In my father's color slides taken during the sixties, there are two photos; one my Dad took of me standing on a country road on a fall day with a shotgun across my arms, and another that I took of him in the same pose. That was a scene from one of the best times of my childhood. My Dad used to take me hunting in the fall to a place in Littleton, Massachusetts.
Leaving my mother and sisters behind, we would leave early in the morning from our house in Watertown and drive through Belmont, past McLean’s Hospital and onto Route 2, passing, each time, the familiar landmarks which were, for a boy, the opening up of the wide world, passing the granite walls of the road cuts oozing ice, stopping at Howard Johnson’s for coffee and doughnuts, going around the rotary at the Concord Reformatory and then driving west to the woods and farmland of the Nashoba valley.
We would always park the car at the same spot at a farm where there was a dirt access road through the fields leading to the woods beyond. We would take the guns out of the trunk of the car, careful to leave the shotgun unloaded and open and walk down the road between barbed wire fences and manure piles. We walked on cornstubble, crunching the stalks and frozen, half rotten apples, and fallen leaves, between juniper trees and under the great old pines into the wild to walk all day and see, as Thoreau said, what men who stay at home in parlors never dream of.
It was cold starting out but I would soon warm up from walking. The sun would rise up and the ice in the edge of the dirt road would melt. The little ponds would sometimes make whooping sounds like someone striking a large piece of sheet metal. When we stopped to rest, the chickadees would fill the branches in the pines near ground level calling chee dee dee to each other and the bluejays would call from higher up. I became attached to the sounds and sensations of the woods and to the easy measured pace of traveling by foot, fortified against the cold by an inner furnace. The woods were a place of escape, a place of freedom and peace. There were old stonewalls, overgrown gravel pits, rusty farm machinery; harrows and plows, and abandoned cars usually filled with rusty bullet holes. They were relics, to me, of a distant and mysterious past; these signs of a long history of people working the land gave me a sense of place in time no less than if we had walked through the ruins of Rome and Greece.
He was careful to teach me to carry and use a gun with great care and responsibility. He told me, never point a gun, loaded or unloaded at another person. The first time I shot it I aimed it at a little dead tree as he stood behind me to brace me. I still remember the copse of woods and the uneven ground under my feet and the feeling of dread and anticipation, the squeeze of the trigger, the leap of the barrel and bang of the gunstock against my shoulder, dead leaves fluttering, and the giddy feeling as my brain tried to piece together what had happened; the blast by my head exploded the world for a brief instant. It was a thrill I’ll never forget, I think I was seven years old.
He knew what gunshot wounds could do to the human body. He had served in Graves Registration in the army during the second world war, which meant that he had to take the bodies off the battlefield, prepare them for burial and bury them. The war to me was like those old cars from some lost age, but was, no doubt, hardly passed to him. The boots that he wore only on these trips were from the army; he had worn them in France and in Belgium. And his field glasses were a German officer’s, for they buried German as well as American dead, taken from the battlefield, an officer whose brothers and sons and parents were likely still living. Older men stack up decades in their memories like old newspapers but I had little perspective on time and place when I was scarcely ten.
By noon, we were pretty hungry and had walked probably for four hours, so we would make our way back to the car and drive into Littleton to an old time diner in a silver-bodied railroad car to have lunch. My dad's favorite was liver and onions, I would have a hamburg or a clam roll and a chocolate frappe. There is nothing like good food after working up an appetite.
After lunch, we would hunt on the other side of the road where we parked where there was an apple orchard. My dad explained to me how the pheasants would run ahead of you in the grass until they ran into an obstacle and then they would take flight. I remember many times scaring them up into the air with their loud drumming wings, and then the blast of the shotgun and my heart pounding. He sometimes came home with a pheasant or a duck when he went hunting with his friends, but I don't remember ever bringing one home when we went together, and I don't think I cared. We rarely, if ever, shot an animal just tin cans and dead trees.
We estimated we walked ten or twelve miles a day, so by the late afternoon, I was tired, the light and my energy fading rapidly. There are two things that mean a lot to children; one is routine or repetition because it creates anticipation and a sense of security, the other one is candy. My father knew how to provide both. A short way up the road heading home we always stopped at the country store. It had real cracker barrels and cheese wrapped in cheesecloth and it had a glass display counter filled with bins of different candies for a penny a piece. He would let me pick out what I wanted and I would eat it all on the way home. We sat quietly in the car and hardly said a word retracing our route to Watertown, looking out at a long line of red tail lights, going home to a smaller more confined world.
That was what we did each autumn, from the time I was 5 or 6 until I was in my teens. I scarcely think about it now, about how much that simple activity meant to me. About the age of fifteen I lost the ability to talk easily with my parents. I entered adulthood with mixed feelings of anger and love for my parents which took me years to sort out. But I had something I think many boys never had and that's a father who spent time with him and taught him about the world and his place in it and who taught him about himself. And who gave his son the things that boys need from their fathers and who really knew how to make him happy.