Guns and cigarrettes...
My dad, being Texan through and through, grew up with a great love of the outdoors, hunting, fishing, camping…all that true redneck sort of stuff. Of course he handed that knowledge and compassion down to his progeny, and we grew up shooting, hunting, fishing and even learning survival skills should we ever get lost without a cell phone. My brother Ben and I got our first .22 rifles at the ripe age of 5 and 6…beautiful cherry wood, single-shot bolt action target rifles that I still wish I had to this very day.
Our pop taught us how to handle weapons of all shapes and sizes, from rifles, shotguns, handguns big and small, bows, and even slingshots just for the hell of it, and we were, and still are, pretty damn good shots to this day.
Anyway…my dad established a sort of tradition in our family. Every year around Thanksgiving weekend, he wasn't the type to sit at home and eat leftovers watching football. Nope, my dad was off on a three-day whitetail deer hunt, prime time during the rut when all the big bulls were out trying to get some female deer action before the coldest weather and snow hit for the year.
Up until I was 12 or so, we kid weren't allowed to go on those hunts with him - sure, he'd taken myself and my brothers out walking with him earlier in the season, mainly because the deer activity was much lower, and it gave my dad ample opportunity to teach us the finer details of spotting trails and tracks, reading "sign" and tracking the animal, setting up stands and blinds, even rattling and calling during the rut season. All wonderfully fun stuff for us at that age…like we were officially being introduced to the fabulous cash and prizes of Manhood waiting for us on the other side of puberty.
But this year, at the ripe age of 12, it was my turn to go on the big hunt with my dad and his buddies, and I even got to plan where I was going to hunt\set up blinds, carry my own gun, and if all went well…take my first deer! I was so excited I don't think I slept a wink for 2 days leading up to Thanksgiving weekend. I packed and re-packed my little backpack, waterproofed my boots, oiled and cleaned my brand new .30-30 Winchester lever-action rifle…no scope…real men shot with iron sites. The excitement of it all was almost too much for my little 12 year old self to handle, but I was ready for that hunt.
And then..finally. My dad roused me out of bed at 3:30 in the morning, but I was already dressed and ready to go, laying in the quiet dark, the smell of water repellent oil and gunpowder my stimulants. I hopped up and grabbed my gear, and we loaded up my dad's "work" truck, affectionately called Old Blue.
Blue was a '68 Chevy pickup, 3 on the tree old school. Badass truck, so bad that my dad his very best to completely destroy it over years' of overworked abuse. Blue hauled countless cords of firewood from our cabin back into town during the winter. She skidded and leveled old logging roads. She loaded brush to the burn piles as we cleared areas during the summer, and even hauled kids down the lake.
Our cabin is high up near the tip of a mid-size mountain overlooking Diamond Lake, north of Spokane. To get to our cabin, the road is nothing more than a very narrow, very sketchy logging road, and during the winter months, the sketch-level is multiplied by the snow and ruts gouged out by the melting\freezing\melting cycle. Now normally this wouldn't be a big deal, but that particular morning that would all change.
Now, I should make a slight note here, dear reader, that what I am about to describe to you is both shocking and a bit sad, especially if you are a car lover as I am.
My dad…he grew up in a different world, in a different time. See, where he comes from, the faster and easier it is to bag your limit for the season means all the more time available to do what you *really* want to do…sit around the fire, drink beer and tell fart jokes with your buddies. With that in mind, the standard Texas way of hunting circa 1945 was to load up the pickup with weapons, ammo, beer, chili and a spotlight and start driving around the back roads of the hill country until you managed to shoot something.
Yes I know. The legalities and unsportsmanlike notions are comedic.
Well as fathers are wanton to do, my dad decided that certain knowledge and history of said hunting 'practices' were ripe for the handing-down to his eager 12 year old boy. What he neglected to recall is that, in the state of Washington, all hunters wishing to do so legally with license in-hand are required to take a hunting and gun safety course…which deftly covered the immeasurable atrocities that road-hunting would bring to man and animal alike.
Well ok…it wasn't that dramatic, but it was clearly stated in my Hunter's Safety Manual that hunting and\or shooting from a vehicle, moving or otherwise was not only supremely dangerous and stupid, it was most certainly illegal.
Not wishing to question my father at such a time of important information-gathering, I said nary a word when we pulled off to the side of the access road as we neared our turn-off to get to the cabin. As he pulled Old Blue over and parked, he began fumbling around with something under the seat which turned out to be my much-cherished .30-30 Winchester lever-action with no scope!
"Dad…what are we doing here?", trying not to seem like I was questioning my student-teacher position.
"Welp," he said in his accustomed Southern drawl. "We're fixin' to get up on the loggin' road here, and it's early feedin' time for them deer."
"Ah…oh. Well isn't that not…right? They told us in class that drive-huntin' is illegal…" and before I could finish my thought, the distinct *click-CLACK* of the lever-action levering its action open on my rifle put a very certain and poignant close to my questioning.
"Eh this is just in case we see something'…then we'll get out and follow it, right?" said my dad. With that, I was content with the unfolding events, and my dad handed me a bullet to hold for said "just in case" moment, the chamber of the rifle sitting open between us on the bench seat of Old Blue.
As we started clambering up the logging road, the ruts and run-off made special effort to knock us and all our gear all over the place. I will always fondly revel in my dad's ability to balance a cup of coffee, light a cigarette, shift gears and steer a very old, very tired 3-on-the-tree, no power-steering truck up the 56 degree angled side of a mountain without batting an eye. Even now, I strive to have that perfect redneck Zen balance.
As I was hanging on for dear life on the bumpy ride up, my dad spotted what must have amounted to something furry and living as he abruptly stopped our forward-uphill progress. Before I had time to unpeel my face from the glovebox façade and collect my thoughts, my dad shut the truck off and killed the lights…the barely-noticeable light of dawn just beginning to creep up over the trees.
"Here git that shell in the gun…I think I saw somethin' yonder" he said through a large exhale of Winston 100 cigarette smoke.
Excited at the sudden possibility of getting right into the Hunt that morning, I one-upped my dad's command and dropped the .30 caliber bullet into the open breach and *click-CLAK* smoothly closed the lever, the rifle now primed and ready to fire.
Now, if you've never seen or handled a lever-action rifle, it's quite a piece of machinery. These are the very same rifles ever-present and popular in almost every Western cowboy Clint Eastwood movie ever made. They were easy to load, easy to clean, and had a shorter total length which made them perfect for mounting to saddles and long trail ride hunts, and they were wickedly accurate and dependable as hell. The most interesting feature of the .30-30 Winchester was that it was a hammer-action, meaning that when you pulled the trigger, a hammer much like that of a revolver fell to strike the firing pin and …well, you know the rest.
This hammer now posed quite a problem for my 12 year old mind and gloved hands. Whenever ever you locked the lever-action back, it cocked the hammer to a firing position, and to get back to a relatively safe position, you had to simultaneously squeeze the lever safety, hold the hammer with your thumb, and slowly pull the trigger, letting the hammer gently go back to a non-firing position.
Yeah. This posed a bit of a problem for me even in the most non-stressful of situations, sans gloves, cold, or my dad breathing smoke in my face waiting for me to get on with it so we could go kill stuff.
After what seemed an eternity of me staring wide-eyed at my very own, beloved rifle mocking me in desperation (which was just shy of 3.2 seconds), my dad solved all my anxiety with a very blunt "Here…lemme do it."
As I moved my hand away, my dad grabbed the handle and with that redneck Zen that I had known and admired, squeezed the lever safety and began dropping the hammer down.
To this day, all I can remember of the following 15-25 seconds was the unbelievable sensation of being trapped in a cloud, only it smelled vaguely like the cloud was made of gun powder and anti-freeze. I couldn't hear anything, I couldn't see anything….I actually thought I was dead and was still traveling on to my next destination, wishing severely that I had gone to confession last weekend and fessed up to swiping that dollar from my mom's purse. I was bound for Hell and it smelled like anti-freeze….how ironic.
Slowly, like a bad movie of the week flashback, the cloud literally began to fade, and things started coming back into focus…hey, there's my dad….
…what the hell's he saying? …"..mmmthhbp…"
"WHAT DAD!??" I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!", I said.
"..mmmmthfkknn ooottt tthddrrrk….!" he echoed back severely.
We began rolling the windows down, fumbling our way through the remains of the cloud inside the cab of Old Blue. My ears were ringing like never before, and it took nearly 15 minutes and us just sitting and staring wide-eyed out the windshield to try and collect ourselves and verify that we were not, in fact, dead.
Turns out that the prior 15 minutes of muffled silence was in the best interest of my relatively-virgin age 12 ears, because my dad was weaving a tapestry of foul language that would've embarrassed the most brazen and\or drunken sailor of ill repute. When the fog in my head, eyes and ears began to clear, my dad and I both climbed out of the truck, the light of dawn now giving us a better idea of what had happened.
As we circled around the front of the truck, I noticed steam billowing out from under her front fenders. I ducked down and took a peek under the front of the truck, and sure enough, Blue was hemorrhaging anti-freeze all over the logging road. We walked back around and leaned into survey the damage on the inside of the truck, now that the cloud of instant heat from the rifle and anti-freeze had cleared out. As suspected, there was a still-sizzling hole the diameter of my thumb in the center floorboard of Blue, and my dad had managed to miss all mission-critical parts on the truck save a major coolant line that run to the heater core.
Still in silence, my dad and I stood at the front of Blue, watching her steam and drip in the middle of the woods in late November.
After 20 minutes or so of solemn quiet for the recently-injured, I turned and looked at my dad, his trademark Winston 100 cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth. I couldn't tell what he was thinking or feeling, so I just took a gamble.
"Dad?"
"Yeah boy."
"You killed Blue."
Dead silence as he took a long drag and blew it out the other corner of his mouth, trying desperately to hold back the laughter I could see in his eyes.
Without changing his glance, "Y'tell yer mother 'bout this, and yer next."
And with that, I've never laughed quite so hard in my life as I did the morning my dad killed Old Blue.
Our pop taught us how to handle weapons of all shapes and sizes, from rifles, shotguns, handguns big and small, bows, and even slingshots just for the hell of it, and we were, and still are, pretty damn good shots to this day.
Anyway…my dad established a sort of tradition in our family. Every year around Thanksgiving weekend, he wasn't the type to sit at home and eat leftovers watching football. Nope, my dad was off on a three-day whitetail deer hunt, prime time during the rut when all the big bulls were out trying to get some female deer action before the coldest weather and snow hit for the year.
Up until I was 12 or so, we kid weren't allowed to go on those hunts with him - sure, he'd taken myself and my brothers out walking with him earlier in the season, mainly because the deer activity was much lower, and it gave my dad ample opportunity to teach us the finer details of spotting trails and tracks, reading "sign" and tracking the animal, setting up stands and blinds, even rattling and calling during the rut season. All wonderfully fun stuff for us at that age…like we were officially being introduced to the fabulous cash and prizes of Manhood waiting for us on the other side of puberty.
But this year, at the ripe age of 12, it was my turn to go on the big hunt with my dad and his buddies, and I even got to plan where I was going to hunt\set up blinds, carry my own gun, and if all went well…take my first deer! I was so excited I don't think I slept a wink for 2 days leading up to Thanksgiving weekend. I packed and re-packed my little backpack, waterproofed my boots, oiled and cleaned my brand new .30-30 Winchester lever-action rifle…no scope…real men shot with iron sites. The excitement of it all was almost too much for my little 12 year old self to handle, but I was ready for that hunt.
And then..finally. My dad roused me out of bed at 3:30 in the morning, but I was already dressed and ready to go, laying in the quiet dark, the smell of water repellent oil and gunpowder my stimulants. I hopped up and grabbed my gear, and we loaded up my dad's "work" truck, affectionately called Old Blue.
Blue was a '68 Chevy pickup, 3 on the tree old school. Badass truck, so bad that my dad his very best to completely destroy it over years' of overworked abuse. Blue hauled countless cords of firewood from our cabin back into town during the winter. She skidded and leveled old logging roads. She loaded brush to the burn piles as we cleared areas during the summer, and even hauled kids down the lake.
Our cabin is high up near the tip of a mid-size mountain overlooking Diamond Lake, north of Spokane. To get to our cabin, the road is nothing more than a very narrow, very sketchy logging road, and during the winter months, the sketch-level is multiplied by the snow and ruts gouged out by the melting\freezing\melting cycle. Now normally this wouldn't be a big deal, but that particular morning that would all change.
Now, I should make a slight note here, dear reader, that what I am about to describe to you is both shocking and a bit sad, especially if you are a car lover as I am.
My dad…he grew up in a different world, in a different time. See, where he comes from, the faster and easier it is to bag your limit for the season means all the more time available to do what you *really* want to do…sit around the fire, drink beer and tell fart jokes with your buddies. With that in mind, the standard Texas way of hunting circa 1945 was to load up the pickup with weapons, ammo, beer, chili and a spotlight and start driving around the back roads of the hill country until you managed to shoot something.
Yes I know. The legalities and unsportsmanlike notions are comedic.
Well as fathers are wanton to do, my dad decided that certain knowledge and history of said hunting 'practices' were ripe for the handing-down to his eager 12 year old boy. What he neglected to recall is that, in the state of Washington, all hunters wishing to do so legally with license in-hand are required to take a hunting and gun safety course…which deftly covered the immeasurable atrocities that road-hunting would bring to man and animal alike.
Well ok…it wasn't that dramatic, but it was clearly stated in my Hunter's Safety Manual that hunting and\or shooting from a vehicle, moving or otherwise was not only supremely dangerous and stupid, it was most certainly illegal.
Not wishing to question my father at such a time of important information-gathering, I said nary a word when we pulled off to the side of the access road as we neared our turn-off to get to the cabin. As he pulled Old Blue over and parked, he began fumbling around with something under the seat which turned out to be my much-cherished .30-30 Winchester lever-action with no scope!
"Dad…what are we doing here?", trying not to seem like I was questioning my student-teacher position.
"Welp," he said in his accustomed Southern drawl. "We're fixin' to get up on the loggin' road here, and it's early feedin' time for them deer."
"Ah…oh. Well isn't that not…right? They told us in class that drive-huntin' is illegal…" and before I could finish my thought, the distinct *click-CLACK* of the lever-action levering its action open on my rifle put a very certain and poignant close to my questioning.
"Eh this is just in case we see something'…then we'll get out and follow it, right?" said my dad. With that, I was content with the unfolding events, and my dad handed me a bullet to hold for said "just in case" moment, the chamber of the rifle sitting open between us on the bench seat of Old Blue.
As we started clambering up the logging road, the ruts and run-off made special effort to knock us and all our gear all over the place. I will always fondly revel in my dad's ability to balance a cup of coffee, light a cigarette, shift gears and steer a very old, very tired 3-on-the-tree, no power-steering truck up the 56 degree angled side of a mountain without batting an eye. Even now, I strive to have that perfect redneck Zen balance.
As I was hanging on for dear life on the bumpy ride up, my dad spotted what must have amounted to something furry and living as he abruptly stopped our forward-uphill progress. Before I had time to unpeel my face from the glovebox façade and collect my thoughts, my dad shut the truck off and killed the lights…the barely-noticeable light of dawn just beginning to creep up over the trees.
"Here git that shell in the gun…I think I saw somethin' yonder" he said through a large exhale of Winston 100 cigarette smoke.
Excited at the sudden possibility of getting right into the Hunt that morning, I one-upped my dad's command and dropped the .30 caliber bullet into the open breach and *click-CLAK* smoothly closed the lever, the rifle now primed and ready to fire.
Now, if you've never seen or handled a lever-action rifle, it's quite a piece of machinery. These are the very same rifles ever-present and popular in almost every Western cowboy Clint Eastwood movie ever made. They were easy to load, easy to clean, and had a shorter total length which made them perfect for mounting to saddles and long trail ride hunts, and they were wickedly accurate and dependable as hell. The most interesting feature of the .30-30 Winchester was that it was a hammer-action, meaning that when you pulled the trigger, a hammer much like that of a revolver fell to strike the firing pin and …well, you know the rest.
This hammer now posed quite a problem for my 12 year old mind and gloved hands. Whenever ever you locked the lever-action back, it cocked the hammer to a firing position, and to get back to a relatively safe position, you had to simultaneously squeeze the lever safety, hold the hammer with your thumb, and slowly pull the trigger, letting the hammer gently go back to a non-firing position.
Yeah. This posed a bit of a problem for me even in the most non-stressful of situations, sans gloves, cold, or my dad breathing smoke in my face waiting for me to get on with it so we could go kill stuff.
After what seemed an eternity of me staring wide-eyed at my very own, beloved rifle mocking me in desperation (which was just shy of 3.2 seconds), my dad solved all my anxiety with a very blunt "Here…lemme do it."
As I moved my hand away, my dad grabbed the handle and with that redneck Zen that I had known and admired, squeezed the lever safety and began dropping the hammer down.
To this day, all I can remember of the following 15-25 seconds was the unbelievable sensation of being trapped in a cloud, only it smelled vaguely like the cloud was made of gun powder and anti-freeze. I couldn't hear anything, I couldn't see anything….I actually thought I was dead and was still traveling on to my next destination, wishing severely that I had gone to confession last weekend and fessed up to swiping that dollar from my mom's purse. I was bound for Hell and it smelled like anti-freeze….how ironic.
Slowly, like a bad movie of the week flashback, the cloud literally began to fade, and things started coming back into focus…hey, there's my dad….
…what the hell's he saying? …"..mmmthhbp…"
"WHAT DAD!??" I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!", I said.
"..mmmmthfkknn ooottt tthddrrrk….!" he echoed back severely.
We began rolling the windows down, fumbling our way through the remains of the cloud inside the cab of Old Blue. My ears were ringing like never before, and it took nearly 15 minutes and us just sitting and staring wide-eyed out the windshield to try and collect ourselves and verify that we were not, in fact, dead.
Turns out that the prior 15 minutes of muffled silence was in the best interest of my relatively-virgin age 12 ears, because my dad was weaving a tapestry of foul language that would've embarrassed the most brazen and\or drunken sailor of ill repute. When the fog in my head, eyes and ears began to clear, my dad and I both climbed out of the truck, the light of dawn now giving us a better idea of what had happened.
As we circled around the front of the truck, I noticed steam billowing out from under her front fenders. I ducked down and took a peek under the front of the truck, and sure enough, Blue was hemorrhaging anti-freeze all over the logging road. We walked back around and leaned into survey the damage on the inside of the truck, now that the cloud of instant heat from the rifle and anti-freeze had cleared out. As suspected, there was a still-sizzling hole the diameter of my thumb in the center floorboard of Blue, and my dad had managed to miss all mission-critical parts on the truck save a major coolant line that run to the heater core.
Still in silence, my dad and I stood at the front of Blue, watching her steam and drip in the middle of the woods in late November.
After 20 minutes or so of solemn quiet for the recently-injured, I turned and looked at my dad, his trademark Winston 100 cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth. I couldn't tell what he was thinking or feeling, so I just took a gamble.
"Dad?"
"Yeah boy."
"You killed Blue."
Dead silence as he took a long drag and blew it out the other corner of his mouth, trying desperately to hold back the laughter I could see in his eyes.
Without changing his glance, "Y'tell yer mother 'bout this, and yer next."
And with that, I've never laughed quite so hard in my life as I did the morning my dad killed Old Blue.
posted by Andrew at 8:12 AM
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