Baker's Branch

  I take the dogs down to the water two or three times a week, sometimes everyday when it’s hot, to swim.   They like it, and I like watching them, particularly when the two older ones, a lab and a mutt, dunk the pup, a German shepherd now six months old. It’s my way of giving them a bath, something Pam insists on for no apparent reason, and judge them done and the water romp over by the length of their tongues hanging out. When their tongues are dragging, I marshal the troops for the walk back through the woods up to the house where I get to watch them shake all over the grandkids causing them to squeal and jump around like popcorn in a popper. It doesn’t take much to entertain an old person’s brain. I hardly ever watch T.V. I feel certain that over the years I have owned upwards of a hundred dogs, most of them hunters of one sort or another, but I am an equal opportunity employer: If you can do something besides licking a hand or jumping up into a lap, you can live out...

  I'm 67 years old and have a lot more sense than you could ever guess just by looking. Wait a minute: I might have that backwards. In any case, I gave up noodling about the time I got a fulltime job, and well before I started raising a family. I fell off the wagon one time in my early thirties when the late Alan Moguin and I took a group of teenagers canoeing on the upper Illinois over in wild Cherokee County. Somehow, the word had gotten out that I used to be a redneck, and I was challenged to demonstrate that I could, and would, put my hands into a dark hole deep under water and pull out a fish with my bare hands. Truth is, I wondered if I could still do it as well. So, I did it, and everybody shut up about it. End of story. The fish wasn't all that big, about a three-pound channel cat, but if I had caught a bird out of the air with my bare hands, not a farfetched analogy in my opinion, those kids couldn't have been more surprised. On the surface of it, it has to b...

Since a boy, my idea of adventure was entering a dense stand of timber at daylight with a twenty-two, single shot rifle in hand. I did it at every opportunity between the ages of ten and seventeen. The rifle, a Winchester Boy’s Rifle, model circa 1937, belonged to my grandfather, Austin Howell.  A box of .22 caliber long rifle shells cost me fifty cents which I gathered up every day from the deposit of discarded glass pop bottles at Hundley’s general store in Calvin. Three cents a bottle, which I gave right back to Mr. Hundley for squirrel bullets. Apparently, we both thought it a good deal, so many years did we barter. I went off to college knowing where to get my squirrel shells and very little else. Just the thought of the adventure I found in those deep, dark woods motivates me to this day. I did not know a boy my age that did not want to be an Indian so heroic a figure did they cut. Solo trips into the squirrel woods allowed a boy to imagine whatever he wanted to imagine. ...

If I said the word “summer”, and then said the word “thundershower”, would you understand the difference? Do you know the smell of hot concrete in the rain, and how gratifying it can be because of what it means? It does not rain in this country in the summertime. June, July, and August are what people in the oil patch used to call “waterhauls”. You can go months at a time in Oklahoma and not see a drop. Not one.  In that country, Little Dixie, and in that time, the 1950’s, my grandparents began thinking of river trips, trotlines waded knee deep to waist high, baited with crawdads seined from a pond; hand-cranked ice cream on the porch in the dark, heat lightning in the distance. Hot, hot summertime. Air conditioning? Jeeminy Christmas. “Swamp coolers” if you were lucky; those that melted the hard candy into amorphous lumps on the coffee table and wrinkled the pages there in the family Bible. The best place in the country was right there on the front porch in the dark; not coo...

  It’s light enough, now, to thread a needle outdoors at six in the morning, and cool enough to make you wonder why anyone ever complains about the heat in Oklahoma. Concrete workers, and roofers, know this. So do catfishermen. In June, in the hot, hot summertime, in the rocks, you’re going to find the catfish, three species, spawning; no roofers or concrete workers. If you do see the latter, just keep moving, gaze averted. One cool morning this week, right after a pleasant nighttime shower, you would’ve found me there. I was catching fish, nice, fat channel cats up to about three to four pounds; one bigger that broke me off. Channel? Blue? Flathead? I don’t know. I was using live bait, so it could’ve been any of those three mentioned, the flatheads almost always preferring live bait to dead. It was big, whatever it was. I say “live bait”, and that would include earthworms and crawdads, wouldn’t it? Over the years I’ve caught more cats in the rocks using what they call “marke...

           Men and women do not react to happiness the same way. Women cry over things that make them happy. Men don't do that. A movie with a happy ending will make a woman cry. So will a graduation, hers or someone else's. A gift card, with no money in it? Oh, yes. A wedding? Holy mackerel. The list is practically endless.         Once I became aware of this significant difference (I was maybe eighteen, thereabouts) I began to employ it to my benefit, and never looked back.         When my wife and I married (Wewoka First Baptist), older women all over the sanctuary, older women she had known for years, broke into tears, recalling no doubt her earlier promise (substantial), and, now, right in front of them, the reality of the fine catch she had made. There it was, me, standing up there beside her for all of them to see. At some point during the ceremony, I heard a sob or two behind ...

My wife is a good cook. Not me. I have to cheat. Somewhere around Memorial day is when you are most likely to catch me. I’m pretty good at it. I’m probably doing it as you read this. I watched over my father’s shoulder the first chicken he ever charcoal grilled. It was up in Nebraska where we were visiting my grandpa Harry between dad’s naval service moves. He hated growing up on that farm, but somehow always managed to pull us into that muddy drive just north of the milk barn for “leave” between the two coasts. Remembering his parents, he wanted to visit with them, farm or not. If we were to stay a week, Dad would get bored somewhere around the third day in, and start doing the farm chores he joined the Navy to get away from. Mowing alfalfa to be baled, he would jump down off the tractor and run down baby jacks and cottontails fleeing the side-mower blades. I said, “run them down”. It didn’t seem possible, but he would bring them to me in a cardboard box to play with. Once he brought ...