Bark at the Moon

If you go outside and start barking like a dog, the whole neighborhood will come alive with distant barking from all directions.  Man, I must have had a boring childhood.  Tonight, I went over to a neighbor’s house to let their dogs in for the night, while their owners were out of town.  I caught myself talking to them as if I had known them all my life.  For some odd reason, dogs seem to understand me.  Not when I bark… I’m talking about speaking to them as if they have a full command of the English language.  My dog knows when I am happy and when I am sad.  She knows just the right time to put her head on my leg.  It’s been said that dogs can read minds.  Whatever.  All I know, is you can talk to a dog and they listen better than most humans.  I just wish they wouldn’t crap on the floor.

Why Do We Kill?

Talk radio can be exhausting.  Everybody is bitching about what the other side is doing.  Maybe folks just like to bitch.  Lately, I have not been listening to talk radio.  There is no election to follow and if there is a political scandal, there never seems to be a resolve.  When I was a child, I shared a bedroom with my younger sister.  We placed orange Hot Wheel tracks down the center of the room to divide it into separate sections.  We would complain about what the other was doing on their side.  Really, we had more fun when there was no track.  Liberals and conservatives want power because there is money attached.  In the game of politics, people become part of a tribe and are brainwashed into believing a single ideology. As long as political officials are elected, there has to be persuasion of the masses. The 2012 election was a disappointment for me because I didn’t like either platform.  If there was some way to strip the money and power away from politics, we could produce real results.  The gain would be for the better of our society, where people benefit… not an agenda.  Today, everybody is talking about gun control… I mean “Gun Safety” where tougher laws will curb gun violence.  The bigger issue is why people want to kill each other.  There will always be a mentally ill individual that goes on a shooting spree and it will scare the hell out of us.  But, there are thousands of killings that happen every year that are gang related or involve domestic violence.  Why do we kill each other?  If we can answer that question, we will quell the killing and be a safer community.  Moral decay and poverty would be my guess.  I believe in our constitution.  It is a brilliant document.  I support the Second Amendment and the rights it gives to the people for gun ownership.  Background checks?  By all means.  A waiting period? Ok, I guess.  A ten round magazine?  That is plenty for self-defense.  This is workable.  Let’s invest money in mental health care and get to the bottom of why our society kills it’s own.  If people want to kill people… many people, it is easy and does not take guns.  Don’t forget that Timothy McVie used fertilizer and diesel fuel, and the 911 terrorists commandeered the planes with box cutters.  Treat the mentally ill and rebuild the moral conscious of America.  Once a day, pray for our future, even if it is at a stoplight.  We will not get better on our own.

Right or Dead Right?

The chalk caves were hidden below the Friant Dam.  A short walk from the paved road led to the entrance of a series of bored out shafts from past chalk mining.  All over the walls, were names and initials carved into the soft chalk.  The floor was covered with a fine powder that makes me cough just thinking about it.  As teenagers, we would go there to hang out.  At the end of the center shaft, was a fire pit and some bench seats made of chalk slabs.  Interestingly, we never ran into other people there, but by the amount of chalk graffiti, there had been hundreds of previous guests.  We could be loud, party or whatever, and nobody would know.  The western side of the caves had large cracks in the ceiling and we avoided that area.  How sensible for a bunch of senseless teenagers!  

Teenagers love to be by themselves and away from adults.  We took great efforts to have our space, whether it was by backpacking or camping, or even just fishing at Hensley Lake in the dead of a foggy winter.  I notice how my son wants to hang out with his friends and just be with people his own age.  His generation.  It is normal, I guess.  That’s great as long as they are safe.  We ran into one of his friends who told us how four of them were in a SUV after having dinner at around 6:00pm in a busy shopping center.  While the four of them were talking in the back of the Suburban (“trunking” they call it) two men pulled up and tried to break into the car, not seeing the four because of the tinted windows.  They pressed the panic button on the key chain and exited the car as the two men, described as a father and son, fled while cursing at them in a language other than English.  I asked my son why he didn’t tell us about this, and he said it was because he figured we would be upset.  Well, I have two thoughts about this.  My first thought is the danger.  People don’t fist fight anymore.  They gun fight.  Approaching someone committing a crime is risky.  You don’t know who or what you are dealing with.  Most criminals are either on dope, in a gang or simply desperate.  All three are dangerous.  My second thought is how it is in a man’s psychology to want to protect his wife, girlfriend or child.  The two young men did what they felt was RIGHT by running the thieves off that early evening.  To clarify, this happened two blocks from our home, while it was still light outside. 

Unfortunately, the consequences of doing what is RIGHT is that sometimes you become DEAD RIGHT. 

I'll take my chances... 

Now, I have another thing to worry about as my children grow up and face a sometimes, hostile world.  The danger we faced as teenagers, was the ceiling of the old chalk caves coming down on top of us, so I guess it is all, relative.  Young people deserve the opportunity to be together and to be safe.  I don’t know where that is today, besides the homes we create for them. 

The chalk caves are no more.  The landowner collapsed them because of the liability and now thirty years later, there is no sign that they ever existed.  Someday, a group of archeologists will uncover the walls of names and initials carved into the chalk and make a discovery of a historical place where kids would come to be kids, a place where there were no adults and no parents.  It was a place where kids could be themselves and celebrate being a part of their generation. Today however, if archeologists should go there to dig, I would suggest they bring a gun.

The Scent of Prosperity

There is somebody in the neighborhood who barbeques steak at least three times a week.  I can smell the wonderful scent as I bring in my bag of groceries that include whatever is on sale.  I need a new hamburger recipe.  While we don’t starve, I am reminded of how little our money will buy each time I go to the market.  The economy seems to be turning the wheels of prosperity backwards.  My grandfather had to feed eight children and did so with a freezer full of venison.  My grandmother had a garden and canned for future meals.  Food and money were hard to come by shortly after the Great Depression.  I used to love a Rib Eye steak, cooked medium, with horseradish.  I used to love to buy them for $4.99 per pound too.  Steak is becoming a dish of the upper class.  Fish?  Forget about it… too high.  How about the McDonald’s McDouble burger? It’s a buck!  If only it came with a coupon for a discounted angioplasty!  Sometimes I stand at the end of my driveway a wonder who it is at the helm of that magnificent barbeque.  What brought them to this pinnacle of culinary delight?  My wife and I used to drive around the mansions of the Van Ness Extension area and wonder what these people must do for a living to afford such grand appointments.  It is probably the same occupation as the Master of the Rib Eye upwind from my home.  This just in! Costco has Rib Eyes on sale for $14.99 per pound… while hamburger is $2.89 per pound.  The classes are separating.

Looking Up

What ever happened to space? When I was a child, the first person stepped foot on the moon. It was incredible to see the pictures from so far away. I remember, thinking “it won’t be long before we can all experience space travel.” What happened? Back in 1969, my mom took me to Manchester Center to see a guy fly around with a jet pack. I would love to do that. I am not afraid of heights really, though I am afraid of falling. This somehow makes sense to me. Perhaps there is nothing worthwhile on the moon. If there was something to harvest, we would be mining it to exhaustion. Obviously, there is no financial gain from going there. Who owns the moon? Does America? Are they giving away land grants? Also, what in the hell have they been doing in that space station for all these years? When there is a full moon, I look up. Normally, I never look up at the sky at night. Well that is not entirely true. When that damn sheriff helicopter goes over I look up and curse. I was told the cameras in those helicopters, can read the cover of a magazine sitting on the front seat of your new convertible. That’s fine, but I don’t own a convertible! It is interesting how the helicopters love to fly over low in the summer time, just in time for bathing suits. You think I’m lying? I don’t like them going over the house for one good reason. They might lose power and crash. Maybe I’m paranoid... but it could happen! Where can we hide today? There isn’t even privacy in our own backyards. There are cameras on us everywhere. There are cameras in the stores, the banks, even the neighbors are watching the neighborhood on the internet from their hidden cameras. I wonder if there are cameras on the moon...

I Woke Up Old

It seemed like it happened overnight. Unsuspectingly, I looked in the mirror and saw a different image. An old man stared back at me with disbelief. Too many years had passed avoiding pictures and reflections. Hairlines and waistlines can keep a man from examining the truth. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was not the same. Something had changed without my permission. Like a thief in the night, my youth and even my young adulthood had been taken. That morning, I woke up old.

Somewhere, a decade had been lost. Work had consumed much of my time with endless hours on roads, leading me to and from clients. Family was at home growing up without me. Somehow, a marriage survived. Maybe. Nothing keeps from changing. Looking back on lost opportunities will leave you in ruin of the loss. Today is different and so am I. It takes effort to stay focused on the future when the end is closer than the beginning. The future becomes your children’s, like most everything else when you are a parent. I don’t know where we will be in ten or twenty years. I hope I am here to see my children get married and have kids of their own. Will they make the same mistakes I have? Or, will they recognize the struggle?

Celebrities “re-invent” their image to keep a fresh presence with their audience. Consumers of media grow tired quickly and want to be the first to discover the next new fad. Most of us never change with the times. When you are in your thirties, you can fake your way through life, thinking you are still as young and vibrant you were in college. By the time you are forty, your mind is still in the twenties, but you find your body and appearance is falling behind. Sure, men can color their hair, but at some point, it looks ridiculous. By fifty, youth is gone. You can’t even pretend. Oddly, your mind is young, but the perception of yourself is one of a minority, as you find there are more people younger then yourself. Younger individuals seek to avoid interaction with people the age of their parents. Many cannot relate. It shows. It is disappointing when in your mind you are still twenty. It makes me want to drive to the mountains, walk to a rock cliff and just sit. As my feet dangle over the edge, I could feel the thermal breezes rise from the face of the cliff and fill my lungs with breath of a life worth living. I would stay there until dark and watch as the city lights emerge through the haze. In this mountain solitude, I would find my strength and reaffirm my purpose.

I am sure I am not alone. We all get a little older everyday. Tomorrow, I may wake up and find I’m seventy. I will wonder what happened to the last twenty years. I may need to find that rocky perch and let my feet dangle over the edge and cherish the memories of a good life. I will stay until dark. The city lights will be greater than ever. Each light representing a moment in time when things seemed a little simpler. That day will come before I know it.

The Hunt

Tossing and turning, I looked at the clock next to my bed. It was four o’clock in the morning. In a few minutes, my dad would be coming in to wake me up. It was a cold Saturday in October, and it was deer season. Anticipating deer hunting with my father kept me from a restful sleep. This time, it would only be my dad and me. Usually we would go with my grandfather and I would be green with nausea from my grandfather’s cigarettes and the hairpin curves of the Tollhouse grade. “Today is going to be great!” I thought, as I waited for my dad’s entrance. Everything had been laid out the night before. All I needed to do was to wash my face, brush my teeth and throw on my clothes. We had to hurry if we were to be in the forest before sunrise. Hearing my dad in the kitchen, I got up by myself and got ready. My dad was filling the thermos full of hot coffee. This would be handy when we were on the hunt. I always looked forward to hunting with my dad. Only in the last couple of seasons, had he let me come along. I was ten now, so I figured he thought I was becoming a young man and could hunt with the men. How I wished that this would be the day that we bagged a deer. I had never been with my dad when he shot a deer. Never had I given much thought about actually killing an animal. I could handle it. I was becoming a man. My dad would even let me have some of the coffee, unbeknown to my mom.

Quietly, we locked the front door and loaded the 1950 Willys Jeep. We buckled up, and headed for the Sierras. The radio didn’t work and it was cold and drafty inside the cab of the jeep. The whining noise of the transmission made it hard to hear each other at faster speeds. It was ok. We would have plenty of time to talk while we road hunted the miles of abandoned logging roads.

As we planned, were right on time, and with time to spare. We had made it a tradition, the season before, to stop by Angelo’s Bakery in Shaver Lake, to get a crunchy (cinnamon roll like pastry) and a bag of cinnamon bears. These were a chewy red candy in the shape of a bear. They were my favorite and my dad knew it. Any nausea I felt from the rest of the drive, quickly slipped away after few of those tasty bears.

The sky was turning purple, and the outline of the pines took a greater contrast. My dad put the clip that held the bullets halfway into his rifle and laid it across the two of us. If we saw a legal buck, he could put a round in the chamber and be ready to fire in a couple of seconds. While some hunters would drive with a loaded gun, my dad was more cautious. The lighter the morning became, the more the forest revealed its self. We could now see into the shadows and through the trees. An early morning frost settled on the meadows and all was still. Nothing stirred. Not even a chipmunk.

Something wasn’t right. Usually, we would have seen a few doe and fawns, but the morning showed us nothing. Could the deer have moved to a lower elevation because of an upcoming storm? Could they have a sixth sense that enabled them to evacuate early? We talked about these theories while sharing a cup of coffee from the thermos’ lid. My dad suggested we try a new mountain and encouraged me to not give up hope. I had over a half bag a cinnamon bears left, so all was good.

Patterson Mountain was large and dark. The forest on this mountain could swallow up a hunter. Several hunters in the past had become lost in this terrain and some were never found. This mountain was also known for big deer and lots of them. As we drove, I found myself thinking about my uncles telling stories on the holidays of their deer hunting successes on this very mountain. The sudden braking of the jeep, woke me from the spell I was under. The gun was slowly lifted from our laps and my dad studied a group of deer near a thicket of trees. At first I didn’t see them. Slowly, my vision made out the outlines of the animals and they came into focus. I was taught to look for the horizontal lines of the animals’ bodies. This trick made them stand out against their camouflage. “Are there any bucks?” I whispered while praying there was one. “I can’t tell. One has horns, but I can’t see a fork,” my dad whispered back. A buck had to have a forked horn to be legal. My heart began to pound with a nervous excitement. I glassed the deer with my Sears and Roebuck binoculars I was given the Christmas before. I couldn’t see any horns on any of the five deer. The buck my dad was watching through his scope was behind the others and out of my view. Disappointed for the both of us, my dad’s gun was lowered and was placed back on our laps. He looked over at me and I was grinning from ear to ear. Even though he couldn’t shoot, we were both excited at the mere possibility of actually bagging some game. I imagined how at Christmas, we could tell our story about Patterson Mountain, and the respect we would receive from grandfather and uncles.

We stopped for lunch on a sunny area of a large rock outcropping. We sat near the cliff and watched below for any movement amongst the low growing manzanita. This was such a great day to be with my dad. We were sharing a family tradition that we could talk about for the rest of our lives. We made white bread and salami sandwiches (another thing we hid from mom) and drank water from my dad’s military canteen. The warmth of the sun felt good on our faces as we sat on the cold slabs of granite. We always made sure to never leave any garbage behind. When all was put away, we headed back to the jeep to road hunt for the rest of the afternoon.

Midday was not the best time to spot deer. My grandfather always said that the deer would bed down in the middle of the day and come back out in the late afternoon. It was only 1:00 p.m. and we had a few hour before we would expect to see any deer. To fill the time, we explored logging roads that were new to my dad. He had only hunted this mountain a few times with my grandfather. Without having to be quiet, we talked about school and my friends and about me going to the hunter’s safety course when I turned twelve. We had almost forgotten about the crunchy we bought at Angelo’s. I reached to the back seat and brought it to the front. It was delicious.

The deeper we drove, the more ominous the mountain seemed. Every once in a while, we would pass another hunter in a jeep, who would wave to my father and he would return the gesture. After about an hour, we turned onto a road that led to a campsite. In the center of the camp was a pickup and camper completely burned. We stopped and walked up to the burned wreckage. The smell of freshly burned plastic and wood still permeated the air. “This just recently burned,” said my dad in a somber tone. “Let’s go,” he said and we walked back to the jeep. “How do you think this happened?” I asked. “I don’t know,” my dad said, rather perplexed. We drove a couple of miles and ran across a forest ranger. My dad asked him if he knew anything about the burned camper. The ranger looked down to the ground and then straight at my father. He told him that a nine-year old boy had been hunting with his grandfather. While the grandfather was at the campfire, an explosion occurred inside the camper from the butane tank and the little boy was trapped in the fire and burned to death. At that moment, I pictured the latex gloves I had stepped over on the walk back to the jeep and realized they had been worn to remove the body. I’m not sure if the Ranger knew I was in the jeep with my father because I sat perfectly still. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even speak. My dad patted my knee and neither of us spoke.

To break the silence, my dad asked me if I wanted another cinnamon bear. I shook my head, no. We drove again with only the sound of the low gears of the transmission. Our hunting trip had ended.

As we reached the halfway point on our way off the mountain, we saw a familiar face, driving in a jeep and coming towards us. Both jeeps slowed and stopped along side one and other. It was one of my uncles, and he was smiling like he had just won a jackpot. He boasted about finding this burned out camper and taking some half burned guns from inside the burned shell. He was so excited about replacing the wooden stocks and getting a couple of guns for free. I couldn’t look at him. My heart began to pound again, but now with total rage. How could this man do such a thing? What about the poor burned boy and the helpless grandfather, who watched as the camper went up in flames? What about the mom and the dad and his brothers and sisters? What about the boy’s friends and his teacher and all the people who loved him? He was only nine years old. He was a young boy like me. Tears started running down my face. I was trembling and could not help it. “Is he ok? my uncle asked my dad. “He’ll be alright,” my dad told him, though never telling him about what the ranger had told us. I was so ashamed to be that man’s nephew. All I wanted to do was to go home. No longer did I want to kill a deer or anything else. I just wanted to go home. Without asking, my father drove us off the mountain. As I stared at the floorboard of the old jeep, I felt my head start to nod as the events day finally consumed me. The last thing I remember before falling asleep, was my dad saying, ”I love you, Son.”

Many years have passed since that cold October Saturday. My father and I didn’t talk about that day very much, and over the years, it became a distant memory. Sometimes however, when the skies are clear, I can look to the east and see the granite faces of the Patterson Mountain’s western slope. If I stop to look long enough, I can find myself again on that mountain, remembering myself as a ten year old boy who went hunting with his dad as a child, and came home that day, a little closer to becoming a man.