The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories (21 page)

When buying or otherwise acquiring dogs, I was always of sound mind. My only defense in that regard is stupidity, for which there would be no shortage of witnesses, professional or otherwise.

My problem is I'm a fool for puppies. Actually, I'm a fool for cute. I like cute puppies, kittens, children, and women. You can have all the beautiful women you want, I'll take the cute ones.
Whoa
! What am I saying? I can't take any women because I'm already married to one. She's very cute, though.

Either God or nature has made puppies cute for a purpose, namely to get innocent people to adopt the cuddly little things in the belief they will remain that way forever. A year after you acquire the cute puppy, a hulking brute lumbers into your kitchen, a piece of your new waders dangling from his mouth, and demands, “Give me meat or else. I know where you keep the split-bamboo fly rods.”

Anytime someone holds up a cute little puppy for you to see, try to visualize it as a hulking brute, picking its teeth with some splinters from split-bamboo fly rods.

There was a time in my early youth when I spent many a great free golden summer running with dogs, going to the dogs, inseparable from the dogs, and, as my mother sometimes pointed out, being almost indistinguishable from the dogs. Some of the dogs were our own unruly mutts, others were those of neighbors, and some were simply strangers that had been passing through but got caught up in the fun and, no doubt, a chance at a free meal. I was Warrior King of Dogs and led my pack of canines off on great crusades across the creek, through the woods, and into the mountains. “Don't worry,” my grandmother would tell my mother. “The dogs will show him the way home.”

“I'm not worried,” Mom would reply.

Once one of the dogs passing through didn't pass all the way through. He spent several days ingratiating him with my grandmother, mother, and sister. My sister said to my mother, “I know he's ugly as sin, but he's such a friendly little guy I think we should keep him.”

“Of course we'll keep him,” Mom replied. “He's your brother.”

As it happened, we were short a dog at the time. My mother, a keen judge of both people and dogs, was reluctant. “Well,” she said, “I guess he can stay for a while,” she said, possibly because she didn't know how to get rid of him anyway. Mom named the dog Stranger. Mom said that way when we spoke to the dog while company was present, they would think we didn't own him. “Hey there, Stranger, you let go of the pastor's leg and be on your way.” Later his name was shortened to Strange. That dog was nothing if not strange. I have written elsewhere about the crimes and misdeeds of Strange and won't repeat them here. As for a brief description of his true character, revealed shortly after it became clear to him that he had a new home with our family—it is difficult, except perhaps simply to reverse the Boy Scout Law. He was untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, unfriendly, offensive, rude, etc. As a Boy Scout, I found these characteristics to be particularly offensive, even in a dog. Perhaps it was Strange who created in me a reluctance ever to become a true dog person. The half-dozen or so other dogs I've owned off and on over the years have not in any way eased that reluctance. For the most part, though, I have enjoyed their company and grieved at their passing, which, in a couple of cases, at least, seemed not quite soon enough.

There is a big difference between being a dog owner and a dog person. My friend Dan is a dog person. Dogs are such a big part of his life that without a dog he would be somebody else entirely. I wouldn't even recognize him without dogs. By contrast, you could take away my dog, Clarence, and not notice any difference in me at all, except maybe I couldn't stop smiling. “He's all yours,” I'd say. “Have a good time with him. Just keep the fly rods out of his reach and you'll learn to love him.”

If you want to know what a true dog person is like, you should meet my friend Dan. When his dog, Peat, got too old to hunt, Dan would take him out to a grouse woods and carry him around, just so the dog could sniff the air. True dog persons are usually pretty nice guys.

For some unknown reason, a television producer, also by the name of Pat, decided he wanted to do a TV show of me out in the woods hunting grouse. Since I am supposedly a humor writer, I tried to introduce a little comedy into the show by missing every shot. Although Dan and Pat appreciated this hilarious comedy, Peat couldn't conceal his disgust, if shaking his head in apparent disbelieve is any indication. Well, no matter how smart a dog is, you can't expect him to appreciate humor.

Finding My Roots

A

while back, my wife, Bun, read a disarming little book on how to collect and prepare wild foods, and ever since then we've been more or less living off the land or, more accurately, out of the swamp. This is not nearly as easy as it may sound, and the reader contemplating trading his grocery cart for a bucket and a pair of hip boots may profit from my experience.

At first, grubbing for groceries directly from the ground was not my idea of a fun weekend, but after a few outings to field, forest, and swamp, I came to abhor it. Nevertheless, Bun's impenetrable logic eventually drove me to take up in earnest the little-known avocation of foraging.

“You should know such things,” Bun would say, “just in case.”

Her phrase, “just in case,” as she well knows, never fails but to fill me with dread. I instantly envision the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding hell-bent through the front door, scaring the wits out of the rather amiable wolf who hangs out there.

Thus motivated, I rushed to the library and checked out every wild food book in sight, not to mention
Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest
and
The Wonderful World of Insects
(one never knows). That, by the way, happens to be one of Bun's favorite expression—one never knows. And, indeed, he or she doesn't. Otherwise he or she would never take up foraging as a hobby.

Plants and animals that I previously had thought to be merely innocent weeds and rodents were described in these books as being extremely tasty. This was true. They did have a great deal of taste.

Before long, my reputation as a wild food expert had spread through the neighborhood. Charlie Spivak had done most of the spreading, my foraging efforts fitting nicely into his humorous repertoire.

Charlie and I were hiking in the mountains one day when I spotted a small broad-leaf plant growing among some rocks.

“Miner's lettuce,” I said authoritatively.

“Good to eat?” Charlie asked.

“Try some.” I gave him my prepare-yourself-for-a-real-treat smile.

Charlie insisted that I try some first, another example of the lack of trust among people nowadays.

I popped in a leaf and began to chew, Charlie staring expectantly at me. The leaves, whatever kind they were, had what might be described as a delayed taste, which, when it finally arrived, went off in my mouth like a small bomb of bile.

“Aaaaa!” I said calmly. “Now here is a good example of what miner's lettuce isn't. Let this be a lesson to you, Charlie.”

About this time I became aware that wild food proponents have their own definition for the word “edible.” To them, “edible” means any food that won't kill you. The possibility of killing the person who fed it to you goes unmentioned. Consequently, the neophyte wild food forager soon learns to limit his wild food diet to those flora labeled in the books as “choice.” Many of the fungi known as toadstools are actually mushrooms. There are many old wives' tales about how to tell a wild mushroom from a poisonous one. These should be avoided. Perhaps you have noticed how few old wives are around these days. The only surefire test for wild mushrooms is simply to eat one. If you are still alive the next day, that was probably an edible mushroom. If absolutely nothing happens the next day, you are probably dead. Mushrooms producing this result are probably toadstools.

Wild food foraging provides some excellent conversation-openers. One day I was standing next to a tall, nervous chap at a bus stop in one of our rougher sections of town. As is my habit, I was studying the vegetation in the vacant lot behind us. I had done so often before but had never detected anything edible. Suddenly, I saw it—a patch of wild burdock! In my excitement, I pointed and yelled at the man, “Look! A bunch of wild burdock!”

The man dropped his briefcase and took off running. This just goes to show how uptight so many of our urbanites are becoming nowadays. They should try to mix a little wild food in with their diets.

The Longest Three Miles

O

ur little family farm was located exactly three miles north of Sandpoint, Idaho, on U.S. Highway 95, known in those days as the Bonners Ferry Highway. Because of that, all my life I have been able to estimate a distance of three miles almost exactly. I have never been able to estimate anything else requiring math with any degree of accuracy, but ask me anything requiring an estimate of three miles and I will nail it. I believe that is because so much of my early life, at least until I went off to college, took place on those three miles. It was said of Mongol warriors that their home was the back of a horse. It might have been said of my teenage friends and me along the Bonners Ferry Highway that our home was the seat of a bicycle. My longest trip over those three miles, however, by my estimate at the time, lasted about a month. But I was only about five years old. First, however, I must tell you about our little farmhouse.

My earliest memory, at about age two, consisted of my wandering around in the backyard. I had taken off all my clothes and was stark naked. Our free-range family chickens wandered with me, clucking all the while in a somewhat puzzled manner, if my recollection is correct. At one point I came to a large pan of water, apparently set out by my grandmother or mother for the chickens to drink. I climbed into it and sat down. The water was warm and comfortable. I remember that sensation distinctly. The chickens seemed quite offended. They gathered around the pan, clucking in an excited manner, apparently expressing some chicken form of outrage, never before having had a naked person sit down in their drinking water. Suddenly, my grandmother tore out of the house, snatched me from the pan, and raced back in the house. As I was told many years later, Gram had spotted some visitors coming down the driveway and didn't want them to see a member of the family sitting naked in a pan of water out in the yard. Gram had a stroke a few days later, and I and my chicken-pan venture were blamed for it. She lived for another fifty years, however, and I never got any credit for those.

Some time ago, I came across an old family photo of the house. It was a rather cute affair, partially enclosed by a white picket fence overgrown with wild roses. The photo didn't show a large cedar stump in the backyard, but I know it was still there at the time the photo was taken. That cedar stump was the cause of the longest ride I have taken in my entire life, and I have been to and back from Europe and the Orient several times. None of those trips was anywhere near as long or as pleasurable as that six-mile roundtrip at about age five that I took to and from Sandpoint with my father.

One day, Dad said to my mother, “I think I'll dynamite that big cedar stump in the backyard.”

My mother said, “No, Frank, don't do it! You know nothing about dynamite or dynamiting!”

“Ha!” Dad responded. “How hard can it be?”

I don't recall the exact words of the argument but I seem to recall it was long and heated.

At one point, Mom probably pointed out that Dad had wrecked the family car after a night spent partying with some of his friends. In any case, Dad no doubt responded by saying he would hitch up our team of horses to our farm wagon, drive them to town, pick up a box of dynamite, return home, and dynamite the stump.

Mom said, “Well, you'll have to take Pat with you.”

No doubt this prolonged the argument, but eventually Dad agreed to take me along on the wagon trip to town to pick up the box of dynamite.

Let me state right up front that driving to town on the rough board seat of a farm wagon stretches those three miles to a distance beyond human comprehension, at least to a five-year-old human. I'm not sure how old I was when we left but I was about eighty when we returned. When we finally got to town, Dad bought the box of dynamite and set it on the wagon, which was parked at the curb on one of the main streets of downtown Sandpoint, apparently with no worries in the world that it might be stolen. I guess Sandpoint at the time was populated only by extremely honest persons or at least persons who didn't need a box of dynamite. Then Dad took me by the hand and led me to a business establishment across the street. It was the most interesting place I have ever visited, and I have wished all my life I could find one like it.

All the people there were having a wonderful time, and every one of them seemed to know my father and to be his friend. Dad introduced me all around, then picked me up and set me on this long table-like contraption I think was called “the bar.” The man behind the bar set a large mug of beer in front of my father and a bottle of pop in front of me, and the wonderful time started, with Dad telling stories and everybody laughing themselves sick, and the bar man renewing our drinks whenever they ran out. After a while, we left the establishment, climbed back on the wagon, and headed home. The ride back seemed a lot shorter than the ride to town, something less than an eternity anyway. Dad said, “Let our visit to the bar be our own little secret, OK?”

“You bet,” I said. I could hardly wait to grow up. I'd had no idea grownups had these secret places where everybody was happy and shouted and joked and had a wonderful time.

The next day Dad prepared to blow up the giant cedar stump.

Mom supervised the operation. “Good heavens, Frank!” she exclaimed. “How many sticks have you put under the stump now?”

Dad told her a number.