27/10/2024
My PD kept me awake most of the night so I wrote a short memory piece.
That's the hell of getting old(er) ... you have more experiences in the past than opportunities for new ones in the future, LOL! So here's a trip in the Wayback Machine to about 1967 and a memory of an outdoor thrill that has buoyed and sustained my spirit thru many a duller, darker day.
FLYING COLORS
One balmy spring morning before sunrise when I was a primary school boy, I quickly dressed and slipped furtively past the door behind which Granddad was snoring the cannon part of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture." Like a desperate burglar I made darn sure the heavy screen door out back didn't slam behind me. Scooping up fishing rod and bait can that held 4 brown disgusting balls of yuck! -- mud leeches-- in moments I had run down the spirea lane, through an open gate and up a familiar 2 wheel wagon track to reach the foot of the pond dam. Granddad and his brother, Tom, had toiled a solid fortnight to form this structure out of rich black Chariton County dirt. Their heavy equipment? Uncle Tom's gen-you-wine Missouri mules, Min and Moe, and Granddad's team of huge Percheron workhorses that were still honored retirees around the farm long after John Deere took over horsepower duties there. Together, men and beasts battled a weedy gully south of the farmhouse, dragging iron "clamshell" diggers to terraform a steep dam that's still pooling water to this day.
Like many of you reading this, I was "eat up" with hunting and fishing even at this tender age. I had already killed my first geese and ducks, including some over the pond where I aimed to cast one of the snakelike leeches. Goal: that a five pound bass would emerge ghostlike from murky strands of coontail to gulp said leech and run back down into cool, dark security.
My leech would have to wait to be eaten, however. I crept through timothy grass to peek over the crest of the dam. I wanted to check if maybe some blackjacks or spoonbills paddled on its clear surface this fine morning. Hmmmm... nothing in sight, from the fishy haven of old cedar blowdowns at the head of the pond, right down to the arrowhead and other aquatic weeds stitching the dam face. Surprising, but oh well, there were bass to be hooked before Grand dad whooped an invitation back to the house for his usual big Farmhouse breakfast. Like my "other" grandfather, Granddad had been a cook-turned-rifleman in World War I France. Granddad's sunrise bill of fare for some reason always featured a small bowl of mashed turnips -- heavy on the cow cream and granulated sugar!
I involuntarily swallowed hard at the thought of those woody, possibly poisonous boiled turnips when suddenly from almost at my feet erupted a blast of flapping, quacking and sprayed droplets of pond water! Bright as a new dime, a startled drake and his obviously unhappy mate clawed for the safety of the skies, flailing the air so near me that I felt the downwash of their wings! Suzy read me the Riot Act in raspy alarm, underscored by higher frequency sqeaks of wing primaries vibrating under dual aeronautical strains of lift and thrust. It was hard to tell who was more surprised by this boyish interruption of ducky breakfasting. And as normal pulse rates returned, I last saw Drake and Suzy winging southeast, most likely toward another but smaller waterhole on a neighboring place, the Krepsbachs. Nobody would disturb them there; the only boy from that farm was halfway around the world at that moment... dealing with explosions of another more sinister sort.
Funny how the mind works, even the mind of a primary schoolboy. Instantly I recallled something I had read in Field and Stream, one of the big three outdoor mags that I consumed the moment the postman brought them. In his hand how-to column "Tap's Tips," Mr. H.G.Tapply had written how you should hide immediately when you jumped puddle ducks like these mallards from their resting and hiding spots. Often, Tap advised, if you hide nearby quietly and well, the birds will often circle back to alight where they had flushed.
Instantly I dropped fishing gear and flattened out in some tall foxtail and grass at water's edge. I wish I could report that I took a quick reading of wind speed and direction, so I would know to watch the sky directly behind me, over the top of the dam.
I wasn't that savvy. I was a kid who read outdoor mags and was still shivering alittle in excitement of being so close to those ducks.
Those ducks! WHERE in the heck were they?? Had they gone on to Krepsbach's pond? Or were they halfway to Hecla, S.D., by now?
Was my hero, Tap Tapply, actually a made-up character? A pen name, used by a housewife in Ohio who was essentially full of beans about duck-hunting and stuff?
Then! As if on cue, airspace at top of the dam was blotted out. In my mind's eye, horizontal rays of sunlight lit up a gliding tapestry of emerald, bronze, black and pure white and orange... those familiar but fabulously striking colors on the undersides of mallards! Repeated countless times in the 60 years since that morning, those colors have never failed to thrill and enchant. At the heights of perfection, they have served as a defining totem, as icons, of not just ducks and hunting and all those things represent, but nature itself. Flying colors, locked in space and time. A million miles behind me. Yet as accessible as one's next thought.
Juking left and right, my pair of greenheads swooshed 10 feet over my hiding place on the way to execute a surprisingly noisy, heavy splash-down.
And never mind that in the next moment came the familiar whoop of breakfast-time from the tall old man in the farmhouse. And with it, duck and drake rocketed once again into clear springtime air...
And into immortality. The kind of immortality that comes without aging or yellowing thru a lifetime in the happy memories of a boy "eat up" with ducks and duck huntin'... but not so wild about turnips for breakfast.
God bless each of you. Selah.
-- 30 --
