The New Me

 I have enough of a following, or at least several thousand readers of this blog on Google to publish a change of new blogs available at http://dalecpeterson.com.  Just scroll to “Blogs” or click the “Blog” button at the top of the entry page.

I may occasionally continue to post here on Google with some of my more “sensitive” topics, but by and large this new address is where most of my writing will continue.

Many of my friends are Sport Hunters.

 Many of my friends are Sport Hunters.

What I hear a lot is, “I was raised around guns and hunting.”

And, “In my family, we all hunt.”

I’m am only one generation off the farm.  My grandfather was a farmer. My father was Military Career.  I was raised around guns so fucking big they could take out tanks.  My Grandfather’s “deer rifle” with a “deer slug” loaded, could blow a hole you could bowl through.  When I was about six, I was in an Armed Forces Day Parade.  There is a photo of me (little boy) sitting on top of some kind of bomb like two car lengths long on a flatbed trailer.  My older brother was too scared to do it.  Like 30 feet off the ground.

Being from Utah and Idaho, I know “hunting is in my gene pool”.  

I don’t sport hunt.  I don’t own a gun.  Included in the “real hunting gene”, from down on the farm, guns and hunting are not for “sport”.  Pistols and sidearms are for the cops and robbers.  Animals were shot for one of two reasons; they were caught killing livestock, or you were gonna eat them. 

There was no “sport” involved and ammunition was expensive. Hunting tended to take place in the fall when crops also needed to be harvested.  So if you were gonna take time away from the farm, there was a real good reason.  Basketball was a “sport”.  Shooting animals was “work” to put food on the table. 

Now some 60 years since then there are two big differences to consider. There are over twice as many people running around (hunting?) and less than half as many animals. And! The available “woods and forests” where hunting is permitted or on Government Land is @ about less than 1/10 of what it was. 

The Gallatin River was once a prime trout fishing river.  Now because of agribusiness and the run-off of pesticides, you can't eat anything you might catch, due to mercury poisoning. And because of fracking and other industrial uses, the cattle raised up there are cordoned off so close to the river, you can’t even drink the water due to giardia from all the cow shit. 

What does that say about eating venison shot within yards of where people are living or out in the woods where who knows what industry may be doing.  I was hiking with a buddy in the mountains in Colorado years and years ago.  Back maybe ten miles from the nearest road we came across a “Nuclear Waste Disposal Site” sign!,!.?

I suppose putting a bullet into some wildlife is a “sport”, but the real “sport” is now that you’ve killed it, what are you gonna do with it?  Go ahead! Gut it, burn it and eat it.  The reward seems like you’ll either get the screamin’ shits or pancreatic cancer. 

Personally I’d rather play basketball.

And, what did that living breathing creature ever do to you, that you feel it is “your right” to kill it.  

I won’t get into the “Amendment” business right here.  But, it’s an “amendment”, it’s NOT a law.  There is a difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amendment

Barney BoBo, Night Pilgrim

Barney BoBo, Night Pilgrim

Pitch black. No moon. Overcast, hot and humid all day and the night chill has settled cloud fog on the ground.  My little pen light, the only flashlight I could find in a big hurry, is not much good. In the piney woods next to our house, sharp broken pine limbs stick out like some kind of midevil weaponry . The ground is all pine needles masking almost all sound.

“Awww-rr-oooooo!”

Kathy is fast asleep. Our daughter has her headphones on watching tv. I have been working with power tools and my ear protectors (things) on. 

“Awww-rr-oooooo!”

“Whah?”  What’s that dog doing outside?  It’s 11 at night. How’d he get out?

“Awww-rr-oooooo!”

Barney (BoBo) is a beagle. He was nine years old when we adopted him. Who knows about his past?  Shrouded in animal adoption mystery. Very sweet, shy, loves love and well … a dog. A beagle dog. Never barks, he howls.  Most hunting (sporting) dogs don’t bark. They corner prey and howl.  A baying sound that cuts right through the dark and fog, but unusefull for echolocation.

I have very bad knees. Old arthritic untrustworthy knees.  If I step in a hole or trip on a downed tree, both of us (old Barney and old me) are screwed. Years in the Boy Scouts and other wilderness adventures over a truckload of years, has taught me, “You can’t trust sound in heavy fog.”  I once got caught in a dense fog kayaking on Lake Erie.  I had a deck compass; my paddling partner did not. I knew if we just headed south we had to run into the shoreline. Lake Erie’s is huge and treacherous for weather changes. Sixty miles wide, well over a hundred long (I ferget).

My buddy keeps saying! “I can hear the traffic over there.  Yup, over that way “ indicating we should go to what my deck compass is indicating is west. Problem, the shoreline runs like a chalk line almost to Toledo from where we put in.  I insist we follow the compass; me and him arguing for a good hour.  I stick to my guns (compass) and we run directly up on the concrete public boat launch.  “Crutch!”  Never saw land before we ran into it. 

“BArNey!  Barney BoBo!!!  BoBo!BoBoc’mhere!”

“Ahroo!” Means, “I gotta rabbit cornered.” “Ahroo, arooo”. 

“Awww-rr-ooooo!” Is I’m so lost. C’mon get me.  I’m scared, where are you?  I know my dog. I know his howling vocabulary. That is my BoBo. 

All I get from my little pen light is a feeble glow-back off the ground fog as I trip over a rotting log and get a good swiping scratch on my arm.  My night vision is pretty good, but my overall vision is like 20/60.  I am aware of a our five feet in front of me and I can either focus on the ground or try to avoid the warrior trees. The blackness beyond my bubble of fuzzy grayness is total. 

Then of course the mosquitoes find me. Stumble on a log, scratched by a broken pine limb, swat a mosquito, step in a hole and snap my knee backwards.  Fun in the dark.  And my now I’m deep onto someone else’s property and out here in southern  virginia everybody has a gun (actually several guns, plus a mortar launcher,  cannon, air to ground missiles).  The local law says you can “shoot first and identify the trespasser later.”

I have just taken my evening old man’s meds and I have about 20 minutes before double vision snooze sets in. And I spot the shine off a small set of animal eyes. I know it’s Barney because I also know his eyes in the dark; I just know.  A feral animal would run away for one thing. But when I call his name, he knows it’s me and the little shiny sparks move towards me. He knows he’s in trouble, but he also can’t resist when he hears my voice. 

I take off my belt to make a leash and we snaggle our way back towards the distant lights still on in our kitchen.

Prequel to Near-Death

 Prequel to Near-Death

This is the prequel to previous blog.

The question came up from one reader, “How did you get stuck out there in the first place?”

Excellent question.

Simple answer; “overconfidence”.  

Overconfidence and the lack of ego inventory.  Every time, or often enough, I allow myself to think, “I’m all that and a meatball sandwich” I get burned.  

It had been a couple of weeks on dry land and I was feeling the pull of the Chesapeake Bay.  I gotta be out on the water!  I need that feeling of floating, paddling across a river.  Looking down from a bridge at a river is so much different than being on the water and looking up at that same bridge.  Thinking, “Anybody could get out on the bridge and look down at the water.  But, me, I am down here on the water looking for an adventure.”

I know I can paddle in big waves, in the rain, even while it is snowing.  I’ve done it.  I’ve crossed the Rappahannock (close to three miles) hundreds of times.  Across and back against three footers and a 15 mph headwind.  Wait!  I was only 60 years old when I was doing that!!?  I’ve been playing it safe for nearly 15 years.  

What?  What happened?  Where did it go?  What happened to that “I can push and/or pull through anything?”  I forgot to do the ego inventory.  I used to run charity races and occasionally broke the top five in my age category.  Now I have to hold on to the bannister to get up and down stairs.  I refuse to climb ladders cause in the back of head I know, “That’s a real bad idea for you.”

I have set out for a salt marsh I know really well.  I know every crook and turn.  Where every downed tree lay.  I know where the channels are and where what is passable at low tide.  I know which channels are high tide only.  I know from the surface ripples where the shallows are.  It turns out that that particular Monday was a rescheduled Labor Day holiday.  Slipped right past my thinking.

When I get to that public put-in, the parking lot is full to overflowing.  Dozens of pickups with massive long boat trailers hooked up.  Cars packed into every slot and alongside the access road for nearly a mile.  “Well, this isn’t going to work.”  I’ve brought my long boat, which was a mistake to begin with.  Why?  I dunno, I just did.  I was heading into the marsh mazes, why didn’t I bring my shorter lightweight boat?  Dunno, just didn’t.

So, I’m up two dumb moves already.  Wrong place.  Wrong boat.  “I know.  I’ll go to the Pumunkey put-in.  Good maze channels there and if you don’t know where it is, you’ll never find it.  The several times I made that longer trip, I was the only car in the parking area all day.

The idea of checking the “Tide Tables” did not cross my mind.  Third dumb move.  Always know the tide before setting out into the tide marshes.  

Ego; “I can take on any tide.”  Truth; “Not on the Chesapeake.”  The tides on the Chesapeake Watershed are big tides.  Two to five feet on the vertical.  Literally.  Entire channels just disappear beneath you on the out tide.  It is possible to not know it is happening, while it is happening.  Or, the channel you came in on is not there when you turn around.  Ego inventory.  “Do your fucking homework!”

What I did was hero my way down a couple miles I thought I knew, to what appeared to be a good dry stand of trees.  To like have lunch, take a break before making the return trip.  I got to the trees.  Ate a bit, drank a bunch of water.  When I got back to my long boat, there wasn’t enough depth to turn the boat around.  It’s 18 feet of thick plastic.  Unloaded it weighs nearly 80 lbs.  I’ve got at least 20 lbs of gear in it. Sharp point bow and narrow rudderless stern. The tall grass will NOT allow this behemoth to turn, at least not while my 170 lbs is inside it.

Fourth mistake; “get out of the boat and lift it to make the turn.”  Uh, no.  Rule 1 in the marsh mazes; “Never get out of the fucking boat!”  Like x-country skiing in New Hampshire; stay on the trail and never take off your skis.  You can find yourself up to your armpits in freezing snow and no way to get your skis back on.  

Break some rules and you’re screwed.

So naturally I got out of the boat, sank up to my armpits with my feet to my knees in sucking muck.  Two steps and my water shoes are gone forever.  It’s funny that I do not recall any sense of panic while this is happening.  I have thirty years of paddling experience in all kinds of tricky situations.  “I know what I’m doing.”  Nope.  Just one dumb move after the other.  

Ego inventory; “Maybe this is a new one.  ?  “The main thing is to find a channel that will float the damn boat.  Accept the fact that you are an old dude.  You are not going to muscle your way out of this one.  Time to turn on the humble part of the brain, admit that you fucked up and think.

Wrong place.  Fundamentally wrong boat.  Lack of forethought and homework.  There was a poster on the wall of many of the many classrooms in which I taught for over thirty years.

“Do the best you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”

So, I did that.

A Near-Death Experience

Yesterday I had what is called a near death experience.

I was kayaking in the tidal salt marches of the Pamunkey river.  The narrow channels wind all around like a nest of snakes.  Sitting in a kayak at water level, with the salt grass growing six to eight feet above my head, long distance viewing is impossible. 

It is simply not possible to see where you are in relation the deeper channels.  It is the most complex maze nature can devise.  And, it changes completely according to the tide.  At low tide the passible channels are easy to recognize and follow.  At high tide there a thousand of what appear to be open channels everywhere.  And, it is very easy to misread the tidal channel flow because the undulating underlay topography is completely hidden by the coffee colored water.

The underwater visibility is less than two or three inches.  From the level of the kayaker’s head, the actual depth of the water is completely hidden.  Under the marshes there is not sand, but layers upon layer of rotting grass and clay mush.  Going down several feet there is only muck without a solid surface of any kind.

And when disturbed it smells like a rotting sewer.  Just a thickness of mush of rotting vegetation and various trapped crab and fish bodies.

At low tide it is possible to walk on salt marshes if you employ a kind of outward swinging duck gait.  Folding over the grass with an outward swing of your feet, creating a kind of a snowshoe support with each foot.  However, at high tide there is about two feet of water above this mucky surface and this technique does not work, at all, because the muck is a saturated goo. The grass stems just squish further into the muck below.

Each foot placing sinks down into the muck up to near the knee, putting the upright body chest high, or more, into the marsh.  The muck pulls at your feet and legs, sucking off any shoes or boots, never to be found again.  Forward progress in an upright position is fruitless; actually impossible.  You are trapped like a mastodon in a tar pit.

The only solution is to lay flat and sort of swim.  And to do is reach arm’s length forward grabbing onto rough sandpaper-like stalks of the saw grass.  Pulling forward like a tug-o-war rope.  Kicking your feet to increase your forward momentum is also fruitless as the grass behind prevents any push you might initiate.

With your vision now right at the water level with six to eight feet of grass reed directly in front is even more compromised.  Staying in the kayak is no good, since you can’t swing the paddle with thick grass all around.  Attempting to paddle is an exercise in stupid pointlessness.

All that can be seen is the sky and clouds threatening chaos above and impenetrable wall of stalks of razor blades surrounding this victim of misjudgment.  Confusion. “What the fuck am I doing Here.”

I’m 74 years old, I have advanced osteoarthritis, my joints are turning to play-dough.  I shouldn’t be here in this ridiculous place.  I could die from exposure.  I think I’ve sweated at least several quarts more than I have been able to drink.  But I’m covered head to toe with brown muck.  Bleeding from a thousand razor cuts on my legs and arms.  Pushing my boat ahead of me.  It’s a plow.  This is a long boat, an open water kayak.  18 feet of bulletproof plastic.  Heavy as wet mattress.

I have left one side of the marsh.  Tall wetland cedars and pines.  A slice of more trees is dimly visible ahead of me.  Tickling in the dark back of by brain says, “That tiny slice of trees ahead is the other side of the main channel (the Pamunkey River).”  This boat is so long and heavy it cannot turn in this saw grass.  If I just keep pushing it, it has to come across the river.  There is no other way, no other thing I can do.  I can’t pull it, since I can’t stand upright in this swamp and even if I tried to do that I could wander around in circles and never get out.

I have to trust the basic physics of the situation.  Being pushed, the boat can’t turn, it has to go straight.  I can’t stand up, so I have to stay belly flat on the water and grass.  Grab a handful of the grass with one hand and push the boat forward with the other.  The grass cuts across my face, pulls my hat off leaving it disappeared in the muck.  My shirt fills with muddy soup and creates a backward drag, but I can’t take it off and have my belly, shoulders and back lacerated even more.

It goes on forever like this.  Reach down for the grass roots, pull, push, reach further ahead, roots, pull, push.  I must be bleeding from every square inch of skin that is exposed; including my bald spot.   Am I wiping mud from my eyes or blood.  A mixture of both I think.

I’ve done some dumb things in life.  Put myself in really tight spots before.  When I wasn’t a worn-out old man, alone.  Now probably only yards from release and safety I am exhausted without the reserves of youth, without the presence of mind of a tough athlete.

And I was a very tough athlete.  During one month in Arizona, I did two 300 mile bicycle marathons.  In the second I did it in 23 hours and 50 minutes.  Every fiber of my 32 year old body hurt.  I had lost all feeling in my right hand and shoulder.  My feet were going around in circles on the pedals, out of habit, just mindless habit.  Thinking, “That’s what we do on a bicycle.  We’re feet attached to legs and we go round ‘n round.  In my mind is one thought, “Don’t fall over.”

This day, today, I am an old fart waiting to become a fossil record in a saltwater river marsh.

An anthropologist’s dream.  Best of all I know it.  Turning over and looking up at the sky, straining to remember that, at this moment I am still alive.  And again, out of habit, I kind of do want to remain that way.  What is driving me?  Embarrassment.  Shame.  The embarrassment and shame of being so stupid.  Actually, giving up and possible dying is less a reason, than being shown for the idiot that died in a swamp, with a boat in his hands, less than a hundred yards from safety.

I cannot allow that to be my epitaph.

Seems like weeks later I push out of the grass and slip into a deep-water channel   About five feet wide and maybe five feet deep.  I can’t tell if it connects with a larger channel or not.  But it is deep enough to float the boat and wide enough to paddle.  As I am completely drained now, I have to actually find a way to get inside the cockpit.  A big water kayak generally has a small opening for the paddler.  Kayaks can be very tippy and flip over easily without good kayaking skills.  How am I going to get my arthritic exhausted legs up over the side and in through this squeaky tight little hole?

Can’t stand in the muck.  I’m waist deep in suck mud, just my shoulders and head above the water surface.  The paddle pry entry, where you put one blade across the cockpit and slither up the paddle handle braced against the water surface, well, that won’t work.  Because I, at that moment, discovered I had also lost my paddle somewhere back in the swamp.  Along with my wet shoes, my $400 GoPro camera, hat and pride.  

The only solution was to invert the boat in the deep water and do an Eskimo Roll.  (I know the word Eskimo is no longer polite, but that is what this maneuver has been called for decades and decades)  Once the boat is upside down, you push your body up into the cockpit, extend the paddle as far out as you reach and pull down on the outside extended paddle blade.  As hard as you can, then swivel your hips in a hard-counter motion.  This can also be done with just your hands spread like little flippers.

I am too old, brittle and uncoordinated to pull this off.  I know it.  I knew it before I tried it on this day.  It was shame, embarrassment and the habit of staying alive that somehow brought together a miracle and it worked.  Now I had a kayak full of water and mud.  Karma (I guess) had secured, saved my kayak pump from being lost.  While I thanked the God Ganesha for saving the pump, my arms were so tired pumping out fifty gallons of water took somewhere between thirty minutes and a year and a half.  Somewhere in that time slot.

It was after I got the boat fairly pumped out that I realized my habit of always strapping a spare paddle to the read deck had been a really good idea!  Also, my habit of stashing a spare water bottle behind the seat, along with a sealed baggy of raisins, almonds and rice crackers, paid off.  So, I reduced my sense of shame by patting myself on the back for always following a routine checklist.

I have strapped that extra paddle on my rear deck for over thirty years of paddling and never once needed it.  I have weeks after a paddle found that food packet molding away behind the seat; completely forgotten.  Sometimes two or three food packets.  Uneaten and unopened.  But the habit of always stuffing a new each time I went out, saved my bacon (as it were) that day.  And as to bacon, I’ve been vegan for over fifty years, so bacon is not truthfully a thing.  I downed the spare water in one chug-a-lug.

While I was having my near-death adventure in the swamp, the wind had picked up and the tide was going out.  So … when I did find my way back to the main river, I had a mile and half into two-foot rolling waves and a headwind.  This is when I put into play my one and only survival tool that had served me for years beyond telling.  That is, “Put your head down and keep paddling.  Each paddle stroke, a perfect stroke. Focus on the stroke.  Perfect motion makes the boat go forward.  Going forward gets you where you need to go.”

“Don’t look up and get discouraged by the distance yet to go.  Focus only on moving towards that goal.  No thinking, just paddling.”  Arms and shoulders are not allowed to be tired and sore.

Draw all your strength from your core, tight abdomen; crunch the stomach gut muscles. Every stroke moves you forward another yard.  Yard after yard.  Suddenly the bow crunches up against gravel at the put-in; at the starting dock.

It’s over.  Not shamed, not embarrassed, no one else saw this fiasco.  Alive for another day, another adventure (maybe).  Only when you get old, do you realize that often the most challenging test you have put up against yourself, you only survived because your mind and body were young.  Not at all because you were anything special, you just had the reserves afforded to the young.  When all that is gone, the problem is that it is not forgotten and when you’re old and you try to fall back on that youthful reserve, it just isn’t there.

Now you have to think your way out of stupid.  That’s the real lesson.

The Saddest words

The Saddest Words

The saddest words ever to be spoken, are

“If only we had known.”

Is it a question?

“If only we had known.”

Is it an answer?

“If only we had known.”

Children are put into cages.

            And they remain traumatized their entire lives.

“If only we had known.”

We don’t care enough to change

            And fathers are shot in the back

            And families are destroyed because sons are shot

            Daughters are raped. And unheard

“If only we had known.”

Those sensitive enough, and yet strong enough

            To say, “Enough, enough, enough!”

            Are ridiculed and ignored and medicated

“If only we had known.”

The ones sent to “Serve and Protect” do so

            Only for some

            And buildings burn

“If only we had known.”

And when the very ground beneath our feet becomes quicksand

                        Everywhere we walk

            And the air in our lungs poisons our brains

            And the food in our stomachs straggles our hearts 

“If only we had known.”

You cannot regain the bullet once the trigger is pulled

            It will hit something

                        Or someone

“If only we had known.”

The saddest words ever to be spoken, are

“If only we had known.”

D. Peterson © 2020

How To Paint Water

 How To Paint Water

You can’t do it.  The paint will not stick to the water no matter how much you may try.  You can try to use paint on some other surface, like canvas, to look like water. Of course, that is what I mean.  I remember my confusion with many things the teachers, the adults, would say when I was a child.  Such as, “Everyone, draw a tree.”  Nonsense.  

“You can’t draw a tree,” I would think.  “I can try to draw a picture of a tree.”

And quite naturally I would draw a lollipop, a green lollipop, like every other kid in the class.  Which seemed like proof to me that nobody could draw a tree.  I wasn’t a grammar fanatic, or anything. In fact, even now I use a kind of shotgun approach to grammar.

If I can read it out loud and it sounds right, then it is grammatically correct.  I mean, gotta be, right?  When you read out loud to other people, all the stupid pops up immediately.  Thinking, “Huh?  That can’t be right.”  

My mother said, a lot, “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.”  What!!!  “Cut off my nose!!! “, that’s what a child hears.  And, “What does my face have against my nose.  My nose is on my face. (Isn’t it?). Years later I learned how to use a dictionary and looked up “spite”.  Oh, I get it now.  It’s like, “Shooting yourself in the foot.”  

Which to my mind at the time meant, “Ah crap, then I would need new shoes.”  Shoe buying in my day was a totally unfun experience for a child.  They always had to to be fitted by a shoe salesman.  A man.  Wearing a stiff shirt and what I thought were the ugliest shoes in the store.  He always seemed to have dandruff too.  

Everything about these guys just shouted, “I actually know nothing about shoes and children are alien beings to me.”  They would clamp your foot onto this really cold metal device and move a thingy up to the outcropping just behind your big toe.  He would read off a number. And my mother would add a half for room to grow.  Which meant I would be flopping down the school hall like a short clown for six months.  Trying not to trip on the extra room to grow.  

And you got the dandruffy saleman’s services thrown in free.

I was fifteen before I put a stop to that.  I told her, “I’m gonna get my new shoes myself!” We almost got a “mother/son divorce” over that.  I was gonna run away from home before I went to the Jr. Prom in floppy shoes.  

It was also a time when there was a communist behind every tree (whether you had drawn it or otherwise).  Which meant being able to run fast in floppy shoes wasn’t gonna work.  “Moms”, what are ya gonna do?

Guns  were also serious business then and shooting was mostly in movies and involved with, like, wars. In my family wasting a bullet on your own foot seemed stupid because you can’t eat your foot.  Ah, the days of yore … 

Today I don’t leave the house without my cell phone.

“The what?”