Allamakee County Chronicles XXX – Necessaries

Note:  A preview from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)

Sometimes It Just Hits You.

Some things in life are inescapable; death, taxes, and ridding yourself of the malodorous assimilated residue of the digestive process, not to mention the accumulation of liquid waste byproducts of the renal process.

Most folks these days, in our increasingly urbanized population, don’t really give these necessities much thought.  One has a nice, clean, warm room with fixtures intended for this purpose, and when such becomes necessary, one uses them, and that’s that.

But rural life sometimes presents other challenges, and sometimes those challenges are due to the fact that other animals have the same necessary actions, and many of them don’t always use convenient locations.  That is to say, of course, convenient for people – for the animals, it’s all about convenience.

Take cows, for instance.  To a cow, the world is just one giant bathroom, and they comport themselves accordingly, and often, copiously.  More on that in a moment.

For Example:

I recollect one time, on a sunny January day with temperatures hovering at about ten below, when my old buddy Jon and I decided to go afield early in the morning to hunt foxes and coyotes.  At the last moment Jon’s father decided to join us.  He was an old Navy veteran, very salty, a great bullshitter and all-around entertaining old fellow.  That morning, we arrived at a stretch of woods that had yielded for us in the past on similar forays for furbearers, and as we dismounted from Jon’s ancient Dodge van, his dad announced the need to get rid of some of the coffee he had swilled on the drive out to the hunting grounds.  “I’ll just be a minute,” he said, stepping over to the fencerow.

Bear in mind that we were all three dressed for the weather, with woolen long johns, heavy jeans, long flannel shirts, all surmounted by heavy insulated coveralls, parkas, and thick gloves.

As Jon and I waited, we were entertained by his father’s muttered curses, accompanied by a cacophony of zips and snaps.  It took longer than a minute, but finally, the old guy came back, ready to hunt.  He made a pithy and earthy observation: “It ain’t easy to take a piss when you’re wearing six inches of clothes and you’ve only got three inches of pecker.”

Jon and I thought it best not to reply.

Livestock

Cow Patty.

Various animals are, of course, bound by the same metabolic laws as humans.  But their byproducts are varying in amount and content.  Horses are best known for the “road apples” they leave behind, the aura they admit being mild and grassy.  The outputs, of course, match the inputs; you can’t have one without the other.  There’s an old story about a guy who was looking for a place to board his horse.  In conducting his research, the horseman was told “the price ranges from twenty-five cents to a dollar a day, but no matter what, you’re entitled to the manure.”  (This was in a time when both a dollar and manure had some value, unlike now, when only manure has any real value, despite Congress producing it in vast amounts.)

So, he goes off to a big, prosperous farm and asks the cost of boarding his horse.  “A dollar a day,” the farmer tells him.  “But I’m entitled to the manure?”

“Yes,” the famer says.

Our intrepid caballero then visits a slightly more run-down farm, where he is informed that the price is fifty cents a day.  “But I’m entitled to the manure?”

“Yes,” the second farmer replies.

Wondering now if he can find someplace really cheap, he visits at last a really broken-down old homestead, where he is informed that the price is ten cents a day.  “But I’m entitled to the manure?”

“Son,” the farmer informs him, “at ten cents a day, there ain’t gonna be any manure.”

Cattle, on the other hand, produce immense amounts of various substances, none of which are pleasant.  I have it on good authority that if one completely disregards several rules of safe gun handling and discharges a 12-gauge round into a fresh cow pie at about a 45-degree angle, the resulting spray of cow manure will cover the pant legs of a hunting partner standing a good six feet away.  Mind you, I would never engage in such a stunt personally.

When it comes to the vileness of secretions, though, swine hold the prize.  And the fun thing about swine is this:  A lot of farmers keep their hogs in indoor pens, from which the manure is hosed out into holding tanks, thence to be used for fertilizer.  Nowadays I understand most of these tanks are enclosed, but back in the day some farmers just shoveled it into a pit.  In the sweltering summer sun, it wasn’t unusual for the manure pit to have a dry crust form on the surface, which crust looked remarkably like just honest old bare dirt.

You can probably work out the obvious practical joke here for yourselves, but it generally started with the assurance, “Oh, you can just walk right on across the bare dirt there.”

This One Time:

Back to us humans.

It’s generally not a clever idea to drink a lot of beer and eat a lot of really hot Tex-Mex late in the night before you have an early morning duck hunt planned.

The actual by-gosh Big Marsh.

A few miles north of the little eastern Iowa town of Parkersburg lies Big Marsh, a big expanse of swampy terrain open to the public for hunting and fishing.  Some great duck hunting was to be found there, and while we frequently used boats and decoys, it wasn’t uncommon to simply don chest waders and explore the marsh on foot, jump shooting as you went.  The water could be up to waist-deep, but that was seldom a problem.

Unless you had drank a lot of beer and eaten a lot of really hot Tex-Mex the night before.

On the morning in question, I was solo, with my usual partners in mischief hors de combat from the previous evening’s festivities.  Not being faint of heart, I stuck to my plan, which had my bleary-eyed self essaying forth into the single-digit temperatures of Big Marsh, clad in heavy clothing topped off with the aforementioned chest waders and a heavy parka.

I was a good couple of hundred yards into the marsh, wading through waist-deep waters, through an old stand of half-dead willows, when the Tex-Mex hit me.  The incipient emergency announced itself, as such things often do, with a copious amount of borborygmi and a warning shot of flatus.

Consider for a moment the state of the twenty-two-year-old me, waist deep in water, encased up to the armpits in insulated rubber, with a heavy parka on.  Consider that there is only one place for the vile, eye-watering emissions described to exit, that opening being right under my chin.  I took that for the warning that it was and started examining my options.

My truck was too far away.  It had taken me almost an hour to get where I was.  The dike that blocked in the water to form the marsh was likewise too far away for the present emergency.  I had one option:  A large, dead willow, maybe a foot through at the trunk, was a few paces away through the muddy marsh water.  I headed that way, breaking a skim of ice that covered the frigid waters.

Willows aren’t the best climbing trees in the best of circumstances.  These weren’t the best of circumstances, but I managed to scramble up and onto a large branch high enough to clear the dark waters of the marsh.  Hoping no one was around to watch (and laugh) I managed to shed my parka, hanging it on the stub of a limb a bit higher up.  Another stub branch served to hang my shotgun by its sling; a sling on a pump shotgun may seem a bit unusual to many shooters, but it’s right handy when you’re packing duffels of decoys out into the marsh or trying to take a dump from six feet up a shaky dead willow tree.

Now for the waders.  This was to prove the real challenge.  These were the sort of waders that had detachable suspenders.  Reaching behind me while crouched on a shaky tree branch while suffering abdominal spasms wasn’t easy, but I finally managed to unhook the suspenders, back and front.  I didn’t want them to fall into the icy water into which I would soon be relieving myself, so I stuffed them into a parka pocket.

At this point I was in imminent danger of an embarrassing incident if I didn’t get waders, trousers, and underwear out of the way quickly, so I grabbed the tree trunk with one hand, dropped clothing to my ankles with the other, and leaning backwards so that the orifice in question was well away from my clothing, I let fly.

In winter.

If I were anyone but me at that moment, I wouldn’t have wanted to be in that area.  This being a family-friendly site prevents me from describing this incident in fullest detail, but I will say that several early-flying flocks of ducks made wide detours to bypass the area, and at least two muskrats swam rapidly away; one climbed up on a tussock of reeds and dry-heaved until he passed out.  As for me, I think it’s fair to say that I passed everything I had eaten for the previous two weeks, and those of you familiar with some particular aftereffects of very hot Tex-Mex will appreciate that, after a few moments, I felt very much like the exhaust nozzle on an Atlas rocket.

Finally, it ended.  I looked down at the cold water.  There was a slick of… well, let’s just say that once clothing and waders were back in place, I was required to wade a few yards from the tree and vigorously slosh around in the icy water to remove any residue from my waders.

My innards were still protesting.  Suddenly, the prospect of roast duck didn’t seem like such a high priority.  I headed for my truck.  The ducks would be there another day.

These Days

Growing older comes with its own issues.

While I tend to indulge in fewer late nights with lots of beer and Tex-Mex, there are other issues, such as having what beers I do drink pass through faster.  This can be something of an issue when, say, in elk camp, where one has to climb out of a sleeping bag, pull on boots and walk a good distance from the tent before initiating micturition.

Still, as with all things, these matters are relative.  As long as I don’t have to climb out of waist-deep water into a dead tree in zero-degree temps and drop chest waders, I won’t worry too much.  As for passing this wisdom on to the next generation – well, who am I do deprive them of the sorts of adventures detailed above?