Hiding Out

       

                                                                                                                                        

      There's a reason we live way out here on Baker's Branch, Pam and me. We wanted to "get away", and we did. Back in those days she trusted me, and saw things pretty much all my way for no apparent reason. We were both young and foolish. She matured, I didn't. 

       When it came time about 1976 that we started thinking about building a house of our own, she let me choose the place and the type of home. The lot I selected on Lake Keystone was enclosed on three sides by extensive woodlands, all Corps of Engineers property where no other houses could be built to interfere with the view of the lake, The Baker's Branch arm of it, which through the trees was literally a stone's throw from what would become our front driveway. The house was to be a two-story log home, aesthetically fit for the surroundings, and as unobtrusive as the post oaks, blackjacks, and the branch's rocky bluff that both surrounded and hemmed it in. Perfect.

       Once the house was in, and the driveway laid in crushed rock, I was very careful about the trees I left standing and those I cut down. I didn't care if anyone could see the house, still don't, and was very much interested in leaving as much wildlife habitat as practically possible. Rabbits moved in with us, dozens, occupying the brush-piles I constructed for them with the carefully selected brush and trees I cut from the center of the property. Birds swarmed us, gobbling the food I put out for them, hummingbirds being the least of them. Snakes, yes, and lizards were drawn to the property; copperheads all the time, and the occasional cottonmouth and timber rattler.

       The snakes and lizards drew in the road runners, "Paisano" they call them in Mexico. We kill copperheads out here all the time in warm weather (Pam has gotten quite good at it) and have killed one cottonmouth and one rattler. Paisano helps us, sometimes even coming into the garage with me in it during his daily reconnoiter for meat around the rock base of our cabin where the lizards and snakes like to sun in the summertime. The cabin rocks really begin to warm between noon and one p.m. daily in June, July, and August, and that's when the ol'hombre comes around. Smart bird. We like him a good deal.

        That being said, I will tell you that it is rare for me to kill even a poisonous snake out here on the branch, so useful are they in keeping down the mouse numbers and pack rats which destroy truck wiring to make nests. Sometimes the dogs kenneled in the back yard will wake me in the night with their barking, and I know if it's not a coon stealing from the bird feeders, it's probably a copperhead out in the pens fighting with the dogs. I kill those. All my dogs have been bitten, swelling in the face, no death, but aggravation none the less. Pam kills several a summer around the back door (sometimes the front where she tends summer flowers), but those have to die, don't you think? Pam thinks so.

       You come onto my property, look at it, in particular the way the cabin is situated on it, you will notice that it's plane is on a north-south axis with the front of the house facing the water, east. You know, Baker's Branch. That's only partly because we like always to look out every east facing window we have and see that the branch is always in our sight. People living in a near-desert never tire of looking at water, yes, but all Indians know (Pam is Choctaw) that an east-facing entry in this country will always will always be protected from the west winds, and the northwest winds, that carry all weather into this country. They needed their villages and camps to be near a water supply for obvious reasons, and I suspected for a year before we moved in out here that we were probably not the only ones to do so. You can look at the lay of our  property and tell, from its proximity to good water and a southern exposure for warmth in the winter, that many people lived on "our" spot long before we did. Hell, long before we were even born. For thousands of years I guess.

       One year our son, Rode, then nine or ten, came into the living room where I was lounging, asleep, on the couch as close to an air conditioning vent as I could get, tapped me on the foot and said, "Dad, where could I find an arrowhead?"

       "What?"

       "An arrowhead," he said.

       He had messed up a pretty good nap, and I was eager to get back into it and said, "Probably right down there in front of the house."

       "Do I need a shovel?"

       "Nah, just go down there where the ground starts gettin' soft at the edge of the drive and kick around in the dirt a little."

       That should've been good for at least a half hour nap, but he was back in five minutes at the most, tapping me on the foot again asking with extended palm, "Is this what they look like?"

       I came straight up off the couch. There in his extended palm were two, count them, perfect arrowheads, one white and the other black. So, yeah, you tell me. I haven't figured it out yet, and Rode is nearly forty years old. Life is full of funny little coincidences, I guess.

       He was at the house the other day with a friend. We went into the living room to sit and talk, and look out the east facing picture window at Baker's Branch shimmering silver through winter-bare post oaks and blackjacks. Just to the left of that window, hung neatly on the cedar logs, is an old fashioned wooden medicine cabinet Mom gave me from her antique store way down yonder in "Looseyanna". I keep Rode's arrowheads and some old turkey beards in there along with an Indian bead work knife scabbard, and a little cedar box call about the size of a big man's index finger Stacy's dad, Milo, made and gave me back when. Back when he was still alive.

       "Hey, Nate," I said. "Come over here. I've got something to show you."

       That's why we live out here on Baker's Branch. The stories. They get us away, every time.

© Conrad Vollertsen 3-17-2020