APRIL 2, 2024 – (Cont.) I also remember the time just before Halloween when I was kicking around the tree farm while Dad worked. I noticed large tufts of long light brown grass that looked like the tops of Viking heads full of thick uncut hair. For the longest time I tried to figure out how I could adapt one of the tufts for a Halloween Viking costume. I told Dad of my idea, since he knew a lot about the Vikings, but he had no suggestions, and I could tell by his reaction that he wasn’t about to make any effort in that regard. If Dad didn’t think he could do something to perfection, he refused to try, and that was the end of it. Over the years, I realized that his key to being perfect was just that—avoidance of all things that he knew were beyond his skill set, as broad and considerable as that was. Converting a tuft of grass into a Viking hairpiece for a Halloween costume was beyond Dad’s expertise.
My favorite tree farm story occurred when I wasn’t even present. I merely heard about it from Dad decades after he’d sold the farm on Round Lake Boulevard.
On a day during deer-hunting season, of all times, Dad drove out to the tree farm alone to do some trimming. He was normally very safety conscious, though that didn’t prevent him from passing anyone driving under the speed limit on the way up to the cabin or, apparently, working on prime deer-hunting territory on the main weekend of deer-hunting season.
In any event, he was hard at work when a large buck with a stately rack of antlers stepped proudly out of the adjoining woods and walked royally through the Norways to the woods on the other side of the tree farm grounds. A short while later a party of hunters appeared from the same direction whence deer had walked. The lead hunter greeted Dad, and Dad acknowledged him in return.
“Did you see a buck pass through here?” the hunter asked.
“Yeah,” said Dad. “As a matter of fact, I did.”
“Good,” said the man. “What direction did it take from here?”
“It went thatta way,” said Dad, pointing in the exact opposite direction from where the deer had traveled.
“Thanks,” said the hunter, as the group turned around and retraced their steps.
As I relate the story, I wonder whether the hunters were rank amateurs. Surely a deer of the size Dad described would’ve been easy to track. But they didn’t bother to look for heavy hoofprints. They followed Dad’s misdirection. And as Dad said at the end of the telling, “I wasn’t about to let those guys shoot a beautiful animal like the one I’d just seen.”
It was classic Dad in his classic element—among a field of Norways he couldn’t harvest, saving a deer he couldn’t allow to be hunted.
Dad sold the tree farm the year before I graduated from law school. He didn’t explain why, and if I asked, I don’t remember his response. He divided the proceeds equally among my sisters and me and told me, anyway, to invest my loot in gold coins. Just like the proverbial broken clock, his doomsday newsletter that had foretold the “coming financial collapse” turned out to be exactly right—twice. I bought when Dad’s newsletter said “buy” and sold when it said “sell” right after the price had gone to the moon. I used the proceeds to fund my Grand Odyssey (See blog posts January 27 – May 20, 2022).
I don’t know that I would’ve seen the world as I did if it hadn’t been for Dad’s tree farm—and his doomsday newsletter.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
