Feeling like caged fox in school

 

In those days I used picture hanging wire. It would only take eighteen inches or maybe two feet, which back then I didn’t know how to measure but cut on sight. You formed a fist-sized loop at the tag end and made a slipknot and then wound around, around, the tag very tightly upon itself and that knot was even stronger than the picture-wire itself, but the slipknot would slip very easily to crimp down on the neck of the rabbit.

In the earliest years I wore a child’s snowmobile suit and then in my youth I graduated to a camouflaged coverall insulated only one-quarter inch. Early on I had children’s snowmobile boots, then matriculated to youth Sorrels with the felt liners that did almost nothing to keep my toes warm. I did not grow up to be a snowmobiler. I grew up to be a trapper and sometimes a trespasser, and occasionally a poacher.

Up at the lake cabin in the heart of winter, you went up from the cabin and then across the frozen drive, the other side of which was the very small stand of red pines, then onto the acre of grassy field, and cutting the corner of the barbed wire of the farmer’s pasture that rose all the way up to the orchard, and there was the backside of the old red barn facing me, and there was the old white farmhouse among the elms and oaks. In there in the drafty farmhouse was a dark-skinned adopted Indian girl whom I thought about a lot, I didn’t know why.

Just beyond there in the great private pine plantation I snared rabbits.

In the winters my vacations from school were the ten days of Christmas and New Year, inclusive, and a weeklong winter break in February. Other than that, on some lucky weekends my grandfather would pick me up after work and school and we would drive up to the cabin, and he would drive me home on Mondays before school.

One curious aspect of the pandemic is the seemingly universal effect on schoolchildren. An aspect I cannot comprehend. It seems that children are suffering from the closing of schools. And as schools have opened recently, children have come back with glee.

I could not imagine the suffering, or the glee.

From nursery school to kindergarten, and grade, junior and high school, I was a caged fox. Waking up in the morning, getting on the bus, sitting down in homeroom, survival of the fittest during lunch period, staying after school for track and field (where they wanted me to be a pole vaulter) and football (where they wanted me to be a quarterback).

I remember playing hooky with my grandmother taking me ice-skating to Aldrich Arena when I was five and six – in kindergarten. She skated her long blades lap after lap while I skated my hockey stick, passing her lap after lap.

Then her taking me to school – already started and warm – and coming in with all the children sitting around Miss Mockler obediently. My grandmother, who was an old matron who didn’t give a rat’s …, excused my absence, with either a lie (“He was at the doctor”) or straightforwardly (“He was with me”).

In the winter of third grade I became an “advanced” or “high potential” literature student, or reader, which meant that I had to come in early to class a couple days a week to discuss Great Books, one of which was a children’s version of “Beauty and the Beast.” But in my drafty corner bedroom with myself I read “Gentle Ben” and “Big Red,” about a boy and his bear and a boy and his Irish setter.

In the sixth grade after lunch, Mrs. Ryan read “The Outsiders” to the class, and I in my corner desk, and with construction paper and a #2 pencil – would draw pheasants roosting in the snow, and cup-winged bluebills, and cedar trees and a log shack in midwinter.

My very first class in my first year of high school was French, because I wanted to read Voltaire and Rousseau in the original. My dialogue partner, seated behind me, was a junior girl who already had a baby at home, and who I could not converse with in either French or English. So I turned back to the notebook on my desk and practiced drawing a drake mallard’s head in profile. Until M. Berg came along, down the aisles, listening to and correcting our pronunciation of “Je m’appelle” and “Comment allez-vous?” and stopped me from drawing and daydreaming.

So my life has gone. Distracted in grade school, disappointing at high school, depressed at college, debauched at university. Confused at work, undisciplined for any career. Too brooding and withdrawn and detached for any relationship.

Absolutely obsessed with all things wild, and natural, and cold.