I got a real publisher instead. I am very excited as this book has important things to say to the country i live in about the tragedy of their health care system. Thaks, and good luck however you are published.
Novel Treatments / Pockets of Change: A Memoir Part 1 (Analysis)
1. PROLOGUE: Dad’s Wife, Cuckoo
One Saturday night when we were already in our pajamas, four children under eight years old, Mom said she was going out to the garage to kill herself and not to open the door or the fumes would get us, too.
Nothing like this had ever happened to us before, and we were in shock. We could hear the engine roar occasionally. Once we opened the door a crack and the garage was filled with
smoke and stink. We had no ideas regarding what to do. Then the garage door went up. Dad’s car was nosing its way in. Mom got out yelling at him but we shrunk into the inner sanctum of the house appeased-she’d been stopped. He was always there when we needed him. We took the synchronicity for granted, like he was God, Peter Pan, something.
I remember the incident with Mom because it was the one time she was suicidal, the reason you couldn’t say,”No, she’s not.”.
2. The Snowglobe
When my sister and I were 9, our brothers Tony, 7 and Terry, 5, our 43-year-old father purchased a cabin on a few hundred acres of woodlands bordered on one side by Big Creek, a tributary of the Au Sable River. This eventually became a timeless picture of seven of us in a snowglobe in a world that lasted forever.
Before he turned into the woodcutter in the fairy tale, he worked for his parents at their Detroit sporting goods store, didn’t make us say our prayers before he put us to bed, watched “The Flintstones” and “Huckleberry Hound” with us, laughing at their names and their dumb jokes more than we did. In the 1950’s these were prime-time television shows, and he left our bedroom door open after we went to bed, in those days of no air-conditioning, to catch cross-breezes across the little house, so we heard the theme song to “Rawhide”–but fell asleep soon after. When Mom put us to bed, the house fell dark and silent immediately, even frighteningly.
Dad rarely put us to bed, though–probably only when Mom had another baby. And not Tony.
Two and a half years after we were born his first son, Paul Anthony Young, Junior, was born. Mom got a breast infection in the hospital. Dad never came to see her and she’d never had a friend–never would–so she had to ask her roommate’s visitors, “Do I look puffy to you?” just before passing out from a severe allergic reaction to penicillin. Dummy Dummy Do-Do Dad sent her flowers to the house in the mostly Jewish city of Oak Park, Michigan. That rubbed it in.
When Mom came home Dad’s mother, who’d been caring for us along with Kitty, pressed us to enter the queen’s chambers alone. We were fearful–we hadn’t seen her in so long we no longer knew her. Come see your mother, your mother is home, the ladies-in-waiting said, and had to nudge us into the room she held court in.
“There are my little sweeties,” the fairy princess said, no longer fat, no longer always on the verge of exploding. “Come, here, darlings. I missed you…. How are you?”
That’s when one of us knocked her nightgown off her bedpost or spilled the glass of water on the night stand trying to get closer to see our first little red baby, and she became the snarling, growling, hating old mom.
Shyly I asked, “When will the old you come back?”
“The old me is 40 decades away–what are you talking about?”
I shrugged goofily. “The fun Mom, the happy Mom.”
“Nobody with children like you could be fun or happy, not with you two as daughters,” she snapped. Forty decades away, the fun her had not returned. Only sometimes–once in a big, blue moon, was she calm, patient, comfortable, and sort of happy. But she was in her 80’s and thought she’d had wonderful children .
There was one photograph of the three of us with Happy Mom, Terry protruding from her belly, the rest of us eating hotdogs in a park, that Debbie and I often showed people in explaining how there was a different mom. We assumed they could see the emotionally healthy, happy, loving
and lovable mother we’d once had –that the photograph had captured that as it had for us. Only when we saw it did we see the pleasant, caring mother we wanted back. When we said ,’This used to be our mom,” we meant that she wasn’t a witch at first and poor us, huh.
Her replacement was a bitch to comprehend. It kept saying, ‘Pray for your father–he’s a very sick man, and God listens to little children.” It seemed to be the opposite of our reality.
Our memories were typical of children of intact families with working parents. Dad worked every day and brought me once a month to open envelopes of feathers and put so many into glassine envelopes so that each fly-tying kit had an appropriate amount of turkey and quail feathers, ermine pelts, ostrich feathers. There was even a gigantic red feather from no American bird I knew of. Grandma explained that some of the birds whose feathers were used in standard flies had gone extinct or protected and so similar ones had been dyed to resemble them.
My cousin Denise and I took turns working there, and both of us loved the little mink pelts with feet still on and slits where eyes had been, cut open with a leathery backside. We were allowed to keep some; I have mine. Other things, Grandma presented to us in metal fishing tackle boxes she said Grandpa had started making for each of us. Mine had a little monkey filled with holes , holding his tail to his mouth. When Dad saw mine in his 80’s he said that his father used to carve them from peach pits as he talked with you, then tossed you the finished product as he left. He has one, too, I found out when he died–compared to mine, his was anorexic. But he never said anything, while turning mine over and over in his hands, about him having one, too. He kept that to himself and for time to find it out, if time did.
I loved Grandpa’s store, which was more like a hunting lodge with its mounted animals and clutter. Uncle Jack and Grandma both had busy desks there, in different areas of the store, and Bob Summers, who joined the sporting goods shop at 18 when I was 5, was usually moving a boat in to replace one he’d just sold, and Hazel Johnson, skinny and ancient, was in her own little room tying flies. Grandpa was at home at the end, too sick from arsenic poisoning from all the taxidermy work he’d done in his 30’s before they had safer chemicals.
When Grandpa died Dad came home in the middle of the day and said,”He’s gone.”
“You killed him!” Mom shrieked, which reaction I will never understand. But it was what witches would say.
Soon after that Dad borrowed $100,000 from his mother and bought a marina way way north of Detroit in Oakland County, the Michigan county with the most lakes of 10 acres or more. He paid her back completely within 6 months.
He bought boats and motors wholesale and sold them retail; Grandpa had specialized in his own products. Grandpa’s store sold bamboo fishing rods and flat woven creels and bamboo nets with the netting growing tinier at the bottom so that one held more net in one’s hand than fish when trying to ease one up and out, insulating the fish from your hand.
He made Trik-Kups–two pieces of thin stainless steel about 2 ½ inches long and a little less high that were fastened with rivets that slid along slots. They looked like a football helmet and a half-moon but in the blink of an eye could be pushed out into a drinking cup that didn’t leak any of it’s two-and-a-half ounces of cold clear spring water, and snapped flat again when empty. Lee Wulff is pictured as having one in the “What’s in your vest?” feature in the May-June 1990 “Fly Rod and Reel”.
Grandpa made Trik-Kutters: tweezers to pick your fly up with to avoid getting hooked, with a gut-cutter in the middle (Not fish guts; line); he attached his and his sons’ to an inner vest pocket with a shoelace for accessability, and also had a quick-release mechanism on the outside of the pocket for getting at things with one hand while the trout was in the other. The killer billy hung from the creel, a beautiful piece of bamboo with a lead-filled steel bottom. Mini-billys, unscrewed, revealed knives so sharp they could shave a man’s arm and two kinds of screwdrivers in one little piece of steel. Other billys had hard-to-pull chains which accurately weighed fish, and different objects had inches marked on them in pencil so you knew what was a keeper. If it wasn’t stamped with his name indented, he wrote on it in India ink(as he did his rods)–he even made his own leader material, line dressing and mosquito dope. He wrote books on fishing and published letters from satisfied customers in his annual catalogues. That they were mostly doctors only gives us insight into the times that were. Before everyone could afford cars, only the rich could hunt and fish the best forests and streams, as one had to get there by rail, plus have the good fortune of the railroad ‘s cooperation in pulling off on sidetracks to park and really let them fish. Grandpa came in just as Ordinary Man could drive 8 hours on rudimentary roads up to the forests and best trout streams therein if equipped with axes, shovels, ropes, and chains. When Dad got his cabin the trip could be made in 4 hours on paved roads and if desired, most of it on the interstate.
This isn’t a linear tale–it’s being unraveled for me as it is being given to you, several months after I lost my parents, in an attempt to take the brain to someplace that can make sense. I cannot say that my story starts when a man walks into a jewelry store any more than I can say it begins when an Uncle Ben gives a kid a book in 1939 with the tops of every 2 pages stuck together, proof that neither ever read the book…I feel it circling everything that needs to come together warily. I feel that there are many players who turn into merely seven. I feel like my mother thought she got the shit end of the stick and maybe it really was my dad, or a sibling, or even me. I knew Marie Curie and Mrs. Leakey worked beside their husbands, shared in their enthusiasms, and I felt like, it wasn’t Dad’s fault Mom didn’t like going outside. Nobody stopped her from caring that much about him. As her children learned everything and entered the house smelling of pine sap or wet with melting snow she could have been with us. She had this mental wheel chair around her, as did Debbie. They not only didn’t, for example, ice skate, but they didn’t come watch you. skate.
My mother didn’t know how lucky she was that she wasn’t a mayfly. And when she was one, she had no knowledge of anything–everything was instinctual, the doctor said, claiming you could caress a newborn’s palm in certain spots and he would wrap his fingers around yours. If the spots he stroked on Mom’s hand right after he said it were intended to back him up, that doctor must be the type that only turns red-faced inwardly. Mom totally ignored his hand, but when I yelled in her ear and gave her mine, she clutched it heartily.
I’d kept trying to tell the medical personal involved with her that she was deaf, and offering to bring up her hearing aid after they explained to me that they ‘d decided she wasn’t “home” because she did not respond when they asked her questions.
“Did you know she was deaf?”
I said.
“UH, no–“
“You have to put her hearing aid in at least one ear.. It’s really like part of her ear. She can’t hear a thing without it.” I wondered if I should explain that to watch television, she had to wear what looked like metal earmuffs on her head, connected to the TV, and she could only hear things over the phone with a particular device. When her hearing went, sounds she didn’t want or need to hear became very loud, such as a ringing she’d had in her ears for years, and children’s laughter. To hear TV over that required special mechanics to block certain sound waves. I hear music on TV movies and it blocks conversation; I don’t know if that is the mix-master’s fault or to do with growing old , but I never went to rock converts to blow my ears out, or have a stereo, then 8-track, then DVD Player. I always wanted it quiet so I could hear the birds. I’m listening to a warbler now, an oven bird probably still wintering in Florida. Maybe it will summer near my cabin. We had a yellow-bellied sapsucker breeding on the edge of its breeding range at the cabin. You’d hate the holes, so little and perfect but the sign of a bird draining the sap from a tree, and if you used Dad’s field glasses and looked high enough up a birch, there sometimes was a black part to it caused by sapsucker damage. I thought Dad was in agreement with me about these monsters, and almost shot one. Dad pushed my gun down. “What are you doing? They’re protected in 48 states.”“I thought his drumming on the old metal sheet was driving us crazy. I thought he makes all those lines of little holes in circles like chains around the birch and aspen and scotch pine trees we love, big black mars where he lets fungus get too far in with his hundreds of little holes. I thought he was known to devour any shade tree, orchard tree, or any good tree in the woods. I thought when they cut open wood, if there were signs he’d been there, the wood lost its value .I thought he was useless.”
“He’s vital to the woodlands,” Dad said.”He makes sap rise to the surface in trees, for other sap-loving inhabitants. Nothing else can do that .Not bats, nor squirrels, nor porkies, nor warblers, not hummingbirds, nuthatches, other woodpeckers…all of which enjoy sap, the theory is that the ruby-throated doesn’t get enough from flowers in the woods. He seems to time his arrival to when the sap’s running.”
Another time, he said, Sap is like blood to us–you’re not supposed to ‘bleed’ to death and the sapsucker getting around those things that perform like blood clots in humans–“
“Oh, they’re going to take their spit and make a blood-thinner out of it,” I said.
“No. They thin sap somehow, not blood. ”
Sometimes I wonder if he died because the heparin I heard them calling for for him, the blood thinner known to be made with a fake relative of a blood thinner in China, failed him?)
Would everybody from my family please stand up and hear me shout, Mom was a Mayfly when she went out.
If only you-all coulda seen Mom.
3. THE MAYFLY DANCE
Grandma and Dad were my relatives who fly-fished together most often. They didn’t name the hatches according to the critters hatching when they fished , since often only the insect’s Latin name was the really correct identifier. A hatch was a hatch. However, hatches at different times of the spring and summer are of different species of Mayfly and even caddisfly.
More caddis larvae are found in trout tummies than the flies. The larvae hatch from eggs in or near the water and build camouflaging on themselves that sticks with silken threads they secrete. They add sand and plant bits to their bodies and even have canopies in distinctive shapes, like a Sno-Cone holder.
They get fat and then molt a few weeks and hatch as winged flies.
The White Miller adult is on the wing from early June to mid-September, during and after dusk. They fly in swarms, small or large, 2 to 6 inches above the water circling back and forth rapidly. Very rapidly.
Mayflies, of which there are some 400 species but only 4 or 5 of them going to be hatching on our river, mate, lay their eggs, and die within a few hours of splitting and shedding their skin, 24 hours after they’ve left the nymph stage the first time. They are the only insect that shed their skin after shedding their skin. Well, after developing fully functional wings. While they have wings their digestive tracts have atrophied to the point where they can never eat again.
The ones that come from nymphs, the subimago in Dad’s language, or dun in the fisherman’s, swarm over the water in great numbers to mate and lay eggs. Then they hang out in the weeds beside the stream until they molt again. The Hendrickson fly is patterned after epemerella invaria. They can hatch with snow on the ground in April and have a peak in May, but continue well into June, sometimes with more peaks. Somewhere between noon and 6 p.m. the nymph releases its grasp on the creek bed and rises toward the surface while, of course, drifting downstream as they rise. While it is still several inches under water the nymphal skin begins to split down the middle of the back, and the molt is completed by the time it surfaces. If it surfaces. Trout love them on their way up.
Reaching the surface, the subimago spends the next 30 to 60 seconds riding its cast- off skin like a raft, and this is the other time the trout goes crazy eating them. This is a rise. The dun is spending that 30 seconds shaking out wings that have been pressed tightly together for up to two years while it clung to the bottom of a rock. It then rises off the water with an unexpectedly steady flight and lodges in the weeds along the water for the night, where it sometimes survives freezing temperatures. As the air warms in the morning, it molts the second time, changing from dun (subimago) to spinner (imago, or, adult). It rests till midday , then the male takes wing, forming a swarm of up to hundreds of flies each alternately rising and falling through space a few inches above the river’s surface to the tops of the highest brush nearby, up and down. Individual females fly in, and each is seized by a male at once. They mate 30 to 180 seconds. Instantly afterwards the female takes off from the swarm but gets nowhere fast, falling and dumping her eggs as she dies in the water. The male may mate again, live another day, and sometimes even flies some distance from the water before dying. When his feminine counterpart dies upon hitting the surface, is when the trout eat like mad for the third time since the creature crawled out from under a rock
Flies called the Gray Fox and The Dark Cahill are made to resemble 3 species of Mayfly which emerge in three groups from Mid-May to Mid-July. These were hiding under stones and logs to stay anchored in the 3 to 5 mph current, and they are pretty flattened, They turn from nymph to dun late in the day and the molt from dun to spinner happens that night or early the next morning. The flies are in mating pairs by afternoon. (The Matin’ Voyage of the S.S. Beagle) The heaviest mating and egg-laying happens at dusk and after it, 20 to 50 feet above the river. The egg mass, yellow stuff, can be released in the air as accurately as in the creek.
The Olive Dun is another good trout fly because its intended twin has 3 distinct color phases as a nymph, translating into more artificial flies. The nymphs grow and eats in gravel riffles in trout streams, emerging 6 to 8 weeks after the mayflies. There is also the Brown Drake, whose duns and spinners are half an inch to 5/8ths an inch excluding the tails, and artificial lures of them are very successful with trout.
The Brown Drake has clear but heavily spotted wings (How’s that for a clear image?), and a body mostly dark brown on top and yellow below. The three tails are twice as long as the body and are a light yellowish-brown with dark bands. Subimagos emerge from the nymphs at dusk and are much sought after by trout as they transform. The dun molts into a spinner that night or early the next day. The first dusk the day after they emerge from nymphs, the adult mating flight forms. Swarms ordinarily occur over the water at a height of 10 to 50 feet, but are sometimes seen in clearings a short distance from the river. Don’t worry, though; they are very suicidal and return to the trout’s grasp or fly into a street light, the bodies piling up in–this keeps happening with bodies up there–objectionable quantities.
One more hatch bears explanation. The Michigan caddis–hexagenia limbata–the fly of the spectacular Michigan caddis “Hatch”, is the largest Mayfly and improperly but popularly called the Michigan caddis. It is no caddis. It’s nymphs burrow in stream bottoms where the mud is compacted enough for the burrows to remain open. They emerge June 14-28, with stragglers coming out until frost in late August or September. (Michigan has 2 months a year without frost.) The hatch starts about 9 p.m. and last call is at midnight.
When the duns, yellowish-green to olive in color, emerge, they hide and rest for 1 to 3 days, then transform into spinners, or imago: clear wings, body yellow with purple markings to dark purplish brown with olive markings (it seems to me all possible color combinations can fit between these). McClane’s New Standard Fishing Encyclopedia calls the mating flight “one of the most spectacular phenomena of insect behavior in the northeastern United States (never minding that Michigan is one of the Midwestern states). Enormous swarms form at or above treetop height and they follow the course of the stream for miles. The rustle of wings is clearly audible at some distance from the swarm.” The book adds that you can direct a flashlight beam at the swarm–if you want to be covered with them in a matter of seconds. Sometimes these females are able to drop their eggs into the water from the air, but more often, the females fall to the surface, and fierce current, dying, and the eggs squeeze out as they croak–all 3,000 of them.
The Caddis hatch, remember, is not the hatching of the Caddis fly but the Mayfly. Anglers just call all Mayfly nymphs Caddis. In the complete cycle of the Mayfly a nymph hatches from an egg and emerges from the water as a winged adult; it can require two years. If you turn over any rock on the stream bottom you’ll see speckled brown or amber nymphs clinging to it. The larvae is a nymph when its rudimentary wings become visible.. . The Caddis-er, Mayfly-hatch is the 2nd or 3rd week of June. To duplicate the bug, Grandpa used clipped deer hair to get the shaggy look of the straw housing of the Caddis nymph at one stage of it’s development. It is white and fuzzy. A night-fisherman uses larger nymphs and spinners. You can get in on the nymph’s initial float to the top unnoticed, or be good at the pregnant female death flop.
One benefit of the grayling fish was that it went right to your flies, even if it saw your rod and line and you. The trout will begin to come out of their deep pockets toward your fly, then vanish at the last second as the materials of the fly produce unusual images or other warning signs that this is not their caviar.
Grandpa experimented. He made caddis egg sacs on pregnant caddisflies, and invented the Strawman Nymph, made to look like one of the casings nymphs glue around themselves–straw. It’s not like any other fly, and can be spotted from a box of flies instantly. It’s the only all-white, shaggy one. Since many have taken it in to the generic class with no idea who developed it, it can have speckled tails, but also white ones.
Arnold Gingrich, founder and first editor of “Esquire” magazine, wrote in his book The Practical Fly Fisherman, that some people using a strawman nymph will give you a blank stare if you ask them if they’ve heard of Paul Young. But then again, if you go to classical fly rod builder websites and forums , E-bay, and many other places online including many states’ fly-fishing sites, the members can be so obsessed with my grandfather that they have photographed 282 of his rods and put the pictures on their websites. They will write back and forth about fine points of his life and operations. This is the family I came straight here from. I suppose someone has to be obsessed to invent better apparatus or ways to play a game. My grandparents had Au Sable cabins to fly-fish; my father seems to have had ours also to teach us about wildlife and even wildlife conservation and management. And maybe, mostly, about adapting.
But then, his father asked everyone who took, to give back. In his book More Fishin’, Less Fussin’(which Grandma gave me telling me I’d make a lot of money off it some day, but as soon as she died, someone not related to Grandpa, some fan, somehow got it reprinted and now makes money off each copy sold as if it were his or his father’s or grandfather’s book), Grandpa wrote:
“While being open-minded on many points pertaining to dry fly fishing, it probably has been inferred that I have formed very definite opinions in respect to others. Among those questions on which I am one-sided are—rod actions, line tapers, leader tapers, quality and lightness of the fly (which, when analyzed means floating qualities) and style of presentation. A dictionary of all existing fly-patterns could easily be compiled by anyone and a fairly comprehensive text jotted down by anyone who can tie a fly. My objective in the beginning was, first, to offer verbal and visual instructions on making practical flies, that will fish and keep on fishing. The constructions described have done that for me and many others. I am ready to confess that I have purchased many flies at a nominal price, the wings of which I could not do as well if the penalty were my casting arm. But even if I could, I would not, for the reason that to me they are useless and, having that conviction, it would not be sincere to urge them on other fishermen.
“If, from any of the suggestions made, you can help yourself or a fellow fisherman out of difficulty and clarify some doubtful issue, I should consider it of more value than all the color plates and infinite variety of flies I could possibly get together for you. Fly tying is real fun and many an evening and Sunday afternoon I have stayed alone and tied flies while the family went out. On the other hand, some of the aptest fly tiers I know could hardly catch a trout in a bathtub and as strange as it may sound, tackle salesmen in many of the big stores are not fishermen. Neither are the representatives of most of the larger manufacturers whom I have met.
“I contend that, if a person who has an affinity toward fishing as a true, sporting proposition, will consider the statements made here seriously enough to disregard some of the old methods and beliefs, styles of tackle, etc, he will derive more recreational value and be instrumental in his fishing friends doing so.
“It is eleven years since the first edition of this attempt was made, and at this date, Oct. 1944, fly making is just as fascinating as it ever was. It has been my privilege to conduct fly-tying classes in various hospitals for the American Red Cross, where soldiers, sailors and marines are convalescing.
It would do any man lots of good to see the eagerness with which these boys go after it, as soon as they get over the clumsy stage. It is recognized by the medics and chiefs of hospitals as of great value in quieting nerves, distracting attention from the patient’s troubles, and in general as great medicine. Let me urge any who read these lines who possibly can to miss no opportunity to teach a convalescing soldier to tie flies. They can do it propped up in bed. My younger son is doing likewise in the U.S. Marine Corps. His older brother, who just returned from Italy in Sept. after making fifty bombing missions, went with me on his first salmon trip to New Brunswick. He insisted on catching his first salmon on a dry fly. He had had years of trout fishing, and had developed a lightning reflex, like most trout dry fly fishermen do. I had told him that he would take the fly from the first several salmon that raised, which he did. I attempted to take one accommodating fish which he raised three times. Knowing full well what to do and how long to wait, the excitement of the occasion got the better of me, and I also snatched the fly away from him twice, whereupon he became disgusted with us, and couldn’t be raised again. It is really an ordeal, to control one’s reflexes after spending years developing an instant response to a rise. You will have to experience it to realize how awfully cussed you feel when the finest game fish of all comes up head fin and tail, opens his big yap and fully intends to inhale your fly, and you snatch it out of his reach by a matter of one or two seconds. After this has happened a few times and you get control of your buck fever, just let him turn down with the fly, wait until you feel the tug and then set back on him. He will take the fly to the bottom before ejecting it, while a trout will spit out a fly so fast you can’t strike too soon.
“Back to the fly tying, before the embryo salmon fisherman [Dad] went back to his re-assignment center we tied flies for the glorious day when the whole fishing family of us can mix it with the salmon and tackle the problem of controlling those subconscious reflexes. I am still at it, although it may be nearly a year before one of those flies can be used.”
“One of the modern marvels of chemistry is a product called nylon. It is made of hydrogen, oxygen, and coal tar. Fortunately it became available to fishermen in sizes suitable for all necessary fishing leaders at the time the Spanish revolution made silk-worm gut scarce or impossible to get. Again, the scarcity caused by World War No. 2 was obviated to a great degree by nylon. There were many anglers who were prejudiced against its use, and who compared it with the Jap synthetic and another American product which seems not so nearly so well adapted to use by fishermen, Many formed a biased opinion the first season or so (1939).
“The trout season opened with a heavy frost in Michigan and no doubt many clumsy stiff fingers did a poor job of putting on flies. Reports began to circulate that nylon was too brittle to use in cold weather. To meet that conclusion let me state that I had the pleasure and good luck to land five bright salmon in New Brunswick on Sept 30, 1939 , with the bottom of the canoe coated with ice.”
“The pleasure from tying beautifully made flies is only secondary to using them properly, which before it is possible on much fished waters, necessitates mastering the rod. After a person has done both, and feels that he has attained a great deal of consistency, then he must seek additional balm for his fishing fever. This is well cared for by indulging in stream improvement. It is my hope that a nation-wide club may be formed by dry-fly men, each obligating himself to spend a certain amount of his fishing time, or else a certain proportion of his fishing expenses to stream improvement. A photographic record showing ‘before” and “after” operations on barren riffles and other stretches, together with carefully kept data should be interesting and beneficial.”
“When he is ready to be netted, ( not with a toy, either—my net bag is 22 inches deep, the mesh at bottom is 1/4 inch up 6 inches, ½ inch for another 6 inches and 3/4 the remainder of way . It is of light weight but perfectly waterproof.)—the rod is changed to the left hand. The net has been hanging over right shoulder from a heavy shoe string which is tied in wader belt loop on left front (no elastic). net does not drag in the water unless it is over the waist, as the string is tied to the bow near handle connection instead of to the 14-inch handle.
“The fish is drifted into the net which is in right hand, then the rod is placed under right arm, above elbow. If the fish wants to kick some more wait for him to get through. Then, with left hand wet, get bag bottom and fish, with his head to your right. Drop handle of net and get the billy if he is to be killed , and swat him on top of head. (The billy is carried in wader or shirt pocket). One good swat lays the fish out. Replace the billy and take the gut cutter-tweezer in right thumb and finger and grasp hook by its bend just below tail. A backward twist will back the hook out and most of the time not a single hackle is disfigured.
“If the fish is to be returned, dispense with the billy operation, but use the tweezers and be more careful, also very careful with left hand which is around net and fish. The wet net insulates him from your hand, particularly one with fine mesh at its bottom. These two considerations, the fine meshed bottom and backing the hook out with tweezers, can be made the principal means of saving thousands of trout each season.”
And, a reference perhaps to why Dad bird-watched instead of bird-killed lies in these lines: “Having been a taxidermist since a small boy has given me unexcelled opportunity for examining innumerable specimens of feathers, hairs, etc. and you may take my word that few chances have passed by without scrutinizing and attempting new adaptations,.Here is one of my pet discoveries which kept the goats of a lot of friends for years.
From one of the large species of owls (Great Horned, Great Grey or Barred but preferably the Great Horned), pluck the “whiskers” or hair-like feathers from around the nostrils , also the little plumes from both sides of his ears…”) that smells of dead owls, to me.
Although stream improvement was what Grandpa advocated, and what his chapter of Trout Unlimited does, and other conservation groups fond of him and donated to by Grandma a lot, Dad was a bird-lover, and took forest improvement as seriously. It all flows through each other. But the whiskers of owls don’t come off, in Dad Land.
. 4.Kids with Guns
We had two driveways. We had the snaking drive with tiny woods between the tracks and a straight, much shorter one with a very sandy track ending at a sandy dirt road next to the barred road to the dam.
To bar it, entire young trees with sticks where they’d had canopies were piled in the way. If a car of drunk teens could get down it, they could ostensibly sail over the remaining part of the bridge and down to the chunks of it below in the creek. A stand of pines was also planted further down to discourage cars, and it got out of hand, the pines being legion, same age, and way too close together--before I left, they went from my knees as a child to taller than me as a 5”9’ woman. You could not fit between them, and at a younger age they’d made perfect Christmas trees. Should have been used thus, perhaps--adult, they were scraggly with short sick-looking “thalidomide” branches. No one could drive the old dirt road there, that was for sure, as the trails man and deer made ran left and right of the impenetrable hillside of tight firs. You could see the track on our side, always—the firs had started between tracks–and down the hill you could walk around the impenetrable forest and find path again, two tire tracks going on to the dam. Down that hill was where I found all my partridge and woodcock, right by the path.
Our shorter drive was surrounded by blueberry bushes and they also grew in the middle of it, with very sweet wild berries, and while their tiny size made it difficult to fill all the big sauce pans and pitchers Mom gave us, we tried, and had many breakfasts cooked for us by the ladies where the crown achievement was the delicious blueberry pancakes.
Dad taught Tony before he was ten how to close down and reopen the place, shut down the pump in the well, what was under the trapdoor in the hall floor.(They climbed down there with flashlights while Terry and I pretended we weren’t jealous. Later Terry tried it when indoors alone, pulling the board back over the hole to conceal his activity, and had to yell to be released when his flashlight proved dead.)
Next we knew, Tony had waders and a vest, a headlamp and his own fly collection. Dad gave him a flat woven creel with a large aluminum leader case of the old style with felt leaves that was his father’s. And Tony told us that Dad always had 4 or 5 candy bars in his fishing vest but didn’t tell us about it because they wouldn’t be there when he needed one after fishing for hours. That part got the most interest from us.
Dad wasn’t as exclusionary about hunting skills--he got a bale of hay and bows and arrows for the three of us, forgetting I was left-handed but I proved I could aim well with a right-handed one: in summer camp a few years later I won the highest prizes in archery and reached the top designation. Eventually though—probably after one summer--the hay kept its tattered target but had a salt lick in front of it against its hill, and we were shooting skeet with shotguns elsewhere..
Each boy received a shotgun by 5th grade and their .22s became mine by the time I was 13 and 14, one a bolt-action tube-fed .22 long rifle with a very accurate scope, the other a leaver-action single shot taking short or long rifle bullets. Tony at ten had a Remington 12-gauge pump shotgun and Terry got a 16-gauge shotgun at age nine. No one used the BB gun anymore and we offered it to Debbie but she smirked. We weren’t teasing her—Dad didn’t like leaving her out of everything. It wasn’t like you could go to a friends’ house, or the movies. It was a 9-mile drive for the day’s paper if the North Branch Store wasn’t open, and it wasn’t always.
My brothers may have been going to get the shotguns earlier--Dad had a thirty ought at 12--but they had shot at bottles and cans on the posts at the edge of the cliff to the river, which Dad had not particularly liked, as bullets could go on for a mile. So they went walking and shot up the only street sign they found, the one informing drivers they were entering Crawford County on one side and Oscoda on the other, about 2/3rds of a mile from the dam.
Dad saw it while out walking and hit us with it. “I’ve seen that sign for 32 years and it didn’t have a bullet hole in it once until you two get a couple of .22s!”
“How’d you see it for 32 years?” Tony said skeptically. Like Dad, he spoke his mind, lacked tact, was a little rough around the edges. If your story sounded like bologna to his limited mind he was certain it was.
“I’ve been here. I’ve had cabins here.”
“Not here,” Tony said. “You said on Mainstream Au Sable.”
“There isn’t much up here, Tony—you ‘ll soon know it all.”
When that incident was long over Dad told us that it was open season on cowbirds, squirrels(except fox), and groundhogs. Any time. He basically asked us, requested our assistance. And offered us a fun pastime simultaneously.Cowbirds particularly irritated him. They laid their eggs in the nests of other, smaller breeds of birds, like the rare Kirtland’s Warbler, which lived only in the Au Sable area and the Bahamas. When the babies hatched, the cowbirds were born earlier, got bigger faster, and pushed the legit babies out of the nest in their quest to hog all the nourishment the parents brought. The duped parents raised only the cowbird, and another breeding season was wasted.
Grandma hated squirrels getting all the food she left to attract birds to her feeders and she shot them with her .22 from her third-floor balcony in Traverse City even when she was in her 80’s. Dad spent some money trying to rid his feeders of them, and got at least one t-shirt with a commando squirrel on it, as a gift, but by his 80’s he ignored them running along his roof and onto the screened top of his lanai …maybe he felt that he and them were both lucky to still have life and left it at that.
Groundhogs, or woodchucks as they are also called, dug holes all over the yard and garden. The first thing I got was one of them. (Heck, I knew where the latest holes were—where my strawberry patch had been.)
The boys confessed to me uncomfortably within a few years of it that their first kills had been birds; one at the feeder for Tony. Some “little sparrow” he thought was a cowbird, and then a female robin, and then Tony felt conflicted and from then on only went after legal game. He could be embarrassingly sensitive, too, and he told me that he just didn’t get his “jollies” out of ending “for them” the life that the birds he’d shot had. He had said he’d thought one was the sly, demonic cowbird (lazy, birders say), but he knew what they looked like—differing from crows in that their black bodies had brown hoods–we had flocks stop around our feeders, and they’d been pointed out many times. Actually, they were handsome birds.
He was perhaps lucky. One day I was crouched on the ground waiting for natural sounds to resume around me after encroaching that far into nature’s world. I heard a loud noise like a jack-hammer going at break-neck wood-pecking speed. A big bird with a big wing-span suddenly left my tree and flew to another, squawking a rapid, high-pitched sound that began with 2 or 3 normal bird notes that went on to mimic an engine trying to kick over. He was huge and had a big red Hershey’s Kiss shaped crest atop his head, a white stripe beneath it, a brown stripe beneath that, another white stripe, another red one, and a white throat with a long black bill that resulted in a cartoonish silhoutte. Its crown was as weird as the dorsal fin of the grayling fish. When Dad came upon me he huffed,”there’s a pileated woodpecker down the other path.”
“I saw one,” I said, and described it, and he agreed it was one. It would have been nice if he’d explained that we’d likely seen the same one (as we’d both seemed to see males), and that only one other had been seen in those parts that year. .Something that outlandish might’ve been irresistible to a boy with a gun. I don’t think Dad would have taken lightly to Tony returning home with a dead one or leaving it with a bullet where Dad would undoubtedly discover it. However, my husband Dan and I saw at least two on our honeymoon canoe trip down the river in 1987. You won’t see one and not notice. And we hadn’t seen their rectangular foraging holes before, holes taller than wide from when a pileated finds a carpenter ant colony and returns for months or years to his “pantry.” These end up going so deep into the layers of dead tree they have broken trees in half.
The pileated woodpecker stays in couples and requires plenty of dead and dying large-diameter trees for nesting and roosting and plenty of decaying woody debris on the ground for foraging.
Another rare bird-sighting with Dad in which he forgot to tell me how rare it was: I was in high school, boarding school in Monroe, Michigan near Toledo, Ohio in 1972 and Dad came alone to get me for the 3 hour drive home.”I just saw a snowy egret not two blocks from you,” he said as I got in the car.
I couldn’t imagine why he’d said it. After driving in silence ten minutes I said,”Do snowy egrets usually migrate out of here by now?”
“More like 1947,” he said.”Only 9 have been spotted in Michigan since then.”
I had to wonder if he’d have even told me if I hadn’t persisted with a question.
He told us so much, so often, perhaps he thought we retained it all–perhaps he had a photographic memory. But most of what he said we couldn’t hang onto in our heads, like how the flight pattern told him what the migrating flock way over our car was. To us, it was just what you knew by the time you were 40–we thought every adult knew all this. It took a few years of living to recognize that there were many specialties that took great loads of time to understand, and no one man could know it all. What we wanted to know, Dad knew.
In 1935 at the age of 14 Dad wrote in pencil on an index card:.
“Phoebe: Nest and eggs Crawford County 5/7/35. Nest beneath house eave, 5 white eggs contained.”
“Kingbird: Nest in thorn apple tree 15 ft. from ground, made of horse hair and grass, 3 white spotted with brown eggs. Ben’s farm 6/5/35”.
I was shall I say jealous? Because I did not know how many feet away a thing was from me by eyeballing it. It seemed to me his place to teach me–“This is how you can tell if something is ten, or twenty, feet from you..” But I didn’t want to let on my stupidity by asking. There was way too much unsaid between us all.
“Hawk: Red-shouldered Hawk. Nest in large beech 40 ft. from ground. 3 young birds about a week old in it. Maxfield Lake 5/14/35”
A 1939 a letter Dad saved says,”To whom it may concern,
...this permit entitles Mr. Paul A. Young who represents the University of Michigan/ Cranbrook Institute of Science to collect the number of species and mammals given below:(4) western meadowlark, (2) dwarf schreech owl, (2) western horned owl , (2) red-tailed hawk (2) white-throated swift, (2) poorwill, woodpeckers, warblers, thrushes and sparrows, (2) chickeree, (2) western squirrels, (2) rats, (2) mice, (2 bats). Reptiles.
Wyoming Game and Fish Commission, State Game Warden.”
When I was 17 I found a high school workbook he’d used, writing answers on the lines in pencil, when he was 17. He was already informed enough to be able to write “tarsi flattened laterally—reticulate all around”. After distinguishing bird families his next lesson was “A Study of the English Sparrow.” He wrote at the top,”Note: sparrow was not in cage. Specimen was captured in backyard by box trap.”
Observe the bird. Does it walk, hop, or combine the two methods? HOP
Name a bird that does not ordinarily perch. Swift.
One that does not walk well on a flat surface. Loon
How far does the sparrow turn its head? About 180 degrees.(Earlier he’d counted the vertebrae in the necks of 4 different birds and concluded that the more movement available, the better one was at staying alive.)
Do the eyes seem to move in the sockets? No
Does the bird use one or both eyes when it looks at an object near at hand? one
Count the respirations per minute as the bird sits in the cage. 86
Put your left hand over the sparrow and hold it around the body and neck; guard the opening of the cage with the right hand to prevent escape. Do not squeeze the bird, as this stops respiration, but hold it tightly enough so that it does not get away. Hold it to your ear and count the rate of heart beats per minute. over 300. Strangle the bird by holding it firmly in your hand for one minute, or until it stops convulsing. Compare its tenacity to life with that of a cold-blooded animal such as a frog or turtle. Easily killed in short time compared to frog or snake.
Terry got a bluejay at the raspberry patch and although he had a goofy expression resembling pride on his face, buried it there rather than show Dad, and then was known for being into trapping critters to make into pets, not killing them. He felt so much unnecessary guilt, since his own dad had killed a bird with his hand as a youth. I gathered that Dad had not told him how he’d caught birds in traps so Terry wouldn’t accidently kill one and feel horrible.
I killed my first thing alone, too, and always felt the pain I imagined a person would have who’d become carried away with the fact that he had a gun and there was something he could hit and it was an innocent species not legal to kill but he was alone and only God could see. In both my brothers’ cases, that Eye of God was way more than they could sleep anxiety-free with, and, whether they understood it or not, the eye of each self was as unyielding in its judgements. .
I mean, Dad had gotten the severity of disrespecting a firearm across to it.
We knew we would not ever ignore the ground rule of having a gun. Never aim a gun at anybody, even if you’re sure it’s unloaded. When the recalcitrant devils’ advocate “Junior Paul” asked why, Dad said “If it’s loaded, you could kill them. Why even take the chance ? The benefits of pointing a gun thought to be empty don’t outweigh those gained by just not pointing it in the first place. Ever. Making that your cardinal rule.”
Tony said,”What’s my cardinal rule?”
Dad said,”Pay attention when I’m talking to you.”
“What’s my bluejay rule?” Both boys giggled behind a comic book.
“Tony, do you or do you not understand—”
Meekly: “Yes.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Yessir.”
Dad had been silly, too—didn’t he remember? He didn’t seem to. There was that goofy grin while he teetered on his legs holding up a dead raccoon at age 8, his rifle in the other hand.
Well, I didn’t do like my brothers, and kill something innocent I might be ashamed of and wince at and repress all my life. I went groundhog hunting. I was sure there was nothing to it—we saw them lurking about all the time.
I must have got them all--none ever were spotted on our property again. I got 3 the first day and 1 the next. One was just popping from a hole--I watched my cat Unicorn studying the ground, curious, because it could hear noises I could not, going on below us. Then we both saw the groundhog burst forth.
I almost had a Unicorn, too—he lunged for the groundhog as I raised my rifle, and although I’d seen him with a mole and a new-born flying squirrel before, he apparently decided that this critter was not his cup of spring water, and got out of the way in time for me to hit the funny-looking thing in the butt, which, bullets having a way of traveling, was a score.
Dad took my first one behind some trees away from the driveway and garden plot and slit it open, seeming to expect me there, so I stood a little ways off, curious but grossed out. He moved stuff aside with his knife and used the blade tip to point at things (“liver”, “stomach contents” “He’d just eaten this, see? Hadn’t even started to digest it yet”). He showed me a sac, the location crucial, which, if I cut into it, would taint the whole animal. He explained how some species of animals, and which, had this and that some had 3 “sacs” you had to steer clear of or you’d make all the meat the most vile tasting and bad food and you wouldn’t be able to eat it—no one could stomach it.
“Otherwise I could eat groundhog,” I said, like a robot reporter.
“You can eat any animal,” he said. “Some are so gamey-tasting or so gristly no one would bother, but it’s feasible.”
Because I’d rid us of a pest, Dad must have taken my expertise for granted.
Many years later I read Grandma’s diary from when she was 18 to 22 and learned that at 19 she was going out alone on the Saskatchewan wheat farm she and Grandpa owned and shooting pesky gophers all day, returning on her horse with 6 or 13 bodies a day, and we all knew that she’d been craftily taking plugs at squirrels from her twenties through her eighties with BB guns and .22s. He probably saw a little Grandma in me, not bad—he’d been raised as 3 males and his Annie Oakley Mom and really had no idea what to do with a girl child. Twin ones, at that. But he was familiar with 3 males and a female and so I had squeezed in, not making his mother any less unique but showing that I’d gotten dominant genetic material from her. He didn’t especially take me aside and train me in specifics of hunting.
But for a moment, a summer perhaps, I wanted to be a good hunter so I could be in the car with Dad and Tony when they went somewhere duck hunting early in the morning or pheasant hunting with a cooler of pop. A Pepsi from a cooler was infinitely more attractive than one from a refrigerator. The ice bits on the sides, the refreshing coldness of it, the “get wet, let the cool dribble down your shirt, have fun while you’re young and be uptight later” attitude.
And I always wanted to go with Dad, whenever he went. He had all the fun.
So there I was, totally allowed to hunt on our land, walking in the woods about the time Tony was bringing his two woodcock home in his jacket pocket.
(Mom would have died, then thrown the jacket out; Tony got the first bird 2 hours before the second but it was obviously not enough bird to eat so he’d stubbornly stayed afield until he got a second).
Leafy branches shook above me and I spotted a red squirrel in a tree. I got him on my first shot.
Which was good, because that was the gun I had—the single shot.
Only he didn’t die, just fell 15 feet to a lower branch where he flopped acrobatically but somehow never fell off.
“Dad…”I said, fist at my mouth in rising terror. “Dad!”
Dad was there as fast as my echo dropped. He was often nearby us in the woods and we didn’t know. “What’s the matter?”
I pointed at the epileptic squirrel. “I only had one bullet and he didn’t come all the way down.”
“What can I do?” Dad said, and I realized he had no gun.
“You’ve got to get it!” I was too young to come up with ideas—not so, Dad.
He picked up a chunk of moist rotted tree bark and leaned back and threw it at the squirrel’s branch. it sailed just under the squirrel some 12 feet up.
The second thing he threw--a rock--knocked that squirrel to the dead pine needle carpet we stood on. It tried to pull itself to brush to escape but went in circles, it’s lower half dragging. Dad picked up a stone and with no warning to me as I looked in horror at the heavily-breathing, cute little guy with huge dark eyes and bulging sides, smashed its skull.
He gave it three blows. Then we walked back to the cabin in silence, as if looking for something. You know, a wild animal.
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wise2owls reviewed Version 2 -
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In reading this memoir, it was apparent that you have a very healthy relationship with your father… His interest in birds, flora and fauna of the area that your cabin was in is amazing to me… Your father was a naturalist when it seems there weren`t many… A joy to read, unique in how you were able to bring how you felt about your home and the many experiences that you had as a young girl… I hope that I see your name on the book store shelves soon…
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artofstocks reviewed Version 2 -
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Great read and when you decide to publish it let me know as I am publishing my own book also.
Publishing your own book is more cost effective then going with a publisher. You can use your local UPS store for binding and printing.
Again, I see nothing in this novel that needs replacing.
Congradulations
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