When I was a kid, a guy that my old man worked with, Bob Miller, would go deer hunting in West Virginia every year. The old man saw this as an opportunity to ditch me for a couple of weeks one autumn and asked Bob to take me along. We were staying in some cabin deal way out in the boondocks. Not the boondocks as we know it now, folks. This was 1967, way-the-bleeding-fuck-out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere boondocks. So much so, as a matter of fact, that our food supply was dependant upon what the hunting party could shoot.
The hunting party was an odd lot. There was Bob Miller, a very large, coarse and burly man whose wife, Evelyn, used to grab be at Julia's Cafe (a bar that the old man frequented after work and above which Bob and Evelyn lived), and try and teach me to dance. What she managed to do was shove her tits in my face and waltz me about this tragically oily pub. I am forever grateful. She had some enormous tits and at 10 years old, that's like Christmas every week.
The Great White Hunters were rounded out by some bloke they called "Wild Bill", a sobriquet he acquired by virtue of his wild west type, curled-up-at-the-ends moustache and his skill with a 30.06; and a some other guy who was a gangly teenaged kid whose name I cannot recall. He was a puffy-cheeked, inbred little dolt, as I recall, though. He looked like every kid you'd feature in your mind's eye when reading a book with a character named "Hymie" in it. He was a putty-faced, artless little fuck and he damn near killed me.
Nobody had shot a fucking deer all week, and the meat supply at the homestead -a rustic joint owned by two rustics named, I swear, Floyd and Ethel- was getting thin. Floyd and Ethel were quite accomodating, though. They were reasonable if rawboned geezers who I assumed were on drop-by-for-tea status with Methuselah.
Anyhoo, while driving back from a long and fruitless day of hunting out in the woods, a groundhog was hauling it's groundhog shaped ass across the road as fast as it could. This was not nearly fast enough to keep Wild Bill from blowing it's head off, from the front seat of the Smithsonian-bound Mercury station wagon that Bob owned, at about 40 M.P.H.
We pulled over and Bill grabbed the poor dead groundhog's carcass and tossed it in the back. It was handed to Ethel after we pulled into the clearing where the cabin lay and she sized it up and nodded. "I can cook this up.", she said.
And she did. She skinned it, cleaned it and cooked it and the damn thing was tasty, too. Like greasy roast beef.
They also had the purest water I had ever drunk. A pipe came up from an ice-cold underground stream and the water flowed constantly. A metal dipper was slung over the pipe and that was used to drink this amazing water.
Wild Bill offered me some chewing tobacco on this trip so as to increase my manly man-ness. They all smiled and told me to pop some in my mouth and offered advice on how to hold the plug between my cheek and gum. Wild Bill then explained that I would have to learn to drink water while chewing tobacco, and offered me a dipper of this wonderful water which, naturally, I carefully sipped and I then promptly swallowed along with the wad of tobacco. I puked, I think. Got a major laugh from my mentors.
We also went skinny-dipping, even though I explained that I would just sort of wade because I was a): aquaphobic and b): had negative buoyancy and c): couldn't swim. Hymie pushed me in the river. This also got a laugh.
To this day, I have no compunction at all about hitting anybody who invites me to go camping with a large pointy stone.
This is getting a bit drawn out, sorry. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to turn the central heating up, order room service and admire the great indoors.
Thanks.
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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.
