An old one

Here is something I wrote quite some time ago. I'm guessing about 2011. I'm pulling it out of mothballs now because I don't have any other post for this week. This will have to do.  

I had heard the saying, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt." 

Writing probably demonstrates one's mental status even more clearly than speech does, and many of you may find this, whatever it is, rather foolish.  Can't be helped.  Reading this again, and editing it slightly, dredged up a lot of good memories for me. I hadn't thought of Richard in a long time and I wonder how he's doing.  

Enough introduction and excuses and procrastination.  

Them Thar Hills

D. Foster

 

Several weeks ago my friend Richard, “The Professor,” called and announced that he is working on yet another book. It's one of those “List of Things I Like” books that were popular at one time.  He asked me if I cared to suggest a few of my own ‘likes’.  If they were plentiful and good enough, he said, I’d get credit in the introduction.

 

Always ready to help, and figuring that this was the best chance I had of ever getting anything of mine published, I rattled off several things that had always been at the top of my list of ‘likes’.   He quickly pointed out that he hoped to be selling his book in those ‘bookseller’ places that are in every airport across the country, and not to be doing free ads for scotch and cigar companies.  Well, that eliminated a portion of my list, and some of the very best in my opinion.   ‘Plentiful’ was going to be harder than I thought. And what he would consider ‘good enough’ was anybody’s guess.

 

Besides, if he was planning to sell this book in airports, he’d be a lot more likely to sell them if it contained a “List of Things  I Don't Like”.  It’s been my experience that people in airports these days are not going to be looking for ‘touchy, feely’ sweetness.  What they want is something that will match their level of frustration, something that will put some 'starch in their shorts.'  

 

In my version of this book of his, the chapter on “Things I don’t Like About Airports” would be first in the table of contents and would probably be the longest list in the book.  I think that sort of book would leap off the shelves, straighten the spines of those flyers in the lines awaiting their session with the T.S.A. agents, and may ultimately even help to defeat any terrorist element that might be loitering in one of the airport food courts.  All this political correctness is nothing more than political ineptness in my opinion.  But what do I know?

 

His suggestion though, did get me thinking of the other sorts of things that I like, once I eliminated all those top-shelf items and concentrated on the things of a more mundane nature.  Here then, are a few things I like. 

 

Treasure.   Many years ago, I had the foresight to meet and marry a woman whose father owned land.  Lots of land.  Farmland in what is known locally as the ‘banana belt of Upper Michigan,’ for its relatively benign climate.  This productive land continually yields up all sorts of treasures.  All you have to do is to go out there and find it lying around somewhere, and bring it home to enjoy.  It’s true that the land can also yield bounties of crops, firewood, and stone fences, but those things take a lot of effort to produce and if you ask me, are not the true treasures of the land.  

 

Now, I’d like to adapt an old saying and admit that ‘one man’s treasure is another man’s trash,’ so if you don’t agree with my list of treasures, go figure out a list of your own.  I think that realizing what your particular ‘treasures’ are is good for your soul.

 

A great early American pioneer, Yosemite Sam, once shouted, “There’s gold in them, thar hills.”  Well, he was wrong, as far as I know, about there being gold in any of my hills. I inherited some and subsequently purchased another big one and a couple of smaller ones, but there are other riches in them that Sam probably didn’t consider when he made that claim. 

 

Float Copper:  Float copper is chunks of copper ore, nearly pure, that were torn loose from copper deposits by glaciers in the last ice age and left lying around, north and west of here, in what’s known, not surprisingly, as the ‘copper country’ of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, when they melted.  This stuff was recognized as a valuable commodity by the very earliest people that moved into the area after the ice exited, and they hauled pieces of the stuff far and wide, trading it with other peoples. Archeologists have found pieces of Michigan copper as far away as Mexico.

 

During one of these trading journeys, some early resident must have forgotten to pick up his load of float copper one morning, after camping for the night at a spot that would one day, ages later, become one of my father-in-law's farm fields.  Dave, my aforementioned f-i-l, while picking stones one day in his newly plowed field prior to planting, found three big pieces that probably weighed 60 pounds in all. A seventeen pounder is now holding open my basement door. 

Mushrooms:  Another treasure is any member of a family of mushrooms, known (to me) as the Morchella sisters; Morchella esculanta, M. deliciosa, and M. elata. (scientific binomials) 

 

(“The tune from the West Side Story song, ‘Maria’, should now start playing softly in the background of your mind.)

 

…“ Mor-chel-la.  I just found a ‘shroom called Mor-chel-la.”  “And suddenly that name, will never be the same….to me…” 

 

“Say it loud, and there’s music playing…”

 

“Say it soft, and it’s almost like praying…”

 

“Mor-chel-la……

 

Okay, maybe it is a little over the top to describe the polymorphic fruiting body of a fungus in such terms, but if you can’t forgive me for getting carried away, it’s undoubtedly because you have never put such a fruiting body in your mouth.  Whether you fry them in butter, cook them with scrambled eggs, or, and I do say this softly and reverently, batter and deep-fry them, they are the queens of all mushrooms. 

 

And, when I tell you that it has been reported to me, by reputable sources, (Fred and McKenzie) that they just saw four fresh, average sized Morchellas (a.k.a. morels) selling for $20.00 in a fancy organic market in St. Paul, Mn., you will possibly understand how rich I feel, having gathered approximately 600 of the beauties last spring. 

 

Such a treasure can be worth a great deal of money, as I’ve just demonstrated, and it bothers me that I should probably be investing in some sort of vault for my stash, and not just keep them in my chest freezer, as I’m doing now.  What if my home were burglarized? 

 

The cop investigating the theft would probably say something like, “Well, this guy’s house isn’t worth beans, and he had no possessions, jewelry, or cash to speak of, but the perp cleaned out his freezer to the tune of about 3 Grand!”

 

Now,  some other mushroom lovers I know, Fred and Mike specifically, have admitted to being enamored of other ‘ladies’ beside my lovely Morchella sisters.  They have the hots for a rather hefty beauty they affectionately call their little ‘hen of the woods’.  Her real name is Grifola fondrosa.  Hmmm….Grifola. Sounds like she might look like one of those flashlight-toting lady ushers at a Russian cinema.  This ‘little hen’ can go 10 pounds without even trying, so if you like lots of ‘lady’, this might be the mushroom for you too.  Me, I like ‘em petite and shapely, so I am staying faithful to my ‘girls’. 

 

But it’s not always easy to stay faithful to them.  They, like some human ladies, have their ways of keeping us in our place.  Hunting them is easy, they hang in all sorts of places, but actually bringing them home ‘to meet the folks’ so to speak, can be very tricky indeed.

 

You wouldn’t think it would be very hard, since they can’t run off when you approach, but they, like all females of every Genus and species, have their wiles.  They take an attitude.  Many a time I have spotted a real keeper, 10 or 20 yards off, that starts my heart doing flips, and I rush over to meet her and entice her to come with me.  By the time I reach her though, I find that she has turned into an upturned leaf, the end of a stick, a hunk of corncob, a pinecone, or some other such thing.  I have often waited patiently for her to turn back into herself or have even re-traced my steps to the point where I first spotted her, but I have found that once she has changed, she stays changed, at least I suspect, until I’m out of her neighborhood.  I’ll bet that I no sooner than I turn the corner than she makes the change, and is as cute as ever, waiting to frustrate the next poor sap that is out for a stroll among the leaves.  

 

Fighting/throwing/walking sticks:  About 1961 or so, my brother Wayne and I watched the 1938 classic, Robinhood, starring Errol Flynn.  Especially impressive to our 6 and 10 year-old eyes was the fight scene over the river that Robin and Little John waged with ‘fighting sticks’, as we dubbed them.  As we watched, we knew that our lives would not be complete until we had each provided ourselves with such an indispensable tool of manhood. 

 

I, by that time, was the proud owner of not only a cub-scout pocketknife, but a recently acquired small hatchet.  This was wielded most of one morning to hack at approximately two dozen saplings, most of them ironwoods I found out much later, until we finally happened across a couple of spindly aspens that actually fell.  A short time later, Wayne and I began to practice our skills, remembering and trying to duplicate the moves we had seen the night before. What we discovered was that we, unlike Robin and Little John, spent most of our time rubbing badly bruised knuckles.  How our two heroes could so successfully handle their weapons while we only made each other mad was a real source of frustration to both of us. 

 

Still, it didn’t take us long to decide that Robin and Little John, probably off camera, also used their ‘fighting sticks’ as spears.  We hadn’t noticed during the movie, if one end of each stick was honed to a razor-edged point or not, but thought that they probably were, and if they weren’t, they should have been. 

 

We lost no time therefore, in beginning to work one end of our sticks to that deadly point needed on any good projectile.  I told Wayne that I had heard somewhere that cavemen had sharpened sticks and then tempered them in a fire to keep the tip from blunting.  Wayne was as enthusiastic as I was about immediately getting a good fire going and doing the same with our spears, but since the fire making materials at our house were carefully monitored by our mother and in one of the upper cupboards besides, we didn’t really think we’d be able to start one, just to do some tempering.  We decided to talk our dad into building us a wiener-roasting fire and then to nonchalantly stroll in with our spears for a quick tempering between the wieners and the marshmallows courses.   Wayne actually came up during our next ‘roast’, with the idea of impaling half a dozen marshmallows in a row on the end of his spear, thus ‘toasting’ his marshmallows and tempering the tip in one step, but that was cut short by dad when Wayne began waving his five foot long, now flaming spear over the heads of my three screaming sisters.  Wayne’s spear was confiscated by dad, the fire extinguished and the threat handed out that if he ever caught us throwing sharp sticks around the yard, he’d ‘whale the tar’ out of both of us.  Since dad’s threats were invariably carried out in exactly the manner and to the degree described, we recognized that our current adventure in Sherwood Forest was over, at least while we were in our yard. Dad never ventured into the woods.   

 

Besides, Robin and Little John were also crack shots with bows and arrows.  Dad hadn’t said that he had anything at all against a well-made English long-bow (where’s my hatchet?) and we found that goldenrod stems made passable arrows, though they did tend to curve a little in flight. 

 

Now, almost 50 years later, I find myself still enamored of a good stick, either straight or with artistic, natural bends and knobs.  I harvest them from ‘the land’, my very own grown-up Sherwood Forest, and haul them home.  I strip the bark and dry them, then sand them till they shine, and layer on various coatings designed to bring out their natural beauty.  I use them occasionally when I take hikes around my 130 acres, and figure that at my current rate of wear on the business end, I should have enough walking sticks to last about 10,000 years, give or take.  If you need one yourself, let me know.  I can probably spare it. 

 

At this point, I must apologize for cutting short my list of treasures.  My fields and woods regularly give up other wonders that I will have to discuss at some future time.  Fossils are widespread.  So are those little white ceramic insulators that were used to support electric fence wires in the old days.  Colorful wild turkey feathers, white-tail deer antler sheds, and even parts of animal skeletons come home regularly with me and are used, respectively, to adorn Jeanne’s artwork, to give to a friend who hand-makes pens, or to share with Charlie, the neighborhood mastiff, who appreciates bones of any description.     

 

Right now, though, the evening is upon me and it’s time to refresh myself, body and soul, with a couple of my ‘top-shelf likes’ mentioned earlier, that my friend Richard, is apparently unaware of.  A wee dram or two (Okay, maybe not so wee) of smoky, Scottish Laphroaig and a Cuban puro (You can find them if you look) will set just the right mood for the glorious sunset that is just beginning to blaze off there, across my hills…. 

Great Horny Toads!  I just realized that Yosemite Sam was right after all, there IS gold in them thar hills.

 

Well, that's it for this week.  To any of you who might be harboring an inclination to write of your own adventures, I say go for it.  You'll be glad that you did.     -djf