Feeling better. Looked chemo in its hollow eyes - and decided I didn't like it. Will withdraw from the treatment. I prefer to have my wits about me as I face this new challenge in my life.
Let the stories continue.....
*****
In high school, even the hard work and boredom of farming became tolerable because I could now step into the characters I was reading about.
I had a new escape, I had exchanged my sketching for reading.
The books that caught my imagination during this time were Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Lord of the Flies by author William Golding, which confirmed for me the wicked potential of kids that I had experienced first hand, and my favorite The Deerslayer, by American novelist James Cooper.
Cooper’s book is an exciting story about the adventures of the woodsman known as Deerslayer and his Delaware Indian friend, Chingachgook. They meet at the lake to plot a rescue of a girl who has been abducted by the hostile Huron tribe. The novel presents the violence and unpredictability of life in a place where only a few hunters and hunting parties have ever set foot.
By Cooper’s descriptions of the pristine life of nature, I experienced a new appreciation for living out doors in our own nature – the farm. The bushes, the grasses, the dugouts and the buildings were a setting for many new imaginary adventures.
I tried replicating the skills of the hunters that I was reading about - moving through the bush without a sound!
In the morning I would get the cows for milking, sneaking up on them, circling downwind, approaching on my belly to see how near I could get before they’d notice me. It also made my father a little impatient wondering why it took me so long to herd the cows to the barn.
The other story that influenced me a great deal was Moby Dick, the story of the monomaniacal Captain Ahab, who on a previous voyage had his leg bitten off by the white whale Moby Dick and in all subsequent voyages Ahab was obsessed with looking for revenge on the whale.
I didn’t have a whaling ship but I did have a stone boat, a low flat sleigh of boards nailed to two 4X4 beams underneath which were cut at an angle in front that acted like skies, sliding on the ground.
The primary use of the stone boat was to pick stones off the field. Being ground level the sleigh made stone picking a lot easier as we didn’t have to lift heavy stones very high to get them onto the stone-boat – we kind of just rolled them on. This was never a fun job – but something we did on those long summer days. Hard on the back!
The second purpose for a stone boat was to help with our regular Saturday chores of shoveling manure from the barn gutters.
We milked seven to ten the cows twice a day, which meant that every cow spent about 3 – 4 hours every day of the week leaving a pile of manure and pee in the barn that had to be cleaned out every weekend!
First of all we would shovel the manure into the wheelbarrow, (wow did it smell) then dumped the load onto the stone-boat. Once the stone boat was loaded, we would hitch the horse to this stinky stone boat and she'd pull it to what we called the “manure pile” in the pasture, about 100 yards or so from the barn. Perhaps I should call it a hill that grew sometimes as much as 25 – 35 feet high during the winter. During the summer it was used as fertilizer in our garden and so on.
When I became old enough to do this rather ugly, boring mundane weekend job on my own, I began to pretend. I now had a boat and a Moby Dick challenge.
How high could I get the horse to pull that loaded stone boat up that hill?
Running alongside the stone-boat with long reins, I would encourage the horse to break into a run as we approached the incline of the hill. She was great as she got into the spirit of it and worked her way up the hill, in the end her hooves digging into the relatively soft material till she came to a stop.
Since we would be doing several loads, I pretended it was a contest to see if we could always go a bit higher than the last time!
It was a weekend contest!
Then during our annual spring runoff pond behind the barn, I tried to turn the stone boat into a raft!
If I was careful, standing at the back area to balance the weight of the chain at the front and if I wore my rubber boots because it floated just at water level, I could pole it slowly around my imagined ocean pond.
Many an imaginary battle or journey was taken on this “whale boat!”
Eventually it was too cumbersome and not fast enough for me so I would tie barrels together and build my own raft. At least this raft floated on top of the water. However, sooner or later the barrels would come apart, and many experiments ended with me being dumped into my swampy lake. I was having to go in to change clothes many times to the annoyance of my patient mother!
But the ending of my story differed from the book. In the book when the white whale, Moby Dick, is finally sighted, Ahab's hatred robs him of all caution, and the whale drags Ahab to his death beneath the sea.
Perhaps its because I wasn’t motivated with revenge or anger – I was motivated.... I’m not sure I knew what I was struggling against. What was my Moby Dyck?
All I knew was that I needed to keep struggling against the routine of farming, the deadness of the mindless chores - and keep my imagination alive.
Let the stories continue.....
*****
In high school, even the hard work and boredom of farming became tolerable because I could now step into the characters I was reading about.
I had a new escape, I had exchanged my sketching for reading.
The books that caught my imagination during this time were Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Lord of the Flies by author William Golding, which confirmed for me the wicked potential of kids that I had experienced first hand, and my favorite The Deerslayer, by American novelist James Cooper.
Cooper’s book is an exciting story about the adventures of the woodsman known as Deerslayer and his Delaware Indian friend, Chingachgook. They meet at the lake to plot a rescue of a girl who has been abducted by the hostile Huron tribe. The novel presents the violence and unpredictability of life in a place where only a few hunters and hunting parties have ever set foot.
By Cooper’s descriptions of the pristine life of nature, I experienced a new appreciation for living out doors in our own nature – the farm. The bushes, the grasses, the dugouts and the buildings were a setting for many new imaginary adventures.
I tried replicating the skills of the hunters that I was reading about - moving through the bush without a sound!
In the morning I would get the cows for milking, sneaking up on them, circling downwind, approaching on my belly to see how near I could get before they’d notice me. It also made my father a little impatient wondering why it took me so long to herd the cows to the barn.
The other story that influenced me a great deal was Moby Dick, the story of the monomaniacal Captain Ahab, who on a previous voyage had his leg bitten off by the white whale Moby Dick and in all subsequent voyages Ahab was obsessed with looking for revenge on the whale.
I didn’t have a whaling ship but I did have a stone boat, a low flat sleigh of boards nailed to two 4X4 beams underneath which were cut at an angle in front that acted like skies, sliding on the ground.
The primary use of the stone boat was to pick stones off the field. Being ground level the sleigh made stone picking a lot easier as we didn’t have to lift heavy stones very high to get them onto the stone-boat – we kind of just rolled them on. This was never a fun job – but something we did on those long summer days. Hard on the back!
The second purpose for a stone boat was to help with our regular Saturday chores of shoveling manure from the barn gutters.
We milked seven to ten the cows twice a day, which meant that every cow spent about 3 – 4 hours every day of the week leaving a pile of manure and pee in the barn that had to be cleaned out every weekend!
First of all we would shovel the manure into the wheelbarrow, (wow did it smell) then dumped the load onto the stone-boat. Once the stone boat was loaded, we would hitch the horse to this stinky stone boat and she'd pull it to what we called the “manure pile” in the pasture, about 100 yards or so from the barn. Perhaps I should call it a hill that grew sometimes as much as 25 – 35 feet high during the winter. During the summer it was used as fertilizer in our garden and so on.
When I became old enough to do this rather ugly, boring mundane weekend job on my own, I began to pretend. I now had a boat and a Moby Dick challenge.
How high could I get the horse to pull that loaded stone boat up that hill?
Running alongside the stone-boat with long reins, I would encourage the horse to break into a run as we approached the incline of the hill. She was great as she got into the spirit of it and worked her way up the hill, in the end her hooves digging into the relatively soft material till she came to a stop.
Since we would be doing several loads, I pretended it was a contest to see if we could always go a bit higher than the last time!
It was a weekend contest!
Then during our annual spring runoff pond behind the barn, I tried to turn the stone boat into a raft!
If I was careful, standing at the back area to balance the weight of the chain at the front and if I wore my rubber boots because it floated just at water level, I could pole it slowly around my imagined ocean pond.
Many an imaginary battle or journey was taken on this “whale boat!”
Eventually it was too cumbersome and not fast enough for me so I would tie barrels together and build my own raft. At least this raft floated on top of the water. However, sooner or later the barrels would come apart, and many experiments ended with me being dumped into my swampy lake. I was having to go in to change clothes many times to the annoyance of my patient mother!
But the ending of my story differed from the book. In the book when the white whale, Moby Dick, is finally sighted, Ahab's hatred robs him of all caution, and the whale drags Ahab to his death beneath the sea.
Perhaps its because I wasn’t motivated with revenge or anger – I was motivated.... I’m not sure I knew what I was struggling against. What was my Moby Dyck?
All I knew was that I needed to keep struggling against the routine of farming, the deadness of the mindless chores - and keep my imagination alive.
“Just living is not enough.
One must have sunshine,
freedom, and a little flower.”
– Hans Christian Andersen
One must have sunshine,
freedom, and a little flower.”
– Hans Christian Andersen
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