Lost Locations

Sometimes they should stay lost

With every step the battered old shotgun got heavier. I just couldn’t keep up. My six-year-old legs could not match dad’s steps, even though he had one leg three inches shorter than the other. A communist’s bullet had shattered his femur creating a nasty wound, disfiguring him and leaving him with osteomyelitis. Even twenty years after the bullet crippled him, the wound would fester. I’d watch him stick a needle in it to drain the pus and blood. It would run down his leg, but he never made a sound. He’d just make an awful face, sweat would bead on his forehead and his eyes would water as he squeezed out the infection.

As we climbed the mountain, dad would stop every now and again to let me catch up and ask if I was okay. He’d said we were going to a place he called “Hickory Holler,” and I’d heard him tell stories about the squirrels he’d killed there. That morning he’d told me it was a long walk but that it’d be worth it. I’d never killed a squirrel, so I was eager and ready for anything—I just didn’t know “anything” was going to be that damned far, steep, or hard.

Dad said his favorite time to hunt Hickory Holler was after a rain. He’d told me he’d slip in and stalk the big fox squirrels feeding high in the hickory trees. The trick, he said, was to listen for the water to fall from the limbs as the squirrels moved through the treetops and then get in close—shotgun close. But he also said that after he shot, he never moved. Soon the squirrels would go back to feeding and he’d shoot another, and another. He only picked them all up when he had his limit.

Finally, we made it to the top and dropped over the crest of the ridge into a shallow, finger hollow. There was a big tree that’d fallen toward the bottom of the mountain, pointing to a big pasture. Dad positioned himself straddling the tree near the root mass and motioned for me to get comfortable right in front of him. “Don’t move,” he whispered. I didn’t, and in no time squirrels were everywhere. Before long a massive fox squirrel jumped up on the big log we were on, and as I started to raise my single barrel shotgun, dad squeezed my shoulder, whispering, “Wait.” The fox squirrel turned toward us and then just walked up the log, stopped, and smelled the end of my shotgun barrel, which was shaking. Hell, I was shaking all over; to a kid it was a magical place where all the squirrels in the world seemed to come out of the ground.

Then the fox squirrel turned and I remember how the morning sun made his bushy tail—now cocked high—glow like a lantern, radiant and almost neon orange, as he started back down the log. I was supposed to wait for dad to tell me to shoot but I couldn’t. I raised the shotgun—a shotgun that had belonged to my mother and had been used by all my cousins for their first squirrel—and shot that fox squirrel right in the ass. He catapulted off the log. I ran to him. I grabbed that long, fluffy, brilliantly colored tail and raised him high above my head. Dad smiled. I felt like I had been struck by lightning.

Not long after that I abandoned the shotgun and began my journey to become a rifleman. Soon I was hunting on my own, all up and down Pot Lick Cove, which, counting the adjacent public hunting ground, covered thousands of acres. Hunting during the day for squirrels and deer, and at night for coons, I learned to navigate that country as well as I could move through our house. I knew every rock, every crooked tree, every ridge, hollow, and field. On occasion, I’d even make that long climb back to Hickory Holler, but I never could find that spot—that shallow hollow and that big, downed tree that had undeniably changed my life.

That exact spot, a spot so special to my father, the spot where the squirrels were as plentiful as gawkers at a Sunday flea market, and where I killed my first one, forever remained a mystery. I looked for it often, and I’d recognize things and places I’d remembered from my walk with my dad that morning, but that exact, specific spot has remained lost to me for more than a half century.

As much as I would have liked to sit on that big log and watch the squirrels again, in a way it seems proper the location has remained such a mystery. It was a special place where a special thing happened, and nothing as special could ever happen there again. Now, everything about that spot and that morning almost seems dream-like. Sometimes while sitting around the fire at our camp, I’ll remember that long walk, I’ll remember the amber, orange, red and yellow canopy that was above us, and I’ll remember trying to place my feet where my father placed his. Killing the big fox squirrel was the climax of that early fall day in the Potomac Highlands, but the real gift was a father sharing one of his favorite places and moments with his son.

Driving down Horn Camp Road to our camp last week, I looked up on the mountain above that big pasture down below where I shot my first squirrel, and I noticed most of the hillside had been timbered. The hickory trees were gone and that meant the squirrels would be gone too. The mountainside will grow back with poplar sprouts and locusts, and it will never again look like it did 55 years ago. Surprisingly though, it didn’t make me sad. It reminded me of that moment, and it also meant that nothing like that moment will ever happen at that location to anyone else in this world ever again. That day, that moment, in that place—it will forever remain singular to my father and me.

That spot on the side of that West Virginia mountain is forever lost. However, I have the memory of trying to keep up with my father—a man who was told he would never walk again—as we ascended that hillside in the crisp kaleidoscope-colored dawn of a fall morning in the Allegheny Mountains. That memory will be forever etched into my soul, just as deep and permanent as the leg wound my father carried with him since the day he left Korea. That memory never oozes blood and pus, but on occasion it will shed a tear, and it’s a tear I’m happy to let roll down my cheek, because it was all earned honest.

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