Nearer the Earth:
David Schneider
As I write this, the sun is coming out and it is warming up outside, wrecking an otherwise perfect autumn couch potato football day. I love my home in the
I took my son Robert dove hunting yesterday and, of course, Dad came along. He wasn’t physically in the car with us as we headed north to the Everglades Frog Pond in
Robert called him on the cell phone to wish him well as we reached the entrance to the Frog Pond, where the C111 canal crosses Highway 9936 leading to
Doves had replaced Deer today; it was mid November, and if we had been up north with the rest of the family, Robert and I would have been entering the cold, snowy confines of a balsam fir bog, hunting for whitetails on the opening day of deer season.
But we lived in the
So Robert and I would spend opening day doing the next best thing down here, hunting doves. And it occurs to me as I park the car that, had I grown up here, this is what Dad and I would probably be doing on this day every year.
As I climb out of the car and watch Robert go to the gun cases, a gust of humid air brushes my face. It is a cool breeze; a rare cold front had passed last night, installing the familiar wrench inside me that comes this time of year, every year, no matter how long I’ve been away from home. It drives me. Not just to hunt, but to feel the crisp air, to see the frost on burnt amber leaves, to smell the woods, to be warmed by the company of those I admire and respect- and miss greatly this time of year.
I watch Robert take the .410 out of its case; the same shotgun Dad gave me when I was Robert’s age. I remember the first time I ever shot it; Dad and his old buddy Gene Rankin took me out in the sticks with a box of clay pigeons. I broke the second one out of the thrower as I recall, then never hit another one all day.
As Robert gears up, I say a word of thanks that Dad was still on this planet with us this morning. He had had a small stroke- a TIA- last night at my sister’s while preparing to go up to our northern Wisconsin cabin for the opening day of deer season. I silently ask that he not be too disappointed that the doctor forbade him to make the trip this year. He would have to watch my brother-in-law Lee and nephew Michael back out the driveway with all that blaze orange and anticipation in the pickup, while he stayed behind with my sister.
The thought of those hunters having to cook for themselves at the cabin makes me smile, now that Dad won’t be there. We never ate better than at deer camp; Dad always went all out for us in the cabin’s tiny kitchen.
I remember the year Dad had to leave Deer camp early to be with my Grandfather who, now that I think about it, had just suffered a stroke opening morning.
Dad left us with a pork roast for that evening in the refrigerator. Normally, he would have returned to the cabin early that hunting day to put the roast in the oven under a slow heat for the other hunters to enjoy upon their return from the woods. Well, my Uncle Lloyd, who could sniff out eight point swamp bucks in his sleep but didn’t know a meat thermometer from one of his welding torches, took it upon himself to prepare dinner that evening.
“Somebody get a saw,” he commanded while pulling the roast out of the ice box, and my earlier mid-stand daydreams of an apple-roasted pork dinner turned into fried pork chops- with ketchup.
Robert and I start down the levee of the C111 canal, also known as the Aerojet Canal, named for the company that was to build the huge rocket boosters for NASA’s Apollo moon program in the 1960s. The canal had been dug out of the limestone and sawgrass of the
Stalking the C111
The plans were eventually scuttled; another company won the NASA contract, and the rocket plant’s buildings and hangers, once on the cutting edge of technology and discovery, sit now as rusting relics while turkey buzzards and red-tailed hawks fly on the high thermal currents above.
Robert and I walk the levee with guns unloaded as regulations state, looking for a flat opening devoid of tall thick sawgrass and palmetto scrub to step down into and wait for the doves.
The cool breeze whistles through the leaves of mahogany and buttonwood trees growing high on the levee, and it sounds strange to a
We see no doves. In southeast Florida, the Frog Pond, a special permit area made up of an old agricultural field sold back to the state as part of the Save The Everglades initiative, is about the only public hunting spot that is open and accessible enough to take the abundant birds, but on this day in November, it was closed to hunting, so we have to settle for the levee.
But it is a wonderful day, wispy cirrus clouds dipping and turning to puffy cumulus, preparing to transform the patchwork blue sky above into the familiar daily Everglades Rain Machine. The Aerojet canal, straight and wide, narrows into the Glades, beckoning to where Von Braun’s mighty Saturn rockets were to be built. Robert is up ahead, his trigger finger getting itchy, and I regret not being able to give him a better hunt today yet, as I call ahead to him, how could it get any more beautiful than this?
It is
I don’t know how many stories I have told my son Robert beginning with the words “when I was your age,” concluding with tales of Dad and Lee and Uncle Lloyd and cousins Mike and Skeeter and squirrels and tree stands and buck snorts and breakfasts before sunrise.
The Buck Hunters at Deer camp
I continue those stories on this day, and in doing so I am ever conscious of new traditions accompanying old ones, and the word legacy is never far from mind.
My thoughts turn to last month, when Robert and I traveled to
These were my thoughts as Robert and I drove home from our day in the field. More than once, Robert asked me “what the smile and the sighs” were for. All I could say was “you’ll see someday, son.”
Those who love the outdoors will immediately recognize the symptoms that accompany falling leaves and a west wind veering north, but the sportsman displaced by time, geography (and perhaps wanderlust?) will truly know the dilemma I face at this time of the year, every year. It transcends work, chores, women, all enjoyable pursuits and routines.
Is it not unlike the blind yearnings of the swallow and the whale this time of year? Yes and no, because in the human it seems to envelop not just the soul but the heart as well. It is joyful to contemplate, yet somehow nearer to the earth.
To quote my favorite line from the film The Deer Hunter, “This is this.” Simply, we must all live in the now, and in doing so appreciate that which transcends.
On the stretch of US 1 now, driving south towards our island home, I look over at Robert, pleasantly dozing in the passenger seat. The sun is setting over
My son is with me, as are Dad’s lessons and love, and the outdoors will always whisper what matters.
Hot or cold, the important things stay the same.
11.23.08
Mr. Schneider is a native of
