Never sniff a gift fish, p.11
Never Sniff a Gift Fish, page 11
It is for that reason that no outdoorsman will ever ask another about a scar.
There are certain constants in the telling of any scar story. One is that the recipient of the near-mortal wound from which the scar was derived never uttered a sound during the ordeal: “So, there I was, my arm laid open elbow to wrist, and me not making a sound. Several of the younger fellows fainted dead away at the sight of it, and I couldn’t help but smile. Then ol’ Pap Wiggens got out a saddle-stitching awl and sewed up my arm with a length of catgut leader, and I didn’t so much as say ‘ouch.’”
It may be nothing more than a coincidence, but I have yet to hear a scar story in which the injured party admitted to bellowing like a bull moose with bursitis.
Another characteristic of the scar story is that the scar always is much smaller than the original wound. In fact, each time the story is told, the difference between the size of the scar and the size of the wound becomes increasingly greater, until you begin to worry that if the story is told one more time the original injury might prove fatal. I’ve seen outdoorsmen express real astonishment that they somehow managed to survive a wound that left a quarter-inch scar on an index finger. Once during a physical examination, I asked the doctor the cause of this phenomenon, and he spent the rest of the afternoon telling me about a tiny scar on his elbow left over from the time he nearly severed his arm. I hadn’t realized until then that he was an outdoorsman. Afterward he gave me a prescription for some drops to clear up my glazed eyes.
Another feature of the scar story is that the teller always remembers to make a dry, humorous comment to his companions as they gape in horror at his damaged hide. “It’s just a scratch” seems to be the standard dry, humorous comment. Obviously, you can’t expect great creativity from an injured person.
One interesting and amusing characteristic of the scar story is how easily an outdoorsman can be reminded of one.
“Have you seen John’s boat?” someone might ask.
“No,” replies the outdoorsman, “but that reminds me. I don’t believe I’ve ever told you how I got this scar on my cheek.”
Persons unknowledgeable about outdoorsmen might assume that a boat played at least some slight part in the acquisition of the scar. When the story is at last over, they will ask, “But what about the boat?”
“What boat?” replies the outdoorsman. “Say, that reminds me of the scar on my ankle.”
Speaking of boats, there’s quite a story behind this scar on my thumb.
The scar is merely a small, whitish crescent just behind the knuckle. I must explain, however, that the scar remained the same size but my thumb grew. When it received the original wound, my thumb was only seven years old. To fully appreciate the gash on my thumb, you must visualize the scar superimposed on a little seven-year-old thumb. Then you realize how truly ghastly the injury was.
The scar happened like this. Crazy Eddie and I were planning our first camping trip. We had both been sentenced to second grade and were due to start serving our time the following week. When you’re seven years old, second grade lasts for life and a day. (When I was eight, second grade lasted only twenty years, which was a great improvement.) We wanted to have one last fling before the doors shut behind us, and a camping trip seemed like a good idea.
Finding enough grub for the camping trip was the big problem. We dug a few potatoes out of the garden, and Crazy Eddie sneaked half a loaf of bread from his house. But we needed some meat. Fortunately, Eddie’s father had hauled a dead horse into their barnyard a few weeks before. He had cut up most of the carcass to feed to the foxes he raised for furs, but there were still some good parts left. Eddie borrowed his father’s hunting knife while his parents were away, and we went out to the barnyard to cut off a few steaks to roast on willows over the fire we hoped to build by rubbing two sticks together because we weren’t allowed to play with matches. Eddie sliced off a nice round steak for himself without incident or accident. Probably one reason he didn’t cut himself was that he used one hand to cut with and the other to hold his nose. The hand that holds the knife doesn’t usually get cut, so the trick is to keep the other hand out of the way and occupied with some useful task like holding your nose. Foolishly, I tried to brush the flies off the steak I was cutting. The knife slipped and laid open my thumb to the bone.
I didn’t cry. That was the first time I had been hurt that badly and didn’t cry. I remember thinking, “Odd, I just cut my finger to the bone and I’m not crying.”
Eddie wasn’t very supportive in that regard. “Geez,” he said, “all your blood is leaking out!”
That made me want to cry, but I didn’t. Maybe I somehow knew that years later I would have this wonderful scar and I wouldn’t want to remember that I cried when I got it.
“Don’t it hurt?” Crazy Eddie asked, apparently because he couldn’t deal with the fact that I wasn’t crying.
I decided to compound his amazement by making a dry, humorous comment about the cut, but I couldn’t think of any. “Naw,” I said finally, “it’s just a scra … a scra … I got to go home.” And I went.
Two weeks later I finally thought of a dry, humorous comment, but by then we were in second grade and Crazy Eddie was too miserable to appreciate it.
During the years of my childhood, I picked up dozens of tiny scars, but none worth showing to anybody. All my friends were constantly getting neat scars. One time Crazy Eddie and I were floating a log raft down the creek. Suddenly, up ahead, we saw a strand of barbwire stretched across the creek about six inches above the water. Crazy Eddie, who was on the front of the raft, lay down and pressed himself against the logs so that he would pass under the wire. He didn’t press hard enough. The barbs raked him fore and aft, particularly his aft. (He wasn’t known as “Crazy Eddie” for nothing.) When I came to the wire, I calmly stepped over it, averting my gaze from the bits of Eddie left on the barbs. Eddie picked up an interesting set of scars from the experience, and he liked to claim later that he never uttered a sound during the ordeal. Maybe so, but the workers at a nearby sawmill went home early that day because they thought they heard the shriek of the quitting whistle.
Crazy Eddie continued to add to his collection of scars with knives, hatchets, saws, arrows, fishhooks, tree branches, sharp rocks, just about anything that had any potential at all for lacerating his skin. By the time we were in sixth grade, Eddie looked like a walking display of hieroglyphics. He was the envy of every boy in school.
I, on the other hand, had only one good scar, the one on my thumb. The problem with a scar on a thumb is that it is not easily called attention to. Once I was lucky enough to fall facedown in a pile of rocks and get a deep gash on my chin. I had high hopes for that wound, but bit by bit the scar faded and within six months had vanished.
“Thank heavens,” my mother said. “I thought you might be disfigured for life.” Mothers just don’t understand about scars.
I have an excellent scar on one of my feet, a gift from a double-bitted ax. But a foot is one of the worst places to have a scar. How do you explain taking off your shoe and sock and placing a smelly foot up on a table so the scar can be noticed? I have often been asked for such an explanation and, failing to come up with one, have on several occasions been forcibly ejected from Kelly’s Bar & Grill. A scar on your foot is more of a nuisance than anything. It is, as Shakespeare put it, the unkindest cut of all.
One of life’s worst misfortunes is to get a truly fabulous scar in a place where no one except maybe your spouse can notice it, and spouses, like mothers, are generally unappreciative of scars. A classic instance of such a scar occurred when my friends Retch and Birdy and I were about seventeen. We had been fishing in a place that required that we drive through a series of hayfields, opening and shutting half a dozen gates along the way. Retch was driving his old 1933 sedan, and, because he was furnishing the transportation, he insisted that Birdy and I open and shut the gates. Birdy complained that this was an unfair labor practice and violated constitutional rights as they apply to hayfield gates. A heated argument ensued, and certain vile names were exchanged. When we arrived at one of the gates, Birdy got out, swearing that this was absolutely the last gate he was going to open and close.
“Ha!” Retch said. “We’ll see about that. Lock all the doors so he can’t get back in. We’ll make him walk all the way to the next gate and we won’t let him back in the car until he opens and closes it. Heh heh!”
With that, he started driving slowly across the hayfield toward the next gate. What happened next came as quite a surprise to Retch and me, since neither of us had ever guessed that Birdy might possess ambitions to become a stuntman.
Once he perceived what we were up to, Birdy raced after the bouncing sedan, making no attempt to conceal his fury. He climbed on the back bumper, worked his way up over the trunk, across the roof of the car, and down onto the hood. Once he was on the hood, he sprawled across the windshield to block Retch’s vision.
His plot foiled and his vision blocked, Retch became furious. “Well, I’ll fix him!” he snarled, pressing down on the gas pedal until we were bouncing along at nearly twenty miles an hour. Birdy reacted by turning his back to us and, now astraddle the hood, grabbed hold of the rain gutters on each side of the windshield to steady himself. Retch hit the brakes.
Birdy shot off the front of the hood as if from a catapult. He made a nice eight-point landing, counting two points for each bounce. Retch and I expected that he would rest there on the ground for a spell and contemplate the error of his ways. Instead, he instantly leaped up and launched into a wild and wonderful dance to the accompaniment of his own whoops and hollers.
That was when we remembered the hood ornament, one of those little jobs with the wings raised in simulation of flight.
The little wings gave Birdy a spectacular matched set of scars. Unfortunately, they were in a place where they were not likely to be noticed in the typical social situation. In the thirty years since, Birdy has not once had occasion to tell the story behind those scars. It seems like such a waste.
Scars are often interpreted as evidence that a man has lived dangerously. I totally dismiss my wife’s assertion that they are more likely proof that he has lived dumbly. She knows nothing about the masculine mystique.
My hope is that the cosmetic industry will soon come up with false scars for men, much as it did with false beauty marks for women. It would be only fair, not to mention a lot less painful. But it probably wouldn’t work. After all, who would want to tell about getting a scar from the Avon lady?
The Bush Pilots
Mostly what I wanted to be when I grew up was a mountain man, but there was one brief period, during the summer of my eighth year, when I gave serious consideration to becoming a bush pilot.
It was Crazy Eddie who got me to thinking about the bush-pilot business. He came up with the idea immediately after our ill-fated venture into deep-sea diving, which, among other consequences, produced a rare form of hysteria in the Fergusons’ herd of milk cows: not only couldn’t they be made to drink; they refused even to be driven to water. A veterinarian was brought in to offer an opinion, but, because he had no experience with the effects of deep-sea diving on cows, he failed to come up with a diagnosis. Had the vet thought to ask Crazy Eddie and me, as people usually did when inexplicable phenomena occurred within the range of our travels, we could have told him what was wrong with the Ferguson cows. They had the bends.
Since the reader may have some difficulty grasping the deeper psychological implications of my bush-pilot phase, an examination of the deep-sea-diving venture may provide some insights, particularly in light of the fact that both experiences involved traumatized cows.
In my own defense, I must report that the entire deep-sea-diving experiment was Eddie’s idea. I was recruited at the last minute, to help with the testing, after Eddie had designed and assembled the diving outfit himself. Although the technology of the outfit would be too difficult for the lay person to understand, I will mention that its component parts consisted of an old milk pail, a tire pump, a length of garden hose, and two bags of rocks. Eddie said he needed me to work the tire pump while he descended into the depths of Sand Creek, the test site being a deep hole in the creek behind the Ferguson place. The hole was next to the bank on one side of the creek. The creek bottom tapered up from there onto a gravel bar on the opposite side, where the Ferguson cows came to drink. Through oversight, Crazy Eddie hadn’t factored the cows into the experiment.
As Eddie and I stood on the bank staring down into the swirling dark waters of the hole, my friend could scarcely contain his enthusiasm.
“Boy,” he said, “I can’t wait to get down there and start exploring. This hole is a perfect place for pirates to hide a chest of treasure. Probably some pearls down there too, and gold and—”
“C’mon, Eddie, let me go first!” I blurted.
“Okay.”
While he was helping me on with the milk-pail helmet, Eddie said he was letting me go first only because I was his best friend and that he wouldn’t even consider doing such a favor for anyone else. I said I appreciated it and, sliding down over the bank, asked Eddie if he was sure the diving outfit would work.
“Yeah,” Eddie yelled, starting to work the pump furiously. “But if it doesn’t, can I have your bike?”
Still contemplating Eddie’s little joke, I plunged into the hole. I sank swiftly into the cool, swirling darkness, the bags of rocks tied to my belt working wonderfully well. There were, however, some bugs in the rest of the outfit. The helmet offered limited visibility, since the only way to see out of it was straight down. Mostly what I could see was the level of water rising in the inverted milk pail, despite the hiss hiss of the air hose. Of even more interest to me at the moment was the distinct tactile impression of long, slimy tentacles of octopus slithering around my body. Thus distracted, and with the water in the helmet now lapping about my eyes, I scarcely touched bottom before setting a course toward the incline of the gravel bank on the far side of the creek. Even though I maintained the calm demeanor I thought appropriate to a deep-sea diver, the vigor of my movements caused silt and gravel to boil up in such a fashion as to effect major changes in the creek channel, or so Eddie later remarked.
It so happened that at that very moment, the herd of Ferguson cows was moseying down to the creek for a drink, apparently mildly interested in the frantic activities of the boy on the far bank but with no expectation of a streaming, slime-covered creature with an inverted milk pail on its head to be emerging from their watering place. As Crazy Eddie later related the spectacle to me, for I was too preoccupied with gasping to notice such things, the entire herd rose straight up eight feet in the air, reversed direction, and to the accompaniment of a cowbell rendition of “The William Tell Overture,” disappeared over a distant hill. Oddly, the route of the cows’ departure was marked in later years by an unusually lush growth of grass. The wondrous vitality of the swath of grass became something of a local mystery, as did the refusal of the cows to go anywhere near the creek for two weeks afterward, despite the maniacal exhortations on the part of Mr. Ferguson to get them to do so and save him the chore of carrying water to them.
Naturally, Crazy Eddie was disappointed in the performance of his diving outfit.
“Maybe it was my fault,” I said, untying the bags of rocks from my belt. “I probably did it wrong. Why don’t you give it a try and let me stand on the bank and pump air?”
Eddie thought for a moment. “Gee, I would,” he said, “but it’s, ah, getting on toward suppertime. Besides, I’ve been thinking that maybe I’d rather be a bush pilot than a deep-sea diver.”
As we walked home, dragging the deep-sea-diving outfit behind us, Crazy Eddie suggested that maybe I would want to go into the bush-pilot business with him. He explained how it would work. “We’ll have this plane, see, and we’ll fly hunters and fishermen back into the wilderness. We’ll land on gravel bars in rivers and in little clearings in the forest, and the hunters and fishermen will be scared to death, but afterward they’ll say, ‘Boy, you sure know how to handle this plane!’ and we’ll just laugh like it was nothing. But we won’t work all the time. Whenever we want, we’ll go fishing and hunting ourselves. It’ll be great!”
Already I could feel myself getting caught up in Eddie’s dream. “But where will we get the plane?” I asked. “We don’t have any money.”
“We’ll have to build it. Of course, we’ll start off with just a little plane, one we can use to practice our flying with and landing on gravel bars and small clearings in the forest. That can be tricky. Come on over to my place tomorrow and we’ll start building the plane.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said, tilting my head to one side and batting some creek water out of my ear.
I did have some doubt that Crazy Eddie and I could actually build an airplane. As it turned out, though, Eddie was an aeronautical genius. When I showed up the next morning, he had already drawn up the plans on a sheet of Big Ben tablet paper. He said he had based the design on a plane in a comic book story about a bush pilot. It looked swell.
“Where will we get the motor?” I asked.
“My dad’s got an old washing-machine motor out in his shop,” he replied. “We can use that, and whittle a propeller out of a board.” That sounded reasonable enough. I felt guilty about having doubted Eddie’s engineering skills.
“We’ll start off with a glider, though,” Eddie continued. “After we’ve practiced landing the glider a few times, we can hook up the washing-machine motor to it, and work on our takeoffs.”
“But we’ll need some high place to launch the glider from,” I said. “What can we use?”
“No problem,” said Eddie. He pointed to the roof of the towering Muldoon barn. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I supposed it was because I wasn’t an aeronautical genius.
The finished plane bore only a slight resemblance to Eddie’s design, possibly because our escalating anticipation of the forthcoming flight caused us to rush construction. Then again, it may have been the limited supply of materials available to us: two apple crates for the cockpits, an empty dynamite box for the motor housing, two long pieces of shiplap siding for the wings, a short board on a rusty hinge for the tail, and the rear wheels and axle from Eddie’s wagon for the landing gear. All things considered, the bush plane looked exceptionally airworthy.
