Lifestyles

Days of summer

By DAVID KITTREDGE
Renaissance Redneck
By David Kittredge

Whenever I drive through town nowadays I am often amazed at the lack of children outside of the houses at play. It is reassuring in the aspect of safety while I drive, because you don’t have to worry about a child chasing an errant ball that is rolling into the street. But where have they gotten off to? It seems that somehow they have been whisked away, as in an episode of the Twilight Zone to some other dimension. I have tried to make sense of this situation and have even broached the subject with friends and their answer is that the kids are inside playing games on their electronic devices. But I believe that the cause goes beyond that due to the television weather forecasters injecting an air of danger in the daily weather reports with UV indexes, thunderstorm threats or extreme heat and humidity warnings. Of course you should always apply sunblock to any exposed skin and you don’t want to be outside during a thunderstorm. When I was young we were taught to read the clouds to look for signs of impending storms by recognizing the mare’s tails or cirrus clouds which meant approaching storms. Another cloud formation portending a storm are mackerel skies which consist of cirrocumulus clouds that resemble scales on a fish. We also knew the Biblical adage, red skies at night, sailors delight, red skies in the morning, sailors take warning. I could often smell a thunderstorm approaching by the pungent, chlorine odor of ozone in the air. The direction of the wind usually changes and quickens before an impending storm, also.

When I was a child we spent most of the daylight hours outside playing and as I remember, there were loads of other kids outside with us. We choose up sides to play baseball, football, or ringlievial, an enhanced game of hide and seek. We had no boundaries to impede our antics, the only rules we had to abide by from our parents were to be home for supper and we were not to start fires. But that was pretty much it. We would go fishing, swimming or built lean-tos in the woods. We were free to roam the countryside.

As a young boy I owned a pocket knife from the age of nine, with which I learned to whittle. I could make a sling shot out of a “Y” shaped piece of branch from a hard wood tree and a strip of inner tube. I used cat’s eye marbles for ammunition, called smallies. I could make a whistle using a piece of green swamp willow twig. You would tap the bark of the willow twig with the handle of the knife and this would loosen the bark and it would come off in one piece. You would then carve a flat spot on top of the bare stick and cut a notch at the end of the flattened reed and replace the bark onto the twig and once it dried the bark would stay on permanently and you had yourself a nice hand made whistle.

As a teenager, I used to help the local farmer hay his fields along with some of my buddies and it was as hot then as it is now but we worked in the heat of the day lugging and throwing bales of hay onto and off the hay wagon for four or five hours. We hayed during the hottest part of the day so that the hay bales were fully dry to ensure no damp hay was stored in the barn as this could lead to spontaneous combustion. We offloaded the hay bales in the loft of the barn, the warm air filled with hay chaff and dust, as it wafted up through the cupola. We didn’t even wear hats, there was no such thing as sunblock then and we worked shirtless. At the end of our work day we would all head to the brook for a soothing swim, in a swimming hole that we had made ourselves in late spring by damming the brook with sand bags. A rope swing was installed also by someone climbing a tree and tying one end off on an overhanging branch.

As the summer progressed, and the trout population dwindled in the brook that ran behind our house I would have to search out secret trout holes that often held holdover stock trout, meaning trout that had lived in the stream for a year or two. These trout would have grown larger and would have become more colored up than the run of the mill stockie. One of my favorite spots in searching out holdover brookies was above Gafney’s Dam and the only way to access it was to wade up the brook as the trout hole was located in a canyon of granite with shear embankments. The canyon was enclosed by hardwood trees, their leaves eclipsing the heat and rays of the sun, to create a dusky, cool tunnel where trout could thrive. The trout had ebony black backs, fiery orange fins and their flanks were dotted with red rose spots and most importantly firm pink meat. The caught trout were wrapped in fluorescent green fern fronds for insulation and then stored in my wicker creel to keep them cool on a hot day during my trek home.

Thankfully in those days we had less oversight, fewer rules and more freedom to cultivate our young minds.

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