on the other hand, found chanterelle mushrooms in the moss. This was far more exciting than looking for deer and I would bend down, snip them with my knife and put them in my pack. After 30 minutes he said, “I thought we were hunting deer.”
“True,” I said, “but you also need chanterelle mushrooms to add flavor to the deer stew.”
An hour later, after lunch and a much-needed bathroom break, which I like to call “pine needle panties” which is the result of sitting bare legged on a needle coated, mossy log, we were on our way again, still not seeing any deer.
We came into a clearing next to a creek, where we found buried in the brush, a one-man tent. This tent looked like it hadn’t been used in years. Of course, the first thing that came into my mind was, there is a dead body inside.
“Let’s look inside and see if anyone is dead in there.” I suggested.
“I tell you what, you look inside, and I’ll have my rifle ready just in case someone who is not quite dead jumps out at you.” This put a whole new twist on looking inside, but he did have a good point.
I pulled back the door flap and cautiously looked in. Luckily there were no bodies, but I did retrieve a very nice hatchet which I placed in my backpack next to the chanterelles.
“The day hasn’t been a total loss. Mushrooms and a hatchet. Let’s head back down the hill and call it a day.” I could tell he was disappointed.
Back at the Explorer I said to him, “Give me the walkie-talkie and I’ll put it onto the charger at home.”
He patted down his coat, shirt and pants. “Uh-oh,” he said. Must have fallen out when I did the rotation on the log.
Almost immediately, I heard my walkie-talkie crackle and a high-pitched chirping come over the speaker.
“The dog-gone squirrels have your walkie-talkie.” I muttered. “Do you have Google Translate on your phone?”
Four weeks later was what we call, “The Late Hunt.” It was one more chance to go hunting before the season closed for the year. Naturally, he was eager to go. I told him we would go to a different spot that I had found on google maps, satellite view. It was a large clearcut. Multiple acres of downed and cleared timber. It would be easy to sit in one spot and scan the area with a pair of binoculars to see deer feeding.
“You got a pair of binoculars?” I asked him.
“I’ve got a nice pair,” he responded.
“Bring em. I’ll pick you up at 5:00.”
As we drove up into the hills, I told him about using scent lures to draw bucks out into the open and about looking for fresh dropping piles which would indicate that deer were in the area.
“We’ll climb through the clear cut to see if we can spook one, but then if we find a good vantage point, we’ll stop and scan for a while. That is a nice-looking pair of binoculars hanging around your neck. They look expensive.”
After pulling over at a wide spot on the logging road, we then walked the rest of the way. I had a copy of the Google Maps satellite view of the clearcut which was not visible from the road. This meant that the other hunters wouldn’t know that it was there. There would be no competition.
“Okay,” I said looking at the map. “We go uphill from here through the timber and over that ridge. The clearcut is hidden on the backside.”
Climbing the hillside was difficult. There were large rocks to negotiate, and again, we found piles of windfallen timber which I elected to go under. He elected to go over. I had to chuckle as I watched him once again swing around the trunk backwards, this time including the cherry drop.
Now dirty and disheveled, we continued climbing to the top of the ridge. There before us was the large clear-cut. Steam rose from the frosty logs and rocks below us as the morning sun began rising. We found a spot to sit where we could view the full acreage.
“I’m going to toss a few scent canisters down the hill to draw them out, then I’ll scan this side of the clear cut with my binoculars, and you scan that side with yours.”
There was no response. Then . . .
“I lost my binoculars,” he said quietly.
Almost immediately, my walkie-talkie crackled, and a high-pitched chirping came over the speaker. I grabbed my phone and hit the Google Translate app.
“We see you through our new pair of binoculars and we have already told the deer. Ski pants and a hard hat? Have a nice day, losers!” The walkie-talkie went silent.
“Squirrels. I hate squirrels,” I muttered.
It was his first and last hunting season, and probably for the best. We both realized that it’s hard to maintain the dignity of apex predators when you’re actively being cyberbullied by creatures that eat acorns.
The roads in Tennessee are like the spokes of a wheel. The hubs are Nashville, Clarksville, Chattanooga, and Memphis with roads radiating out from the hubs 360 degrees and crossroads running perpendicular linking the spokes. The closest visual description I can give is bullet holes in a car windshield. There are no straight roads, all roads wind around something. Google maps cannot locate most destinations. From the moment I drove away from the Nashville Airport until the day I returned, I had no idea where I was.
My next-door neighbor Craig and I were working on our minibikes in his garage when we heard talking on the other side of his hedge. It was not uncommon to hear voices out there because opposite his hedge were the cliffs which dropped down to Bellingham Bay. On beautiful, sunny, summer days, it was normal for people to walk the cliff edge next to the train tracks to look at the bay and the sailboats. What was unusual about these voices was that there were also the sounds of tools clanking on metal. Craig and I went to investigate.
I cannot for the life of me understand the reasoning of a black fly. It literally has the whole world at its wingtips and yet it sits on the side of my house and waits for me to open the door so it can enter. Why? Are flies interested in interior decorating? Do they want to compare my house with the one next door?
When a spouse dies, it seems that the one thing all widows and widowers have in common is loneliness. Even those who appear to be living a normal, happy life are secretly lonely. For those who have not lost a mate, you wouldn’t understand the emptiness of missing the other half of who you are.
My mom was widowed at the young age of 51. It took her years to find happiness in companionship again. Up until that day, I witnessed her trying to make it through each day lonely, and it was sad. I was living in the same house at the time and helped to maintain the property.
Living in a small house behind us was the old widower, Swede. He had lost his wife to a stroke many years before my dad was killed. Swede handled his loneliness by sharing his home with his rescue-dog, Digger O’Dell, and medicating with his friend, Canadian Mist. Swede at this time was in his mid-80s. He was a man’s man. He was employed, as a teenager, on a steam tug which hauled log booms across the sound from the Olympic Peninsula to lumber mills on the Seattle and Tacoma waterfronts. As he got older, he was a spar tree setter, meaning he climbed to the top of fir trees in a logging site and set the block for the cable which pulled the downed trees up to the log trucks. His last job before he retired was as a lineman for the power company.
Swede taught me everything I needed to know about hunting, and fishing and he loaned me all the guns and fishing gear I needed to get started as a real outdoorsman. Although he wasn’t an educated man, he knew a little bit about everything.
One day, when he was only slightly under the influence of the Mist, he ambled over to our house in his overalls where mom was busy sewing in her study. He knocked on the back door and mom answered.
“Well good morning, Swede. What brings you over on this sunny spring day?” she asked.
“Well, gal-darn it, Pat. I was wondering if we could have a spot of tea,” he said in his best British accent.
“Of course,” she said, and invited him in. The two sat at the dining room table for an hour talking and sipping tea.
Outside, at this time of year there appeared to be a blizzard. The tall cottonwood trees to the south of us were losing their cotton and the breeze was carrying it through the air and into the yards on our side of the street. The ground was covered and looked like there had been a light snowfall. As the cotton floated up against the house, it began to pile up like snow drifts.
Cottonwood tree cotton
It was a yearly event for us, and everywhere else in the county that had Cottonwood trees was experiencing the same blizzard.
Because people with allergies get plugged up when the cotton floats by, they assume that the cotton is the allergen, but this is not the truth. The cotton has no allergen in it but because it is sticky it picks up allergens from grasses and other trees that do have pollen. So, the cotton is just an innocent carrier.
“Look at that gal-darn cotton,” he said, and he pulled out his handkerchief to blow his nose. “It’s nothing but a mess. It blows into my house and gets all over everything. Even my dog, Digger O’Dell, comes in from outside looking like he has been rolling in a snow drift.”
“I know,” mom said. “This afternoon I have company coming over and the driveway and sidewalks are covered. It will get tracked into the house and make a mess.”
“I plan on sweeping the sidewalk before they come, mom,” I assured her.
“Well hold on, gal-darn it,” Swede bellowed. “You don’t need to sweep nothing. I’ve got one of those electric leaf blowers. That will get rid of it.”
It seemed like a brilliant idea. Swede ambled home and returned with the blower and a large coil of extension cord draped over his shoulder. Digger O’Dell walked closely by his side.
“Find some place to plug the cord into, Marty. I’ve got to try this out. We could be the hit of the neighborhood.”
Finding a plug-in in the garage, we unrolled the cord and plugged in the leaf blower. Swede turned it on, and starting out on the lawn, he began blowing the cotton toward the house. Instead of staying on the ground, it became airborne again and turned into another blizzard. Still, the old man thought it was doing some good and he kept swinging the blower back and forth, moving the cotton around.
In mom’s rock garden, was a small ceramic maiden who had been there for years. She said that it made her happy when she looked out through the kitchen window and saw the maiden out in the garden. Swede, now blowing cotton through the garden, accidentally hit the maiden with the air blast which toppled her over breaking her head off.
Swede shut off the blower and we both stared at the maiden. We didn’t know how mom would react to the bad news.
“Gal-darn it!” or something like that, Swede mumbled. “I’ve got some Super Glue in my kitchen drawer next to the sink. Run over to the house and get it. We’ll glue it back on before your mom finds out.”
Running over to Swede’s “house of confusion,” I found the tube in the same drawer with two bananas, which had been over-ripe a long time ago. There was always something rotting in his kitchen. I made a hasty return back to Swede just to get away from the smell.
“Slop some of that glue around the neck and stick the head back on,” he told me. “And don’t get any of that goop on your fingers or you’ll glue them together.”
Carefully gluing the neck, I gently placed the head back on the body and held it there while the glue set up. I handed the tube back to him and he placed it in the back pocket of his coveralls.
“Looks good as new,” he said. “Don’t tell her we broke it.”
“We broke it?” I asked.
“Come on,” he growled. “Let’s finish with this cotton.”
The blowing once again started but the cotton was impossible to control. It just mounded up in big drifts against the base of the brick house. Swede shut off the blower.
“Well, this ain’t working like I thought,” he said. “It’s like trying to herd bubbles. Even if we blow it beyond your house, it’s all going to blow into my house. We have to think of a way to get rid of it.”
“How about a shop vac?” I suggested.
He pondered that idea for a moment.
“Hmmm, maybe,” he said quietly.
Then, an idea popped into his mind, through the haze of the Mist.
“I’ve got it!” he said. “Go over to my garage and bring back the weed burner. We’ll torch the cotton.”
It seemed like a good idea to me. With a jack-of-all-trades like Swede, I could trust his good judgment. I brought back the propane tank with the hose attached to the weed burner.
“Okay, I’ll show you how to turn this thing on. Here’s the striker. You take it around the house where the cotton drift starts and start burning it this direction. I am going to take a sit-down on this garden stool and have a snip of the Mist while you’re working.”
He sat down and rocked back and forth until he felt comfortable, then pulled a flask from his coveralls. While he sipped, he played in the drift with his boots.
“Gal-darn stuff,” he mumbled.
Going around the house to the start of the drift, I set down the propane bottle and opened the two valves. Hearing gas leaking from the burner, I held the striker out in front of it and scratched a spark. The explosion was louder than I had expected. I rubbed my mustache feeling the hair fall off in my fingers. Taking the tip of the weed burner, I carefully placed the flame into the drift.
Did you know that cottonwood cotton burns like gun powder? There was a bright flash, and it was gone. And the flash shot around the house, and I heard a loud scream.
“Bring the gal-darn garden hose and put me out,” he yelled.
Mom, hearing the commotion, came running from the house. She had never seen Swede smoke so bad since he had his five pack a day tobacco addiction. The laces were burned off his boots, and his coverall legs were setting off small sparks, but a good squirting of water put him completely out.
“Well, these coveralls are shot,” he grumbled. “My butt feels like it’s on fire. Check me out.”
He stood and turned around. There was nothing burning, but his back pocket appeared to have some discoloration. I walked up and took a closer look. It had the familiar smell of super glue.
“You sat on your Super Glue tube,” I said. I tugged on the seat of his coveralls, but they did not pull away from his body. His coveralls and boxer shorts were adhered to his right buttock.
“Well, gal-darn it! Take me to the hospital.”
By the time we entered Emergency, Swede was nearly completely self-medicated and barely felt any pain at all as they cut off his clothes. After careful examination and consulting between themselves, the nurses gave him some cream for his now hairless legs, and it was decided that the simplest way to deal with the glued area was to leave it, and the cloth would gradually pull away from the skin. On his medical chart, next to the name, Swede, the nurse put in parentheses the second nickname for the cantankerous old man — “Patch.”
When we left the hospital, his boots and coveralls had been tossed into the garbage. He rode back home in socks, a pair of Depends, and a hospital gown. He smiled at the crowd in the waiting room as he passed through, and commented all the way home on how cold my vinyl seats were.
As time went on, Mom found herself a good job, made new friends, and toured the world. She later remarried, and the loneliness slowly faded away.
As more women in the neighborhood became widowed, Swede and Digger had more homes to visit for a spot of tea. Whenever I would stop over to check on the old mountain man, he had to keep reminding me, “The name is Swede. Stop calling me Patch.”
As far as I can tell there are two types of kids who go to college: those who have a goal and direction and those who haven’t got a clue. Because I was in the second group, my college days were few.
Highway 99: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the travel trailer Aloha. Its three-week mission: to explore strange new sites of interest between Bellingham and Chihuahua, Mexico while being pulled by a high mileage Oldsmobile sedan. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no Mitchell family has gone before!
The difference between the words sweety and sweaty is one small letter, but the consequences of using them wrong is catastrophic.
I had just mass-emailed a letter to various members of my church intending to say in one of my statements, “My wife is a sweety.” It was my own fault for not proofreading before sending the statement which the predictive text feature changed to “My wife is sweaty.” The responses came back almost immediately.
