They say a picture is worth 1,000 words…but I think what they are really worth is 1,000 memories. These days they’ve gotten so easy to come by. The digital world has improved some things, but I still miss the feeling I had back when I turned in a roll of Kodachrome and went to see them “again for the first time.” The end of the year is a time for reflection, and I am actually writing this on December 30th, 2016.
The office is quiet today and I am able to look around my small portion of it at some of the photos that clutter my wall. I had a fellow tell me one time, “Wow your office is like a monument to you.” I don’t think he meant to insult me, and if he had looked closely he would have seen all the other people and pets in those photos. I did not bother to try to explain to him that these photos are like my “Linus blanket.” These office walls and this job can close in sometimes and it is hard to explain the suffocating feeling I get from time to time when I feel like all I can do is never going to be enough. So I surround myself with people and places that take me to someplace warm.
I see friends when we were young. Like that time we went to Santee-Cooper South Carolina and caught enough catfish to fill two big coolers with fillets. One night we fished through a violent thunderstorm. Those were the “bullet proof” days. We were fishing two poles each until the storm hit and as the rain pelted the water, the fish began to hit so fast we had to reel in one pole and focus on one. We caught them up to 40lbs. The next day we took these pics, hauling them in a wheelbarrow to the cleaning table.
I see a picture of me and a friend back in 1983 on a rabbit hunt while I was home on leave from the service. I am holding a rabbit and I’m wearing a pair of blue coveralls my Mom gave me for Christmas and a white toboggan – back before blaze orange became mandatory. Yes, luck sure plays a role in our continued existence sometimes.
And there is a photo of most of the core members of the 5 Bs Hunt Club posing in front of our deer hanging tree with 7 deer in the background and all of us striking a pose like we had just conquered Normandy. Of the six of us in that picture, two have now gone on to hunting grounds in the sky and our club as a whole has seen seven members pass on since its heyday. We visited the old cabin this November on the anniversary of one of those lost. The old Catalpa tree that hung our deer had also succumbed to time. But those memories hung on the fall air like wood smoke and, if you listened real close, you could hear feet falling on the old cabin floor.
I see a photo of an Oregon license plate from 1994. It was the year a good friend and I cut two weeks of grad school classes to fly to Oregon and hunt for 13 days. I killed a grand total of 13 game birds on that trip – one for each day, I spent a thousand dollars I did not have and probably sunk my chances of graduating with honors, but one thing I did not do was acquire any regrets. I don’t remember a single thing from any of the classes I cut, but the memories of that trip are a wonderful tattoo on my mind. In one photo the mountains slant to the right, the hunter stands straight with his gun slanting upward, and the clouds in the sky slant to the left, and it tells the story of that land of angles. The only flat place in that country is the bottom of a well. Like the author Cormac McCarthy said “It’s no country for old men.”
There’s a picture of when I first started working for this outfit. One of my co-workers and me posing with two nice jakes during spring gobbler season. We got ribbed pretty hard for killing jakes, but we didn’t care. I have hunted turkeys all over, and I have been defeated by wary old long beards way more often than I have won, but those two jakes…what a hunt. Long story short, my friend taught me a lesson about teamwork that spring. We hunted as a team and in this case we had been after these birds for a couple days, we had a decoy set-up and we sat about 2 yards apart with our backs to a downed stump ball. Over the hill they came running to the decoy, both like high school boys at their first dance. Our shots rang as one sound and the two birds dropped within feet of the decoy. I have never been more proud of a turkey.
There’s one of my wife before we were married. She was learning to fly-fish, but this day we used fly-rods and bait to fish for stocked brook trout on the South Fork of the Piney River in Amherst County. Of course, I was trying to impress her with my skills and she caught the biggest brook trout to date either of us has ever caught. Life gets crazy and we don’t fish together much anymore. It seems to me relationships have a way of going around some bends, but then coming back someday. Her smile that day raised the temperature along that chilly creek by 10 degrees.
One is a classic “tailgate” shot of bird hunters after a day afield. Some kind friends took me to a preserve one day. There’s Raymond, Bill, John and “Grunt”, Raymond’s son who was about seven at the time. He is well into his twenties now. And in front of them is Shell, grungy as usual, her woolly fur holding every bur, twig and clod of dirt she rubbed up against. And she is looking up at the hunters, tired but not out, and seeming to say “You done good.”
I could keep on for many more hours talking about these memories. I hope you have many of your own. I hope every day you wake up you say to yourself, “Let’s go make some more.” The last one I’ll mention today is of my daughter and me at a fee trout pond in Nelson County. When she was young I took her to a place I knew she could have success. The trout were expensive, but she didn’t know that. She had a ball. But what I remember most when I look at this picture is not that day itself, but a day a couple years later when I asked her, “Do you want to go back to the trout pond, or do you want to try fishing for them in the river?” She said “Daddy, I think I’d like to earn my trout, let’s fish in the river.” I think I’ll sit here and look at these pictures a while more…and just keep the thoughts for myself.
