Deer2

Part 2.Deer and Bird Flop. Maybe ,though, not

When I was 26 I went home for a visit and the peace I always found on the Au Sable River, which runs through little towns in the Michigan woods where few people stay through the harsh winters.My brother took the trip to the woods with my parents, grandmother, and me , him being fresh from college where he 'd just gotten a B.A. in organic chemistry.I hadn't seen any of them in several years and we were renewing our relationships as much as anything. But today was the day Dad decided to sell the cabin, although we didn't know it then.

Soon as we got there Tony and I climbed out on a huge rotted cedar and sat in its pocket over the creek and looked at the clear coon prints in the fine clay near us. There were balsams an inch high growing in the wet log.Then we ran

over roots to the cabin. Grandma and Mom were sitting in front of a fire in the fireplace. It was 8:45 p.m. and they said Dad was waiting at the road for us to get a load of firewood. We dragged the Sport Yak all the way to the road but

Dad was off birding and there was no wood. When we got back to the cabin Tony asked me if I wanted a screwdriver and I declined. He kept persisting, "Are you

sure?" and "Party-pooper." He made himself one as Dad came in. Tony and I had has a camera all over the woods and found nothing. Dad had come across two

porkies on the ground ("I could have stepped on them") mating; and a third nearby eating grass.

I seemed disappointed so he said, " Have you ever

seen a woodcock fly up in the air and then dive straight down and just before it hits the ground, spread its wings and fly up again?"

"Not really," I said.

"Well, they're doing it now," he said."Come on."

We went outside and Tony had set a lawn chair at the edge of the steep clay bank and was perched precariously there, listening to a tape of his own acoustic guitar playing, on Dad's tape player, turned way up, on Dad's batteries. We ignored him and went down the path where Dad thought we'd wind up on the dam path about the time of dusk that the woodcock do this crazy dive.

They only do it for about ten days each spring as part of their mating procedure.We found one on our path almost immediately. You tell by this "grebe...grebe...grebe" sound from the dark forest floor.(Dad calls it a "pebe sound " but it is grebe.) After we sat on fallen birches for 15 minutes it

finally flew, not up and down in the large clearing but right over us, over the creek, and off.Undaunted, we went on, cutting through the woods to hit the dam path quicker.Halfway up, walking seperately like Indians in a stop and go pattern,we stopped because we heard a whippoorwill. "Must've just arrived; wasn't here yesterday," Dad mumbled.We stood there motionless for 20 minutes .

The sky was still blue although the ground was all long shadows and dark interior landscapes.The quarter moon was bright enough to reveal nearby plants.

As we stood I took it all in...the moon, the loudness of the whippoorwill, the dead doe to my left with her hind legs on one side of our fence and her front legs and head splayed out on the other, half her tailbone and guts eaten out by

raccoons.Dad had deduced she'd starved to death last winter caught in the fence, and lately thawed.

"Must've just arrived," I started. but Dad grunted and began to say "naw, you've been seeing it for weeks, it's the same one, you're just disoriented because we came from this direction , which is different..."

Does he have Altzheimers or something? I thought, used to his absurdist humor, startled that he'd take me seriously. A robin was startled too and gushed a strange, freeky black note.Mice rustled under every one of the hundreds of

small pine trees to our left and right. The man in front of me in the burgandy ski jacket didn't move a muscle although the tic one in his eye moved of its own accord, making him appear to be winking everytime he said something.Years

later my husband's employee would tell me he thought my dad was winking conspiratorily at him, approving a relationship between him and me, telling the

hapless fat guy through his wink, I know you see her desirability and I hope you get all the way.(He left after that because I didn't have enough bandaids for all the slits my sword put in him.)

When we walk in woods together, Dad and I, we seperate by many yards, and I stop whenever he does, to hear what he does, or so both of us can just hear. It takes awhile of silence before the forest critters begin to go on as if alone

to themselves . I put my trust in his intuition ,in his freezes. When I walk with my brother, we use me as a reference point for the frozen tag.Then I trust me better.

Finally Dad began the slow rhythmic padding that mostly gave off the sound of his jacket rubbing on another part of his jacket, or his Zippo lighter flicking, and no clue at all that he was maneuvering through rocks and dead leaves.It was getting pitch (opposite of rich) color out there but all ahead of us was five feet's width of of clearing for about a furlong.I followed Dad, behind enough to be a different hunting party, close enough to hear when he stopped and stop too.Just past our driveway we found two morewoodcock grebing at the road.We heard the wings of one whistle but couldn't see the dive.The other greber petered out after we waited motionless for 10 minutes.

"He's already strutted his stuff," Dad said, checking his watch.Next time we'll come here first. I thought they'd be in the swamplands where they eat the worms I found in the one I cooked last night; I had no idea they mated in the dry

Tony was drunk when we returned to the cabin. He followed us in. playing his tape loudly. I plopped in front of the fire to read a "U.S. World and News Report"--Grandma had brought us a bundle of magazines she thought we should

read.Tony asked her when her worst period was and I about died but she didn't get it wrong (only I did) and she said while her two boys were off at war. I'd never thought of that period of her life, of her as a mom worried about awful

things hurting her boys. I 'd expected it to be when grandpa died.

Mom was sick and retired early. I don't know why she made two packs of jello topped end to end with tiny colored marshmallows if she was so sick--because no

one touched it today, she could have made it tomorrow. Maybe to show Grandma she's taking care of her son good. Should have put trout pieces across the top then, or woodcock.

Grandma went to bed at 10:30 and dad at 10:40 with instructions to me to "take Tony with you" because Tony was lying on the couch, eyes nearly shut, yelling

the words to a Zappa "tune."

Mom gave me a valium. I think she hoped it would somehow knock her son out, not me, but she wasn't going to give him one becasue he was drinking. Maybe if I

threw it at his temple just right--

Tony asked me where I thought I'd be living in 10 years, in 1990. I said I had no idea but I knew one thing for sure, and that was that Dad was going to give me the cabin instead of both of us, he'd said that day, that all Tony used the

place for was to get high.It did seem to be happening like he said, like Tony just couldn't be there in that wondrous greatness created for people like us by God as a gift , a world unto itself away from the exact other world we had to

brush against the sharp parts of every time we turned around, but far from vacuous---it had natural laws, life, action, adventure, cuddly photography

moments, life being lived large in it. Realistic, down-to-earth life, not fantasy, laugh-tracks, and invented propietiary socializing codecs.

"This will be my home,"I announced,"These woods are the back of mine hand. I know how to be here, know every tree, stump, swamp, fern, bird, rustling noise, footprint, bend of the creek.What else is the world ?Why for?"

How did I know the goofy kid was tripping as I said this! Pileated woodpecker

holes here, deer droppings over there.What's over and under all these fallen

logs over here?And through the thicket I go. I walk hours and never tire of it.

Say hi to a kingfisher. Flush a partridge.There's another world? It meets this no where; not a single overlapping circle includes aspects of them both.

The other world is the only world to many , at least now, today, although they might change as they fall out of our group and marry and take their children state-hopping or locally camping or locally to slot car races or try out a

horse ranch and immerse themselves deep in their escapist world as I've always been able to do, like a kid living secretly on the great Sleeping Bear Dunes and encountering stores , career holders and the movie star concept only through reading.

The next day I noticed that Grandma perenially hums as she does chores, washes dishes or packs her suitcase. Lawrence Welk tunes I suppose, if one can't

commonly hum opera and I think you;d have to have quite a range in your voice to.Dad cut her a spray of arbetus when he returned from the dump.It just

bloomed, yesterday it was white and folded, and she was clucking "lookee kiddies, spring is almost here--this is the first flower that opens!"Today, pink and unfurled, the delicate little flower no longer dances with the forest

, but goes into a hot red Buick to wilt til it gets to a little apartment windowsill where it will look old and wrinkled and then under fish tails in the trash can under the sink.

As she pecked my cheek goodbye Grandma, her face all soft and velvety like the old leather change purses she keeps sending home with us kids with a dollar or a dime in them, told me to get married so she could come to my wedding before she dies.

Dad(pretending it was to him):"How did you know Dorothy and I never married?"

Tony followed her car out. Dad and I got in a car and went to a marsh to see a green heron but saw instead two black-tailed Virginia white-tail does and the

place where beavers dam the dam nightly and the DNR has to tear down the beaaver part daily to keep the water level down proper . Beavers like the water high so they can float the logs they want , swimming underwater stealtily

behind them,rather than carry the wood over land and lay themselves open to predation.

When we got back to the cabin Mom was drawing a river scene (the birches all off ) , seated on a folding chair.I got this cool idea of drawing on the canvas of the chair, but she said no."zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz'you're back!" She said, after 4

minutes of chitchat with me. She jumped up and rushed off to the cabin to tell Tony he needs help with his self-abusive tendancies. You could draw the bulet's projectory now--his behavior sending her to bed sick inside the night before,

not even caring to offer the drunk some of the jello she'd worked doggedly on to please what he used to be.it was actually a little uglier than booze, we were getting into drugs even I knew nothing about here. He burned ether in the bunkhouse the night before he was drunk . He was releasing PCP from a 3-necked beaker they found so they think he sniffs ether .

Dad and I (he approves of me when the male child acts like a horse's butt- isn't he just too dear? ) went for the woodcock dive earlier tonight--8:30 .The day birds--hermit thrushes--were still blowing their flutes . We saw 2 partridge

at the top of a still bare, thin-branched tree. They looked like the drawings of the partridge in a pear tree--elongated birds, in that stylized manner of drawing that went over big in the mideival days , their tails both hanging straight down,their necks up : through the field glasses we saw their crests and that they faced opposite directions as they ate berries, As I gasped at the unique view a hermit thrush bounced up to one and sang in its face .Earlier,

Dad played a tape of a winter wren and got one chirping up at the bridge to come the furlong to our cabin and sing on our log rail a long time , looking everywhere for his rival with his super x-ray vision.

But now, at dusk, there were people shouting--these geeks who come up to fish, males of course, banging on something, then, carrying a mile no sweat, "Disha

git any fish yet?" "NO!" But I heard a grebe under their yelling and we heard his flight and while he flew we ran to his clearing. When he landed we froze until the next set of grebes terminated with flight, during which we ran again. This time we outshot our mark, because we couldn't guess where he was and had not yet seen him. He landed nearly ON us --flew like 4 inches over our heads to a spot about 10 feet from me. "Grebe, grebe..." Countdown had begun.

I was on one foot's little toe and the side of the other foot, in mid-run, when he froze me there. For 10 minutes. Then he just shut up. Dad got mad.

"Fly, you son uvva..." he cursed, and then said,"Aw cripes, let's flush the dam thing ."

So we stomped all over where we'd heard him rustling and clucking and grebing but never stepped on him. Although it's possible I guess we smashed him flat as

he said"gree-"like half an hour before. Dad guessed we'd scared his female off and, getting no response, he'd canceled his show.Or else we were still getting here too late and he'd done his 4 dives for the day (we'd heard two).

As we walked home Dad lit a Kool and said, the smoke bandying about his head, mosquitoes all around him like flies follow a bleeding animal," Saw a coon and a skunk cross the road together today."

"I never see anything,"I complained.

"Two years ago I found a nest of baby coons with their eyes still closed ."

."Why didn't you tell us ? Where?"

"Why didn't you bring one home?"

"You don't want to bring one home," he said sharply, looking at me as if I were trying to talk him into smoking out of a 3-beaker apparatus."Their eyes weren't even open. What would you have done with it?"

"Opened its eyes?" I said.

"The mother --who has one heck of a bite and strong nasty claws--was looking down at me."

"Did you go back again?"

"When your mother came with me the next day the mother coon wasn't around and the babies, hearing us climb the log--me climb the log-- --they thought we were their mother and started pushing each other around to get to the hole first."

He's like that, keeping discoveries secrets. My other life I have to get back to has too many words, too many cars, too many of us pushing everyone else out

of our way to be first.

The next day we heard , instead of birds, artillery, artillery, from 7:30 p.m. past 11:30 p.m. Our cabins both shook. The National Guards of five states practice here.

When I awoke a mouse had eaten, I saw right off, half my cigarette pack open. I froze in the night and my leather

watch strap broke. I had 6 cups of coffee while Tony asked me 6 times if I wanted to go for a walk, showing me a joint ("My last one"). Finally I went with him. We went to the crater but he didn't like it,saying it was too planetarily alien, a meteor crater in virgin woods showing who's the big guy

anyway--not the biggest trees, nor the biggest mammal, or the biggest weather event--but events from other planets, interstellar space, the place where God hasn't taught the brains there yet about his rules and fashions. Out of bounds ! God only rules the earth people! Be afraid!. So we went to my cedar swamp where fragrant incense of cedar oil and sunlight dappling fallen leaves choking the

warm pool rule.Right away Tony creatively turned on the tape of his guitar playing.

"Great move!" I said crabbily. "Dad's looking for birds--he's close enough to hear the tape--he'll be mad." Tony just sang loud with some song he was a bad player on.He lit the joint and a second later Dad was on the dam path going

I ran quietly to his side to tell him we'd flushed a partridge. He said,"Tony just wants to get high," and walked away, kind of stumbling in his rush. I was hurt and when I reached Stoney he'd smoked half the joint already without me. He had it unlit in his mouth and kept saying,"Listen to this--I made it for you," and rewinding the tape. Poor kid, like the cat I never have time to pet and it keeps coming to me and I keep shoving the damn thing away.

He's thinking of me, jamming, getting up to start recording when he feels I'll like it, thinking of me, making it good, turning off the recorder, thinking I'll like this. And I don't even hear anything in it, nothing special, nothing I can be proud about, I am so unimpressed, and he wants my pleasant, encouraging, attentive companionship. He asks me where I think he'll be at age 85 and I snort "dead."

"I need some family history to tell my grandchildren," he says."Too bad grandma didn't stay."

"I don't think she could take you," I say.

"I didn't do anything,"he says languidly, hiding his sensitivity if he's tuned into it .I got antsy about Dad around , all around, who knew where the fed-up head would pop up at, and I took the j out of his mouth and lit it. One toke

and I threw it at him, spitting,""There's PCP in it!"

"There is not," he said.

So I took another hit. There was no mistake about it then.. I couldn't move for 20 minutes. I got mad--real mad.No one could have gotten me to do PCP for a million dollars and here it was in me, sneaked on me through lies and

subterfuge,by my own bro, and no million.

I made it home and collapsed on the floor and told Mom.It wasn't like I could help it--she could see the wasted person on her kitchen floor and I really had no imagination as far as cooking any other reason for it up..Tony came in shortly, wearing sunglasses and tripping over his feet. I was so dizzy I couldn't go out and enjoy my last day in the woods. I had to sit in one spot from 2 to 5 p.m.(Tony,astutely::"Dede. doesn't the river look crooked to you?" ) It's what they stun horses and tigers with to give them dental surgury or whatnot. You might get your arm to respond to a command, like throw the coin in

the fountain;; your arm might hold a coin out, but it doesn't let go, rev up, pitch the coin into the fountain. You just keep standing there holding the coin, unable to go to the next step.

Dad seemed mad at me for toking off a joint. But I got ok after supper and ,figuring our woodcock thing was rained out by drug abuse, went for a walk alone at 7. I saw a robin's nest and a partridge and then Dad at 8:10 (he'd gotten 2 turkeys and a loon) but he kept walking. I saw the 2 partridge in the usual tree and flushed 2 more. At quarter of nine saw Dad on the road being followed by a puppy, He was rid of it when I spotted him again around 9--later than our woodcock dive--and we made our way slowly toward each other and our woodcock's clearing. The partridge in the tree were eating birch shoots, I saw with his field glasses. The hermit thrushes were still going. We saw Woodcock take off, fly in a circle over his clearing, and land.We moved in when he went back up and he landed right by us--finally, we were seeing him on the ground. He glides soundlessly the last few seconds, like a baby owl I released from a cardboard box that just vanished without a sound .The woodcock flew right in front of our faces at face level. He flew about 7 times but must have seen us because everytime we heard his wings (him going up) we;'d move to a tree by where he was taking off, only to have him land elsewhere behind us.Oh for the one moment where he flew straight down, spread his wings moments before his

streamlined dive-bombing body splattered with his beak stuck in the earth, and sailed back up gracefully, slowly , like he'd just pulled his fine ripcord. I knew when I got back to Florida male friends with large egos were going to

snort,"No bird flies straight down til it almost hits the ground and then spreads its wings and stays aloft. You saw a duck fishing in the bay or a heron and you dreamed the rest!" I realized I'd hear it anyway, even if I'd seen the

display. It was a male thing, the demonstration of daring and skill and wild beauty and ability. The only female thing going on out there at that time was the dead doe offering herself up to be seen at her very worst,making the

ultimate in sacrifice by letting the male does--deer,ok?--see her like that for hours and days and weeks much longer than she would ever let them , could she do a thing about it; or her rancid odor, her butt held indecently high in the

sky by the unrelenting barbed wire that had broke her neck,her entrails gorged , like a head on a stick in a Florida dorm room.The most indelicate of wakes , she was a non-speaking performer in. See everything I'm made of all dripped out of me , my entire inside exposed in all my gross non-beautuful, wretched reality.See the male thing flash and flirt with death with a grin ( or a grebe).

See the young men go off to war with their fishing poles and their dashing , medal-heavy uniforms while the mothers bleed and show their guts and their pained interior long after no one wants to smell that smell any more. And the

mother protecting her babies ,then going off for sustanance while other animals trick the babes into shoving their way to the top dog position.Although raised by women, the babes are characterized by their greed before they've even opened

their eyes to see what they can see here.And where's Mom fit in, taking to bed when she thinks her son is in trouble, no, is trouble itself, right around the corner ? First trying the everything is ordinary I'll make a double jello approach, followed by the "when he returns I'm giving it to him good"...

We got back to see a flying squirrel in our feeder. Tony went fishing as proof he didn't just use this place to get high .All he accomplished was to lose 2

streamers.The dead deer stinks a long ways away now. Dad tried to cut her tail for me the previous day, after pulling this long yukky green stuff out, called the "insides", but it was so rotted after he slit it open that all the hair fell

off the hide --the very thing you salt and sun it to prevent. It was too late.

So Grandma surprised us, worried most about two soldiers that for her were little boys she'd loved. Her husband had equipped them to be hunters and fishermen, not murderers. Her father and husband had equipped them, and her, with all the outdoor man skills necessary to live alone in the woods as scary hermits . In turn we were learning the names and habits of the creatures sharing our world of woods with us, and suposed to be giving the elders some sense of pride, destiny, a hand in something way good--Dad's respect for his surviving son, Old Sunglasses ; Grandma's fear of changes to her sons as soldiers., a decade before that, her pride in her little boys alone at ther river cabin all summer at age 12 and 14, building a dock while keeping the victuals cold in the river's underground spring feeders. The determined clown antics of a male akin to one driving a jumbo jet straight into the side of the tallest building in America , the laid open, violated female violating everybody's senses on and on and on, helplessly; the no-nonesense woman who shoots squirrels at her bird feeder and fishes wading up stream at the age of 92, carefully as always wading the fast, cold Au Sable waters with rocks on the bottom she had to feel with her feet and give wide berth to or continue to climb up ever so cautiously, wader boots sideways, catching ; Grandma incrementally adding more weight, ok, I'll stay, I've traversed yet another submerged rock , feel for the next with

my foot in this 48 -degree frigid stream, Tony's guitar days doing to the sense of hearing what the doe did to our sense of smell and sight .

. We try to appreciate the other world given to us by God and ancestry , try to perfect it with fine magazines of the best photography of our national parks , to encourage all of us to go be in it, it's divine natural simplicity which is as unsimple as the one of auto detailing and engineered guitar solos , with ways we learned or perished from not knowing, such as taking babies from their mother.

And I don't know where this fits in at all, or what I can deduce from it. But as we waited, that last day, for the woodcock to go up and fly straight down and transform back into a winged creature of remarkable dexterity just in time to save its neck,and all was deathly still and expectant and we were straining every cilia in our ears to catch the soft noise that betrayed our target's position, not really on speaking terms because of the disgusting way I took a toke off Tony's dope , but still trying to be scientists together, differences possibly able to be tossed aside, communion between father who wanted an interested son and daughter who wants an interested father , and all our personal privacy, unlike the doe we were constantly winding up downwind of , our very own secrets still, he farted.

It was his destiny. It was his nature, unwrapped from fishing vests and hunting guns and snowmobiles and taking the garbage to the dump and seeing all the good

things, every time he walked outside, and knowing every bird he heard by its song and being carried through his slip-ups and hard parts of life by his loving , crow-eyed, always watchful Mom. Underneath the thin veneer, he gave off his species' note, it's trumpet blast , his own tape of his own music, his opinion, if you will. His dive. I wasn't embarressed for him..I guessed his secret-he was merely human.I guessed so were we all. And we could thaw without leaving the odor of a particular white-tailed doe.

After that, between me and Tony , who didn't last many years longer, he became "the old fart."And he stayed that way even after Tony became the idiot who OD'ed with one semester of college left before his PhD. It was mainly my anger at his selling our woodland escape upon Tony's death, as if I couldn't possibly enjoy it like Tony could. We were supposed to inherit it together, . What humanized him was also a way of dehumanizing him. Of course I

politely kept that night's real fart to myself.

Man flashes. Artillery. artillery. Woman opens up , almost too much, to love, embrace, forgive, tolerate. .

It was all there, displayed for me in that little vacation I took, my little visit to the microcosm of a culturally disparate country, the disparate aggregate of creeds, songs, and prayers between male and female opera-ignorant fishermen,druggies that were once your little brother, the son-hungry foolish, those on suicidal dives, and wild nature entangled in man's business. The artificial world of man banged against the true world , the one independant of and undefined by mankind,except in retrospect. And none had control of it's instrumentation.

.To experience the peace God does, I gathered, I should have just down-loaded a trout. They have no sound, embody nothing that even murmers.

But then, there would have been that splash that only sounds so good, so exciting and so like peaceful nature, if you don't realize it means something is about to die.. .