Judy and I arrived early on a Friday for the Easter campout that fateful year. We had to pick up our grandson from our daughter’s house so that we could spend the day doing our grandparent thing before the arrival of the rest of the family and friends as they all have to work for a living while I was a Federal employee. The weather was partially overcast and showers were predicted for Saturday morning but all an all it looked like it was going to be OK. The first omen that it was not is when the grand kid poked himself in the eye with a sharp stick. I was walking right behind him when it happened. He didn’t fall or stumble. There were no overhanging branches at eye level. He just started crying for no apparent reason and managed to blurt out between sobs that he had poked himself in the eye with a small stick he was carrying. Eight year old boys are uncoordinated. He was in a growth spurt at the time making him more prone to this affliction. Being the empathic person that I am, I instantly realized this and comforted him,
“Do you want to wear an eye patch for the rest of your life?”And “I am not buying you a friggin parrot!”
OK, I am lying. I am really not that bad of a grandparent. But the thoughts did pass through my mind along with an image of all the “adults” in camp wearing eye patches and talking like Long John Silver all weekend, a real possibility with this group.
Later that day and evening the rest of the group showed up finally totaling twelve adults, five kids, four dogs, and one bewildered and very frightened cat. We put up the tents, tarps, canopies, and awnings, then started the campfire, with every indication that this was going to be the finest Easter campout yet.
The next morning it started to rain. Undeterred we put up a couple of extra tarps to extend the two canopies that were over the picnic table and cooking area. Alan brought out his flame thrower and got the fire going pretty good even though it was raining a bit harder. Wes, seeing Alan’s flame thrower for the first time got that glazed, ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’, look in his eye. At 35 he had not grown out of that wave the burning stick from the campfire thing. Soon nothing was safe as he experimented with burning all manner of things including wet pinecones, left over cantaloupe rinds, and rocks with and without Easter egg dye on them. In between burnings he waved it in the air and pretended to be the Statue of Liberty. But we knew he was totally gone off his nut when he attacked a folding camp chair that had broken the night before. If it had been a regular camp chair, he might have got away with it but it was an OSU Beaver’s camp chair complete with an image of Benny Beaver himself. We wrestled him to the ground with cries of “sacrilege!” and would have stoned him senseless were it not for the Easter season. After we had buried the chair on a hill overlooking the campground, we had finally calmed down and Wes had returned to his senses. At the trial that evening, Gail being his wife, judge, and jury, ended the affair when she quietly told him,
“You blew it there sparky. No matter how much you beg you will never be allowed to play with Alan’s flame thrower ever again”.
He accepted his sentence like the man I had taught him to be, knowing that there would be times when his wife would be too busy with the kids to catch him.
After a breakfast of way too much food for anybody’s waistline, we distracted the kids enough to hide the Easter eggs that they had colorized the night before. In our warped mythology the Easter Bunny is a very weird rodent who steals the decorated colored eggs then hides them along with additional plastic eggs which are full of candy.
This is really not that strange. Matter of fact it was quite clever of me to come up with this idea when my kids were little, especially as Marty had no trouble recognizing the Easter egg that he had colored the night before. This was because Marty as a child had no artistic talent which carried over to his teenage years. The proof of this was all too evident the year when Judy decided that we should paint those little ceramic ye olde shoppe-like things and tiny Victorian houses for Christmas décor. Judy came up with this idea to give us some quality family time together with our teenage children that did not involve violence and foul language. Judy and Delda’s houses always looked the best with multicolored petals on teensy little flowers that required you to hold your breath and time the bush stokes between heart beats. LoriAnne’s and Wes’s looked pretty good, while mine looked good from 3 or 4 feet away if you took off your glasses and squinted your eyes. In my defense the playoffs were on in the background and I have always had a bit of a problem in releasing my artistic talents without the aid of copious amounts of an alcoholic beverage of my choice. Marty, bless his heart, tried for a while to paint like the rest of us, but soon excused himself. I thought he had just gone #1 which I was going to have to do real soon considering the amount of Christmas cheer I was imbibing, but then I realized that his Victorian art project was missing as well. A few minutes later he was back with a triumphant cry of “Done!” proudly displaying a freshly painted house in metallic fluorescent green. I knew there was a reason I had kept that partially full rattle can.
But I digress. Back to the Easter bunny-egg thing. Even as a preschooler Marty not only possessed a phenomenal memory but also, as indicated above, could not draw a stickman with the requisite number of limbs. He knew that the egg the Easter bunny had hidden was his egg that he had “decorated” the night before.
“So Dad” he says in the lead up to one of those pithy Martyesque questions,
“How did the Easter Bunny get my egg out of the refrigerator last night, and why did he hide it under the edge of the coffee table.”
Thinking fast I answered, “Cause the little shit was trying to steal our eggs and would have got away clean if your mother and I hadn’t been chasing the little furry thief around the house with a broom and baseball bat trying to get our eggs back. Must have dropped yours in the chase and it rolled under the coffee table. I bet he stole the candy from someone else’s house and it just spilled out too.”
It was brilliant! How else is a rabbit going to hide Easter eggs that the kids had colored the night before? Marty, although extremely bright, was also a kid and ergo gullible. Added to this was that the gullibility gene is carried by both sides of his family. How else could I convince Judy’s 16 year old sister Millie that it was OK to have a picnic on the grass in a state park in rattlesnake country because the small plane circling overhead was the “Rattle Snake Patrol” with a state parks sharpshooter inside equipped with a high powered rifle whose job it was to shoot any snake within a half mile of the park. I had also convinced Alan when he was 10 that Santa Claus had passed on his job to Howard Hughes who shipped presents to children via Greyhound Bus. I convinced my mother that a red needled and very dead Douglas fir sapling was a red fir. She was so convinced she had my father dig it up and plant it their yard back in Medford. She told me a year later that Dad must have cut the tap root while digging it up as that winter all the needles had fallen off and they did not grow back that spring. Marty, now gown up and on his third hitch as a linguist (aka spy) in the Navy convinced a now 50 year old Judy that unmarked tanker trailer semis were in all likelihood Air Force ICBMs which drove our freeways day and night ready to launch their nuclear tipped payloads in minutes if the Ruskies attacked. Two of Judy’s brothers also told her that if you wired the little chest freezer that they had just given Grandma Fran backwards that it could be filled with water and used for a hot tub. When she questioned this, I chimed in with
“Why do you think they put that little shelf in the bottom for you to sit on?”
That sealed the deal for her. If her bother Tim could have kept a straight face, she would still believe it to this day.
But the worst, the one I will probably go to hell for, was the one I pulled on my sister. Sandra has an excessive personality, sort of an “I Love Lucy” without the klutz but a lot more annoying. I don’t know why she started to obsess on salmon fishing. She had not been fishing since we were kids and I don’t remember her being particularly fond of it then. But obsessed she was, and as I was her brother who also happened to live in Waldport which is on the Alsea River, one of the preeminent salmon and steelhead rivers in the world, I must know all there is to know about salmon fishing. In actuality, I had caught exactly one salmon in my entire life, but that was enough in her obsessive state of mind to make me an expert. I was getting calls almost every night from her about when I thought the salmon would start their yearly run up the river, to which I answered that it needed to rain first. For the next week I got a nightly phone call to check if it had rained. She might have watched the daily weather forecast, but as they only gave the weather for Newport, OR on the news and as Waldport was a whole 15 miles south of there, the weather might be different. When it finally did sprinkle a bit, I had to tell her it needed to rain more.
Finally, the conditions were right, it had rained, and Alsea Bay was full of boats trying their luck. She showed up the next evening with Jim, her husband at the time, her youngest son and Alan’s brother Neal, and one of Neal’s friends. In person she was much more obsessive than over the phone in asking questions about salmon, their habits, and how best to catch them. So, I pulled out one of those old fishing jokes and told her that she ought to use a DuPont spinner. For those of you not up on old fishing jokes, a DuPont spinner is a stick of dynamite or other explosive material that is tossed over the side of a boat like a fishy depth charge. The resulting underwater explosion kills or stuns the fish, some of which will float belly-up to the surface. I don’t advise any of us to try this as it is illegal and tends to ruin your day if you misjudge the water depth. Sandra, having grown up with me, knows that I like to pull these kinds of jokes, was instantly suspicious.
“DuPont Spinners?? DuPont is a chemical company. Why would they make salmon lures?”
To which I replied with a long soliloquy about how lures are often named after their inventor and how Guy DuPont had come up with this killer lure after years of trial and error, and that it was just a coincidence that his name and that of a chemical company were the same. She still was not buying it, so I decided to bring in an outside expert,
“Why don’t you give Karl Rukavina a call?”
I had worked with Karl for about 20 years. After a stint in the Korean War and before he started working for the US Government as a biological technician, he had spent a number of years as a fishing guide in Northern Minnesota where he was born and raised. Karl was also the only person I knew who had actually used DuPont spinners, which might have been the reason why he left the hunting and fishing industry in such a hurry. Karl was also a master at practical jokes when it came to fishing and hunting. He was so good at it that he had one of his many girlfriends convinced that if you tied a worm on a hook with string that she would catch more fish. Later when she complained that no matter how hard she tied them, they kept falling off, he had asked her
“Did you tie them lengthwise or crosswise?”
When she responded “crosswise” he responded with
“you dummy, it’s lengthwise”. I can only assume she tried it. Karl went through a lot of girlfriends that way.
I gave Sandra Karl’s home phone number then slipped into the bedroom as she dialed to listen in on the conversation on the spare phone. She introduced herself to Karl as my sister and verified that he had been a fishing guide. Then she dropped the zinger on him,
“Have you ever heard of DuPont Spinners?”
To which Karl replied, “Yeah, its dynamite!” Karl could be a little slow on the uptake sometimes, but his momentary lapse was missed as my obsessed sister came back with
“That’s what Bruce says, but are you sure that they work on salmon?”
Karl, now wise to the joke answered “You bet! If there is salmon within 50 feet you will get him. It’s a sure thing!” Sandra then asked where she could buy a few, to which he replied “Bittler Brothers”.
Sandra now so excited she was forgetting to listen came back with “Hitler Brothers?”, but eventually got the name right and where it was in Newport. Personally I would have asked if there was a place in Waldport but as I have said Sandra is obsessive and if given advice on the best place to buy a DuPont Spinner from an expert fishing guide, she was going to take it. Karl, bless his larcenous sole and uncharacteristically quick thinking, had picked the one place on the planet that was absolutely guaranteed to be in on the joke. Old man Bittler had been in the sporting goods business since the hook had evolved from two pointed sticks tied together with mastodon sinew. This was going to be good.
I clued in Jim, who clued in Neal, who clued his friend. The next morning, they all went to Newport for breakfast and to purchase their fishing gear. Sandra strode into Bittler Brothers, followed quietly by Jim and the rest. Not finding a DuPont Spinner quickly enough in the lure display, Sandra asked a young clerk if they had any. The kid got a quizzical look on his face, turned toward the handgun counter where Bittler was talking to two other old and grizzled fishing geezers and inquired in a loud voice
“Do we carry DuPont Spinners?”
I wish I could have been there for as many times as I tried to get Jim or Neal to tell me exactly what happened next, they never could get it out in coherent language.
What more can I tell you. I have a gift from God. Although I would have preferred an Apollo-like body, or the genius of an Einstein, this is the gift I have, and I know how to run with it.
Although I have a slight tendency to exaggerate, I assure you that all of the above stories of my family’s gullibility are absolutely true and unembellished. But please don’t think that this affliction is limited to my family alone as I fear that the gullibility gene is a dominant as it adversely affects the majority of Americans. Why else would so many people go to chiropractors or believe in water witching or that Uri Geller can bend spoons with his mind? Let me make it absolutely clear to all of you. There is no big foot, Elvis is dead, and space aliens did not conduct sexual experiments on your bother-in-law, even though he deserves it. And please, if you voted for Trump, don’t do it again. America needs help and it is not getting it from you.
Like I was saying before, we distracted the kids and hid the Easter eggs in the rain at Humbug on that last morning and thanked God that in his wisdom he had designed boiled eggs so they float. Then we pulled the old joke about the bunny stealing the eggs and had a great time watching the young ones slosh around getting soaked as it began to rain even harder.
Our canopy and tarp covered play area was getting a little muddy, so Judy went into the nearest town to buy straw. She was back in an hour with a bale of moldy hay. This helped a bit with the mud. The tarps were keeping the rain from falling directly on us, but the picnic table and fire pit are always placed, out of tradition, in the lowest portions of any campsite. Although we had dug a complex network of diversion ditches and constructed air borne aqueducts out of more tarps and bungee cords, by midafternoon the moldy hay was floating in two inches of muddy water. We had all planned on staying another day but packed it up and were home by dinner. You can have only so much fun.
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