Another excerpt, 'Good Times and Creative Truths'

[valhallalongboats]

Hey all,

As mentioned in previous posts, I just finished the rough draft of my (hopefully) humorous novel about spending 12 years as a whitewater canoe guide. Not all the stories are about whitewater, as this excerpt will show. Some of it was just ...stuff...
In any case, I hope anyone who reads this enjoys it, and I am interested in feedback and commentary as I am still at the 'refining the rough draft' phase of the book. Oh, and by the way, the idea that what we were doing in this story might not be ecologically sound has occurred to me, and it isn't something we do anymore, so only point this out to me if you feel you really must.

Good Times and Creative Truths
Gladiators and Slingshots

I’ve always found Neil’s view of my more modern upbringing (or more precisely, his reactions to it) both amusing and depressing. Amusing because there is no reasonable way he can expect someone forty-five years younger than he is to have the same sort of experiences; and depressing because he clearly grew up in a better time than I did. The same old story can be seen no matter when it was written, i.e.: things were always better in the old days.
Reasonable thought would suggest that if things have been relentlessly getting worse since the beginnings of written history we should probably all be extinct by now. Nevertheless, I am prepared to believe whole-heartedly that America in the 1950’s really was a golden age, and it is regrettable we will in all probability not see a decade like it ever again.
One day in early summer, before Sarah Totten Campground had the benefit of having ‘Leroy’ oversee its maintenance, (see elsewhere in this work for a description of our good friend Leroy) Neil and I did a lot of maintenance on the campgrounds ourselves. We cleared brush, hacked back blackberry bushes, removed tree-limbs that had blown down over the winter, raked the ground, and generally did our best to make the campground look nice for our incoming clients. One day while cleaning out one of these campgrounds, Neil called out to me excitedly.
“Hey Rob! Come and have a look at this!”
I put down my rake and wandered over to see what he was so excited about. A reasonably-good-sized tree-limb had fallen from an oak tree, but it had been caught up in some other limbs as it fell, and as a result, it was just hanging haphazardly over one side of the campground. I wasn’t sure why Neil was pointing it out to me; as we had already looked at it and decided it was going to finish falling eventually, and since it was right over a tent pad, we had already decided to remove it.
“Look, right there!” Neil exclaimed while pointing, “You could look for days and not see one of those!”
Well, I looked where he was pointing, but I could see nothing of any great significance. I was looking for some sort of wild animal, a bird, a bat, a lizard, a bug….something. No matter how long I looked, I couldn’t see anything worth noting.
“What am I looking for?” I asked.
“You mean you can’t see it?” I could tell he was disappointed with my response, so I redoubled my efforts; to no avail.
“I can’t see what you’re pointing at,” I said eventually, “you’re going to have to tell me.”
“You don’t see that stick?” He asked. ‘Oh, great, he’s finally gone senile’ I thought to myself, ‘he’s pointing at sticks as if they’re special’.
“Is it a magic stick?” I asked in my best psychologist voice.
“Yes it is,” Neil replied, confirming my fears. “That’s the most perfect sling-shot stick I’ve seen in a long, long time. ‘Oh thank goodness, we haven’t hit senile just yet’ I added in the privacy of my own head.
“I didn’t notice that,” I admitted.
“Do you mean to tell me you’ve never made a slingshot before?” Neil asked me.
“Neil, if I need a sling-shot I can go and buy one at Wal-Mart.”
“There’s no hope for you, you know that…right?”
Further discourse revealed that Neil and his friends used to make slingshots all the time while he was growing up. The first step, of course, was finding a perfectly forked stick to begin construction. This isn’t quite as easy as you might think. Nature doesn’t often bother much with symmetry. Now Neil was on one of his many missions to amend my education, so we had no choice but to finish working and then build a genuine ‘Dennis the Menace’ slingshot.
There is something about building your very own tool of destruction with your own hands. It is much more satisfying than just going out and buying one. Neil already had a bit of soft leather that would work perfectly as a pouch, and after heading down to the Rainbow Store down the road to collect some surgical tubing and twine we began constructing our slingshot. The only downfall was the color of twine available (pink) but all in all, it was a great little weapon. I suggesting purchasing some manufactured steel slingshot balls to fire out of it, and this earned me another scathing look. Instead we spent the day hunting for small, round stones to use as projectiles. Again, this is not as easy as you might think; vis-à-vis nature’s disregard for being symmetrical.
Finding ways to entertain ourselves during the lulls between clients was always an issue, and our new slingshot helped to fill the boredom. After all, since we had to pack two pickups with enough supplies to last us a month or more in camp, space was at a premium, and we could only pack so many books. We did have a nearly unlimited supply of Pepsi cans (due to our severe caffeine addiction) so we had plenty of targets for our new toy.
We didn’t actually build the slingshot to use it for hunting, if we were to be honest with ourselves, we didn’t even build it for target practice. We built it just to build it. The construction was fun for me, nostalgic for Neil, and not long after building it we grew tired of actually shooting it and it merely sat on our kitchen table. There it would have probably stayed for the remainder of the summer, were it not for the sinister ticking of my over-active imagination.
Remember when I said finding entertainment was a major factor for us? Well; sometimes we had repairs to make on the fleet, and sometimes we spent hours considering which runs to take our clients on the next day, and sometimes we had plenty of maintenance to do on the campground. On days like those, we had plenty to keep us occupied; but on occasion, our clients would learn quickly, avoid smashing their boats into rocks, keep their campsites clean, and generally make our lives very easy…thereby leaving us wondering what to do with ourselves in the evening. So we would fall back on reading, and as dusk stretched its fingers across the camp, we would start watching the bats.
Dozens, hundreds, thousands of bats would come out at night around Sarah Totten. Just above our campsite, there was a large clearing of the forest canopy. Against this azure blue backdrop of evening sky, we would watch a half-dozen different species of bats perform the kind of aerial maneuvers that would make a Blue Angels pilot turn green with envy. On occasion, a moth large enough to be seen with the naked eye would struggle across this clearing, silhouetted against the evening backdrop, and then we would all sit up and watch more carefully…as the bats converged on their prey. Echolocation set to maximum, wings primed, fangs gleaming, the bat would center in on the hapless moth, and in one fell swoop the moth would be struck from the air, instantly consumed by the predator…and the guides would cheer (I have no idea what the bats thought of us applauding their skill, but I’m going to continue to imagine they appreciated it). This was our Coliseum, and the bats were our gladiators. Like I said, entertainment was hard to come by.
The only trouble with this entertainment was waiting for the moth to cross into the clear backdrop so we could actually see it. Sometimes we would only see two or three in an entire evening. I’m sure moths were being purged by the hundreds under the forest canopy, but our frail human eyes couldn’t see this, so we were missing out on all the fun.
“We have to figure out a way to get more insects into the kill zone,” I announced one evening.
“Oh yeah, what are you going to do, try and shake one of these massive trees?” Neil asked me, “Go ahead and see if you can shake it, I’ll watch.”
Well, I was pretty sure shaking a tree with a four-foot diameter was out of the question, even if I employed a pickup, but I kept thinking about the issue. There just had to be a way to get more bugs into the sky.
Inspiration came the next day when I was cleaning up our camp kitchen a little bit, and I picked up the slingshot. I looked at the slingshot, and then I looked at the hole in our canopy. Well, I reasoned, if the bugs wouldn’t go up there on their own, perhaps I could help them along a bit. I ran into the next problem when I considered the sort of prey items I could launch into the sky with my slingshot. The usual prey we could see was moths, but I couldn’t see a moth surviving a launch from a slingshot. I suspected they would simply disintegrate upon release. Flying beetles were the next option, but I had noticed that many of the flying beetles that did cross the kill zone were ignored by the bats. The big flying beetles we would find around camp were heavily armored, and maybe just too big for our bats to fit into their mouths. Then again, the beetles might also be poisonous, or else (and this seemed likely to me) maybe they just tasted bad.
Later on that day I had to go to the Rainbow Store down the road, and I noticed something in the fishing tackle department, a cricket carrier. This is a plastic and screen device used by anglers to hold live crickets for fishing bait. Crickets wouldn’t work as a prey item, because although I was sure they were tough enough to survive a slingshot launch, they couldn’t fly, and if they couldn’t fly, they would be harder for the bats to home in on. I imagined launching a cricket into the sky wouldn’t be much different from launching a small rock, and the bats would have to be really on their game to manage to get them. Crickets don’t fly…but grasshoppers do.
So, later on that day, a grown man could be seen running around the sand dunes at Sarah Totten with a cricket carrier, a small insect net, and a look of ferocious concentration. I am somewhat abashed to admit that grown man was me. At one point a person camping in a space near us actually came out to ask me what I was doing.
“Catching grasshoppers,” I replied.
“Uh, why?” He asked, while speaking as though he were concerned I might have escaped from a mental hospital.
I thought about trying to explain my theory of launching grasshoppers into the sky with a slingshot to feed the bats, and decided it sounded too complicated.
“I’m hungry,” I said. He went away.
That afternoon a group of clients came into camp. Having collected a dozen or so good victims…er…grasshoppers, I abandoned my quest and west to issue gear and safety talks to our people. That evening, as it began to get dark, some of the adults in our new group were in the guide camp chatting with us. I wasn’t sure how well my feeding the bats routine was going to go with these people, but I have never been the most patient individual, and our ‘feeding-time’ window was limited. With this in mind, I took out my grasshoppers and my slingshot.
“What are you doing?” one client asked me.
“See the bats?” I asked, pointing to the sky, “I’m going to feed them.”
A certain amount of incredulity arose, and I wasn’t sure myself how well this scheme was going to work. Trying to act as though I’d done this before, I extracted a grasshopper, loaded him into the slingshot, took aim and fired. What I was hoping would happen was this: the grasshopper would gain some good altitude after being launched, and then at the top of his arc, he would open his wings and attempt to fly. When this happened, I was sure the bats racing through the sky would notice this semi-stunned flying insect, lock on, and destroy him. To my surprise, this is exactly what happened. I hadn’t been watching the clients as I launched my victim, but apparently they were observing all this with great interest, because as soon as the bat nailed the grasshopper, they cheered.
“That was amazing!”
“Do you have another grasshopper?”
Smiling, I removed another victim…um, I mean…grasshopper from my carrier and readied my slingshot.
The next afternoon, after returning from our day on the river, the other campers at Sarah Totten were likely confused by the sight of a half a dozen grown men and women on their hands and knees combing the grassy dunes.
“Just remember,” I advised my clients, “if anyone asks why you’re catching grasshoppers, tell them you’re hungry. They’ll go away.”