White Oak Mountain Ranger: Fall Fantasies

  • Tuesday, October 22, 2024

“The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering”. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” - Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.” - Albert Camus

The golden and rust colored shagbark, as the sun drops low after another miraculous cloudless fall day, finds the old drought stricken tree turning into the last shadows of early evening’s fading light. A soft and warm light illuminating the tall old monarch, dry rusty, yellow flecked, nut laden and still.

The golden shagbark elicits a sudden flood of deepening fall fantasies. More fantasies than normal. Stacked up in a slow, messy sort of collision with one another. More than any other time it seems. Why now? Why when the rusty gold of the hickory, contemplating her soon dropping of all but a few of her leaves? Why more dreams than can be realized in one dream season of travels? Unable to categorize them all, much less make them some sort of reality, before ice sets in and locks them all away?

The nearby bugle of the bull elk above a golden stand of aspen at 9,000 feet.

The lucky snap shot at a drumming grouse on the third flush.

The sound that a Zara Spook makes as it chugs along in a leaf strewn slough. The sound made when it’s suddenly and unexpectedly engulfed by a mighty smallmouth bass, or any bass for that matter, leaves and line splashed high from the cold misty surface of some placid lake.

The sight of a black faced fox squirrel, with a white muzzle, as it creeps under your tree stand looking for nothing in particular.

The cackle of long tailed and gaudy rooster pheasants, frantically climbing ahead of a feverish young dog, just out of range.

The vision in a cloudy scope of a buck bigger than anything you’ve seen in years.

The largest shouldered brown trout you’ve ever witnessed following your stick bait on the Caney Fork.

A crossing double, in some thin pines, after a surprise large covey rise of gentleman bob whites.

The smell of freshly cut sawdust from stacking a cord of dry stove wood.

The riotous colors, too numerous to describe, of maples above some creek bank campfire.

The lonesome bawl of the tall and rangy ribbed black and tan coon hound, at the base of a big white sycamore, up hill, nearly a half a mile away, in the early morning mist.

The majesty of waves of the purple and blue mountains to the West, as the day ends, on some Appalachian bald, while coffee boils on a backpacking stove.

A pin oak swamp full of twisting, contorted, noisy wood ducks, or flock after flock, of Canada geese, flaps down, contented to land in your lap.

The sound of silence that follows the roar of smoke from a fall muzzle loader, touched off on some elusive ghost.

Footfalls in leaves that strongly resemble beds of Fritos.

As a proponent of a vivid fantasy life in general, it appears to me that it is this time of year, when I slip into a gear or two well beyond warp drive. This seems to happen when the shag barks turn rusty gold.

The boy turned up for a weekend stay carrying a toothbrush and his 70th anniversary Red Rider BB gun. There was a little medallion on the stock that proclaimed it the 70th anniversary of this model of the diminutive and iconic firearm.

Funny how a Red Rider BB gun can emote nostalgia. We sat under the big black walnut tree and pounded away at the clusters of hanging green targets, yet to litter the pasture floor. I tried to limit the stories of “back when I had a Red Rider” for the boy’s sake. But it was not to be. I struggled to keep these stories at a minimum, while we attempted to de-nude the nut festooned tree of the slowly dying nuts.

I omitted how I felt about guns and women. How similar the sensations were when deeply analyzed. How I felt when I held them, smelled them, and the romance of having them in my hands, on my shoulder and against my cheek. Maybe that’s the sort of explanation that’s best left for another day, when you’re with a 10 year old novice shooter.

More than likely that’s the sort of thing that’s just my stupid sort of fantasy. Probably it’s all best left unsaid when in the company of a 10 year old, intent on learning marksmanship.

There was another piece of nostalgia best left unsaid as it relates to Red Riders and the intense safety training that coincided with my first cherished BB gun.

The old man was a veritable task master when it came to firearm safety. Each and every training session was incomplete until I had gone over and repeated back, each and every safety rule, verbatim. Without this recitation, the excitement of target practice, could not, and would not commence.

There were cans and cards set at various distances, and as the lessons progressed, fishing line strung at oblique angles between our clothes line poles. Cans dangled from rolling wheels made of tinker toys, which slid rapidly down steep slopes, simulating challenging, fleet little birds on the wing.

This level of marksmanship was relatively easy to quickly master. After a series of short lessons, it wasn’t too long before I noticed that the old man was getting bored with my mastery of the shot. That’s about the time he inserted into the training regimen, what became known as, ‘four to the corner.’

I listened intently to the rules of the new training game with great attentiveness, until it suddenly dawned on me, that I was now to become the target for the new challenge, called ‘four to the corner.’

This new endeavor suddenly broke all of the previous rules I had so painstakingly burned into my short attention span. I stood there wild eyed and dumbfounded at being told how it really wouldn’t hurt if I ran fast, dodged, ducked, and weaved well enough, to avoid hot lead.

While this all seemed suddenly overly exciting, it was the feeling of excitement that was filled with both dread and a rather healthy sense of abject terror.

I nervously dug the toes of my P. F. Flyers into the dirt for a hot start. The old man quickly commenced the countdown.

“ONE” he shouted eerily and calmly. I bolted for the safety of the corner of the house. Two, or maybe what seemed like three long seconds later, I heard the count of “TWO.”

I figured at this increasingly rapid pace, I’d manage to make it to the corner safely by about the count of four. Just to be safe, I bobbed and weaved, left and right, and somehow located another gear.

The time delay between “THREE” and the shout of “FOUR” diminished dramatically, and the safety of the corner of the house, was now, in my terrified mind, in serious jeopardy.

Then came there dreaded “FIVE.” I lunged for the corner and freedom from the screaming little hot pellet.

I never seemed to pass this final test. The BB slammed home, normally in the cheek of the barely exposed and bony buttocks, by the edge of the wall, of the corner of the house.

The live fire instructor always came over to where I was rolling around in the dirt, thinking I was mortally wounded, and he inevitably assured me that everything was really just fine. And, how next time, I might run a little harder and juke just a little better.

I assured the old man that I would indeed run a little faster and juke like my life depended on it right after I asked him when it would be my turn with the Red Rider in my hands. This swap was apparently was not to be found anywhere in the rule book.

Now during the next training session, when I sensed the old man was getting a little bored, I requested a latrine break. I slipped into the house and slid a Boy’s Life and two Readers Digests down the back of my Levis. I don’t think the old man ever caught on to my ingenious use of PPE (personal protective equipment).

Now It’s important to note here that my sainted mother never showed much interest in my whiny complaints about BB induced whelps on my rear end. I guess she just thought that this is the standard type of marksmanship training all young boys should endure. But there did come a day, a momentous day, where she interceded rather violently, and ended live fire training in a most emphatic manner.

This particular day coincided with my dear mother at the stove in the kitchen. I had actually managed to make it safely to the corner of the garage on the count of “FOUR” and was screaming at the top of my lungs for my mother to open the kitchen door, which happened to be right next to the kitchen stove.

I could easily hear the instructor cocking the Red Rider and hear his heavy footfalls as he turned the corner into the garage for the clean follow-up.

The kitchen door flung open as I did a Pete Rose style head first slide off of the side of the stove and onto the kitchen floor. My mother stood there wide eyed with a large, empty wooden spoon in one hand and a pile of mashed potatoes strewn all down the front of her apron.

She had heard the BB’s impact, high on the porcelain stove side and when she instantly inspected the big ugly black dent on the stove, I watched in utter amazement as this sweet woman, immediately transformed herself into a slit eyed, deranged, axe murderer sort of psychopath.

In a flash, she produced her favorite butcher knife and lunged into the garage like a lioness protecting cubs from a pack of ravenous baboons. I belly crawled to the door and watched in stunned amazement as the old man dropped the Red Rider like it was an ingot of molten lead, as he back peddled furiously out of the garage and knife range.

I watched in horror as mom chopped away at the wood stock of the abandoned and fallen Red Rider. She had slipped into some sort of deadly frenzy, like the fallen BB gun was some dangerous pit viper in need of a good killing. She hacked on, until splinters flew, like snow in the wind.

When she finally cooled down a little, she took what was left of the gun over to the vise on the workbench, clamped it firmly in place, and proceeded to grab a 2 lb. shop hammer. She then, rather quickly, fashioned a well done 90 degree bend in the barrel. For a small framed woman, she handled the 2 lb. shop hammer as good as ole John Henry himself.

When my Aunt Sue was told of the death of the Red Rider and ‘four to the corner’ she laughed so hard she wet her pants. My mother had four sisters, all beautiful, but Aunt Sue, the youngest, took the blue ribbon.

The old man maintained a roving eye and he was often heard to exclaim to me, after a visit from Aunt Sue, that he hadn’t seen a rear end like momma’s little sisters’ since he had come home from Saipan. At the time, I just assumed he saw a potential new candidate for ‘four to the corner’.

Well, when Aunt Sue quit wetting her pants from laughing, after hearing about the wounded stove, and the demise of the Red Rider, her response was not at all what I’d expected.

You’d have thought it was something like, “You should call Child Protective Services,” “No, better yet, you should call the sheriff,” or “I’d take that knife and shove it so far up his…” or, maybe something like, “Why don’t the two of you come stay with me for a long while?”

Nothing logical like that was ever spoken by Aunt Sue. No, it was simply; “That sounds like something he’d do!” Then she started laughing so hard I worried that she might mess in her pants again.

She didn’t even ask if I was traumatized just the littlest bit, or if I was even OK!

After shooting about fifty walnuts out of the old tree, and drifting off, lost in nostalgia, I looked at the young lad, Red Rider in hand, and decided to skip that old story about the badly dented stove, the day of the death of the Red Rider, and how Aunt Sue wet her Levis that day.

Kids/Parents!!! DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!!!

Times have changed. In this rare case, thankfully, for the better.

Maybe it’s not the rusty gold shagbark in the light of days end.

Maybe it’s really the hunters’ full moon that dredges up these multiple old fantasies.

I’m not just sure anymore.

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