I’ll never forget the elation I felt as I set down a plate of pancakes for a friend on a Sunday morning in January  and he told me of a place in Hocking Hills and a buddy of his. Five minutes later my buddy handed the phone to me. I was talking to the guy and he was telling me about his place, a 70 acre orchard. “I can’t wait for you to come.” said Gordon. “Those turkeys come in the Spring and knock down all the blossoms and then the dang deer come by in the Fall and eat all my apples. You can shoot the whole lot of ‘em!”

Reagan was President.  I was fresh out of college.  I had fallen in with a bunch of old coots that kind of kept me around as the junior partner.  Among them was a retired newspaperman, an ex-Marine, a retired outdoor writer, an Israeli paratrooper,  and a guy with a degree in pyrotechnic engineering.  Most were avid shooters, some were active hunters.

When I caught the bug for hunting, it was like what Sam Kinnison used to say:  friends are the kind of people that will encourage to urinate in your own luggage when you are drunk.  That is not an exact quote, but it is close enough.  So you can sort of see where this is going.

My buddy John heard me grousing about not having a place to hunt turkeys.  There was an open season on them in Ohio, at least in a few counties. However, I did not know the first thing about hunting turkeys.  I had no idea where to go.  About the only thing I knew came from reading Outdoor Life.  I have news for you:  don’t believe everything you read in Outdoor Life. There actually had not been much written on turkey hunting back then.

So I was hooked up with a place to hunt.  Now I had to put it together.  The camo was  not going to be a problem.  I had a bunch of camouflage clothing left over from being captain of my company’s paintball team.  In fact, I had quite a collection of the stuff.  My girlfriend at the time worked at Cincinnati Opera.  One night, she brought all her gay friends over to the house and the guys got into my closet and played dress-up.  Yikes.  It was funny.

The shotgun?  My Dad had not shot trap since the early 60’s. He’d been quite a shooter in his day and had a bunch of trophies from Vandalia.  He loaned me his Model 12 Trap.   I stopped at Sports Headquarters in Sharonville (the one that burned) and asked Jay for some turkey loads.  Jay was the manager.  Jay knew all my friends and had taken me under his wing.  It was the weekend, and there was a big crowd in the store.  It turned out there had been a turkey seminar earlier.  Jay fixed me up with a guy who put a Quaker Boy Grand Old Master box call in my hand.  I saw pictures of Dick Kirby many years later.  I think it was him.    He also told me to pick up a couple of Ben Lee cassette tapes.    I also walked out with a two boxes of Remington #4 Nitro Magnums– of course they were 2 3/4!

In those days you had to. . . let’s see. . . I’m trying to get it all pieced back together. You had to write the State of Ohio and request to have them put you in a lottery. This had to be done before. . . Feb 1.  Then they’d tell you  had won and you had to mail a check for $20 and then you had to go stand on your head and spit shotgun shells. . . It’s all screwed up in my mind.  It wasn’t like now, and you had to be careful that you didn’t miss dates.

I finally egged one of my old fart buddies to come hunting with me.  Jerry wouldn’t go.  He thought the idea was stupid.  John wouldn’t go. He’d frozen his feet in the Bulge and needed to go South for the Winter.  “South” for him meant Matawhala, Mexico.  John spent about a third of the year doing the old Ambrose Bierce  Gringo-with-a-death-wish act south of the border, driving around in an old Olds 88 ragtop.  John was a little loco, and the locals thought he was a brujo who could give the evil eye.  I had just been lucky to catch John that weekend in late January back for business.

The only one who would go with me was Big  Bob.  Bob was the retired gun editor of  GunDog Magazine.   Bob was prone to go off on rants that would start off  “So one night Bill Ruger, Elmer Keith, and I . . . ”    Bob hadn’t hunted in years.  He hadn’t camped since his son was in boy scouts.   We decided to go the second weekend of season, that put it the end of the  first week in May.  However,  I knew that whatever happened, it was going to be fun.

Or so I thought.

In those days, I was  a computer programmer.  I took off at noon and showed up at Bob’s house.  Bob was having a fit.  Here was the ex gun editor rummaging through the house for his lost shotgun.  He had the barrel for his Ithaca 37. He just couldn’t find the shotgun itself.  He finally figured out he had loaned it to a guy five years earlier and never gotten it back.  At the last minute, we had to drive over to a lawyer-friend and get a loan of a nice  Charles Day O&U.    We didn’t get outside the loop until after 5 PM.

Hocking Hills was about 3 and half hours away.  We had to go through Washington Court House, Circleville, Laurellville, and . .  There was a bridge out somewhere along the way.  That detour took us an an extra hour.  Along the way, I wanted to keep listening to the Ben Lee tapes.  We got through them a couple of times, and then Bob had enough.  We rode the rest of the way talking guns, and the women we had known and that sort of thing.  That’s mostly all we talk about now, thirty years later.

We pulled into Orchard Ridge after 10 PM .  Gordon, the guy who had offered the land, had been there all afternoon waiting for us, and given us up for dead, and had already called back to Cincinnati to report us missing.  No. We’d been the long way around, but we’d kept moving.

I pitched the tent.  Bob rounded up some sticks.  We built a fire. We sat around a while, ate something and then turned in.  Bob snored like a bear being strangled slowly with a rope.

The alarm went off in the dark, but I was already awake.  Whoever had been strangling the bear had switched from a rope to something less efficient.  It now sounded like a tuberculosis ward after the Friday night smoker.   I woke Bob up and we got to it.

Gordon had told us to hit a dirt road next to our camp site and take it east as far as we could.  When we came to an oil rig, we’d be where he’d seen the turkeys.  We did pretty much that.  Bob stayed in sight of the oil rig , sitting on a stump, smoking cigarettes.

I went over to a big pile of stumps on the other side of the rig and waited for the light to come up a little.  When it looked about right, I pulled out the Quaker Boy Grand Old Master box call and gave it a stroke.

“Yawk!  Yawk! Yawk!  Yawk!  ”

“Garrrabl-able-able-able!”  It came from out of the fog that was covering the creek that marked the back boundary of the property.  That is the moment I became a turkey hunter.   It was like electricity shooting through me.  I could not stand still.

I spent a good part of the morning angling my way down into the creek, walking the creek bottom, occasionally pulling out the box call, sometimes getting an answer. At one point I made it back up to the top and found Bob had left his stump.  I went back out and scoured the back end of Gordon’s property, looking for a turkey until about 11 AM.  I came to a small retention pond left over from the days when Gordon’s place had been a strip mine.    I found a good sized bush and crawled in behind it and sat with my back to a mud bank.  At 5 minutes to noon, a lone hen turkey peaked out from behind a tree and then disappeared back the way she came.

And then it was over.  In Ohio you could not hunt past noon.  You could not hunt on Sunday. That was it.   I wandered back to the tent.  I found Bob up talking to Gordon.  Bob had grown bored of the whole thing shortly after I left and gone in.  Gordon was peeling sassafras root and Bob was smoking cigarettes and the two were having a nice chat. Gordon’s operation had kind of gravitated from being an apple and peach producer to a tourist attraction after a big ice storm took out the bulk of his trees.  He sold homemade jams and jellies out of his barn store.  He had sassafras and dandelion and gooseberry– all stuff he’d picked off the place.

Gordon said the results were to be expected:  that time of year the turkeys hardly ever showed up. The only place you would see them was in the drainage culverts on the side of the road.  We packed our stuff and left.

Fun? No.  The weather was pleasant.  Nothing bad happened. However, this was the beginning of a long dark road for me.  It was 5 years before I even saw a gobbler on that place.  When I did, it was 300 yards from the back property line.  There was a gobbler out strutting around in the middle of the road and all I could do was sit and watch.  It took two years for me to figure out the turkeys never roosted on Gordon’s property and only came over when the spirit moved them.  No, this was like having your friends introduce you to heroin.  Three decades later I’m still trying to figure out why I went or why I kept coming back for a half-day a year of frustration.

Bob’s still around, but his knees gave out shortly after the trip. He never did get the shotgun back, but he got a good deal on another Ithaca back in the mid-90’s and it make for a good story.  Bob’s retiring next year.  Jerry, John, Jacque , the other Bob and the rest of that crew are all dead now.   I’m now in with another bunch of old farts, but it is getting so it is hard to see that I am still the youngest by a couple of years.

It had been a good twenty years since I went to Hocking Hills. We had time to kill this summer and I took KYHillChick and Angus back that way after Angus played a bagpipe gig in Columbus.    Gordon is long gone and the orchard had been subdivided into a few places.  Where the oil rig sat has a house on it.    There’s a sign falling apart in Islesboro that has “________Ridge 1.3 miles”    However, sure enough, we saw turkeys in the ditch on our way out.  Go figure.

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