The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories (20 page)

But enough about romance.

At one point in my life, I owned three canoes. Being poor, I could not afford more. We lived next to a river at the time, so it was necessary to have a minimum of three canoes. One of the three was a thirteen-footer made of Kevlar. The ad for it claimed it could be dropped off the top of a ten-story building and survive unharmed. If you are not familiar with canoeing, you may not realize how often on a river you come upon something resembling a ten-story building; the sighting is usually announced by the lead canoeist shouting, “Holy bleep!” or a similar expression. That is a technical term often employed in canoeing.

Once a couple of my daughters took the thirteen-footer upriver and a wind storm arose, so they pulled the canoe up on a bank, tied it down, and walked home. If they are not particularly thoughtful of their father, they are at least sensible. Because it is quite easy for the wind to blow an empty canoe into the next state, I went up to get it and was soon paddling back home. When you paddle a thirteen-foot canoe alone, however, the whole front half tends to rise out of the water. This is especially bad in a strong wind. Despite my best efforts, the canoe soon began spinning like a top. I drifted downriver in this undignified fashion, the canoe totally out of control. As I spun past my house, I noticed Bun standing on the dock, hair blowing, hands on hips. She shouted, “Are you crazy! Stop fooling around out there and paddle in here!”

So you can see canoes aren't foolproof when it comes to selecting a spouse.

Another of my canoes was an eighteen-foot Old Town wood-and-canvas job. It was ancient but still gorgeous. Its one problem was that the previous owner had covered the canvas with fiberglass. This atrocity became apparent when you had to snap the canoe up the last quarter inch or so onto a cartop carrier all by yourself. If you weren't careful, you could easily hook the canoe on your eyeballs. Besides, the neighbors started complaining that my groans and grunts were scaring their pets. The time had come to sell the canoe, and I eventually found a young man appropriately appreciative of this superb craft. I helped him load it on his cartop carrier. As I watched the canoe disappearing down my driveway, I gave it a sad little wave. Then I shouted to the young man one last little canoeing tip: “Watch out for your eyeballs!”

I am now reduced to a single canoe, a seventeen-foot thin-skinned aluminum Grumman. It's a bit battered but otherwise in excellent shape, and I can pop it onto the cartop carrier with ease. The two of us, the canoe and I, have shared many an excellent adventure. Once on a hunting trip, my friend Retch Sweeney and I paddled it across a major Idaho lake during a late-November blizzard. The whole canoe was covered with frost—or maybe it was ice, I'm not sure now. As the bow paddler, I kept hearing this weird clicking sound, not especially unusual in a car but strange in a canoe. It turned out to be the chattering of Retch's teeth. Not all of our canoe outings were so much fun, though.

I first fell in love with canoes at about age ten. I was fishing along the creek that ran through the back of our farm when I suddenly came upon a canoe tied up to some brush in such a way that one might suppose its owner had attempted to hide it. Right away I guessed that it must belong to a teenaged ruffian by the name of Buster. Despite his frequent threats to eradicate me from his life, I realized that Buster must be attempting amends, by leaving such a fine canoe tied up on my side of the creek.

Even after all these years, I possess a vivid image of that canoe. Clearly, Buster had built it himself, probably in no more than a thousand hours in high school shop class. The delicate wooden framework was covered in canvas, which the young builder had painted blue, apparently with house paint. Nevertheless, you could see the skeleton of the craft right through its taut skin. It was lovely.

Buster had been thoughtful enough even to the extent that he had left a paddle for me to use. Glancing about to make sure there were no immediate threats to my life—bears occasionally passed through our area—I slid down the bank and into the canoe. I quickly cleared away the brush that covered it, wondering all the while why Buster would be so careless with his property. I soon found the canoe much easier to paddle downstream than upstream, I don't know why. After a test float of a few hundred yards, and finding it extremely difficult to paddle back to the craft's original berth, I steered over to the bank and parked. Being a particularly thoughtful boy, I tied up the canoe in a place where Buster would have no trouble finding it. Then I went off home.

Later I thought maybe I should have wiped the canoe clean of my fingerprints, just in case Buster might be upset by someone's borrowing it. I was right, too. My fingerprints gave me away, no doubt about it, because Buster immediately zeroed in on me as his number one suspect. Boy, what I wouldn't have given for a witness protection program back in those days, the days I first fell in love with canoes.

Christmas Over Easy

O

ne day my rich friend Fenton Quagmire said to me, “I'm sick of all this electronic gadgetry that kids want for Christmas nowadays. I wish we could go back to times when Christmas was simple, when kids made tree decorations by stringing popcorn and cranberries and making chains out of strips of colored paper.”

I said, “I was a child in simple times and I remember that our Christmases were . . .”

“Stop!” cried Quagmire. “I never again want to hear about your simple times!”

But I would not be deterred, even though Quagmire pretended to cover his ears with his hands. He probably would have jumped up and left if I hadn't been driving him down the freeway at seventy miles an hour.

Back then, as I told Quagmire, my family lived far back in the mountains and we survived mostly on deer my father shot and fish he caught. There were no hunting and fishing seasons to abide by back then. There were game wardens, of course, but they lived in town and never came out of their houses unless disguised as real estate agents.

I went to first grade in our leaky old log cabin heated only by a barrel stove. The teacher, my Mom, chopped the firewood and dipped our drinking water out of a creek with a bucket. One day, a glowing coal shot out of a hole burned in the side of the barrel stove and set fire to the floor. Mom bounded across the room and stomped out the fire. Later she said she wished she had been wearing shoes. Teachers received very little pay in those simple days when hardly anyone bothered to pay taxes and people were happy.

“Stop!” cried Quagmire. “I can‘t breathe!”

As Christmas vacation approached, Mom put on a Christmas pageant for all the parents and neighbors. We kids sang carols and performed in a Christmas play Mom had written in her spare time. All the mothers enjoyed the pageant while the fathers gathered outside the school and passed around a bottle of something they referred to as “Christmas cheer.”

Suddenly, Santa Claus himself, all dressed in red and adorned with his flowing white beard, bounded through the door and roared out, “Ho ho ho!” I almost had a heart attack. I'd always thought of Santa Claus as a figment of my father's imagination. But here was Santa in person! He went around the room and asked each pupil what he or she wanted for Christmas. He also gave each of us a candy cane slightly bigger than a newspaper question mark. When he bent over me to hear my request for a present, I was still shaken up by his abrupt appearance and couldn't think of anything I wanted. Then he was gone! But I did get one surprise—Santa drank whiskey! I could smell it on his breath!

A short while later, my mother said to my father, “I think we should spend Christmas at the farm.” Yes, we did own a small farm, and because life was simple in those days we grew much of our own food. My father understood that when my mother used the phrase “I think,” it was actually an order, as when she said to me, “I think you should go bring in some firewood.”

Dad immediately went into action. He got a long stick and began probing the mounds of snow outside our cabin to see if he could detect our car. Once the vehicle was found, he dug it out and set about getting it started. Now you would think that an old car that had sat unused for months, one of them under a pile of snow, would be impossible to start. At the very least, its battery would be dead, there would be no way to charge it, and you couldn't call AAA for help, because there was no phone and probably no AAA anyway.

Aha! But because these were simple times, the car didn't depend on a battery to start. It had a crank! The crank was a crooked steel bar of sorts. You stuck one end of it in a hole in the front of the car and gave a quick turn to the other end. Sometimes the crank performed what was referred to as a “kickback,” which, in an extreme case, whipped the cranker around and slapped him against the ground. But that was only in extreme cases. Usually it just dislocated a shoulder. Before he even started to crank, however, the cranker had to adjust the spark arrestor, which was operated by a little lever on the steering column. I'm not sure how it arrested the spark, but I think if you didn't have it set properly, you blew up your car.

Our car also had a rusty wire protruding from the dashboard. There was a loop in the wire that you could stick a finger through so you could pull or push it. I believe my father put the loop in the wire himself. He was always devising such innovations. He probably even devised the wire, now that I think about it. The other end of the wire, I believe, attached to either the throttle or choke on the engine or possibly both. The wire had to be set just right or the engine wouldn't start.

Now all of these functions required certain incantations to be shouted out by my father if success were to be achieved. I wish I could remember the words, because I think they would come in handy in the operation of this computer.

Before the car would move through the snow, however, my father had to attach to each rear wheel something called “chains.” These were made out of steel links, some of which always came loose and banged against the inside of the fender, producing a sound very much like the firing of a machine gun as the car went down the road. Some war veterans dived into a ditch when our car went by. Nowadays, in these more complicated times, we have snow tires, some of which even have studs in them. People no longer bother with chains.

Once the car was started and chained up, we all piled in and headed off to the farm, which was about sixty miles distant. When we had traveled no more than three or four miles, we heard a peculiar thumping sound. My mother said to my father, “You have a flat, Frank. I think you should stop and fix it.” My mother never said, “
We
have a flat.” My father owned all the flats. Then my mother said, “I don't think you should use that kind of language in front of the children.”

Darn! I wish I could remember some of the words!

Now you might suppose my father would get out and put on the spare. Ha! These were simple times, remember. There was no spare. Only rich people had spares. Actually, we didn't know any rich people, so I'm not sure whether they did or not. As for ourselves, we didn't have a spare anything. Everything we owned was in constant use.

Dad then got out, jacked up the car, took off the tire, jerked out the inner tube, patched the tube with a little patch kit everyone except rich people carried in their cars, stuffed the tube back in the tire, pumped up the tire with the tire pump, put the tire back on the car, lowered the jack, and we drove away. In these more complicated times, of course, even poor people have spares.

Quagmire found that disgusting. “Poor people shouldn't have spares!” he shouted. “What's the point of having poor people if they have everything rich people have?”

Settled in at the farm, my mother said to my father, “I think you should go cut us a Christmas tree.” Dad rose up from the chair in which he had slumped and shouted out another incantation, this one somehow connected to the cutting of Christmas trees. He stormed out of the house and a few hours later returned with what he referred to as a Christmas tree. He then built a stand for it, which allowed the “tree” to stand, if you leaned it against a wall.

Mom said, “I think it looks more like a Christmas bush than a Christmas tree.”

My sister and I made decorations for the Christmas bush. After Christmas, we ate the strings of popcorn and cranberries. Cranberries don't taste all that good after hanging on a Christmas bush for a week or so, but they're a lot better than nothing.

So that is an example of the simple-life Christmas, as I told Quagmire.

“Sounds pretty boring,” he said, as I dropped him off at his mansion. “Come on in and have some Christmas cheer.”

“I would,” I said, “but right now I have to go Twitter.”

Dog People

I

've never been much of a dog person. That doesn't mean I don't like dogs. I do. I like them a lot. But mostly I like them if they belong to someone else. Dogs, in my opinion, should be much like grandchildren. Most of the time they're a lot of fun to have around, to play with, teach tricks to, throw sticks to, and so on. When they start acting up or otherwise making a nuisance of themselves, you should be able to send them home. Your dog, on the other hand, is already home. He isn't going anywhere.

My children all grew up with our family dogs, cats, horse, chickens, rabbits, gerbils, guinea pigs, and even a hamster that once escaped from his cage and, while on the lam for several weeks, ate its way through a volume of Shakespeare's plays, although with little sign of intellectual improvement. All of these creatures created endless problems for me, the horse taking first prize in the competition for great nuisance but the dogs running a close second. I had an excuse for buying the horse, though. I was insane. In fact, I had a professional opinion to that effect.

“I just bought a horse,” I told my friend, who happens to be a clinical psychologist.

“You gotta be crazy!” he said.