Promises to the Rising Generation

I just spent a few minutes reading my Amanda's blog.

She is the youngest of my 5 nieces and is quickly approaching that magical, powerful and frightening 18th birthday. She will cross the legal threshold from minor to adult by the tick of a clock. It will happen while she is asleep, unless she elects to stay up until one second beyond midnight. I hope she doesn't because this is a moment best appreciated in dreams. Walt Whitman may have been thinking of this particular midnight when he wrote in "A Clear Midnight":

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.

Night, sleep, and the stars.

I have witnessed this passage made by three sisters, two other nieces and two daughters. I have also watched my sons take the step. I have another niece, my wife's brother's daughter, who made the journey but I don't know her at all, really. Watching, however, is a poor substitute for experiencing so I write from this point, from my personal experience with the advantage of time and history to moderate the anxiety, hope, fear and anticipation of what lies ahead.

My 18th birthday began one second past midnight on the 15th of May, 1969. I was asleep in my bed in my parent's home in Fort Riley, Kansas.

I was about to graduate from a high school I had only attended for three weeks after being invited to leave Shorecrest High in Seattle, after my family had left the Pacific Northwest in the autumn of the previous year; leaving me behind with the Vails, to complete my senior year.

I was asked to leave Shorecrest not because I had caused trouble by hi jinx, but because I was driven to expose what seemed to me at the time, to be great injustice. The details are in another blog entry somewhere here and they are not really important to this one except as background.

At Junction City High School I was really back in an environment I understood. I had, except for Kindergarten through first grade and the three years in Seattle, always attended schools located either on or near major Military bases. The majority of my classmates had always been other Army brats. The few local kids who attended those schools were the anomaly the rest of us never understood. While there is something to be said about diversity, being one of the minority is never as easy as being one of the crowd.

The Church was strong in Seattle in 1969. At Shorecrest there were a number of LDS kids. This was different for me. I had been accustomed to being one of few, it not the only LDS kid in my school. So at Shorecrest, because I did not enjoy the celebrity that brought, I turned to a quiet version of anarchy. In Kansas, I was one of two LDS kids in the entire school and the only one in the senior class. I had again, the attention that being the Mormon delivered and as able to cash in on being "good" once again.

I do not claim to having been anything more than a shallow teenager in 1969. As shallow as I was however, where grabbing attention was concerned, I did suffer the deep emotional distresses that have plagued teenagers since, I suspect, Cain hit his 13th birthday.

The single most important job I gave myself as a teenager was to hide from the world how broken I really was as a human being.

I did not want anyone to know I came from a family that was fractured. I wanted no one to know my mother was insane nor that my father could be brutal and cruel. I didn't want another human to know how afraid I was all the time or what little talent I had or how really stupid I was. I became very good at making what I imagined the world could love rather than showing the world the real, unlovable, me. This habit made it impossible for me to form deep and lasting friendships because it was extremely difficult to maintain the facade all the time; especially when one becomes tempted by intimacy, to let one's guard down even momentarily.

Where girls were concerned, I fell madly in love with several during the years from 1962-1969. Most of them never knew but there was a small group I actually persuaded to return the favor. In every case, the moment they tried to penetrate my soul, I dropped them and dropped them hard.

I have been told that, while my case was so extreme as to me clinical, feelings of inadequacy are common among young people so this comes my first promise.

You will one day understand how valuable you are. First you will learn that your parents, with all their human flaws, love you the best way they can and that your Heavenly Father loves you without condition and wants, more than anything else, you to be happy.

There will come a day - hopefully sooner than later - when you will begin to feel comfortable in your own skin. You will understand that everyone has something to offer everyone else; that we, to some extent, are all broken... or at least cracked. And that that common bond of human frailty is best healed in groups who love the Lord.

It took me 40+ years to learn this. I pray it won't take you nearly that long.

I suspect that when you see the news, you think the world is a pretty terrible place. When I was 18, Vietnam was raging, the U.S.S.R. was waging a cold and expensive war with the United States, there were tsunamis and earthquakes and tornados and hurricanes and floods and erupting volcanos, murders, rapes, deadly diseases, drug addiction, alcoholism, car wrecks, train wrecks, airplane crashes, suicides, ugly political campaigns, terrible public scandals, gossipy Mormons and mean dogs.

As we age we tend to remember the "good old days" with fondness. I promise that you will too. At the same time I encourage you to follow the prophet who, last month, taught us to learn from the past.

He also encouraged us to live in the present. I know that's really hard when you're 18.

There is so much you want to do and all of it seems to be waiting for us in the future rather than available right now. Perhaps we should focus more on what we can do, right now.

I promise, that when we do, our lives are richer and we are happier.

Finally, a last promise.

Someday, when you're wake up on say, your 57th birthday, you will look back on your 18th and smile. You will wonder why you had been so worried; so nervous... so scared. You will look in the mirror and count the wrinkles and the scars and see them as the chisel marks of a loving God as He has given you a life that sculpts us into people who love Him. You will think of the lyrics to Garth Brook's hit, "The Dance":

Our lives are better left to chance I could have missed the pain

But I'd have had to miss the dance...

Humpty Dumpty and Other of Life's Surprises

In Sixteen Hundred and Forty-Eight
When England suffered the pains of state
The Roundheads lay siege to Colchester town
Where the King's men still fought for the crown
Then One-Eyed Thompson stood on the wall
A gunner of deadliest aim
The cannon he fired from the top of the tower
Humpty-Dumpty was its name...

Until 15 minutes ago, I had always believed that Humpty Dumpty was an egg; a large, anthromorphed egg with little legs, littler arms and a face. He also had a little hat.

In pictures I have seen in nursery rhyme books, he looks a lot like Jonathon Winters.

Now I learn that, not only was he not an egg but that he was either the sniper known as One-eyed Thompson or the canon he fired from the top of The St. Mary's at the Wall church in Colchester, England (There are two versions of the above poem. The other one identifies Humpty Dumpty as the canon).

in 1648 the Roundheads battled the royalists for 11 weeks at the church, before one of their portable canon scored a direct hit on both Thompson and his canon, causing them to tumble to the ground inside the stronghold. Naturally, all the king's horses (cavalry) and all the king's men (infantry) worked very hard at reassembling the big gun, but their efforts were in vain. After learning that their compadres in the north surrendered at the Battle of of Preston. After that Oliver Cromwell took charge and begin his tenure as Lord Protector of England and instituted the genocide of Irish Catholics, thus starting the trouble with the Irish that presisted for centuries.

Notwithstanding Mother Goose, Humpty Dumpty was not an egg.

So, yet again, life has thrown me a curve, low and inside that always results in a swing and most often, a miss, as it was this time. Strike One!

The Brook Trout is not a trout at all, but a member of the char family.

I didn't just learn this. In fact I don't remember when I learned this.

It's not all that bothersome a thing except it makes me one step further from my goal of catching at least one of every species of trout in North America. What I did learn recently is that there are three other species of "trout" that are not trout either; the lake trout, the bull trout and the Dolly Varden!

That means I scratch those three off my list of "caught" trout.

I thought there were 22 known species of North American trout and now I learn there are three fewer. So of the 19 that are left, I now have caught 6 rather than 9 (10 if you count the Brookies).

Strike Two

I have just learned that life is not fair.

Actually, I have suspected this for a long, long time but kept hoping things would improve as I got older.

Don't get me wrong, though. I am not all that bothered because it is not fair because it's not fair for anyone. We all get screwed from time to time, just as we all experience dumb luck, merited rewards and blessings we could have never imagined, much less earned.

Perhaps this really means that life wins the prize answer from the magic mirror... "Who or what is the fairest of them all?"

So on the fairness of life issue, I found my groove and smacked the ball over the Green Monster, driving in two runs with me.

How can anyone not like surprises?

Rabbit Shooting on the San Juans and a Wounded Hunter

Sometime around 1880 someone living on San Juan Island released a pair of domesticated European rabbits into the wild, it wasn’t too long before the rabbits infested that island and others in the archipelago. 80 some years later, Earl, Beezer, Joe and I rode the ferry to the main island on a Friday night and spent Saturday shooting as many as we could.

I had shot jackrabbits before, and spent many hours hunting the delicious cottontail, but this would be my first and last experience shooting these prolific, if illegal, aliens.

I drove, of course, because I was the only one of the four with my own car, even if it wasn’t much of a car. It was a 1961 Rambler American wagon; robin-egg blue with “three on the tree”. I called it my blue lunch bucket.

I was also the only one with a shotgun, or really a gun of any kind, so I brought it and my Springfield .22 semi-automatic that I would lend to Earl who promised to kill all his rabbits – even those on the run – with headshots. He didn’t realize how empty that promise was.

Someone had told us about these rabbit hunting resorts on the island. There were really nothing more than farms in the summer that, once the crops were in, became profit centers by charging rabbit hunters 8 bucks a day and by renting firearms to those who didn’t have their own but had a bloodlust to shoot bunnies. You could also sleep in these resorts but the local hotel was cheaper and reminiscent of the hotel in Gunsmoke – except there was no Miss Kitty or dancing girls by any other name.

When we departed the ferry it was snowing and there was a good cover of snow on the ground – the better to track rabbits, as though that might be necessary in the morning. After we checked in, Joe and I decided to take a drive out into the country-side and see what things looked like in the dark. Earl and Beezer wanted to go to bed and watch one of the two channels on the black and white TV that came complimentary with the room. It had rabbit ears for an antenna – which was quite appropriate.

As we drove around the country roads in the dark, with big fluffy flakes of snow falling hypnotically, we happened upon a rabbit in the road, himself hypnotized by the headlights of the Rambler.

I was pretty sure what I did next was illegal. It certainly was everywhere else I had ever hunted, but I determined to “kiw dat wabbit”! I got out of the car, pulled the .12 ga. from the back and shot him dead. I threw his carcass in the back of the car, noting that his eyes were open… staring at me with a look that said something like “What the hell?!?”

There were no sirens or anything so we drove back to the hotel and went to bed.

In the morning we had breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant. I don’t remember the meal but I am sure it was wonderful. Afterwards, we headed to the resort we had contacted earlier in the week where the farmer rented a .20 ga. and a .12 ga. to Joe and Beezer and pointed to a field that promised to have a lot of rabbits.

The field was some 50 yards from the house but we didn’t walk six feet before a rabbit took off from some clump of grass toward that very field. Earl raised the Springfield so I didn’t shoot. He shot 4 times and watched the rabbit bound away. I made some crack about a headshot and he flipped me the Earl bird which is a lot like the real bird only rather than extending the middle finger, he used his ring finger. He believed it to be similar to saying “shoot” instead of “shit” but I am pretty sure his take on that translated well to people who didn’t know him.

The next rabbit that got up, I shot… I put the fellow in my game pouch and walked on.

Tracking was completely unnecessary and useless anyway. There was no snow where there was no track. The rabbits were running everywhere.

After four or five misses, Earl finally killed a rabbit. It was just my luck that he actually did shoot it in the head. He said “There, now I have the hang of this rifle!” He killed two more rabbits but neither of them with headshots.

Beezer and Joe, with their rented shotguns, were killing almost as many as they missed and we were all having a great time until Earl came up with his “idea”.

On one side of the field that was a wash that dead-ended against a small hill. Earl suggested we walk in an arched line with he and I in the middle and Beezer and Joe slightly in front of us on the ends. He believed we could herd the bunnies into the arroyo and slaughter them like so many fish in a barrel. Foolishly, I agreed.

As we walked a rabbit took off but it did not follow Earl’s plan. It ran directly for Beezer and I screamed “NO” as I saw Earl raise the .22. I screamed too late.

It was not a head shot – fortunately. It was a leg shot; only it wasn’t the rabbit’s leg that took the lead, but Beezer’s. Earl hit him square in the fattest part of Beezer’s thigh. Beezer, being a distance runner, however, didn’t have much fat on his thigh or anywhere else., but he did, as it turns out, have active and healthy tear ducts.

Earl was sorry, of course, but Beezer promised to extract revenge just as soon as he could walk again and all this as we carried him, two-armed basket-style, to the Rambler. Joe returned the guns to the farmer and asked where we might find a doctor to treat a minor gunshot wound. The farmer, hoping to avoid liability, told us to get the hell off his property.

We drove into town and found a little office with a shingle announcing there was an MD somewhere inside.

I suppose times are different now because the old Doc did not call the sheriff. He merely extracted the lead and bandaged up our buddy. He told him to see his family doctor when he got back to Seattle.

As we got back into the car for the trip home, I counted the rabbits we were taking home to eat. Of the dozens we shot, we kept eight but it was the first; the one I shot by the light of my car, what was the most troubling. Being left in the car all night in the dead of winter, froze his eyes open. When I counted him in the eight, he was still staring at me; but his message had changed. It was the same, cold stare that Beezer gave Earl all the way home; a stare that promised revenge. I tried to shake off the eerie feeling because, clearly, this rabbit was too dead to be having any thoughts at all.

After I dropped Beezer off at his house and listened to his father call me all kinds of names, as though I had been the shooter, I dropped off the other two and went home where I skinned and butchered the rabbits. I remember it was not nearly as easy as doing the same thing to cottontails. I hoped, at least, that they would taste as good as cottontails.

A few weeks later, after Beezer was released from being severely grounded and his father had forgiven me as the instigator of it all, I removed the rabbits from the family freezer, thawed them for my mother to cook, and invited the hunting party over for a feast.

The rabbit wasn’t as good as cottontail, but it wasn’t terrible either. We all ate with gusto until all was devoured save two forequarters and two hindquarters… one rabbit.

Later that night, after my friends had departed and my stomach stretched, I decided to eat the leftover rabbit. I took one bite and noticed it tasted differently than had the others. It was both gamier and sour at the same time. I tried another bite that proved to be the same so I threw the rest out.

Along about midnight I ran to the toilet and barfed my guts out. I repeated that process every 15 minutes until the next morning when my dad took me to the emergency room. After the poking, prodding and interrogation, food poisoning was the diagnoses and the prognosis was that I would probably live.

It took a week to completely recover and the same amount of time for me to remember the curse of the jacklighted rabbit.

Some lessons are harder to learn than others but this one was easy. I have never shot anything after dark since, nor have I hunted with Earl Dennis.