The Good Old Days

The Good Old Days
                When my family moved to a new home in the southern Upper Peninsula I was a third grader. I spent the next five years living only several hundred yards from the north city limits and a wonderful outdoor world that captured my soul. I have written about this before but the big transformation came when I entered the eighth grade and we moved to a new home out in the county and out of any city limits.  This changed my life from that of a “city kid” to that of a “country kid” and the significance of this will become clearer in a moment.
                Country kids were perceived by the city kids as being wild, unmannerly, quick to rile and generally free spirited when compared to our tamer city brethren. We also had to ride school buses into the city to go to junior high and high school which those more elite city kids had no need for because they lived close enough to a school to walk or bike ride or they got rides from parents or friends etc. Country kids tended to be more “outdoorsy” and prone to do things like fish or hunt or tramp around in the woods for want of something more refined like the proverbial “city slicker”.
                I had already developed an outdoor attitude from being so close to the city limits and rural America from my time in the city but moving out into the county opened up a million more opportunities to be outdoors. I had hundreds of acres of farmland and woods to explore and hunt and fish on and it was like an awakening or rebirth for my spirit and my continued love of the outdoors in general and hunting in particular. I was given access to all kinds of small game like partridge, rabbits, squirrels and pheasants and my being was profoundly changed when I became a deer hunter. Never again would I ever be content to dwell far from a rural setting with forest and wilderness all around.
                One particular person who helped harden my resolve to be an outdoor enthusiast for the rest of my life was a teacher in one of my ninth grade classes. I was in a biology-science class and our teacher was a new young teacher (who will remain nameless) from some little known community in Michigan but he was an avid hunter and outdoor expert, at least as much of an expert as I had ever met previously. He often gave tutorials in class on animal biology and usually brought specimens like deer antlers or mounted birds into class to augment our discussions. One time he even brought a fully cooked turkey to class and showed us how to “dissect” it for thanksgiving dinner!
               He had a grant or something from one of the large paper mills to work on the study of animal damage to trees in the vast tracts of paper mill forest or more accurately, paper pulp timber. This study would ultimately be used in his Master’s thesis later. He often talked at length in class about how animals like deer and rabbits chewed young saplings such as aspen or maple and that the impact of this tree predation was not very well documented. One of the other animals he was focusing on was the porcupine or “timber pig” as they are sometimes referred to. He was documenting what trees they liked to chew on and how much damage a single 'porky' could do in a forest.
                 During the weeks leading up to our Christmas break that year he solicited a few of us who were more inclined to wander the winter woods than most and proposed a field trip to harvest some specimens for his research. This would aid his research and be a plus for us lucky participants to possibly earn extra credit in his class. He arranged a bus for transportation to and from a vast track of mill land and we all got permission slips for our parents to sign which, I might add, included a disclaimer that we would be using firearms to harvest the specimens. While my memory is spotty as to exactly how many of us participated it was somewhere around six or seven students (both male and female, since country girls were also well attuned to the outdoors), our teacher and a driver (an avid hunter with chauffer’s license) who was also a student chaperone as required back then for field trips.
                We spent the entire Saturday from early morning until almost dark tramping the snow covered woods identifying the various trees, looking for animal chew damage and droppings, especially porcupine droppings because porcupines are very messy eaters often dropping a huge pile of waste below their aerial dining room and they often spend days or even weeks eating in a big tree. Best of all, we each got a shot at a porcupine for a specimen. The .22 rifle and ammunition were provided by our teacher and we were re-indoctrinated on firearms safety, even though we were all relatively experienced shooters. The teacher also did field dissections on one or two of the specimens to show us the flow of tree bark into waste through the digestive system and we were able to compare actual outdoor experiences with a textbook description. Our participation was awarded extra credit when we all wrote a report on our learning experience in the woods that day and turned it into the teacher when class resumed. An added bonus was the pizza party our teacher paid for on our way home!
                 About a year after this trip my science teacher moved to Alaska and wrote back several times to let us know how much he loved it. He was working on a second Master’s and also a PhD! Over the next fifty or so years I lost touch with him but recently was reminded of his class and this long ago special project when an old classmate sent me his obituary. He had lived a long and rewarding life teaching in his adopted Alaska and spent a lot of that life hunting the wilderness he loved and had inspired his students to love as well.     
                In today’s atmosphere of paranoia and fear of anything concerning weapons a field trip such as this one I have described will never be possible ever again. Our nation’s children have been taught that they must fear firearms and their use and they are being slowly indoctrinated into believing all animals are as human as we are and therefore must be protected from harm such as posed by hunting and fishing. If my old teacher’s legacy to his students is lost to future generations it is a sad thing. I doubt if any of our kids or grandkids will ever have the experiences like I had in my early life.
Chris