The day I found myself, the wood duck came full-speed. From upriver and darting among cypress and willows — spilling air from his wings.
Things had not been going particularly well, one single and specific vehicle of distress difficult to identify. Perhaps it was simply a matter of misconception, a malady that seems common to the human condition. A disorder that leads one to such a point of consternation even valid questions can’t be formulated. So pronounced that the worrisome and impotent why bubbles to the surface and floats on a turbid current of lethargy. But whatever it is or was, that was where I resided. In the abyss of lost. With so much beauty about, so much grandeur surrounding, how could bleakness inundate? I wondered. I sought rescue.
That magic time of legal shooting stands just around the corner. Duck hunters treasure the moment.
I had, stuffed deeply in a corner of recall, some suggestion of where and how rescue might occur. Such transitions had taken place there in the past and just might do so again — The Jennings Hole. I visited it often during one season of life, that time when we walked across the Herrington Place and the Sanders Place and the Brooks Place to the bluff above that hole. Two immense pines commanded, their demeanor authoritative but kind. A specific smell was found there at Jennings Hole. Wood ducks, too. Both would be medicinal.
An onomatopoeia for smells would facilitate the description of this next element. Like bang for sounds. Or boom. Smells don’t have such handy devices. Pungent might work, but it requires interpretation. What is required for the thorough explanation of this smell I sought is to lead someone to a given locale known to produce that smell and say, “Take a deep breath. Smell that? Well, that’s the smell I am talking about.” It was that smell — that pungent, sweet, almost offensive odor I needed for some measure of recovery. Decaying leaves and soft mud and air caressed by river water. Pungent. A smell that even in its sting brings tranquility. I would go there.
Waiting for ducks in flooded timber is exhilarating.
This particular trip would demand a small, puttering outboard and battered johnboat. No walking across those properties of memory. Travel time about the same, but that walk, as I recall, was always pleasant. Eventually I was there.
The Jennings Hole had changed. Of course it had changed. Practically everything and everyone had changed. I played first team in this business of change. Time. All changed, save those beguiling pines on the bluff. And even they had expanded their girth.
The Jennings Hole, as if had in the past, produced a wood duck.
I squirrel hunted beneath those pines in an earlier stage of life, and beneath some oaks and hickories that kept company with the evergreens. It was a fine and pleasant locale. Fields on one side, the Jennings Hole, river and sloughs on all other sides. Quiet, reflective. I remember the embraces common to that spot. I learned recently that the two pines had fallen victim to high winds. Time, again. Like an old Merle Haggard song. But I choose to recall.
With the old boat tied to a willow, I eased over a sandbar and came face-to-face with Jennings Hole. As I’ve said, it had changed. But not everything. Like those pines. Most fortuitous of all was that smell I sought; it was as it used to be and should be, and it was what I needed. And those other few elements where change went missing — the swamp; the January chill; the calls of Cardinals; the gurgle of river water circumventing tangles of once tall oaks that had slipped into the flow as steep banks obliged the river’s whims. And the sentiments. Powerful and consuming and sobering as ever. Peace. Dreams dreamed, yet still unlived. Future gains and losses and past pains and joys and successes and failures and gentle touches, smiles, tears. They were here — at Jennings Hole.
Ice spangles the Jennings Hole on a cold January morning.
The wood duck came full-speed. From upriver and darting among cypress and willows, spilling air from first this wing and then that, a specter squeal allowing his arrival — immediate, frantic and furious, permitting no time for error. He tumbled downward at the shot, momentum still propelling him forward. Probably a local, hatched in a cavity of some cypress or oak or poplar and plopping into water as a chick possibly right here where he now lay. Regal and gaudy and beautiful and dignified and majestic even in this terminal posture. Here in Jennings Hole, a place that, it can be reasonably assumed, he visited with great regularity. I stood staring, mesmerized, a tear trickling down each cheek. Possibly from the cold wind biting my face. Possibly not.
I retrieved the duck by chunking him, an elementary approach we used as boys. Throw a chunk of wood to the off-side of the bird and wait as expanding ripples push the prize closer. Slow but effective. Once I had the duck in hand, I laid him across my knees and sat quietly, winter and solitude surrounding. I smoothed his rumples; admired those red-encircled eyes and feathered coronal stretching from pate to back; touched a patch of mottled russet stopped short by white-on-black bars where wings melded with body. Felt his warmth while it remained.
A Jennings Hole Woodie – perhaps the most beautiful duck known
Here in my hands, hands that had ended the drama of life with intent but with complete admiration and respect, I honored a model that has routinely coaxed brush to canvas, the carver’s chisel, the sculptor’s wax or clay or bronze. Superb monuments many have created through their admirable talents. But only God could have created this finished and perfected original.
I had been here many times in years lying behind me, here at this very spot, engaged in this very activity. And likely carrying the occasional burden during some of those visits, burdens probably much lighter and certainly more juvenile. I considered, among a great many other things, Robert Frost. I knew “…yet knowing how way leads on to way…,” there would be more burdens, regardless of the road I traveled. I would possibly need the Jennings Hole again. But today, with this wood duck, in this series of complexities, I had found myself.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:9.
Small Water Waterfowling: Potholes, Flooded Timber, Rivers, Streams, Beaver Ponds, Wild Rice, Small Lakes, Farm Ponds & Temporary Floodings.
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