Jackie Wells-Fauth
Couples are supposed to spend more time together, right? I mean, a healthy, solid marriage is built on mutual respect and time spent in each other’s company. Or so I always believed.
Today, I put that theory to the test and it didn’t fare so well. I went with my husband on one of his local hunting excursions and we came back from that and almost headed for the divorce courts. And why, you might ask? I’ll tell you, it’s because when he drives out to go hunting, he calls the rutted, pitted messes he is driving on roads or maybe “section lines”. I call them the highway from hell, and that should in no way indicate for you that there is anything remotely like a highway anywhere near where we are driving.
He always takes the pickup on these pheasant tracking excursions, and apparently if you have the pickup, you can drive through anything. And while the pickup does fine on paved roads and even gravel or dirt, I don’t happen to trust it to navigate grass tracks barely touched by farm equipment, let alone a pickup.
It started out fine. We got in the vehicle and went driving down a fairly wide, paved road with hardly any chunks out of it. On that road we were able to play “chicken” with a pheasant—not easy to do. The pheasant refused to fly away and just kept walking towards us…I thought for a moment we were going to bag it with the pickup! Eventually, with a cackle, it flew into the air and bang! Roy had ‘em.
“Splendid,” I praised as he came back to me. “Now that you have your pheasant, we can go home.”
“That’s only one,” he answered. “I’m not done. I haven’t got my limit.”
“Your limit? What is your limit?”
“I can get three pheasants in any hunt, that’s my limit. And I haven’t reached it yet.”
As we got back in the pickup and headed down a somewhat narrow, gravel road, I contemplated telling him about MY limit, but I had just watched him shoot a pheasant that refused to back down…I wasn’t going to take any chances!
After a few minutes of spitting up gravel and dust, we turned onto a narrow, dirt road. Now, I was raised on a farm…I know when we have reached the end of the road and when we got to the end of the dirt and the start of grass, I knew we were through.
“Well, too bad, we’ll have to turn around,” I said, trying not to chortle.
“Turn around? What do you mean? The road is up ahead.”
What he optimistically called a road looked more like two tire tracks across a football field, but a football field that was full of potholes and littered with bales of hay which served more as blocks than guides. As we bumped along, the pickup tilted because on one side, the wheels were deep in a rut and on the other side, the wheels were driving at a precarious angle on some high grass.
At last, without running into a single pheasant, we came to a gully in the tire tracks which could only have been crossed with a ferry.
“What a shame!” I said. “We will have to turn around and bump our way back on this section line superhighway. We can’t get over that.”
I was wrong. He put the pickup in reverse, bumped across a couple more tracks, and, squeezing between the scratchy bale and the vicious barbed wire fence, he managed to detour around the hole. Oh, yay!
We finally came to a point in the section line which was fenced off for cattle. We stopped, Roy did some hunting, and I did a little exploring and discovered that to one side of us was a fine dirt road, which looked like the European Autobahn compared to the section line we were on.
“Well, at least there is a road to this side that is an actual road,” I said, pointing to be helpful.
“Oh no,” was the emphatic answer. “If we turn around and go back (past the gully, remember), there is another section line to drive. I hope that big mudhole has dried up.”
Yup, in the future, I think our marriage will stand a better chance if we spend less driving and hunting time together!
dropsinthewell 