Sat, Oct 11 2008
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Published May 31, 2008 11:00 pm - The difference in geese ... the difference in the world Last week I wrote about how many geese there are in the Ozarks now and what a different creature they have become, with so many of them becoming non-migrators and just staying where they are, raising goslings on every little farm pond where cattle graze on permanent pasture.
Just think about it. When I was a boy, and not all that long ago, we never saw a goose in the Ozarks in the spring and summer. You seldom saw one close up in the fall, as they’d pass over in long strings, making beautiful music as the nip in the air and the falling leaves told you that winter wasn’t far away. Floating down the river in November and December, hunting mallards and wood ducks from our old johnboat, if we saw a few Canada geese on the river, and actually had a chance to bring one home, it was a never to be forgotten experience. Now, out hunting turkeys in the spring, it would be so easy to fill the freezer with Canada’s. And while they aren’t as good to eat as wild gobblers, a smoked goose, or a roasted goose, certainly isn’t to be made light of. It’s the goose-feather plucking that makes everyone think Colonel Sander’s fried chicken is the best route to take for Sunday dinner. What a difference there is in the Canada goose today and the one I saw as a boy, only 40-some years ago. But then again, what a difference there is in this world today. The creeks so full of water, in which I swam throughout the summer, are dry today by the time July and August come around. The woodlots along the river bottoms have been bulldozed and are now fields of green grass. Where there were a dozen old cows there are now great herds. Oh yes, we had lots more quail and rabbits. There weren’t many hawks to be seen, and deer and turkey were just beginning to come back. My, what a crowd an eight-point buck in the back of an old pickup on Main Street would draw. But I saw the Ozarks from the standpoint of a kid who didn’t really have to worry about where is next meal was coming from. I knew there would be enough to eat because dad had a job at the shoe factory. Of course, there wasn’t enough money to buy a whole lot more in the way of luxuries. In my time, in the hills of the Ozarks, my grandparents’ sons and daughters drove used cars and pickups, we hunted with old guns traded for or bought for very little money, and whatever furniture graced a home when you were five years old was probably still being used when you left home as a high school graduate. Most of us high school graduates of the late 1960s were the first of our families to achieve such a goal. Most of us country kids in the heart of the Ozarks had parents who may have gone through the eighth grade, but few of them finished high school. My dad and uncles talked about a college education as if it were some lofty goal they dreamed of for their children like men might dream of finding a pot of gold. But most of us who wanted that education got it because we worked so hard to achieve it. At the University of Missouri, I worked at three jobs, up to 35 hours per week, to earn that degree. I was the first Dablemont to ever achieve such a thing, and maybe one of the least deserving. Today what seemed so great an achievement is something taken for granted. But we also have come to take for granted much which the future may not allow our descendants economical transportation, abundant clean water, affordable and available food, unpolluted air, and enough space for everyone to live on. Like geese, there are just too many of us. You may refer to it as nature, or the divine hand of an all-knowing creator, but it seems as if, in foreign places, the reckoning is beginning, with hurricanes and earthquakes, cyclones and tsunamis and new diseases and starvation in a world where there is plenty. No man can see the future, but nature can, and in a way we are being told things, perhaps being warned. I doubt the warning will be heeded, or the outcome changed. What is coming is coming. Of course it is easy for me to remember the days of my boyhood, and how different things were. But should you go back farther, to my dad’s boyhood, you found him living in a cabin with a sawdust floor, heated by a stove made from a barrel. You saw a time in the 1930s when a wild goose on a farm pond in the spring would have attracted hungry eyes. No, there were no deer and turkey, not so much for any other reason than hunger. And if some local rancher had owned a herd of cattle anything like we see today, he would have lost them in a hurry, not because Ozark hill people were outlaws, but because they had hungry families. Yes, it is something how the wild goose has changed, but it is even more remarkable how man has changed as well … in some ways, for the better, and in some ways, not. Uncle Norten is heading for the river this week to take some folks on an Ozark float trip. At 84, he may be the oldest fishing guide in the country. Remarkably, he has guided fisherman since his first trip in 1933 at the age of 11, when his first fee for a whole day on the Big Piney was 50 cents. Only a wealthy man could afford such money back then, and the client was a fly-fisherman. 
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