Things That Get Away
In early fall, when the potato greens have withered upon their hills, I take a spade and pierce black earth, cautious not to push too hard too quickly. I lift and place each load of soil on a screen stretched across a frame of two-by-fours, which in turn sits atop my wheelbarrow. Every six or seven spadefuls, I stop, put down the spade, and break apart the wedges of soil, letting the grains and smaller stones fall between the apertures. What accumulates below the screen is fine as flour, while upon the screen, plump and pockmarked and smeared with mud, sit the year’s potatoes. I brush them off, place them carefully in boxes, and carry them down to the cellar, where I consider them the golden currency they are, a treasury of sustenance and pleasure that will carry me through the year.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to think of memories as something like potatoes, at least in the way they are retrieved from the soils of my accumulated experience. Without my even trying, I heap moments on whatever sieve is stretched between my heart and mind, and notice only later what passes through or not, irrespective of my preferences. I’m now old enough to have placed a few good loads upon that screen, though I’ve come to think that with time, each aperture in the mesh has gotten bigger, and with each passing year a few fewer memories are retained. That realization affords me a degree of sadness, as I’ve generally liked my experiences, and would hoard the bulk of them if I could. But screens are immutable, and more stubborn than my mere desires, and so I must have faith that what passes through goes back from where it came, while what remains must be made of bigger stuff, or at least stuff less willing to break apart and be forgotten. And so, I gather those memories like I do potatoes, handle them with care, and draw upon them too for joy and sustenance. I’ve come to think that it’s best not to think too hard on why I remember the things I do, but to dwell instead on the fact that memories remain, likely for good reason.
*
After the potatoes are in, I take up a gun and go walking in woodlands that wither upon their own hills, passing from green to gold to gray. When I was younger, I walked the same woods almost daily, in the same ten-mile radius of the Massachusetts farm where I then lived. I suppose I was a bird hunter, one whose enthusiasm far outweighed his skill, and I missed my share of birds and then some. I was a grouse and woodcock man to the exclusion of most else, with a twenty-gauge double I was far too poor to own, and a young Brittany who understood the game better than I ever will. We’d walk alder runs and bittersweet tangles every autumn day save Sunday (when the game laws said we couldn’t) picking our way along Blackmer’s cow pasture, the oxbows of Tully Brook, and the wet swale by John Moore’s hayfield. The dog was patient with me and my inadequacies, and I could tell he never counted on me much when he found himself entwined in a plume of grouse scent. He did his best by me on woodcock, though, and when he led the way through chalk-marked bottoms, he’d slow to a creep, letting me tag along at his heels. He rarely if ever missed a bird, even as I missed plenty, and his intensity never wavered as the woodcock rose and twittered between the volleys of number eight shot, lighting well within reason that we might find and flush them again.
I suppose we both considered woodcock a close second to the grouse that proved few and fleeting. They were scattered in that region, and he found them only on occasion, and often fractions before they busted wild, bending through the popple whips, confident in their escape. With every grouse I flushed and missed I believe the community of men and birds and dogs and autumn woodlands became more convinced of my inability to mount the gun and get off a shot of any consequence. Perhaps it was the infrequency of those grouse that made them grow in the collective conscience of that same community, making them far too big to fit through the mesh of memory, the one through which the woodcock, both those hit and missed, sifted fine and flour-like. The memories of grouse are the ones I carry.
One afternoon at John Moore’s place, me and the dog walked the field edge south for a good half mile to where the tangle gave way to tall pines. There was a stone wall there that came to perpendiculars, taking a hard east turn back towards Moore’s dairy barn. A copse of apple trees was hidden a hundred yards in, meager producers even on a good year, but no less a beacon of hope each time we hunted in their direction. The dog and I banked towards them, and I leaned into rosebushes that tore my hands and pulled threads from my shirtsleeves. The dog had a better time of it, following tunnels through the pucker brush that traversed the wall. We slowed down a bit as the apple trees loomed close, and I let the dog work ahead as best I could, eager as I was to run right up there with him in hopes that a grouse would jump.
That day the apple trees had nothing to offer us, and so we turned back north on a line a good deal deeper than the one we’d followed in. I remember the way each step drew us back to where we’d started, and where we’d have to end, what with the failing daylight and chore time fast approaching. I remember how, with each cast of the dog across my bow, I grew a bit more discouraged, my hope for a bird getting smaller as my little dog ate up the distance between us and the end of our walk. Nary a bird and nearly back to where we’d started, the buckthorn and alder opened up a bit into a piece of wet ground that made for easier walking save for the sucking mud. Almost through it, almost back to the truck, I’d loosened my grip on hope, and let my mind move past the matters at hand to things opaque and farther off; only the absence of the clanging bell at length held me up. I looked around for the dog but couldn’t see him or remember quite where I last had, and in that beat of time, as I slowly tied together the threads of recognition, a grouse got up off the edge of the opening and banked my way. I lifted the gun and touched off two shots almost in concert, just as the bird saw me and changed course, ruddering back left and away. Examining the coincidence of our decisions, mine to shoot and his to turn, I have to think his instincts were quicker than my own: as the fading day swallowed up the concussion of the shots, he took a straighter line through a wide-open channel, his fan and spread wings clear as day, and seemingly big as a billboard. I remember with absolute clarity how I stood there, two spent shells smoking in the chambers, and watched the shot I should have taken materialize, pause in flight for what seemed an eternity, then fade fast into lengthening shadows.
*
It was nearly a quarter century ago that I missed that bird, and yet I remember the metallic taste of disappointment, how it lingered on my tongue. I remember the sinking feeling that I was no good at something I wanted desperately to be good at, and the sullen chucking of the gun into the truck’s back seat, the hasty uncollaring of the dog. For whatever reason, that memory has persevered, in minute detail, for all these years, emerging alongside thoughts of a dog now gone and a place I long ago moved on from. There was a time when I’d try hard to understand why it remained so clear and so immediate. But now, with the benefit of age and distance, I’ve abandoned the need to know why exactly; I’m comforted instead to think that I’ve carried that miss for good reason, a token of something valuable, something durable.
From the vantage of a quarter century and all that it encompasses, I look back on a lone missed grouse and consider the “what” and not the “why”. I see a young man who hated missing because he felt that missing had nothing to show him aside from disappointment; I see a young man who was quite sure he’d never have sufficient command of a game that he loved to be a worthy player in it; I see a young man who feared he’d never have sufficient faith in the prospect of good things to just slow down and wait, wait long enough for the flight paths of departing birds and his intentions to align, and only then to touch the triggers; I see a young man who assumed that only with a bird in hand would he ever be a bird hunter, and a good one, at least as he then defined it.
These many seasons later, I’ve been afforded opportunities I could not have imagined then: great dogs and far-flung travels and birds in number that I’m almost ashamed to admit. With those opportunities I’ve gotten “better”, at least in the sense that I miss with less frequency, and indeed with less disappointment. I can’t say that I’m not a little bit proud of this hard-won sense of proficiency. But pausing here in middle age to look upon a treasury of memories that have gathered upon a screen stretched between my heart and mind, I don’t see many dead birds, nor do I re-live many moments of birds crumpling in flight, suspended by my intentions and well-timed shots. Sure, I see a few that came together, and a few birds plucked from days that still, in the recollecting, punctuate the narrative of a life I’m privileged to call my own. But mainly I see one bird framed in flight and disappearing quickly in a physical sense, but lingering, radiant and exquisitely detailed, in my conscience while two spent shells smoke in the chambers. And the gift of that memory is knowing that I didn’t choose it willingly. It simply remains, plump and pockmarked and mud-smeared, reminding me of humble beginnings, and how sometimes life gives us what we need, independent of what we think we want.
I don’t wonder if I’m a bird hunter anymore. These days I know I’m one. There’s some comfort there, but not enough to mean that much in the greater scheme of things. I see myself instead as someone learning slowly but learning nonetheless, willing to let the seasons swell and burst and wilt again, passing over and through me, providing gifts I’ve had no say in choosing. I draw upon a treasury of things simple and golden, and I consider myself lucky. I even find at times the space to pause, grateful for things that got away, and all the things that didn’t.
First Published in Gundog Magazine
