Rubber Legs and White Tail-Hairs, page 12
“See,” I said, “if you touch a match directly to the tinder, Horace, nothing happens. First you must strike the match on something. Here is a good way to strike a match. Place the underside of your thumbnail on the head of the match. Then snap it down and back like this and …”
“It’s all right then, sir,” said Horace presently, “to say those words when you have fire shooting out from under your thumbnail?”
“Yes,” I said. “Also, I hope you noticed how I grasped my thumb with my crotch and leaped about in a circle. That is an excellent way to extinguish the flames shooting out from under a thumbnail. So, anyway, that is how you build a fire. Remember, don’t practice it in your bedroom. Now I will show you how to take the fish home and trick Granny into cleaning and frying them.”
“That is something I would really like to learn, sir,” Horace said. “It is wonderful to be your small relative.”
“Thank you, Horace,” I said. “You are a very fine small relative, and someday you will be a great outdoorsman.”
At that moment, my dream sequence was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. Bun answered it. She came back a few minutes later, beaming.
“Guess what. You have a new baby relative—a girl.”
“Great!” I said. “Just think, in ten years I can start teaching her all I know about the outdoors. She will make a fine woodsperson. By the way, what did they name her, ‘Moonbeam’? ‘Snowflake’?”
“Clementine.”
“All right! Now that’s a name I can live with.”
Loud Screeching and Other Tips on Getting Lost
Summer is that time of year when thousands of otherwise normal citizens are overcome with the urge to rush out to the great forests and mountains of America and get themselves lost. Most of them, however, have not the slightest notion of how to get properly lost, and if they do somehow manage to achieve that exhilarating state, it is by mere accident. Since getting lost in the woods is almost always the highlight of any outdoors vacation, it should not be left to chance.
Getting lost requires planning. Otherwise, you will discover your vacation almost at an end without your having been lost even once. Then you will have to rush to get it done, and in the process you will probably botch the whole thing.
If, for example, you have a week for your wilderness vacation beginning on Saturday, set aside the following Wednesday for getting lost. That will give you Thursday, Friday, and the next Saturday to recover, to let the shakes die down and the goosebumps recede, and to sit around camp savoring the experience of, first, getting lost, and second, getting found. Some people claim that getting found is even more satisfying than getting lost, but my research shows that people tend to treasure the memory of being lost much more than of being found.
Another thing about getting lost on Wednesday is that it gives the Search and Rescue people Thursday and Friday to find you, and therefore doesn’t use up their weekend. My own forty years of experience at getting lost in the woods has proven to me that it is much better not to get lost at all than to be found by Search and Rescue people who have spent their whole weekend looking for you. They are often tired and irritable and may have a tendency to regard you as a nuisance rather than as a pathetic but nonetheless heroic lost person. Actually, Search and Rescue people will regard you as a nuisance under any conditions, but more so on weekends. So plan your getting lost for midweek.
Keep in mind, also, that you will need several days to polish the account of your harrowing adventure for the folks back at work. Imagine yourself telling the people at the of fice, “Yeah, I got lost in the woods and sat down on a log and an hour later a park ranger came by with a nature-study group and found me.” That simply won’t do. To return to work without a polished and suspenseful story about getting lost deprives you of much of the enjoyment of the experience.
Now, how should you go about getting lost? Naturally, you don’t want to tell the other members of the party, “Well, now that it’s Wednesday, I think I’ll wander off in the woods and get lost.” You must appear to have some other objective in mind. Efficiency is a good one. If you are camped in a public campground, simply say that you are going to take a shortcut to the communal spigot to fill the water bucket. Since you have absolutely nothing else to do in a public campground but go for water, someone may inquire as to the need for a shortcut. You could take three hours to fill the water bucket and nobody would care or even notice. Therefore, simply ignore any inquiries about the need for a shortcut.
Shortcuts rank number one among ways to get lost quickly and thoroughly. The typical shortcut requires triple the time to traverse as the long way around. Some shortcuts to destinations no farther away than the campground restroom stretch into days and weeks, which many lost persons find excessive and even tedious.
Before starting your shortcut, take careful note of the position of the sun. This will give the impression that you know what you’re doing but otherwise is absolutely useless, because the next time you try to take a bearing on the sun, it will have moved. The North Star is much more reliable, but you can only see it after dark, when you have other things on your mind, such as the strange loud snuffling noises at the foot of the tree you’ve climbed. Under such circumstances, I’ve never found that the North Star had the power to hold my attention for any length of time and was best ignored.
Always study on which side of the trees the moss is growing. Guides and other experienced woodsmen are fond of giving this advice, because looking at moss helps even them to get lost. The moss would help you get unlost if it always grew on the side of the tree facing camp or the nearest population center or some other meaningful direction. The sad truth is that moss—rather perversely, I might add—grows on any side of a tree it takes a mind to. That is why it is such an invaluable aid in getting lost.
If you have been out in the woods for an hour and still aren’t lost, you must resort to drastic measures. Start picking wild berries, for example. When I was a child, my father and mother always used huckleberry or dewberry picking for getting us lost in the woods in a quick and efficient manner. We would start out with our empty lard buckets roped to our waists, the individual berries making pleasant little plunking sounds as we dropped them on the tin bottom. The standard joke shouted back and forth, as we worked our way from bush to bush, was, “Is your bottom covered yet? Ho! Ho!” It was always good for a laugh.
“Over here,” my father would call. “These bushes are loaded.”
“Oh, my goodness,” Mom would say. “Look up there! The berries are as big as grapefruit!”
We would charge from one berry patch to another, and in practically no time at all we would be lost. I always knew when we were lost because my parents would suddenly get into a loud and complex argument about the direction back to the car. “I know the way!” Dad would shout. “The sun was off to our right and the moss was growing on the other side of the trees, and—”
“It certainly was not!” Mom would yell. “I remember, I climbed over a big log and there was a little creek … !”
Both of them would have wild, desperate looks in their eyes, and I could see that it was time to introduce a little levity into the situation.
“Is your bottom covered?” I would ask, thereby learning that lost persons are the toughest audience in the world to get a laugh out of.
What should you do once you know you are actually lost and not merely standing behind some brush next to a shopping center? Well, the first thing you do is panic. Get the panic out of your system immediately, so that you can start thinking straight. Inexperienced lost persons often try to hold the panic in until it explodes and sends them ricocheting off rocks and trees, or propels them over entire mountain ranges. Years ago, I invented the Modified Stationary Panic, which consists of madly running in place and screeching. (You may wish to substitute an inspirational song for the screeching, but you would be the exception.) The MSP has the advantage over uncontrolled panics in that when you are finished you are still in the same place and in one piece, thus making yourself easier and neater for Search and Rescue to find.
Once the MSP has been performed to your satisfaction, sit down and calmly carve a notch on a piece of wood. All lost persons carve notches on pieces of wood, each notch indicating another day they’ve been lost. Carving notches is part of the tradition. Actually, it’s a good idea to carve several notches right away, just in case you get found within the next fifteen minutes. The people back at work might laugh if you showed up with only one notch on a stick. Lost persons must always plan ahead.
The Big Fix
I had the opportunity the other day to ride in the perfect outdoor vehicle, namely one of those vehicles that belongs to somebody else.
In this case, the owner of the perfect outdoor vehicle was young Milt Thomas, a lad scarcely older than his car. Although I own a four-wheel-drive pickup, the road up to the mountain stream Milt and I intended to fish was so rough and terrible that I quickly realized that the only appropriate vehicle for such terrain was Milt’s 1968 sedan. As he is still relatively inexperienced in outdoorsmanship, the lad was slow to perceive why his vehicle was the more appropriate one to meet the challenge.
“It’s quite simple,” I explained. “The Blue Creek Road is rough and dangerous, and requires a certain delicacy of motion to traverse. Your car just happens to possess that essential subtlety of traction provided by tires unencumbered by tread. See? Now shut up and drive.”
Scarcely had we left the interstate and begun pounding up the Blue Creek Road than the wisdom of taking Milt’s vehicle became loudly apparent. A horrible sound began emanating from beneath the sedan: WOPPITTY WOPPITTY WOPPITTY WOPPITTY!
“Aaaaigh!” Milt cried. “A flat! Do you know what this means?”
“Oh no,” I said. “You don’t have a spare?”
“Sure, I have a spare,” Milt said. “But we still have to change the tire. Then if we have another flat, we won’t have a spare.”
“Yeah, I already worked that out on my fingers,” I said.
“We better change the tire and then go get your pickup,” Milt said.
“Let’s not be too hasty,” I said. “Going thirty miles back up into the mountains without a spare, that’s the sort of risk the true outdoorsman thrives on. Remember, Milt, it’s risk that whets the edge of a person’s life.”
“Really?”
“Yup. Now, you hurry up and get that tire changed, while I have a cup of coffee and peruse the fishing regs pamphlet one more time. I’ll be over there in the shade of that tree if you need any advice.”
I would like to point out here that I eschew making the pretense that I am helping someone change a tire by standing next to him and occasionally handing him a tool that is no more than six inches from his hand. Such a pretense allows the stander-by to lay claim to a share of the work of the actual tire-changer. “We had to change a tire,” he can brag. But think how much better it is to remove oneself entirely from the workplace and allow all the honor and glory to fall intact upon the person who does the real work, traditionally the owner of the perfect outdoor vehicle.
Unschooled as he is in logic and ethics, Milt failed to perceive the favor I was doing him. He seemed irritated even by my words of encouragement, such as, “Let’s speed it up, Milt. Fish don’t bite all day, you know.”
As Milt shaped his mouth into its whining mode, I quickly offered inspiration. “Milt, Milt, my boy, you should look upon this bit of adversity as an opportunity to build your character.”
“I don’t see you building your character none,” he retorted clumsily.
“That’s because you fail to realize the strenuous mental labor required to comprehend fishing regulations pamphlets these days. Build my character? Why, just trying to understand the possession limit has put up four walls, roofed, and added a porch to my character in the short time I’ve been sitting here. My character’s overbuilt, anyway. But to return to my original point, you should consider having to change a tire as an uplifting experience. Now fixing a tire, as they used to do in the old days, that was a journey of the spirit, Milt, a journey of the spirit, fixing a tire.”
“Gosh,” Milt said, “for a moment there I thought I heard background music. You kidding me? How could they fix their own tires in the olden days? They didn’t even have VCRs back then.”
“Yes,” I said, “we are talking ancient times—pre—Columbian, pre-VCR. I myself was but a small child when I first was witness to a tire-fixing.”
Tire-fixings were to become a regular and enlightening occurrence during the years of my early youth. My father was a man who believed that a spare tire ranked as a shameless luxury, an accessory serving no other purpose than evidence of conspicuous consumption. He apparently felt the same way about tire tread, if not the thin film of rubber coating the cords of his tires.
The typical tire-fixing occurred on remote dirt roads, where my father frequently took us on Sunday drives. Deprived as I was of almost any form of entertainment in those days, I looked forward to the drives with great anticipation, largely because of the excitement and adventure promised by the inevitable flat.
That first flat tire remains one of my earliest and most cherished memories. We were driving happily along, my father and mother in the front seat singing the forty-ninth verse of “The Old Gray Mare,” my sister (the Troll) and I enthusiastically slugging it out in the back seat, when suddenly the joyfulness of the moment was shattered by an ominous sound: WOPPITTY WOPPITTY WOPPITTY!
“Oh dear, a flat,” my mother announced. “Well, you will just have to get out and fix it. You really should buy a spare.”
Dad responded by banging his forehead up and down on the steering wheel. “Women!” he snapped, in a tone suggesting the flat was Mom’s fault. I wasn’t sure how she had made the tire go flat, but supposed she had driven a nail into it when no one was looking.
We all got out and gathered around the flat, staring at it as though it were some aberration of nature. Dad kicked the tire a few times. That effort failing to inflate it noticeably, he heaved a long sigh. Hoping to cheer him up, I suggested that we could all sing “The Old Gray Mare” while he fixed the tire. Dad stared at me as though I, too, were an aberration of nature. After that I kept my suggestions to myself and concentrated on learning how to fix a tire.
A car jack apparently fell into the same category in which my father placed spares and tread. In any case, we never seemed to have a jack with us. Thus, Dad would go off in search of what he termed a “pry pole,” usually one of the fenceposts a considerate farmer had stationed at intervals around his field for just such an emergency.
Dad returned with a pry pole and built a fulcrum out of rocks and pieces of rotting wood, giving no indication that he heard a word of Mom’s lengthy lecture on the subject of jacks. Once the car was levered up into the air, Dad crawled under it and blocked up the axle, while the rest of the family sat on the end of the pry pole, bouncing it up and down to Dad’s hearty cries of, “Steady! Steady! Stea-deeeee!”
As soon as the car was precariously blocked up, Dad remembered that he had forgotten to loosen the lug nuts on the wheels, and so the whole process had to be repeated. This was the first time I realized my father knew a foreign language. “Sum glits um blotten putter fitzon mang fudder dits!” he shouted, although I can no longer remember the exact words.
Nowadays, lug nuts are welded to their bolts by fiends in garages using pneumatic wrenches, in the expectation that the tire might next be changed at the edge of a busy expressway at night in the rain by a pudgy middle-aged man using a hand-powered lug wrench. Pneumatic wrenches being unknown in the old days, lug nuts were held in place by rust, an early fixative possessing the qualities of both holding strength and cheapness.
Once the rust bond had been broken and the wheel removed from the axle, Dad set about separating the tire from the rim. To accomplish this, he used a tire iron—an instrument now unfamiliar to the average motorist—and a screwdriver. The screwdriver substituted for a second tire iron that was essential for removing the tire from the rim.
I studied Dad’s technique carefully, to be ready for the day when I, too, would be old enough and lucky enough to fix tires on remote roads.
First, Dad shoved the tire iron between the lip of the tire and the wheel and pried a six-inch section of the tire up over the rim. Next, he stuck in the screwdriver and pried up a three-inch section of tire lip, leaving a gap about as wide as a man’s hand between the screwdriver and the tire iron. Finally, holding the tire iron down with his knee, and the screwdriver down with his other hand, he thrust his fingers into the gap and attempted to jerk the rest of the tire lip up over the rim. That was when his knee slipped off the tire iron and the tire clamped shut on his fingers with kind of a slurping sound.
Mom gasped. The Troll emitted a frightened yelp. My father, not to be outdone in the dramatics of the moment, sprang to his feet and began to dance around in an impromptu impression of a foreign-speaking maniac, the tire swinging from his fingers like a vicious but toothless dog.
“Glop kitch feng dopper glitz!” Dad shouted, clasping the tire under one arm and wrenching his fingers free. His lighthearted antics had provoked me instantly to loud, delighted laughter, which was quickly smothered by Mom’s hand over my mouth and a vague but ominous prediction as to my immediate fate should I persist. Nevertheless, I have long cherished the thoughtfulness of my father in taking time out from a dirty and difficult task to entertain his young son, a person generally regarded as somewhat peculiar by the family.
Eventually, Dad managed to eviscerate the tube from the tire. For those unacquainted with tubes in this day of the tubeless tire, I will explain that tubes consisted of a donut-shaped collection of patches held together by narrow margins of rubber. Dad hated tubes. The patching kit was equipped with a perforated lid used to roughen the tube surface so that a patch could be affixed to it. Muttering incoherently, Dad scraped the tube so vigorously as to make one think he was trying to torture out of it a confession of all its many crimes against him.
