Today's Special

These old boys ambled toward their table next to the corner windows in Miss Shelly’s Place. The sign by the two-lane just called it “The Place.” Underneath, the words “Country Cooking” had “Country” highlighted in quotes, as to make clear.

Inside, pies and cakes were lined up on the counter, each under a glass bell. The chalkboard listed today’s

special: 

Biscuits and gravy, two eggs, two strips of bacon, all the coffee you want -- $3.99.

T-boned

Two crosses, one with plastic flowers, are in the grass on the corner across from where this guy just got T-boned. I could see it coming. The courteous people just ahead of me were leaving a gap to let a small yellow Nerds-to-Go van make a left turn.

I looked in my side view and saw a Black Kia coming along in the third lane at what looked like normal speed. Neither one

of these guys could see they were on an intercept, but I could see the whole board. No amount of horn-honking or hand-waving was going to help.

They say that time gets distorted in moments like this. It’s

true. Pieces on the board are in motion, slow-motion. The outcome is inevitable. If Jill had been sitting next to me, she would have said “what’s wrong?” in response to what would have sounded from me like a slow, drawn-out combination of a groan and the word: “Nooooohhhh.”

The Kia laid on his brakes but it was a done deal. He hit the little yellow van a solid one. It got the van up on two wheels and spun him once, the van driver now facing me. I watched him as the little truck teetered and started to roll.

Imogene Pass

It was 27 years ago that I saw her see God. Twenty-four years since her mother Anna brought her ashes up here and spread them in this alpine meadow. It was now August and it had been 22 years since I'd been here to visit the bronze marker her mother had set at the foot of this boulder at 11,600 feet.

Before she died at age 21, Michelle took time to write down her wishes. She didn't want to be buried. Her daddy's horses needed the land to graze. She wanted to be cremated. She wanted to rise with her smoke back to her God. She didn't care what they did with her ashes, but she wrote, "A field of wildflowers near Ouray, Colorado is a wonderful memory for me."

Pursued by a Book

The picture on the magazine page looked like snowy TV static. Beads of sweat formed on my brow as I stared at the pattern. You remember Magic Eye 3D pictures, right? If you focused your eyes past the image on the page, a hidden three-dimensional shape was supposed to reveal itself: a sailboat or palm trees or winged birds in flight.

These 3D pictures were all the rage in the early ‘90s. Newspapers featured them in the Sunday funnies. They showed up as plot elements on TV shows like Seinfeld and Friends. Three different Magic Eye books spent a total of 73 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. Even the gentlemen’s magazines were getting in on it.

This may have partially explained the beads of sweat as I sat in my studio apartment, the summer of ’92 at age 31, trying to defocus my eyes on a magazine page with the banner:

“HEY! This page has bodacious 3-D Ta-Tas.”

After 10 or 15 minutes of crossing my eyes and moving the

page back and forth, I couldn’t see anything but what looked like a close-up of beach sand.

The oath of citizenship

A good friend raised his right hand and took an oath and became a naturalized US citizen. Brad was Australian by birth, and he was joined in that courtroom by 70 other people. They were from Russia, Burkina Faso, Vietnam, and Mexico, They came from Great Britain, Guatemala, China, and India. They'd been born in Japan, Peru, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Jordan, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Kenya, Chile, Venezuela, Eritrea, and South Korea. They'd migrated from Iran and Iraq. 

The world had come to that courtroom. They wanted to be Americans. They'd waited for it. They’d worked for it and they’d earned it.

Stuart Hart is another friend who can trace his lineage back to an ancestor who'd fought in the War of American Independence. He walked to the lectern, turned to the judge and asked permission to don his hat. He faced his fellow citizens and said:

Rooster

As I was stitching together pictures and memories into this video, it occurred to me that even the dogs are smiling.

Ownerless beasts

I kept my promise to the boys and quit my office job at the end of December. I grew up on a ranch outside Reliance so can't say how I ever ended up in a cubicle. Carol didn’t like it one bit that I was giving up a steady paycheck and benefits. She liked it even less when I told her what me and the boys had planned. She called me a fool.

Femur and Tommy quit their jobs that very same day. They’d grown up outside of town, like me. Hunting and fishing with their fathers, like I had. Femur had landed in pharma sales in Philly, and thought the alliteration of it was funny. He wasn’t married, so he didn’t have to answer to nobody.

Tommy had been a sheriff’s deputy in Larimer County, just

outside Fort Collins. When he came home that December and told Connie what he’d done, she left him. Went back to her mother’s. She didn’t sign up to be married to a 42-year-old loaf, she said, who up and decides at mid-life he’s going to quit his job and go play cowboy.

Meriwether Lewis and Two Tomahawks

I went to the Antique Arms show in Noblesville to catch up with my friend, gunmaker Marvin Kemper. We share an interest in Indiana's frontier sheriff and gunsmith Colonel John Small (1759-1821). I got lucky to write some magazine stories about Col. Small recently, and Marvin has crafted (or has plans to craft) reproductions of nearly every John Small rifle, pistol, and tomahawk known to exist -- including the "Grouseland Rifle," Indiana's Official State Rifle.

We talked at his table while he paused to chat

with passersby, answering questions about his work and the flintlocks he had on display. After 20 or 30 minutes, a tomahawk on his table caught my eye. I recognized this tomahawk.

"Is that...? Did you build a Lewis tomahawk?"

Road Ends in Water

The sun cut long shadows across the field as we hunkered down in a tree line. Our breath came in billows. Frost glazed the grass. Mike sat in a shock of thorny brush 30 yards to my right. He began working his coyote calls and I settled against a bare oak and awaited the appearance of a predator.  

This morning was our second run at coyotes in the 12,000 acres around Salamonie Lake in northern Indiana. The Miami Indians called the river O-sah’-mo-nee, or “yellow paint,” for the flowering bloodroot that grew on its banks. The Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Salamonie in 1965. At its low “winter pool” levels, the reservoir is drained, its capacity waiting to take the snow melt and spring rains that would otherwise flood the downstream river towns of Wabash, Peru, and Logansport.

Tubes of meat

We've been coming together every year for going on 16 years. Many of us have moved away from Indiana, off to every corner of the country. But we rendezvous every year to hunt or fish or just to sit around and eat meat and watch "Band of Brothers" for the eleventy-seventh time.

Sure, part of the draw is where we go or what we do. But part of it is listening to the conversations, taunts, schticks, and wisecracks... and trying to get them into a notebook before they drift away with the campfire smoke. We'd hope that outdoor writer and funny guy Bill Heavey, author of titles like If You Didn't Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat? would feel at home around our fire.

These are some of the best from over the years.

*********************

"What are you bringing? I’m bringing some of those meat tubes. Tubes of meat. What do you call those?”

"Summer sausages?"

Snaps his fingers. “That’s it!”

Christmas Dinner

On Christmas Eve in the neighbor's kitchen, nine-year-old Kevin kept a finger through his father’s belt loop as strangers kept introducing themselves.

“Tom, is it?” they would say to the father. “So glad Jenn asked you and your boy to come over,” they would say. They'd

Photo: Craig Sanders, Flickr, Creative Commons

introduce themselves as Jenn’s brother or sister, somebody's mother or aunt. Kevin glanced up to see his father shaking their hands politely. The boy couldn’t keep track of the names. He clung to his father’s belt.

A three-hour tour, a three-hour tour...

Outdoorsman Steve Rinella wrote, “When someone asked us what we liked to do, we said huntin’n’fishin’ as though it was one word.” There’s been more of that in recent years for the group of us who choose to call each other brother. 

We’ve hunted mallard and pintail and teal from blinds on Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee. We’ve walked fallow fields in South Dakota

and Kansas for ring-necked pheasant and reclined in laydown

blinds for Canadian goose. We’ve cast for snook and speckled trout and sheepshead in the grass flats off Cayo Costa Island in southwest Florida. It brings a sense of connection to the land, eating what we catch. 

But for Timmy and me, a susceptibility to seasickness may mean that any deep-sea tuna, grouper, or swordfish on our plates may have to come from the menu at McCormick and Schmick’s. 

The Grouseland Rifle: A Longrifle by John Small

Appearing in the November 2016 issue of the National Rifle Association magazine American Rifleman:

"In its own odyssey, an historic American long-rifle from the bench of Revolutionary War gunsmith John Small (1759-1821), long separated from the town where it was built, would be delivered to its home by modern-day versions of those

Greek mariners. As Odysseus was returned home to Ithaca, so was John Small, in a way, carried home to Vincennes, Ind. 

"This long gun, built by Indiana’s first sheriff John Small around 1803, would become known in 2004 as the “Grouseland Rifle” when it returned to Vincennes to reside in the museum at Gov. William Henry Harrison’s Grouseland home. In 2012 when the Grouseland Rifle was adopted as the official rifle of the State of Indiana, it would come to symbolize an entire state’s regard for its frontier heritage."

Story continues on AmericanRifleman.org.  

John Small's Grouseland Rifle: An Official State Rifle and its Reproduction

In Muzzleloader magazine (September/October 2016):

"INDIANA GUN MAKER MARVIN KEMPER laid John Small’s 200-year-old long rifle on the dining room table in William Henry Harrison’s Grouseland home in Vincennes. It was summer of 2015, and Kemper looked out the windows to sunlight mottling the leaves in a stand of walnut trees.

"Governor Harrison had met Shawnee chief Tecumseh among those trees in 1810, and listened to Tecumseh’s protests over acquisition of tribal lands by the Americans. Colonel John Small had been adjutant general to Harrison’s territorial militia from 1801 to 1812, and would have dined at the table in this room, eating roasted prairie chicken and discussing military operations with the governor.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark passed through here, Kemper reflected, and were guests at Harrison’s table.

"History transpired in this place. Small, Harrison, Tecumseh, and Lewis and Clark might have all been looking over Marvin Kemper’s shoulder as he began his process of bringing new life to John Small’s 'Grouseland Rifle' at this table."

Story continues in Muzzleloader magazine, available for order at Muzzleloader Magazine web site.

The Grouseland Rifle: Tied to the Land

From the pages of Muzzle Blasts, the magazine of the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association, a story I was privileged to tell:

"An historic American long rifle from the bench of an 18th-century gunsmith is seeing a rebirth in the heart of the Old Northwest Territory. The “Grouseland Rifle” was crafted in the early 1800s by Revolutionary War veteran and gunsmith John Small (1759-1821), and was designated the Official Rifle of the State of Indiana in 2012. 

"As part of Indiana’s 2016 bicentennial, the Grouseland Foundation commissioned a reproduction tied as deeply to the land and the history of the Old Northwest as is the original Grouseland Rifle and its maker, John Small of Vincennes. This faithful reproduction will be available at auction in August/September 2016."

The story continues in Muzzle Blasts:   Link to story on NMLRA.org

Mitakuye Oyasin

When I was 21 and serving as a Marine Embassy Guard in Yaounde, Cameroon, I found a third cousin in that city. Marie and I met. Our great-great-grandfathers were brothers.

The Llangeryw Yew in North Wales,
estimated to be 4000 years old.

Last year while doing Sons of the American Revolution research, I discovered that a new friend, Kevin, and I had 8x great-grandfathers who were neighbors and served in the same militia unit -- 400 years ago in Hartford, Connecticut.

While doing book research on an 18th-century Knox County sheriff and gunsmith, I learned that a branch of my mother's family had lived on the farm next to his.

Bank Heist

I don't picture myself ever landing in federal prison for bank robbery, but Jack did.

In our early 20s, Jack and I were a lot alike. We were both US Marine guards at the American Embassy in Nassau. We both liked whiskey and coke with a squeeze of lime. We flirted with the same kind of girls on Cable Beach. 
We shot pool at 

Settler’s Pub on Bay Street. We ran together on five-milers. 

But ten years later, I was wearing a cap and gown at a college graduation and Jack was wearing khakis at a federal prison in New Jersey.

First Annual Reelfoot Duck-Blind Rodeo

Nobody goes hungry in a Reelfoot duck blind. It’s part of the deal. Your guide works the duck calls, coaxing in mallards or teals or gadwalls. Come time for breakfast or lunch, he'll take a break and get the frying pan to sizzling.

Hunters should be prepared for plates loaded with sausage-egg biscuits, bacon sandwiches, cinnamon buns, cheeseburgers, or fresh catfish rolled in Nona Belle’s Golden Fry. A fan favorite is fried baloney with American cheese on Wonder Bread. (Don’t knock it until you try it. Everything tastes better in a duck blind.) If you're lucky, your guide's wife might have sent him out with a loaf of her banana-nut bread. 

All good eats, but it’s a lot of food over a two-day hunt. And that food needs to go somewhere.

Cloud Atlas

It's the year 1637 and Kevin's ancestor Thomas Spencer and ours, Thomas Root, are living a mile from each other in Hartford, Connecticut. They're as close as Kevin and I are living now, next neighborhood over.

In 1654, my Thomas Root moves away from Hartford, 30 miles north into Massachusetts. Now here in this century, Kevin and his family have moved about 30 miles away, to Brownsburg.

It feels like the shadow of a pattern that repeats itself. 

The "what-if" in this story: what if in the year 2393, his descendants and mine, living in adjacent settlements on some distant planetary outpost, discover that their ancestors Kevin and Joe knew each other back on the home planet, in the state they called Indiana.

Little fräulein

Anna reflected that Michelle would have been age 46 yesterday, if not that Michelle will always be 21.

Summer 1990

She was a 20-year-old Indiana University nursing student in 1990, recently diagnosed with leukemia, and a patient on 5 East Oncology at St. Vincent. After scoring a remission, Michelle had relapsed, and wasn’t too happy about it. The one thing that seemed to cheer her up was the idea of another remission and getting strong enough to make her first skydive.