| History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided. (Konrad Adenauer) |
| Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God's Paradise. (Phillips Brooks) |
| "Have your say here" Post at: post@myeasyticket.com Send your (travel) stories. Give us your opinion. Post your ads. Complain. Recipes from your country |
| Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. (Henry B. Adams) |
| YOUR STORIES (AND OTHER ONES) |
home
just kidding
your music
your photos
book/pay
Published Jul 30, 2007
"The Pipes of Pan"
The first promise of summer was always an exciting thing to a boy - the
spring winds eased and the sun burned away the April rains, the green
pushed softly up and all the smells began. Mornings before breakfast were
delightfully cool and breezy, and bred a restless excitement that made you
want to caper barefoot on the dew-wet grass.
The smells were something. Down. by the creek the dogtooth violets pushed
up through the moss. The heavy tuberosy smell of the yellow jasmine filled
the countryside, and the dogwood trees were white and pink with delicate
bloom. In the orchards the early peaches and plums were breaking into
blossom, adding their scents to the wild ones. The first tame flowers were
popping out into the warmth, competing with the wild violets and the Johnny-
jump-ups. I used to think that heaven would smell like this - cool and moist
and very delicately fragrant.
You took to the woods then, not as a hunter or a fisherman, but as a
naturalist. The Old Man was very firm about that.
"You’re a bloodthirsty savage," he said, "like all boys are bloodthirsty
savages. But there’s a heap more to it than killing. Seeing the whole world
come alive again after a long winter’s nap and a wild, wet spring is more fun, ’
specially as you grow older, than all the shootin’ and fishin’ there is. And I
never was able to explain it, but the critters seem to notice this too. You’ll
see how tame everything is this time of the year, when it’s wilder’n a buck
rabbit in the shootin’ season."
Maybe it seems a little dull today, but we used to go berry picking, after the
blackberries had turned from green to red to purple-black, glistening on their
thorny vines, and found it exciting. There were so many things to see and
hear in the spring when you took a pail and went out berrying, to come
home tired, with a crick in your back and your fingers and lips dyed purple
from the juicy berries. There were birds around that I do not seem to see so
often any more - brilliant bluebirds, which came early in the spring and went
away later in the summer. There were lots and lots of the big, fierce-looking
redheaded woodpeckers; lots of what we called yellowhammers, another
species of peckerwood known as flicker; the big cuckoos we called rain
crows; the carnivorous shrikes with the bandit’s velvet masks across their
cold robbers’ eyes; and hordes of the big, brilliant, raucously screaming blue
jays.
The wet, plowed fields were crowded with teams of killdeers and the dainty-
walking titlarks, racing along like pacing horses. The bobolinks were
beginning to sway on the ends of high weeds, the stalks bending under their
negligible weight. Soon the Baltimore orioles would be along, filling the air
with sounds like the clinking of coins. The big cardinals were patches of blood
against the dark green of the pines and cedars, and the scarlet tanagers
darted like air-borne snakes.
When I think of it now, I think of it in terms of sounds and smells rather
than sights. The catbirds quarreled in the low bushes around the house, and
the big, fat, sassy old mocker that lived in the magnolia mimicked the
catbirds. The doves cooed sadly from a great distance, and the quail called
from the brushy cover at the edge of the cultivation. They came marching
boldly into the strawberry patches, not in coveys but in pairs, walking
through the back yard as if they owned it.
The killdeers wheeled and dipped in clouds over the wet fields, the skies filled
with the mournful kill-dee, kill-dee, and the meadowlarks sang in the fields,
and out of the wet places came the wild, sweet song of the woodcock. The
crows and the jays raised general hell with everything, including the spring,
and you could hear the rain crows’ hollow tonk from some hidden position in
a tall pine, and the solid knock of the woodpeckers, and the sweet chirrup of
the little bluebirds.
This was the time of the year when the boys rushed out of school to swim
naked in the creek at recess, and when it seemed impossible not to cut
classes. This was the time of the bellyache from eating berries that had not
completely ripened, from experimenting with stone-hard green peaches; and
this also was the time of the lavish use of castor oil and calomel. It was
impossible to concentrate in school, for the drowsy hum of June was just
over the hill. Hence this was the time that boys were kept after school for
throwing spitballs and making paper airplanes and dipping pigtails into
inkpots. Summer vacation was yearned for by the teachers even more
eagerly than it was craved by the students. Marks dropped terribly, and
discipline teetered on the ragged edge of anarchy.
The Old Man said he reckoned the whole world went a little crazy at this time
of the year, and he told me if I listened real close I could hear the piping of
some old pagan god named Pan, who was half billy goat, away off in the
wood. I told the Old Man that if Pan was anything like my billy goat I would
just as lief have nothing to do with him.
"Be that as it may," the Old Man said, "that wood back there is creeping with
all sorts of forest gods and spirits right now, and if we went and set quiet I
ain’t so sure but what we might see some. Hear ’em, anyhow."
The forest he mentioned was located back of the cow lot, and it was
bounded by a big field of sedge where my pet covey of quail lived, and by a
gully in which my secret interlocking caves were built, and by a big pond in
which the diedappers swam and dived, and by a big soybean field that was
full of doves in the fall. The forest covered about six acres, and was
composed of towering pines and twisty live oaks and dogwood trees. Its
floor was clean and mostly free of brush, a slippery floor of pine needles and
jaunty wild flowers.
The Old Man and I spent a lot of time back there. We had to remodel some
of the caves, which meant we needed fresh pine saplings for the front and
some fresh beams under the heavy sod roofs, so some woodcutting was in
order. It takes a lot of work to keep a cave in good shape, especially when
there are half a dozen connected by long tunnels. The reason we needed so
many caves was that I was then chieftain of a robber band, and in
watermelon season the robbers needed plenty of sudden sanctuary.
Sometimes, when we got tired of working on the caves, the Old Man and I
would sit down under a tree and lean back against the bole. He would light
his pipe and tell me all sorts of wild tales about the Druids, who lived in
trees, and the first Britons, who dug enormous caves called dene holes in
the Kentish countryside in England, and about the bad spirits that lived in
the Black Forest in Germany, and about the old pagan gods like Pan, who, I
gathered, was a pretty fast fellow with the girls.
The Old Man had been near about everywhere, and I guess he had read just
about everything, because anything I remember today I remember from
what he told me. I always got pretty high grades in geography, because if
they asked what country Kent was a county of, like New Hanover or
Brunswick County in my state, I could always say "England," on account of
the dene holes. I understood what a dene hole was because the Old Man and
I had just dug us one.
We saw a lot of interesting things, just sitting quiet or walking carefully. One
time I saw a rain crow, one of those big cuckoos, chase a dove off a nest
and settle down in it herself. I went back the next day and shinnied up the
tree, and sure enough, there was one great big egg laid in the clutch of
smaller dove’s eggs.
We saw the squirrels fighting and chasing each other through the trees, and
once I saw two squirrels breeding. The rabbits hopped around softly and
unafraid of us. Once a deer and a fawn wa1ked right up to us and stared for
a long time, and then the old lady sort of nodded to junior and they went off
not running, not jumping, just sort of frisking, with junior kicking up his
heels.
I never did get to see Pan or any of the other strange people that live in the
woods, but I swear I heard noises that I couldn’t hook up to bird or frog or
animal or insect, and soft rustlings that proved to be nothing at all when I
went to look, my skin goose-pimpled and my neck hair lifting like a worried
dog’s when he hears a sound he can’t quite figger.
What I did get was the feeling that there were spirits who lived in trees, and
that there was something very special about an ancient wood, and that there
was some peculiar magic about the late spring that has been justified by the
behavior of beasts and people down through the ages. (This I learned later
from books.)
There had been some talk among the grown-ups at the time about sending
me off to the mountains to a boys’ camp, and I was hot for it until the
spring got soft and sweet and started to beckon toward the summer, and
the Old Man and I made our daily pilgrimages past the cow lot and into the
secret woods. But in May I would begin to weaken on this camp thing, and
by June the camps had lost a customer. I knew when I had it good, because
the Old Man always used to say that a smart feller knew when he was well off
and was a goldarned fool to change it for something he didn’t know about.
Then, too, you understand, I was too busy to go to camp. The Old Man and
I had a lot of projects together, apart from the baseball and the swimming
with the other boys. We had to get the boat in shape for the summer’s
fishing, and there was a puppy litter about due. We wanted to do some work
on the duck blind, of course, and there was this billy goat to discipline - I
guess you remember we failed on that one. And then there was fishing, of
course, salt-water for blackfish and speckled trout and croakers, and fresh-
water for bass, and by the time we got done fishing it would be September
and the tides would swell, and then there would be the marsh hens jumping
creakily out of the flooded marshes.
When we finished with the marsh hens, the bluefish would be along; and
when we got through with the bluefish and the puppy drum, then the quail
season would be on us, and before you knew it, Christmas holidays had
come and gone.
We were sitting quietly in the secret forest one day, waiting to hear some
word from the Old Man’s friend, Pan, when he stabbed his pipe at me and
said, "I suppose you’re going off to camp this summer and leave me alone
and unprotected with all the grown-ups, eh?"
"I reckon not," I said.
"Why not? They got all sorts of things up there in the mountains. They got
counselors, and a swimming lake, and archery, and woodworking, and basket
making, and lectures, and all sorts of things. You’ll get to live in a tent and
paddle a canoe and -- "
"I been in a tent and I got a boat and I got the Atlantic Ocean and the Cape
Fear River to swim in," I told him. "I got you for a counselor. I ain’t
interested in basket making or archery, because I got a shotgun and a boat
that needs fixin’. I just ain’t got time to play with children. The duck blind’s a
mess."
"But here it is just spring, with a whole summer ahead of you," the Old Man
was teasing me.
"The way I figger, I’m through Christmas already," I said, "and by that time it’
ll be puppy-training time and we’re right back in the summer again."
"I expect you may be right," the Old Man admitted. "Time just seems to fly
away for a boy. That, I s’pose, is why one day you wake up suddenly and
you ain’t a boy any longer. Anyhow, I’m glad you ain’t going. It gets awful
lonesome around here with all them grown-ups."
"The Pipes of Pan"
The first promise of summer was always an exciting thing to a boy - the
spring winds eased and the sun burned away the April rains, the green
pushed softly up and all the smells began. Mornings before breakfast were
delightfully cool and breezy, and bred a restless excitement that made you
want to caper barefoot on the dew-wet grass.
The smells were something. Down. by the creek the dogtooth violets pushed
up through the moss. The heavy tuberosy smell of the yellow jasmine filled
the countryside, and the dogwood trees were white and pink with delicate
bloom. In the orchards the early peaches and plums were breaking into
blossom, adding their scents to the wild ones. The first tame flowers were
popping out into the warmth, competing with the wild violets and the Johnny-
jump-ups. I used to think that heaven would smell like this - cool and moist
and very delicately fragrant.
You took to the woods then, not as a hunter or a fisherman, but as a
naturalist. The Old Man was very firm about that.
"You’re a bloodthirsty savage," he said, "like all boys are bloodthirsty
savages. But there’s a heap more to it than killing. Seeing the whole world
come alive again after a long winter’s nap and a wild, wet spring is more fun, ’
specially as you grow older, than all the shootin’ and fishin’ there is. And I
never was able to explain it, but the critters seem to notice this too. You’ll
see how tame everything is this time of the year, when it’s wilder’n a buck
rabbit in the shootin’ season."
Maybe it seems a little dull today, but we used to go berry picking, after the
blackberries had turned from green to red to purple-black, glistening on their
thorny vines, and found it exciting. There were so many things to see and
hear in the spring when you took a pail and went out berrying, to come
home tired, with a crick in your back and your fingers and lips dyed purple
from the juicy berries. There were birds around that I do not seem to see so
often any more - brilliant bluebirds, which came early in the spring and went
away later in the summer. There were lots and lots of the big, fierce-looking
redheaded woodpeckers; lots of what we called yellowhammers, another
species of peckerwood known as flicker; the big cuckoos we called rain
crows; the carnivorous shrikes with the bandit’s velvet masks across their
cold robbers’ eyes; and hordes of the big, brilliant, raucously screaming blue
jays.
The wet, plowed fields were crowded with teams of killdeers and the dainty-
walking titlarks, racing along like pacing horses. The bobolinks were
beginning to sway on the ends of high weeds, the stalks bending under their
negligible weight. Soon the Baltimore orioles would be along, filling the air
with sounds like the clinking of coins. The big cardinals were patches of blood
against the dark green of the pines and cedars, and the scarlet tanagers
darted like air-borne snakes.
When I think of it now, I think of it in terms of sounds and smells rather
than sights. The catbirds quarreled in the low bushes around the house, and
the big, fat, sassy old mocker that lived in the magnolia mimicked the
catbirds. The doves cooed sadly from a great distance, and the quail called
from the brushy cover at the edge of the cultivation. They came marching
boldly into the strawberry patches, not in coveys but in pairs, walking
through the back yard as if they owned it.
The killdeers wheeled and dipped in clouds over the wet fields, the skies filled
with the mournful kill-dee, kill-dee, and the meadowlarks sang in the fields,
and out of the wet places came the wild, sweet song of the woodcock. The
crows and the jays raised general hell with everything, including the spring,
and you could hear the rain crows’ hollow tonk from some hidden position in
a tall pine, and the solid knock of the woodpeckers, and the sweet chirrup of
the little bluebirds.
This was the time of the year when the boys rushed out of school to swim
naked in the creek at recess, and when it seemed impossible not to cut
classes. This was the time of the bellyache from eating berries that had not
completely ripened, from experimenting with stone-hard green peaches; and
this also was the time of the lavish use of castor oil and calomel. It was
impossible to concentrate in school, for the drowsy hum of June was just
over the hill. Hence this was the time that boys were kept after school for
throwing spitballs and making paper airplanes and dipping pigtails into
inkpots. Summer vacation was yearned for by the teachers even more
eagerly than it was craved by the students. Marks dropped terribly, and
discipline teetered on the ragged edge of anarchy.
The Old Man said he reckoned the whole world went a little crazy at this time
of the year, and he told me if I listened real close I could hear the piping of
some old pagan god named Pan, who was half billy goat, away off in the
wood. I told the Old Man that if Pan was anything like my billy goat I would
just as lief have nothing to do with him.
"Be that as it may," the Old Man said, "that wood back there is creeping with
all sorts of forest gods and spirits right now, and if we went and set quiet I
ain’t so sure but what we might see some. Hear ’em, anyhow."
The forest he mentioned was located back of the cow lot, and it was
bounded by a big field of sedge where my pet covey of quail lived, and by a
gully in which my secret interlocking caves were built, and by a big pond in
which the diedappers swam and dived, and by a big soybean field that was
full of doves in the fall. The forest covered about six acres, and was
composed of towering pines and twisty live oaks and dogwood trees. Its
floor was clean and mostly free of brush, a slippery floor of pine needles and
jaunty wild flowers.
The Old Man and I spent a lot of time back there. We had to remodel some
of the caves, which meant we needed fresh pine saplings for the front and
some fresh beams under the heavy sod roofs, so some woodcutting was in
order. It takes a lot of work to keep a cave in good shape, especially when
there are half a dozen connected by long tunnels. The reason we needed so
many caves was that I was then chieftain of a robber band, and in
watermelon season the robbers needed plenty of sudden sanctuary.
Sometimes, when we got tired of working on the caves, the Old Man and I
would sit down under a tree and lean back against the bole. He would light
his pipe and tell me all sorts of wild tales about the Druids, who lived in
trees, and the first Britons, who dug enormous caves called dene holes in
the Kentish countryside in England, and about the bad spirits that lived in
the Black Forest in Germany, and about the old pagan gods like Pan, who, I
gathered, was a pretty fast fellow with the girls.
The Old Man had been near about everywhere, and I guess he had read just
about everything, because anything I remember today I remember from
what he told me. I always got pretty high grades in geography, because if
they asked what country Kent was a county of, like New Hanover or
Brunswick County in my state, I could always say "England," on account of
the dene holes. I understood what a dene hole was because the Old Man and
I had just dug us one.
We saw a lot of interesting things, just sitting quiet or walking carefully. One
time I saw a rain crow, one of those big cuckoos, chase a dove off a nest
and settle down in it herself. I went back the next day and shinnied up the
tree, and sure enough, there was one great big egg laid in the clutch of
smaller dove’s eggs.
We saw the squirrels fighting and chasing each other through the trees, and
once I saw two squirrels breeding. The rabbits hopped around softly and
unafraid of us. Once a deer and a fawn wa1ked right up to us and stared for
a long time, and then the old lady sort of nodded to junior and they went off
not running, not jumping, just sort of frisking, with junior kicking up his
heels.
I never did get to see Pan or any of the other strange people that live in the
woods, but I swear I heard noises that I couldn’t hook up to bird or frog or
animal or insect, and soft rustlings that proved to be nothing at all when I
went to look, my skin goose-pimpled and my neck hair lifting like a worried
dog’s when he hears a sound he can’t quite figger.
What I did get was the feeling that there were spirits who lived in trees, and
that there was something very special about an ancient wood, and that there
was some peculiar magic about the late spring that has been justified by the
behavior of beasts and people down through the ages. (This I learned later
from books.)
There had been some talk among the grown-ups at the time about sending
me off to the mountains to a boys’ camp, and I was hot for it until the
spring got soft and sweet and started to beckon toward the summer, and
the Old Man and I made our daily pilgrimages past the cow lot and into the
secret woods. But in May I would begin to weaken on this camp thing, and
by June the camps had lost a customer. I knew when I had it good, because
the Old Man always used to say that a smart feller knew when he was well off
and was a goldarned fool to change it for something he didn’t know about.
Then, too, you understand, I was too busy to go to camp. The Old Man and
I had a lot of projects together, apart from the baseball and the swimming
with the other boys. We had to get the boat in shape for the summer’s
fishing, and there was a puppy litter about due. We wanted to do some work
on the duck blind, of course, and there was this billy goat to discipline - I
guess you remember we failed on that one. And then there was fishing, of
course, salt-water for blackfish and speckled trout and croakers, and fresh-
water for bass, and by the time we got done fishing it would be September
and the tides would swell, and then there would be the marsh hens jumping
creakily out of the flooded marshes.
When we finished with the marsh hens, the bluefish would be along; and
when we got through with the bluefish and the puppy drum, then the quail
season would be on us, and before you knew it, Christmas holidays had
come and gone.
We were sitting quietly in the secret forest one day, waiting to hear some
word from the Old Man’s friend, Pan, when he stabbed his pipe at me and
said, "I suppose you’re going off to camp this summer and leave me alone
and unprotected with all the grown-ups, eh?"
"I reckon not," I said.
"Why not? They got all sorts of things up there in the mountains. They got
counselors, and a swimming lake, and archery, and woodworking, and basket
making, and lectures, and all sorts of things. You’ll get to live in a tent and
paddle a canoe and -- "
"I been in a tent and I got a boat and I got the Atlantic Ocean and the Cape
Fear River to swim in," I told him. "I got you for a counselor. I ain’t
interested in basket making or archery, because I got a shotgun and a boat
that needs fixin’. I just ain’t got time to play with children. The duck blind’s a
mess."
"But here it is just spring, with a whole summer ahead of you," the Old Man
was teasing me.
"The way I figger, I’m through Christmas already," I said, "and by that time it’
ll be puppy-training time and we’re right back in the summer again."
"I expect you may be right," the Old Man admitted. "Time just seems to fly
away for a boy. That, I s’pose, is why one day you wake up suddenly and
you ain’t a boy any longer. Anyhow, I’m glad you ain’t going. It gets awful
lonesome around here with all them grown-ups."
| "The Pipes of Pan" - by Robert C. Ruark http://www.ncwriters.org/services/lhof/inductees/rruark.htm |
Oleg Zhivetin
Poem Reader
Poem Reader