They Shoot Canoes, Don't They?, page 4
I was about to refuse, when I glanced off across the lake and saw the figure of a tall, lean man striding purposefully in our direction through the clouds of driven snow. Even though he was downwind from me, I could tell it was Rancid. I could also tell he was carrying what looked like a piece of broken ski in one hand.
“I’ll ride home with you on one condition,” I told the fisherman. “And that is that you leave right now.”
The Rifle
At least once a week from the fifth grade on, I made it a practice to stop by Clyde Fitch’s Sport Shop after school. Clyde was always glad to see me, and we would josh each other.
“Hi, Clyde,” I’d say as I came through the door.
“Don’t handle the guns,” Clyde would say.
“Yeah, there is a chill in the air,” I’d respond. “Folks say it’s gonna be an early winter.”
“You got peanut butter on one of the twelve-gauges last time,” he would retort. “I wish you’d find someplace else to eat your after-school snack.”
I would nod appreciatively at Clyde’s sharp wit and mark up a score for him in the air. Then, as he turned to wait on a customer, I would hear a soft sweet song beckoning me to the gun racks. It would be the rifles and shotguns singing to me:
“You drive me to distraction
When you work my lever action,” sang a .30-30.
“When you give my stock a nuzzle,
You send chills down to my muzzle,”trilled a .270.
“I lie awake nights
After you peer down my sights,” moaned a .30-06.
I’ll admit they weren’t great lyricists, but they had nice voices and the melody was pleasant. Before I knew what was happening, a .30-06 would have leaped into my hands and I would be checking its action.
“DON’T TOUCH THE GUNS!” Clyde Fitch would yell, doing a fair impression of an enraged businessman.
“Good, Clyde, good,” I would say as I set the rifle back in the rack and peered down at a sleek, inviting .300. Apparently displeased by my lack of enthusiasm for his performance, Clyde would rush over, grab me by the back of my coat collar and belt, and rush me out the door of his establishment. We kidded around with each other like that for about four years, occasionally working in new bits of dialogue but with Clyde always opening with his favorite line, “Don’t touch the guns!” I suppose the reason he liked it so much was that it always got a laugh.
Just a few days short of eternity, my fourteenth birthday finally arrived. I had expected it to come bearing as a gift one .30-30 rifle, about which I had dropped approximately 30,000 hints to my family. No rifle! I could tell from the shapes of the packages. They were all shaped like school clothes. “Something seems to be missing here,” I said, nervously ripping open a package of Jockey shorts. “You sure you didn’t forget and leave one of my presents in the closet?”
“No,” my mother said. “That’s the whole kit and kaboodle of them right there.”
“I was, uh, sort of expecting a, uh, thirty-thirty rifle.”
“Oh,” Mom said. “Well, if you want a rifle, you’ll just have to get yourself a job and earn enough money to buy one.”
It was not unusual in those days for parents to say brutal things like that to their children. There were no laws back then to prevent parents from saying no and, worse yet, meaning no. Life was hard for a kid. Still, I couldn’t believe that my mother was actually suggesting that her only son go out and find a job.
“Surely you are jesting,” I said to her.
“No,” she replied.
Naturally, I had heard about work. My family was always talking about it within range of my hearing, and, as far as I could tell, seemed generally to be in favor of it. I didn’t know why. Nothing I ever heard about work made it seem very appealing. My old friend Rancid Crabtree had told me that he had tried work once as a young man. He said that he was supposed to cut down trees for the man who had hired him, but when he picked up the ax and started to chop, his whole life passed before him. He gave up work then and there. He said that he knew some folks loved to work, and that was fine, but that he himself couldn’t stand even to be near it. Of the two opinions about work, I favored Rancid’s.
Still, if I wanted to hunt deer that coming fall, I would need a rifle. On the other hand, if I got a job, that would ruin my summer and leave me only mornings and evenings and weekends to fish. At best, I might be able to get in some more fishing on days I was too sick to work. I weighed my need for the rifle against a ruined summer and, after much long and painful thought, arrived at a distasteful decision: I would have to borrow a rifle.
Then, as now, people did not stand in line to loan out their rifles to beginning hunters, or to anyone else for that matter. Rancid Crabtree seemed to me to be the best prospect for the loan of a rifle.
“By the way, Rancid,” I said to him casually one day, “how about loaning me your thirty-thirty for deer season this year.”
Rancid’s face erupted into that beautiful snaggletoothed grin of his. “Thet’s a good-un,” he said. “Make it up yersef or somebody tell it to you?”
“It’s no joke,” I said. “I need a deer rifle, and I don’t see why you can’t loan me your thirty-thirty.”
“Wall, Ah would loan it to you except fer one thang,” Rancid said. “An’ thet is, Ah don’t want to.”
Rancid had only two defects to his character: He had never learned the art of mincing words, and you could never talk him into doing something he didn’t want to do.
I shook my head in despair. “You’re the only person I can think of, Rancid, who might loan me a rifle. I guess the only thing left for me to do is to get a job and earn some money.”
“Now don’t go talkin’ like thet,” Rancid said, as soon as he had recovered from the shock. “A young fella like you, got everthang to live fer, talkin’ about gettin’ a j-j-jo—throwin’ away his life. No sar, Ah won’t stand fer it! Now, hyar’s what you do. You go ask the Inyun if you kin borry one of his rifles.”
“Pinto Jack?”
“Why shore, ol’ Pinto’d give you the hide offen his scrawny carcass iffin it had a zipper on it.”
I found Pinto Jack puffing a pipe on the front porch of his cabin, and put my request straight to him.
Pinto Jack smiled only on rare occasions, and this was not one of them. “You want to borrow my rifle?” he said, studying me thoughtfully through a cloud of pipe smoke. “If I loaned you my rifle, what would I use when I raided the ranchers and burned their buildings and drove off their livestock, and like that?”
“Couldn’t you use a bow and arrow for a few raids?” I said.
“You tell me, how am I going to drive my old truck and shoot a bow and arrow at the same time? No, I got to have my rifle for raiding the ranchers.”
I looked crestfallen, having many years before learned that this was one of the best looks to use on Pinto Jack.
“Tell you what,” he said after a moment. “I could maybe let you use the old rifle my father brought back from the Great War.”
“First World?”
“Little Big Horn. It’s a single-shot and kicks a bit, but you’re welcome to it.”
I rushed home lugging the monstrous firearm, pinned a target to a fence post backed by a sandbank, paced off a hundred yards, drew a bead on the target, and gently squeezed the trigger. Later I heard that all the livestock within a mile radius sprang two feet into the air and went darting about in all directions at that altitude. Apples rained down out of the trees in the orchards. Three lumberjacks swore off drink, and two atheists were converted to religion. My own interpretation of the event was that I had just been struck by lightning, a meteorite, or a bomb. When my vision cleared, I knew I was in trouble. Not only would my folks be upset about my shooting one of their fence posts in half, but the neighbors would be mad at me for destroying their sandbank. Nevertheless, I decided to try one more shot, this one left-handed. The second shot went off a little better, since by now I knew what to expect. It was easier for me to keep my nose out of the way, too, because the first shot had moved it up into the vacant area above my right eyebrow where it would be safe. By the time I had finished sighting in the rifle, I figured I’d be the only kid in the school talent show who could applaud behind his back with his shoulder blades.
My first deer managed to elude me that year. Even though I had opportunities for several good shots, by the time I had grimaced enough to pull the trigger, the deer was always gone. At the end of the season, I returned the rifle to Pinto Jack.
“Any luck?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Well, don’t feel so bad about it,” he said. “Come on in and have yourself an orange pop, and I’ll show you how I can applaud with my shoulder blades. Bet you don’t know anybody who can do that.”
By the time the next summer rolled around, it had become apparent to me that the only way I was ever going to get a deer rifle was to earn the money for it. There was a dairy farmer by the name of Brown who lived nearby and whose reputation in the community was that of a kindly, if somewhat frugal, gentleman. Out of desperation for a deer rifle, I broke down and indentured myself to him at the rate of fifty cents an hour manufacturing postholes. Mr. Brown gave me the job after asking if I thought I could do a man’s work. My ingenious reply was: “It depends on the man.” The farmer said later that he supposed the particular man I had been referring to was an Egyptian mummy. For all his other drawbacks, Mr. Brown did not lack a sense of humor.
About his other drawbacks. It was only after going to work for him that I discovered that he wasn’t a kindly gentleman at all but the former commandant of a slave-labor camp. Our mutual misfortune was that he had somehow missed the last boat to Brazil and had been forced to escape to Idaho, where he took up dairy farming as a cover.
“Vork, vork!” he would scream at me, slapping the leg of his bib overalls with a swagger stick. “Make die postholes, make die postholes, fahster, fahster!”
And I would streak about the landscape, trailing fresh-dug postholes. Sometimes, after glancing nervously around, I would step behind a tree to catch my breath. The farmer would drop out of the branches and screech at me: “Vot you do-ink? I not pay-ink you fifty zents an hour to breathe! Vork! Vork!”
At day’s end, my mother would drive over to the farm to give me a ride home. She and the farmer would chat about my capacity for hard labor.
“I’m surprised you can get any work out of him at all,” Mom would say.
The old farmer would laugh in his kindly way. “Actually, I have found him to be a bit slow, but he is doing better. Just today, while he was digging a posthole, I thought I detected some motion in one of his arms.” Then he would give me a pat on my sagging, quivering back. “Off you go now, lad. See you bright and early in the morning!”
Odd, I thought. He seems to have lost his accent.
Bright and early the next morning the farmer would tell me: “Vork, vork, lazy Dummkopf! Make die postholes, fahster, fahster!”
At the end of the very hour in which I earned the last fifty cents I needed to buy the rifle, I resigned my position. When I told the farmer I was quitting, he tried to conceal his disappointment by leaping in the air and clicking his heels. There are few things, by the way, more disgusting than a dairy farmer clicking his heels in the air.
“I’ll say this for you,” he told me. “You have dug what I regard to be the most expensive postholes in the whole history of agriculture. If it was possible, I would gather them all up and put them in a bank vault rather than leave them scattered randomly about my property. Nevertheless, lad, should you ever find yourself in need of a job to buy yourself, say, a shotgun, why you just come to me. I’ll be happy to recommend you as a worker to my neighbor, Fergussen, who, though I may say a harsh word about him now and again, is not a bad sort at all, particularly for a man who is stupid and greedy and probably a thief.”
Naturally, I was flattered by this little farewell speech. I even changed my mind about his being a former commandant of a slave-labor camp. “Thanks,” I told him, “but now that I’ve tried work and found it to be about what I expected, I think I’ll avoid it in the future.”
Mr. Brown said he thought that would be a good idea and that, as far as he had observed, I had considerable talent for that line of endeavor and was practically assured of success.
The very next day, with the money for the rifle wadded up in a pocket of my jeans, I sauntered into Clyde Fitch’s Sport Shop.
“Hi, Clyde,” I said.
“Don’t touch the guns!” Clyde shouted.
I took out my wad of money and began to unfold it.
“Seriously though, my boy,” Clyde said, “I was just asking myself why ol’ Pat hadn’t been in lately to fondle the guns. Yes indeed. Now, good buddy, I’d be much obliged if you would try out the action on this new thirty-thirty and give me your expert opinion of it.”
They Shoot Canoes, Don’t They?
A while back my friend Retch Sweeney and I were hiking through a wilderness area and happened to come across these three guys who were pretending to cling to the side of a mountain as if their lives depended on it. They were dressed in funny little costumes and all tied together on a long rope. Their leader was pounding what looked like a big spike into a crack in the rock. We guessed right off what they were up to. They were obviously being initiated into a college fraternity, and this was part of the hazing. Not wishing to embarrass them any more than was absolutely necessary, Retch and I just let on as if everything was normal and that scarcely a day went by that we didn’t see people in funny costumes hammering nails into rock.
“We seem to have taken a wrong turn back there a ways,” I said to them. “Could you give us some idea where we are?”
The three pledgies seemed both angered and astonished at seeing us. “Why, this is the North Face of Mount Terrible,” the leader said. “We’re making an assault on it. You shouldn’t be up here!”
“You’re telling me!” I said. “We’re supposed to be on our way to Wild Rose Lake.”
“Say, it’s none of my business,” Retch put in, “but this thing you’re makin’, don’t you think you would get it built a lot faster if you found some level ground? It’s pretty steep up here.”
That didn’t seem to set too well with them, or at least so I interpreted from their flared nostrils and narrowed eyes.
“Say, don’t let a couple of flabby, middle-aged men disturb you,” I said. “We’ll just mosey on past you and climb up to the top of this hill and get out of your way. Maybe we can get a bearing on Wild Rose Lake from up there.”
Well, I was glad they were all roped together and the rope was fastened to one of the spikes they had hammered into the rock. Otherwise, I think they would have taken off after us, and that slope was so steep you could just barely walk on it, let alone run. They would have caught us for sure.
“Those guys certainly weren’t too friendly, were they?” Retch said later.
“No, they weren’t,” I said. “The very least they could have done was offer to give us a hand with the canoe.”
Upon later reflection, I came to the conclusion that it was probably the canoe itself that had disturbed the pledgies. There are people who can’t get within fifteen feet of a canoe without turning psychotic or, as my psychiatrist puts it, “going bananas.”
I’ve been around canoes most of my life and have high regard for them. They’re versatile and efficient and serve the angler and hunter well. But I have no truck with the sentimental nonsense often associated with them. Some years back I wrecked an old canoe of mine that I had spent hundreds of happy hours in. When I saw there was no way to salvage it, I tossed it on top of the car rack and hauled it out to the city dump. That was it. There was no sentimental nonsense involved. Just to show you some of the strange things that can happen, though, a few days later my wife went out to clean the garage and found the canoe back in its old place.
I had to laugh. “Well, I’ll be darned,” I said. “The old thing must have followed me home from the dump! Well, if it cares that much about me, I guess we’ll let it stay.”
After babbling sentimentality, the next most prevalent form of irrational behavior evoked by canoes is raw terror (occasionally there is boiled terror or even fried terror, but usually it’s raw). Take my neighbor Al Finley, the city councilperson, for example. I figured that anyone so adept at floating bond issues as Finley certainly wouldn’t have any trouble floating a canoe—a duck to water, so to speak. I’ve taught him most of the paddle strokes and he is quite proficient at them, but he has never gotten over his fear of canoes.
“Careful!” he screams. “It’s tipping! It’s tipping! Watch that rock! Careful!”
The way he acts is absolutely pathetic. I don’t know what he’d do if we ever put the canoe in the water.
Some canoe-induced behavior is so odd you can’t even put a name to it. Take the time I was canoeing up in Canada with Dork Simp, a chap who had been a staunch atheist for as long as I could remember. When we saw that we had made a mistake and had to shoot the Good God Almighty Rapids (named by the first trapper to take a raft of furs down the river), Dork yelled out that he had recently had some serious doubts about the intellectual validity of atheism.
“Forget philosophy, for pete’s sake!” I screamed at him. “It’s getting rough! Get off that seat and kneel down in the canoe!”
“Amen to that,” he yelled back. “You say the words first and I’ll try to follow along!”
We smacked into a rock and broke several ribs, two of which, incidentally, seemed to be mine. As we slid sideways off the rock, Dork shouted out that he had just found religion.
A few seconds later, as we were paddling up out of the vortex of a whirlpool, he swore off smoking, drinking, and profanity, the last of which cut his vocabulary by approximately half. When we were at last forcibly ejected from the lower end of the rapids, Dork said that he had decided to enter the ministry.
