The Dogs Days Arrive

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This is the 45^th August I have spent in Texas, nearly all here Behind The Pine Curtain. This month in East Texas is to be endured, not enjoyed — at least by this transplanted Yankee.

An aside: I have milked the Pine Curtain phrase — in dozens of columns, a couple of books, and a few magazine pieces — for so long that some younger folks think I coined it. I didn’t. First time I heard it was from a now-dead buddy — Michael Busby. Michael was a poet and scholar. We met at Stephen F. Austin State University in the early 1970s. He became the godfather of Kasey, my oldest daughter. Michael loved literature, history, cigarettes, coffee, conversation and an occasional dram of whiskey. He also loved running the Attoyac River in Deep East Texas, heavily armed, ready to shoot water moccasins hanging from trees.

We were about as close as men get.

One time, I was told, a water moccasin fell into a boat over which Michael held sentry. He quickly racked his over-and-under 12-gauge shotgun. His boat-mate quickly pointed out that shooting the snake would put a rather large hole in the aluminum boat’s bottom. Michael saw the wisdom and flipped the snake into the water with the barrel.

I wish Michael were around so I could ask him where he first heard the Pine Curtain phrase, but lung cancer killed him way too young, at 36 two decades ago. Some things you never get over. Michael’s death is one of those things. It took me a while to come to my senses and quit smoking after that, but I did.

But I digress. My mind starts wandering. The heat does that to me. To get back on task, my parents moved us here in June 1968 from Allenstown, New Hampshire. My grandfather, Carl Borders, was a Boy Scout executive. I quickly was enrolled in Troop 201, with its cabin at Teague Park.

This was my initiation into an East Texas summer. I was about to turn 13, weighed about 120 pounds, talked funny (from a Longview perspective), was near-sighted as an armadillo, and had just been transplanted about 1,800 miles south of everything and everybody I had ever known. So my parents and hale-fellow-well-met grandfather decided that the best way for me to make friends and adapt was to go on a 50-mile hike with Troop 201 from Uncertain, Texas, on Caddo Lake, to Longview. My dad, a commercial artist who moved here to find a job, volunteered to print T-shirts for the troop, which I was pressed into duty helping to hang up after he ran the squeegee of ink across the fabric.

Soon I was on the road, at Uncertain — a hamlet incorporated, I later learned, so it could sell beer. At age 12 I held more romantic notions about its name, not realizing that Texas had a byzantine wet-dry system of selling booze. In New Hampshire, the state owned the liquor stores, which in retrospect is equally whacked out. Anyway, under the direction of the legendary scoutmaster V.G. Rollins, Troop 201 trudged west from Uncertain back to Longview. Most of us wore our “50-Mile Hike” T-shirts that my dad and I had silk-screened.

The thing was, I had never encountered heat like this before. It was early July, probably an average summer. I was from New Hampshire. Five months earlier I was standing outside, spitting like kids do and watching as my spittle froze before it landed in the snowbank at my feet. It was 20-below, a fearsome winter. Now I was walking along an asphalt farm-to-market road, my feet sinking into the shoulder, the canvas straps of the backpack tearing into my shoulders.

Either the third or fourth day, I fell out, as they say. I’m not proud to admit that, but there you go. I had heat stroke and had to give up. My parents came and got me, brought me back home and invested a bit of money to turn on the window AC in the back bedroom. Most of our house on South Twelfth wasn’t air-conditioned yet in 1968. That would soon change.

Summer would remain my parents’ enemy, as well as mine. My mom, until her death last year, cursed the season under and over her tongue. My dad longed for his youth in Wyoming. My brothers, who both live in Texas, escape when they can. At the moment one is in Vermont, the other Colorado. This year, I’m stuck here in August along with the rest of you. There are worse fates, like shoveling one’s way out the front door in January. It is all a matter of perspective, I tell myself, as sweat covers my eyeglasses while walking at 6 a.m.

Still, fall can’t get here soon enough for this long-transplanted Yankee.

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