“Been A Bad Ol’ Booger, But He’s Come 'n' Gone”
Fall and Poppa were both born by the same breath. Fall was our favorite season. We braved the freeze of winter, the muck of spring, and the sweat of summer until we got to Fall. It was Fall when Poppa was most alive, and, because he was, I was, too. Poppa was really grandpop, my grandfather, but not any more. I called him Poppa early on and have done so ever since. When I was little I rode Poppa’s back through a blueberry jungle in August. It seemed I was always riding Poppa’s back somewhere, through something, around something, the world from Poppa’s back.
I never have been a big fan of Summer. Born and raised in a cleft in the Catskill Mountains when they were still home and hearth to dogged farmers tilling fields whose main crop was rocks. This was way before so-called hipsters from Brooklyn donned their L.L. Bean backpacks crammed with gorp and discovered we lived here. I don’t dispute that summer in the mountains is lovely – fulsome creeks fished by blue herons and eagles, thickets shielding deer, partridge, and bear, Golden Rod and Purple Astor, so many shades of green I couldn’t count, but, still, for me, mercifully short. It’s a season that can’t be avoided and therefore posits the obligation to hungrily suck it dry of all its pleasures right down to the last hot dog on the grill and that August mountain thunderstorm right above your head. I do, but I cannot tell a lie: that first chill wind and the changing colors soon after – that’s what I wait for. Maple syrup, pumpkins, and the palette a hardwood forest offers in the Fall – maple, ash, beech, oak, black cherry, walnut, chestnut – an opera of shades – basso profundo – coloratura - bronze, orange, red, yellow…I know from firsthand experience that Alaskan hardwoods are small and stunted. There are no beauty queens on the tundra. It’s so cold that leaves and roots become necessities. Wood, the stuff of trunks and branches, is a luxury. I look at the mountains across my valley and it’s like looking at a bouquet. “Here y’go, young lady. This one’s for you.”
Every year of my life back then, and even now sometimes when I’m back, me and Poppa kicked through the cover of dry leaves that had fallen to the ground when we walked through the woods along Hunter Creek one October morning. I remember a young spruce, maybe three feet, sparsely but gracefully branched, decorated by wind and gravity, with brightly colored leaves that had fallen from other trees. It was not the burning bush, but it dazzled. Our mountains are part of the range that goes south into West Virginia and Kentucky, all the Appalachians. Oh, my, the aroma of fresh, rich mud – better than morning coffee – that came from those kicks. Life was in those kicks. Even the sound – that crispness – that snap, crackle and pop - of leaves so casually scuffed aside! To walk through that woods in the Fall was to experience transcendence. I’m not talking religion here, but I know the feeling when it’s there. It envelops me and whispers to me, though I never quite catch the words. What was that, that something I can almost remember, a sad thing and a happy thing, not birthday party happy - astonished happy - and not terrible sad but longing? Feels both at peace and a piece of the puzzle, tranquil and untroubled, and yet something I urgently needed to know, just out of reach. How could it be that with every breath I was both aroused and at rest? How could that be? I remember leaving the woods of that childhood at dusk, and above me the moon was full and bright, serene, imposing: Buddha. How could that be?
It was Fall, first day of school, but we had plans. Poppa knocked on my door when it was still more than an hour from daybreak.
“Bacon, sunny sides, hash browns, hot chocolate. Hit the deck,” Poppa hawked from the other side of the door. “Dress warm.”
I had my warmest clothes all laid out, layers of ‘em. I felt like the Michelin tire man, but it was gonna be cold out there. I love being out in the cold but I don’t like being cold, you know?
In the Spring you smell fresh flowers. In the Fall you smell dead ones, crisp and sharp. The season has a tang to it. Poppa showed me a wild apple tree. A macoun. His secret. Nobody else knew where it was, and how it got where it got even Poppa couldn't say.
“They talk to each other, y’know, not like we do, but think of all those tangled roots mingling underground, connecting like telephone cables. Information gets passed on through. All these oaks? They weren’t here when you were born. Logged out. But all this time they’ve been migrating down the mountain, and look at them now. Maybe they send out pilgrims to scout new territory? Like anybody would. ‘Course, I’m no botanist, so wha’ do I know?” he said. Poppa said that after a lot of things - “Wha’ do I know?” But he knew just about everything, and, if there was a speck of something he didn’t know, he’d find somebody who did or look it up or just go and figure it out for himself. He’d pick up a bronze leaf and tell me oak, a red leaf, maple, a yellow leaf, birch, a different red, sumac. Wild berries had been gone for a month, but pears and apples were in, and a pumpkin patch he planted just for me, tiny pumpkins and really big ones, hundred pounders, a patch the size of a swimming pool. That patch made my Halloweens even more magical. Every Halloween we’d choose the second biggest and carve a monster mug, scary being the operative word. The first biggest, the biggest biggest of all, we saved for when I was Cinderella and needed my coach.
With a bellyful of breakfast, RuAnn stuffed egg salad sandwiches into the pockets of our red and black wool hunting jackets.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” she asked.
“She is in school,” said Poppa.
“I am in school,” I said.
“I didn’t ask you,” said RuAnn
“Yes, you did,” I said.
RuAnn shut the door behind us, called the dogs to join her, and dove back under her quilts.
We set off over the back field towards the tree line and a special spot Poppa had picked out a few weeks earlier. all by the light of a slender sickle moon. He had his ancient shotgun with him, turn of the century, Remington Model 1889 12 gauge double barrel. Worth a fortune to a collector. It had been his father’s and his father’s. He could’ve afforded a new one, but why? This old thing could damn near shoot itself. He might admire the craftsmanship of British shotguns, fine metal married to finely grained wood, delicate engraving, light and whippy. But, still, Poppa wanted one good reason, “Why?” He could be cantankerous. Once he was quoted in an interview as saying, “If you don’t own a gun and you don’t own a book, what good are you?” He actually said that. It was the caption under a picture of him grinning like he’d won $5,000 a month from Publisher’s Clearing House. I think he was joking.
No matter how hard I tried not to make any noise, withered grass sheathed in ice crackled underfoot. Poppa had taught me how the Mohawks walked while hunting, slowly, setting the whole foot down gently, one single gradual movement instead of heel-toe-heel. My feet still went crunch crunch. Poppa wore moccasins and made no sound at all.
Up in the blackest sky I’d yet ever seen, the moon had shrunk to a slice. The stars looked as if the popcorn machine exploded. Tingles of light cluttered the sky. I got thinking about the wandering bands of early humans. How much of their lives were spent staring up at the stars? It was the best quiz show in their universe. Stories flowed. Ideas flourished. Mathematics was born. Directions were set.
I don’t know how he did it but when we crossed the tree line into the woods it was so black I thought I went blind only Poppa didn’t seem bothered one bit. I knew Superman could see in the dark but I didn’t know Poppa could, too. Off to the side somewhere over the hogs were already on the move nuzzling for chinkapins. Might be some wild ones with ‘em. Poppa beckoned me keep quiet. We didn’t want to set them off and spoil the whole thing. Pass on by. Shhh. Poppa veered off a bit. I could just see an old maple tree, thick like a pillar on an ancient temple. You couldn’t miss it, trunk warped and twisted all the way up with large boles like warts. Something so sweet once came from that tree. Poppa pointed to the ground. I sat down, my back against that scratchy bark. Poppa cut brush and fashioned a blind, then sat down next to me. He put his finger to his lips, took three long, slim bones from a leather pouch hanging from his belt. Call bones. Thin, graceful, harp-like. Call bones he’d had since he was a kid. Cup them to your lips and talk turkey.
With the shotgun in the crook of his arm, Poppa arranged the bones in the palm of his hand, cupped them to his mouth, and what came out was a puk puk puk, a sweet chirp almost impossible to hear. Puk puk puk. I listened hard but all I could hear was quiet. Puk. Puk. Kinda like, tickle tickle. I think Poppa mighta winked at me. Not sure. The next one just fluttered out, some sweet puk puks, lilting chirps, and tra la trills. A symphony of bones. I listened hard. The silence was thick and firm. Then, oh my God, I heard this boom boom boom coming towards us. Boom boom boom! Heavy wings beating on the ground. Might’ve been Godzilla. Poppa gave a final puk puk trill cluk, and the most humongous turkey on earth busted through the brush smack into the clearing in front of our blind. Stout as a sergeant major. He came to a stop, stood at attention, and looked around. Poppa gave it one more lick. That big dandy fanned out his bodacious tail - a thing of beauty if you ever see one - an emperor - danced and pranced in a circle, and made right for us. The shotgun jumped to Poppa’s shoulder and fired. That bird went down like a running back clotheslined by a linebacker. Whop. Down. Poppa didn’t move. One wing fluttered then fell still. Might’ve been the wind. We waited for the echo of the shot to fade away and then sat still some more. It goes so quiet in the woods when a hunter - man or beast - takes prey. Something about that silence says you must sit still for a while. I got up when Poppa got up, and we walked to where the bird had fallen. Poppa knelt down to check the bird’s spurs, big ones, long, sharp, a good two inches. He didn’t say one word for a bit until, with as much reverence as I’d ever heard him, he said:
“Been a bad old booger, but he's come and gone.”
**************************************
