Doc's Musings

How Wild Ducks Find the Skillet

In a costume, diagnostic - as much as the green head, blue wing patches, and curlicue tail feathers are for a drake mallard - of the psychiatrically committable duck hunter, he steps out of his warm four-wheel drive pickup in form fitting waders, the latest wetlands camouflage, a twelve gauge black Benelli strapped on his back, and, his duck band-coated lanyard hoisting its double reed call; then, having trudged half a mile through thigh-deep ice-floating scrotum-freezing water, he extinguishes the puny pencil-dick beam of his flashlight and nestles under the semi-sheltering bough of the willow oak, already mostly defrocked by inexorable winter. Suddenly, motion, and the warmth of motion stop. Now, only the dark and the quiet and the quiet cold are suzerain. The not sounds are deafening: All the hunter hears is undulations of that low moaning tinnitus, issuing from no direction, omnipresent, if only he will pay homage attention to the engulfing maw of the impenetrable, silent, frigid blackness.

The source of the pheromes, which lured him here away from a distaff warm bed, is not evident.

In this perfect dark and silence, without grounding, the mind’s, the heart’s unfettered twists and turns become twirling divagations run amuck; as a duck vortexed by intersecting jet streams, no safe harbor is readily anticipated.

A wintry broth of some purgatory and, a little, redemption constitute the miscegenation that is waiting for sunrise on a duck marsh: thoughts kaleidoscope the good, the bad, the comforting, the terrifying, the paths followed and those avoided … the failures and middling successes … those pilgrims let down and those assuaged: A life being muddled through. Making it even worse, the cold pressing his flesh through neoprene gives advantage to the more dreary vistas of tomorrow, of yesterday. And so, the first presage of the dawn is unduly welcome, hopefully forcing back his haints deep into the closeting adyts of his soul. (Okay, you think this is sick; it is even more so, once you recall that this enterprise is fully voluntary. I grant you that. But, might you not also grant, that those of us conversant with the darker angels of our nature might refract the light of dawn more keenly?)

In the still dark, in that middle distance – too far to call, close enough to savor, he is lullabied by a symphony from an unseen flight of widgeons. (Though widgeons can yodel only two civilized notes, each bird seems to throat a pitch of a different timbre; thus, a passing flight in song, vaguely approximates an airborne flute ensemble.) In this dream-like state, his soul flies up to greet them, barreling about, flying the loop-de-loop. He becomes of that old wise Russian widgeon, also with fancy top hat, Pushkin, who wrote:

Headlong I soared, soared, soared,

Whither, I neither remember nor know;

I only shouted to the stars I met:

Keep to the right!

Meanwhile, back in the mud and water, the first puffs of wind from the north waft through the fractured darkness like a draft from a door left open. Then, the plaintive, hair-raising, howling coyote-whistle of a wood duck wails in the distance, confirming to the man that he actually is suspended in some inchoate land, which, being in the rend between hell and heaven, doesn’t know how to behave.

With conscious slowness, as darkness expires, he moves towards the realm of the concrete … of breathing, doing, and, is encouraged in this, seeing his faithful black lab at attention on the nearby log, waiting for commands, waiting for the ducks. The first hint of the irredentist red of the birthing day, then, an eerie orange phosphorescence, glooms strangely without heat from the east, but, like the man expectantly warming his still-frozen hands over a cold wood stove whose nascent flames have not yet jarred the artic equilibrium of just was, he has fragile faith that the fire is there.

The jet-like slicing of wind over soaring wings is a dash of cold water on his face; he braces, becomes fully a man of action and begins to call. He squints three mallards. Closer and closer they circle. Face down, he cackles. He watches the icy water’s reflection of his dog’s eager gaze to glean the flight path of his quarry. Foolishly, he sneaks a skyward glance: To his aching dismay, from his pale expectant face, the ducks have flared and are streaking away.

The pintail duck story is that of a dichotomy: the aerodynamic bull sprig with his stanchion long white erect neck is so breath-takingly beautiful that he is penalized by being allowed to sing only in a pathetic kind of grunt whistle; also, he is paired with such a homely earth-toned hen that one wonders what he sees in her, how he is able to breed. But, multiplied they must have, as hundreds of them in an evidently choreographed circular landing pattern, are on top of his head. Sadly, no mortal man can hide from twice hundreds of searching eyes: They fly away without apparent remorse after making only Dante’s second circle.

Meanwhile, the three mallards sail past, still looking for breakfast.

The hen-on-the-water from the call on his lips beseeches their return. Again and again. Loudly. And lo … here, they turn, back. Around, around, around, interminably around. No same blunder this time: By no upward glances, but only by divining shadows - a denizen in Plato’s cave, his sole connection with reality arises entirely from his surmise of the meaning in the gray light of the dark shadow in the iron water of the black dog. More of that damn infernal circling. “Quack, cackle, quack, cackle, cackle …,” he deceitfully coquettes. Finally, no more circling: Here they come, landing gear down over the decoys. Reflexively, without cognition, but with perfect melding of neurons and muscle and metal, he uncoils like a snake, shoulders his shotgun and blasts the two mallard drakes and the hen from the heavens. Hopefully, you are not offended. After all, they have flown too close to the sun; it is only right and just that they now plummet to earth.

As he was born to do, Tyrone ecstatically retrieves them, one by one. The hunter puts their heads in his carrying sling and hopes for the gods to send three more pairs of whistling wings his way to fill his limit. But that really does not matter: The day is now fully launched. The mind is clear. There are no regrets.

NUTHIN’ DOIN’: A SQUIRREL HUNTING MIND WANDER

The smile of a child is so appealing because it conveys unambivalent joy, uncontaminated with even a smidgen of nuance that inevitably accompanies the adult equivalent whose wizened owner is by definition no longer awash in that heavenly virginal ignorance of the dark side of life; in addition, there used to be, before Wal Mart was conceived, small shops in small towns with inviting alcoves where customers and proprietors alike would gather unhurried to converse and commune with a warm familiarity, sharing their pastimes and dreams as if at a family dinner table; so, in such a prelapsarian era, it was not unnatural that this smiling boy would suppose he could be welcome in his country town’s last sporting goods store where his scrawny frame appeared as an organic toothpick propping up the counter, leaning in against the display case with an attitude of awe, unwittingly aping an arthritic cigar store Indian whose rhythmically nodding head cantilevered with feigned insight and understanding as the weathered old men reverently recounted, in alternately hushed and excited tones, the previous weekend’s hunting adventures.

Absent any concrete personal experience germane to the topics of these discussions, what compelled my abiding interest in them? Hardwiring methinks, but maybe that is only a pretext to excuse how I eventually turned out. But I suspect it is the same reason why girls adore dolls and then, on the road to ingrained motherhood, babies, and not because they’re already inured to the smell of diapers full of stinky organic matter, nor are they ignorant of the fact that the warm little purring critters passing as infants have a more than equal capacity to grow up to be monsters as well as poets, a situation not much more preposterous than if a caterpillar possessed the pluripotential to develop into a skunk as well as a butterfly. Upon considered reflection, I believe it a more rational calling to be held captive by an atavistic will to hunt than the forward-looking drive to have a brood.

In their limitless cerulean sky, cotton candy clouds wafted over the towering oaks like hot air balloons over Paris warming up to go ‘round the world in eighty days. Below all of those mundanities, the first squirrel lost his head while plucking a low hanging acorn because of my youthful predilections that had soldiered on. I don’t know if he noticed the clouds or not or just focused on his next meal or thought only of securing his food cache for the winter. I briefly complimented myself and my rifle for our shooting as I observed his right eye was missing as he was clumsily deposited in my game satchel. The sepia-toned smiling boy leaning against the counter would have had some sense of revulsion at the spattering of blood and brains just effected, but as an adult hunter, I was not only not bothered in the least, that is to say oblivious, but, even worse, had already been taken prisoner by that relentless gluttonous imagination that envisioned other squirrels frolicking higher up in the same old oak, ready to get the same loving ballistic treatment, even if they hadn’t yet showed themselves. I had come so far from that happy eon of childhood, when, upon looking down at the blood-spattering gasping death rattle of the first beautiful, innocent deer I’d ever kilt, my soul was seized by terribly conflicting emotions whose schizophrenic commingling could result in a positive outcome only as the title for a country song: I Don’t Know Whether to Jump for Joy or Lay Down and Cry.

Adultly armed now with such an uncluttered mind, I gazed up into the explosion of the yellow-green colored impressionist palette of sun-drenched and shaded water and willow oak leaves that languidly wafted in the gentle breeze – producing the illusion of a million tethered butterflies: an autumnal montage which should have been gently pacifying had I not been straining so to see where the damn squirrels were hiding.

A fat man decked out in camouflage trying to slink pachydermous unseen through the woods is the literal definition of an oxymoron. The cognizance of such brought a fleeting smile to my face, as I have always aspired to membership in the politically incorrect and its most honorable subset, the ridiculous, an aspiration, I have good reason to believe, that I have unsanctimoniously fulfilled long ago. (Don’t take my word for it: my closest friends have repeatedly assured me that this is so.) (In fact, dear reader, if you haven’t fathomed this already, for your guileless sake, please read no further.)

Meanwhile, pressing on, I amble-plodded with bulbous ataxia along the forest floor under the irksome squirrel-shrouding canopy in search of more to kill for dinner.  With each additional sweaty expenditure of two or three mets, the vistas changed as new realms of leafy morasses perplexed my hunter’s eye: Darkness and light, still and breezy; the trees in slow undulation seemed alive and were enlivened by the rhythmic chirping of birds of all colors and sizes that flitted in and out of shadows, seen and unseen, bouncing on moving branches, mimicking the utter insouciance of a squirrel gamboling through the dessert courses of his arboreal buffet.

In the many damp places, the black earth was like a fallen chocolate soufflé that had been stuffed with leaves and acorns by the now absent chef. And all about, baby oaks sprouted from this mimic of primordial goo in pursuit of sunlight. Unfortunately for me, the squirrels were not so phototropic - seeming instead to prefer the more tenebrous haunts of the forest.

By and by, the little boy plastered to the display case merited an occasional glace from the old men entranced in serious conversation. And later still, he was apparently judged to be worthy of questioning, if not yet acceptance: “What have you been doing boy?” “Nuthin’.” “Whaddya know boy?” “Nuthin’.” And so they named me Nuthin’. Hence forth, when my Mom would drop me off while she did her errands, they’d welcome me with a hearty, “Well … here comes Nuthin’. Come on in boy.”

So a boy of only eight had gone to heaven but, contrary to what the Baptists would have you believe, he hadn’t had to die or even do right to get there.

Beavers are to neotropical forests what conniving females are to good men: sooner or later they usually get the best of ‘em. And so it was here: About an acre of gaunt black trunks with mostly amputated arms arose starkly from about six inches of murky root-suffocating water. Though deep in the maw of the dark woods, I beheld an eerily sun-splashed golden visage as there were no leaves to act as natural parasols. Sort of a hidden wooden Stonehenge it looked to me; and just like at Stonehenge, the little people that used to worship here must have all been dead too as I waited around quite awhile, watching, but left because I didn’t see no little hairy people or squirrels in attendance and didn’t have a millennium to hang around to see if they would resurrect before all before me got rotted up and became the dark goo I had already stepped in.

Meanwhile, as I gallantly set out again on the quest to head-shoot some meat for the table, I pondered the old men I had once prepubescently listened to with such solemn reverence. They were all long since deceased … the railroad conductor, the small town lawyer, the gunsmith, the old widower and the store owner. I imagined sitting in their graveyard where they could observe me at this moment. Socialistically nestled in the black loam with equal incomes now, I supposed they would be happy to see me and the squirrels and the forest and the flitting birds burnished in the fallen glow of their erstwhile memories in which all moving things shall become again of the leaden earth.

As the gloaming usurped the waning daylight, while still entranced in my retrospective reveries, a magnificent pileated wood pecker peremptorily knocked out a high-pitched staccato peroration of imperial resonance that commanded the rest the living creatures of the forest go silent. Having now spent a lifetime achieving the keenest understanding of the wilderness, I immediately perceived that this was a telegraphed message from below from the old men freighted with the enormous question, “since we were planted so long ago, we wonder what now are you about Nuthin’?” Without hesitation, I replied to the old woodpecker, “Yall’d be damn proud, Nuthin’s doin’.”

 

DOGS ARE BAD PEOPLE

About 3 years ago, at the young age of 54, I had a stroke. As far as my big central nervous system goes (I have never been able to find a hat large enough – what I may have lacked in quality, I’ve made up in volume.), as such bad things go, it was a relatively trivial thing: my left hand and leg got weak, and within three months recovered 90% of their function, to the point where I am now unable to detect any deficit @ all on a normal day. And, unfortunately for the rest of the world, it did not affect my cognition. (Insanity is rumored to be contagious.)

However, to my chagrin, I can no longer dribble with my left hand, and am thus unable to play basketball any more. The most serious, irreversible consequence of this extant living tragedy is that I will surely never again be called Sweetness, which is what that the black kids used to call me when I played ball with them @ the Y when I first came back to my hometown, also to play doctor. For some, probably no good reason, no damn white person has ever called me that.

(As the first of many asides, I detest the appellation, African American: First, it is inaccurate, implying a duality between 2 continents. During their office visits, none of my many black patients ever talk about the daily events in Botswana or Liberia. None of them speak Swahili and English, though the white guy who can’t jump in me - literally now – see stroke above, must embarrassingly and politically incorrectly confess, has had passing thoughts that this language combo may constitute what Ebonics actually is. Second, it somehow connotes the idea that African Americans just got off the boat and have not yet had time to morph, assimilate into actual Bonafide Americans, whereas, in fact, the forbearers of most black folks have been here centuries longer than those of the average white folks. So, characteristically humbly, Bob suggests we adopt the following more accurate and less judgmental nomenclature when referring to one another: African Americans will henceforth be referred to as Chocolate Americans, White Americans as Vanilla Americans, Native Americans as Strawberry Americans, Hispanic Americans as Mocha Americans, etc. This opens up endless colorful possibilities for naming people with mixed ancestry, for example, if Obama had had a Native American grandpa, he would be a Neapolitan American. But, I must admit, before my system is adopted by the populace at large instead of just brain-damaged victims like me, there remain bugs to be worked out, for example, what label would you assign to Tiger Woods?)

Before my stroke, I had abused my body: Though I was grossly obese, daintily weighing in in my heyday at a mere 325 lbs, my blood pressure and cholesterol were both always, at least according to my jealous asthenic, yogurt-eating friends, disgustingly low. After my stroke - not having taken my blood pressure or cholesterol for over 2 years - to my dismay, I discovered that they had gone through the roof. As a new car that can initially be run for a long time without service eventually requires regular maintenance, so, I had also used up my newness (youth) and had run smack into off-warranty middle age; I realized that my metabolism had changed, and thus, if I intended to hang around much longer as a live public nuisance (I am fully convinced that my maker imbued my person with the ability to haint.), my body needed some attention.

To whit: I started taking cholesterol medicines, blood pressure medicines, lost 90 lbs in 6 months and started walking ~ 4 miles/day 4 or 5 days a week. (Even starting eating yogurt, but, nonetheless, I’m not gay yet.)

The title of this piece stems from tales of my walking, but before I move on to the subject @ hand, let me confess that I gained 40 lbs back and have now lost 10 of that. It is obvious to me that I am clinched in a long term life or death wrestling match with the Pillsbury Dough Boy, a contest I suspect I will lose in the end (He and my appetite are relentless; I get weary.). I wish I could say honestly that it is the art of the effort - like I believe to be so in much of life - the game, the playing of it that is important, not the end result, but, if I was able, with the abiding mendacity needed to say that, I surely would have had the requisite skills to become and would probably already be a politician. In other words, it really sucks – the total absence of eating pleasure truly does matter. I have nothing good to say about it, i.e., I don’t recommend it as a hobby.

Meanwhile, as I said, I done gone to walking, walking in the country, that is. And until recently, I have always walked with dogs. When I first began my walking exercises, my 4 black labs, Tyrone, Sassy, YoYo, & Roxie, accompanied me. On these excursions, I was the epicenter of a real roving canine menagerie. As I registered my aerobics, the adventure was more about watching the dogs interact, play, chase piglets, coons, and deer, and splash in the water than it was a commune with nature. Some would hang by my side, while others roamed all over the place. Old Tyrone always seemed sorta put out by all the commotion, generally staying @ heel, seeming to periodically admonish me with his sad, doleful brown eyes for allowing my black children to wreak such havoc. YoYo, getting up in dog years herself, hung close to keep Tyrone company. Sassy, despite motoring on only 3 legs – my hunters called her tripod, a victim of hip dysplasia, and the youngest, 6 year old Roxie, were the ones who really kept the countryside in riot.

In the past year, Tyrone, wrapped in blankets on the back porch, peacefully succumbed to old age, and Sassy and YoYo became more and more feeble, finally simply disappearing in the night, never to come home, probably providing a meager meal for those ubiquitous howling coyotes. So, as of last month, only Roxie remained.

But walking alone with Roxie was a trip in itself: She was skilled at catching perch and tadpoles in the ponds we passed. She generally didn’t hang too close to me – preferring to range out and chase the critters, but when she did, she loved to jump in the air and snag the horse flies that often harassed my backside. I’ve never seen another dog able to do that. On our last walk together, oddly, she stayed @ heel almost the entire 4 miles. The next day, she was killed in an accident.

And then there were none.

I found (find) walking alone somewhat depressing. Nonetheless, there are some nice things about it. Since mayhem no longer precedes me, I unexpectedly often interacted with animals @ close range: Last week, with the wind just right, I walked, still unsuspected, about 300 yards down the road less than 15 yards behind a juvenile bobcat. The next day a young raccoon walked to within about 5 feet of my stiff body before he, for some inexplicable reason, suddenly birthed an unscheduled bowel movement and skedaddled. Every outing I see deer and hogs by the dozens; am almost able to touch some of them. And the birds are everywhere. I especially am fond of the wading birds that sound like dogs croaking and frogs barking (black-crowned night herons, rails, gallinules, anhingas, calico herons, etc.).

It is obvious that wild animals are programmed to recognize movement as a sign of danger, whereas, it seems to me, it is in the beguiling not-innocence of stillness where evil lurks. (Picture a fat man standing motionless for way too long, in the middle of nowhere, for no apparent reason, thinking bad thoughts.)

Meanwhile, the cat squirrels don’t seem to give a damn one way or another: they bounce around without a care in the overhead limbs or squirt around on the ground, and around tree trunks shaded with Spanish moss, peeking out with little impish elfin grins. Bizarrely, I imagine them as my little ill mannered cousins trashing Chartres, running in and out of anterooms and around and around the columns, whooping it up all the while, having no respect for the grand cathedral they are dishonoring while having a blast. But with my unfortunately judgmental nature, I am far too harsh: The squirrels do demonstrate extreme agility and effortless grace as they seem to fly through the air from tree to tree. You see, I have forgotten that most important of rules, that, to extract the rewards of beauty and pleasure almost always existing just beneath the surface of reality, one must learn to recognize the sublime in the ridiculous.

Despite the positives of the silence that now accompanies me in the woods, I feel I have suffered a grievous loss, and like the coffin bearers in the poem, Ode to an Athlete Dying Young, I am now a “Townsman of a stiller town.”

In the end, it finally comes down to me alone against my appetite and the horse flies. It hardly seems fair. And surely it is not, but then, as Roxie’s father and as a doc, I have learned first hand that dogs, like people, are not forever, only more so.

Robert F. McFarlane M.D.   

DATE  8/11/2010

Stumped for an Evening

 “then laugh … for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis” ee cummings

How many calories come with each breath? I have long suspected one could gain weight just by inhaling in the riverbottom. The fragrance of rotted and growing carbon mixed with the freshness of wild flowers is its unique signature sensation which silently proclaims the timeless richness of the neighborhood.

As I sit beholding on a now soft oak stump – the result of a decade ago Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the motion and the lack of motion and the smells and the light and the shadows and the air are hypnotic: the trees and the saw grass and the palmettos undulate seeming with and without synchrony as the untrustworthy wind vanishes through this neotropical maze.

The large gray-barked oaks convey certitude of permanence, while the juvenile, lithe ones swaying in the breeze suggest imminent if not eternal rejuvenation. Parked in the firm black earth dappled with impressionist failing light, one gets the sense that this tableau has always been, a surmise which would be incorrect. The black dirt is a migrant, having emigrated from the blackland prairies about Dallas; having arrived in millennia past in millennial floods; having come down in what geologist would call deep time – a time so vast as to extend beyond our ability to relate or comprehend. So, to be fair, in a strictly human sense, it has all been here forever.

The floods are really what make this land so fecund, depositing in this black earth the rotting detritus of washed away plants and the soil in which they lived and died year after year after year, eventually creating version two of Eden.

Of course it is the Sun which is ultimately responsible, powering the rotting death and growth of flora and the rain and the floods necessary for the creation of hardwood cathedrals as well as man who pollutes them. (I wonder if the old Aztec ritual of prying beating hearts from the body was intended to stop the latter. At the very least, they knew the Sun was the to blame in the end.)

As the old logging road continued to the south in its mending rend in the forest, I received the gaze of an immature spike buck outfitted with its first antlers – already shed of velvet, thus drowned in the throes of its confusing virginal puberty, peering at me, looking like the frozen statue of a gray ghost – how long it has been there watching I do not know, but suspect for not as long as the black dirt. For seeming ever, it does not move, in relief juxtaposed against the black land and the brown and the gray of the tree trunks conveying in its coiled muscles an attitude of tension and excitement. After awhile, he too seems a permanent fixture, cast in stone in his first rut as a phantom incarnation of “Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,” but then he glides off with scant motion and no sound as shades in the forest do and thus the urn remains unpainted.

As evening begins to fall, at times multitudes of dragonflies, wings glinting golden in the sepia light, pirouette soundlessly with graceful motion as if ethereal miniature ballerinas in a silent opera, but, also they are prone to ataxic fits and starts, apparently jerked about as if tethered to a giant mobile, alternatively spun and stopped abruptly by some celestial brat.  Beheld, all this is too surreal, especially without sound so that memory and perception - was, become confused and conflated, today … yonder; coalescing in Thoreau’s apparently, but not actually, oxymoronic fusion of “the joyous and the serene”: A giant arboreal mood poem whose vibrancy and overarching resonance seduces one into its maw of timeless reverence without sound or apparent effort.

As the light of the Sun fades, and the dark of the earth rises to meet the sky, it becomes bathed in the silvery light of the Moon, and fittingly, an a cappella nocturne is tapped out by an insomniac woodpecker who, in turn, is eventually serenaded by the plaintive French horn of the forest, the barred owl; and so, in this firmament of unnatural light, fractured, albeit soothingly, by the first sounds of the evening, all seems to become as fused into one as in a dream: the smells, the not-sounds and the sounds, the panoramas, the animals, and the trees … my redneck nirvana, or, as Willa Cather averred in My Antonia and, later, in part on her tombstone, “I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is the sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved in something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

And what a place to lay down to rest: Where better to be underground when, in 5 billion years, the Sun extinguishes its hydrogen and quits powering the rain and the floods and the people and then expands and incinerates all man has known  - the Mother of All Cremations? Maybe Aristotle’s uncaused cause could come back and start over from here?

All too unknowable for me, except I’m sure, when what ever happens happens, what a setting this will have been to have come to grips with singular finiteness, mortality – no instant replays or reruns, and then on to irenic slumber, in deep time no less; so, Amen.

 Or to paraphrase Robert Frost, “One could do worse than be a sitter of stumps.”