My father loves to recount the trip up to Lake Lizzie on the opening weekend of duck hunting in 1980. I was ten years old and it was the first “trip” I went on with my father, who was a duck hunter, and who was a very young father then.
It was a miserable weekend. It rained all Saturday. That was when first shooting began at noon on the first Saturday. And it rained all day. We had bought my children’s rain gear at K-Mart the week before and my boots were children’s work or hunting Irish Setters from Red Wing’s, for which our uncle George was a retailer.
It was not just a half day of being in the rain, because in those days we would launch the boat – our 12-foot Alumacraft with the 15-horse Mercury with oars and a push-pole – before first light at 7 a.m., in order to get in a good duck blind before others. Then we sat in the boat in the blind in the rain until 10 a.m. when you could put out decoys (dozens of bluebills and ringbills and a couple Canadian geese and maybe some coots as confidence decoys). Then continue to sit in the rain in the boat in the middle of a great lake of emergent vegetation.
“You were game,” he says to this day, meaning that I sat in the rain hunched or curled up in the bow of the boat all morning before shooting, and then through the afternoon, without complaining or crying.
In the evening, luckily, at the boat landing at Lake Lizzie, we were invited to cook our dinner in the camper topper of one of my father’s buddies, rather than on a Coleman stove on the tailgate of our truck in the rain. I was surrounded by men duck hunters while I sat at the funny table in the camper topper drinking hot chocolate, and the men were outside in the rain drinking and inside smoking and in and out and my father cooked venison and potatoes for us two.
Then at 7 p.m. in the dark we went in to town to the local small town Laundromat and dried (but did not wash, of course) our clothes, and warmed up in the comfortable yellow vinyl aluminum chairs of the Laundromat, and drank Pepsi and ate Snickers.
We slept back at the landing on Lake Lizzie in the bed of the old red Ford in cheap sleeping bags with the topper over us, so the rain pounded on the aluminum topper and everything somehow seemed wet again. You didn’t sleep. Then you got up at Sunday at 5 a.m. for breakfast and launched again to hunt ducks.
“You were game,” my old man praises me even now.
He doesn’t understand that I didn’t suffer, or stand, or feel the miserableness. He doesn’t understand that I was with my father, and that’s all I ever needed to be to be alive.
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