You all know my preferences on firearms and so forth by now.  I have plenty more to say on that score, but just to change things up, I thought I’d share a tale or two from my younger years, when I was a little tad learning my way around life in Allamakee County, Iowa.

To that end:  It might be interesting to poll parents on the subject of what sound they would most associate with memories of their children. Some parents might remember the sound of laughter, the plunk of piano keys, or the squeak of a bicycle chain.

In such recollection about me, my parents would probably have said “thump.”

If there were a title for the Northeast Iowa Falling Champion, I’d have won it hands down for quite a few years running. There are probably less than three bodies of water in the northeastern quarter of Iowa into which I haven’t fallen; if you can fall into, off of, on, or out of it, I’ve done it. A typical scene at my parent’s house in my childhood years may have read something like this:

A typical Allamakee County foot bridge.

ENTER: DAD, sitting in his chair on the front porch, reading a book.

YOUNG ANIMAL enters from stage left, and stops in front of the door, water dripping from his hair and clothes.

DAD: (Not looking up from the book) “Fall in the creek again?”

YOUNG ANIMAL: “Uhh… Yeah….”

DAD: “Don’t drip water on the carpet. Your towel is in the shed where it always is.”

In spite of the repeated dunkings, often at times of year which made immersion in a spring-fed stream extremely uncomfortable, there was always the urge to attempt a crossing on a three-inch wide down tree covered with loose bark and wet from a cold rain. At times like that the conflict between ego and id approached the stage of a declared war:

EGO: “Go ahead, you can walk across on that.”

ID: “Are you kidding? You won’t make it five feet! Remember what happened last time? And the time before that?”

EGO: “Don’t listen to that wimp! Cross on over, there’s bound to be grouse in that thicket on the other bank and now that it’s stopped snowing, they’ll be out feeding.”

ID: “This isn’t a good idea!”

SPLASH!!

Northeast Iowa is full of wonderful climbing trees, but as a young boy I had less than the normal enthusiasm for them, probably due to the repeated impacts with the ground underneath. Several of my Mom’s gray hairs were directly related to my crashing, high-speed, gravity-assisted exits from large trees.

I gave up hunting deer from tree stands in my early teens for this very reason. Mind you, this was in those innocent years before modern tree stands.

I recently received a catalog from one of the nation’s largest outdoor suppliers and was amazed at the technology in today’s tree stands. It now seems that the properly equipped hunter has a tree stand made of titanium and nylon webbing, with a nicely padded seat and backrest, a comfortable safety harness, a tray for your lunch and a beverage holder. The modern tree stand weighs less than a typical sandwich; well, at least less than one of MY typical sandwiches. It also follows you out to the hunting area, scouts the area for fresh sign, aids in the location of a tree, climbs the tree by itself, and places convenient steps strapped harmlessly to the tree trunk.

Our tree stands consisted of a piece of 2×6 nailed into the crotch of a tree at least 50 feet up, to make sure the deer wouldn’t see you. Safety belts? Safety belts were for sissies. We shinnied up the tree and used a piece of bailing twine to haul our shotgun or bow up after us. It was generally considered wise to have a shotgun or bow in the tree; not for the chance of a deer happening along, but rather because the weapon provided something to break your fall when the inevitable happened. Black-powder guns with large protruding hammer spurs and bows with razor-head arrows were preferred for this purpose.

With typical teenage enthusiasm, a typical opening morning of Iowa’s December deer season would see me on stand three hours before sunrise, shivering in the sub-zero cold, waiting for legal shooting light. With the approximate speed of a two-toed sloth on Valium, the sun would creep up over the horizon and with the light, enough warmth that I would begin to feel almost comfortable in my insulated coveralls. With comfort came the normal drowsiness associated with a 15-year old operating on exactly 12 minutes of sleep. With the drowsiness, eventually, came sleep.

Some memories stay with you, vividly, for years.

Reminiscing about hunting from a tree stand always brings to mind a wonderful dream. In the dream, I was enjoying a remarkable, floating sensation. I was adrift among the clouds, floating weightlessly above the ground. I remember thinking, isn’t this neat!  I remember, though, something about a tree… What was I doing, before I fell asleep, that involved a tree?

The memory at this point involves a vision of grains of snow among brown, dried oak and maple leaves, seen from very close up, for one reason: I generally awoke, facing downward, approximately six inches from impact. Not just any impact, either, but the sort of tooth jarring, bone-rattling IMPACT that loosens several vertebrae and has you seeing stars for several hours afterwards. It is a singularly unpleasant way to wake up, one that I don’t recommend.

My most spectacular fall involved a .22 rifle, a cliff, a river, and a squirrel.

The Chimney Rocks, circa 1975.

The Upper Iowa River winds through some of the Midwest’s most beautiful countryside. The best of the best is the Chimney Rocks area near the tiny town of Bluffton. The Chimney Rocks are a set of limestone bluffs that form rounded towers a hundred feet or more above the river.

Early one morning, my friend Jon and I were creeping along the top of the Chimney Rocks, rifles in hand, searching for gray squirrels. A barking squirrel in a large hickory had drawn my attention, and in a stalk with all the sophistication and woodcraft available to a teenage boy, I had managed to close the gap to about 30 yards. Doing this, however, had necessitated creeping along the very edge of the bluff…

The more intuitive among you, dear readers, have probably already seen this one coming.

I could see the squirrel’s tail jerking as he barked a greeting to the morning. Another step and I’d have a shot.

The structure of the Chimney Rocks was such that the edge was somewhat, well, frangible. Pieces of limestone would occasionally detach themselves from the top edge of the bluff, to splash seconds later, through six inches of water, into the gravel riverbed far, far below.

The Chimney Rocks are composed of marine limestone, formed under some primeval ocean, countless millions of years before there were squirrels, boys, or .22 rifles. Over the eons, the limestone hardened, the oceans receded, the land rose. Over that unimaginable stretch of time leading to the present, the Upper Iowa River formed, eroded though a hundred or more feet of rock in forming its present channel. The Upper Iowa River flowed along the Chimney Rocks before Indians came to what is now Iowa. When Columbus set out in three tiny ships for the New World, the Upper Iowa flowed placidly through the woods and meadows of this place, and the Chimney Rocks stood watch over the river as now. When Patrick Henry shouted about liberty and death to the Continental Congress, the Chimney Rocks stood over the river, unconcerned. When thousands of Americans went off to fight in two world wars, the Upper Iowa and the Chimney Rocks were unimpressed. It was only after all those events, after that vast, unknowable stretch of geologic time, that I came in my eye-blink of time, to hunt squirrels on the upper edge of the Chimney Rocks. On that particular stretch of the bluffs, where I crept closer to the tantalizing flick of a gray squirrel’s tail, a section of the edge of the cliff stood as it had for millennia, waiting for a seminal event in the Earth’s history.

That seminal event, of course, was my stepping on that section of the cliff top. A large section of the cliff face – the section I was standing on – chose that moment – that precise moment! After millions of years of geologic time, after all the seasons, all the events, the section of cliff face chose that moment to give way and tumble to the river a hundred feet below.

Not being entirely willing to plummet a hundred feet into the river myself, I grabbed the only lifeline offered – a two-inch sapling growing near the new edge of the cliff. I then found myself in the interesting predicament of being suspended over a vast gulf of chilly mid-western air, a hundred feet over a six-inch deep river with a hard rock bottom. I had a rapidly shrinking sapling in one hand and my rifle in the other.

The squirrel bounded to the end of his limb and looked down. I wasn’t aware until that time that squirrels could adopt an intolerably smug expression.

Several seconds later, the detached rocks pattered into the water far below.

With the usual teenage aplomb, I flung the rifle up over the edge, to free my other hand; I was unable, however, to reach the sapling with my free hand.

After several years (well, it was probably only several seconds) it occurred to me that my salvation lay in my hunting partner Jon, who still stalked tree-dwelling rodents some fifty yards away. With a voice pitched a couple of octaves higher than normal, I calmly called to him.

“Hey! I could use a hand over here, Jon!”

Jon wasn’t known as a particularly bright character, but he did possess a certain primitive slyness.

“Are you trying to get me to spook him your way?” Jon replied, referring to the squirrel. “You can’t catch me that way! I’ll be on him in a minute!”

The squirrel grinned down at me from the branch.

“Jon, just get over here!”

Jon, walking towards the sound of my voice, was rather intrigued to find a .22 rifle lying unattended on the ground. At this point, even his primitive intellect sensed something amiss.

“Say,” Jon noted, “You can’t shoot no squirrel without your rifle.”

At this point, the sapling had shrunk to approximately the diameter of 2-pound test monofilament. The squirrel made himself comfortable on the end of his limb, in anticipation of shortly seeing a teenage boy attempt to fly.

Well, to make a long story short, Jon eventually saw my hand holding onto the sapling, and my arm disappearing, strangely, over the edge of the cliff. At this point, he realized that something had to be done and with a strength born of all his summers of tossing hay bales, he got hold of my wrist and managed to haul me to safety.

As I sat a few feet back from the edge that had almost led to the early and catastrophic end to my career, gasping hard enough to strip leaves off of bushes fifty feet away, Jon handed me my .22. The squirrel, sensing a reversal in his fortunes, had long since departed.

We trudged back to Jon’s van in silence.

Finally, as he was starting his ancient and asthmatic Dodge van, Jon decided to break the silence.

“So, I guess you didn’t get a shot at him, huh?”

As the years have gone on, I’ve grown somewhat more cautious. With age comes wisdom, after all, or so I’m told. (My wife may disagree.) In Colorado, mountain terrain offers unique opportunities for some really spectacular falls while pursuing mule deer and elk. Still, my record is improving, and my id and ego don’t fight over things as they used to, perhaps because 50-something-year old bodies don’t recover from spectacular drops onto sharp rocks as well as 15-year old ones do:

EGO: “Listen, those rocks are probably pretty stable. And you’re at least ten feet from that drop off, and the slope’s not that steep. You did see an elk over there three weeks ago, remember?”

ID: “I don’t like this. That’s at least a two hundred foot drop off, and I don’t think it’s ten feet, I think it’s more like three.”

EGO: “Well, maybe you’re right. Let’s go back to camp for a sandwich.”

Some things really do improve with age!