Written By: Randy Lawrence. Junction City, OH
It felt more like driving the getaway rig for a jailbreak than leaving for a hunting trip. I would pull into the Honda plant parking lot just before 11, Lyle’s dogs and mine settled in their crates, Lyle’s gun and gear stowed behind the front seats. I’d find a spot where I could watch the main door, idling the truck, listening to late-night Reds and Bengals talk on the 50,000 watt radio station out of Cincinnati. It was always easy to spot my friend among the second trick autoworkers. Lyle was the one sprinting down the sidewalk.
In my memory, we laid rubber out of that late-night car park like something out of The Blues Brothers, except we were on a mission from the grouse gods. In truth, we simply “made haste slowly,” determined to beat the after-work exit jam. Once on the highway, Lyle cranked Hank, Jr. on the cassette deck, rapped the bottom of a fresh can of Copenhagen, and I turned the nose of that battered white Blazer north toward Opening Weekend for Lake States grouse.
The trip to the several little upstate towns we used as HQ’s took all of eight hours. The first few years, we drove straight to our first hunting spot, aired the dogs, then slept upright in the truck seats for an hour or so. The best times were when we made friends with an elderly widow who was desperately trying to keep a ramshackle backwoods motel open. She learned to trust us and for several seasons would leave a room unlocked. I remember one room that didn’t even have a doorknob. We’d slide a scarred chest of drawers in front of the door for security. We’d crash for a bit, breakfast on gas station donuts and Mountain Dew, then push our over-caffeinated carcasses and unruly mix of pointers and setters into the woods.
The hunting was always good. The finding? Hit or miss. Most years, brutally high temperatures and rank, green cover translated into generally poor scenting conditions and spotty dog performance. The shooting for the most part was execrable. Dank, jungle coverts, the aspens and alders still carrying most of their leaves, meant that we heard far more birds lift than ever we saw or shot (at). For two guys burning precious leave time from our jobs, it surely wasn’t the best bet for stylish dog work or birds in the bag.
But we’d waited nearly seven months since the end of Ohio’s grouse season and couldn’t bear to wait any longer. We had worked dogs all summer, shot clays from the tire-mounted thrower behind the barn. We’d pored over maps, made plans, upgraded our gear. If somebody somewhere was going to come marching in to sainted ruffed grouse coverts on September 15th, we wanted, as the old jazz standard goes, to be in that number.
And we loved the north woods. The aspen, alders, dwarf oaks, and tamaracks looked and smelled different from our Appalachian strip mine stretches of tulip poplar, stunted cedars, blackberry and laurel thickets, grape vine tangles. Best of all, most of our Lake States coverts were on wondrously flat terrain, much easier to hike than the up-and-down-uplands of home. Our heavy Filson armor, we left at home. “Up North”, we hunted in t-shirts and light jeans since the woods were not filled with the murderous cane briars we knew in southern Ohio and West Virginia. And if those alder brakes weren’t exactly filled with game birds, that was ok. Most seasons, we could still count on moving more birds in a Lake States afternoon than we would in a weekend back home, our Ohio coverts ravaged by grievous habitat loss and added pressures of late season hunting on vulnerable remnants of grouse populations.
Today, I’m almost sad to report our Opening Day Fever has broken, at least for now. I tell myself I can wait, struggling to extricate a week or two from a maddeningly more encumbered life. I work my Firelight setters on local woodcock as soon as the law allows and try not to get all green-eyed over texted photos of friends’ dogs locked down on point, tails just visible above tall September vegetation in an upland version of Where’s Waldo? The frosts will come, I tell myself, and I will arrange things here on the farm so the dogs and I can be gone to where the woods smell different, the aspen and tamarack glow golden, and maybe the late-October grouse will lie for a precocious puppy.
But I miss late night vigils at the Honda plant, obsessively checking my watch against the walk in/walk out worker traffic. I miss the pushing through “road rash” fatigue and first-dog-down fiascos. I miss the days before GPS technology, the bell going silent in those Luddite days when we even hated beepers. I miss the deft teamwork of two friends who’d bonded over every bird hunting mistake in the book beating in toward a flush, wishing we had a machete instead of my lightweight double gun or Lyle’s svelte Model 12 16-gauge, the one with the barely legal, bobbed barrel. Too often we’d struggle into the stand after a bird had battered up somewhere close and the dog had broke, the bell’s frenzied clangor like a factory fire alarm.
I miss the high fives when everything went miraculously right and both dog and bird were still there after’s we’d fought our way in. The shooting was as much by feel as by sight as grey shapes thundered up into the heavy canopy. I miss Arran or Pistol Pete, Eli or Riley, disappearing into the brush for the retrieve, the steady rhythm of the clapper marking the dog cakewalking in, head up, a by-gadfrey Lake States grouse draped from slobbery jaws.
I miss scarred pool tables and oldies juke boxes that played twenty songs for a dollar. I miss smothered burritos and microwaved pot pies served late nights in smokey log cabin bars. I miss gas stations that doubled as sporting goods stores, tailgate breaks of homemade venison jerky washed down with bottles of Gatorade dripping wet from the cooler, Snickers bars and Twinkies standing in as dessert. I miss first-season pups bursting out of dank, sodden coverts, tail tips bloody, tongues lolling, their faces saying, “I have no idea what we’re doing, but this is really a good time.”
I miss our friends Gary and Nancy Johnson and post hunt toasts on Nancy’s brother’s sediment ‘n’ suds home brew that rose out of dark bottles like a science fair project gone horribly wrong. I miss linebacker-shaped waitresses with big hair sporting Chris Spielman Lions jerseys. They would tell us about the night Ted Nugent bought the house a round or Kid Rock – “Bob,” they called him – sat in with the local band. Not to be outdone, I would compliment their #54 Detroit gear and brag that Lyle had been named All-Ohio in football one of the same years that Spielman was.
I miss dog friendly budget motel rooms with a bird cleaning shed out back, sputtering AC and heating units in the rooms, coat hanger TV antennas, and thin walls with ardent lodgers on the other side. I miss listening to the stretch run of the baseball season and the beginning of the football year on the static-ridden AM truck radio that went in and out between spots we’d locate from the tattered plat book, pages stained with coffee mug rings. Most of all, I miss the fire in the belly that refused to let us stay in Ohio when there were covert operations being held, Opening Weekend for Lake States grouse.
