A Fine & Pleasant Misery

by Patrick McManus

  Camping in a national park is an invigorating experience. My seventy-year-old mother went off looking for a restroom among the sea of tents, cabins, and campers. After about an hour of unsuccessful searching, she was loping along looking for a path that led off into the wilderness and came upon a wild-eyed man loping in the opposite direction.

  "Sir," she said as they passed, "could you tell me where I can find a restroom?"

  "I don't know, lady," he shouted over his shoulder. "I've been here for three days and haven't found one yet!"

  Some parks still have excellent fishing in them if you can find it, but on the easily accessible streams you would have better luck digging for clams in Montana. There are of course the tame fish planted by the park service, and these can be caught with a bent pin on the end of a clothesline with bubble gum for bait. The sight of a live insect or even a dry fly makes them nauseous. Catching one of them is almost as exciting as changing the water in the goldfish bowl. After being dumped into one of the park streams the fish quickly adjust to their new environment, however, and within a week or two are consuming vast quantities of soggy hot dog buns and cigarette butts.

  (Scientists estimate that eating one of these fish is equivalent to eating two loaves of bread and four packs of cigarettes.) If antilittering eventually catches on, a lot of fish will be alongside the highways with the bears.

  They'll be begging smokes from tourists.

  Many people are under the mistaken impression that transistor radios come from japan, but that is not the case. Transistor radios breed in national parks and from there move out to infest the rest of the country. Their mating cries at night are among the most hideous sounds on earth, approximately on the order of those of catamounts with arthritis. The offspring are prodigious in number. During the day you can see hundreds of youngsters carrying the baby transistor radios around the park. I proposed to a park ranger that a season be opened on the adults of the species with an eye to limiting the population growth. He said he himself was all for it but that park regulations forbid hunting of any kind.

  The site on which we finally pitched our tent was in the middle of a vast caldron of writhing humanity. This made it easy to meet interesting people.

  Several times I chatted with the fellow next door about his hobby of pumping the exhaust from his car into our tent. The fellows on the other side of us were members of a rock band. For a long time I thought they were just pounding dents out of their bus, but it turned out they were practicing.

  Their rendition of "A Truck Full of Empty Milk Cans Crashing into a Burglar Alarm Factory" was kind of catchy, but the rest of their stuff was much too loud for my taste. People would also drop into our tent at all hours. They would look about for a second or two, a puzzled expression on their faces, then leave. Then we discovered that the trail to the restroom passed under our tent. This discovery made Mother noticeably happy and she vanished like a shot up the trail.

  I decided that the best thing to do was to give up on tenting and try to get into one of the park tourist cabins. After mortgaging our home and indenturing two of the children for fourteen years, we managed to scrape together sufficient rent for two nights. The architecture of the cabin was about halfway between Neoshack and Neolithic. Frank Lloyd Wright would have loved it because it blended so naturally into its surroundings--a superb replica of a hobo jungle.

  The only good thing about the cabin was that the roof didn't leak all the time we were there. Of course if it had rained, there's no telling what might have happened. It is doubtful that the seine net used for roofing would have kept us dry, but I figured we could always set up the tent inside the cabin.

  Our days at the park were filled with the delights of viewing the marvelous phenomena. There was the spring hot enough to boil an egg in, and someone was running a scientific experiment to see if it would do the same thing for an old newspaper and a half-eaten hamburger.

  Reflection Lake was truly beautiful, with the scraggly spruce trees around its edges so sharply defined in the glass on the lake bottom that you could make out the hatchet marks on them. The Painted Rocks were interesting in their own way, especially where park employees had managed to remove some of the paint. The kids seemed to enjoy the ancient hieroglyphics to be found everywhere: "Fred and Edith Tones, Peanut Grove, Calif.--1968," etc. Then there were the antics of the wildlife. Once we were fortunate enough to observe two mature male Homo sapiens locking horns in a territorial dispute over a parking spot.

  just when I finally found a way to amuse myself in the park, my wife insisted that we leave. She was afraid I would get arrested for trying to poach transistor radios with rocks. Also, while attempting to photograph a bald woodpecker, she flushed a covey of young people deeply engrossed in their own particular study of nature. (If the truth were known, she was probably more flushed than they.) Anyway, she said the only vistas she wanted to see for some time to come were the insides of the four walls of our mortgaged house. We hit the road for home the next day.

  Next summer I think I'll skip the national parks and take my family to a place I know up in the Rockies. It doesn't have all the conveniences and accommodations of a national park, of course. The bears aren't especially friendly (but if you do see one, he doesn't look as if he recently escaped from an iron lung). If you have the sudden urge to buy a plastic animal, you just have to grit your teeth and bear it.

  The scenery isn't all that spectacular, unless you get a little excited over invisible air. The place doesn't have even a geyser, but when I get there it will at least have an old geaser. Some people like to watch him sit on a log and smoke his pipe, in particular a certain middle-aged woman and four ignorant kids. If you need more spectacle than that, you can always go to a national park.

  A Yup of a Different Color

  About three weeks before the opening of the first deer season in which I had been guaranteed permission to be an active participant, our resident deer vanished. All that remained of them was some sign sprinkled arrogantly among the plundered rows of our garden. (Since I was only fourteen at the time and not much good at reading deer signs, I could only guess that the message was some complaint about the quality of our cabbage.) Among the rules that had been laid down by my mother in allowing me to go in armed pursuit of that mythical creature, My First Deer, was one that stated in no uncertain terms that I would have to confine my hunting to our own farm.

  Somehow the deer had gotten word of this fine print in the contract and immediately (no doubt snickering among themselves) split for the next county.

  When I reported this act of treachery to my friend and mentor Rancid Crabtree, the old mountain man offered scant sympathy.

  "Why hell, boy, they wouldn't call it deer hunting' if you didn't have to hunt fer the critters," he said. "Shootin' a deer in yer own pea patch ain't hunting', it's revenge."

  I explained to Rancid that if a grown, mature man of unsurpassed excellence in the art and science of hunting were to speak firmly to my mother about the importance of shooting one's first deer and to forthwith offer his services as a guide and overseer of such an endeavor, my mother probably would withdraw the stipulation that I hunt exclusively within the boundaries of the farm. Rancid replied that he had a bad headache, his old war wounds were acting up, and he thought he was going blind in one eye, but if he managed to live for a few days longer and just happened to run across such a man he would convey my message to him. We spent the better part of an afternoon sparring about like that until Rancid could stand it no more and finally broke down and invited me to go hunting with him and Mr. Hooker, a tall, stringy old woodsman who lived a mile up the road from our place.

  "I don't know what ol' Hook is gonna think about this," Rancid said somewhat morosely. "Me and him ain't never took no kid with us before."

  "Well for gosh sakes don't take one along this time," I told him severely. "Just you and me and Mr. Hooker."

  "I reckon that'll be more'n enough," Rancid agreed.

  I sho
uld mention that both my mother and grandmother were harshly critical of Rancid's lifestyle. One time I asked Gram exactly what it was that Rancid Crabtree did for a living. "He's an idler," she said without hesitation.

  I decided right then and there that I wanted to be an idler too, because it gave you so much time off from the job, and I intended at first opportunity to have Rancid teach me the trade. It wasn't until I was thirty years old that I realized he had succeeded at that task.

  Although both Mom and Gram disapproved of Rancid's artful striving for an uninterrupted state of leisure, they were secretly fond of the man and even on occasion spoke begrudgingly of his skills as an outdoorsman. As a result, Rancid's halfhearted suggestion that I accompany him and Mr. Hooker on a hunting trip won immediate approval from the family.

  The great hunting expedition was set for the middle of the season so I still had plenty of time to sharpen my eye, on pheasants, grouse, and ducks and to put in an occasional appearance at school lest the teachers completely forget my name and face.

  One of the interesting things about your first deer is that it has a habit of showing up where least expected, even in school. Toward the end of geometry class my deer would occasionally drift in to browse on the isosceles triangles and parallelograms, and once it bounded right through the middle of sophomore English, not only startling me but scaring hell out of Julius Caesar and Brutus.

  "Caesar, that deer almost ran you down!" cried Brutus.

  "Et tu, Brute?" exclaimed Caesar.

  "Whatchername there in the back row," shouted Miss Fitz, the English teacher. "Stop the dreaming and get on with your work!"

  It should not be assumed that my days at school were devoid of serious scholarship. Indeed, every morning before classes started I and my cronies would gather in the gymnasium to exchange learned lectures on that aspect of alchemy devoted to turning a set of deer tracks into venison.

  These morning gatherings presented an interesting study of the caste system prevalent among young deer hunters. One was either a Yup or a Nope, depending upon his answer to that age-old question, "Gotcher deer yet?"

  I, of course, was still a Nope.

  Although Yups and Nopes looked pretty much alike they were as different as mallards from mongooses. For one thing, a Yup would preface all his lectures with the statement, "I recollect the time I shot my first deer." Now the reason he recollected this historic event so well was that it had probably occurred no further in the past than the previous weekend. The use of the word "first" of course implied that he had downed a good many deer since.

  Those little nuances in the use of language were the privileges of Yup rank, and none of us Nopes challenged or even begrudged them. We aspired to be Yups someday ourselves. In fact, I wanted to be a Yup so badly I could taste it.

  And the taste was very sweet indeed.

  This caste system was an efficient and humane way of determining the proper social level of a new kid in school. While we were standing in the gym sizing him up on his first morning, somebody would ask, "Gotcher deer yet?"

  Depending upon his answer, he would be accepted immediately as a mature, respected member into the community of Yups or relegated to the humble ranks of us unsuccessful Nopes. If the new kid said "Yup" to the question, his tone would be so modest and matter-of-fact the uninitiated might assume that he was dismissing the topic as unworthy of further consideration.

  Nothing could be further from the truth. If he was a bona fide Yup, the entire defensive line of the LoS Angeles Rams could not have dissuaded him from relating every last detail of that momentous occasion. He would start off with what he had for breakfast on the morning in question, whether he ate one slice of toast or two, whether the toast was burnt, on which side it was burnt, and the degree of the burns. It might be assumed that this toast would eventually play some crucial part in the shooting of the deer, but its only significance was that it was eaten on the morning of that great day. This known power of one's first deer to transform minor details into events of lasting historic significance was the chief test we used to determine the authenticity of Yups.

  Announcing the news that you had just changed your status from Nope to Yup was a problem almost as great as getting the first deer.

  Obviously, you could not rush up to the guys shouting some fool thing like, "I got my first deer! I got my first deer!"

  The announcement had to be made with oblique casualness, in an offhand manner. The subtle maneuvers employed toward this end included the old standby of wrapping an empty rifle shell in a handkerchief. (Any old empty would do.) When the handkerchief was pulled out, the shell fell to the floor in front of the assembled Yups and Nopes. "Dang, I dropped my lucky shell," the new Yup would say. "Careful you don't step on my lucky shell there, I sure wouldn't want to lose my lucky shell." Only a person with uncommon restraint could keep from asking, "What's so lucky about that shell?" Most of us Nopes, it should be noted, were possessed of uncommon restraint.

  Another trick was to wear deer hair on your pants until someone noticed.

  Occasionally, you would pick a deer hair off and fling it to the floor, saying loudly, "Dang, I got deer hair all over my pants!" A skilled practitioner of this art could make a handful of hair last most of a week or until everyone within a ten-mile radius had been made aware of his new status as a Yup.

  Naturally, if during this period his parents or possibly school officials required that he change his pants there was the tedious job of transferring the deer hairs to the new pair.

  My hunting trip with Rancid and Mr. Hooker approached with all the speed of a glacier, but I put the time to good use in making preparation. I studied every book and magazine article on hunting in the local library. I even took notes, which I carefully recorded in a loose-leaf notebook. A typical note went something like this: "Deer Horns--Banging two deer horns together is a good way to get deer to come within shooting range. A hunter should always have a couple of deer horns handy." The notebook contained about four thousand such tips, most of which I forgot immediately upon reading them. For a while I considered carrying this vast reservoir of knowledge along with me for quick reference just in case I should run into my deer up in the mountains and forget what to do.

  At long last the great day arrived. Rancid picked me up in his old truck at four in the morning and then we rattled over to Mr. Hooker's place. Mr. Hooker was a fine, hard old gentleman with a temper slightly shorter than a snake's hind legs. I seemed to have a knack for setting off this temper. Mr. Hooker had no more than settled himself on the seat alongside me than he instantly shot up and banged his head on the roof. The string of oaths thus ignited sizzled, popped, and banged for upwards of five minutes.

  "What in gosh almighty tarnation dingbat dang is that on the seat?" he roared at me. "It liked to stab me half to death!"

  "Just my deer horns," I told him indignantly. "But they seem to be all right. I don't think you hurt them none."

  Mr. Hooker said he was mighty relieved to hear that.

  Going up into the mountains, everyone's mood improved considerably.

  Rancid and Mr. Hooker told all the old stories again, starting each one off with "I ever tell you the time ...?" And we drank scalding black coffee and ate the fat homemade doughnuts Gram had sent along, and the two men puffed their pipes and threw back their heads and roared with laughter at their own stories, and it was all a fine thing to be doing, going up into the dark, frozen mountains early in the morning with those two old hunters, and I knew that I wanted to do this very same thing forever.

  I didn't get my first deer that day or even that first season, but that was all right. Up until then I thought the only reason people went deer hunting was to hunt deer. We were after bigger game than that, I found--game rarer than a four-point unicorn. And bouncing along in Rancid's old truck, squeezed in between those two rough, exotic-smelling, cantankerous old woodsmen, I became a Yup without ever having fired a shot, a kind of Yup that I hadn't even known existed.

>   It never bothered me too much that nobody ever asked that particular question.

  Besides, I'd had other kinds of hunting success, and when a new kid arrived in school and I wanted to size him up, I could always ask, "Gotcha duck yet?"

  Mountain Goats Never Say "Cheese!"

  Somewhere up ahead, beyond the green cleavage of a mountain pass, a Fish and Game helicopter was waiting for me on a wilderness landing strip. I was several hours late for the rendezvous, having been nearly swept into oblivion while fording the river. Then there had been the long climb up to where I now found myself, inching along a game trail that ran perilously close to the edge of the gorge. Far down below, through the lingering tatters of morning fog, I could see water churning among giant boulders. Every few feet I had to stop to catch my breath and wipe the perspiration from my eyes. It wouldn't have been so bad if I had been equipped with decent mountain-climbing gear-rope, ice ax, thick-soled boots--but I was driving my car.

  Little would the casual observer of that strange scene have realized that here was a man at the apex of his career as a great outdoor photographer. I didn't realize it myself. Here I thought I was just getting started in the trade but already I was at my apex. Ahead lay defeat, humiliation, poverty.