Walking Vine Street in my Mind

I forget now which gooey Portuguese writer once opined that, when visiting a place, one leaves a part of oneself there. When returning, therefore, we are not just revisiting a location, but rediscovering a bit of ourselves as well. If that is true, I wonder what to make out of these 200 acres and the pieces of myself I have left strewn about like dirty sweat socks sticking to a bedroom wall.

My mind goes ever back to Vine Street (or is it Walnut?). We’ve never been real tight on the name. Is Vine Street to the left of the tree line as you go to the campground or to the right? Oh well, (sigh) as I was saying my mind always drifts to the center road running through the property and all the odd bits of my being I have left along that three quarters of a mile.

There is the leaner at Hammond North, north of the Honey Hole. I remember on one of my first hikes on the farm getting my brain a little cooked in the heat and getting turned around and walking up the wrong creek bed. That old oak bleached out in a decade or more of sun was there like a beacon when I finally emerged from a dense cedar thicket. It was one of the first places I fully remembered. The old tree is finally fallen over, but I cannot help but look up there every time I go past. I remember that tree, walking out to Midway in 2008 with a stiff North wind blowing and one of the deepest blue skies I had ever seen. I have seen that old trunk against an angry sky during turkey season as a thunderstorm blew across north of the farm.

There are the little bits as well, like the bare spot south of Midway where nothing has ever grown and in the dark I try to miss it, so I will not get my feet muddy and on the way out, I always check for tracks. There is the rut coming down to Fountain Square that never quite fills back in and the long last bit going up to the house. I felt like I was going to die a hundred times over that spring where I caught pneumonia in the middle of turkey season. I felt reborn when, a year later, I could take that last hundred yards of the hike without stopping to rest. It took until this year for me to walk that stretch without remarking to myself how well I was doing.

If that Portuguese was telling truth and not just trying to write something to impress the chicks, then there are dark places along that road I nearly never travel. There is the last little bit, past the turnaround where the path runs on to the neighbors. There is the short bit of creepy claustrophobic cedar thicket after the outhouse where Hurricane Ike snapped all the trees and then it all falls off into a steep gully where nobody ever wants to go. I’ve been through there, but I invariably take the turnoff to the campground to avoid it as if it were a dark memory from my past.

There is the spot there, where in the first couple of years I got trailed by a buck as I was coming out from a long day of working on my stands. Hearing footsteps behind me, I stopped and turned. He was a small six-pointer, and he had me confused with either a rival or a mate. He was coming at me in that stiff-legged way that tells you an animal is listening to that deep part of his underlying lizard brain. Our eyes met, and I could tell nothing from his– no fear, no intent, no curiosity– and that dull mayhem shook me, and I responded by throwing up my arms and telling him to shoo. That seem to rouse him, and he went back to being a normal deer with normal cervid sensibilities and he leaped off the road and bounded down the dark gully.

And last, there is the place, always somewhere past the Honey Hole, where in the dark pre-dawn I stop and cool off on my way to my Opening Day stand at Campground. I have come about two thirds of the way from the house and I want to dump the accumulated heat out of my clothes before making the final part of the trek. I take my hat off and look up at the sky and take my time observing Orion, Canis Major, The Pleiades, and Taurus the Bull. It is not so much a given location, but rather a time and bit of ritual.

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