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TICKS, GARS AND MEMORIES

  by

  Michael Allender

  Copyright 2014 Michael Allender

  (The seventh in a series of fourteen stories)

  Ticks, Gars and Memories

  (Story # 7)

  Like most of our adventures, there were just the two of us. Ben always thought that one or two people was best for exploring life's most important lessons. This time he’d taken a notion to paddle our tandem canoe along twenty miles of slow moving water in The Big Thicket of east Texas, about a hard hour's drive east of our little dirt farm. Might take the better part of three days, he told Dad. Poking around would best describe how I viewed it. Soft exploration.

  Hard core living off the land is more what Ben had in mind. Survival of the fittest. He wanted a place where we could lose our farm identity and robe ourselves in the rough cloth of wildness and mystery. He didn't put it quite like that, however. "No guns, no traps, and no frog gigs this time, Sis," he told me. "A little grub and our wits. We'll see what we can do with 'em." If it was all right with Ben, it was okay by me. I knew Ben to be woods savvy.

  The Thicket consists of scattered patches of old growth forests, just north of Beaumont near the Louisiana border. A big chunk of it is swampland where looking up through the interlaced trees and vines can engender thoughts of unexplored jungle complete with critters like howler monkeys, jaguars, and anacondas the size of fire hoses. In reality there's nothing more dangerous in those woods than water moccasins and poison ivy, maybe a bear or two, and they don't come looking for trouble. Still, Ben assured me we'd have to stay sharp if we didn't want to go hungry.

  Dad dropped us off at a bridge over Big Sandy Creek and promised to pick us up two days later at another bridge downstream. "Mind what I say, Ben," he said while we loaded our canoe. "You're responsible for Abbie as well as yourself. Keep an eye open for moccasins, copperheads and bears. Don't go making friends with strangers. Some pretty low down swamp hillbillies live in these parts."

  Bears? Wow, I could hardly imagine getting to see a genuine live bear. Swamp hillbillies though... We'd keep a lookout, but it seemed pretty far-fetched to me.

  "Everything we need's right here," Ben said as we paddled around the first bend. "You just have to know where to look for it."

  I looked back and caught a last glimpse of Dad standing on the bridge, hands on his hips, big straw hat canted to one side, and felt a pang. But we only had two nights, and I'd known Ben to provide our whole family with a meal of frog legs he’d taken no more than a couple of hours to gig. And our old black neighbor, Price Walker, had taught him how to recognize edible mushrooms, like ink caps, morels, and giant puffballs. With Ben’s knowledge and some staples like flour, baking powder and a little grease, we’d get by. You don't need much when you're just out gathering memories. And memories, as it happens, was the official reason we were going.

  You see, Ben was taking an experimental course in psychology, and he had to write a research paper on something related to memory. Experimental—meaning it was being taught by Coach Davis. Still, the course gave Ben a kind of authority, the kind little sisters respect. It changed how I heard him, much like a badge will change the way you see a gun on a hip.

  "Here's what we'll do," he told me a week before the trip. "We'll canoe through The Thicket for a few days, living off the land. We'll both try to remember what we see. And hear and everything else. Then we'll compare and see if it's different. That’ll be my paper."

  Somehow it appealed to me, not just the float trip, but helping him on his paper. I'd never done that before.

  "Look at this scene," Ben said as we paddled out into a swampy meadow. "Remember what you see." After five minutes of straining to memorize every detail while Ben paddled, we reentered the forest and he spoke up. "Now, tell me what you saw."

  "The stream, a leopard frog, grass and sedges. I saw a water snake...lots of things."

  "You see the otter trail coming in from that little hill in the middle?" he asked. I hadn't. "How about those pockets of stirred up mud, and those trails in the shallows. What made ‘em?"

  "Beaver?"

  "Nope. Soft shell turtle trails. And that big cypress leaning out over the stream?"

  "I saw it," I said. "Looked like there was a nest in the top."

  "Crow," he answered. "And there was a woodpecker hole in a hollow limb."

  "Yep, I saw that, too," I said with satisfaction.

  "Did you see the owl castings underneath?" I hadn't, and it vexed me. But then, Ben was the expert here, too.

  "Maybe we see and hear things different," I suggested. "Maybe it's 'cause we are different, like Kissy and me are."

  My sister Kissy, two years younger than me, was domestic as a little Betty Crocker. Can you picture someone called Kissy helping run a trap line for skunks like I did with Ben? Or going to the dump ground? Like, 'Kissy, there’s a big old rat. Go stomp on it.' Right. I figured the reason we were opposites was because we must see and hear things differently, and so we remembered things in our own little ways. Which somehow made us grow up as different as lemons and sweet potatoes.

  "Nope, everyone sees things the same," Ben assured me. "And hears the same, too, or we wouldn't be able to talk. It's how it all gets stored; that's the difference. Think how memories get stored," he said. "It's all in the cerebral core. Nerves communicate with each other, with chemicals, mostly. Like 'tassium, sodium and epaneferon. And some other stuff you wouldn't recognize. Get the balance off just a little, it's not the same anymore. Remember Gatlin?" he asked, and of course I did. Ben steered our boat onto a sandbar and we took a short break, sat in the sun against a weathered log and let our thoughts drift back a ways.

  Gatlin Tewksberry was a local carpenter who took a fall, which resulted in a twelve penny nail being punched through the side of his skull. Before the accident he had been a noted storyteller who could do anything with wood or words. He charged a lot for his woodwork, but he was fast, long as you didn't let him get started on his words work. After the accident his stories all seemed to run together, rough-sawn, lacking their final polish. Had trouble walking right, too. Kept taking a big step forward, then a little one, then sometimes a little hop back. People called it the Tewksberry shuffle, and it was cruelly popular for a while at the dance hall.

  And Gatlin remembered things different too, things that were already firmly in his head, like where he lived. After work he kept going to the house next door to his own, pouring himself a glass of milk, and then getting all agitated when Mrs. Wilson came into his house.

  "If you could put a egg beater in your brain and crank it a couple turns, you'd have a whole new world," Ben explained. "The same things would be in there, but they'd be all scrambled up, like with Gatlin."

  That thought put my teeth on edge and made me a little queasy, but I got the message.

  "Coach says you aren't anything more than what you remember," he said with genuine seriousness. "So be careful what you put in your head." He was pointing a stick at me and making little stabbing motions like he wanted to push it into my skull. He had his own ideas on what I should remember.

  I got up on my knees and skipped a stone across the creek, thinking on his advice. "But if we see things the same, and we remember them different, who's right?" He stared at me for a moment too long, time enough to let me figure out I had him. Then he drew the four crossing lines of Tic-Tac-Toe in the dirt and played a game with himself, which he won.

  "I am," he said.

  After we resumed our journey, the primary psychology reason for our trip was soon forgotten. We got down to the business of pulling paddles through the murky water, and fendin
g off hunger pangs that felt like those soft shell turtles were clawing around in our bellies. At least we were feeling the same things, and as the day wore on we kept all four eyes alert for encounters with edibles.

  Stocking the larder would have proven much easier had we brought Ben's single shot .22. He’d rejected that idea because he wanted to rough it, to get closer to the 'heart of the earth'. "I'm not looking to root through the brush like a wild hog," he told me before we left. "Don't plan on it coming to that. We might have a hunger spell or two, but we can ride them out."

  I guess that's also why we didn't bring the traps or frog gigs. And did I mention it was late November? Mushrooms and berries weren’t out in any abundance yet. Still, Ben had a savvy way in the woods.

  By mid afternoon we were anxious to make a camp and explore the land instead of the waterway.