I was on the phone with a close friend for a half-hour the other day. He recently had surgery, and on top of that, a mutual friend had passed away the day before. In my circle of friends, those exact same two situations have caused several calls of late, even though the circumstances were different.
A bit earlier someone called me for advice, and I apologized that I couldn’t offer more tangible assistance, namely handling a shovel. He laughed and assured me that he had that part covered.
Thinking about those two calls, I couldn’t help remembering when I was the one asking for the advice and handling the shovel – or more often chasing the birds with a shotgun and riding a bicycle for hours on end.
Now don’t get me wrong: I am shocked and grateful to God that I have somehow survived this long. My paltry collection of decades is nothing compared to so many other folks. Most of my health issues are directly related to my own poor judgement. Yet I have reached an age and more importantly, a generally busted-up physical condition, where sittin’ in the shade with a good dog and a cup of coffee has replaced much of the restlessness of youth.
Another friend sent me a video the other morning of his son on the opening day of archery season for deer. He was justifiably proud of a young buck whose harvest will not help feed his family and improve the gene pool. The young Nimrod was trying not to have too big of a smile on his face while his dog followed the short blood trail and the dog let the world know that his boy had made meat.
I couldn’t help but think of my dog Dudley and his partner Dixie, watching the fall of a dove, then trotting out to bring the bird back. Dudley did it by instinct, whereas Dixie had to have a little training. She never was quite as good at finding or retrieving as her old man, but she ably learned the disgruntled expression he wore when I missed a ridiculously easy shot.
I was past bicycles and into the unreliable, snorting, smoking hiccupping truck stage when Dixie came along. Prior to that, Dudley must have run thousands of miles beside me, heading to baseball, fishing or hunting, the necessary accoutrements of the day tied across my groaning bike in utter disregard of the laws of nature and physics. Of course those wonderful dogs have long since crossed over the Rainbow Bridge, as have a few of our human companions from those restless times.
We rarely had either the opportunity or the audacity to tell our mothers (mostly stay-at-home or part-time employed) that we were bored, because by Cracky, a mama will find something bored boys can do, and it wasn’t always fun. Ergo, I doubt there was an unexplored creek, swamp or abandoned house within miles of our territory. In retrospect we likely knew more forgotten burial grounds, native village sites and homesteads than the most preeminent historians of the time.
If we got caught in a rainstorm, we simply sheltered in whatever library, front porch or old shack was available. We even went so far as to carefully scavenge bricks and build a small firepit in a clean but forgotten barn, placing it so the prevailing wind carried the smoke out a missing section of roof. I know beyond a yellow-dog doubt we never had permission to go in the barn, much less build a firepit to stay warm, but we were never specifically told not to, either. That little firepit came in handy once when we discovered the hard way that Southern boys do not have the instincts necessary to determine when an iced-over pond is safe for a shortcut.
We never took anything from the barn (all that was left were a few rusty chains and tools with termite-eaten handles, anyway). We kept a salvaged bucket of water handy, and a rusted afterthought of a shovel, to properly extinguish our fires. After we drifted apart and began chasing sports, girls and other less noble pursuits, someone moved onto the property. I was fishing in the pond (with permission) when the resident happened by and casually mentioned that there was an old “hobo camp” in the barn. I kept my counsel and didn’t disabuse him of the notion.
Our restlessness took us to the banks of the Cape Fear, where generations before had camped, catfished and hunted ducks. At first those same bicycles were loaded down as previously mentioned, but later when we had the luxury of automobiles, one would have thought an Army battalion was bivouacking there.
That campground is gone now; I last saw it about 25 years ago, when on a trip through my old hometown I decided to take a side quest. The vine-draped, river-twisted trees had been carefully trimmed, and a small dock replaced the muddy shoreline where we caught catfish and built dangerously large fires. There was a neat fence and steps leading up the gully where we slipped and slid and swore as we hauled supplies to the shoreline. At the top one turned onto a paved street; there was no longer a rutted road where we occasionally had to pull each out to get home in time for church. A card-controlled gate allowed the worthy few access to a long line of generic homes that looked entirely out of place in the pines and hardwoods.
I couldn’t help but recall how a couple of us decided one day to ride our bikes from a farm down to that spot; it was significantly farther than we realized, and the traffic far worse along the two-lane highway, but we somehow made it, exhausted and sustained by only a Pepsi stuck in someone’s back pocket and a canteen someone had forgotten to unhook from a bike during a previous adventure. As I remember we all got a bit chewed on by our parents after that particular trip, since we weren’t home when we were supposed to be, we weren’t where we had said we would be when someone checked, and they found out through a third party that we were riding our bikes on the highway.
I miss that restlessness sometimes; I guess it’s more accurate that is hasn’t gone away, but my ability to act on it has, what with a worthless excuse for a spinal column and a knee that needs replacement if not outright amputation. While I grumble at the pain and indignity of not being able to haul a 60-pound pack down a muddy riverbank in the dark, I still can hobble through a forgotten burying ground, watching for broken headstones and collapsed tops lest my walking stick betray me and I unwittingly join the permanent residents therein.
I see that same inner restlessness in my friend’s son, chasing deer and trapping coons, and in the boys whose parents have allowed me to watch them grow up. One has a scar where he gashed his knee while hauling in a fish from a place he wasn’t supposed to be. Another has his own scar from a rusted piece of metal that objected to his exploration of a long-overgrown and subsequently forbidden trash dump.
Sometimes one of the boys will ask my advice, and I try to accept my assignment as gracefully as any elder holding court on a hundred thousand porches before me.
I know full well that sometimes my advice will be ignored, and I am okay with that, because I too once followed the siren’s song calling to the restlessness in a boy’s soul.
