The Horse
in My Garage
AND OTHER STORIES
The Horse
in My Garage
AND OTHER STORIES
by
Patrick F. McManus
Skyhorse Publishing
Copyright © 2012 by Patrick F. McManus
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-62087-064-8
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Preface
A Scholar of Worms
Shaping Up for the Hunt
A Bit about My Writing Life
Big
$7,000 TV Historical Extravaganza
Wild Life in a Room with a View
Risk Assessment
The Forty-Pound Brown Trout
Bear Hunters
A Lake Too Far
The Chicken Chronicles
Secret Athlete
The McManus Principles
Basic Lying Made Easy
A Chainsaw Kind of Guy
The Lady Who Kept Things
September Song
The Longest March
The Stalk
The Horse in My Garage
The Tent
To Smoke a Steelhead
The Teachings of Rancid Crabtree
Christmas Shopping
Who Ate My Shakespeare?
Romantic Moments
The Canoe
The Writing of “The Green Box”
A Routine Fishing Trip
The Brown Pelican
Canoodled
Christmas Over Easy
Dog People
Finding My Roots
The Longest Three Miles
Scrabble’s Powers of Observation
The Dark and Other Dangers
Preface
O
ne day, as a freshman at Washington State College (now University), I was browsing through the magazine section of Holland Library and came across two magazines aimed at writers and would-be writers. It was at that moment I discovered there was such a thing as freelance writing. That’s for me, I thought. I couldn’t imagine an employer dumb enough to hire me, and I wouldn’t want to work for somebody that dumb anyway. But here was a form of work where one could be his own boss. It never occurred to me that I would still be working for someone pretty dumb.
From then on I began writing features for magazines and newspapers. By the time I graduated from college, I had sold dozens of features. Typically, I was paid $25 for a piece, but there were lots of cheap publications around, too. Still, I loved the work, regardless of the rate of pay. Eventually, I was hired by Eastern Washington State College of Education (now Eastern Washington University) as an instructor in journalism. I had summers off to devote my time entirely to freelancing.
All of the stories I wrote in those early years were factual. Two of the factual articles are included in this collection and pretty much represent the high point of my article writing. Even though both are factual, I think the one thing that distinguishes them is that each has a touch of humor. One is “Wild Life in a Room with a View,” originally published by Sports Illustrated and later abridged by Reader’s Digest. The other is “$7,000 Television Extravaganza,” published by TV Guide.
During this period, I wrote every night for two hours, seven nights a week, and I tried never to miss a writing session or to cut one short. One night, in the first hour of my two-hour session, I finished an article on the use of telemetry in the study of wildlife, whereby wild animals are hooked up with radio transmitters so scientists can follow their travels at night. I finished writing the article in the first hour of my session and still had an hour to go. So I decided to write a piece of nonsense to fill up my last hour. The idea for the piece was that eventually all animals will be equipped with radios, and this will simplify hunting a great deal. As was my practice at the time, anything I wrote I sent off to a magazine. This piece went to Field & Stream, because it touched on hunting. One day I went out to the mailbox, and there was a small envelope from Field & Stream. Freelance writers tend to get excited over small envelopes as opposed to large envelopes. Large envelopes contain the rejected manuscript, and small envelopes contain checks. I ripped open the small envelope and it contained a check for $350! Now I had just sold a factual article for $750, but it had taken me a month to research and write. This piece of nonsense had taken me an hour! At that instant, I became a humor writer.
Also included in this collection is my very first published fiction, “The Lady Who Kept Things.” I wrote it in a creative writing class, and it was later published in SPARK, the student literary magazine at WSU. The instructor never thought much of my writing and refused to give me a grade higher than a B. We often had to read a story aloud to the class, and one day I read one of my humor pieces. The class laughed themselves sick. Even the instructor had to take off his glasses and wipe away tears of mirth. Back came the paper, with a grade of B! I stormed into the professor’s office and cried, “How could you give me a grade of B on this story when the class loved it and even you had to wipe away tears?” He said, “Yes, McManus, it was a very funny story, but this is a class in the writing of serious literature, and you have to admit that story wasn’t serious.”
I offer this as a word of warning to anyone interested in a career as a humor writer. Indeed, once I received a letter from an editor, asking me to write for his magazine. “But not humor,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.” Yeah, well, he should try writing it.
A final note: You may come across in reading this collection of stories and essays a few repetitions of subjects, ideas and experiences. Let me explain how they and this book came about.
In the corner of one of the closets in our business office, I came across a high stack of file folders with a sign on top that said “Stories not collected in books.” Well, I said to myself, it would be a shame not to put these stories into their own book. I did not realize the complexities involved in this undertaking. The stories had been written over a period of fifty years, say from when I was twenty-nine to my present age of seventy-nine. None of my other collections contained stories written over such a span of time. Most were reprinted from Outdoor Life and Field & Stream, each collection covering stories from a period of no more than two or three years. In this book, however, two stories could be separated by as many as fifty years. In writing the second story I probably had forgotten the first story, and somehow managed to repeat some material. I think the editors and I have managed to catch
the most grievous repetitions, but, if you should come across one, perhaps you would be kind enough to view it as an archaeological find, in other words a gold nugget, in the drifting sands of a failing memory. P. M.
A Scholar of Worms
M
y wife brought a neat little metal box into my office the other day and asked, “Wouldn’t this be good for worms?”
I looked at the box. It would fit nicely in a shirt or vest pocket. The latch on it opened easily. You could hold it out toward a fishing partner, snap it open, and ask, “Worm?” I figured it was about big enough for four worms at a time. It would work well if your fishing buddy carried a big can of worms, and you could meet him from time to time for a refill, kind of like fighter planes meeting a tanker in mid-fight to get a refill.
“Perfect!” I said.
Actually, I couldn’t remember the last time I had fished with worms. Maggots, yes—worms, no. Worms were starting to become a distant memory. The thought saddened me, because I’d once been a scholar of worms.
My very first worm scared me half to death. I was four or five years old and digging in the dirt at the corner of our ancient log cabin. Dirt, at the time, was my favorite toy, possibly my only toy. I forget what I used for a digging tool, perhaps an old spoon my mother had given me. I was soon working on a major excavation. That is how you play with dirt; you move it from one place to another. Suddenly, I unearthed a huge night crawler. It had never occurred to me that a worm could be so large. I thought it was a snake.
I went into the cabin to report my find, something I by then viewed as a scientific discovery.
“Don’t rip the door off its hinges!” Mom shouted. “Stop that screeching and shaking dirt all over the floor.” (My mother had very little experience with scientists.)
I pulled her outside to show her the snake and was pleased to learn my discovery was only a worm. Still, for several years, I was not particularly fond of night crawlers. They kind of ruined dirt for me. Afterward, I only dug in the dirt tentatively, always expecting the next spoonful to turn up another monster. I preferred worms with fewer pretensions, something a bit more modest.
As mentioned, I have in recent years used mostly maggots for bait. True, they lack the worm’s personality and character, but on the other hand they are rather tidy, not counting the wood shavings vendors typically use as fillers in their plastic containers. I suppose maggots, technically speaking, are worms of a sort. If you have gathered maggots from their natural medium, you will think their plastic containers one of the great inventions of mankind. You will not mind in the least vacuuming up from the floor of your boat the wood shavings and the little brown corpses of escaped maggots. (What were they thinking, anyway? That they could make a run for it?) Another thing I like about fishing with maggots is that if left alone they turn into flies. What kind of future is that for them? You have saved them from that particular horror, for which they should thank you copiously. At least a worm has the self-respect to remain a worm. Kind of reminds me of a couple of kids I knew in high school, not that I’m promoting any shortcomings of self-respect.
A couple of years after the discovery of my first night crawler, we moved back to our farm in Idaho. We raised mostly stumps on our farm. They tended to mind their own business and didn’t cause much trouble, such as whining to be harvested. Then my parents lapsed into insanity and started populating the farm with cows, pigs, chickens, rabbits, and other irritants. Our former tranquil life in the woods was suddenly transformed into endless emergencies, perpetrated by these useless and irresponsible new residents.
On its plus side, the farm came with a creek. The creek was a mess. It had high walls of brush hugging its banks, logs crisscrossing it, beaver dams backing up the water, and huge cedar stumps disrupting the current. It was lovely. Sometimes during runoff, ice would catch on the logs and form huge dams. Once, the water rose so high behind one dam that it almost took out the barn and its livestock. But no such luck.
The creek, or “crick,” as we referred to it in those days, was wild and unpredictable, much like my own character at the time. Even though the creek harbored mostly chaos, it also contained in its deep dark holes an abundance of hungry trout. Those trout changed my life. Had I not discovered them, I might have grown up to become . . . well, I might have grown up.
In my pre-creek years, I thought of worms as primarily useless, if occasionally entertaining, in the way only worms can be. Once I realized worms could be used to catch fish, I began to study them closely and soon became a scholar of worms. I read everything I could find written about worms. OK, I’ll admit it, not all that much was written about worms.
In the spring of the year, before fishing season opened, worms were plentiful. They lay around on the top of the ground sunning themselves or, often, drowning in puddles, getting themselves squished under vehicle tires, and otherwise acting stupidly. Those wisely remaining underground could be clever, inventing numerous escapes from my flailing shovel. Sometimes I would notice the rear tip of one disappearing into the bottom of my excavation. Despite my making the dirt fly, I could never seem to catch up with the worm. It was as if it knew of secret worm speedways routed through the dirt.
Sensing the arrival of fishing season, all worms, even the dumb ones, began burrowing deep in the earth. Usually, the best place to dig worms was in what we laughingly called “the garden.” Each spring we would spade up the ground and plant numerous seeds, with visions of squash, pumpkins, lettuce, onions, and potatoes dancing in our heads. I vaguely recall some of the plants actually reaching a height of two inches or more before drying up and dying. It was that garden that first taught me the futility of hope. Nevertheless, the garden soil had been loosened, and that made it fairly easy to turn up a dozen or so worms in a fairly short time, at least in the months of May and June. One spring, having experienced a dearth of midsummer worms in previous years, I dug up several dozen worms and saved them in a large box of dirt. I had been told that worms like coffee grounds, so I dumped in a bunch of grounds to provide them with nourishment. Come July, when other worms had dug themselves halfway to China, I went out to the box, smugly anticipating great wiggly handfuls of its contents. Apparently high on caffeine, the worms had gone over the walls en masse. (“The next moonless night—hic—we make our break. Pass it along.”) No matter the cause of the inmates’ disappearance, I blamed the coffee grounds. Never again did I try to store up worms.
Fortunately, we had a huge pile of cow manure out behind our barn, and worms could be found there any time of the year. They were pale, skinny fellows, as you might expect of anyone who lived in a manure pile. The fish in the creek, however, did not seem to care much for manure pile worms, although I doubt they actually knew where their next meal was coming from.
My study of worms has produced some interesting facts. I bet you didn’t know that a worm has five hearts, or that there are 2,700 different kinds of earthworms. My source also says, “It’s hard to imagine something more interesting to watch than an earthworm giving birth.” I’ll have to put that one on my list of Fun Things to Do in My Free Time.
In another publication I learned you can go out to the typical golf course putting green, drive a couple of metal stakes into the ground, connect wires between the stakes and the terminal to a car battery, and watch about 10,000 night crawlers come flying up out of the ground. Well, I’m not exactly sure of the number, but a lot of big worms, enough to keep you in bait for years, as long as you don’t feed them coffee grounds. It is my impression that some industrious people actually gather worms in this manner and then sell them. If you’re thinking of taking up the practice, however, I suggest you do it in the middle of the night. I don’t know what the laws are in regard to the collection of worms from putting greens, so you’re on your own. I think it might be embarrassing to be arrested for worm theft. If it turns out your jail mate is a bank robber and he asks, “What are you in for?” don’t tell him.
Just recently I read a report
in which researchers claimed that worms don’t feel pain. In all my years of baiting hooks, I have felt twinges of guilt every time I threaded a worm on a hook. Now I find out they don’t feel pain—they’ve been faking it!—just to play on my sense of guilt!
If you can’t trust a worm, whom can you trust?
The very best worms for fishing, I determined years ago, are those that have been power-tilled in gardens. They’re tough, angry, and belligerent, and perfect for catching wily fish of all kinds, particularly walleye and other arrogant species. Power tillers are expensive, of course, but well worth the price for tough, street-wise worm: “You wanna piece of me?” they growl at the fish. “You wanna rumble? Let’s see what you got!”
The worms you buy at gas stations and other places of business are mostly raised on worm farms. They have grown up pampered and coddled and simply don’t have the menacing personality of your power-tilled or even your manure-pile worms. One word of caution, though, should you ever buy commercial worms. If you go into a backwoods gas station and find a large, rough-looking woman behind the cash register, don’t ask, “Do you have worms?” My friend Retch Sweeney did that a while back. He should get out of his full-body cast any day now. I’m exaggerating. The cast covers only part of his body. I won’t mention which part.
I took the metal box from Bun and dropped it in my vest pocket.
“Perfect,” I said. I guess she must be aware she’s married to a scholar of worms. How great can that be!
Shaping Up for the Hunt
T
he exercise fad in this country is reaching epidemic proportions. You can’t have a simple business meeting anymore without your associates comparing their tennis elbows, shin splints, charley horses, and athlete’s feet. It’s downright disgusting. Even my boss walked up to me the other day and asked if I would like to see his Adidas. I said, “What do you think I am, a pervert or something?” It turned out he was talking about his new pair of tennis shoes!
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