This Way River
by Philip Bourjaily
The gravel road angled downhill off the highway, marked by a crude hand-painted sign on a two-foot by three-foot sheet of plywood nailed to a tree trunk: "This Way River." Even though I was too young to hunt ducks with my father, I knew he often parked on that road and hiked down to the river, returning home hours later, sometimes with a pair of bedraggled ducks, but always wet and muddy, his sleeves and pant legs covered with Spanish needles.
In the spring and early fall, he'd drive past the sign, park, and go down to the river to watch ducks for an hour or so after picking me up from school. Usually, I chose to stay by myself in the car (you could do that, then) with a book called Living Fishes of the World, whose bright color pictures of fish and coral reefs captured my imagination in a way that the dirt banks and sandbars of the river bottom didn't.
Not that I spent my whole childhood with my nose in a book. Occasionally I fished in ponds and creeks, walked in the woods, rode ponies, hunted mushrooms, learned to identify trees, tracks and birds, even followed the men in fall once or twice with a BB gun as they hunted pheasants. When I turned seven my parents had bought their own farm, 500 rolling acres of timber, pasture, and creek bottoms; perfect for a boy to explore. Problem was, I had no interest in being Tom Sawyer. I wanted to be the kid from Flipper, and we lived 1,000 miles from the nearest ocean.
My parents did their best to accommodate me. Twice we traveled to the Caribbean to snorkel when I was nine and ten years old. The coral reefs were (and I hope still are) all I hoped they'd be: wondrous nearly beyond belief, swarming with Technicolor fish, the sea floor covered with brittle, antler-like coral and writhing anemones.
How often can even the most indulgent parents afford to take a kid diving? There was no trip the next year, or the year after. It's hard to sustain a mania for skin-diving in rural Iowa. Farm pond tadpoles, bluegills, and largemouths in murky water hold your interest underwater for only so long, and mine, as I grew older, switched to sports and hanging out with my friends from town.
Then, in 1980, when I was 21 years old, home from college on Christmas break, I finally went pheasant hunting with my father. After a long afternoon of misses, the shorthairs bumped a rooster that flew through the low-angled, golden rays of the late afternoon sun, crossing in front of me, right to left, 30 yards out. Why a novice shotgunner hit that one after missing several easy straight-aways over points I don't know, but this is the bird that tumbled after all the others had flown on. I held him in my hands, marveling at the bright metallic colors of his plumage, implausibly perfect camouflage in a landscape that no longer looked quite so drab and boring to me.
From that day on, I saw my old familiar surroundings in a new light and not just because of the amber tint of my new shooting glasses. Awakening in me was a predator's gaze that brought the smallest detail swimming into sharp focus with the surreal clarity of the coral reef seen through the faceplate of a diving mask. Suddenly, every acorn or deer track was fraught with over-amplified significance, the sight of it setting my mind reeling with urgent questions. What deer made this, when? Why? Most important, when would it be back?
In many parts of the country, if you'd waited, as I did, from the 1960s to the 1980s to take up hunting, you'd have found yourself all dressed up with no place to go. The days when you could walk out your back door or drive a few miles from town and go hunting are gone in much of the U.S. today, plowed under by the modern agriculture of the '70s or buried by suburban sprawl.
Eastern Iowa, thankfully, is not yet such a place. In fact, the hunting here may be better now than it was 30 years ago. Deer have multiplied their way from curiosities to nuisances. Turkeys, livetrapped and released here, thrive in woodlots and timbered river bottoms among the cornfields. Giant Canadas have come back, and pheasant numbers are booming in CRP fields. Even bald eagles have staged a recovery. One day last winter I stepped out my front door to receive a package and happened to look straight up. Seven eagles circled my house.
"Look," I said to the delivery guy, "eagles!"
He glanced up and handed me a clipboard, saying "Uh-huh. Saw a dozen near the reservoir yesterday. Sign on four, please."
Living in a town of 60,000, I can't very well walk out the door and hunt anymore. However, access to hunting land remains easy in a state where nearly everyone is still connected to the land, either directly or one generation removed. For instance, the furnace guy spots the compound bow on the wall of your basement and starts talking about deer hunting. He shotgun hunts on his uncle's farm near Cambridge, where the deer are devouring the orchard. His uncle would happy to see another bowhunter on the farm.
Or you drive out to a small town to buy a Christmas tree from the Optimist's Club. Even in winter, the man selling trees in striped coveralls tucked into galoshes has the half-red, half-white face of a farmer. You ask him about the weather, then the corn crop, just to be friendly.
"I don't grow corn anymore," he says, half pleased, half apologetic, "my land's all in the CRP."
Your ears perk, probably visibly.
"Okay if I come check on your pheasant crop sometime?" you ask.
"Oh, I have lots of pheasants," he says, raising his hands expansively, "come on out any time."
Perhaps you get lost on your way to find a man who's selling quail for dog training. You stop at a farmhouse to ask directions to the quail breeder's house. The farmer tells you how to get there, then says "Do you need a place to hunt? I let people on here sometimes."
Only in our memories does the land remain unchanged forever. We have growth and sprawl here, same as anywhere else. "This Way River" road is paved now, lined with new houses, each with the standard boat, snowmobile, and satellite dish in the yard. The old handpainted sign is long gone, replaced by an official metal version reading "Friar's Landing" and listing permitted activities, waterfowling conspicuously not among them.
Still, I'm lucky enough to live in a time and place where most of the roads to the river are still open, even though I made a long detour to find them.
