Run at the Bunnies

I’ve been writing folk songs and recording them. I have no pretensions about my voice, my musicianship, and songwriting talent, and I rarely perform in public. I enjoy being an amateur. 

A recent song called, “Run at the Bunnies”, recalls an incident with my father. He took me squirrel hunting when I was about twelve. I got lost in the woods, scared off game by tromping over dead leaves, and came down with poison oak.

Dad and Mom decided that I wouldn’t go hunting again. I felt relief as I hadn’t enjoyed the prospect of shooting squirrels and gutting them. (On hot days, a hunter had to cut open the belly, insert a thumb, and scoop out the intestines. The game would go bad if this disgusting job was neglected.)

A few years later, Dad approached me and offered to take me rabbit hunting. Except I wouldn’t shoot at anything. I asked him what I would be doing instead. After some hemming and hawing, he finally revealed that I would act as a beater. I would scare the rabbits into the open so that Dad and a few of his brothers could take aim with their shotguns. In effect, he was politely asking me to be his hound dog. I politely said no.

I made a video this morning featuring photos of my dad from back when. As I worked, I started to miss him. He died in 2021, and there are times when I’d like to take a car trip with him one more time. We wouldn’t say much, maybe swap a few stories, but would mostly enjoy each other’s silent company. And a song intended to be funny became sad.

It’s odd how memories cut in all directions.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiUuQNh-6ss&ab_channel=DennisSchmalstiig

Lyrics with guitar chords:

Chorus.

(C) Last time you…scared off the game, (D7) got dirt on your (G) gun, made me question if you’re (C) really (G) my (C) son.

(C) Won’t you run at the bunnies, (D7) it’ll be (G) fun. Make tails skipper-scamper and (C) don’t (G) worry (C) none.

Verse 1. We meet in the stubble–used to be corn. The land’s in trouble, the farm’s outworn…Won’t you run at the bunnies…

2. There’s coneys in the bushes, rabbits in the brush. If you run right at ’em they’ll come out in a rush.

3. Buckshot doesn’t hurt ’em. They don’t scream long. We eat what we kill, ain’t doing nothing wrong.

4. Yeah, Eddy likes whiskey, takes nips from a flask. His hands stay steady, so why did you ask?

5. The beagle got cancer. Old Bowser dropped dead. So, what’s you answer? Stop shaking your head, and run at the bunnies…

Nature Walks

I’ve been doing demos for a class. I’m teaching students to combine thematic images to create hybrid shapes. Areas of these drawings are developed as patterns and tones. The idea: evoke a memory, a place, or a person without using direct illustration.

I seem to be drawing a series based on memories of various forms of nature experiences. I might have to do one about a painting trip where, during the span of 4 hours, a buzzard pooped on my palette, deer flies harassed me, lightning threatened to zap, and encounters with a black snake and gator proved startling.

The first demo is based on a hike in the Rocky Mountains. I initially drew overlapping mountains, a ptarmigan, a hiking boot, a lightning bolt, a boulder, a stream, a cigarette lighter, a path, and a stumbling figure. The separate images fused and metamorphosed into an abstract arrangement of shapes, tones and textures.

2125, graphite, 7×5″

The second is based on my first and last hunting trip. I proved better at scaring away game, getting lost, and catching poison oak than in bagging a squirrel. I remember thinking, as I dragged my heavy rifle around, that I’d enjoy the whole experience a lot better if I could simply absorb the peace and quiet of the woods. Having to locate and attempt to kill harmless tree rats spoiled the embracing beauty.

2126, graphite, 7×5″

What Kind of Man Are You?

I had contrasting male role models when I was a boy.  My Mom’s dad sang in the church choir, helped out around the house, read books and listened to classical music.  He was a calm and thoughtful man who took care of others.  The men on my Dad’s side drank whiskey and beer, smoked cigars, hunted and fished, played cards and bowled.  Some referred to cooking, cleaning and child rearing as “women’s work”.  They maintained an allergic attitude toward anything related to the “c” word: culture.  That’s not to say that they were stupid, but more that they liked what they already understood.  Reading a book, going to a museum, listening to a concert seemed like pointless exercises.

The movies I watched as a kid (pre-cable, often in black and white) starred John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and James Garner.  These actors represented contrasting styles of manhood.  John taught me to suck it up and endure danger and physical trials with little or no complaint.  Women were to be treasured and protected, but would remain largely unknowable.  Robert showed me that men may act on evil tendencies and can’t be trusted at first glance.  James acted as a jester, as a man who pointed out the absurdities of life.  Running away from a stupidly dangerous situation, not of one’s making, was acceptable.

I’m not like any of these examples, and I can’t really define precisely what makes a man good or bad.  Many men I’ve known drift back and forth between kindness and cruelty.  Most lean hard in one direction, but even the extreme cases have surprised me on occasion.  Some evolve from one form of manhood into another.

I guess that my bases for self-judgment draw on all these influences.  I know who I’d like to be while remaining aware that I fail to meet my own standards.  I try not to judge other men’s lifestyles and choices, but a recent public example of  “tough guy” manhood seems particularly repugnant to me.  I’ll never take that hot mess of hyper-inflated ego, blind cruelty, and pointless domineering as a guide to anything exemplary about manhood.

Here’s what I believe:

1. A good man accepts defeats and success gracefully.  He doesn’t blame others for his failures and doesn’t claim full credit for his advances.
2. A good man acts for the welfare of his family and community.
3. A good man does not denigrate others or spread gossip and slander.
4. A good man acknowledges his mistakes and sincerely strives to do better.
5. A good man admits that he feels pain, and does not pretend that he is invincible and immovable.  Stoicism becomes an act of choosing a rational response to hardship, not a denial of pain.
6. A good man tries his best to follow through on his commitments.  He does what he says he will do.
7. A good man does not exploit the weak and less powerful.
8. A good man tells the truth as he knows it, but doesn’t believe that he is the sole and complete possessor of truth.
9. A good man does not believe that his current good fortune is God-given proof of his higher worth.  He chooses to be grateful for blessings received.
10. A good man is humble.  He understands that he is a small speck in a vast cosmos.

The Right to Bear Arms: Let’s Talk About the Second Amendment

I try to avoid political discussions (especially in an election year) as I never relish a hot-headed argument that leads nowhere and changes the mind of no one.  But this morning I read that Orlando set a new high in gun deaths in 2015, and the local section featured four articles about recent shootings and gun deaths in 2016.  We central Floridians appear to be picking up right where we left off. The news of the ongoing bloodshed distressed me once again, and I decided to publish an essay I wrote last month following the mass killing in San Bernardino.

Many gun ownership advocates claim that they are strict readers of the Constitution, but conveniently forget that the Second Amendment speaks about gun ownership in the context of maintaining well regulated militias. I agree that state militias should bear arms and be well regulated. Private gun ownership is another matter.

But before I anger a number of you let me say that my father owned bolt action rifles and a shot gun when I was a child. He never used them to threaten bodily harm to any living creature other than squirrels and an occasional rabbit. He taught me how to aim and fire a rifle and a shot gun. I enjoyed target shooting and understand why folks are fond of their guns. Consequently I do not oppose ownership of single shot hunting rifles and shotguns as they are not designed with the sole intention of killing human beings. And if someone did wish to use them to commit mass murder he would have greater difficulty concealing these weapons when entering a crowded space, and if he did manage to get off a shot there would be a delay before he could begin targeting again.

Weapons that are designed solely to kill other people should be restricted or banned. Hand guns are used in the vast majority of gun deaths in America. Their only function is to kill human beings. (You’ll never see a deer hunter pull out a .45 to take down a buck.) If gun rights advocates assert that individuals have a right to defend themselves and should own hand guns if they desire, then I can reluctantly agree if the weapons have a limited magazine. If confronted by someone breaking into my home I don’t believe that I will need to turn the invader into mincemeat by firing a clip at his torso. Assault rifles have been used in mass shootings for the last 30 years. They obviously are intended to be used in situations that go beyond the self-defense of an individual. Their primary purpose, in their original design as military weapons, is to spray bullets at a wide field of targets with the intent of killing as many people as possible in a short period of time. Unless I am attacked on the street by a swarm of well armed gangsters it is unlikely that I will ever need an assault rifle to defend myself.

Strict and conservative readers of the Constitution claim that updated interpretations of and recent amendments to the original document pervert its meaning and belie the intentions of the Founding Fathers. They believe that the Second Amendment must never be challenged or reconsidered in light of current social and technological changes. My comments above brand me a traitor in the eyes of these purists. But are they being strict enough? I’d like to take their argument one step further to introduce a greater form of patriotism that truly adheres to all things deeply conservative. Put aside the endless debate about whether gun ownership is made sacrosanct by the Second Amendment. Let’s say that it does guarantee the right of every American to own a gun. But let’s turn our attention to the guns themselves.

If we take up the issue of gun rights then let us be faithful to the intentions and understanding of our forefathers. They spoke and wrote in terms of the weaponry of their age. At the time of the writing of the Constitution the only guns available were single shot rifles and pistols. Their weapons had to be muzzle loaded. The accuracy of pistols and rifles were as limited as their firing rates. It took a lot of care and concentration to hit a target, and a skilled rifleman could only take two successive shots within the span of a minute or two.

A man had time to consider the effect of his choice to use deadly violence before firing once again. He didn’t have the soft leisure of squeezing a trigger and holding it down while indiscriminately firing in all directions. He had to choose one particular victim and take deliberate aim.

I fully support a return to the good old days of our forefathers and the use of their weapons of choice. Let’s honor tradition and the original intent of the Constitution by jettisoning our modern, newfangled weapons and by replacing them with flintlock rifles and single shot, muzzle loading pistols. We could all still defend ourselves if absolutely necessary in our every day encounters. All other weapons should be banned and confiscated as they are unmanly and unpatriotic. Folks who consider themselves true Americans can get behind this incredibly conservative movement, can’t they?

Then no religious, racist or political fanatic could become an “active shooter” and mow down masses of people trapped in a crowded, enclosed space. Then no conscienceless punk could kill a score of innocent bystanders while trying to rub out a member of a rival gang. Then no father, mother, sister, brother would have to identify the body of a loved one torn into hamburger by bullets rapid-fired from an assault rifle by a suicidal, psychopathic idiot.

Skwerpockt (Of Squirrels and Men)

My Dad’s older brother Eddie spoke very rapidly and slurred his words together. If he said, “Hey, how’s it going and what have you been up to?” it sounded something like “Hayowzagoen, ehwuvbuptoo?” His sisters and brothers could mostly follow what he was saying, but everyone else tried to pick out a word or two to get the gist. He was able to hold jobs and was successfully employed for the entirety of his work life, however, and was a garrulous, confident and competitive man. It didn’t bother him when someone asked him to repeat a statement, and no one challenged him if they thought that he had said something off color because he was stocky and thickly muscled, and sported a burr haircut that gave him an aggressive look. Strangers were forewarned that he was a man who could do damage if sufficiently provoked.

He and my Dad used to go hunting together in the fall for squirrels and rabbits in woods and farmland north of Dayton. Dad came home empty-handed at sunset from one such expedition. He seemed cheerful all the same and stopped to talk to us for a few minutes before he ran water for a bath. He was looking forward to going to a party that evening.

Uncle Eddie called while he was in the tub, and I was the one who picked up the receiver.

“Hey Tom!”

“This is Denny.  Dad’s in the bath.”

“Hey, Dehhy, Tah yerdah skwerpockt.”

“What?”

“Skwerpockt. I puskwerpockt in Tomshuhjakt.”

“Squirrel?”

“Yeah, puskwerhuhjacktpockt. Tell yerdah.”

“Okay.”

I cracked open the door to the bathroom and said to Dad, “Uncle Eddie called and said something about a squirrel.”

My Dad said, “Oh yeah. He shot more squirrels than he could eat. He’s going to come by and drop one off.”

Dad went to his party, Uncle Eddie never showed up and we forgot about the phone call.

A few days later we began to smell something bad, something like rotten meat or road kill. We thought at first that a possum or raccoon had gotten trapped and died in one of the piles of lumber and building materials that Dad kept precariously stacked in the garage. But there was nothing out there. The garbage cans by the garage door were smelly, but no more than usual. We checked around the kitchen and between cabinets for a piece of meat that might have fallen off a plate, but didn’t find the source of the ever more pungent stench that permeated every corner of the house.

I decided to widen the search and followed my nose down the rickety wooden stairs to our basement. I was getting closer: the death smell was a lot stronger down there. I sniffed and peeked and poked until I came up to my Dad’s hunting jacket. It was hanging on a hook on the basement wall farthest away from the stairs. I opened the jacket and a devastating wave of rot assaulted me, and when I stopped gagging I gingerly opened a pocket with one finger and found a curled up bundle of gray fur.

I took the coat out to the garage, and when my Dad came home from work I told him what I had found. He remembered the phone call from Eddie and asked me to repeat what his brother had said to me. I said, “Tell yerdah puhskwerpockthuhjackt.” I repeated the string of syllables at my father’s request and a light dawned in his face. He translated: “Tell your Dad I put a squirrel in the pocket of his hunting jacket.” He added, “Eddie must have slipped it into my coat when I wasn’t looking, and he called to warn me.”

Dad took the corpse of the squirrel out of the jacket and buried it in our garden in the back yard. He hung up the coat in the garage on a hook usually reserved for the rake and went back inside the house.

I would have thrown the jacket away, but my Dad let it air out over the winter and used it again the next fall. He was a child of the Great Depression and wouldn’t let the lingering scent of a dead rodent keep him from using a perfectly good coat.

Bunnies

When I was two or three I had a yellow, plastic pull toy with red, plastic wheels. It was a bunny with large blue and black eyes. The spokes of the wheels were bent so that the toy bobbed up and down as it followed me. When I was studying to be a painter I rediscovered it in the bottom of a wooden toy chest in my parents’ basement. I used it in a series of still lives that I entitled, “Rabbit Season” that also featured a decorative wood and copper duck that used to hang above our kitchen table. (I was a fan of Warner’s Bros. cartoons.) The rabbit helped me to put some emotional juice into the paintings, which can be difficult to do with still life, by helping me to remember nearly forgotten moments from childhood.

Dad’s family were country and small town people, and my uncles and he still went back to woods and farmland in western Ohio to hunt in the fall. I visited my grandparents’ house one day in November with my father, and as I walked into the kitchen I saw Grandpa Schmalstig and my Uncle Eddie seated in wooden chairs on either side of a galvanized, metal wash tub. I was about 4. They held something gray and furry between them and I watched in horror as Grandpa John took a hunting knife and made several cuts through the dead animal’s pelt. He set the knife down, took a tight hold of its head and told my uncle to pull. The rabbit’s skin was gradually peeled away from the carcass and I could see pinkish gray muscles exposed inch by inch from its neck down to its long hind feet. Blood dripped down into the tub. Uncle Eddie grunted from the effort it took to remove the rabbit’s skin, but the last strip was finally removed when the head was laid bare. I believe that the dark, black eyes remained in the sockets. The flayed animal looked vulnerable and fragile, and it was hard to imagine that it had ever hopped in a corn field or munched on clover.

My Dad waited until I was about eleven to introduce me to squirrel hunting. He had shown me at a firing range outside of Bellbrook how to shoot a 22 caliber single shot rifle. We drove up north very early on a Saturday morning to a farm. The farmer invited us in when we arrived and gave us some coffee. He didn’t want any money for the privilege of hunting in his woods, but told us to shoot any ground hog we saw along the way.

I turned out to be a horrible stalker making too much noise as I dragged my feet through dried leaves and snapped any available twig in my path. I scared away game, got lost, and missed the one good shot my Dad and I had the whole day. My legs started itching back home that same evening, and my mother discovered that I had somehow managed to come down with a raging case of poison oak even though I had worn long pants and boots. While I was busy in my bedroom trying not to scratch my shins, I heard them conferring in the living room about my future as a hunter. My mother wanted Dad to never take me again, and he agreed without making much of an argument. I don’t think that he believed that I would ever be any good at it.

I never was invited back again, which was a great relief to me. The day in the woods had been a series of humiliations that discouraged me from ever trying again. And there was one item of business that my Dad had neglected to mention before we set out, but which was revealed about midday. My cousin Mike had come along on the hunt. He went his separate way far from my crashing about in the undergrowth, and bagged a little, gray squirrel. He came up to my Dad when we all met in a clearing and said, “Uncle Tommy, will you gut my squirrel?” It was a warm day and the meat wouldn’t keep if the intestines were given time to rot inside the rodent. My Dad replied, “It’s your squirrel,” and Mike reluctantly used his knife to cut open the furry, white belly. Then he plunged his thumb into the opening just below the ribs and pushed down hard. Gray and red, sticky glop dangled from the carcass before dropping with a quiet, mushy plop onto the ground. The smell was of warm blood and shit. Mike wiped his thumb on his hunting jacket and stuffed the gutted animal into a pocket. I knew at that moment that I would never be a hunter.

A few years later my Dad mentioned to me that he was going rabbit hunting and wanted to know if I wanted to come along. I thought that I was finally being given a chance to redeem myself, but I saw a calculating look in my father’s eyes. I asked him if I would be using a shotgun, and he told me no. He explained that I and some of my male cousins were being recruited to act as beaters. We were to walk in a line through a harvested corn field to flush rabbits out of their hiding places among the dead, brown stalks. Dad, Uncle Eddie and Uncle Jerry would be waiting at the other end of the field with shotguns in hand. I turned the “offer” down. I didn’t trust my life with these men (there were rumors of them taking whiskey flasks along on cold days to keep themselves warm), and I didn’t want to be used by my father as a stand in for a hunting dog.

We sometimes ate rabbit or squirrel for our Sunday dinner. My mother insisted on baking a chicken for those, herself included, who found the hunted meat too gamy, or who didn’t enjoy spitting out shotgun pellets and bone fragments. My Dad would pull out a cardboard milk carton from the deep freezer in the basement and set it on a kitchen counter to thaw. Inside would be a headless, skinned animal frozen in water. After the ice melted my Dad would cut up the rabbit or squirrel into leg quarters, backs and breasts, would dredge them in salt and peppered flour, and brown them in a iron skillet. They were baked until well done in the left over drippings, and I remember enjoying the taste of squirrel more than rabbit. I also remember feeling a bit uneasy whenever I took a bite because I knew exactly how they had been taken from the field and delivered to our table.

My Dad had an odd sense of humor, and enjoyed teasing us in rare moments of…levity. One of his favorite “jokes” was to tell us on the Saturday night before Easter that he was going to stay up all night waiting for the Easter Bunny. He’d have a weird smile on his face when he added that we shouldn’t expect any baskets of candy in the morning as he intended to sit in a chair by the front door with a loaded shotgun, and that we would be eating the Easter Bunny for our Easter Sunday dinner.