Charlie and Brown M&M's

 

There are two things I always carry when I go duck hunting: trail mix and toilet paper.  I haven’t had to deploy them on every hunt, but the needs they serve are common enough that I feel naked in the field without them.  Though I have had a couple close encounters of the second kind, I actually haven’t had to poop in the woods since I was a boy.  I make a point of squeezing out what I have on board before I leave the house, and there’s always been a porta-potty or a gas station near enough at hand for post-hunt needs.  But I’m terrified of having a blowout in my waders more than anything.  I’ll “forget” the life jacket, but not the TP.  The trail mix, on the other hand, gets pulled out more often than not since the slowest part of the day seems to line up with breakfast wearing off.  A couple handfuls of something munchy can help bolster your will to perch on a mud seat in the rain.

Or in the sand behind a pile of tumble weeds.  When I lived in Central Washington, I’d take my two older sons hunting along the Frenchman Hills Wasteway.  I loved hunting these little ponds in the desert, not because I was very successful there, but because it seemed so sand people lumping over the dunes to a little pothole.

Sand People

 I know the smart people call it sagebrush steppe, but too me, who grew up in a place where you had to mow your lawn twice a week, it’s desert.  Sand + scrubby, poky things + rattlesnakes = desert.   

Anyway, the boys loved it too.  Making a blind was a cinch; just turn them loose for a few minutes and I’d have enough tumble weed for four blinds.  And there was always random things to find lying around.  They also took great delight in the trail mix and started angling for it about the time I finish setting the decoys.  I imagine that they conflate the two in a Pavlovian way.  

Well, as anyone who has kids will anticipate, at some point one day, they both had to rock a deuce.  Charlie, the older one, wanted to go home.  I said, no way and handed him the TP.  He was reluctant and decided to hold it.  On the other hand, Jasper, the younger one, saw no sense in that.  A couple minutes behind a sagebrush on the other side of the dune and he was much more comfortable.  Jasper’s new-found relaxation convinced Charlie, and he headed off to find his own seat of ease.  He was gone longer, which isn’t a good sign in these situations, but just before I got up to go look for him, he returned with an uncertain look on his face. 

“You OK?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you smell?”

“I kind of got some on my hands…”

Of course, I didn’t have soap with me--why would I?  The whole point of toilet paper is to keep the poop off your hands.  I directed him to do his best with what we had, so he “washed” them in the pond and rubbed them on some scrubby grass.  Which worked about as well as you’d expect pond water and grass to… pretty much not at all. 

Most people lower their personal hygiene standards to some extent when in the field.  At home, they insist on clean dishes, refrigeration, and hot, soapy water for whole bodies, but once in a campground, the five second rule gets extended to just before the ants show up.  My own standards are pretty low to begin with, but even with the out-of-doors modification, I draw the line at eating with poop on your hands.  So no, Charlie couldn’t have any trail mix… unless he could figure a way to eat it without his hands. 

He asked if I could pour some into his mouth.  I gladly obliged , but of course, it quickly devolved into seeing how far we could throw a cashew into his mouth.  We stopped short of complete Burgundian court behavior (viz., making him sing a special song before we flung nuts at him, while dancing dwarfs emerged from a huge pie in floppy hats and velvet doublets), but we did only let him have the brown M&M’s. 

So many lessons were learned that day.