Shoo, Squirrels

Every time I hunt, I learn something new. Today I learned that you don’t always want to bag anything.

I have live oak trees, and they never stop dropping leaves. I bought a lawn sweeper to remove them. Live oak leaves are highly resistant to lawn sweepers because they are heavy and flat. They suck on the ground when the brushes of the sweeper pass over them. Also, for some reason my yard contains a lot of Spanish moss. I mean the grass itself, not the trees, contains Spanish moss. It winds around the sweeper’s axle and stops the wheels, and every so often I have to stop the garden tractor and hack at the moss with a knife. I tried removing it with a torch, but it bursts into flame.

Anyway, it takes about three minutes to fill the sweeper with leaves. This removes about 0.001% of the leaves in the yard. I then have to drive to the burn pile in the pasture, dump the leaves, and return. Today I made about eight trips, and I would say I dumped 400 pounds of leaves.

When it was over, I was tired, but it was mostly from aggravation, not exertion. The tractor does most of the work. I wanted to get some exercise, so I picked up the shotgun and headed out.

I kept thinking about the stench and effort of cleaning squirrels, and I realized I would probably be happier if I didn’t kill any. I needed a shower. I had some butchered squirrels I needed to cook later, to keep them from spoiling. I wasn’t all that eager to spend half an hour pulling out squirrel guts.

At first, things went the way they usually do. I saw two squirrels very close to the neighboring house which is three millimeters from my land. I don’t want to be the guy who shoots a shotgun outside their house every day, so I kept walking.

After I had looped back toward the house, I heard a bark, so I started toward it. Ten steps. Stop. Listen. Ten steps. Stop. Listen. I had taken my ear plugs out so I could hear squirrel activity. The barking squirrel wised up and shut his piehole, so I turned to continue toward home. There in front of me, three feet off the ground, 20 yards away, staring at me, was an enormous squirrel.

I had two choices: shoot without hearing protection or take a chance on losing him while I fumbled with ear plugs. I chose the latter course, and he ran up the tree as soon as I was ready to shoot.

I know how to deal with squirrels hiding in trees, so I sat down to wait him out. I didn’t see him again, but a bunch of new squirrels started leaping their way toward me like the Flying Wallendas trying to make a dramatic entrance. They ended up nearly overhead. I could have shot one without getting up. But the angle was such that it was conceivable that some of the pellets would have ended up on someone else’s land, so I let them go. Man, I hate a squirrel.

Up side: no butchering. No funky squirrel smell on my hands and cutting board.

I went in the house and fried the squirrels that were waiting in the fridge. I think I know how to do it now. I put together a likely mixture of flour, salt, pepper, chipotle, sage, and garlic powder. I wet the squirrels down with buttermilk. I coat them with the mixture and fry them in half an inch of fat. It seems to work.

Treating them with baking soda (my prescription for gamy meat) must work, because now they taste exactly like a chicken leg. They’re not quite as tender as chicken, but they’re okay.

The frustration I have with shooting angles makes me feel like I will need more land in the future. I keep thinking about Tennessee. Ocala is wonderful. Compared to Miami, it’s like heaven. But I can see a neighbor’s house from my front porch, and I can’t hunt without worrying about where the projectiles go. If I could find 300 acres in Appalachia, I would be in business.

I could live here the rest of my life and be very happy, but now that I’m hunting, I know I’d be missing out on a few things.

First, the trees here are all live oaks. Literally 90% are either live oaks or some other kind of trashy oak which is even worse. They’re rotten inside and full of huge roaches. The wood is worthless. They don’t produce nuts. I remember the neat trees in Appalachia. White oaks, red oaks, black oaks, chestnut oaks, hickories, locusts, black walnuts, dogwoods, redbuds, cedars, poplars, plums, maples…you name it. If you have your own woods up there, you can cut trees and dry the wood for woodworking. You can eat walnuts, apples, peaches, plums, and cherries. And you don’t have to worry about every fourth tree on your property falling over if the wind blows.

Second, the dirt up there is real dirt. Here, it’s grey sand. In some places it’s white, like the beach. It’s not very productive. The grass in my yard and pastures is Bahia, which is very long and thin. I thought I would be able to have it baled and sell it, but I found out it’s not worth baling. My grandfather had a farm in Kentucky that produced beautiful bales of hay so heavy it was tough to throw them up onto a wagon. A guy I know entered one in the state fair and won a prize. I don’t think you can grow anything like that here.

Third, it’s hotter than I expected. It was in the high 80’s today, in February. In Tennessee, it was in the 60’s.

Fourth, and this is related to the heat: this area has a major mosquito problem, and any day now, three months before I expected it, they will be back in full force. When you go outside in bug season here, you have to wear repellant all the time. I don’t mean when you go to the mall, but on my property, you will get eaten alive. We also have tons of spiders in Marion County, and they build gigantic webs in the woods. You can’t walk 50 feet without getting wrapped in a web containing a spider the size of a grape. In Appalachia, they have ticks, yellowjackets, and hornets. That’s about it.

Fifth, people…keep…moving…to…Florida. Yankees, as always, and since Irma, Puerto Ricans. Florida is now considered a purple state. Our conservatism is fading. I can hear traffic noises when I walk in my woods. I expect it to get worse, and I’m afraid a lot of the new traffic will be cars full of people who vote for socialism, perversion, and authoritarianism.

Sixth, the game here is not that great. If I really tried, I could bring home 20 squirrels a week, but they’re smaller than squirrels up north. You have to be very determined in order to eat them. I haven’t seen a single deer or hog. I heard one turkey call, but I’m afraid it was a neighbor getting ready for the season. We have bears, but the freaks and hippies won’t let us hunt them, because they’re cute.

I sound like I’m knocking this place. I love it here. But I might love it more somewhere else.

I am starting to miss Appalachia badly. I have learned I can live in the sticks and be happy. I don’t miss people or cities at all. I don’t have to have the Guggenheim Museum or the Helen Hayes Theatre five minutes away. I could enjoy Appalachia. I miss the scenery. I miss the waterfalls and creeks, which are things you can’t have in Florida. I mean, yes, we have creeks, but they’re actually sluggish warm streams. Not like the beautiful creeks in Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky.

I almost wish I had my grandfather’s old farm near Rogers, Kentucky. It was big enough to get lost in, and the back side was high cliffs overlooking the Red River Gorge. But I could never live in Eastern Kentucky again, because of the Defcon 1 racism and the widespread aversion to self-improvement. When I think about that, I always remember my cousin Byrd, who was a judge and an erudite individual. He said, “Just once I’d like to use a three-syllable word.”

Also, people would know me there. They know my family. For that matter, I still have relatives there. My family has never respected me at all, for reason I can’t fathom. I’m the most educated person in my family, by far, and I’m the closest thing my family has produced to a sophisticated person. Nonetheless, they never pay any attention to anything I say. I’ve changed a lot; I’m not the same person they used to know, with the same willingness to put up with nonsense. When you change, and then you go back to people who knew you before you changed, they pressure you to accept the treatment they used to give you, and you may give in and revert. I’m not doing that.

Here’s a story. My family owned a piece of land, by inheritance. We owned it in common. We sold it to another family. Political friends of my late grandfather. They found a problem with it, and they wanted to rescind the sale. I’m an attorney, and I don’t mean an attorney who practiced in the woods in Eastern Kentucky, against people who charge $75 an hour. I practiced with some of the sharpest people in a major market. I practiced intellectual property law, which is the most difficult field. I don’t have any lawyer relatives who are qualified to do that. I told my relatives to take the property back.

We had sold it for $40,000, which is not much money, and it would have been relatively inexpensive to take it back and auction it again. I thought our defense was weak. We would have kept our friends, and we would have moved on. They wanted to hire a lawyer and go to court. Over what probably amounted to $4000!

Guess what they did? They hired the lawyer, and we ended up paying him. My relatives kept quiet about the final result. When I finally got them to tell me what happened, they said we lost the case. Of course we did! Hello? Who predicted that? So we paid the lawyer’s fee, we gave back the money, and we wasted a ton of time. We also alienated people who had always been in our corner. This is an example of how my advice goes over up there.

It’s fine that they disagreed with me, but they didn’t even consider my advice. I was 100% correct, and they could not have been more wrong, and they didn’t have the background I had. They could at least have thought my advice over.

Here’s another story. Kentucky condemned part of a piece of property that belonged to us, to build a highway ramp. When this happens, you need an attorney to negotiate. At the time, my dad was a top-notch lawyer. He was sharp enough to be on the Supreme Court. He told the family he would handle the job for nothing. I said I would work with him for nothing. They turned us down and hired my cousin. He charged a 33% contingency fee. Contingency fees are for poor people, not people who can pay. Anyway, I forget the figure, but I believe he got over $100,000 for an easy job. It’s almost as if they thought it was worth paying six figures in order to avoid trusting my judgment.

I will never understand that.

Anyway, you can tell I am greatly respected.

I suppose there is a good chance I’ll run into racism in a place like Tennessee or Georgia, but I would hope it wouldn’t be as bad as it was in Eastern Kentucky, where it seemed like every tenth word was “nigger.” Even if it was, at least I would be around fresh people. I love my relatives. Don’t get me wrong. But I had a dysfunctional upbringing, my relatives were peripherally involved, if only as witnesses. There is a certain stubborn dynamic among us, and I am not going back.

Visiting? Fine. I hope I eventually get to visit them again, and I like talking to them on the phone. But living in the area where my mother grew up and dealing with certain expectations people have of me and my family…I’m not doing it. I’ll tell you something else. My family has enemies up there, and I don’t even know who they are. For all I know, some of them hate us for good reason. Now that I think about it, the ones my sister alienated have plenty of reason to dislike us. I’d rather go somewhere new and make my own enemies.

I was talking to a friend about this last night, and I put it this way: when you work for a company and get a promotion, they don’t let you stay where you are and boss your old friends around. They move you across the state to boss new people around. Why? Because of the existing dynamic between you and your pals. Your buddies won’t respect you or produce for you, and you won’t assert yourself. If you do assert yourself, they’ll tear you down. People function best where they’re respected and appreciated. I can’t imagine being respected or appreciated in Wolfe County or Powell County Kentucky.

It sounds nuts to talk about moving, right after leaving Miami, but it’s not as crazy as it sounds. I don’t want to be morbid, but my dad is 86, and he has a condition which has a certain expected end, within a period of time doctors say is short. It won’t be long until it’s just me here, and when that happens, my life will be very different. I won’t be a caregiver any more. I won’t need hot winters or a city geared to the care of old people. I won’t have to hire a sitter if I decide to travel and look at land. If I move, I’ll just hire movers, watch them pack, and drive to the new place. I won’t have to do all that while looking after someone who can’t drive, take his pills correctly, shop for food, or be left alone.

It would be nice if I had a wife to move with me, because moving is a chore, but I haven’t made any friends here or met much of anyone. No prospects whatsoever. But I can’t predict the future. Maybe someone will fall from the sky next week.

I haven’t written about it, but God has made real changes in my life over the last week. This will sound weird, but I feel he is telling me I’m finally one with him. It doesn’t mean I’m suddenly a good person. I just feel that I am more closely identified with him now. I am getting faith like nothing I’ve had before. Before I developed supernatural faith, I would try to believe, quit, and fail. After I got faith through prayer in tongues, I felt something in me pushing and holding my faith up, and I believed pretty well. Now I feel insistent faith that doesn’t come from me, and I feel like responding, “ALL RIGHT! I GIVE UP! YOU’RE RIGHT! YOU’RE RIGHT!”

I believe things that weren’t possible before are going to start happening now, so I’m not afraid to think about a final destination north of here.

This farm is great, but I now think I would be better off with less cleared land and more woods. Cleared land requires maintenance. I would love to have 300 acres, including 10 acres or less of pasture, without fancy fencing. Just barbed wire.

Here, the woods require maintenance, but this is a special situation. I’m in a hurricane zone (another issue I would like to leave behind). A rare storm came through and knocked over dozens of big trees. I think they’re still falling. My memory isn’t good enough to recall every tree, but it sure seems like I find more horizontal trees every month. Maybe Irma weakened them, and I’m still seeing the effects. I have the world’s only self-clearing agricultural tract.

Anyway, GENERALLY, woods require no maintenance at all. You just walk in once in a while, shoot some things, and walk out.

A little place in the Blue Ridge region would be really sweet, if I could just find an area where the people were okay.

I’m going to make the best of it here. When my dad’s situation changes, I’ll sell and leave. Then I’ll stay wherever I am until I die and leave this wretched world behind. At the moment, this is my plan.

Life here is really good, so I can’t complain while I’m waiting.

Wish me luck with turkey season. It’s right around the corner, and I have no idea what I’m doing.