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Words have depth.  One word can mean many different things in different contexts.  How we may understand a word or phrase in our youth can be vastly different from how we understand that word latter.  This isn’t anything new, you can go back in your mind to think of examples of this from your history.

Not long ago during the Trump era add campaign in the fall of 2020, with the mask laced pandemic protocol, we met two 9–10-year-old boys riding scooters around a parking lot that we were walking to.  We went to one of the store fronts and they rode up to us and told us that it was closed.  We started up a conversation with them.  Unsure of where our loyalties were at, they seemed compelled to a certain degree to gush about an “old lady” who verbally berated them for not wearing their masks in the outside world in spite of the fact that nobody was around for miles.  She told them to not get to close to her and they should be wearing masks.  She also told them that they should be home and not outside… obviously she was a loon.  We asked them what they thought about what she had told them.  And with the limited verbal filters they possessed, and determining that we were not the enemy.  They asked us if we voted for Trump in the previous election which seemed to be the ticket to be on “their right side”.  We could hear a lot of parental wording spouting from their youthful mouths.  Big adult concepts boiled down to what they could grasp at their ages.  Kind of a definitive logic, you like this, so therefore you must be like that—in an all or nothing concept of sorts.   

In essence the voting for Trump, the not liking of masks meant you were a friend, but if you were an “old person” who were at least 50 years old (as they described her) then you were not friendly and probably didn’t like Trump either.  Masks and the fear of disease or the not fearing was the dividing line in their world.  If you liked masks or agreed with it, then you were an idiot from their understanding of the situation and were not a friend.  More than likely parroting what they heard and understood from their homes—or at least what they perceived to have understood.  The take away from that conversation to us, was what parents say in the home is compressed, filtered, massaged and can be meaningful in many different ways therefore could be misinterpreted in many ways too.

One of our religious tenants is not to drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, it is called the Word of Wisdom—there is more to it than just the “don’t do this or that”, but the don’ts can be grasped easier than the dos at an earlier age.  With that understanding I was talking with coworkers regarding some of their experiences in the past and that involving their kids with respect to the misunderstandings.  As an example, one coworker told of a story that another couple recently stayed with them at their house- they were relatives —my coworker was not LDS and so he and his wife rose early and prepared coffee for the morning, as many do across the world.  Well, the daughter of the visiting couple was stunned and started to bawl when she found them drinking coffee.  She with unfiltered angst, said that uncle and aunt so-and-so are now going to hell and she was inconsolable.   On one hand it’s funny and cute innocence but somewhere the little girl had heard a message what happens when people disobey rules and this was a rule in her world, I really doubt the parents taught her that anyone who drinks coffee is consigned to hell—but maybe in this incidence the daughter believed that all people who drink coffee are disobeying a rule and are rule breakers therefore the rule breakers go to hell—a pretty closed loop argument of logic in a tiny brain.  It seems growing up you think that everyone else growing up has a similar way of being raised—that everyone does the same things—until you start to observe the differences.  I remember this concept when having sleep overs, not everyone did the same things, they ate different things or things were missing from the daily routine that I might have been used too.  I believe that everyone growing up seems to think that “this is the way”, and there is no other way.   We all eventually find that everyone has different lives growing up and that there is not just “one way”.   If you tried to explain that to a young person without the contrasting experiences of observation then the concept might be completely inconceivable—they have no other experience to gauge the difference by.  It is just not understood, until they have more experience and live to see those in action.  To be clear I don’t think there should be any direct pressure to get every 5 years a total data download of all humanity and the differences that are present over a lifetime—just to make sure they have it all that day.  Youthful innocence should be enough of a concept to hold onto without having them being too grown up to soon—there will be plenty of time to be all grown up, innocence should be a precious commodity.

Another co worker then shared the story of his nephew telling his mom that he was concerned about his uncle (my coworker), that he had become a smoker.  When he got on the phone with this nephew’s mom (his sister) he asked what was going on.  Well, the story went that, my coworker had recently bought a wood smoking grill to cook and BBQ meat with… he had become a “smoker”, the only thing the kid heard was that Uncle Nathan was now a smoker (and the only smoking he knew about was associated with cigarettes) and that made him feel bad that his uncle was now a serious sinner.    Words at his age and understanding maybe only meant one thing.  As an example, the word “run” could be an activity to do, to run along the road, run could also be a place where salmon move along a stream or paint dripping… run can mean a lot of things—this is where the depth is found, in the discovery that words aren’t just single facets, but are multiple faceted like diamonds and therefore can have a richness to themselves.

Finally, when I was 5 or 6 or close to that age, we had some sheep in our pasture where we lived.  One of the sheep was mine to take care of and the other was one of my sisters –   My sheep was a male and had a black face and therefore, I named him “Blackman”.  A description of his face color without malice or any sinister classification of people.  It was simply a sheep with a black face.  We also had a game that we played with our neighbors, called “tackle blackman” two end zones, where one guy had to tackle kids running from the safe zone to the other safe zone.   We just used words to describe events or things—no political motivation, just simple.  The game was also a mimic of events that actually occurred in the pasture.  We had to run from safe zone or pasture to safe zone without getting charged or bucked by the ram Blackman…. He in essence was the kid in the middle.  It was Blackman that we tried to run from—because he was a mean ram sheep.  Just part of growing up with animals on an acreage.    Never in our minds did we equate the name of my sheep called Blackman and our childish games to the suffering of the lives of the real slaves in the early American and World trading of humans for labor—nor should we have done; we were still innocent of the world and there was no need to get old all of a sudden.  It would be inconceivable to expect an understanding of that concept. 

Kids are funny in how and what they hear, and how they restate what they thought they heard.   There is a lot of misunderstandings in what the intent of a situation can be. There is a lot of parental parroting which might or might not be intentional, only in that it’s called raising kids.  There is no need to have the wisdom of Solomon realized in grade school, there will be plenty of time to be an adult later.  We don’t need to hurry that process along because of expediency, and especially because of fear.  As adults when we discovered some nugget… remember “how did you come by that little nugget of wisdom in the first place”.  Usually through some hard-won experience.  I believe that kids should and need to be taught and lead through the process of adulting, but innocence is a precious commodity too—The adults now seem to be in a hurry to make all kids aware of the atrocities of life in 1^st grade.  Why not just let them grown up as innocent as they can be. Let them discover the depth of words through their own lenses, and smile with them as they do; you might even learn a little of what you have been missing yourself.

When I was a kid in grade school, I must have seen few movies about mountain men in the early frontier west- one movie that comes to mind specifically was Jeramiah Johnson, starring Robert Redford.  Whatever the reason was during the time—it became my favorite movie and has remained so my whole life.  I have watched that move dozens of time, “…. you cook good rabbit pilgrim.”

What was it about that movie?  I remember checking out books from the school library on Kit Carson and other noted mountain men.  My best friend at the time, Mark, and I resolved that we were going to go to Canada and be mountain men, we were going to hunt, fish and trap and live in cabins on the wild frontier- we needed gear and experience so we ran away… just kidding, dinner was ready so it would have to wait.  However I held onto that dream and it served me in my passion for hunting and outdoors in the years to come and I felt that tug every year to be in the mountains.  Hunting season to me was like Christmas time, I almost couldn’t wait- the joy, the excitement, the preparation.  I read The Outdoor Life or other hunting stories and read books by Jack O’Connor and his adventures, I even dove into stories of Africa by Peter Capstick…. Heady stuff, and was rounded out by John Goddard with his adventures and goals in his life.

Around 2006 I had an opportunity to really learn how to trap from an individual- I was interested in bobcats specifically.  So I ran a trap line catching bobcats, coyotes, and fox.  There is a lot to trapping, it takes time to run the line, to set the traps, to understand the target, to read the country, to think like the target, to reset traps that were sprung by rabbits and to do this over and over again for the season.  It’s not for everyone.  It’s not for blood sport either, although some might think it is, it’s a management tool of the fish and game to control species- it’s based on science not emotion

My first catch however was a couple of years before.  We lived in a typical subdivision neighborhood and had neighbors to the right and left, it was a quiet street.  Our fine neighbors to the east of us had an old car that cats lived in and they just let them run all over the place.  I was getting tired of having these “feral cats” run all over the place after seeing tracks all over after a snow storm during the Christmas time.  Ok I had had enough and was going to do “something about it”, I had 2 muskrat spring steel traps and thought that would be perfect if I set them up along their travel path.  Early one morning I placed these traps on the ground, buried them with a layer of snow and tied them off to the fence.  I put some nice tuna fish and juice on the trap pan as an attractor (I would find tuna isn’t stinky enough).  It would be perfect—I was fixated on catching me one or all of those cats.  Bear Claw Chris Laferty would have been proud.

My oldest son Travis met me at the back door and was curious about what I was up to—and in normal dad fashion I just shh’d him, as it was early,  and told him to never mind what I was doing and not to go outside that day.  It had just snowed, so I didn’t think he would want to do anything like build a snow man or anything like that.

My wife and I got ready mid-morning and went Christmas shopping, we got a baby sitter to watch the kids and went out.  When we returned there were 3 more cars in our drive way and one set of neighbors (luckily not the cat neighbors) and a certain amount of harried commotion.  We wondered what in the world could be going on so we, with a little trepidation, walked in the house.  There were 3 couples and a very distraught baby sitter, her hair was all a kimbo and there was Travis with a towel wrapped around his hand laying on the couch, bawling his eyes out.  The other couples were friends with dire looks on their faces.  My next door neighbor with a certain solemnity asked if I knew that were traps set in our back yard.   Oh course faced with the horrible truth and consequences, I said “no that I did not”.   At that point I think I was ready for Congress or at least the Presidency, because the lie just rolled off my tongue with a certain smoothness that I was a shoe in for public office.

Natalie looked at me and asked me what it was that I had done, of course, one lie had to flow from another and they flowed from the pinnacle or virtue to the precipice of fate…. I was in TROUBLE.  I feigned innocence, I guffawed, I denied, I was shocked…. I knew I was toast—I had to get everyone out so that I could do some proper damage control.  I looked at his fingers…. whew,  all 6 were there on the one hand, the trap hadn’t done any permanent damage; it had only lacerated the skin a little – but overall he was fine.  I was more worried about the baby sitter…. She was rocking back and forth, mumbling incoherently, she had that wild look in her eyes like that of being shell shocked.

So now the story starts to come out.  After we left and within an hour or so of us being gone, curiosity did truly catch the cat, the cat in the baseball hat.  Travis wondered what in the world could I have been up to and went to the back fence, following my tracks.  The snow was disturbed around an opening in the fence, so he proceeds to poke and prod the snow with his fingers until, “SNAP” his hand is caught in the spring loaded trap.  He panics and starts to wail like a stuck pig and the nice 13 year old baby sitter in her calm couch sitting position hears the murderous screams and runs out to the back yard, only to be greeted by a child that is tied to a metal implement on his hand that is tied to the fence and that he is totally panicking, so she decides that the best method of solving the problem is to also panic.  She starts screaming and both are running back forth and of course trying to calmly talk about the weather.  The neighbors hear the commotion and cooler heads eventually prevail.  The baby sitter didn’t know what to do, she was in shock and didn’t know how to open the spring traps… the neighbors do and release the little screaming pig.  They gather everyone up and get them in the house.  Another set of friends show up and ergo our house is the epicenter of pandemonium.   All with the inquiring questions of what in the world are the Dowdles up to (me of course), being at the top of the list.   Five minutes later we show up and after an initial grilling and death ray stares into my soul I had to rush Natalie out of the house to take the baby sitter home or hospital- if only to persevere my own life.  Needless to say, the babysitter, never worked for us again- I never did understand why?

Clearly I had not thought the trapping scenario out fully, what would my ever curious kid do should have been top of the list.  What was he capable of, we were leaving and I left the traps fully set- now that was brilliant.  At the time it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. The biggest deficit of all was what I would have done if a cat actually was caught in the trap either with me home or especially with me not being home.   Ok not my finest hour of decision making.

Now what of the cats, they continued to be the rotten little creatures that they were but in some ways they were embolden to be even a little more cavalier.  They knew I no longer had the power over them, I even thought I saw them sitting on the yard berm as this whole debacle was unfolding and I thought I saw them laugh to each other and shake their heads, knowing that they won that battle, I had missed them as the trapping targets and rather Travis my own son had become my first catch……well it’s a start.

This isn’t the first time and won’t be the last time that you have had to say goodbye… to a parent, to a relative, to a sister or a brother, to a spouse, to a friend.  It happens everyday–times thousands and times millions.  Songs are sung, memories are surfaced and thoughts are poignant.  But they are still gone… for the time being.  This isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last.  I heard it say as you get older there comes an inflection point where life starts to take more than it gives.

What is it like to lose a love one, you don’t know until you do, it can be painful, it can be a relief in some cases, it can be a shock, it can be a lot of things and you are never full prepared, even when you know that it’s terminal and at some point they will go, it’s the finality and it’s painful- but with the right information and knowledge it can also be joyful for many reasons.  Death is not the end, it’s said, but a beginning.

I read a book a while back, called Earth in the Beginning.  It’s more or less a scientific approach about the earth, the creation, our creation and what is in store for us as we move from this world.  The scope of our existence could be billions of years times infinity.  We have been and will continue to be forever and I utterly do not comprehend this concept.  However our existence is but a tiny sliver in the overall picture and progression of our body and soul.  So is death an ending? Yes, in a certain sense but it’s a path to a door moving forward.  Death is and has been 100%– nothing as certain death and taxes as the saying goes.

Death is not like eating a piece of apple pie with ice cream, it’s not pleasurable… it is a part of life however and “that” is joyful—at least it should be or it should be the goal; right!

There are some specifics about loss that are heart wrenching– the loss of course; the loss of companionship, the loss of the immediate future.  The unresolved at times, the incomplete.   Do you know what it is like to clean out a closet of the clothes of your companion, or of a child?  To pack up the shells of their existence and put them in boxes- because they won’t be using them any longer– in this life.  I can tell you, that is a tough day.  What do you keep, what do you give away, what is significant, what gets thrown away?   If you are not a decisive person then that can, can be kicked down the road with no end in sight if not fully embraced at some point. 

Right after the funeral there is a lot of “rallying”, people concerned with your well-being at the time, lots of food, lots of looks and then life starts up again, for everyone.  The jagged is smoothed after a time, but it lives at home, you come home to it every day- and nobody is there to rally every day for you- you have to assume that duty eventually.  The weeks/months after are hard, as you come home and no one is there.  One stares the stark right in the face every day- it’s part of the progression.   Method, discipline, tasks are ways to keep one busy, to keep the mind from wandering to the edges of the pool and falling into the deep end.  Moving forward always… with the thought now and again of running away.  To be a boat captain in Tahiti or a Bush Pilot in Alaska.  No wonder alcohol is so popular, it numbs the pain, but it can envelop you like a dark blanket if you allow it to.  Who is the master and who will be the slave?

Death is like your little toe, it’s at your feet all the time, but you don’t think about it unless it gets smashed and then it’s painful, it scars, it heals and then that little piggy goes back to the market.  Everyone will face it personally and through proxy, many times many in their life.   I remember the first incident of dealing with it at 14 — a school friend–Chris Wallace, was accidentally shot by another friend as they were going bird hunting.  It was an accident, I don’t remember how I felt specifically but I remember the funeral and service and some of those details.  I don’t think too often about Chris but I’m sure his family does- does it crush them daily, I hope not, what do they feel about the afterlife, do they have hope? Will they think they will see him again,… again I hope so too.  Does and will 40 years dull that loss.  At quite moments do you sit back and wonder where is he at right now, or what is she doing you may ask…. I do.  I think of her every day, and still wonder if running away would work.  How do you say goodbye?