Novel Treatments / Pockets of Change part 11 cuz urbis decides where it ends on the page not me

It’s sad for me to see a photo of Dad with sons 9 and 7 standing beside him, coming to the top of his swimming trunks. Little boys on a trip out west with their dad, so excited about buffalo and coyotes, canyons and Indians. That’s when he should have been with them every single day—because soon enough, he was going to have to live another 24 and 37 years without them. Those should have been the years he took off during. But we never know, and neither of them would ever say their time with him was shortened. They were as rich as I was with what, who, and when we were.

There’s a lot you’ve withstood if you’ve been at the Au Sable region for more than 48 hours in spring or summer.You are always wiping dead or dying legless, wing-less gnata out of the inside corners of your eyes , and if you don’t run when a batch encircles your head they’ll die up your nose and in your mouth if you open it. When you get to a mirror you dig them out of your ears.  Rarely, the wind keeps them behind you like your dance troupe instead of ahead of you flying into your face. They last from daylight to dark.
At dark, and also just after sunrise and the grass is all wet with dew, the mosquitoes come out of the woods’ dark edges. They have two irritants--a poison that makes you itch after it’s injector stings you, and a hum as unmelodious as waxed paper over a comb that keeps you up all night promising you that one bite she gets before, filled up on your blood, she goes off to lay her eggs and die.They don’t like just getting it over with--they want to torture you, too.
There are horseflies, too--big, fuzzy, rasin-colored bodies on wings too short to sustain them , but they do; when one finds you it goes around you in circles, accompnying you everywhere, which sure doesn’t cut it if your plan was to be out for several hours, and you really shouldn’t be wasting .22 bullets on these. You just get sorely tempted. Mostly they go by your ear--like a millileter from it—with a nasty loudening, then quieting “bzzz”, and as you duck your head, get caught between your hair and your face with a big rattle of bzzzing and bouncing.They are as ubiquitous as the deerfly.
Deerflys are shaped like air force jets in pins and things. Unlike the lone horsefly, 3 or 4 of thse much smaller creeps fly around you all the way to wherever, biting your bare calves and shoulders . The bites prick. They sting. The 14 and 15 years Charles Henry and Eva spent in the “painting”, the childhoods Dad and his brother and me and mine spent outdoors in the Au Sable region,  the work the first Benjamin Young had to do all day outdoors building troughs and making block logs, the work Dad had to do in daylight to make his land appeasing to ruffed grouse (mapping, dividing acreage into 10-acre strips, building activity centers on some), Grandma fishing by day and walking to the line of mailboxes at the drive’s edege to get mail daily, all of them were beseiged by these 4 bugs every moment they were outdoors.And there were a lot more mosquitos in the region than most night-fishermen across the continent experienced. Larger communities spray insecticides for community mosquito control, possible harming animals not alerted; but the Au Sable had to depend on the mosquito Hawk, and maybe the soft-shelled turtle that peed on you and other nasties. The people of the Au Sable River must really,r eally get something wonderful from her to put up with the bugs, and those of Bear Lake, too, which populace grew to as many as 2,000 before reverting back to 200 inhabitants, 2.9 a house. A flyer declared that “The benefit derived from the pervading tranquility is immeasurable in the sense of an infinite greatness.” Many books point to “tranquility” and “pervading’ and “salubrious quality of the air”(I thought ‘salubrious’ meant bracing). Afficiendoes of the river know it points to God . People will tell you,”You gotta go—it’s God’s county” about a place in Kentucky or Hawaii or Utah,but by referring to the Au Sable as God’s Country I can at least refer you to the feeling of happiness you have the moment you’re in your “God’s County”.
It’s like that, times the number of annoying  bugs you ignore, intend to ignore when you step out the door and hear the silent wild woods.
Au Sable lovers are either the craziest people ever, or the place is worth walking through a thousand afflictions to get to.

By all accounts, Dad was a playful little bugger and prankster merry. Grandma called him her polliwog.  She said he’d cal her and then slide a whole hotdog past his face, standing sideways it seeming to go down his throat with out him chewing .To paraphrase Mick Jagger, tricks they  thought were theirs, we thought were ours. Dad daid he had asubstitute teacher in high school who liked to ask cut-ups, “where are you on the honor roll?” Dad liked that, and cut up so she’d ask hum. “At the top,” he said.
Grandma wrote me many letters asking me to forgive Dad—that he was an entirely different person when he got back from the war. It changed him. “Many good friends of his died in the war,” she wrote.

I try to picture Dad making that decision to take off from home for 3, 6 weeks. he’d go out to his glovebox for cigarettes--he always kept a carton there--and drive off for a month. he’d go to the store for them and not return for days. He’d leave the shop at 6  p. m. , right ahead of Mom, but never come home. I have the bank envelope he often left with to go to the bank--only to return weeks later. Did he still carry the cloth pouch? Did he paln it for days? Was it spur of the moment?  If instinct could cause such uniform and demanding behavior of bird species’, could it be behind complex behavior of humans, rather than choice? Were we mapped to feel fulfilled with starlight when we reached a certain place? I sought these answers and came away with others. That Alice foolishly didn’t look in front of her when on her fishing expedition. That the destruction of the Grayling’s spawning beds meant a tasty fish for Grandfather B.T. Young and lots of birds for his grandson Paul Anthony  to see all his life. (Is that, “with bad comes good?) And that Dad never left the cabin or the Au Sable to go on a bender--ever.
The only thing I am sure was within human power was Mom’s staying with him. A lot off kids lost contact with their real fathers while young for a lot less. It was extraordinary, what Mom did, putting up with years of unexplainable  rejection so that we could have our father and he, us. She seems to be who loved the most—loved him the most, loved us the most.
Because Mom stayed I got to know my father and respect him and him, me. I got to know about the ancestors he’d saved the letters and paintings of, from his side of the family. I got to, in the end, own them. For this, I cherish her.
From burgess to birder, what could invoke America’s material, spiritual, and ethical values better than such a family tree of pioners and immigrants?
And as I’ve said, I didn’t feel cheated; I felt lucky to get Dad when I did, Dad who drove all the way out to some park to see a rare bird and when he got there, there sat a cat, who the people with binoculars all around said had just eaten the bird. Dad, who laughed each time he recounted to me the awful story  of what happened when  my 13-year-old stayed two weeks with him  the month before he died and he asked her what fruit she liked and when she said grapes and Mom bought twice the  grapes  she normally bought for two weeks, my brat ate them all before Mom woke up the next day. All.
“She thought we bought them all for her!” He’d finish with that love in his laugh that was the only way we’d known, all our lives, that he loved us.
I never said, “She knew better--she’s done it 14 times at home--she places herself above everyone else.” I didn’t want to ruin his affection for her. After all, he’s the one who took her to the mall for her birthday for clothes and brought her back with clothes, pierced ears (he said he was the father, and they believed him), and a camera cellphone. He seemed to approve of her pushy, bold ways, which must have been what his mother was like.
Dad went birding with the same man for The Christmas Count every year for 20 years, and worked out with the same fiendly group of people in a gym three days awek for 20 years, who all gave him birthday and get well cards, but at his funeral all of them were surprised to hear he’d had sons.
When the Audobon Society of Florida read that donations should go to  the chapter of Trout Unlimited named for his father, they called the daughter, confused: he’d never told any of them who his father was and what he’d done.
No one knew him, really.
After Dad died I found a few neat copies of Grandpa’s book and catalogue, Making and Tying the Fly and Leader,  and the copy he’d pretended to get $75 for for me because the first page was missing--he didn’t even try to get anything for it, he must have just given me the $75--, and a pink Johnson “Princess” spinning reel.
Pink?
Princess?
I travel back mentally to the summers before the cabin when we rented cabins with rowboats in Lewiston.Debbie did not go out then, either. It was mine. Mine? Good heavens, someone give that guy some sisters!
It’s like Grandma’s “Martha Marie” rod. Grandpa named it for her , his shortest rod, 5’8”, and gave her the first she ever saw as a present—all ripe to be the rod she favored. Except she didn’t.
She liked a Parabolic better. She rarely fished with the dainty “lady’s” rod.
Guess they learn from us eventually, huh?
Dad had his last drink in 1982 and his last cigarette in 1987, 25 and 20 years, respectively, before he died. When I asked him how he quit drinking he said, “I just didn’t drink. It’s as simple as that.” I tried it, too, and have been sober for 21 years now. It was hard—but not really. I just did exactly what he said. Knowing I’d regain his respect was a powerful impetus; I had no idea I’d get two daughters, too.
Well, I look about my room and its not a store everyone comes in, its so cozy, but it’s a room like that, with pretty homages to the woods and the primitive. Grandma said Dad was a different man when he got back from WW2. What if it was something there, the way they make them live on the edge of their adrenaline, maybe it can’t ever go back to pre-war levels. Maybe something in fumes, in pills to make water safe, in the free smokes they got overseas. Crossed into the semen, causing deformities of future babies nervous systems, too. If they found that out someday, what good are all the books in the world about self-discipline, self control? Or the ones blaming a man for trying to numb a haywire brain? What would you do with one—run around and say you’ve got one, or keep it down and try not to draw attention to that (even if you have to draw it to something else?)

Dear Dad,
I love you more than you can ever guess.
I know you were sick--it’s ok. It’s all OK, Dad, except that I still want to go with you, wherever you go--but I’m getting over it. Whenever I think, “I never left YOU, Dad”( sob, sob), I make myself remember that you were always suposed to go first.
For one reason or another, we just never thought of it.
P.S. I saw a deer up close finally, a young buck, just off the dam path on our side. He was 6 feet from me and walked around me four times, looking at me constantly. Bet that never happened to a hunter with a buck license!
One minute he was there, the next he was gone.
I think I know who this noble, dignified, elusive character really always was but never mind; I know you wouldn’t understand with your practical mind. You’d say, “Most of those years, I was right there at your side.” But my ambition was to get a strong, smart, fascinatingly wild animal tame because I needed him. Now why was that.
I bet you would have finally told me you love me if there hadn’t been a breathing tube down your throat. I pray you didn’t relive being cramped in a little B-24 in your last hours of conciousness. I know you tolerated that hell because you wanted to live so bad. I hope you heard in that hospital bed, hands tied to it, unable to speak, bird songs in that great mind. I would have brought you some, but you left too quick. I love you, you majestic pine perfect peach-pit monkey and Au Sable mosquito bite deerfly  prick.
Told you I’d think differently by the time I finished this…I’m accepting that side of Dad I almost didn’t even put on paper.  We all have times we wish we’d been mature every second we lived. We all hope God goes by, “Basically…” instead of “Sometimes…” or “Once…”.

But out in the woods in the dark, hearing the river run, hearing the water trickle over sticks and stone, hearing a branch way in back of you crack,seeing  the stars bright in the very-far-off sky, knowing the water’s full of fish, the sky with owls and bats and moths, the dark with animal life, even babies following mothers, you know this isn’t going on with no thing or no one seeing it but you. It could not have been, such a huge thing, made for your enjoyment alone. It must mean God’s home. The rest of America is gypping each other with HMOs that cheat on promises and have to make sure their most expensive clients die, hospices that keep people that are regaining their memories heavily sedated, so no one will know and remove the patient, taking badly needed money away from them; developers selling  homesites with big trees they secretly know they’ll cut down; archaic medical practices that allow  men in homeless shelters no opportunity in 13 months to learn they are dying of liver cancer; developers that take money, then abandon projects uncompleted; young people witnessing unspeakable carnage in war; even little girls who eat all the grapes for the family as they sleep. But God is at home in the natural world He created and adores. And I think he allows contact.
Mom can have roses; that young buck was more than I’d ever hoped for. I think it’s all of you: Dad, Tony, Terry, who spent so much time with me in that spot near our large white pine on our half of the Blondie Dam road. I saw you waving, four hooves on the ground, lovely eyes that had never seen man looking at mine unwavereringly for 5 full, emotional, ecstatic minutes. Seeing the deer assured me that we had been cheated of nothing, that we had always been in God’s country and always would be, and it in us.

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