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Two Skunk Stories
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I've never been a politician, and given the direction in which my aptitude
for schmoozing is developing, I probably never will be either. But if fate
should take such a strange turn, I shall be well equipped in at least one
regard to perform my duties, since I am in possession of a reasonably good
skunk story. And I would not have to violate whatever shred of integrity I
might have after such a occupational shift, because this is my own skunk
story, earned myself the hard way. The "I" in these stories is me (though,
as you'll see, there's another guy who might be able to get even more stump
mileage out of the story than I could).
The summer of my twentieth year, I washed dishes at the Bob Mathias Sierra
Boys Camp. Bob Mathias, you might remember if you're old enough to have lost
your ability to remember things like this, was a two-time Olympic decathlon
gold medaler from Tulare, California who became a movie star and a member of
the House of Representatives (and died in 2006). I have never got to theaters often, so the
movie star part of Bob's past I learned about because "The Bob Mathias
Story" and "The Minotaur," both starring Bob and his wife, were shown at the
camp whenever he was in town. In the latter of these films, their mouths
moved in Italian while they were speaking English. The summer that I was at
the camp, we had several movie nights because somebody was actually
challenging Bob's right to represent the people of Tulare in Washington,
where his usual residence was, and so Bob was around, and so we saw the movies.
At the beginning of the summer, before any of the campers, who were
designated by age as "Explorers" (high-school guys), "Settlers" (grade
school), and "Pioneers" (in between), arrived, a special meeting was held at
which the new staff members were assigned camp names. The rationale was that
the task of yelling at campers, which was a major part of our work, could be
more effectively done if the campers didn't know our real names. Maybe the
real reason was that it was considered best for the campers and their
daddy's lawyers (or lawyer-daddies in many cases) not to know who we really
were.
I missed that all-important meeting, which I was later told was facilitated
by a lot of beer-drinking and obscene language, both of which would come to
be in short supply when the campers arrived. In my absence I was given the
name Bubbles by my fellow staff members. Only one of them had met me yet,
and he also was a newcomer, so the name was not given in recognition of my
personality and indeed could not have been, any more then than now. It was
given in recognition, rather, of the equipment of my job. I could have been
Suds, instead, and so wore the name Bubbles proudly, even literally, after I
made a belt later that summer with the name on it. I'm not sure why I did
that.
Dishwashers were always newcomers to the staff. No one ever did that job two
years in a row. My colleagues, two guys my age or so, were camp-named Zif,
in honor of a substance used to clean the grills in the kitchen, and Goat,
either because the bearer arrived with a beard (off before the campers
arrived, in accordance with the corporate image) or because he climbed rocks
for a hobby. In civilian life, Goat was called John Knight. Though Zif was
already an acquaintance of mine before that summer, his civilian name has
long since left my mind. But that is of little consequence, since John
Knight is the person of interest here, the one whom the skunk story involved
more than it did me.
Zif owned a new car because his parents could afford to buy him one.
Goat/John had a Chevy II with an endearing name and a carburetor that often
needed encouragement with an improperly used wrench. I didn't even have a
driver's license for another couple years, so where either of them, usually
both, went in off-hours, I went. In civilian life, John shared an apartment
in Fresno with a loud and beautiful hispanic woman. The other two of us got
to know this woman mostly during a couple of weekends in Fresno.
All three of us dishwashers were Christians, which meant to us something in
the range of fundamentalist to evangelical. Zif and I had been Christians
for some time, and Goat/John had become one only recently. Zif and I were
very much shocked by this new brother's relationship without benefit of
clergy or the blessing of a lower tax bracket with the beautiful hispana. We
prayed for our friend. The woman, as I've mentioned, was beautiful, or
should I say, as I might've then and certainly would now if that were today,
she was hot. She was also charming in her way, though not a Christian. We
prayed a lot for our new brother.
Actually we envied him a lot. In an unrelated incident, I once punched John.
Bob Mathias Sierra Boys Camp was adjoined by Bob Mathias Sierra Girls Camp,
which had its own staff, so we did not pass the summer without
seeing young women on a regular basis. One of the perks of washing dishes
was that the three of us really worked for both camps. The other perk was
that we could grab a bite to eat whenever we wanted.
One of the regular features of a two or four-week session at Bob Mathias
Sierra Boys Camp (not the far more genteel Girls Camp, which was named after
Bob but run by his wife) was the Counselor Hunt. For the purposes of this
event, diswashers were counselors. After dark one evening toward the end of
each of the three sessions of the summer, each of the counselors would hide
and the campers would attempt to find them, tackle them, and name them.
There was some inducement here for the campers to learn our camp names.
The
camp was in semi-wooded mountains. For the first hunt, I hid in some bushes up
the hill from the restroom-shower cabin. I was discovered, took flight, and was
pursued. I dived down a hill into a largish stand of manzanitas. Easterners, I
have since discovered, don't understand about manzanitas. It's no wonder.
Merriam-Webster makes them out to be "any of various western No. American shrubs
(genus Arctostaphylos) of the heath
family." Californians call them "trees," but Californians, especially of the
Southern Californian family, have to be fairly generous in what they give
the designation "tree" to. (Californians also have something called a "live
oak tree," which has received the first part of its name because its
appearance calls for a reminder that it is a living object.) Californians
respect manzanitas. They don't brush against them when hiking because of
their stiffness and pointiness. Californians also don't wade into stands of
manzanitas, which stand very close to each other. Once you've lacerated
yourself in, there's no way out but further lacerating.
Some years after the incident I'm describing, I helped my father survey and
mark off six acres of California mountain. I was the thinner of the amateur
surveyors, so I was doing the harder part. When I discovered a line that had
been cleared through a very large stand of manzanitas, that became the
property line.
So I deliberately dived into some mananitas at midnight at Bob Mathias
Sierra Boys Camp. My philosophy in doing so was to provide as positive a
camping experience and as good a role model for the boys as I could, to show
them that a young man should not give in easily. I was, in fact, tackled and
named. I was glad the next morning to see that I had taken down some of the
brats with me in that dive. We were indeed lacerated.
That day, I checked with Zif and Goat on where they had hid. They had spent
the Counselor Hunt under an upturned canoe in the middle of the lake. That
violated both the spirit and law of the Counselor Hunt, during which the
lake was off-limits, that in honor of the lawyer-daddies. I decided that for
next Counselor Hunt I needed a better plan than the bushes uphill from the
johns.
When that time came four weeks later, I consulted with Goat/John, who always
seemed to have an idea or two. During a break from the dishes, he took me up
a hill above center field of the camp's baseball diamond and therefore also
above the house-size sandstone rock that shortened center field and provided
a place for John to teach climbing and rappelling to interested boys. There
was a granite outcropping a ways up that hill with a fifteen-foot-long crack
across its surface. John showed me that the crack was, in fact, about ten
feet deep and wide enough at the bottom for either of us to sit in
reasonably comfortably, and that there was a walk-in entrance at one end
hidden in some trees.
So before the second Counselor Hunt of the summer, John and I were inside
that rock with our flashlights. Lots of boys figured out that there was
somebody somewhere on that hillside because we shined our flashlights out of
the crack up into the trees, made noises, and tossed rocks out of the crack.
We shined our flashlights up at campers stepping right over our heads. And
we threw rocks at them, fairly accurately. None of them ever figured it out.
Apparently none of them had ever looked at that outcropping in the same way
as my John had.
After forty minutes of this sincerely enjoyable activity, John heard
something rustling around at his end of our crack in the rock. Since this
was rattlesnake country, we were curious to know what was there. First, John
said "Let me get my light on this" and then he said "It's a skunk." I
believe there was some other word before "skunk" that revealed something
about the extent of John's sanctification.
But we were
having fun and the skunk had not reacted with hostility (or fear or whatever it
is that makes them do what they're known for), so we decided to stick it
out until those counselors who had remained victoriously undiscovered were called
in. John and I were, we figured, in the skunk's home, but thought
he or she might be willing to stay cool until it was time to move
toward the exit for his or her nocturnal activities.
But after a while, when our watches were just about to report that we had
made it through the designated amount of time for the Counselor Hunt, John
reported some restlessness on the part of our host, that he or she was, in
fact, approaching with malicious intent. I was closest of the three of us to
the door. I cleared out in about as much time as it takes to read a comma,
bolted down the hill, and was tackled into a tree (pine this time) by a herd
of campers. And named. John, hearing how things went for me, decided to stay
put.
He did not show up for work in the kitchen the next morning. When he came in
at about lunch time, he was mostly cussing about having had to burn, under
the camp director's orders, his best pair of surplus fatigue pants. I
learned before the next Counselor Hunt that the girls would be in the dining
room watching "The Minotaur" while the boys were hunting counselors. I knew
Bob wouldn't mind if I watched it again.
I have another minor skunk story. That six acres that my father and I
surveyed was what my parents bought to live on when they left the city a
couple years after they had married off their youngest, which was me. The
narrow two-story house there, like some of its neighbors, was built without
benefit of building permit or licensed contractor. It had two logs running
vertically up the middle of it from in the ground below the first floor into
the attic to the roof. The account provided by the neighbors was that the
house was originally built without those logs. But it had begun to tip
shortly before completion. To prevent total loss of their work, the builders
lashed the house to a nearby tree (the neighbors pointed out which one),
then felled two other trees, stripped and barked them, and then inserted
them through the house into the ground, thus ensuring the stability of the
house. I have certain questions about that story.
The six acres had a number of outbuildings in various bad conditions,
including a greenhouse that the manzanitas had pushed into and taken over.
None of the outbuildings was adequate for woodworking, so my father's first
woodworking project after the move, well, after the first shipment of baby
chickens had been moved out of the bathtub into a repaired shed, was
construction of a woodworking shop. My wife and I received triumphant
pictures of this shop with my parents' new dog (they were getting into
country life in a big way) on top of it.
My father also bought a revolver since a gun was said by the neighbors to be
a necessary aid in raising fowl. I tried out that gun during a visit and
could barely lift the thing properly, even less point it accurately at a can
fifty yards across the yard. That was the first time I had ever seen a real
revolver in person that was not strapped to a policeman or an actor or
behind glass in a sporting goods store. The second such sighting was when a
student in a New Testament Greek class I was teaching, a woman in her
sixties, stopped me in the seminary hallway, accompanied by her daughter-in-
law, and handed me a lunch bag with a revolver in it and said "John, you
have to take this." I didn't take it, but I did come away with a very brief
account of some trouble her son was in. The devil sometimes deals out
special testing to those whom the Lord has called to the ministry during
their student years.
Both shop and dog came to bad ends. The dog made friends with some of his
wild relatives (coyote: "a small canid [Canis latrans] native to western No.
America that is closely related to the American wolf") and took up some of
their habits. He was always home for dinner, but his appetite varied. One of
the neighbors shot him and was not blamed for doing so.
My father had built his woodworking shop under a large oak tree. About a
week after he finished it, a heavy snowfall took down a branch of the tree
and flattened the shop. It was replaced with a metal one out of the Sears
catalog.
My mother settled into gardening and meeting the neighbors. My father opened
a real estate office and had a couple of heart attacks. Two and a half years
after they began life there, he was to have quintuple bypass surgery. My
wife drove up for a visit and to stay at the house and feed the cats after
they had gone to Sacramento for the surgery. By that time, my father was
sleeping downstairs rather than up in the bedroom and had to rest twice on
his way from the house to the car.
In the middle of that last night before
the surgery, my wife and I were awakened by close-by gunfire. The next
morning my father reported that a skunk had been getting into the cat food
just outside the back door and that in his limited condition he was such a
bad shot that he had actually hit the skunk instead of just scaring it off.
(There were a couple of bullet holes in the late-forties Chevrolet hubcap
that served as a dish for the cats, evidence of previous skunk visits.)
This skunk story does not have as
exciting an end as the other one. My father reported which shed he thought the
skunk had gone under after getting shot and then went off to Sacramento to get
his bypasses. My wife and I were at the house to find out that a skunk shot dead
has a much stronger odor than a live one. The smell was still there to greet my
father when he came home a week later, walking a bit more quickly than when he
had left.
pix from Microsoft clipart
text copyright� 2007 by
me
One of the geo ads that came up for this page linked to this site on Bob Mathias, which has a couple videos, neither, unfortunately, from any of his movies. The second one is Bob on TV in 1958 and includes teens sitting on the floor around Bob, a great old mouthwash commercial ("bad breath stops you at the kissing line"), and Bob dancing with girls from the audience.