“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner.
I’ve had a knife in my pocket since about age seven or eight. I struggle to account for the number of knives lost since then. A lost knife is a staggeringly significant event. It feels to me to be a feeling somewhat similar to inexplicably finding yourself partially undressed in public.
I liken the feeling to the sensation of jumping out of someone else’s wife’s upstairs bedroom window wearing nothing much more than your underwear and the rest of your hastily grabbed attire crumbled in your sweaty armpits.
Forget the watch, maybe she can explain that.
A scant few lost knives seem to stick in my memory. There was the three bladed Browning that I reflexively flung in the bushes after doing self surgery on my left palm. I looked for that bloody knife for weeks and never found it. Mr. Browning made a fine knife for sure, and I haven’t seen that model since.
There was a sheath knife made in the antique style, consisting of a German sawmill blade affixed to a deer antler handle by pewter. The craftsman that rendered it said this is how they were crafted by blacksmiths in the old days and it was a true thing of beauty and craftsmanship. Regrettably, it was entirely too expensive to lose. The rich leather sheath affixed to the belt by a riveted, bent silver spoon which was ultimately how the blade and I became separated, somewhere on the side of a large and incredibly steep mountain in Idaho.
I thought so much of that knife I went back a year later and looked for that lost treasure. The elk that had out foxed me the morning I lost the big blade was no longer there. That elk had rendered me a pure pile of disconnected nerves. Thinking back on it now, I was just lucky enough to have not lost my mind entirely, but I was still goofy enough to lose my best blade ever.
The odds of finding a lost knife in the wilderness of Idaho are about as steep as the mountains the elk in that part of the Rockies call home. If that wonderful piece of art is ever stumbled upon by some lucky elk hunter, surely he or she will believe they have found an antique left behind by some mountain man from hundreds of years past.
There is a small amount of consolation in the fact that I have fortunately managed to spot someone else’s lost knife or two. It’s interesting to note that when I managed to trip over someone else’s lost knife, their selection of knives never seem to manage to match the quality of the ones I let disappear. But the knives I have managed to recover, from other’s misfortune, have never been lost by me. It’s difficult to make much sense out of that fact.
The knife in my pocket today came from a fishing pier on St. George Island. Apparently the previous owner caught so many fish that he forgot his new knife in his haste to get his catch to the grill. Irrespective of the loss of his new bade, I’m thankful for the present. It’s a Kershaw and I’ve managed to hold onto it for a couple of years now and it keeps a pretty good edge. Maybe my luck is changing a little. Who knows?
I think about these things when June oozes upon us with her humidity and afternoon thunder storms. The month of June, 9ft fly rods and willow flies are synonymous to me. They take me back to lazy and humid evenings spent adrift in a canvas canoe along big limestone bluffs that stand like grand stone monoliths along the edge of the slow moving Tennessee River.
In the sultry evenings of June my fishing partners and I would drift down this one bluff by our house, flogging the trees full of the willow flies with one hookless beater fly rod. Then we would cast to the fish in a feeding frenzy for the flies we had just knocked in the water.
This novel technique kept both the fisherman and the fish amused as we waited for the next evening hatch to emerge from the limestone where willow fly forefathers had deposited eggs the June before.
The fact that willow flies actually live less than 24 hours has to be one of the most amazing phenomena in the life of a big bass, or any fish for that matter. When everything is in sync, the eggs hatching, the flies emerging and the fish gorging themselves, this life cycle being played out is a fly fisherman’s paradise.
We used big poppers and a dropper fly and it was the norm to have two fish on with the same cast. A decent largemouth on the popper and a bluegill on the nymph was the big bonus when millions of willow flies emerged for their short life journey, while a soft June moon eased over the horizon.
When everything about this wonderful bug life cycle was just about perfect, there were so many flies in the air that the river was alive and better than vibrant with life.
June brings waves of heat too; and when it’s upon us like a monster, I sometimes drift back to an early June morning in 1968 on Amnicola Highway.
The Chattanooga News Free Press sponsored one of the first, if not the first, 5k road races in local history. Iron Man races had not been invented in Chattanooga yet, Marathons were still an Olympic sport, (1968 was an Olympic year). For just $5.00 you’re being encouraged to enter this race up Amnicola, get a free one color t-shirt, and be a part of the glory of local 5K running history.
In 1968, Chattanooga seemingly had only three distinct classes of distance runners that endured mileage beyond two or three miles at a time.
First, there were the boxers. Road work was nothing new to them, and in that era Chattanooga had a pretty good mix of better than decent fighters that routinely trained through road work.
Next were high school distance runners who did that sort of thing because their coaches made them do that sort of thing.
And thirdly, there was a scant few cadres of recreational runners, who for some strange reason thought running was good for them.
In 1968, this minutely small third class of runners must have been the bunch that had heard of FUN RUNS sponsored by some other metropolitan area. These guys are the surely the ones that must have been able to goad the Chattanooga News Free Press into sponsoring this glorious event in the killing heat of June.
My best guess is that this third group of crazies probably morphed into the historic Chattanooga Track Club.
So the Chattanooga News Free Press hyped this race daily for weeks and the runners on my high school track team agreed that we could bring glory and fame to our dear old alma mater if we dominated everyone else in the big event. Expectations for glory were high. It was an Olympic year.
Apparently, when race day dawned and the fifty or so runners milled about the starting line, only Tommy Burns and I could get out of bed, or come up with the $5.00 entry fee. It was up to us to salvage glory for our school.
Tommy was a raw boned, natural athlete from Cresent Club Drive. Cresent Club Drive in those days was a hot bed of natural athletic prowess. Tommy’s older brother Eddie and Eric Easterly come to mind. There were more good athletes in that neighborhood but these guys were standouts.
Tommy didn’t run track in high school but he was fast and had the endurance of an Arabian stallion. I was glad he showed up because I hadn’t run five miles in two or three years. School pride, after all, was on the line here.
As we warmed up for the historic gala, I warily surveyed the competition. I recognized a couple of the flat nosed boxers from the Frye Institute and Golden Gloves events and I acknowledged the colors of other guys who I had run against from other schools. Then I dimly recognized Mr. John Robere, resplendent in his Speedo and tennis shoes, no shirt. I somehow remembered him as an organ player from the Brainerd restaurant, The Wimberly Inn.
John entertained diners and their children nightly with his organ music and wind-up toys. The large collection of wind-ups blew bubbles on kids who stood around agape at his myriad of mechanical marvels while mom and dad ate in peace and quiet.
Come to find out later that Mr. Robere parlayed some amount of legendary organ music all over the Scenic City for years, but my reference point went back to those wind-up toys, in an earlier decade back when my folks could afford to eat out once or twice a year.
Apparently the lawyers at the Chattanooga News Free Press thought that there might be some liability to running in the June heat; so right before the race was scheduled to start, the Red Cross showed up and dramatically placed a big thermometer on the asphalt in front of the Lower Deck Club.
All the runners were getting a little jumpy at this point and all the keyed up glory seekers seemed to eye the Red Cross with a good deal of righteous suspicion.
The Lower Deck Club (where the Sand Bar sits today) was home to a bunch of part time trot liners who occasionally sold live catfish, card players, hardcore river pirates/moonshiners, knife fighters and purveyors of home made liquor. It was the kind of place where they drilled holes in the wood floors late nights to drain the blood after a good brawl.
I frequented the place on occasion to ogle the big live catfish maintained in a large dark tank. It came to my attention that the same fish stayed in that tank for years at a time, so I concluded that selling live catfish must have been simply a ruse for the staff’s other varied, or illegal business interests.
There were occasions where a cold beer was consumed by more than a few minors while admiring the big captive catfish they allegedly sold every now and again. This was 1968s equivalent to the forerunner of the Tennessee River Aquarium, complete with illegal juvenile beer sales.
So, the sweaty Red Cross dude bent over and clutched the big thermometer, ceremoniously announcing that the race was deemed unsafe and the temperature of 105 degrees was a threat to our health.
A lusty chorus of boo’s crescendoed from the wad of ready-to-rip glory seekers.
That was the point when a big flat-nosed light heavy weight named Snyder stepped out of the crowd of anxious runners and got right up in the Red Cross dude’s face. Snyder looked like a good left hook was about to be launched when he gritted his teeth and hissed in the Red Cross dudes profusely sweating face, “HEY MORON, #@%&$%^&” START THE “#$%@! RACE!”
This little, not so subtle, confrontation apparently startled some guy with the starter pistol so much that he actually pulled the trigger, and we all cheered, and roared up the hot road like a herd of cows freed from a slaughter pen.
The first annual 1968 Chattanooga News Free Press 5k FUN RUN to the dam was away with a bang.
It was anything but FUN.
In those days Amnicola Highway was a good location to rabbit hunt, an OK place to dove hunt and a pretty fair area to find arrow heads when the fields were plowed in the spring. There wasn’t much else there other than weed filled ditches.
Traffic wasn’t much of an issue since the four lanes pretty much dead ended around the Lower Deck Club’s cold beer/moonshine and catfish sales emporium.
I lost track of my running partner in a mirage caused by the deadly heat about the time we crossed South Chickamauga Creek. We had easily tooled by a good double handful of heat stroked folks wobbling, or walking, gasping of air, and crying out for water.
That was about the time I fixed my sights on the next runner I decided needed to be passed. It was the light heavy weight, Snyder, the one that started the whole mess by intimidating the Red Cross do-gooder and startling the poor clown with the starter pistol.
The boxer was in full stride as I came up on his shoulder. I was about to pass, when he suddenly, without missing so much as a single stride, veered hard right, full speed, into a head high, weed filled ditch and disappeared out of sight.
For all I know they might not have found the body until they built the Coca Cola plant years later. I didn’t stop, but I did make a mental note of where I thought they might locate the body. It was about the least I could do.
Within the next mile I had forgotten what planet we were on. I hope Snyder lived.
At that mile marker I did not care that the Red Cross dude may have been right, or that no one at the Chattanooga News Free Press had the good foresight to provide ambulance services for their big inaugural race. It was probably just a relatively fair case of heat induced delirium.
When I finally made it to the railroad bridge I could see Mr. Robere up ahead and he was now weaving across all four lanes of Amnicola. Police were stopping traffic and people were honking horns and yelling at him to stop and save himself. The closer I got to this rapidly unfolding piece of pure life and death drama, he had done a good twelve or fifteen lane changes and then, as if in a bad dream, I watched as he face planted in the middle of the road. Out cold as a dead catfish.
Horrified, I had the finish line in blurred vision and I watched people jump out of cars and grab his lifeless body and drag him to the side of the road where he was supposed to have been.
As I passed the crowd attending to the dead man, I noticed two streaks of tennis shoes and two bloody streaks from his knees where the Good Samaritans had drug his lifeless body across the smoldering Amnicola asphalt.
The Chattanooga News Free Press later printed that Mr. Robere spent a couple of weeks recuperating in the hospital after that little FUN RUN in 1968. Apparently the FUN RUN didn’t affect his organ playing as much as it did his own organs.
Tommy finished third and brought glory to the school. I may have finished fourteenth but the delirium is somehow easier to remember.
June does this sort of thing to me from time to time.
To quote Bruce Springsteen, “The past is never past. It is always present. And you better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad.”
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