Sister Diane sent me a birthday card recently, and enclosed an obituary notice from a local paper for a man named Bob Brustad. There was quite a bit of stuff in that short piece for me. First of all the man had been my best friend during high school and for several years afterward. When I married and moved away we lost touch, and since neither of us was very good about keeping the cards and letters going, soon I had no idea where he was or what he was doing. A couple of years ago I tried to locate him using the internet and failed.
The notice said that he had died in West St. Paul, which is where he lived when we went to high school. It said he had retired after 43 years with the railroad, which meant that he had followed in his dad’s employment footsteps. At the end of the obituary it was recommended that memorials be sent to the Alzheimer’s Association. There is a world of heartache baked into those last few words.
I got to know Bob when we started working at the same grocery store. After HS graduation I went on to become a serial college dropout, and he continued to work for several years at the store. During that time our lives took different directions, but for a handful of years we were besties.
Let me tell you the story of the one and only time I went deer hunting. It was Bob’s idea. The plan included borrowing his dad’s car, driving to northern Minnesota, walking into the woods and getting a deer each. There was plenty of room on that station wagon to haul the carcasses, and we brought along enough rope to do the job. A simple plan, guaranteed success, what could go wrong?
(Photo taken 1956, the year of the epic hunt. Bob is the guy filling his pipe. The other person is some vagrant)
Well, there was one drawback in that I had no rifle, for one thing. And there was not enough cash lying around to get a new one, so I went to the classified ads in the newspaper and soon became the proud owner of a Winchester Model 94 carbine, one of those storied firearms. Unfortunately I knew nearly nothing about calibers, and this particular rifle was a .25-35. Ammunition for this relic was difficult to find, and when I did locate some the guy who sold it to me suggested that while this was a good gun for shooting rats at a dump, it was far from a first choice for deer hunting. But at least, I thought, I was now armed.
On a November Saturday after work we loaded up our gear into Bob’s father’s new 1956 Ford Country Sedan station wagon. A beautiful vehicle and I’ll be honest, if that were my car I would never ever have loaned it to two screwlooses like Bob and myself.
We drove three hours due north before we took a right and turned down a small gravel road leading into the forest. Going toward some place Bob had heard about. It was a cold night, and there was about two feet of snow on the ground. On the way in we passed a hunting camp where a dozen men were seated in a circle around a huge campfire, the ground around them littered with empty beer cans.
Bob turned off the gravel road onto a level spot, and we slept in the wagon, starting it up periodically during the night to keep from freezing. Around four in the morning we gave up on sleep and went into the nearest small town where Bob had heard there was a Catholic church that offered an early “hunter’s mass.” It was interesting attending church services where all the attendees wore the same red clothing (hunter’s orange had not yet become the standard).
Then it was back to the forest to park the car and wander separately into the woods to find each a place to conceal ourselves and wait for the legions of deer that would surely pass by us. The season would legally begin at dawn.
An hour before dawn the firing began. It was at first sporadic, but by the time the sun came up it seemed that I was surrounded by nearly continuous rifle fire. My mind was now fully awake and alarmed, and it arrived at two clear thoughts. One was the memory of those drunken hunters sitting around that campfire who were now out there in the same forest someplace. The other is that there were not enough deer in the entire state of Minnesota to warrant the number of gunshots that I was hearing, so what was everybody shooting at?
At that point I heard a rifle report and a small branch was clipped from high up on a very tall pine tree, the one I happened to be sitting against at the time. Before that branch hit the ground I was on my feet. I took that rat-killer of a carbine, my half-filled Thermos of coffee, and I walked the few hundred yards back to the road. There I found a stump and sat on it for the rest of the day, trying as much as possible not to look like a deer. On that stump was where Bob found me toward dusk.
And that was it. No deer, a severely diminished faith in my fellow man, and cold feet to boot. On the way out of the woods we got stuck once in snow and had to roust up a guy out of his cabin to come help get us out. Later that week I put an ad in the paper and sold the Model 94 carbine.
I never returned to that war zone laced with beer-filled bozos. Each year thereafter I would read about some poor shot-dead sod who had somehow been mistaken for a 300 pound, four-legged, antlered woodland creature, and I would think, Yep, I made the right choice once again.
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From The New Yorker
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This past year is going down with Robin and I as the Year of the Praying Mantis. While we see a couple of these fascinating bugs in our back yard every year, this summer they were present down by the river in greater numbers than ever. On a single walk in September we probably encountered 7 or 8 of them. All were of the same bright green color.
I reached down to pick up one of the larger mantises and as my fingers touched its wings the head swiveled instantly 180 degrees and those huge eyes were staring directly into mine. Startled me so much I let it go immediately.
These guys have powerful arms, powerful jaws, and can strike in a fraction of a second. While it was not fearing for my life that caused me to drop the bug, there was always the possibility of being nipped slightly, which has less appeal than you might think to a tender soul like myself.
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From The New Yorker
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We finished the last season of Reservation Dogs, which is only the third one. No more are planned, and that’s a lovely idea.
This makes this series even more special, their quitting on top, so to speak. Of course you can’t make a ten season-long series about Native American teenagers because at some point they aren’t any more. Teenagers, that is. They are adults and let’s face it, films about adults have to be spiced up somehow because we aren’t nearly as interesting when we start to mold.
And Reservation Dogs is right up there with the best of all the television series about Native teenagers. In fact, as far as I know, it’s the only television series about them. As a taste, here’s an introduction to a spirit warrior who appears at various moments in the series. His name is William Knifeman, and he almost fought at the Little Big Horn. He’s special.
Even if you don’t have access to Hulu, it’s worth signing up for the free trial and then watching the hell out of that week or so. There is much to learn here, young warrior (of any age), much to learn.
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A song from the musical The Most Happy Fella, done by the great Peggy Lee. I think it’s just the right song for November, as the last leaves flutter down from the trees and delicate ice forms overnight on the ponds in the mountains. If there was ever a time for moving on, this is it.
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Little Home In The Valley 