In the Woods

            “I’ll be back,” my wife said, as she set her phone on the table and wheeled around to go to the restaurant’s restroom.  The waitress flitted by and asked, “Need a refill?”
            “Sure,” I said, and get my wife a third glass of the carbonated water and lime.” Then, the table started buzzing.  This is pretty typical whenever my wife’s phone is on a table.  I looked, and saw that it was a phone call from Wesley, our son.  Well, he’s a stepson.  That was established early in our relationship, after I married his mom.
           “I told my dad that I call you dad too,” Wes said to me when he returned from a weekend visit.
            “Yeah?  How did that go?” I asked.
            “He doesn’t want me to do that.  He got mad.”
            “Well, just make life easy and call me something else.”
            “How about if I call you Bob?”
            “That works fine with me.  I’ve already been trained to answer to that name.”
            Two months later, Wes came home from his dad’s house and said, “Dad got mad again.”
            “What went wrong?”
            “He was calling me to the kitchen and I said, “I’ll be there in a minute, Bob!  He was mad I did not call him dad.”  He was 9 years old then.  He is 26 now.
            Anyway, the buzzing table went to voicemail, and my shirt pocket started buzzing.
            “Yeah,” I answered, seeing it was Wesley.
            “Hi Bob,” he said in his baritone monotone, “Do you know where mom is?”
            “She is in the bathroom,” I said, “What’s up?”  I could almost guess what was up—he was looking for some money.
            “I am playing a few gigs soon, and I need some money.”
            “Where is your paycheck?”
            “Well, Bob, if I still had that money, I wouldn’t be calling you.”
            “Alright bud, stop by the house.  I have a few jobs I could pay you to do.”
            “Can’t I just get what I need, and pay you back?”
            “Only if you give me your debit card, and I will get the money in cash when your direct deposit paycheck clears, before you spend it all on video games and pizza.”
            “Okay,” the monotone came through the phone, “I will come over tomorrow after work.”
           “Get there before it rains, scooping dog dirt in the yard is better before it liquifies,” I gave him a little encouragement.
            Renee heard that last part as she sat down, “Aren’t you worried that you will hurt his self-esteem making him clean poop?”  Much of modern life is concerned with self-esteem.  I have never understood this obsession, but my father was more concerned that a person would have too much self-esteem rather than not enough.  “Confidence doesn’t need affirmation, and it doesn’t need to brag,” he would say.
            “If he gets there too late,” I said to my wife, “I will already have it scooped, and there will be less work he can do.  And my self-esteem will be fine.  I have been picking up turds for, well, how many years?  Since 1985….
            Nostalgia hit me and I was back to 1985, with my first beagle.  Back then, sawdust was free.  Any store that sold lumber had free sawdust.  Dad got it in a giant burlap sack from the local building supply center.  We had an outdoor kennel with wire runs, and a cement slab underneath.  Every day, rain, shine, sleet, or snow, I was out there with an old metal coffee can that was filled with water, Pine-sol, and a toilet brush.  I would scrub the wire with the brush and knock the feces to the sawdust that covered the cement slab below. The sawdust collected urine too.  I then got a hoe and drug all the sawdust out, and I then shoveled the sawdust into a big metal can, lined with the extra heavy duty garbage bag.  Lastly, I scattered fresh sawdust under the wire runs of the kennels.  Every. Single. Day.  The garbage bag went to the end of the driveway each week on garbage night.  I scrubbed so much wire with Pine-sol that I cannot use it in my house.  Renee mopped with it when we first got married.  I took a whiff, and full of nausea said, “Can we please never use Pine-sol again?  I know it is a great product, but all I smell is dog shit when people use it!”
            Wood pellets, which are made from sawdust, cost over $4 per bag last winter.  I figure I shoveled enough sawdust as a kid to pay for a new truck at modern sawdust rates!  After cleaning kennels, I could walk over the hill from my house and jump hare or cottontail to run, and that was one of my favorite things to do as a kid.  Whenever anyone asked, “Where is Bob?” My mom would say, “If them dogs ain’t in the yard, then he is in the woods.”
            “In the woods” was the term used for everything from camping, to fishing, to making tree forts, or just walking.  We didn’t have hiking.  Hiking is what people do when they have to drive to the woods before they start walking.  When you live in the woods, or right next to them, then it is just called going for a walk. “The woods” had been timbered, mined for coal, and timbered again over the years.  My dad had a deer stand on a spot he called the clear cut.  The “clear cut” was covered with tall trees about 20 inches in diameter, so how long ago was it a clear cut?  At some point in my father’s life, it was definitely done, but he it wasn’t recent! I was 30 years old before I even considered the fact that my dad lived his entire life within a mile of the house where he was born, except for a couple years in the Philippines during the Second World War.  He spent 60 of his 64 years within 100 yards of those same woods that I roamed every day.
            Dad grew up in those same woods.  As a kid, he climbed a tree and beat the crows away to get a hatchling.  He fed it, and it was trained to roost in the yard, and flew down to his shoulder when he would go outside. It even said a few words from time to time.  In those same woods, as a kid, he carved his name on a. Flat rock with a hammer and chisel.
             “Where is that rock?” I asked.
          “Somewhere on the edge of Gordon’s pasture.  The Gordon farm also bordered the woods.  I can’t tell you how many times I looked for that rock, and I am sure that it got tilled over as the pasture and fields were moved and adjusted.  Being chased by the Gordon’s bull was almost a daily occurrence for me, if I had dogs out and they bounced a cottontail in the fallow field.  The bull would get aggravated at the dogs and I would rush in like a rodeo clown to give it a bigger target.  I see people with arm tattoos that look as if barbed wire is running around the circumference of the bicep.  I have had barbed wire around my arm, diving out of the cow pasture—I wished I had a barrel for an escape.  Speaking as a guy who has had actual barbed wire on me, I have no desire to get a tattoo of the stuff. I much preferred chasing the hare, they never went in the farm, but stayed in the woods.
            I was looking for that rock again not too many years ago, and decided that it was gone forever.  I sat next to a dead log, and carved my name into it.  That log will definitely decay into nothing, if it hasn’t already.
            In the 1950s dad had beagles, and he would open the kennel door and turn them loose in the woods next to the Gordon farm.  If he had to go to work at 3, he would leave, and the dogs would come home eventually.  One day, his beloved Prince dog never returned.
            “I saw the dog with your brother, Clarence,” a guy told my dad, “He was hunting the bottom fence row.”
            Dad found the dog, dead, shot.  He felt Clarence killed the dog out of jealousy, because it was a far better hound than any Clarence had.  I hate to think someone would be that cruel to anyone, let alone a sibling.  I think it was just as likely that Clarence shot at the rabbit when the rabbit was first jumped, and Prince was too close.  He left the dog lay, not wanting to tell dad.  That’s just my hunch.  At any rate, dad got out of beagles right after that, and never got another until 1985, when I begged for one.
            I was allergic to dogs my whole life.  A friend had a beagle, and we would take it out all the time, into the same woods.  I was hooked and wanted a dog.  I remember praying every night to no longer have allergies to dogs.  Then, we figured out that dogs no longer bothered me.  We were in my cousin’s house one day, a cookout got rained upon, and we went inside with the intent to eat and leave before my allergies flared up.  We stayed for hours with no problems!  My cat allergies never went away, I still have them to this day.  I still get stuffed up in a barn with horses or cattle.  A friend has goats—yep, they make me sneeze and snot too.  But Dad and I got beagles, and built the kennel.  I probably spent more time with those beagles, in the woods, than I did with anyone as a kid.  Guys will often pay someone to start a beagle puppy, or pay someone to condition dogs or take them to trials.  I never minded the solitary hours of being with dogs and listening to the chase.  It always allowed me to think, and relax. They were always enough company for me, and to this day I tend to hunt rabbits by myself.  I don’t need lots of conversation interfering with the hound music.  I was probably conditioned to be like that as a teenager when all my friends were more interested in sleeping in on summer mornings, and fixing cars in the afternoon.  I just went to the woods.  I couldn’t afford a car, so I ran dogs and then would beg dad for his truck.  Once in a while he would let me take it out on a date. 
            One day, dad and I watched our beagles—his Princess and my Duke running a rabbit, and he said, “Thanks for getting me back into beagles.”  He said it matter-of fact, looking at the dogs, not me.
            “I had to beg enough!” I said. Princess was named as an homage to his Prince dog, that he found dead decades earlier.  My dad was 45 years old when I was born, so it was like being raised by a grandfather.  I have half-siblings old enough to be my parents.  I have nephews and nieces older than me! The decades between Prince and Princess seemed to fade away and dad and I were always in the woods. We bred Princess and got a couple more pups.  I often wondered how different my life would have been if I would have remained allergic to dogs.  What if a person born to be a florist was allergic to flowers, or a guy born to be a carpenter was allergic to wood?
            Ten years ago, or so, I was tested for allergies, and my back was pricked with all those needles.  It itched right away.
            “I hope you don’t go outside,” the allergist said.
            “Why?” I asked.
            “You are allergic to every tree, bush, grass, or any plant pollen!  Your back must itch.”
            “Oh yeah,” I said, “And don’t forget cats.  My lungs get wheezy within minutes of being in a house with cats.”
            “Yes, and dogs too,” he said.
            “What?”
            “You are as allergic to dogs as you are cats!”
            “That must be a false positive,” I said.
            “No, you are definitely allergic to dogs.  But, the good news is you are no longer allergic to seafood of any kind, or eggs.  You outgrew those allergies.”  That was why I was getting tested.
            “I must have outgrown dog allergies too.”
            “Nope, I wouldn’t get a puppy if I were you.”  I didn’t bother to tell him I was living in a house with a half dozen rabbit running, brush busting beagles.
            I was thinking about that earlier, and remembering how much I prayed to get that first beagle.  I remember how the hound song changed my whole life. Especially the last summer dad was alive. I was a college freshman, and home for a few months before starting my sophomore year.  I was running Duke and Princess while he was in the living room, gooned out of his mind on narcotics as the cancer ravished his body.  I was while listening to those dogs and I decided to study things that were more philosophical and theological.  Science and math had always been my jam.  My high school even created an advanced physical sciences course, I was the only student.  I had exhausted every other science class available, there were none left for me to take.  I was left, unsupervised, in a lab to do experiments every day.  I was top heavy in math and science in my first year of college too, and loved it.  My work study job was in the chemistry laboratory
            “Dr. Clippard,” I said, “Our lab in class today is to determine the molarity of this sulfuric acid.”
            “Yes, I know.  I gave the assignment.”
            “Umm, I mixed this solution at work this morning.  I already know the answer.”
            “Oh, well then you shouldn’t be here long.”
            Duke and Princess brought that rabbit out of the pasture, down past the bottom fence row where dad had found Prince’s lifeless body, and went up to the top again, and I decided right then and there that I was no longer wanting to study the notions of how the world came into being, but the so what of creation.  We have this great world, how do we live in it?  Names carved in wood are ultimately as ephemeral as names chiseled in wood.  The lives that go with the names can have real impact—good or bad—on the people around them. The folks who are hikers, and see the woods as a place far away are ultimately as connected to those natural places as those of us who live in the middle of them.
            I would never pay someone to start a puppy, not that I am judging anyone else for doing it.  There is just something about that the first time a pup barks on rabbit scent.  It makes a bark that he has never bayed before.  It doesn’t sound like a playful bark with other pups, nor does it sound like an angry bay at an intruder or rival.  It is a dog’s rabbit voice, and it truly is like a switch going off in their little brains, and they are activated and will never be the same.  From that moment on, their primary focus is rabbits.  The pup has answered a calling.
            “We aren’t out of the woods yet,” is something people often say, as if the woods were a place to be avoided, or a bad place.  More and more, I find myself going into the woods, and not wanting to get out of them.
 
 
 
            “You know that, right?” my wife said, drawing me out of nostalgia at the restaurant, snapping me back to the present.
            “What?”
            “Wesley needs a guitar.”
            “I bought him two guitars over the years,” I said.
            “His electric guitar got stolen.”
            “Oh, I didn’t know that.”  I was stingy about buying him junk, but I always supported his musical talent, and he is very good.
            “Is he going to make enough money scooping poop to get a guitar?”
            “Tell him I will buy the guitar if he scoops the poop and also goes in the woods.”
            “What woods?”
            “The woods,” I said, “They are all fundamentally the same, on a primal level.  He needs to hear a rabbit voice, and learn what it means to answer a calling.”
            “You say some strange things when you come out of those trances.”
            “I will make him run dogs.  And listen to them. He won’t want to do that, but I will make him do it to pay off the debt.  He can catch dogs for me too if the pack splits and have dogs on two different rabbits.”  Wes used to like the woods, but as a teenager he turned into a suburbanite.
            “He will probably get lost!”
            “I will put a tracking collar on him too,” I said, “And you can pay for this supper!”