Things were different when he was a lad—back when nothing was artificial or contrived, and the days and seasons were filled with high adventure.
It’s a popular pastime among adults, when the hair begins to gray and the aches of middle age grow stronger, to look back on the prodigious deeds of their youth and proclaim that we’ve all gone soft and that they don’t make boys like that any more. The Old Man had a theory about this. He said that as a man grew older, the miles that he used to walk to the Little Red Schoolhouse grew longer.
“I am convinced,” he said, “that what schoolin’ I had took place no farther than half-a-mile from the homestead, but the older I get the longer the trip seems to get. If you asked me right fast how far I walked through the snow, I reckon I’d say ten miles without battin’ an eye.”
I wasn’t paying too much attention to what the old gentleman was saying, except I caught the word “snow.” It was steamy August and I was torturing the crank handle of an ice-cream freezer. Or, rather, the crank was torturing me. Sweat was gushing down my face, and only the promise of being allowed to lick the dasher kept me grunting at the task as the cream in the cylinder, surrounded by a mixture of cracked ice and rock salt, got stiffer and stiffer.
When it got almost immovably stiff the ice cream was done, and I would be onto that smoothly creamy wooden paddle like a duck on a June bug, and there would be wonderful chunks of frozen peaches making lovely hillocks under the satin surface of the ice cream. This was known as soldier’s pay, or extra incentive, and I was allowed an even start on the bulk of the ice cream with the family. I usually came out ahead.
It seems to me that this was the best ice cream ever tooled by the hand of man, when you consider the miracles one used to work with Jersey cream, sugar, eggs and vanilla extract, with a few peach nuggets or cherries stirred into the mixture. They don’t make ice cream like that today.
This thought occurred sharply as I was smitten by a violent crick in the back the other day when I was trying to recapture my misty youth by producing some home-churned ice cream instead of sending somebody to the store for a carton, or merely reaching down into the freezer for a rock-hard package that generally tastes of sawdust, no matter how brilliant the stripes.
I reckon that in recent years I’ve ruined an awful lot of good meat cooking out of doors in pursuit of youth. I will go fishing or camping just for the fun of being frozen or sunstruck, fly bit or mosquito chewn – anything at all as long as it’s uncomfortable. I am a sucker for picnics, and like anything at all to eat if it’s either raw or burnt and has sand in it.
In recent years I have eaten elephant heart, raw antelope liver and half-cooked sand grouse or gazelle chops – meat that had been flying through the air or gamboling on the plains a few short minutes before. Let me catch a fish, and I’m not happy until I’ve given it a clay pack and shoved it into the coals. If it comes out half raw it doesn’t hurt the taste, even on a tongue that may have been jaded by thirty years of nicotine and honed smooth by prohibition gin.
But it is true that things were different when I was a boy, and the Old Man represented the irretrievable mystery of yesteryear. I do not suppose that I would get very far in interesting today’s crop of nippers in what to me was high sport and great fun some thirty to thirty-five years a-past. It was altogether too simple then for this age of television and ballet in the circus. Progress, like nearly everything else, is relative, and I often wonder if its benefits are entirely undiluted.
Most of the things we did in the long-buried days happened out of doors. The seasons were sharply etched on the calendar as to potential. Winter was the infrequent snow, with icicles to suck and snow ice cream to be made, and traps for rabbits and the little snowbirds and waxwings that miraculously appeared with the first powdering. The traps were simple. A box was tilted and propped with a stick that had a cord attached. A trail of breadcrumbs led to the box, and when the prey entered the trap you gave the cord a twitch from your hiding place and the box fell, imprisoning your quarry. Then the only problem was getting the birds out, and they usually flew free.
A thin skin of ice on the Sweetwater ponds made duck hunting easier, because the ducks rafted in clumps and bunches in open water and were loath to fly in the flurrying snow. Somehow all animals and birds seemed tamer and easier to hunt in the snow, and it was tremendous fun to track a deer instead of running him with hounds.
Springtime was strawberry time, and green peaches time, and bellyache time, and – blessed of all the blesseds – getting-out-of-school time. As May nudged lazily into June and the bobolinks swayed atop the long grasses, and the black cherries oozed sweetness as their trees oozed jewels of gum, the medicine cabinet took quite a thrashing, and the castor oil lowered its level in the penance bottle. And it was time to swim again, strictly against parental orders, so you swam anyhow, and the goose-pimpling waters were rendered doubly pneumonically delicious by their very illegality.
Summer, with the horrors of the schoolhouse all but forgotten, was a steady diet of fishing and swimming. There were some summer camps, even in my time – up in the mountains, mostly. These were basically created for parents who wanted their children out of their hair for six weeks or so, and so remanded them to a kind of benevolent concentration camp with supervised archery, boating, swimming, hiking, campfire-making, basket weaving and suchlike.
The nicest thing about August was that it was a kind of preparatory school for September, when the real adult action started – when you started to train the puppies seriously, when the dove season opened, when the big nor’easters swelled the tides and fetched the marsh hens into sight, when the big bluefish and the channel bass supplanted the inside fish as a point of interest.
October gave you squirrels and chinquapins glossy brown on the bushes, alum-tart persimmons wrinkling, and the quail calling sweetly in the dusk, still innocently secure from the fusillade that would greet them in November. That was when it really got frosty, and the undergrowth withered. The necks of the buck deer swelled, and you could hear the big fellows scraping the last of the velvet off their antlers and snorting in the thickets.
Practically none of this was artificial or contrived. I shot a bow and arrow, but I had made the bow and the arrows according to a recipe in a book by Ernest Thompson Seton. I didn’t need a counselor to teach me archery. We could sling a hatchet, tomahawk fashion, and throw a spear, and make a deadfall, and hurl a knife, and row or sail a boat.
The barn walls in winter were generally tacked full of rabbit-skins and the hide of an occasional coon or possum, and I daydreamed violently of meeting a bear to add to the trophies. I never did, but I saw one’s tracks once, and that was almost as good as seeing him and shooting him.
There was also a secret life that adults never shared – a life of interlocking caves, of out-of-the-way islands where pirates surely once had buried their loot, of tree houses and even log cabins, their beams out of plumb, to be sure, but a power of cozy comfort to the weary pioneer.
The train from Southport to Wilmington, North Carolina (called the W.B.&S., which meant “Wilmington, Brunswick and Southport,” but was corrupted to “Willing But Slow”), consumed the best part of half-a-day to travel thirty miles, but the trip was fraught with high adventure and a sense of vast travel. The trip on the river boat, of which my Uncle Rob was engineer, took longer, but you felt pretty near like Columbus once you passed the stinking fish meal factory. It took longer to make that thirty miles than it does to fly from New York to London.
It is probably perverse and cranky of me but I can’t understand what the modern youngster sees of interest in rockets to the moon and satellites and such when there are still so many things to discover in the tangible sea. Nor how the extravagances of television can claim precedence over camping trips, or even over the limitless, understandable adventure to be found in books that do not deal with space cadets and moon dwellers.
But as a boy grown old I do not seem to be lonely in this appraisal of things not being like they used to be. The weather’s changed, and everybody talks about whether or not it’s the atom bomb’s fault. The safari business is booming, and is patronized largely by old boys with prominent veins and potbellies, men trying to torture themselves into a misty remembrance of things past. You never see any bluebirds any more, and the redheaded woodpeckers have joined the dodo.
Things are definitely not the same as when I was a lad, and if you asked me right smart how many miles I walked to school through the snow I would probably top the Old Man and say “Twenty.” That would be a lie, because all the time I had a bicycle, and the schoolhouse was just around the corner. It wasn’t red either. That was the color of the seventh-grade teacher’s hair at just about the time the birds and the bees took on a slightly different significance.
Come to think of it, they ain’t making redheaded schoolteachers the way they used to either. Not the last time I looked.
©1960 by Robert Ruark, renewed 1982 by the estate of Robert Ruark. Permission to reprint granted by Harold Matson Company, Inc.