My First Blog Post, Fauna

I know, Baby, you dig it the most!

— Vincent Vega.

Chapter 1

Fauna

I can no longer remember the dream, but I know there was water in it; running water, cool and fast but not deep or really all that dangerous unless you got careless. I’m sure the dream had water because we were camped in a lean-to not thirty feet from the from the Buffalo River under an enormous elm tree where we always slept when we camped at Buffalo State Park some twenty miles from home in Northern Minnesota; the happy gurgling and giggling of the river could at all times be heard from where we slept and rested, and it was like the babbling of a delighted baby speaking in her own language not for me to understand. I’d slept under that tree with my dad five or six times- twice in the winter- and we always slept in the open air under a canvass lean to that I would invariably help him set up and make taut all around, and then we’d proudly look at it for a while as the Old Man smoked a Marlborough and I laid out our sleeping bags and the ground cover. Then we’d join the rest of the troop- My older brother Tom’s Scout Troop that my Dad led: His leadership style was very hands off in that he let the boys decide what they wanted to learn and whenever they did decide he was a damn good teacher who gave his full attention and rewarded them with teasing and compliments in plenty. In short; he was very well liked by the boys and worshipped by me, his fourth of five children.

I was probably nine years old and dreaming of said water when I was gently shaken awake by my father. His hand went directly to my mouth to keep me quiet and he whispered “Wadey, look!” and look I did! Not twenty feet from us was a family of deer grazing on the early morning dewy grass and from our prone position on the ground they all looked very tall and somewhat terrifying. “They won’t hurt us” he promised “if they get scared, they’ll just run like the wind.” Dad continued into my ear and I could smell his aftershave and on his breath was coffee and tobacco. He was curled around me, protecting me, and as I looked out under his chin but over his forearm I believed him completely and I just gazed at the beautifully tall family of White Tail Deer before us: There were three does and at least five fauns who still were sporting their stripes and spots. It was easy to tell which fauns belonged to which does because they did not and would not stray very far and as the does grazed the fauns bent their heads upwards at an awkward angle to drink milk from their mommas and I didn’t feel in the least like an intruder watching this amazing spectacle laid out before us. In the distance was the buck: He was watchful and proud, and I knew they all had their eye on him; their movements were at his discretion and if he got agitated and flicked his tale or snorted they’d be gone in an instant! “He’s the boss!” Dad whispered, somehow knowing that was where my eyes were looking “We stay out of his way and everyone’s happier, huh?” and he gave me a little squeeze and I nodded in agreement. The Buck never strayed far from cover, was always alert and looking fierce to me and I knew why: There was no Doe season, the ladies were never hunted, nor the fawns. But not the Buck, he could be hunted every fall and you didn’t get to be an old buck by being lazy or lax; half the year another buck wanted to take away his family and for two months each year hunters wanted to gun him down, so he had to be careful! As a kid in a house full of kids I knew what it was like believing you had to stay sharp or what was yours might get taken away.

We didn’t hunt; it wasn’t a moral thing for us, just a choice of my father’s and we all went with it. I think that having served in two foreign wars my old man had had his fair share of killing and could no longer stomach it. I knew he’d kill to protect us if he had to, that was never questioned, but to kill for sport when there was food to be had at Piggly Wiggly was more that Dad was willing to do. We watched the wild critters for a while and then suddenly at some unknown disturbance the buck looked around, then right at my Dad and me, and snorted softly, and like snow that comes down but melts right away, they were gone!

That was one experience among many in my childhood that made me love and crave the outdoors, to never mind the rain or even a harsh blizzard, to seek and observe wildlife even in my own back yard. There have been stretches in my life where due to work, family, and financial obligations the wild was simply inaccessible to me so I had to do with staring into the bushes outside my business to see what the birds were up to, or taking long walks after lunch to see the flowering trees in spring and to keep track of my favorite pair of robins and how their chicks were doing. I was never a “natures child” and you never heard me say I get high on nature or any of that nonsense but whatever spirituality I poses is amplified and clarified when I engage with nature in a passive or active way. So it was no surprise to anyone who knows me that when I had kids I brought them out to nature and encouraged them to find it when and where they could: We did the Cup Scout, Girl Scout and Boy Scout thing and I think I was a good leader for the boys and I know my ex-wife, Laura was a great Girl Scout leader.

I’m fifty-six now, and Laura and I have been divorced for ten years, I’m an engraver and have been since I was eighteen and I am in a new marriage: we have a baby girl who is nineteen months old and is our hearts delight! Diana is smart, cute and precocious as hell: She thinks she’s much older than she is and can be really hard to keep up with because she is fearless and will try anything she sees someone else do, and some things she’s never seen anyone ever do! And I worry about raising her. I worry about our youth’s obsession with social media and smart phones, tablets, and computers and please don’t get me wrong, I love all those things and make full use of them but I fondly remember my friends and I being bored and obnoxious and  excommunicated from our homes by our mothers so they could get some housework done (at least till dinner time!) and the whole lot of us all laying in the grass on our backs while throwing a tennis ball into the air and trying to land it on one of us so we could continue the game. One of the guys shouted “Hey, what’s that?!?” and pointed in the air at something none of us could see until we actually got behind his arm and followed the pointer to… what? It looked like an all-white badminton net gently bunched up and floating in the air on the breeze! It was hard to tell, but it might have been two hundred feet off the ground and we immediately gave chase but realized shortly that we couldn’t keep up, so two guys stayed with it while the rest of us ran back to retrieve our bikes and in a few minutes we were all together again with one kid on someone’s handlebars and the other guy riding behind me on my bike because I had a banana seat. We chased that floating thing for over an hour till it came down in a sugar beet field and when we caught it we realized it was a spider web, or thousands of them, and it was literally crawling with what my thirteen year old mind figured was “millions of baby spiders!!!”.

What kind of spiders they were we never knew. Although terrified of spiders I had nothing against them in the wild so we stood around dripping sweat and making predictions as to what they were doing and where they had come from till we’d all had our say and we gathered up our bikes and went off to play at the creek that bordered our neighborhood and was our haven from prying adult eyes for many years. We discussed those spiders at least a hundred times over that summer vacation, but since it was summer, and school was closed, and the public library was really too far away, none of us really knew any of the answers to our questions. But if we’d had smart phones in 1976 we could have easily looked up our queries… except, we wouldn’t have had them, would we? No one would have been looking at the sky, would they. And in these modern days when do you ever hear of little kids being kicked out of their homes because they are too messy and in the way, and Mom has laundry to do and is hoping to sneak a cigarette before Dad gets home? No, it saddens me, but those moments are a thing of the past and I could stack a thousand of them together and call it my, and most of my friends’ childhood. Roy Baddie, in the movie Bladerunner said “All those… moments… will be lost in time, like… tears in rain.” And is that what I want of my childhood? Has it become a relic? And should it be? I’ve used outhouses to do my business but never actually had to live with one and I’m very glad we’ve moved (pardon the pun) beyond them. Mumps, measles and chicken pox; been there and done them all and good riddance to childhood diseases! “There are plenty of things that should be relegated to history, but I don’t think a healthy connection to the natural world around us should be one of them!” Shouted Grandpappy Wade to anyone who’d listen to him in the old folks home at the end of his mortal days on this here earth between Checkers and Matlock at seven and evening meds… So, I’m making a conscious decision to make these things, and many others, a regular part of Diana’s life, and to keep her engaged in the pulse and heartbeat of the natural world even though competition is stiff and gadgets have a way of becoming obsession. School will be a problem too, but we’ll have to work around it somehow- I remember getting in big trouble for looking out the window too much in the fourth grade one September as a squirrel and his wife busily stowed away acorns for the coming winter in their nest which was a hole in the crook of a giant Elm tree just outside my school window…

But I have a plan! Can’t tell you how many times I’ve said that exuberantly shortly before a big bike crash, or being caught by one of my parents, or nearly expelled from school, or before the bike ramp collapsed! But really, I do have a plan and in this manuscript I’ll document it as well as I can for your consideration; it’ll take a while to write because Diana is only nineteen months old and it will take some years for the plan to unfold and emerge with it’s on-the-fly course corrections and pitfall avoidances.

Before the baby was born I told a little of my plan to a friend who is also a client and he admonished me with “Man, I wish you had told this to me years ago! I could have done that with my kids, and the grand kids too!”

“It’s never too late…” I told him.

“Yeah, but where do I begin?” he asked and seemed to be anguished at the hundreds of missed opportunities over the years. “could you make it an online book? All us dads and granddads could read along and get started on this years and years earlier!” he asked genuinely.

I have thought about this for some time now, and I think it’s time to give it a shot! It’s time to share what’s worked and what hasn’t, what I tried too early and what I should have tried instead, and to throw in a little of what my Dad did, and what I did with the older kids when we lived in Montara Ccalifornia in what was really a country town separated from the sprawling Bay Area by a ten mile wide mini mountain range.

Reflections:

• I’m capitalizing the names of all trees and plants and animals as if they were people in a story… it just seems fitting.
• At Fossil Rim animal reserve in Texas I bought a pair of kids’ binoculars for Diana when she was less than one year old; any day now we’re gonna use them for the first time!!
• I’m hoping to post something new at least once a month, and I’d like feedback or suggestions please. Also, I’m going to shamelessly advertise my other projects that are for sale (The Summer Trip, novel – The Birch Lane Chronicles, collection of short stories and Celestial Navigation, novel in progress, all by yours truly).
• Any link to merchandise on this site is something I recommend and use regularly.