Along the Arkansas: It's About Time

 

We mark time in different ways out here on Baker's Branch. Here's one: scorpions.

When I lived near Capistrano, it was the swallows in the spring. In Pacific Grove it was the monarchs in the fall on the way to Mexico clustering orange in the seaside pines. Out here on Baker's Branch it's the little honey-colored scorpions in the dangdest places imaginable all over the house, and usually two weeks to the day before the first real cold weather of autumn.

I don't know how the little "jabbers" mark their seasons so accurately; all I know is that they do. Everybody who has lived in this house has been stung by the little %$#&*^**! except my son Rode and me, and we've had our close calls. Pam and Sarah have been nailed, twice. Apiece.

When they were little, getting Sarah and Rode ready for the drive to town and school was a daily exercise in chaos with Pam in charge. Super Mom, but she couldn't be at all places all the time. I always told her she was lucky she didn't have to dress me. It did not make her laugh.

Once when he was about two, Rode began doing a peculiar, little dance on the kitchen floor before Pam could re-direct her attention from Sarah's clothing to Rode's shoes. I noticed the dance from across the room and thought it odd as he had never shown any interest in the arts before. Something about the impromptu Indian stomp made me get up and move towards him.

Standing over him and looking down between his feet following his own gaze, I saw a beige-colored little scorpion, tail raised in striking position, taking dead aim (so to speak) at Rode's feet and exactly between them. I don't know how he kept from tromping barefooted on the beastie, but he didn't. I ended the dance with a size 10 and a half shoe.

Next story. Same time of day, same set of daily circumstances, one year later. Rode was dressed and ready for pre-school; Sarah was a work in progress. I was sitting on the end of the couch drinking a cup of coffee, Rode was playing in the doorway picking things up off the floor. One of those things moved, and I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye. I focused my gaze and was immediately horrified to see that he held a live scorpion by the only body appendage by which it could not bring its stinger into play, its head, with his thumb and forefinger.

I leaped off the couch as if I had been touched by a cattle prod and smacked the critter right out of his fingers and brought the size 10 and a half back into play. The smack out of the blue of course started him crying, what with all the usual departure hullabaloo, and brought Pam into the room which of course got me into trouble. Was the kid lucky, or what? That all changed before he was 18 but held pretty good there for a while.

Last story. For years I preferred watching TV while lying on my side right in front of the set, my head propped in my hand. I spent hours that way without moving. That was before the advent of arthritis which I think I invented.

One night, just before the onset of the year's first cold weather I was in that mesmerized position, deep into the third quarter of a Monday night football game, when I felt something cold, firm, and dry crawl just inside the bottom of my tee shirt sleeve where it rested on the floor holding the arm that propped my head. I knew in an instant without looking what it was. Then, I did look, moving my gaze downward and ever so gently.

Yep, there that sucker was, just its evil twisted tail stinger visible and dangling next to my underarm skin where it exited the shirt sleeve. My luck at least, if not Rode's, was done. Or was it?

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I gathered my will, gritted my teeth preparatory to a bad outcome, and used my other hand to swat the "visitor" down and away, hopefully, from my bare skin, and it worked. The old faithful 10 and a half D finished this tale, too.

That's not the last scorpion story, by the way. That one, the last one, happened on the ceiling right above my head last night before I went to bed. It was exciting in its own way, too, but you've had enough of this inane chatter, I think.

There's one other way to tell the seasons out here: sporting catalogues. They arrive by the traincar-load months before the seasons advertised. Christmas, for example, comes in September in case you didn't know. And then there's all the conservation organization requests for membership renewal. I have been at one time or another a member of nearly every one you can name, and some you can't. On my retirement, I cannot afford membership to all of the organizations that request it, no matter how important they try to make me feel in their mailers.

I have been a member of Ducks Unlimited for the better part of 40 years. In the beginning it was a much more fun organization than it is now, shackled, as it is, by the corporate heads that rule it like they do their corporations: more and more business, less and less play. So be it. The intent is honorable, and I feel guilty shooting ducks, eating them, and not returning something at least symbolically. I'm a member of Delta Waterfowl as well, a similar, but different, organization.

Audubon Society? Yes. Trout Unlimited? Yes. Quail Unlimited? For several years. National Wildlife Federation? Yes. And on and on it goes. Some of these groups my membership has slipped, probably lost in all of the other fliers stacked in my office. Seriously.

You need to support something your heart is in but be judicious about it.

I will never, ever, let my membership in the National Rifle Association wither. Hunt, defend myself, or family, without a gun in my hand? How? You want me to use a knife? A club? Where do I sign? How much? Cheap at the cost.

Arriving in the mail yesterday was a request to renew my membership in the National Wild Turkey Federation, an organization I first joined at its inception back in 1973. They wanted $30. Certainly, I have killed my share of turkeys, and so I reached for my pen, and then hesitated. They peeved me by insinuating in their mailer that they were the main reason wild turkeys exist today. All conservation organizations fall prey to this type of deceptive advertising, and it always bothers me.

They said not a word about the importance of the development in the late ‘40's and early ‘50's of the last century the cannon net, a device by which turkeys were lured into corn-baited areas, an explosive charge attached to the net throwing the net over them, the live turkeys then literally boxed in cardboard carriers and released into suitable habitat that held no wild turkeys, the rest being, as they say, history.

Prior to the cannon net's development, game departments all over the country tried raising wild turkeys from eggs taken from wild nests, and captive birds that nested in penned conditions. The results, tried here in Oklahoma by the way, were disastrous. The cannon net turned that failure around, so much so that by the mid-1960's Oklahoma had a season on wild turkeys and a flourishing population of same well before the advent of the NWTF in 1973.

I knew all of that reading the flier, and so, yeah, I was peeved, but I sent them $30 anyway. I have always been a sucker for affairs of the heart. Aren't you?

Copyright © 2020 Conrad M. Vollertsen