My boys and I started building a stone wall in front of our cabin years ago. Every summer when we came to the cabin on vacation we would gather rocks from around the property and add them to the wall. Over the years the stone wall grew to the point where it is quite a respectable stone wall as stone walls go.
After I moved here, I spent a lot of time that first fall and winter hunting rocks and adding to the stone wall. Almost daily in all sorts of weather I would leave the cabin and slowly wander through my fields and woods hunting for rocks. Some days the temperature was in the teens, and I was so bundled up that it was an effort to bend over when I found a rock.
I would place the rocks I found in small piles, and when I had enough piles scattered over the property I’d drive around in my tractor, load the rocks in the tractor bucket and dump them near the wall. Every few days I would use the rocks I had gathered to add another few feet to the wall.
After spending so much of my adult life in offices, deposition rooms and courtrooms wearing a suit, it was a genuine pleasure to put on an old pair of jeans (and about 35 other articles of clothing on the really cold days) and work outside. It was satisfying to see the wall slowly grow. In retrospect I realize that the rock hunting and stone wall building I did that first fall and winter was therapeutic. It occupied me while I was making the transition from work to retirement, and helped me shed the accumulate stress and pressure of 37 years working as a trial attorney.
I found it calming and relaxing to hunt rocks and building the stone wall. I had time to ponder and meditate on things while performing simple, non-demanding tasks—tasks which, over time, resulted in the creation of a sturdy rock wall that has become part of the landscape and represents some degree of permanency in a hectic and transitory world.
A few weeks ago I decided to extend the stone wall and that means I’m in the rock hunting and stone wall building business again. This time I have a companion—our new dog, Recon. As far as the vet can tell, Recon is a bull terrier and border collie mix. He is still young and untrained but he’s a great farm dog because he likes to be outside. What could be more relaxing and bucolic than ambling leisurely through the fields and woods hunting rocks with your trusty farm dog at your side? The stresses of the day slowly melt away to be replaced a calm acceptance of life and the eternal rhythm of the seasons. Inner peace pervades you, and you become one with the world.
So it was the other day—me, the dog, woods and fields, hunting rocks, inner harmony—the whole package of rural peace and tranquility. And then the Fed Ex truck came with a delivery to the cabin. You see, Recon has taken to running after vehicles as they leave our property. We’re working to break him of this habit but he is still young and strong willed.
Sure enough, as the Fed Ex truck drove away up the long gravel road that leads to our property Recon came streaking from the woods like a bat out of hell and ran after it. I called to him to come but I might as well have been talking to my stone wall.
This pissed me off because I’m getting tired of walking up that damn hill looking for the dog. I found myself—red-faced, spittle flying, veins bulging in my forehead—standing at the foot of the road shouting obscenities at the top of my lungs to the dog (who by now is 100 yards away and receding fast). So much for inner peace, harmony and tranquility. Dr. Jekyll, meet Mr. Hyde. Bruce Banner, meet the Incredible Hulk. Mr. Jim, meet Mr. Stroke.
There’s no moral to this story. But the episode did cause me to wonder: do Zen masters ever lose it now and then? Do swami masters of meditation pop a cork occasionally when things don’t go their way? I bet the Dali Llama can be a real asshole at times. For some reason I am comforted by these thoughts.
One of the traditions of small town America is the pancake supper. The idea is simple: advertise a day and a time, make a lot of pancakes and sausage and charge everyone five bucks for all the pancakes and sausage they can eat. It’s an easy fundraiser for churches and civic groups. Whoever thought of it was brilliant.
The church I go to always holds a pancake supper on Shrove Tuesday. As it was explained to me, Shrove Tuesday is the day before Ash Wednesday which is the first day of Lent. You’re supposed to fast during Lent. I guess it’s a Christian version of Ramadan or maybe vice versa. Anyway, the idea is that you pig out on Shrove Tuesday before you start to fast on Ash Wednesday. That’s why Shrove Tuesday is also called Fat Tuesday. It’s also called Pancake Tuesday in some countries because pancakes are traditional Shrove Tuesday fare. Apparently that’s because pancakes are rich in milk, butter and eggs. Hey, I didn’t make this up—I read it on the internet. My assumption is that the pancake custom dates back to an earlier, less affluent time. Maybe even a time before cows were invented. I’ve never considered eating pancakes to be high living. If it were me, I’d make it Steak and Key Lime Pie Tuesday.
The whole subject of Shrove Tuesday pancake dinners is all very complicated actually. I think you have to have a degree in theology to really understand it.
This Shrove Tuesday thing is simpler, easier to understand and a lot more fun in places like New Orleans where they celebrate Shrove Tuesday with parades, booze, beads, bacchanalia, and women baring various parts of their anatomy. Personally, I like that idea better than eating pancakes and sausage but this is the Bible Belt so pancakes it is. (Not to mention the fact that Lent falls in February which is a very cold season in this neck of the woods so the idea of baring any sensitive area of the body is not very practical.)
In my church it’s the men’s group that puts on the Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. It is an opportunity for men who do not know what they are doing to make a mess in the church kitchen.
This year for some reason I was designated as one of the three pancake makers. I’m still trying to decide whether this was an honor or not. I’m not sure why I was picked to make pancakes. I have no pancake-making experience, and there’s nothing on my resume to suggest I would be good at making pancakes. Maybe they thought I handled a case once involving pancakes.
At any rate, I showed up at the appointed time and proceeded to make pancakes. Making pancakes is not that tough—you get the hang of it pretty quickly. The object is to make nice round pancakes. I have to admit that my first three pancakes fell far short of the objective. They resembled a Rorschach ink blot, a pregnant guppy and the outline of the nation of Botswana. But I got better. Which is good because I couldn’t have handled the shame of being demoted to the syrup line. If you’re on the syrup line your job is to make sure the syrup pourers on all the tables are full. It’s a very sticky job.
One of the guys started making Micky Mouse pancakes for the kids. That’s a round pancake with two smaller circles for Mickey’s ears. Not to be outdone I proposed making Minnie Mouse pancakes with two small circles for ears and two small circles for boobs but I was overruled by higher church authority on moral grounds.
I learned that there is yeast in pancake mix. The longer it sits after being mixed the more it rises when you put it on the griddle. There was a long pause after the first initial rush of pancake eaters and so the pancake mix sat for a while. That led to some interesting pancakes. When we started making pancakes again, the small pancakes looked like hockey pucks, and the larger ones came out discus-shaped.
Unfortunately, the church’s pancake supper coincided with an ice storm. It was going well until around 7:30 in the evening. That’s when it was announced that the roads were turning icy. Icy roads are bad news around here, and the room cleared as if someone had announced that an anthrax bomb had gone off in downtown Blue Ridge.
That was okay with me because I was starting to get tired of making pancakes and watching people eat pancakes. Plus the smell of 30 pounds of cooked pork sausage was beginning to nauseate me.
So now I can say that I have participated in the great American tradition of the pancake supper. And that’s all I have to say about that.
Weird things seem to keep happening at my happy country home. Last spring I found the severed foreleg of a deer in my garden. Not too long ago I discovered a dead possum with puncture wounds in its throat in my side yard. Shortly after that I found a dead young deer with similar puncture wounds in its neck hanging from my fence line.
I consider these events to be weird or at the very least unusual but then I’ve never lived in rural Southern Appalachia before. Maybe this type of stuff happens all the time here.
Now I have another mystery on my hands—the mystery of the two skulls.
Let me set the scene. When I found the young deer hanging from the fence about two months ago I had to dispose of the body. My son and I cut off its head and threw the body into a wood line away from the cabin. We placed the head on a red ant hill under a stout plastic barrel. The idea was to let the red ants pick the skull clean so I could hang it on a wall in the workshop. It seemed like a suitably country thing to do. What man doesn’t want the skulls of dead animals decorating his man cave?
Mindful that there are animals around here who would like nothing better than to have a deer skull as a play toy I placed six cinder blocks on top of the barrel to prevent animals from getting to the skull. I felt comfortable that the skull was protected. So I was a little surprised a few days ago when Meredith told me that there was a deer skull in our yard.
Sure enough, there was a clean, bleached skull sitting on the grass. I could see the barrel out in the field, and it still had the cinder blocks on top of it so I knew it had not been tipped over. I figured some animal had burrowed under the barrel, gotten the young deer’s skull and left it in our yard.
I didn’t think anything more about it until a couple of days later when I was walking our new dog in the field near the plastic barrel. I noticed there were no signs that anything had burrowed under the barrel so I took the cinder blocks off and looked underneath it. To my surprise the deer head I had placed there was still there. If you’re following the story so far that means I now have two deer skulls on my property.
The other thing I noticed was that skull under the barrel was significantly smaller than the deer skull in my yard, and I concluded that the new skull came from an adult deer.
A day or two later I saw our dog chewing on a large bone in the yard. I assumed it was one of the many chew bones we give him. He has a habit of taking them out of the house to chew. The yard is littered with them. But when I investigated I discovered he was chewing on one of the long bones that make up a deer’s leg. What's more, he had gathered a couple of other long bones from a deer. Given the size of the bones it is clear that they came from an adult deer and not the juvenile deer I found hanging on the fence.
I suppose it’s not surprising that there are two dead deer carcasses in the vicinity of my property. There are a lot of deer around here, and deer hunting is a favorite sport in these parts. Come hunting season, it seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry is crawling through the woods with a rifle or a bow trying to bag a deer. It has occurred to me that a good way for a guy around here to commit suicide in a way that his wife can still collect on the life insurance policy is to strap a couple of antlers to his head and walk noisily through the woods during hunting season.
But one thought keeps nagging me. I was under the impression that most hunters do not butcher a fallen deer in the field. I think the usual practice is to gut the deer and haul the body, skull and all, somewhere to butcher it. If that’s true then you’re not going to find a lot of deer skeletons in the woods. Moreover, I’ve told this story to a number of people who have lived here for some time, and they think it is unusual for deer parts to keep showing up in my yard. Obviously, it is not a commonplace occurrence.
I suppose it’s possible there is a real Daniel Boone-type in the neighborhood who knows how to butcher a deer and disposes the carcasses in the woods. That might explain why there are deer bones in the vicinity.
Of course, there are many other possible explanations. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that a deer died of natural causes about the same time another deer got hung up on my fence. Maybe I live in the Appalachian equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle for deer. Maybe my dog that is part paleontologist, and he is trying to gather enough deer bones to construct a complete skeleton.
The bottom line is that I’m not sure what to think about the mystery of the two skulls. All I know is that I have enough chewed dog bones, deer bones and skulls littering the yard around my cabin that it’s beginning to resemble a Neolithic hunter-gatherer’s camp site. When I moved to the cabin I was seeking a simpler life but I was not intending it to be Stone Age.
I guess this is just another example of how life in the country is so different from life in the suburbs.
