GETTING IT RIGHT

"I'm gonna kick your ass this year!"

Not exactly what you expect to hear booming at you from across the river in the early-morning stillness of Oregon's wine country. From my fishing boat, I recognized Mickey. He lives right there on the river and works the vineyards that stretch back from its steep, wooded banks.

While fishing last fall, I had chatted frequently with Mickey, who keeps his beat-up metal rowboat upside-down on the river bank at the base of the 30-foot embankment below his simple camper. Mickey had watched me catch lots of coho salmon throughout the season while he caught few. I was happy to share my secret with him -- orange Kwikfish, size 11. Apparently, this year Mickey was stocked up with the numinous plugs and ready. Ready to kick my ass.

Yeah, we'll see about that, is what I thought. What I shouted back, changing the subject, was, "How'd you keep your boat safe in last week's rains?" Mickey related his challenges of dragging his clunky boat halfway up the hillside, out of reach of the extra ten feet of river that the storms had brought. Water levels were just getting back to normal.

The river is an odd culture of professional fishing guides and their clients, local good-ole-boys, now and then a TV fishing show guy (see Hawg Man), and ever-hopeful newcomers -- all of them addicted to one degree or another to catching big fish. Plus, there's Mickey.

Sound carries over water so you hear things. From mid-river, I eavesdropped on Mickey and his two friends from Hawaii who had been salmon fishing with him that morning. His visitors seemed in a hurry to leave and hadn't caught any fish, though Mickey had caught five. One was a 25-pound hawg chinook, bigger than anything I'd ever caught out there, so who knows? Maybe Mickey really is gonna kick my ass this year.

Despite his friends' poor fishing luck, the river was filled with migrating coho salmon, freshly arrived from the ocean and silver as brand-new quarters. Hooking one of those magnificent fish, full of energy for its suicidal spawning journey, is like snagging a dervish on acid. There's nothing like a giant, unseen fish, hooked and pissed, peeling line as your reel's braking-drag screams beautiful music. It's a connection to a primal piece of the Earth.

A fish you don't even hook, however, can be almost as exciting -- the ones that do a fish drive-by. At the end of a long cast as the fluorescent lure glows slowly into view from the gray-green depths, and just as you're about to pull it from the water, a silver torpedo materializes, tracking the wobbling Kwikfish. First, the predatory face appears, then its great body, and in an instant the salmon harmlessly bumps the top of your lure with its nose and vanishes. Gone. Like that fish was just fucking with you.

A few days later, I noticed someone else had taken out Mickey's rowboat to fish, and eventually our watery paths crossed. I met Josh, a friend of Mickey's. Josh sounded possessive towards the river, as in, "We keep an eye on fish caught in our river."

He and I engaged in the ritualistic sharing of fishing success or not. I had caught seven salmon the day before. "That's a good day on this river," Josh confirmed. "That's a good day," I concurred.

Josh looked sideways at me, "Wait a minute. I think Mickey has told me about you. Orange Kwikfish, right?" His tone became pleasantly deferential after that.

Josh was fishing with this garish purple plug. "Guys yesterday said it was the hot color. I don't get it," he confessed. After our conversation, he switched to an orange Kwikfish.

I'd like to say that Josh immediately caught a giant salmon on my recommended lure, but that didn't happen. Myself, I managed to catch a few fish over the course of the morning, but it was slow.

From a distance, I watched Josh hopelessly snagged on the rocky bottom, then finally, give up and snap his line. Something told me that he had just lost his only orange Kwikfish, and as I fished past him, he complained that was so.

"I've got one that's all chipped up and you can have it if you want," I said. "I don't think the chips really matter to the fish."

He pounced on my offer. I dug out the battered Kwikfish, motored close, and tossed him the lure, noticing that I had upgraded its set of treble hooks. "It's got super-duper hooks on it, too," I said, matter-of-factly. "I'm sure it's caught lots of fish."

Later, as I motored toward the boat ramp to leave, I again crossed paths with Josh, now a half-mile downriver from Mickey's place. "I just missed one," he beamed.

As he reeled in his line, I saw my old orange Kwikfish with its distinctive chips. "And on the magic lure," I said. "But now you've got a long row back upstream."

Josh seemed bemused and grinned broadly: "I would love to just row all day long."

Josh thanked me again for giving him the lure. But why not? After all, the only way I learned how to catch those sometimes-finicky coho salmon was because this old guy in a beat-up blue fishing boat loved to talk and pointed me in the right direction some years back (see I Saved Bambi). Ken Moore was his name. "Just remember Sears," he explained the first time he introduced himself.

It appeared to me that Ken Moore's very favorite thing in life was to anchor his blue boat in the middle of one of those invisible travel lanes used by migrating salmon, toss his line downstream behind his boat, and sit there all day long, days at a time, his hours broken rarely by a big fish, but frequently by conversation with anyone within earshot in another boat, or with fishing friends via cell phone, and all in the top-of-your-lungs voice that sometimes accompanies old men. Eh? What's that you say?

I haven't seen Ken Moore for the past few fishing seasons, and I fear his many health issues may have overcome his passion for fishing. I often remind myself of the ancient piscatorial scripture: "The gods do not deduct from man's allotted span the hours spent in fishing." Maybe Ken Moore had already passed his allotted span, but for his fishing.

Not surprisingly, most guys fishing on weekdays, which is the only time I go out, are old retired guys. Like me. Unlike me, however, they bring to the river lots of health complaints and a need to share with anyone who will listen.

Waiting in the barely daylight in the parking lot to launch my boat, Jerry, one of the local guides told me about his recent bout with gall stones and pancreatitis. "Almost killed me," he explained in some detail.

It's not as if we were complete strangers or anything. I had, after all, talked to him a couple of times on the river two days earlier. I guess after you've swapped fishing yarns, anything goes.

Catching a big salmon, especially if it happens to be an infrequent experience, can turn normally taciturn, burly old men into gushing, chattering teenage girls. For minutes afterwards, they relive their adrenaline-fueled, big-fish experience, which often included stumbling over each other and shouted, contradictory instructions as the fish screeches off and the reel sizzles, then a string of profane superlatives -- "that's one big-ass son-of-a-bitch" -- after the leviathan is sighted emerging from the deep, followed by clumsy stabs to net the mad fish. Then, a racket of clattering and chaos as the captured salmon flops and flounces about the metal boat.

Finally, a distinctive thunk...thunk as a billyclub "priest" delivers the fish's last rites, followed by unpriestly high-fives.

I was fishing near a quite-small boat packed with a middle-aged man and his quite-large father wedged into the transom seat, facing the back of the boat. The son hooked a big chinook salmon on an underpowered fishing rod and fought the fish for many minutes. "That's one of them 30, 40-pounders," father prognosticated. Son readily agreed.

Anticipating son's victory over fish, father twisted his corpulence to reach their landing net, and his foot kicked open the boat's drain plug. Water poured in.

One might think: so stick the plug back in. Right? It's not that simple if you can't even see, let alone reach your own feet. As son's fish-battle waged, fat father struggled to reach and replace the boat plug. He motored to the river's edge, which was really no help since it was a rock wall abutting 20-feet-deep water.

Somehow, however, father managed to stop the flood before too much water got in, and they successfully netted the salmon and brought it aboard, thrashing and crashing about.

Thunk...thunk.

"What do you figure it weighs?" I asked from my nearby boat.

Son studied his deceased fish carefully. "Thirty-five, I figure."

He pulled a scales from his tackle box and hoisted the three-foot-long fish. He screwed up his face. "It's giving an error at 20 pounds," he mused.

I offered to let him use my digital scales, which measures up to 50 pounds. I brought my boat close, and he took my scales and held up his prize -- a late-season, fairly dark chinook salmon. A big fish, no doubt, but not one of the river's mythical hawgs.

He read the new weight: almost exactly 20 pounds. Pssssft! You could feel his deflation.

"What had you guessed?" he asked me.

"Oh, I was guessing about 25," I lied.

A week later, I ran into the father-son team at the boat ramp. Son had positioned their rag-tag, baby-blue boat next to shore just-so, and father struggled mightily to lift his right leg over the gunwale to get in. Son steadied him, actually helping father hoist his immense calf. I noticed for the first time that father's transom seat was tricked out like a fishing throne, with thick, beige cushioning on the seat and a matching tall, padded back.

We swapped recent fishing lore and lies and as they pushed away, I added, "Don't sink your boat this time."

Not even a smile.

Fisherman ineptitude is one of the ways that fish escape. Attention drifts. Fishing lines get nicked; hooks get dulled on rocks. Landing nets get tangled. In other words, big fish often get away. In fact, once a salmon takes the bait, I'd say it's got about a one-in-three chance of getting away. It's not easy getting everything right.

You have to remember the context: you may have been out there fishing for hours, even days, without catching anything. Then out of the blue -- wham! -- a fish comes out of nowhere and smacks the bait.

One morning, Josh told me about just such an experience, and I replied that it happens to everyone. I added, "You get lackadaisical."

As our boats drifted our ways, I pondered what the fuck kind of word that was to use. I wondered if "lackadaisical" had ever been uttered before on this river in all of human history. I watched a mink with a snake in its mouth run along the riverbank.

At that point, including my prior fishing trip two days earlier which had been a complete bust, I had been casting for six hours without a fish. That's when -- wham! Right at the boat in plain sight a coho hit my orange Kwikfish. Of course it got away. I got lackadaisical.

Just below that stretch of coho water lies calm, deep river that holds both chinook and coho until late in the fall. It’s easy fishing so gets a fair amount of pressure from guys slowly trolling plugs. They also drift gobs of fish eggs under bobbers. That’s what I watched a guide with his bumbling clients doing, and one of them caught a nasty, dark chinook, and they all found it grand.

What the hell. Can't argue with success. I abandoned my orange Kwikfish for eggs. Damned if I didn’t soon catch my first fish of the day, a lovely coho salmon. As I bent to release it -- you can't keep any wild (non-hatchery raised) coho there -- I was shocked to see that it had no adipose fin on its back. That marked it as a rare, fin-clipped, hatchery-raised fish, suitable for harvest. And eating.

"Son of a bitch," I exclaimed loudly.

Thunk...thunk.

Hours later, there I was, still drifting eggs at 2:00 in the warming afternoon, down to my last two stinky, gooey gobs of fish eggs, and ready to call it a day. I had caught no more salmon. From what I could tell, everyone else had given up and gone home.

I use my sonar fish-finder to know the depth of water I'm fishing, but pay little attention to actual fish blips on the screen. This time, however, as I drifted in 24 feet of water, I saw unmistakable images of three large fish right on the bottom below me. I flipped my next-to-the-last gob of eggs upstream and let it sink back to where I guessed those ghosts lay. Sure enough, one sucked it in, and I had a fabulous time in the autumn sunshine, all alone on the river, landing a beautiful 14-pound chinook hen.

Thunk...thunk.

Fishing over for the day, I headed upstream with my two-salmon limit. There I found Josh futilely casting a brand-new green Kwikfish, the hot color of the previous day, he explained to me. I asked if he would do me a favor and use my iPhone to take my picture, and he readily agreed.

On a grassy point in the shade, I cleaned my two salmon, bagged their eggs for later curing into bait, drank a Corona, and ate lunch in the shade. Santana played under a blue October sky. Light filtered through the hillside of bigleaf maples, resplendent in their Northwest ochers, rusts, and greens, and mirrored perfectly in the river's flat sheen.

 



For long moments, I basked in the contentment that comes from being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, and doing exactly the right thing.

 

* * *

 

I finally ran into Mickey again out on the river the other day. The chinook run was winding down and the fishing slow. We agreed that we needed some rain. I mentioned that I had been chatting the past few weeks with his friend, Josh, and had given him an old orange Kwikfish.

"Yeah, I know. I'm using it right now," Mickey said, pausing on his beat-up wooden oars and holding up his fishing rod. Sure enough. Hanging on the end of his line was my old, chipped-up lure. "In the last couple of days I've caught five chinook on it."

Has Mickey kicked my ass this year, like he threatened early-on? I guess that depends a lot on how each of us measures our success on the river. Besides, this year still has a few weeks of fishing left in it. Anything could happen.

 

AN UH-OH DAY

It didn't start out as an "uh-oh" day. It started as a perfect one. Blissful, even.

Alone on the river, anchored in glittering rapids, I was hunting the first of migrating fall salmon. The sun had been up an hour, but remained hidden behind a distant fog bank. Currents gurgled under my boat.

While I waited for signs of fishy movement, my mind wandered and I followed a hawk jetting at treetop level, headed upriver. A peregrine falcon, it picked the highest limb in a tree adjacent to my boat to land.

Through binoculars, I could see his trademark black mask, which cuts glare to his active eyes constantly hunting the landscape below and sky about. I memorized his details in close-up so when I returned to fishing, my imagination could fill in the details of that large gray bird, perhaps 250 feet away, if measured my-eye-to-his-eye.

Something about being in a boat makes you largely unthreatening to the river's wildlife. The hawks, herons, and little birdies, the beaver and river otter -- they seem to get used to hapless fishermen like me.

From the opposite bank's brambles, a wrentit bubbled its song -- like a bouncing ball if the ball made the sound of a flute at each accelerating hop. To accompany him, I played my new CD for the first time:

"River's strong, you can't swim inside it
...a little bit of summer's what the whole year's all about"
(John Mayer, "Wildfire," Paradise Valley)

I paused, trying to preserve that perfect moment, but captured only a fragment in the picture I posted to Facebook:

And, ok, the scene wasn't quite perfect. A big fish, even one just splashing on by, would have been a nice touch. I concentrated hard on casting to invisible salmon, drifting gobs of cured orange salmon eggs along the rocky bottom and through a narrow shoot on the wide river, an underwater cleft that forces any migrating fish to within casting distance.

I branded my yet-to-show fish as Godot Chinookie. Like Estragon, however, I waited in vain for my Godot. I had hoped the prior day's soaking rain, nearly unheard of in August in western Oregon, would have stirred the salmon to start their mysterious flight from relative safety in the Pacific Ocean, sixty miles downstream, to their spawning waters far upstream. My job was to intercept in mid-flight their reckless, suicidal rush to spawn and die. Luck had a lot to do with it -- mine, that is, not the salmon's. And mine was about to run out.

Something spooked the vultures, still on their treetop roosts and waiting for the sun to warm their long black-feathered wings. They awkwardly flapped airborne, a dozen or more suddenly overhead and soaring effortlessly. In all that ruckus, the peregrine slipped away, off to do his falcon business elsewhere.

Moments later, a red-shouldered hawk appeared at the same sentinel, but seemed more intent on introspective preening than hunting, ignoring the harassment from a flycatcher. A pair of black-tailed deer wandered along the bank, now and then giving me indifferent glances. All was well.

It's not like I didn't catch any fish. I did. The smallmouth bass fishing was terrific, and I caught dozens and kept six, taking filets to freeze for winter and leaving the carcasses for those carrion eaters shadowing me above.

Besides, even with no salmon, how could I feel cheated on such a day? It was, indeed, the perfect morning. And then it wasn't.

Before quitting for the day, I motored far upstream, enjoying the sunshine and solitude. As I turned to head back and gunned the outboard, it responded with unnatural guttural rattling.

Uh, oh.

Maybe something simple? After pulling the engine's cover, I discovered a loose screw on the cover over the flywheel, and obviously the problem. Whew! I was so confident of my simple fix that I stored away my tools, settled back, and cranked open the engine for home.

Uh, oh.

This was no rattling plastic cover. This was some serious clanking inside the motor. Miles from the boat ramp, I puttered back very slowly. If the motor died, at least I was heading down current. Worst case, I could always drift back to car.

Except for those shallow rapids where I had started my day that had seemed so perfect just minutes earlier. Isn't that how it sometimes goes? The way a perfect moment in life can go to hell in an instant?

Anyway, to get through those rapids safely, I needed to get the boat up on plane -- meaning, go fast and skim over the top of the barely submerged rocks. Either that or bounce off boulders and bang and clang through the rapids with little control.

So I punched it, the engine rattled and protested, but then, suddenly, sounded almost normal, and I flew the last few miles to within sight of the boat ramp. Was that it? Had my crisis fixed itself? Hope springs eternal. I slowed, then stopped mid-river.

Uh, oh.

The engine barely fired back up and clanked worse than ever. I limped in and home.

* * *

At the boat repair shop the next day, I explained my plight. I proffered the culprit my father-in-law had suggested: ethanol in the gas had messed things up. The service guy wasn't impressed:

"Naw, that's what everyone tries to blame for everything. Not likely. More likely mechanical. We'll just have to see."

"Could be a blown engine," he added helpfully. "At some point, you gotta figure, why put money into ten-year-old technology. Think about a new Honda four-stroke."

Later, I mentioned that possibility to my wife, and she asked how much a new engine could cost. I professed complete ignorance. "Ballpark," she pressed.

I thought hard. "Maybe eight," I said.

She seemed taken aback, but conceded, "It is what it is."

That evening as we sipped wine on our deck in the sunset, I did a quick Google check on prices for a new Honda 50 hp outboard.

"Not as bad as I thought," I said. "Probably around sixty-five with the jet drive."

I thought she was going to choke. She looked confused. "Wait. Sixty-five. What do you mean? Hundred?"

Uh, oh.

"When you said 'eight,' I thought you meant eight hundred. I thought that was a lot."

It was so wrong, but I couldn't help myself. I laughed out loud. "Eight hundred?! If it was that, I'd go out and buy a new engine tomorrow."

Was that a tear?

Uh, oh.

I expected that it would take a week before I learned what was wrong with my poor boat. But the very next morning as I was driving to town, I got a call from the boat shop. Then fifteen minutes of tension until I got off the freeway and could listen to the voicemail.

Uh, oh.

I drove straight to the shop. There sat my boat, cylinders exposed. One was quite obviously fried; its piston had a hole burned in it. Kevin, the mechanic, tried to explain what had happened, but he had never seen anything like it and none of the possibilities he considered made complete sense. He told me stories about how reliable Yamaha motors usually are, which was very little solace, to be honest.

I learned more than I ever wanted to know about ethanol-in-fuel-caused problems, and I must say, I'm still not completely convinced that's the issue.

After we talked through the options for repairs, I said to Kevin, who by now had gained my trust and confidence, "Let me just ask you straight up, Kevin. What would you do?"

We agreed that replacing the engine's guts made the most sense, more than trying to repair the broken pieces, and about half the price of a brand new engine.

Maybe Kevin can figure out what went wrong when he takes everything apart to fix it. Not that it matters all that much. I've already decided, whether or not my father-in-law was really right, that I'm going to take his advice and pay the extra for ethanol-free gas from now on.

By the way, my father-in-law was very sympathetic when I told him the diagnosis. He resisted the totally justifiable urge to say "I told you so."

* * *

This sucks. Not having my boat, especially at the start of the chinook run, is awful. It reminds me of when I hit that damned peccary pig down in Texas and got stuck in that god-awful state for weeks while waiting for my car to get fixed. (See The Pecos Pig.)

Kevin has all the parts for my boat engine ordered and on the way. He figures I can be back in the water within three weeks. A lot poorer, to be sure, but what you gonna do? Which brings me to the only moral of this story that I've been able to come up with:

Shit happens.

"BARE NAKED WAYNE"

Bare Naked Wayne, my book of memoirs, was just published online.  You can download it in full in your preferred ebook format. It's completely free:
http://smashwords.com/books/view/301945

I hope my Preface and Table of Contents, below,  will pique your curiosity:

              Preface

Here is the life of Wayne -- sometime environmentalist and one-time land developer, Jesus freak and atheist, hippie-mailman draft dodger and newspaper reporter, recluse and family guy.

I like to write stories, and these are the best ones I know. All are true, insofar as it's possible to tell the bare naked truth about yourself.

This ebook tells of my miserable, preacher's-kid youth and my search for purpose in life, which turned me into a prominent environmental rabble-rouser in the Great Lakes region in the 1970s and 1980s.

I've chronicled colorful characters I met along the way, such as Michigan's conservation behemoth and my boss for a decade, Tom Washington, and my friend and provocateur extraordinaire, Abbie Hoffman. I describe the karmic price I paid for bad behavior; my retributive tab included being for way too long the sixth husband of a wacko white witch.

My stories are frank, sometimes raw or vulgar, and occasionally embarrassing (e.g., "Fortunately, my horrid taste in clothing took some of the focus off my hideous head."). I cut out only a couple of good stories that I could have told. One was in deference to my parents' memory; another had to do with my uncertainty about the legal statute of limitations in Michigan. You can understand.

I wrote this memoir for myself, first, but I also wrote for my family and friends, letting them in on my perspective of events that may have affected their own lives. Even if you are a total stranger, however, I expect you will find something here to entertain you. Consider, for example, that Uncle Sam once officially diagnosed me as a "non-aggressive sociopathic sex deviant (with a hernia)."

Writing a memoir is a self-indulgent undertaking. After all, everyone has stories; some are interesting, some not. In picking which of mine to tell, I followed author Elmore Leonard's rule: "I try to leave out the parts that people skip."

These stories come from the first half of my life; for my next book, I'm working on stories from the second half -- some painful, some lovely, and filled with surprises, successes and failures, and more characters.

"What mystery lies within." That was the caption on my high school senior yearbook picture. All my life I've saved letters, journals, pictures, and memories; always in the back of my mind was the expectation of this moment late in life when I would use them to try to unravel that mystery.

I know that others may remember some of the events here differently. If you don't like the way I've told my stories, then write your own.

 

--April 1, 2013 - Cottage Grove, Oregon

Senior Yearbook - 1964
Bendle High School - Flint, Michigan

 

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Growing Up with Jesus
-----Dr. Dino
-----Born on the Fourth of July
-----We Eat on Picnic Tables
-----The Great Commission
-----Victorious Christian Youth
-----Schmidt for God
-----Sisters in a Nutshell
-----My Father's Son

Chapter 2: Roots
-----Dad Talked to God
-----Mom Married a Guy Who Talked to God
-----Happily Ever After
-----What War?

Chapter 3: First Love
-----Light My Fire
-----Summer of Love
-----Hippies, Not Communists

Chapter 4: Looking for Wayne
-----Goodbye, Vietnam
-----Bad Shit
-----Living Life My Way
-----Summer Days -- 1969
-----God Sends Maggots
-----California Dreamin'
-----My Wheel of Karma Turns
-----Epiphany

Chapter 5: Looking for Love

Chapter 6: Looking for Work
-----Small World
-----Dead Ends
-----Thank God for LSD

Chapter 7: Tilting at Windmills
-----Tom Washington Shit in My Hat
-----The Fij
-----Ring-around-the-Collar
-----Politicians, Pony Tails, and Liberace Soap
-----Purple Paws
-----I Burn Miss Utah at the Stake
-----Drains, Sex, and Farts
-----Freeways and Hanging Ropes
-----Saving the Great Lakes
-----I Wore Abbie Hoffman's Coat
-----Not the Last Rat Off
-----Speaking in Tongues

Chapter 8: Just Open a Vein
-----Fake Fred, Secret Salaries, and Rat-tailed Maggots
-----The Nature of Michigan
-----My Writing Life

Chapter 9: Season of the Witch
-----Warning Signs
-----Compared to Fucking What?
-----Fuck Me
-----What the Fuck?!
-----Why the Fuck Not?
-----"I Am Not a Cunt"
-----What Was That?

Postscript

 

Download a free copy of Bare Naked Wayne at:
http://smashwords.com/books/view/301945

 Available formats include Kindle and Epub (for iPad/iBook/iPhone and most ebook reading apps).

 

# # #

THE DEATH OF MISS BUFFY

Home from routine errands, I paused in our front yard to admire three little Townsend's warblers gorging on suet, the brilliant yellow-and-black birds a happy contrast to the grays and moss greens of Oregon winter.

Meanwhile, in our backyard, tragedy awaited. Miss Buffy, our favorite hen and our sweet, fluffy pet, had vanished. Assuming she had flown the coop, I quickly scoured the neighborhood, clicking the call I use when feeding treats, but to no avail. Finally, I discovered her limp body in a hidden corner of our fenced yard.

Through my tears, which came and went for the remainder of the day, I quickly buried her. Best guess, she succumbed to an internally obstructed or broken egg. Damned chickens, the way they can get to you.

My last encounter with a dead chicken had been on an Easter Sunday morning a few years ago, after our daughter and son-in-law's dog got loose and killed the two favorite pampered chickens of a family living up Rat Creek Road. The bereaved family had grabbed the dog, got Kristen and Troy's number from its collar, and called them with some veiled threats. I drove Troy to their isolated farm and had stood in their muddy driveway under my umbrella in a drenching rain while Troy negotiated the release of his chicken-killing dog. I tried clumsily to sympathize with the owners for their senseless loss, but I didn't have chickens then and couldn't really understand.

As for the death of our own Miss Buffy, we decided to spare our grandsons the story during their visit that afternoon. We had agreed to baby-sit while their parents went to Eugene on business. That evening as Troy and I talked, he agreed that Miss Buffy's demise was inexplicable. "If anyone ever gave chickens a perfect place to live, it was you," he told me, and I admitted that was true.

I had spent some time that afternoon considering the options for replacing Miss Buffy, come spring when the feed stores get their shipments of baby chicks, but hadn't made any decisions. Maybe I should also get rid of Miss Connie, our bitch-chicken that kept pecking big bare spots from feathers of the remaining three hens. Only amiable Miss Buffy had been spared her torture. What to do now?

"Maybe chickens are like kids," I told Troy. "Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to raise them perfectly, bad things happen to good ones. And sometimes, some of them have fucked-up problems that you can't fix.

"Unlike chickens, though, you don't get the option with kids of trading in the problem ones," I added. "Maybe my chickens are a metaphor for my kids and I should just make the best of the ones I've got."

It reminded me of that old joke,

. . .you know, a guy walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, hey doc, my brother's crazy! He thinks he's a chicken. Then the doc says, why don't you turn him in? Then the guy says, I would but I need the eggs. I guess that's how I feel about relationships. They're totally crazy, irrational, and absurd, but we keep going through it because we need the eggs. (Woody Allen, Annie Hall)

 The next evening Eva and I had dinner with her cousin, John, and his wife and talked about chickens and other recent animal adventures. John manages a gentleman farm with more than 200 Angus cattle. Plus, a coop full of chickens. "What's one more? Just bring her out," he said of my dilemma with Miss Connie, our bitch-chicken.

And that's just what I did the following day. In about two months, we'll get two or three new, cute little chicks to raise and add to our urban flock. And why not? After all, chickens aren't kids.

I'm hoping for the best for our orphaned Miss Connie, but I can't say it was easy walking away. After letting her settle in with twenty or so older hens in her new, rustic digs, John and I went back to see how she was adjusting. She certainly wasn't picking any fights, and was hanging out alone. You wonder if she knew she had blown a good thing.

Immediately recognizing my voice, she came over, flapped up on a railing at nearly eye level, and just looked at me. I talked to her for a time, petting her back and neck, something she had never let me do even one time before. I could see the plea in her eyes, "Can we go home now, Dad? Is this play-date over yet?"

I apologized and took my leave. I can't tell if my remaining three hens with their little pea brains are glad to have her gone, or are lonely for their two bygone sisters, but I'm pretty certain that getting Miss Connie out of their lives will be for the best.

Meanwhile, our Miss Loco has gone all broody, so is laying no eggs for the time being. Since she was at the bottom of the pecking order, maybe the break will let her recover from her constant plucking by now-banished Miss Connie. Which leaves Miss Coco and Miss Aussie for the egg-laying duties. They're trying, but it's winter and now we're down to just one or two eggs per day.

Poor Miss Buffy is buried on our hillside overlooking the snow-capped foothills of the Cascades. R.I.P. Damned chickens.