Rubber Legs and White Tail-Hairs, page 11
By the time Hank had got himself safely back to the ladder and sucked in a couple of deep breaths, and Winnie had collected her wits, her bathrobe, and her spectacles, Strange had vanished from sight. I suppose it was only natural that upon seeing a hairy, leering face at her bathroom window, Winnie would leap to the conclusion that it must belong to Hank, particularly given her opinion of his character defects. In any case, she jerked up the window, stuck her head out, and shot fierce glances around the roof. And there, to confirm her worst suspicion, was Hank’s grizzled face poking up from the edge of the roof.
“You hairy pervert!” Winnie screeched. “I saw you, you … you … you peeper!”
Hank, of course, had not the slightest notion of what she was talking about, and cared even less, as he was still regrouping his senses after his recent acrobatics. Even after Winnie’s head had disappeared back in the window, he clung silently to the top of the ladder.
“You gonna come down or what, Hank?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Pretty quick. As soon as I can make my hands let go of the ladder.”
“What was Winnie screeching about?”
“I don’t know. Probably tryin’ to scare me to death, the crazy twit!”
I could tell from his tone that Hank had abandoned his best behavior.
We soon got the whole mess straightened out, and Winnie had a good laugh over the misunderstanding. Hank, however, seemed depressed. He disappeared into the bathroom for a while and then returned, clean-shaven.
“You shaved off your beard!” Winnie yelped. “Why, you know, I think I liked you better with it. Covered up your weak chin.”
Hank responded with a comment that indicated he was off his good behavior. Winnie laughed. Hank was back to normal, and the tension began to melt away. He and Winnie matched insult for insult, and if I’m not mistaken, both of them thoroughly enjoyed the rest of her visit.
But every so often, I would catch Hank staring moodily off into the distance, and it wasn’t too hard to guess what troubled him. I’m sure he didn’t care one way or the other about being mistaken for a Peeping Tom, but it bothered him no end to be mistaken for Strange.
As usual, the dog escaped unscathed and unrepentant, but he kept a wary eye out for Hank the next few days, and for good reason. Shortly after we had determined the identity of the true culprit in the troublesome affair, Hank made a strangling motion with his hands and snarled, “Where is that miserable mutt?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably at the dog shack, trying to figure out how to raise the drawbridge.”
Strange never again climbed the house, and it was a long, long wait before he did anything else of which I could be proud.
To Filet or Not to Filet
During the years I was a college sophomore, I became interested in philosophy and signed up for several courses, hoping the intellectual discipline would improve my mind, or, failing that, help me get girls.
Even to this day, I still read philosophy on occasion. I have just been perusing Mortimer J. Adler’s Ten Philosophical Mistakes. Surprisingly, Mr. Adler forgot the most important philosophical mistake: enrolling in philosophy courses as a sophomore. In his chapter “Consciousness and Its Objects,” he cuts right to the heart of the problem: “If two persons are talking about an object that is an object of memory for both of them, or an object of imagination for both, or an object of memory for one and an object of imagination for the other, the question about whether that common object is an entity which also really exists, which also once existed, or which also may exist in the future, cannot be so easily answered.”
Right! In fact, I found such problems absolutely impossible to answer. I never even knew they were problems, no one in my family ever having mentioned them.
But I have no regrets about studying philosophy. For one thing, it comes in handy for fileting bluegills. Just the other night, my friend Keith Jackson and I went out on the lake and caught a nice mess of bluegills. As is well known among pan fishermen, there is no such thing as catching too many bluegills while you are catching them. It is only when you must start fileting them that you realize that any number of bluegills is too many to catch.
Upon returning home late at night, Jackson and I were both overcome with the traditional generosity of successful bluegill fishermen the world over. “You take all of them,” I told Keith. “Then when we go walleye fishing, you can pay me back.”
Jackson said he would stand for nothing of the sort. “I took all the bluegills last time,” he said. “No, it’s your turn. You take ’em. Be my guest!” This last exclamation being expressed in the intimidating tone of Clint Eastwood’s “Make my day!” and given the fact that Eastwood is but a puny shrimp compared to Jackson’s six-foot-five, two hundred fifty pounds, I reluctantly acquiesced and hauled the whole mess of bluegills into my house.
My wife, Bun, was stretched out on the couch, wineglass in hand, watching the late news. “Catch anything?”
“A couple thousand bluegills,” I said. “I’ll just stow them in the refrigerator for tonight and get up first thing in the morning and filet …”
Bun’s eyes narrowed instantly to the slits that thirty years of marriage have taught me mean trouble and, even worse, work. No doubt she recalled the last time I had stowed a plastic sack full of crappies in the refrigerator. Her friend Lulu had been spending the night. I had told Lulu a dozen times that a lady of her intelligence and sophistication should not watch movies like Son of Killer Piranha, in which a vicious fish comes ashore and eats tourists.
Futhermore, I told her, piranha are seldom if ever found lurking in the fitting rooms of chic dress shops, although that’s not a bad idea. Even less are they likely to be found crouched in suburban refrigerators. All right, I will admit that a crappie does look something like a piranha. So what happened was, Lulu can’t sleep and gets up in the middle of the night and goes down to the refrigerator for a glass of milk. She opens the refrigerator door, reaches for the milk carton, and a half-expired crappie flops out of the plastic bag in front of her. There is no way that it could have gone for her throat, as she hysterically claimed. I, on the other hand, would have been happy to go for her throat, a voluminous organ that no doubt instantly raised all the neighbors a good three feet straight up out of bed. I personally was raised to within a few inches of the ceiling. Hovering there, exuding cold sweat, I calmly tried to deduce the reason for the psyche-shredding screech emanating from my kitchen. The only thing I could come up with was that a burglar had broken in and was feeding Lulu through the pasta-making machine. Later, when I learned that a mere crappie had set off Lulu’s alarm, I gladly would have paid a burglar to perform that service.
Rising menacingly from the couch, Bun pointed to the back porch and my fish-cleaning table. I slouched out, the bulging bag of bluegills sagging from my weary casting arm. It is at times like this that my years of delving into the quirky, quicksand depths of philosophy pay off.
I spread newspapers on the porch, then dumped the spiny, slimy pile of bluegills on them. Immediately, as I stared down at the pile, the philosophical question of guilt came to mind. Would there be any reality to the guilt I would feel if, instead of fileting the bluegills, I used them in their entirety as fertilizer for Bun’s roses? Would my guilt amount to anything in the endlessly expanding universe with its trillions of stars, some of which were probably orbited by worlds containing intelligent life, one being of which was probably at that very moment staring down at the equivalent of a slimy, spiny pile of bluegills, wondering how he could get out of fileting them? That would certainly be one test of his intelligence. As to the question of guilt, I could only answer, “Yeah, probably.” I had killed them. So I would filet and eat them. I picked up a bluegill and had at it with the fileting knife.
An exhausted and shivering person fileting ten thousand bluegills at midnight could easily slip into insanity and scarcely notice it. Thus, the need to invent ever more difficult philosophical questions to keep the mind firmly astride the track of rational thought. Here is one of the tougher problems I came up with: “If a wife has never expressed an interest in hunting in the past or the present and shows no inclination of doing so in the future, and if she has shown no discernible enthusiasm for guns, and indeed mildly distrusts them, would it be a relevant and significant act to give her a really nice .257 Roberts for her birthday?” In the existential sense, the answer is, of course, yes. Still, the risk must be weighed. As the great philosopher Immanuel Kant pointed out, under such circumstances one must be alert to every slight deviation in one’s normal existence, such as having your oatmeal taste funny three days in a row.
Perhaps the single most difficult question that has stumped philosophers since the time of Aristotle is, “Why do men fish and call it sport?” Clearly, the act of sport fishing is absurd, lying as it does outside the realm of reason. No sport fisherman can deny the absurdity of his activity, particularly at one o’clock in the morning as he stares down at a pile of twenty thousand bluegills that he must filet. Nevertheless, one must learn not only to accept the absurdity of one’s acts but to triumph over it. In one of the Greek myths, a character by the name of Sisyphus is caught by the gods in some misdemeanors involving wine, women, and song while he is supposed to be boringly dead. For his punishment, the gods force Sisyphus to push a huge stone uphill for eternity. As soon as Sisyphus gets the stone to the top of the hill, the stone rolls back to the bottom, and Sisyphus must walk back down and start pushing it up again. One version of the myth has it that Sisyphus triumphs over his fate and the gods, because, on his way back down the hill, he laughs! Okay, so it’s not that big a triumph. Nevertheless, it appeals to me, because that is often the only triumph we have over our fates—to laugh.
Bun jerked open the back door. “Would you stop that silly cackling!” she hissed. “You’ll wake the neighbors! You’ve got every dog in the block barking his head off!”
So much for Greek myths.
At 2:00 A.M., with the eyes of fifty thousand unfileted bluegills staring gleefully up at me, I turned to the philosophical question of identity. Say, for instance, you have wooden boat A. You remove a piece from it and use it to start building wooden boat B. You transfer each piece of boat A to boat B. Eventually, you have transferred all the pieces. Now what is the identity of the boat—is it A or B? That’s a tough question to answer, unless, of course, I am doing the work, in which case boat B leaks like a sieve.
Finally, with 200,000 bluegills glutting the porch at three o’clock in the morning, I came to the ultimate philosophical question. Is it possible for lifeless matter, such as rock and ice swirling in space, which the world once was, to evolve eventually into intelligent life, or approximately one-sixty-fourth of the human population on the planet today? I mean, go out and look at a rock and ask yourself how long it would take that rock to become a divorced public-relations man who is three months behind in his child support. Quite a while, right? In fact, just about the same length of time it takes to filet half a million bluegills.
What’s in a Name, Moonbeam?
One of my daughters and her husband were recently going through the mystical ritual of naming a new baby, which, upon its arrival, they claimed, would be either my grandson or granddaughter. They had failed to take into consideration that I am much too young to be a grandfather. As I told my wife, Bun, I’ll be danged if I’ll have some little whippersnapper going about referring to me as “Gramps.”
“Don’t be so crotchety,” she said.
“Crochety!” I bellowed. “Do you realize what you said, woman?”
“I must have been out of my mind,” she said. “I meant to say ‘irascible.’”
“That’s not any better.”
“Miffed?”
“Okay. Now, do you know the name they’re thinking of giving this new baby, if it’s a boy? Treat!”
“I think Treat’s a nice name for a boy.”
“Nice! Why you couldn’t even call the kid without sounding like a damn bird.”
“So what kind of name do you think is appropriate?”
“Well, certainly not any of these nature names you hear all the time nowadays: Rain, Breeze, Sky, Snowflake, Moonbeam. What’s wrong with the good, solid-sounding names we used to have? They could call him Horace, for instance. Now there’s a name with character built into it.”
“Horace! I wouldn’t feel right about calling a little baby Horace.”
“He’s only a baby for a little while. He and you can put up with it for a little while. But he’s going to be a man practically forever, and Horace is a man’s name. I sure as heck can’t imagine myself saying, ‘Watch closely, Treat. I’m gonna show you how to gut an elk.’”
“That’s so disgusting!” Bun said.
“Right,” I said. “Why would anyone name a kid Treat? I can tell you this, I won’t call one of my grannnnn … grannnnn … one of my small relatives Treat. I’ll give him a name of my own, probably Horace.”
At this, I drifted into one of my dream sequences. My small relative was now ten years old, and he and I were on our way out to fish the beaver ponds on the Conckle place. Only the lad had shown any signs of aging. I looked the same as I always have for the past thirty-seven years, since the age of sixteen. The fishing trip was but another of the many lessons in the extensive outdoor education I would provide the youngster.
When we got out of my pickup truck, I locked it up tight and then put the keys on top of the right front tire.
“Pay attention to this, Horace,” I said. “All outdoorsmen always hide their keys on top of the right front tire. No one would ever think to look there if he wanted to steal your vehicle.”
“That’s a wonderful bit of outdoor knowledge, sir,” Horace replied, his eyes shiny-bright with appreciation.
As we were climbing through the barbwire fence onto the Conckle property, Horace caught his back on a barb, tore his shirt, and cut a bloody scratch across his back. “Ha, ha,” he laughed. “I just cut a very painful bloody scratch across my back, sir.”
“You handled that very well, Horace,” I said. “As I have taught you many times, a person cannot enjoy the outdoors unless he is willing to laugh off a few cuts and bruises. No outdoorsman ever screeches or whines over a bit of pain. Let me hear you do the laugh again.”
“Ha ha, sir.”
“Good. You don’t want to overdo it.”
We then waded into the swamp that surrounds the beaver ponds, sinking into the slimy, smelly muck almost up to our knees. Actually, since my knees were higher than Horace’s, he sank in almost to his hips. Clouds of mosquitoes descended, and queued up in dozens of lines so each would get its fair turn at us. Deerflies soon arrived and tried to crowd in line. Threats were exchanged. Fights broke out.
“This is bad,” I said. “Still, it is much better than some other things you could be doing. What are some of those things, Horace?”
“Lying around the house watching TV,” Horace said. “And hanging out in shopping malls. Those are two of the worst things, sir.”
“Right.”
We soon emerged from the swamp and passed through a grove of aspen. In the branches above us, a bird went “Tweet.”
“What, sir?” Horace said.
“I didn’t call you, Horace. I never call you by that name.”
As we strolled along the stream bank, I suddenly did a one-legger down a beaver hole. After a bit, I smiled grimly.
“It’s all right, then,” Horace asked, “to screech when you do a one-legger down a beaver hole?”
“Only if you think the beaver has hold of your leg,” I replied, “and has mistaken it for a cottonwood limb. That was what I surmised in this instance. By screeching the way I just did, you can often frighten the beaver into letting go.”
“That is a useful bit of information, sir. Are the other words used to frighten the beaver, also?”
“Yes. However, they also frighten mothers, so I advise you not to use them around your mother or Granny. Use them only when you do one-leggers and after you are twenty-one or older. Now, if you will excuse me for a moment, I would like to say this: O W.W.W! OOUCH! OOOOOH! AHHHHHHHH!”
“When are you going to do the laugh, sir?”
“In about six months, Horace, in about six months.”
We finally arrived at the beaver ponds, and I showed Horace how to hold large boulders over the water in the slight chance that a beaver might stick his head out. I then made several deliberately bad casts in order to show the boy how to remove a $1.50 fly from the top of a fir tree. I further demonstrated to him how to make a No. 14 dry fly splash like a diving osprey, which is a good way to excite fish from midday doldrums and get them to strike. A good outdoorsman, as I told Horace, must be a keen observer of the psychology of wildlife. Later, when he was older, I would teach him what Freud had to say about the subconscious of fish, and why Jung was ridiculed by Freud for his interpretations of perch dreams.
I did not neglect his instruction in aquatic insect life, explaining the various stages of development: egg, baby bug, child bug, adolescent bug, and finally, of course, adult bug.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Horace said, “but all this is too technical for me. I’m only ten.”
One of the worst things you can do while educating a youngster about the outdoors is to push him along too fast. I decided to instruct him in more practical matters, such as how to build a campfire to cook a couple of our trout. I cleared a spot on the ground with my boot, carefully arranged a handful of tinder on it, built a tiny pyramid of sticks around the tinder, and touched a match to it.
