A Midsummer’s day dream My sons came to see me this morning and told me a story about last night. They recalled with vivid detail an unmistakable odor that ran them away from their room and into ours at the other end of the house. They described the odor of the Mephitidae. As they spun their yarn, I slipped into a moment when I lived in my hometown of Centralia and came across that smell in a much more intimate way, a day I discovered something about me. The summer before third grade, I did everything with Bart and Carl Lawrence, two brothers down Mayberry, whose parents sort of reminded me of Ma and Pa Kettle, albeit, Pa taught at the local college. That summer, if I recall, David Cagle, Mark Zimmerman, and the Lawrence brothers walked with me out through Old Man Alexander’s property where we usually found ourselves hunting frogs at The Pond with BB guns. An overcast summer day found us scaling barbed wire fences and living our lives with zero care about taxes, bills, jobs, or money. Not a bad way to live. The scrub alders outnumbered the firs, lichen outnumbered moss. The Pacific Northwest might be green, but it has a fair amount of soggy browns and dusty grays as well. By the third grade, most my friends had already started hunting, and coming from my mother’s family, not hunting is tantamount to treason. By the time I hit ten, my father had made me a marksman, taking me to a rifle range where he had use of an unlimited supply of ammo. I had a lightweight long barrel .22 and from fifty yards, I had mastered a bull’s eye target. But my father killed a few men, quite a few men, and I remember asking him if he would take me hunting, hunting for real game. He had squared up and stared me in the eyes. “Son, you’ll have to find someone else to take you hunting.” With his slight Southern drawl, he continued. “When you’ve hunted something that hunts you back, you sort of lose the taste for killing.” I never asked again. I’d have to find someone else to mentor me. So there we were, out along the Chehalis River, working our way to our favorite pond when we came upon a Mephitidae. I can’t recall who said it, but someone suggested we kill it. It had burrowed itself up under the roots of a fallen tree. We surrounded the creature in a semi circle and it stared back at us with the innocence of trying to make its way as best it could. Every attempt to avoid us led us to narrowing the playing field. Slowly we backed it up to where the only thing left for the creature amounted to a five on one self defense tactic. Bart and Carl had their dog, a wirehair, nipping at the creature to keep it checked. That’s when they raised their BB guns in a plan of attack. I will never know what possessed me to take a stand, hell, I didn’t know I had a stand, but I circled around and stood between them and the Mephitidae. “You can’t kill it.” They looked at me like I’d lost a screw. I held my ground but they didn’t care. The first shot went off and the sting of the BB must have hurt because the creature backed up and turned away, using its defense mechanism to its fullest. That didn’t stop them, they fired another volley. I dropped my BB gun, ran up to the creature and picked it up by the nape, screaming, “Stop shooting this thing.” My friends lowered their BB guns and watched as I marched out of the woods, into the field, and toward Mayberry holding a Skunk. I held it out in front of me, all the while taking hit after hit of aromatic defense spray. I climbed a fence with that creature. I went through ditches and over swales with that creature. My friends had high-tailed it home to tell the neighborhood I planned to walk a skunk all the way home. I didn’t have a plan for what I would do with a skunk, but this creature was not going to die under my watch. As I came up the ridge to the dead end of Mayberry, I could see my father flanked by all my friends. He met me halfway and said, “You can’t bring a skunk home.” “But they were going to kill it.” My father had smoky dark eyes, and always had stoicism to him, seldom did those eyes flash anything other than an occasional irritation, but in those eyes I saw pride. He felt pride I hadn’t joined my friends in killing this lowly animal. “You’ve done your job, now you need to let that animal go home.” I turned and noticed how far I’d come, “That’s a long walk.” “I’ll walk with you.” We made it to the fence and he suggested I lean over and put it down, that it could make it back from there. Needless to say, I came off as both hero and goat. My friends thought I’d pussed out, but Mrs. Lawrence bought me a porcelain skunk I still own to this day. For my part, I spent the next several days trying to remove the stench of Mephitidae from my skin, my hair, and my clothes. Every morning my mother had to change my bedding until slowly it faded to nothing more than the memory of the day I discovered what I was made of.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 17:30:35 +0000
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