Living in da swamp

 Thanks for the pics Beagles.  Just hearing you talk about the swamp and all the hard work and hard times it made me think of it as dismal.  But looking at it in these photos it was beautiful.

That sweep of white in the winter. The golden hue of spring with the Canada geese standing all majestic and no care in the world stance.  And then the bright green of the summertime and the living is easy.  

How big was it in miles?  Can I get your address again so I can google earth it?  

Yeah I guess you know enough about my life to tell that it is pretty biographical.  Things didn't happen like that but not that far off.  As I was writing it seemed kind of depressing, the guy was near the end of his rope and he had that grim attitude towards life.  But I have to recall it didn't seem that bad at the time.  At 40 I guess I still felt pretty young.  I couldn't get a job in Champaign but coming to Texas the boomtown with my recent certificate in the promising field of data processing, it was exciting Man.  

In retrospect sending my cat through that Emery thing seems kind of risky, but at the time it seemed like the reasonable thing to do and I never expected them not to take her off the damn plane in Austin.  I did have a neighbor named Mona who liked to be called Mona Lisa and we did eat popcorn and drink beer on the walkway outside her door, and maybe she wasn't that frisky but she did run off with the Rotel and the Hot Tomato bass man.  

And there was the woman who married and then was abandoned by the Laird, and I did have that moment when I thought oh hell, why don't I just fall in love, but when she looked back up at me I did think of a joke to tell and the subject never came up again.

I can't say that I ever had much of a plan for my life, just do whatever comes next.  But you knew from way back when you were in knee pants that you were gonna live in a swamp and hunt and fish and do all that outdoorsy stuff that you loved so much.  Here's to you Pal.

A Tough Nut to Crack

I've been looking through my photo collection for things that I thought might be interesting to you guys.  I found this one of my wood splitter in action.  I must have taken this shot because it was particularly difficult piece.  

 Did I tell you guys that my wife went to the emergency room a couple weeks ago with a gall bladder infection?  They shipped her to Petosky for the operation.  A few days later they transferred her to a rehab facility in Charlevoix for extended recovery.  She is coming home on Friday, but not for long.  An opening is coming up in an assisted living facility, also in Charlevoix, and we are next on the waiting list.  We might be moving in as soon as the end of this month.  

Comin' Through the Rye

This was one of my annual activities back in the day.  I would work up this field, about 1/3 of an acre, in front of my deer blind and plant rye grain.  I would usually do this sometime in August so that it would be up and growing before the November seer season.  This photo was probably taken about two weeks after planting when I went back out there to spread fertilizer.  

The field would not produce grain until the following summer, but that was okay because what I was after was fresh green grass in November when it would be an unseasonal treat for the deer.  I don't know how much the deer valued the grain because they have plenty of natural food that time of year.  I would mow the field before working it up and replanting next August.  

Breakup in Beaglesonia

Breakup is the time of year between winter and spring.  The snow and ice are melting, but green up is a long way off.  Breakup usually occurs sometime in March, while green-up usually waits until May.  Ironically, the time in between is our wildfire season.  After the snow melts away, all the dead vegetation from last summer dries out.  Wildfires, however, are usually not a problem when you live in the swamp.  

I used to kid my wife about living on waterfront property this time of year, but she never did buy it.  That's because our intermittent marsh dries up in the summer, not enough to cultivate, but enough that it can be mowed to keep it from reverting to trees and bushes.  My plan was to develop it into year-round water so that the ducks and geese that dropped in for a visit during breakup would stick around for the fall hunting season, but it was not to be.

Beaglesonia in Winter

 

This is our driveway after a moderate snowfall.  We are looking from the house towards the county road.  You can't see the road from here because the driveway makes a sharp turn to the left just before it meets the road.  I configured it that way to take advantage of the highest ground available.  Total distance is about a hundred yards.

Here's me sitting on the tractor getting ready to start plowing.  We are not looking down the main driveway here, we are looking across the parking and turnaround area towards one of my tractor trails that leads to the deer blind, about a quarter mile away.  

That was a good story the Uncle Ken posted the other day.  It sounds like something close to his real-life experience, perhaps slightly embellished as we creative story tellers tend to do.

  

A-Hunting We Will Go

 

I took this picture one morning on my way to my deer blind.  When I was quite young my father took me with him on several deer hunting trips to Freesoil, Michigan.  We stayed with a family of farmers who rented out a few of their spare rooms to hunters.  They lived across the road from the Manistee National Forest, so we could walk to huntable land, loading our guns as we exited the farmhouse.  I thought that was so cool and vowed that I was going to live in a place like that when I grew up.  My dad claimed that this was impractical in the

modern world, and maybe he was right, but I did it anyway.

  

Deep in the Heart of Texas

 I've been hanging at the downtown Senior Citizen writing class these last few weeks and this is what I came out with:

Deep in the Heart of Texas – Ken Schadt.

 

I was standing right across from the train to Texas and suddenly it hit me.  I didn’t have to do this.  I could cross the street to the Greyhound station and go right back to Champaign where all my beer drinking friends lived.  They were probably beginning to drop by the Esquire this very minute.  I could take the bus back and I would be sitting at the bar before happy hour was over.

Sure I could do that, but I would have to bum beer money  off of  one of my pals, because I didn’t have any money, because I didn’t have a job.  And that’s why I was taking the train to the boomtown.  I got on the Texas Eagle.

By midnight we were crossing the Mississippi River at St Louis with the gambling boats gleaming in the night.  I dropped off to sleep after that and then it was a misty dawn when we were passing through Little Rock, then we went west for most of the day, miles and miles of miles and miles of Texas as the songwriter wrote.  At Dallas we went south until we hit Austin about the time the bars there were closing. 

I was up first thing in the morning, waiting for my cat to arrive. The day before I took the train I took my cat to the vet’s where she would be given a sedative and then Don would pick her up and take her to the Emery office to begin her long ride by plane and truck to Austin and now she would arrive at my apartment in one of those red and white trucks, which were driving up and down Lamar, but none of them pulled into the driveway in front of the apartment and then it was dark and there were no more trucks.

I went down to the payphone with a pocket full of quarters and called up Don.

“My cat’s not here.”

“No, no she is not.”

“Where is she?”

“Detroit.”

“Detroit?”

“Detroit Michigan.”

“What?  How?”

“Didn’t I warn you about your dumb scheme to send a cat by delivery truck?”

“What?  You never said a word.”

“Oh, well I meant to.  Anyway don’t fret, they are driving her down hear even as I speak.  I will be at their office later in the morning and I’ll bring her back here so don’t you worry.”

“What is she doing in Detroit?”

“Oh that.  I talked to the guy and he said they put her in the plane here and the plane flew to New Orleans and Baton Rouge and everything was fine, but then when they stopped in Austin they forgot to take kitty out of the airplane.  Then there were a few more stops and when their trip ended she was still on the plane.”

“How was she?  How is she”   

“Well she was hungry, but they got a can and she ate it all down,”

She didn’t talk much but she always cleaned her bowl.  “Well, so, wow.”  Can they send her back here tomorrow?”

“No they can’t.  I asked.  It’s winter now you know,  no more cats in the air by themselves from now until  Memorial Day.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing.  But I’ll tell you little buddy, sometimes it gets a little lonely out here in the trailer court, maybe I could use a little buddy myself for company over those long winter months.”

“She doesn’t talk much,” I warned him.

“Neither do I,” he answered.

I was 40 years old.  I had never been married or had any kids.  Didn’t even have a job.  All I had was the cat.  And now she would be a thousand miles from me in a stranger’s trailer until  spring.

 

That was my first morning in Austin and in my second I met my white winged warrior.

I was leaning over my railing looking east towards the dawn, over the honking revving traffic of Lamar.  On the other side and maybe half a block up there was a little patch of live oaks where I saw a sudden flash of light and then it was moving.  It was a bird, a large one, a pigeon, a great big white pigeon, broad wings stretching out as it rose in the sky,  rising higher and coming across Lamar and setting down right on the railing a few feet from me, where he tucked in his wings and looked at me, like specifically at me, like he wanted something from me.

Well peanuts of course.  Isn’t that what brought them down from the cliffs to our rooftops, from scrounging for seeds to accepting a friendly handout from those humans?

And I had nothing.  I wasn’t expecting a guest.  “You wait right here.” I told him and dashed down the stairs and across the street to the Safeway and came back with a little bag of dry roasted peanuts.

But he was gone.  Well shit.  I shook the bag in the air but nothing, but when I turned around there was whoosh of feathers and there he was giving the peanut bag the eye.  I shook one out of the bag and then another and it was looking like the start of a beautiful friendship.

 

In my third morning in Austin I met my next door neighbor.  Her name was Mona, but she liked it if you called her Mona Lisa.       

Mona Lisa wanted to know if I had a girlfriend.  I said I had a cat, she smiled.

“Want one?”

“One what?”

“A girlfriend?” she answered  pointing her thumb at herself.

Well what guy doesn’t want a girlfiend? I looked for words.

But I was too slow, she was laughing, “Just a joke,” she said.

And then she wanted to know if she could see my cat, and so I had to tell the story.  It was a little bit comical and I told it like it was some kind of joke,  but she wasn’t laughing.  She was wondering when they discovered that they had a cat on their plane.  Well I didn’t know, maybe she was under some other box.  Well wouldn’t they have heard her?  I told her that she was a quiet cat, which she was.

Mona looked up into the sky.  “They could have dumped her, “ she said, “They could have not  wanted anybody to know that they messed up and gotten rid of her.  Maybe they just didn’t want to do the paperwork.”

“ Oh I am sure she was on some other list, and anyway nobody would just dump her, people don’t do shit like that.”

“Some do,” she answered.

When I left Champaign I had to get my cat to the vet’s by four.  I had been kind of putting it off all afternoon, but then it was four o’clock, and I had to do it right then.  She was a quiet cat and she didn’t say anything when I lifted her up and put her in the cat carrier and then closed the transparent top above her.  She just looked at me from inside the carrier.