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
I loved reading this about your treasures. Fred and I shared many of these wonderful treasures with you and we have our great memories of it also. That cauliflower in your header picture is amazing. McKenzie
ReplyDeleteYeah, it was fun hunting both mushrooms and deer with you two. What good times we had.
ReplyDelete