“Why do you always tell people you’re 80 when you’re not?” my wife asked the other day. “And the pirate joke is getting old, very old.”
“Because I’m very close and telling people I’m 80 grabs their attention when 79 doesn’t,” I say defensively. “It’s sexier. People are shocked and make very complimentary statements, like, I can’t believe you’re 80; you look 62. Or You’re hilarious and you’re really 80? My grandpa is 80 and he’s on oxygen and drools. I’ve found that being 80 is a babe magnet. And I like to tell the joke.”
“You can’t be serious? A babe magnet? You may be looking at them but they sure as Hell aren’t looking at you,” she barked. “Another thing, you way overuse the joke and with your seriously flawed memory, I’ve watched you tell the joke to the same people over and over again. They can’t be happy to see you heading their direction, especially walking like you’ve got a peg leg. You never tell it right, either.”
“Look who’s talking,” I retorted. “I’ve heard you blow it several times, like with that waitress in Tucson. She didn’t have a clue what you were talking about. She chuckled only because she wanted a decent tip.”
The pirate joke goes something like this. Someone asks me my age and I respond, “Aye Matey.” That’s the correct way to tell it. More often than not, I have to tell them to ask me my age because most everyone considers it rude to ask a person their age. The incorrect way to tell the joke is to just say, “I’m 80” in a matter-of-fact way. Even using my best Piratese, it only elicits a look or confusion or just a smile, unless you are a waitress wanting a tip. Now I rehearse.
I love humor in most any form but stand-up comics frequently bore or disgust me. Like, the guy who dropped watermelons from the roofs of buildings to watch them explode in the parking lot below. Very creative. For many years, SNL was a great source of fantastic comedians from John Belushi and the gang to Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy and Chris Farley. But now, too often we geriatrics haven’t a clue what’s going on in a skit. I’d rather listen to a Gregorian chant than most of their guest musicians. The last SNL I seriously laughed at was a 1998 skit when Pete Schweddy, alias Alec Baldwin, sold Schweddy Balls and Schweddy Weiners to Ana Gasteyer and Molly Shannon, hosts on NPR’s Delicious Dish.
Humorous material in today’s world is not easily found, especially in the subject of politics. Occasionally, a Republican will emerge begging for a laugh. Mitch McConnell does a great gobbler or turtle. Perhaps a basset hound. Or Lindsay Graham saying, “Y’all come on down to South Carolina, hear? I’ll put a light on fer ya.” Or Sarah Palin throwing a football to Putin from her front porch. Trump evoked a lot of humorous cartoons and pundits early on, but now, he’s nothing more than the Republican frontrunner.
When I’m around them, I can almost always find humor in the Seattle 3, our three little grandsons, 8 (twins) and 10. I’ve tried to teach them all at least one line of several butchered foreign languages or dialects. For example, their dad works with a woman by the name of Genevieve. I’ve told the boys that the best way to ensure their dad gets a raise is to say to Genevieve the next time they see her, “Bonjour mon amour, Mademoiselle Genevieve.” Genevieve isn’t French. Their father was not amused, and neither was Genevieve, so the French was dropped. Italian, “Mama mia, gimme a pizzeria” is always a hit. Or German, “Ein bier, bitte.” Or a boy from Alabama to his mother, “Git over here wooman, I’m gonna larn you with ma belt.” And then they snap my leather belt accompanied by a fake evil grin. I always laugh my ass off and they laugh with me, but interested passersby usual just walk away shaking their heads. I have told their mom to buy them all miniature wife-beater T-shirts, but she refuses.
Someone hearing impaired recently asked me if I had ever considered being a stand-up comic. “Never,” I signed. “Humor is therapeutic for virtually everyone, but for me it also keeps me immature. Our daughters enjoy my sense of humor and I enjoy theirs, but the buck may stop there. For 50 years I have been asking my wife why she’s not laughing when I’ve deliberately tried to make her laugh. Her response is always the same, “Because it isn’t funny.” In front of an audience, my jokes would never get off stage.”
We have a long-time female friend who is 93 and still sharp as a tack, funny, with an incredible memory, and an unreal laugh. I love to make her laugh, in part because it’s so easy. She always says the same thing, “Oh, David, you are a hoot.” Or, “Oh David, you kill me.” Almost 50 years ago at their ranch in New Mexico, on the front porch of a bunkhouse, she and I got drunk on a bottle of cheap tequila. Actually, I got drunk; she just laughed and drank enough to laugh continuously. I still bring up the incident and she still laughs but never forgets that I was the only one drunk. After her 90th birthday party, which we attended, she privately asked my wife, “When did David go from being a Ph.D. to being an imbecile?” Aye Matey.
Just a few days ago, I buried myself under a Pendleton wool blanket and down comforter in our tiny cabin in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho. It was a still cold early July morning, and I couldn’t get up even though my wife was snoring reasonably peacefully alongside me which would have been fine were it not for the fact that her bubbling lips were next to my left ear. That was not reason enough to get up and go for a walk until I looked again at the mountain, towering above the cabin outside the window. It had been gray and barely visible until it turned a brilliant gold in a matter of several minutes. The sun was on the ridgetops now and it immediately brought back then. I got up, dressed, and walked out the door.
Then
I had one more task to accomplish before I crashed. The alpenglow was kissing the Methow Valley goodbye as I poured gasoline on my first pair of hiking boots and tossed a match to them. The burning leather stunk like a rotting cow carcass. It was early September of 1969, and my feet were still blistered after over 500 miles of living in those boots. The soles had even come unstitched and were flapping like an old man with loose dentures. I had finished my first summer of several as a Wilderness Ranger in the Pasayten Wilderness Area in the Okanogan National Forest. The Pasayten is located on the east slope of the North Cascade Mountains on the Canadian border. The east slope is the rain shadow side, hot and dry relative to just a few miles west. That first summer of the several I was there. Winthrop was still a sleepy little western town. But that was before the North Cascades Highway was dedicated in 1972. After that, it was never the same. That previous spring, I had received a typed, personal letter from the Winthrop District Ranger offering me the job. That wouldn’t happen today. I ordered those worthless boots from REI right after I got the letter.
During the 60s and 70s, the Forest Service was in transition from the days of the Pulaski to the computer. The Pulaski was an axe-adze combo named after the famous ranger who saved his firefighters during the Big Burn of 1910. A story from the early days that was still lingering around in the Methow country, was that foresters slept with their Pulaski instead of their wives and used it as for everything from chopping up burning trees to dicing carrots. Those were times when fires were totally different beasts than today. Smokejumpers were often the first line of defense and could single-handed extinguish a fire. Today, climate-changed holocausts with winds that uproot colossal trees get out of control in minutes. During that transition, bandy-legged cowboys and brawling loggers were replaced by female forest rangers and desk bound researchers. The Wilderness Act was only five years old in 1969, so wilderness rangers were the new kids on the block in the National Forest wilderness areas of the West. It was a historic time environmentally. Excepting the Wilderness Act, the major environmental acts were passed in 1970: National Environmental Protection Act, Clean Water Act, and Clean Air Act.
As a ranger, over a ten-day period, I often backpacked over 100 miles, coming out for four to recover, which meant eating junk food, drinking voluminous amounts of red beer (beer plus tomato juice) in the Three Fingered Jack Saloon, and sleeping. On those trips, except for my last summer in 1973 when my new wife joined me, my only companion was a neurotic German Shepherd – Lab mix, Louise. Any strange noise terrified her, from high wind to trail crews firing off their six-shooters. One night a gun went off outside a trail crew camp and Louise became a blur of brown streaking into the woods. I tracked her six miles the next morning to an old broken-down miner’s cabin where I found her shaking, scrunched in under a bed. Those summers were idyllic and served to usher in a lifetime passion for hiking and backpacking.
Earlier that summer of 1969, one Friday afternoon, I found myself perched on top of several striped, moldy governement surplus mattresses, peering over the protection of the most recent, heavily pawed, Playboy, at a small group of men huddled in the corner of the warehouse. Their conversation was way more realistic and interesting than my fantasies about what I might do on a date with Miss June.
“Golly durn,” said Luke, the tiniest of the group, slapping his thighs with his head thrown back in laughter. “Gosh dang,” he gasped, “That is the funniest durn story I ever did hear. Did she squeal afterward.”
“Luke, that weren’t no pig. It was a woman who couldn’t stack wood. Normally, the joke is told that’s why men prefer women over pigs. Pigs ken’t stack wood and women ken,” said Willard, the tallest and rangiest of the group of four. Willard was pencil-thin and wrapped in leather. He worked on saddles during his time off. He had destroyed one hand with blasting caps the previous year.
Luke changed the subject. “That’s like the time I was sitting on a big ‘ole cedar stump with my shotgun across my lap, rolling a Bull, so one hand was occupied. An a big ‘ole bear come out of a big ‘ole hole at the base of that big ‘ole stump and I held ma shotgun between ma legs ‘n kilt him. One-handed, too.”
Rusty, another ranger sitting with me on the mattresses, whispered, “If he shot anything, it probably was his pecker.” Not a pleasant thought preparing for a night with Miss June.
“That’s bold-faced bullshit, Luke,” said Kicker. The story was Kicker had gotten kicked in the face by a mule. “Besides what does that have to do with women and pigs? Nothing, that’s what I’ll tell ya. Nothing.” Kicker, the meanest member of the group and the least liked by the rangers, didn’t pretend to like seasonals, particularly if they displayed a vocabulary better than his, which wasn’t difficult. Luke shuddered and seemed to melt into the floor.
The quietest one of the four, Clyde, my favorite, was the only legitimate cowboy. He had been raised on a ranch in eastern Washington and had been around mules, lariats, and bad whiskey all of his life. Clyde was not mute when he lost his temper, but the rest of the time he just stared at the ground or into your eyes if you asked him a question. If he answered, you couldn’t hear it, and it was uncomfortable as hell. Like waiting for a lake to freeze over. We seasonals wanted to keep a low profile until quitting time, while I think the cowboys wanted to be casually noticed, slouched there in a circle, low muttering and grunting while rolling a Bull Durham.
For the Bull Durham ritual, it was critical to roll your cigarette without appearing to be rolling your cigarette. It wasn’t authentic if you used both hands. The wooden match had to be struck on the back pocket of Wranglers, sometimes allowing it to burn down enough to singe your fingers before lighting. Boots shuffled and leather creaked. I would not have made a good cowboy. Some of the boys chewed Copenhagen or Happy Days (rasberry flavored) snus, or snoose, simultaneously. As the ad said, “Just a pinch between cheek and jaw,” giving the user a slight bulge below the lowere lip. I got into snoose because my boss and good friend, JD, convinced me that Friday afternoon spitting contests were good for the soul. They were but I got addicted until my wife got tired of finding disgusting syrofoam cups or Planters peanut cans around full of swill.
As I said earlier, my favorite of the bunch was Clyde. I’m sure Clyde just tolerated me as he did any of us college kids. Our lives intertwined with Clyde’s only in the back country. He was married to a reclusive, second-generation French-Canadian woman, whom he referred to, unaffectionately, and always muttered, as “The French One.” He rarely spoke of her, which was easy to understand. The French One was a short, squat bulldog tyrant who spoke bad English. Clyde and the French One had one thing in common: they would hole up all winter, both unemployed, reading western novels, from Zane Grey to Louis L’Amour. Allegedly, in the winter, they only appeared in town for booze, cigarettes, and canned food stuffs. One day I had to go to Clyde’s cabin for some reason and he came to the door cuddling a tiny toy poodle. Clyde called him Buck, or something absurd like that. “What the Hell?” I thought. “Mr. Macho with a toy poodle?” Apparently, when Clyde was stretched out on the couch reading, Buck would curl up on his chest.
Clyde was the head back country packer for the forest. The French One never interfered with Clyde’s domain in the wilderness but Buck often did, perched on Clyde’s saddle in front of him. As rangers, our responsibilitie including finding old camps left usually by hunters before the Wilderness Act had passed, and bag up their rusty bean cans and whiskey bottles and place them alongside the trailfor Clyde to come along later with his mule string and pack them out.
We seasonals thought mules were a pain in the ass and exhibited only one character trait: stubbornness. But those who worked with them could speak of them in hushed reverence for hours. “Snowflake has remembered that danged ground hornet’s nest for 17 years at mile post 31 on Booger’s Lookout trail and kicks up her heels and throws her pack every time.” On several occasions, I listened to these mule worshippers from my bunk, as they stoked the stove until the wee hours of the morn, cackling at each other’s told and retold stories of mule antics. They would pass around a flask of rot-gut whiskey wrapped in a greasy brown paper bag. Spanish Camp, one of the cabins, was buried miles in the wilderness, yet the boys still worried they were breaking some Forest Service law. They would periodically look sneakily over their shoulders, worried that the district ranger was going to bust through the door with the state troopers, six-shooters blazing.
Sometime in June of that first year, the district ranger directed Clyde to the Hidden Lakes trail head to teach rangers about mule packing, even though none of us were using mules. Unofficially, it was called mannying, the art of wrapping two packs of gear in heavy tarps, one for each side of the mule’s saddle and of equal weight. Clyde got the assignment one Monday and I think he was in shock when he told us. I saw his lips move but nothing came out. It was a blistering hot day when we crouched in a semi-circle around Clyde as he silently wrapped mannys for each of his 17 mules. We were dripping in our official long-sleeved polyester Nudelman shirts and green jeans and Clyde was in his duds.
“Clyde,” I cautiously asked, “How do you know when the tarps each will contain the same weight? “
He yanked the belly strap tighter causing the mule to inhale air in defiance. “You just knowed,” he said. When all 17 were packed, Clyde rose up and walked slowly over to the truck, opened the door and sat down. He poured himself some boiled black coffee out of a thermos and rolled a Bull Durham. He cocked his sweat-stained Stetson back off his dripping forehead, put his right foot on the running board of the truck, took a long slug of coffee and a long drag on the cigarette, and stared at the trees. You could have cut the air with a knife; the only sound was the occasional flop of a mule pattie hitting the dusty ground of the corral. Then Clyde did something that made zero sense; he strapped on heavy leather chaps over his Wranglers and put on spurs. Cowboys in the movies put on chaps for chasing outlaws, driving cows in rough terrain and brambles and rain. The outlaws had faded into the sunset of the Old West, there were no cows for miles, you could drive a truck up the trail to Hidden Lakes and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. And spurs? Clyde’s horse, Trigger (after Roy Rogers famous horse), was as compliant as a trained circus dog. We didn’t ask.
After Clyde had thrown his heavy saddle on Trigger and cinched it down, he sighed. “Well, boys, better git this shitshow on the road.” He threw his leg over Trigger, at the head of the string, and swung gracefully into the saddle. As he reined in, he tipped his hat toward us, as Roy or Gene would have done at the end of their shows, and Trigger really did rear back on his haunches. Just like on TV.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Clyde but not to us, several of the mules had wrapped themselves around some of the pine saplings, snarling their leads. No way were any of us going to warn Clyde that he’d fucked up while he focused on his cowboy routine. Besides, we saw the potential for a discrete laugh. When Clyde started the string up the trail, Bull Durham dangling from his lips and blue smoke curling up, all hell broke out. In an instant, mules, packs and dust were boiling everywhere.
“Sheeeeeeeeeeit! Gawd damn, git them leetle cocksuckers,” red faced and puffy cheeked he bellowed over and over again as he and Trigger madly raced around chasing bucking mules into the woods. Mannied packs were flying. We could hear him swearing at the mules as they scrapped their packs off against the trees. “Gawd damned you, Millicent, when I ketch you, I’m gonna kick your moldy ass from here to Timbucktoo, you leetle fucker.” When it was finally over and he’d restrung the string, Clyde’s hat was pulled low as he almost physically dragged the string up the trail. Nothing was said, by anyone. That would have been suicidal.
The last time I saw Clyde was near the end of the summer of 1973, my last summer in the Pasayten. I understand he later left the valley with the barmaid, taking Buck with him and leaving the French One behind. Apparently, he died not long after that of lung cancer and a bad liver. We were at Spanish Camp, and it was about 4 a.m. and starting to get light. Clyde was sitting alongside that glowing wood stove drinking fresh boiled coffee, smoking and hacking. He’d probably been there most of the night polishing off his bottle of rotgut whiskey. The temperature in the cabin was probably in the 90s. A story was told that he often wouldn’t go to bed but head out before dawn, leading a string back down the trail, arriving passed out in the saddle at the trailhead, draped over Trigger’s neck. He walked over to my bunk and gently shook my shoulder, leaned over with some seriously foul breath and softly said in my ear, “Time to git up, boy, sun’s on the ridgetops.” And then he walked out the door.
