I’m taking down the few remaining Posted signs around our place. The other few have already fallen down or disintegrated over the years, falling into litter in the leaf duff.
This is no great welcome mat for the steelhead fishermen. I have seen banks on the Kadunce and Devils Track rivers eroding from heavy boot traffic. Along the honey holes on the Flute Reed and Brule are littering salmon eggs, yarn, hooks and monofilament fishing line.
No, it is no great gift to humanity. We have only 2.5 acres. There are no big pools to hold steelhead. No brook or brown trout in the creek to fish. The pups have chased off the deer – especially the careful bucks of deer season. Difficult walking around; no trails; sparse raspberries. Barely enough to survive for the resident one red squirrel and one foreign chipmunk.
I was lucky yes and no when I was a kid. I was unlucky to live in the suburbs, even with the solitude of the swamp behind K-Mart and the red pines on the frontage road. I was unlucky up at the weekend lake cabins because there was private property – farmers, locals, weekenders – all around.
But down in the small-farm rural suburbs, my old man and I were lucky enough to have access to 80 acres that was sort of my own Hundred-Acre Wood of Christopher Robin, except the wood was only partly oak savannah, partly duck puddles and largely leased-out fields of corn.
One morning together during duck hunting out there we could see thousands of ducks and geese milling around a half a mile away to the east on the land behind ours.
My old man was medieval on ducks. This man would do just about anything to bring a duck to hand. He said I was too young for a gun but he brought me along for the ride.
So we reconnoitered for a second, and then headed off east across the stubble fields. We came up on the barbed wire fence demarcating our rights and the adjacent farmer’s. The ducks and geese were landing in his picked field 200 yards away east. My old man looked up and down the fence line and didn’t see any Posted signs, and I got anxiety.
Of course, my father whispers, “You walk out there raising your arms and flush up all of them. Hopefully some will fly my way back over here.” The idea being that, without a gun, I wasn’t poaching on that property, and being just 11 years old all I was doing was wandering around if the farmer came out to make a rue.
And I did it. And all those ten thousand geese and ducks alit, all honking and five-quacking so loud, with the landowner’s farmhouse up behind obscured. But none of them flew over my old man. That’s the end of the story.
So I guess as a boy although I was not old enough to have a gun I was already a son of a gun and a sinner because I trespassed on another’s land. I leave you to decide how that has worked out for me.
Leave a Reply