All of you that are really friends know that in 1987 I got busted with 177 pounds of really nice pot down on the road to Boca Chica Beach. I think the first series of stories is going to be about that time in my life.
It started off with a simple conversation at Bermuda's down on South Padre Island, one Happy Hour in fact. I asked someone if he needed any help and he said "Sure". Help meaning smuggling pot.
A week later I was in a car, headed south, with a transmission in the back seat, one that we had not declared as we went into Mexico. Making it 'contraband'. We stopped after crossing the border in Matamoros, filled out our Tourista cards and headed south, tranny cleverly hidden under a towel, sure to elude notice should we be stopped at a check point. As it worked out, we didn't get stopped at a check point, we got pulled over by a 'state trooper' well past dark, 30 miles outside of Monterrey. We had just taken a good hard smell of some rather ratty cocaine when light came on behind us. Sure enough, the cop noticed the tranny sitting there and asked for the papers, the ones we didn't have. The driver, somewhat scatterbrained to begin with, tired and addled from lack of sleep and manitol laced cocaine, made the one mistake you never make in Mexico to a State Policeman. He offered him a bribe, which went over badly, very,very badly. He grabbed the guy who offered it, and I knew for sure he was going to take us to jail, where I felt pretty sure they'd find my little stash of weed and things would go down hill from there. So I said to the cop "He wasn't trying to bribe you, what he meant was if there was some place closer than driving all the way back to the border at this time of night, someplace you could tell us to go....". We explained it wasn't for resale, that a truck was broken down around Tecoman and they didn't have a transmission that fit anywhere. After about 10 minutes, he decided we weren't worth it and let us go. We ended up taking a hotel room that night in Monterrey.
Next morning we headed out, still south, from Monterrey, through Saltillo where we stopped for lunch and gasoline. I'd been to Mexico before but it was over on the Sea of Cortez, Baja the first time, Hermosillo the second. This was down the spine, high sierra desert, stark landscape surrounded by mountains. We went south out of Saltillo, past a town, Pulque, that was named after a mildly halucengenic cactus that the locals made bread and a drink out of. About 30 miles after that, the town of Conception de Oro, a hard left at the Pemex station, next stop, about 4 hours down the road, Zacatecas. This was bandit territory, the sides of the road littered with wrecked, rusting cars and trucks, lots of them burned either by banditos or accidents.. the road wasn't exactly the best, and guardrails had yet to show their shining steel along many miles of road. Right outside Conception, there was an Army post on the right hand side, armed guards standing at a shack every time you drove past... not much help at night to those unfortunate enough to break down on the road.
About 20 miles outside Conception, there was a small town, with perhaps 200 adobe homes, a PEMEX station and a truck stop. That small town, in the middle of nowhere, had a massive, domed Catholic Church, so big it was ridiculously out of place. It wasn't particularly ornate and the shape, a dome, was out of sorts with almost every other church I'd ever seen, in Mexico or anywhere. It was brown, perhaps 60 feet tall, set on top of a square of earth brown stucco. A dusty, dirt street passed in front of it, and then it was past as we flew down the road in the car.
Before Air Conditioning
When I was 5 years old, we moved from our home in New Haven to Madison, a house down on Neck Road. I looked at it on Google Earth the other day, and what stood out was the pine trees. We had a tradition of of getting live Christmas trees and planting them along the property line to the north of the house, Scotch Pines mostly. Now, they're huge, pushing 60 years old. Amazing what you can see on your computer these days isn't it?
When we moved to Madison, hardly anyone I knew had air conditioning, so you slept with your windows open. Since I was small I loved sleeping in a chilly room, so I kept mine open late into the fall, only closing them when the first snow rolled into town. I remember the sounds that came through those open windows, the booming and cracking of the ice on Neck River in the spring when the ice broke up and the night was again filled with the sound of running water, the rifles under the bridge behind our house. I remember hearing the geese flying south in the fall at night, the faint music of their soft honking as they flew to some golf course in Mexico, Cuba or Florida rather that freeze their tail feathers off in Canada.
When the wind blew in the fall, and the brilliant maples leaves had lost their color and turned the dull brown of death, you could hear the leaves falling from the trees, swirling noisily into piles in the wind eddies of the trees and the house and garage. I remember one night, sitting bolt upright, terrified as the screams of a rabbit caught by one of the red foxes rolled through the night. Rabbit scream like a small child when they're being bitten to death and unless you know what the noise is, a childs mild fills in the blanks with imaginings of demons and devils racing through the night.
But the finest sounds came from across the street, late on a Friday night when Augustine Duques, head woodwinds instructor at Juliard, returned home for the weekend, to spend it with his wife Emilou, a former Rockette dancer. Sometimes he would sit out in his yard and play classical music, and it would come through the window and fill the room with the most beautiful sounds.
Now, the night is sealed off, the music dulled behind dual thermapane windows and the constant low hum of the central AC. No more do children hear the geese honking, or the tree frogs singing, or the soft bark of a red fox, or the crunch they make when eating the apples beneath the tree in back. The only semblance of music is the intrusive annoying bass of some young person trying to sound cool and chill. All those beautiful songs, and all that wonderful music is lost and I think it's passing is something we should consider.
Hey, dude... FIRE!!
It was a nice cool, clear evening down on the beach, La Ticla, and the stars were out by the billions. Of course, not having any electricity within about 10 miles will do that for you. Was smoking a fatty, laying in the hammock about to go to sleep when I heard "Hey.. dude...FIRE!!". Being mildly curious by nature, I looked down the row of palapas and sure enough, there was a fire...
About 4 the previous afternoon, a beautiful 1965 Pontiac Bonneville station wagon, in mint condition, came rolling into town. We were sitting at the little restaurant, Emalia's place having some grub... snook fillets from the fish I'd caught that morning. A guy from the station wagon came up and asked who to talk to about renting a palapa for a week or so, we directed him to the kitchen door where he made the deal. He backed the car in under the palapa and came over to get something to eat. We started a conversation and they all seemed pretty cool if not the pretty predictable California surfers on the trip to Mexico. Someone asked about the closest place to get a tire fixed, we told him La Placita and after he ate he and one of the 4 dudes took the left rear tire off the wagon and headed up to the highway to hitch a ride into town to get the tire fixed. They were planing on spending the night because it was late, and even back then hitch hiking along the road at night was risky business.
SO... I look to my left and sure enough, there's a fire. Wouldn't be all that big a deal except that the roof of the palapa they were under was connected to the palapa me and Bill Cooksey were camped under, so I yelled to Cooksey and barefooted, headed over to help put the fire out. One of the less intelligent stay-behinds had decided to sleep in the car, which was fine. BUT.. this is where it gets tricky.. he decided to read by candlelight. So he stuck a candle on top of a stack of surf magazines and promptly went to sleep.****Safety Tip***** Do not put a candle on a pile of flammable shit and go to sleep without blowing the candle out. Just a hint.
When I got to the car, the interior was engulfed, the back windows were blowing out and the imbecile who started the fire was busy pulling boards and personal effects out of the car while his friend threw plastic cups full of sea water on the fire, oddly enough, with little effect. The Sex Wax was going, the stacks of magazines where burning and so was the interior of the car. As it that wasn't bad enough, the common roof to about 10 palapas, including ours was on fire. Took me a minute to figure it out but I finally knocked all the dry palm fronds down, which kept the fire from spreading any further. What followed was this.. Angry Villagers and Startled Surfers were standing around at the edge of the firelight, the little thieving asshole kids from Ticla were running around stealing everything they could get their hands on.. propane cylinders were exploding in the car, tires blowing out.. bad stuff all around. Finally, the fire burned itself out, the locals took the two idiots 'into custody' and we all went back to bed.
Waking up the next morning, we all went and looked the scene over on the way to our migas down at Emalia's... and low and behold, into town comes the two with the repaired, but no longer needed, tire for the car that had burned to the bare metal the night before. The expected WTF look came over them, and as we were telling them what their moron buddy had pulled the night before, the locals came and got THEM and took them to decide who was going to pay and how much they were going to pay for the burned Palapas. Jujinio had collected the surf boards from the kids who had stolen them during the fire and were holding them ransom. The owner was trying to explain that all his money and shit worth anything had been destroyed in the fire and the mood was getting ugly. Since there was a pretty good crowd down there waiting to buy some weed, we got up a collection to pay off the locals and they were satisfied to the point of returning the remaining surf boards to the owner of the now defunct car. We asked them what they were going to do... the two morons had taken off earlier, leaving the owner and his buddy to fend for themselves... and he said "I'm going to go surfing, that's what we came down here to do". So as we enjoyed lunch and some cold ones, the two guys walked out of town and hitched a ride south, probably to Rio Nexpa.
Things I've Seen
I've seen lightning in the middle of a snow storm, muffled thunder peeling, strobe light snowflakes twisting and spinning through the night.
I saw a field of woodcock at the gloaming, females in the middle of dancing circles of males puffed out to twice their size, bursting 30 feet into the air in an instant and whistling, fall, spiraling back to the female waiting to choose her best danger to be the father of her brood.
I saw an 80 year old man giggling like a 4 year old as we threw small rocks into a canal at Outdoor Resorts and the explosion of electric blue algae washed up against the bulkhead by the winter wind. We spent 20 minutes watching and tossing pebbles while his wife yelled that if we didn't leave we'd be late for their flight. 45 minutes later as he got out of the van at the terminal in Harlingen his face was still aglow and his eyes were still wide with excitement. He grabbed my hand and said "I'm 80 years old and never saw anything like that in my life!".
I saw a fox walk into the river behind my house, stick in his mouth. He slowly laid down in the water, over probably 2 or 3 minutes, until the tip of his nose and the stick were the only things sticking out of the water... then he let go of the stick, leaped out of the water and stood, shaking himself like a dog for what seemed a minute, then, licking his nose and sneezing, he walked off into the woods.
I've seen whales breaching at night, far out in the Pacific, landing with a huge explosion of that same bioluminescence, and the lips of waves full of the same bursting into bright blue electric neon as the waves broke and tossed them into the air, and the huge explosion as the wave rolled up inside itself as it smacked into the beach.
I've seen Northern Lights, pale green curtains dancing across a jet black night, full of the most stars I think I've ever seen.
I saw my old girlfriend Pam, tall and thin with long dark hair, walk into the room one night, holding and singing to her baby daughter Brandi, and the slow side to side dance as she sang to her child, and the moon light coming through the window, falling on her shoulder and Brandi's face as she snuggled into Pam's neck was the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life.
First time into Guadalajara
The first time I went into Guadalajara, we were winding down the canyon, do to the river crossing where you began the long, winding climb up into the city. We were about a mile from the bottom, and as we came around a corner, there was a man standing in the road, flagging down traffic. His face was deathly white, and he appeared to be in obvious distress. As my eyes went from the mans face as we passed, I looked back down the road and I was perplexed. Sitting in the road were 5 or 6 young girls, obviously from school because they had on their uniforms. Black shoes, white knee socks, plaid skirts, white shirts and green sweaters. Catholic school, I'd seen that uniform ever day from 1st until 6th grade. They looked disheveled, their hair was a mess. They were crouched down, not sitting and as I took in the scene, I saw 5 or 6 more girls, similarly clad, laying in the road. My first reaction, for that very first second I became aware of them, was that they were with the other girls and just laying there instead of crouching like the others. The girl nearest to me had light skin and almost blonde hair, her uniform was smudged and I could see her hand was scraped and bleeding. Other than that she looked almost angelic, serene there on the road. Then I saw the men on the side of the road, on the sharp point of the bend, and they were frantic.. I saw ropes going over the edge, and I craned my neck to see down the cliff. About 30 feet down, on a wide ledge covered in dry, brown grass lay a school bus, on it's top, with men crawling over it like ants, ropes all over. I looked at the girl to my right and I dawned on me that she was dead, and the 3 or 4 other girls laying beside her were dead as well, their bus having lost control on the curve and plunged over the side, down to the broad ledge with the dried brown grass. There were too many people there running around for us to stop, so we crept through the afternoon scene, young school girls crouched on the road in the bright, clear afternoon sun, beside their dead classmates, more dead and injured being carried and pulled up the steep cliff side by the men on the shoulder of the road. As we gained speed after the accident scene, at least a dozen ambulances, shrill sirens demanding clear passage, abject fear and anxiety painting the faces of the drivers hurtling to what they by now knew was a horrific, tragic scene. One after another they raced to that sunlight nightmare, and people, perhaps parents of the children on the bus, were running outside to see what was going on. On their faces were looks of curiosity and concern, but they had not yet learned what horror lay just a few miles down the road.By the time we reached Dr. Alt, about a mile from the City, the people lining the road had looks on their faces different from those down the hill, and seeing them crying and praying, you knew the details of what had happened had reached them. Either by radio or telephone, the story had reached Guadalajara, and I will never forget the rush of people towards the deadly road that wound down the mountain, as if they were water and someone had turned the town on it's side and the water was draining out that one corner of the town, like they were drawn to the tragedy, seeking, by sheer number of weeping, grieving, praying people, to make it not be true.
A Texas Surfer in New York
When I was arrested with 177 pounds of pot, I kept my mouth shut about my associates, went to prison, did my time and got out. I was honored to do so, to be a "Stand Up" guy. In fact, I was called that by the two big Mafioso in Big Spring, the Smaldone Brothers.
Well, about 8 months after I got out, we had moved to New Haven. I get a call from the guy I used to work for, Sandy Saunders. Sandy was the sweetest drug smuggler you'd ever meet, he really was, and I still tear up thinking about him. Anyhow, I get this call, asking if I want to meet him for a weekend in New York City for a "Thank God you kept your mouth shut" party, had a room at Trump Plaza, so I said sure, what's a little parole violation? So off I go on the train, take a cab from Grand Central and went up to my room overlooking Central Park. 14th floor, nice. We have some drinks, rent some women, have some fun. Saturday, Sandy has some business. He wants to go to the Garment District and talk to someone about selling some fish leather... yes, fish leather. Sandy had some connection with a place in Mexico that was buying and tanning Marlin, Tuna and redfish skins.. We're walking down the street in So Ho...see a young Hasidic Jew... well, young by the Garment District standards, about 45 or so. Sandy, pure Texas accent, asks him "Hey, can I talk to you for a minute? I have something I'd like to speak to you about". We get a look, a nod, and we're hustled into a small but nice office. I'm sitting back, watching and listening. The man walks around behind his desk and sinks into his chair, braids hanging down, hat snugged tight and asks "SO, vat do you want want to talk to ME about?". Sandy tells him "I have some fish leather I'd like you to see, maybe if you like it we can do some business.". "Do you have anything vit you I can see?" "Yeah, I got a swatch right here", offering two small samples, one a redfish skin, the other a section from a Blue Marlin and lays them on the man's desk. The man doesn't move. He looks down at the skins, his eyebrows arch, his shoulders hunch up and he leans forward, looking directly at Sandy and says.. "THAT's a Svatch?? Weeellllll, if you want to call that a SVATCH..... it's a SVATCH!".
Hummingbirds
I’ve always had hummingbirds in my life, from Connecticut to Washington State to Colorado to Texas, not just a casual connection, but one that, if I believed in a ‘spiritual universe’, was cosmic.
My mother was a pretty avid bird watcher, and we used to get Ruby Throated hummingbirds up in Connecticut during the summer months. When I lived in Colorado, I used to fish weekly on the South Platte River, and the place where I fished was full of hummingbirds part of the year. Washington State hummingbirds, one in particular, a female, gave me the greatest moment of my military career. All three years of it. And a hummingbird in Texas changed my life in a most profound way.
When I was in the Army, I was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington. I was a scout for a tank battalion , and we subsequently spent a lot of time out in the field. Fort Lewis is in western Washington, just south of Puget Sound and it covered with thick pine forests and wide open range that were home to lots of flowering plants, pretty good hummingbird habitat. I was driving my platoon sergeant, Larry White, and we were not good friends to put it mildly. Let’s just say we came from different backgrounds and had a different view of life and Army in general. We were practicing scout stuff with the tanks, and had some down time, so we pulled over into the trees to get out of the rare but hot summer sun. I was reading an article in Readers Digest on hummingbirds, and although it was short, it had a lot of information about hummingbirds that I was unaware of up unit that point in time. I was reading about how Native Americans regarded them as fierce warriors and powerful totems or spirit guides, and most interesting, how they were fierce defenders of their nests and territories. Seems they have such a high calorie requirement due to their incredible metabolism that they cannot afford to share the flowers and nectar in their territories with other birds, so they are prone to attack one another. The article said that they would drive snakes, cats, raccoons and other predators, even black bears, from their nests by using their beaks as weapons, stabbing their antagonists and darting away until the trespasser is driven off.
As odds would have it that particular day as we pulled into the shade, we ended up about 50 feet from a hummingbird nest. The agitated parents drew our attention and Sgt. White said “Wow, a hummingbird nest! I’ve never seen one of them! I’m gonna go look!”. I said “Hey Sgt. White, I was just reading about how they use their beaks to defend their nests, you might want to leave it alone and watch from here”. I didn’t put a lot of ‘sell’ into it, but I made the effort, and to be honest, I wanted to see if Readers Digest was telling the truth about them being so fierce and aggressive. He laughed and said “Swanson, you’re so full of shit, you come up with the most ridiculous bullshit in the world and you just expect people to believe you. You think you know so much!“ Well, I didn’t have long to wait. Sgt. White walked over, the parents took off and started buzzing around him. I said “Hey man, I told you.” His reply was typical of Larry White, god love him. “Hey, it’s a damn hummingbird, what the hell do you think it’s gonna do?”. He reached up, pulled the branch the nest was on down to look at it and sure as I’m bald, he got nailed twice in the back of the neck by the parents. I mean POW! It was just that fast… he let’s the branch go, grabs his neck, starts screaming because, well, it probably hurt like hell considering what the holes looked like when he showed them to me and the medic. Two holes about the size of a pencil lead about two inches apart. I said “Looks like a rattler bit you”. The best part was being able to give him a hard time while he was running around screaming and trying to stop the bleeding, I mocked him in my most sarcastic voice, and that’s pretty sarcastic, saying “Gawd Damn you Swaansoon, you think you know SO MUCH and all you do is BULLSHIT”. It was wonderful, and I knew from that moment on that me and hummingbirds were operating on the same level.
Three days before I got married, my brother Barry and I were up before dawn, going out fishing for redfish and trout on the absolutely beautiful lower Laguna Madre, which also happens to be one of the places where migrating hummingbirds make landfall after flying across the Gulf of Mexico on their northern migration. We lived in an apartment building that had open parking underneath the apartments, with a lighted stairwell going from the parking area up to an enclosed stairwell.
We walked out of my apartment on the second floor, and as I turned to close the door behind us, my brother said “Holy smokes, look, a hummingbird!” I turned around and there up against the window was a hummingbird, lured up by the lights and trying to get out. I had what I would call a ‘very strange, quiet feeling’ come over me, almost a ringing in my ears, and it seemed that all my focus was on that hummingbird. Without really thinking, I slowly walked over to the bird and held out my left hand, index finger out, something to land on. He looked at me for a second and landed on my finger. We were just looking at each other, and I slowly turned and started walking towards the stairs. I slowly put my right hand up and cupped it over the bird, not confining it or holding it, just covering it. I walked down to the parking lot, walked back well away from the stairwell and held my hand out, took my right hand away. The bird sat on my finger for just a few seconds and then did something that so profoundly affected me that if I live to be 100 I doubt I will ever be so moved by something. It took off, but it just hovered there in front of me, looking me right in the eye. It held it’s hover for a couple of seconds and then in a flash was gone over my left shoulder, close enough that I felt the wind from his wings as he passed, hopefully on his way to that canyon outside Denver on the South Platte River.
I once dated a woman who, as it turns out, was taken by hummingbirds too. The first thing I saw the first time I walked into her house was hummingbirds, all over, from glass statues to pictures to paintings to prints. We got along pretty good after that, in fact, she was instrumental in a life changing event in my life.
I went to bed in my apartment on South Padre and had a dream, that’s what most people would call it but to me it was a lot more than a just a dream. I guess it would be what most people call a “waking dream” and I have to tell you, that’s exactly what it was. It was like being there, awake and totally aware.
I was in Colorado, taking a nap on the bank of the South Platte where I always used to fish when I lived in Colorado, and as I stood up, I thought ‘Man, that’s strange, I had a dream I lived in Texas!’. I wiped the gravel off the palms of my hands from when I pushed off the sandy soil where I had been snoozing. I walked into the river, feeling the cool wetness wrapping itself around my legs. The scent of pine was in the air, there was a slight breeze and the brown trout were biting. I caught and release a couple of nice ones, changed my fly to a streamer, a Mickey Finn, and went back to fishing in the afternoon sun, like I had hundreds of times before.
As I was fishing, I heard a car drive up and I turned to see Lillian, my old girlfriend with the apartment full of hummingbirds, standing on the bank. She was surrounded by dozens of hummingbirds and was trying to tell me something, but because I was out wading in the middle of the river, I couldn’t really hear what she was saying. I thought she must have a feeder behind her back to attract so many birds, I know it seems strange now but in the dream it made perfect sense. My old girlfriend from Texas, where, according to the dream, I never lived, was standing there talking to me on the banks of the South Platte River outside Denver, surrounded by hummingbirds. I swear it seamed perfectly acceptable in the dream.
Anyway, while she was talking to me, I heard her say “Nazca”. That was the only thing I heard her say and I heard it clearly. She turned to leave, I waved and went back to fishing. I fished for a couple of more hours, moved about a mile down the river and went to wait for my ride. I went to sit in the same place I used to when I lived there, leaned back against the bank, removed a stick that was poking me and closed my eyes for a quick nap.
When I woke up in my apartment on South Padre, I absolutely freaked out. It was like the Twilight Zone or something and I was pretty whacked by the whole thing, so I sat down and said to myself “Look, something is going on, sit here and think this out and it’ll be all OK”. When I was going over the dream, Nazca came to mind and it seemed really familiar, but seeing as I had just woken up and was freaking out, it didn’t ring a bell so I went on my computer and went to Gopher, the old search engine and typed in Nazca and hit “Enter”. First result that came up said “Nazca Lines” and I clicked on it. Which ended up scaring the crap out of me far worse than the dream had. What came up on my monitor was a picture taken from a plane of the Nazca Lines in Peru, huge representations laid out on a massive scale on some high desert plains. What had come up on my computer, what had freaked me out so badly, was that the very first image from that link was of a hummingbird. I printed it out, walked over to Peggy’s Tattoos and got my first tattoo at the age of 43. It’s a hummingbird, over my heart.
Just a few years ago I had moved into a new apartment and had some friends over. I was on the second floor, and the patio of that apartment was actually about 50 feet in the air due to the fact that the building was on a hill that fell away to a creek behind the complex. It was really beautiful so we walked out on the deck to check out the creek. I had just told them about my connections with hummingbirds a few minutes before we walked out onto the deck, and as we looked down there was a hummingbird checking out some flowers along the creek. I said to Rich “I’m surprised he hasn’t come up here to check us out”, kidding of course. Not two second later, the bird flew up, stopped about 10 feet out in front of us, looked the thee of us over and went back down to the flowers below. Rich and Jessica about fainted.
This spring I was at a friends house, sitting on the deck overlooking their beautifully landscaped backyard. They had out several hummingbird feeders and I asked them if they had seen any yet, they said no. We talked about how cool hummingbirds are, I mentioned some of my encounters with them. True to form, a few minutes later, a male ruby throated came by the deck, flashing his tail in a territorial/mating display. I think there’s something more serious than coincidence going on here, but I’m not really sure.
Aunt Betty
This is something I wrote when I was writing Editorials for a newspaper down in the Valley.
Dave. Best I can do today.
“Tanstofl”, according to Robert Hienlien, roughly translates into “There ain’t no free lunch”. “No good deed goes unpunished”, “You’re gonna’ get caught!”. Simplistic little sayings that you hear all your life, most of which refer to the fact that nobody gets out of here alive, you will always get caught, and no matter how bad it gets it rarely gets bad enough to kill you. It can lead you to the realization that we are all the victims of caprice of the gods, that fate can and will smash you when you least expect it, even though fate can smack you as flat even when you do expect it. It can be a humbling experience to find that no matter how well laid plans, out of the blue something can and will go wrong. We are not the masters of anything but our own time, and we can only do with our time what we believe we can.
One thing you hear a lot from older people is that things get better, things get easier as you learn more about life, like anything else, you either beat your head flat or you learn how not to beat your head flat. Youth is for the young because anyone with life experience wouldn’t ever go back to when you had pimples, you didn’t know squat and you spent most of your life recovering from your last boneheaded adventure. And in truth. life does get a little easier when you finally figure things out, when you discover your limitations and are then free to act on life in accordance with what you know, say, like golf. We have a tournament here in the Valley call the Life Begins at Forty. And I have to admit turning forty wasn’t as traumatic as I had anticipated it being when I contemplated the event in my youth. Time gives you the gift of perspective, but time also takes away in a manner you never envisioned when you were a kid. Hence the “no free lunch” aspect of life, the yin and yang of day to day existence.
Time gives us many things in it’s passage. Experience, realization and accomplishment, the joy of friendship and companionship, the recollections of shared experiences with friends. But the toll time exacts is sometimes fearsome, it can cut you down and break your heart, because what life presents you it can deny to you at the same time. Years of associations can be severed in a flash, usually by a phone call, usually early in the morning, when the bell tolls for thee. When we deal with the death of a loved one, expected or not, age or experience is no shield. The ringing of the phone can take the most powerful man or woman and in a flash make them a lonely child, overcome by grief, unable to speak... the phone can make your world stop, can cause time to freeze.
By chance I was lucky enough to have had an aunt, a great aunt, sister to my grandfather who I am named after, though he latter forgave my parents. She never married, was of small stature, but was so full of life and adventure that she left people amazed when they met her, a real pisser. She was a nurse, she was a thinker, she traveled the world. Her apartment was full of the things she had collected on her journeys, from the SS Queen Elizabeth to the miniature Eiffel tower on her windowsill. She spent her life with wild extravagance and she loved it. She enjoyed the shock when people heard she traveled the world alone, just to see the things she had read about. You did not know her so you cannot understand what or who she was, but her gusto and joy at life had a tremendous impact on my life and the way I live it.
This morning about six, the phone rang in the way it does when something has happened, so I didn’t get up to answer it, but when the message came on, I heard my mothers voice and knew that my Aunt Betty had passed. For me it was something more, for it was her time and she knew it and, no longer independent, she welcomed it. For me it was a generational passing, she was the last of my grandfathers generation. The reference library of my family has passed and no longer will I be able to hear first hand her stories of the world and her great adventures.... My ancestors are all anecdotes.
Some aspects of life get easier as you get older, some do not.
Fishing
I’ve been lucky in my life to have spent significant portion of it engaged in the endeavor of fishing. I’ve fished for striped bass on Cape Cod at Longnook, and caught bluefish in Mexico, trout in every state I’ve lived in, spinning and using bait, fly fishing and gigging flounder. Definitely, the most significant memories of my life are about fishing, either specific fish caught, or the simple beauty of the day, or night, spent outdoors. Of all those memories, all those hours fishing, all the sights and sounds and tastes encountered while pursuing this obsession, this is the most significant event related to fishing in my life.
Years ago, a good friend passed a “secret spot” on to me, telling me where to find excellent fishing in Wyoming if I cared to wander off the beaten path for a while. As chance would have it, my brother and a friend of ours happened, in 1983, to be in the area. We discussed it and decided to see if my friend was a good friend or a good fisherman, and off we went. It turned out to be as advertised, a rare, wonderful place where fish were eager and strong and large and happy. We caught large, fine, beautiful fish and released them back to the clear water, glad to have met them.
Again, years later, I was waiting tables on South Padre Island, where the redfish are large and the speckled trout are fierce. I walked up to one of my tables, a well dressed family of a wife, son and father. The son, about 10 or so, was wearing an Orvis fishing shirt, and I asked him if he was down here fly fishing in the Laguna Madre. He said no, he didn’t have any salt water gear with him but he and his father had decided to definitely bring some next time they came down. I asked him how long he’d been fly fishing, and he lit up like a candle, telling me he’d been doing it for a couple of years, loved it, and he and his family were going to Wyoming over the summer and he was going to go fly fishing on some of the great rivers out there, the Green and the Snake and the thousands of creeks and brooks all across the state. I took their order and as the night went on, they were really, really cool people, not at all impressed with their obviously comfortable lifestyles, basically, just two fishermen and the woman who loved them. So, to all of us, a family we’re all accustomed to.
I decided to tell them how to get there, and I did. I told them exactly where to go, exactly how far to drive, where to walk, and how to approach the water where those fish, hopefully, still sat, eager, fat and happy, waiting to meet this eager young angler and his quite, simple father. And that was that, they left, I wished them good luck and promised them if they went to “the spot” it would be a special experience. I hoped I was right and went on with my life.
Almost two years later, still waiting tables between fishing trips, I was told that I had a phone call. It wasn’t busy, so I went upstairs to the office to take the call. The voice on the line said “Hey, you don’t remember me, but my wife, son and I were at the Lantern Grill” and I said “Did you get to that spot on the Green?”. What he told me next reaffirmed a lot of what I’ve always believed was important in life. It changed me life in a significant, positive way, and I’m really not articulate enough to explain what it meant to me. He said this. “My father, son and I got up real early and drove to where you told us to go. It looked pretty sketchy the first couple of miles off the main road, but after a bit you could see this beautiful river that looked like it was full of fish, we were really eager to stop but decided to go to where you’d told us to go, seeing as that was the reason we’d gotten up in the first place. It was a lot better than you told us it was. My son caught the first fish, a brook trout at least 24 inches, and he caught the second, a brown trout about 20 inches. The rest of the day, all three of us caught the biggest, most beautiful brook and brown trout we’d ever seen. About 20 minutes after we got there, my father caught the biggest brown trout he’d ever caught, probably about 5 or 6 pounds. We all took pictures and my son released it. I got to sit there, on a beautiful fall morning, surrounded by my family, watching my father teach my son how to fly fish, and I just wanted to thank you.”.
Birds and Me.
Without comment one way or another.
When I was in 3rd grade, I was sitting at my school desk, looking out the window and a ruffled grouse flew out of the woods and directly into the window. He smashed through the window, cut to pieces, and skidded across the floor at the front of the classroom.
I was attacked by a swan once in Rhode Island.
I had a nighthawk fly into my forehead through an open window one night at about 3AM while rushing to an emergency on a gas well I was drilling in Bedias, Texas. I was doing about 90 when it hit me, about broke my neck.
I was riding my motorcycle through Laguna Vista, Texas and a peacock flew out, slammed into my headlight and up into my chest, almost knocking me off the back of the motorcycle.
