Mitchell Way
“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.
** Title photo taken by Diane Haggith
Faith Family Life Getting Older Growing Up Misadventures Music Patriotism Pets or Pests? Snips Tributes
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.
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.
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.”
Faith Family Life Getting Older Growing Up Misadventures Music Patriotism Pets or Pests? Snips Tributes
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.
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.
“Mr. Mitchell,” came a soft voice behind me.
“What is it Cam,” I whispered.
We were in a movie theater. I had taken the middle school boys from the church as a reward for their achievements during the year. Cam was sitting in the theater seat directly behind me.
He sat silently drifting on the surface of the lake. An ominous presence, scary and possibly deadly. We didn’t know. We stared at him from the shore. He gave the impression that he may be a crocodile waiting to strike. He wore sunglasses, had sunblock smeared heavily on his nose, an Army drill sergeant’s hat on his head, and a transistor radio which was playing softly from the bow seat. He didn’t smile, he didn’t speak, he just glared. Such was our introduction to Mr. Darson, the Black Mountain Waterfront Director.
I could see him from a distance. We had known each other for years and though he stops over occasionally, I have never really learned to enjoy his company.
In the early 1980s, I was determined to be an inventor. This combined with my interest in deer hunting led me to create and patent a hunting tree stand which I called the “Mitchell Limb Stand”. It was a name not unlike the name of my other inventions, since everything was the “Mitchell something.”
It started with a cow – as most stories do. I was sitting at the breakfast table eating my daily fried egg and cinnamon roll, when I noticed my Pyramidalis hedge which parallels my west property line shaking violently. What manner of beast is tearing them apart this time, I wondered. The hedge looks the way it does now because the deer seem to find it incredibly tasty in the winter and they can only reach up so high. So, I went outside to see what was going on and there I found my neighbor’s cow chewing away on the backside of the hedge.
Now here is the thing about my neighbor – he is the world’s worst rancher. There is a five-acre field which borders my property on two sides. The owners of the field live somewhere in Arizona and pay no attention, or care anything about the field or their house which they left. Therefore, since the field is up for grabs, the rancher runs his cattle on it.
Now, in the summer this is fine since the grass is growing in the field and the cows keep it mown down, but in the winter, the cows eat the grass down until there is nothing left, and they look elsewhere for something green, which lately has been my yard.
I do have a barbed wire fence around my property which is meant more as a boundary line marker than to keep animals out, but there are three strands on the fence line. The problem with hungry animals, whether cows, horses, elk, or elephants, is that they don’t care about fences when they want to eat what’s on the other side of the fence. The cows will come up to the fence, push the top wire down with their neck until it pulls the staple out of the fence post, then they will do the same with the middle wire, dropping it down. Then they merely have to step over the bottom wire, and they are in my back yard.
One Sunday morning, as we were getting ready to go to church, I raised the garage door and stepped outside. In front of the garage door were three piles of cow poop. There was cow poop down the sidewalk in front of the house and my ornamental hedges had been chewed on. To make matters worse, there had been heavy rains, and the ground was soggy. The cattle, who circled my house all night long, punched a trail into my grass. There were holes all over the yard.
Now, you would think that the rancher neighbor would do something about the mess, but calling him, he said, “Sorry about that. You need to fix your fences, so they don’t get into your yard.”
“Huh,” I said. “Let me get this straight. I must sink hundreds of dollars into my fence line to keep your animals out because you aren’t giving them enough feed and they are starving. They are your animals, why aren’t you maintaining the fence lines?” And that’s as far as it goes. My option is to be an ornery neighbor who calls the Sheriff or Humane Society and turns him in or come up with another plan.
And the plan was this: I would run a strand of electric fence wire parallel to the property line barbed wire fence that the cows keep destroying. I would place it three feet out into the field so there was no way that they could get close to the barbed fence. This would cost me the materials and the power to run it, but it would keep them away from my yard.
After a trip to the farm store, I came home with fence posts, wire, insulators and a stinger box which hooks to the power. It cost a mere, well, I don’t want my wife to know. It was an easy job setting it all up with the ten cows standing behind me overseeing my work. When it was complete, I plugged in the stinger and watched with glee as the cows each tried it out. This was the fence line on the north side of my property. The cow field also borders the west side of my property, but that part was closed off so the cows couldn’t get into it, and it was overgrown with tall grass and blackberries. The rancher saw this as an opportunity though, another way to keep from feeding his cows. Last year he came over and opened up the fence into that field to let the cows roam in the tall grass.
During the summer, I noticed the west fence being pushed down. My grape arbor and the fruit trees which were mere feet from the fence line were stripped of leaves and fruit. My lawn next to the fence line was chewed short. So, I chased the animals out and closed the entrance to that field but the hungry cows, much like elephants, pushed it down and regained entry, which takes me back to my breakfast and the Pyramidalis hedges.
I already had the electric fence on the north side of the property. It would be easy enough to attach another wire to it and run a line down the west side of the property the same way I had done the north. And this is how my day started to unravel.
I keep my old farm truck parked quite aways from the house back in the trees just so people driving by don’t think that it is my main source of travel. If I was to go to the Feed Store to pick up fence posts, I needed to use it. So, I hiked back into the woods to the truck, and walking around the back of it I noticed that the license plate tabs were expired.
Huh.
No problem, I’ll walk back to the house and buy the tabs online. Getting back inside, I climbed the stairs to the office and sat down in front of the computer.
The Department of Licensing web site is easy to use but the first screen required me to provide a license plate number and my last name so they could bring up the vehicle. The last name was easy enough, but I didn’t have the license plate number. I strained my eyes at the truck through my office window but couldn’t read the plate. No problem, I’ll go downstairs and find the title in the file cabinet. It has the license number on it.
After clunking my way downstairs and finding the title, I slogged back to the office and put the license number into the computer. The web site kicked it back saying the plate number was in error. Ah! I have owned this truck for so many years, I have had to change the plates. Okay, I’ll walk back out to the truck and get the number. The upside was that I got my steps in for the day.
Luckily, the license tab renewal store was right next to the Farm Store. Taking back roads, to avoid the police, I was able to pick up the new tab and apply it to the plate. Then, walking next door, I picked up 12 fence posts only costing me a mere, well, no sense letting my wife know.
Upon returning home, I quickly set about putting the new posts into the ground in the west field, three feet from the barbed fence. Then satisfied with how the posts looked, I strung the electric wire from one end to the other. This was not happening without the full audience of cows standing around in a half circle offering advice. As I was getting to the final process of hooking the west line to the hot north line, I noticed a buckskin Jersey cow walk to the north electric fence and put an insulator with its wire in her mouth.
Huh. I wonder how long the north electric fence hasn’t been working.
Completing the wiring hookup, I went into the shed to get my voltmeter. It’s not like I go into the shed much in the winter, so when I opened the door and looked inside, I saw that all the tools on my bench were lying on their side and there were tools strewn across the floor.
Huh. What has Cheryl been looking for out here. We’ll have to discuss tool shed etiquette.
Now, the tool shed is not sealed tight and during the cold season, cats will come inside and climb up onto the plywood lying in the rafters. Sometimes, I’ll find kittens. It looked and smelled like a cat had been in my shed.
I found the voltmeter and started straightening up the tool bench which may have created somewhat of a racket. Then, I bent down to pick up some tools off the floor when suddenly, something of great weight hit me in the shoulders. The four sets of claws in my back told me that it hopefully was a cat. The blind-side tackle from the rafters pushed me forward through the door, out onto the lawn. Lying on my face in the grass, I turned my head to see a very large feral Tom Cat disappearing across the yard.
Huh.
Testing the old power stinger with the voltmeter proved that the unit was indeed dead, although, there was a red LED light on indicating that it was working. Liar!
It was 5:45. I didn’t know how long the Farm Store stayed open, but I thought that I must try, so I hopped in the old farm truck with the new tabs on it and sped into town.
I was able to get to the store before it closed and I purchased a new stinger for only, well, I really shouldn’t say.
Back at home, the cattle were grazing in the west field when I installed the new stinger. I checked it with the voltmeter, and it did indeed work. I watched a bull mosey over to the new wire. He stuck his head under the hot wire, eating grass next to the barbed fence. Then, he lifted it up and the back of his neck came in contact with the hot wire.
A startled bovine makes a unique sound, different from their other unique sounds. I’m sure that in cow language it is profanity. At any rate, he jerked his head back and ran into the center of the field taking the fence wire with him. The wire was stripped off each insulator of each fence post.
Huh. I wasn’t expecting that.
The rest of the herd made a strange sound. Possibly they were laughing.
Okay, try again. Luckily the wire wasn’t broken and after shutting off the power, I re-strung it. Then after repowering the system, that buckskin Jersey walked up to the north fence and stuck her nose out at the north hotwire.
“Don’t do it, Daisy,” I thought.
She did. I guess she can figure out how to get herself out of that cherry tree.
The rest of the herd made a strange sound. Possibly they were laughing.
It was starting to get dark, and the last thing to do to make sure that the fence was ready was to weed eat the tall grass which could come in contact with the hotwire and short it out. I went to the garage and brought out my weed whacker. Climbing over the west barbed fence, I started knocking down the grass in the three-foot section between the barbed and the electric fence. In the dusk sky, on the back side of the Pyramidalis hedge I turned a bit to work the whacker under the barbed fence and I accidentally stepped backwards into the electric fence.
People in the neighborhood said they saw the arc flash in the night sky and heard someone scream in possibly an Asian language. The charge only lasted a second, but like a near death experience it seemed like hours. I was able to see all the major network stations, as well as Prime and Netflix. There was a Spanish speaking show I watched but couldn’t understand a thing they were saying.
Rubbing the back of my leg after regaining my senses, I heard the semi-circle of cattle making a strange noise. Possibly they were laughing.
That though, is one sure-fire indicator that your electric fence is working.
Faith Family Life Getting Older Growing Up Misadventures Music Patriotism Pets or Pests? Snips Tributes
The animated version of the Disney movie, Peter Pan, was released in 1953. Disneyland theme park opened in 1955. I was born in 1955. Are you seeing the connection? I grew up in the era of Wonderland, of the lost boys, of never wanting to grow up, of wanting to fly . . . and sometimes occasionally wearing green tights.
The Boy Scout motto, which we all had to memorize to earn the Scout Rank is: Be prepared. So, I memorized it and said it to my Scout Master so I could begin earning my Tenderfoot rank. At the time, two words was about the extent of my ability to memorize.
But no one really explained to us what we were supposed to be prepared for. Did it have anything to do with bears coming into our camp? If we were indeed responsible for being prepared for any situation which would arise, I would have to spend considerably more time in the library speedreading books on every topic to get a general knowledge of what to do when a situation needed a solution, and in the fifth grade I was lucky to read through one book a year.
It was not until this year that I found out that Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouts, had intended the boys to be ready for anything from a sudden accident to the defense of their country. When he was asked what they should be prepared for, he replied, “Any old thing.”
The motto has awakened me at 4:30 many mornings as I lie in bed wondering, “What am I not prepared for today?”
This was something that I brought up with my best friend, Chuck, as we stood out on a sandbar, river fishing for Silver Salmon. He was about twenty feet upriver, fishing with his nine-foot rod which was now eight foot, six inches long since he chopped six inches off the tip by dropping his tailgate closed before he got his pole completely out of the back of his SUV.
“Here’s something I was thinking about,” I said as I lifted my boonie hat and swabbed the sweat from my forehead. “What would you do if I grabbed my chest and fell over on the beach?”
“You mean dead, or just fell over like you sometimes do?”
“I mean a heart attack.”
“Well, if you were dead anyway, I might swap my pole with yours and check in your tackle box to see if there’s anything I need.”
“You mean that you wouldn’t start CPR?”
“Hypothetically speaking, what if I had a fish on?”
“Would you call, 911?”
“When I got the fish on the beach.”
“You know, this is something we need to be thinking about. Neither one of us is getting any younger.”
“You are actually six months older than me.”
“When was the last time you took a CPR class? I haven’t taken one for about 15 years.”
“How old were we when we were working on our First Aid merit badges in Scouts?” he asked.
“Well, cripes! I’m signing us up for a class.”
And immediately after I had lost another three lures to a snag in the river, I went to the local fire hall and inquired about their next CPR class.
“We don’t get many men your age signing up for the class, a buff looking 20-something firefighter told me. Mostly, we get older women who are running daycares, or young kids who need it for a college class requirement. Are you physically up for it?”
“Hey,” I said, obviously offended. “If I can still use my bicycle pump to inflate my lawnmower tire, I think I can push on a chest for two minutes.”
“Yeah,” he said, slowly eyeing my out of shape muscles. “I’ll put you down for this Saturday.”
“Oh, I’ve been put down before. And put down my buddy, Chuck too. I’m relying on him to be the one to kick start me if I keel over.”
So, Saturday came, and I drug the reluctant Charles to the 9am CPR class. Just as the fireman had warned us, we were the only two “Older” men in a group of mature women and college girls.
“Thank you for attending Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation training,” the instructor said. “Let’s go around the room and tell us your first name and why you are taking the training.”
As was predicted when I enquired about the class, the older women were daycare owners or workers, and the college age attenders were taking CPR as one of the requirements for a Community College class. When it got to us, we had the classes’ attention because no one understood why two old broken down men were interested in CPR.
“My name is Marty and I worry about my partner, here. He could shut down at any time.”
“My name is Chuck and I’m six months younger than him. I doubt that I would jump start him because look at that face. I’m not blowing air into that mouth.”
Sometimes the truth hurts.
There were three adult Resusci-Anne mannequins lying on the floor and three infant Anne dolls on a table. The instructor began giving us scenarios about finding an unresponsive person and what to do if you were by yourself, or with other people helping. He showed us proper hand placement on the sternum and how deep to compress. He then produced some alcohol swabs and wiped the mouth of Anne and showed us how to tilt the head, lift the jaw, pinch the nose, and blow in, raising Anne’s chest.
“For your information, Anne holds the record for being the most kissed doll in the world. We will apply two blasts of air and then start compressions at a rate of 100-120 beats per minute. Try to think of a song that has a beat of 120 beats per minute, like Row, Row, Row Your Boat. You will alternate between two breaths and 30 compressions. Since we only have three Annes, while one person is practicing, the rest will watch and critique.”
The college age kids seemed eager to get practicing, so they gathered around one mannequin and one of the kids began. Chuck and I, and the older women were a little more hesitant to be the first to begin, so one of the women volunteered. She was a rather large woman in her late 50’s. With a little help, she lowered herself to the floor and sat on her knees next to Anne. After attempting to wake the patient, she concluded that Anne was not breathing and had no pulse. She told one of us to call 911, then, having previously swabbed the dolls mouth area, she tilted Anne’s head, brought her jaw up, pinched her nose, took a deep breath and came down on Anne’s mouth to give her the first breath of air, and . . .
“Frapp!”
Those standing around critiquing took a step back and looked at each other, not knowing what to do. In all fairness, she was able to fill Anne’s lungs also.
The next woman up was a thin woman also in her late 50’s. She took the position on the floor and after concluding that Anne was not just sleeping, she filled the doll with two blasts of air and began the chest compressions. After cycling through the process twice, she stood to let the next person in the group try. She faced the group with a smile on her face, as if to say, “That wasn’t so hard.”
The group’s reaction was, “Whoa!” She had blown so hard into Anne’s mouth that she broke a blood vessel in her right eye and the white of that eye was dark red.
“The old group ain’t doing so good,” Chuck mumbled.
“The next thing we are going to introduce into the mix is the AED unit,” the instructor announced. “The acronym AED stands for Automated External Defibrillator. More and more businesses, churches, and schools are buying them, so you should be familiar with how to use them.”
He went through the attaching process, which included removing the clothing from the chest area where the electrodes would be placed.
“Using an AED requires no previous training because the pads are marked to show you where to place them and an audio voice will give you instructions. Chuck and Marty haven’t done their CPR practice yet, so you guys get on the floor. One of you will be doing the CPR and the other will apply the AED pads, then you will switch.”
Using a chair, we lowered ourselves onto our knees. The crackling of the joints made me worry that we might not be getting up again. I was in position for the CPR. We ascertained that our victim had no heartbeat and was not breathing.
“Okay, call 911 and see if you can find an AED,” I told him, “but first take her shirt off.”
“Whoa, hold on! I’m not taking any female’s top off. My wife would kill me.”
“As soon as the paramedics arrive, her top is coming off anyway,” the instructor commented.
There was much grumbling as we removed her sweatshirt. I then began CPR as Chuck applied the shock pads to her chest and we followed the instructions given to us by the AED box. After swapping out positions, we had reached the limit of our ability to sit on our knees on the floor and both needed chairs to pull ourselves up to a standing position.
The last demonstration of the morning was dislodging obstructions in infant and adult windpipes. The J-Stroke, or Heimlich Maneuver, to be used on an adult, was done by pairing up the class. One person stood behind the other, made a fist, and visualized the upward thrust from a spot above the navel to the breastbone.
When I placed my arms around Chuck and made a fist in the center of his belly I asked, “Should I try one thrust so you can see what it feels like?”
“Not unless you want a wad of tobacco in that woman’s hair,” he said.
“This is a lot like giving the Heimlich to a very pregnant woman.”
He ground my foot lightly into the carpet with the heel of his steel-toed work boot.
Dislodging an obstacle from a baby required holding the baby in one arm face down, and hitting it between the shoulder blades, five times. If you can’t then see the obstacle in its mouth, lay the baby on its back on one of your arms and slap its chest five times. If that doesn’t dislodge it, start again on the back. This seemed like excessive beating of the baby and because our doll was old, its head kept falling off.
At 11:30, the instructor was satisfied that we could all perform CPR, and he said that our certification cards would be in the mail within the week. Returning once again to the sandbar, Chuck cast his lure out into the center of the river. I watched as he stepped deeper and deeper into the swiftly flowing current. He was still complaining about the morning of fishing lost to a CPR class.
“Here’s something I was thinking about,” I said. “What if I fell into the river and was being carried downstream. When was the last time you took a junior lifesaving class?
His next cast swung wide over my head and his lure snagged my boonie hat and carried it out and into the far side of the river.
He did that on purpose. I’ll be checking into Lifesaving classes at the YMCA tomorrow.
Faith Family Life Getting Older Growing Up Misadventures Music Patriotism Pets or Pests? Snips Tributes
Inner tube rolling
The act of wedging oneself in the inside diameter of a tractor inner tube and vertically rolling.
Although I had proven the idea ineffective for long distance travel, I was curious if it could become a competitive competition.
“Dave! Did you hear that? Can you feel the earth shaking?”
“It sounds like a spooked, slobbering horse,” Dave remarked nervously as he looked around the edge of the building we were standing next to. “Cripes! It’s getting louder. It’s coming this way!”