THE ADVENTURES OF JOHN AND BARNEY Part 3, The Word Processor is Mightier Than the Sword.

After the trapping fiasco, Barney made one last attempt to make me into the kind of son-in-law he had hoped for. He invited me into the most sacrosanct corner of his life—on a Sunday early in November he informed me that I would spend the next weekend at deer camp. 

Now, given the choice between spending time with Barney and his cronies in a cold, snowy, miserable swamp somewhere west of Iron River or being entertained in the warmth of his home by his beautiful daughter and his wife, who had, like her daughter, become quite fond of me, it is obvious how that decision would be made by any sane person.  However, I was insanely in love with the daughter, so it behooved me to do what I could to try gain favor with her father, even if it meant taking part in what would in all likelihood be another failed attempt to measure up to Barney’s standards for manhood. 

When I arrived the next Friday night Barney and his son, my future brother-in-law, Ted, were packed and ready to head out to camp.  Gwen and I lived for these weekends together, but she understood the great significance of this event, and, with a smile and kiss goodbye, sent me on my way. 

It was quite late by time we arrived at camp, an old, 32 foot Air Stream camper, and, after introductions to Leo and Albert, Barney’s friends, we headed off to our bunks.  Morning would come early.  I was awakened at 5:00 the next morning and, after a hearty breakfast of eggs, potatoes, pancakes and bacon, Barney presented me with one of his old rifles and showed me how to use it.  Then, it was off to the woods.  In the middle of November, at the extreme western edge of the Eastern Time Zone, it is very dark at 6:00 in the morning.  Yet, Barney was totally at home in the woods, with or without light, and we set out by starlight into the swamp.  In a half hour or so we arrived on a ridge that overlooked a stream and open meadow.  Barney pointed out a stump near a giant white pine tree and told me that this would be my post.  He said that when a deer with horns walked through the meadow I was to shoot it.  “Yes sir”, I said.  Then he left me there alone.  I took solace in the fact that there was quite a bit of snow on the ground and I would be able to follow our trail back to the camp if Barney decided to solve his son-in-law problem by simply leaving me there in the middle of the wilderness.  He didn’t share a lot, so I never knew what he was thinking. 

It was a long day.  I had a thermos of coffee and some bologna sandwiches, but no books to read, and it was impossible to write with the heavy gloves I was wearing.  Although I had an unobstructed view of the meadow below, it had begun to snow, and it would not be possible for me to determine the species of any critter that might pass through, much less determine if there were horns on its head.   My feet were cold, my hands were cold and everything in between was cold, but I stuck it out for the day.  The gun was never fired.  Late in the afternoon Ted came by to bring me back to camp.  I slept well that night, and in the morning announced that I was going back to town.  No one tried to change my mind. 

Many years later Gwen and I moved to Marquette, where I worked at NMU for a few years as director of their school counselor training program, and Gwen was able to be near her parents and sister, who had recently divorced and was living with them.  It was during one of our visits with Gwen’s folks in Gaastra that I noticed Barney writing in a spiral notebook.  I asked him what he was doing, and he told me that he was writing his memoirs.  At last! I had an opportunity to prove myself.  I asked Barney whether I could take a look at what he had written, and he obliged by produced several spiral notebooks filled with his writing.  In it were several chapters (He called them articles.) describing events in his life beginning with early childhood. Like the man himself, what he wrote was mainly descriptive, not a lot of heart and soul in it; what you saw was pretty much what you got—but, charming nonetheless.  “Barney”, I said, “If you’d like, I can take some of these with me and type them up for you.”  He wasn’t anxious to let the books out of his sight, but reluctantly agreed to let me have them.

For the next several months Gwen and I devoted ourselves to typing up Barney’s memoirs.  The word processor on our computer soon contained many files with his name on them.  He, of course, assumed that we were typing them on a manual Remington typewriter, and, in fact, at one time asked whether we were using carbon paper to make copies of what we typed.  Each time we visited in Gaastra we would return his notebooks to him in exchange for new ones.  Eventually he was satisfied that he had remembered all that he was going to remember.

Gwen and I completed typing Barneys’ memoirs, in point of fact, it was Gwen who did most of the typing, and I began the task of editing the material into a book.  There would be chapters on his early life, education, working in the mines, and, of course, hunting, fishing, trapping and being a jack-of-all-trades.  Gwen did an amazing job of adding life to his words and correcting historical and family inaccuracies, and we were ready to print it all up.  I took what we had printed to a local shop that bound dissertations and had them make several hard-bound copies of it.  Of course, the title on the spine, in gold letters, was “Memoirs of a Hunter, Trapper, Fisherman and Jack-of-all-trades, by Casimir Arthur Bartczak.  We wrapped the box of books and presented it to Barney as a Christmas gift.  Barney was never without an opinion on anything, and I had never seen him speechless until he opened that box.  He took out one of the books, looked at it, smelled it, felt its weight, took out his reading glasses, and began thumbing through it with something that could only be described as reverence. He headed off to his bedroom where he spent the day reading his book. 

The next time we saw Barney he paid me the highest of compliments by saying that I had done a good job of making what had now become “his book;” but, here was list of some things that would have to be corrected and changed in the next edition.  He had already begun remembering a slew of other articles that should have been included and was busy writing them.  We eventually completed three editions of his memoirs, and a copy of it is contained in the Iron River Library.  During his later years Barney’s health began to fail and he was confined to a nursing home in Iron River.  The last time Gwen and I saw him before he died, I remember saying goodbye to him as we were preparing to leave, and he asked me where his book was.  He was blind at this time.  His book was on a shelf near his be; I picked it up and handed it to him.  He lovingly held his book in his hands. “Thank you, John,” he said. 

The Adventures of John and Barney, Part 2, The Trap

Although it wasn’t necessary for me to ask Barney a second time for permission to marry his daughter, Gwen and I did a have a long conversation with him and Bertha about our wedding plans.  Part of that conversation involved asking Barney whether he would be willing to help out with the wedding.  “Sure,” Barney replied, “I’ll hold the ladder when you elope.”  This wasn’t exactly the full-blown blessing for our proposed nuptials that we had hoped we might get, but, it was a start.

Over time Barney gradually accepted my presence in the life of his family, if for no other reason than I spent every weekend at his house beginning in July of 1962 and on into what seemed to Gwen and me an interminable time until the wedding date we had set as June 8, 1963.  I would arrive at his house on Friday evening and leave on Sunday evening.  

When I arrived on one of those weekends he had a surprise for me.

Barney was well aware of my deficiencies as far as being a hunter, trapper, fisherman and jack-of-all-trades was concerned.  And, nowhere was I more sorely lacking than in the trapping area.  He was not impressed when I told him about my success at trapping mice in the barn on the farm and setting snares for rabbits in the cedar swamp below our house.  He set about to correct this flaw in my resume by announcing on Sunday night, as I was leaving, that I should bring some old clothes next weekend—we were going coyote trapping. 

There was no longer a bounty on them, but Barney was not a fan of coyotes; he saw them as sly, cunning predators that did nothing other than prey on deer herds.  When he got on his soapbox about coyotes, as he would with only the slightest provocation, he would say that when all the people are gone from the face of the earth there will still be one coyote running around.

When I arrived on the next Friday night, Barney was already involved in some sort of pre-trapping ritual that involved a fire pit beneath a cast iron black cauldron filled with a foul-smelling elixir made of water, hemlock bark, and something called logwood powder.  To this day, I have no idea what logwood powder is other than that Barney got it from Herb Lenon, a trapping guru in Engadine.  The traps we were going to use the next day were immersed in the boiling liquid to remove their shine and any human scent. 

Before retiring for the night Barney had me help him pack a knapsack with several items including a canvas drop cloth, a wooden frame with a screen over it, rubber gloves, a garden trowel, a roll of waxed paper, and a small packet of something that Barney called scent.  Scent, also acquired from Herb Lenon, would be used as bait for the traps.  I asked what it was, and all I could deduce from Barney’s explanation was that it had something to do with dried reproductive glands of the animals we were going to trap.  I could hardly sleep that night, wondering whatever we were going to do with the contents of that knapsack on the next day, and, more importantly, would I be up to Barney’s standards for becoming a trapper?  Would I be able to someday say to Gwen: “Hon, let’s go for a ride over to Engadine; I have to get some scent and logwood powder from Herb Lenon?”

We arose at sunrise the next morning, ate the hearty breakfast that Gwen and Bertha prepared for us, and then loaded up Barney’s four-wheel drive Toyota pickup.  We didn’t have very far to drive, but there was time for conversation.  The topic of marriage never arose; instead we talked about the merits of fly-fishing with a muddler minnow as opposed to spin-casting with a Meppes Spinner as a preferred way to catch brook trout.  I could see what Barney was up to here; he was going for a twofer.  He was not only chipping away at my trapping deficiency, he was throwing in a little work on the fishing problem.  Hunting and jack-of-all-trading would have to wait for another day.

It wasn’t long before we were bumping down a two-track “Forestry Road”, as Barney called it.  We arrived at what looked like an abandoned gravel pit, and Barney announced that this was a good place to set a trap for a wily coyote.  He slung the knapsack over his shoulders and headed down a trail into the woods.  Now my serious training in trapping began.  Wherever there happened to be a bare spot of dirt on the trail I was instructed to avoid stepping there so that I wouldn’t leave a track.  “Geeze,” I thought to myself, “those coyotes must be awful smart to be able to see our tracks and know that we were carrying paraphernalia  that would be used to bring about their demise.”   Barney set me straight on this; he didn’t want any other trappers who might stumble upon our trail to discover where he was going to set the traps and come back later to steal whatever he had caught.

Apparently there is no honor among thieves.

Before too long, we stopped at what Barney determined was a spot where a coyote was likely to pass on its way to prey on a herd of deer.   Now my education really began.  First, he carefully spread the canvas drop cloth on the ground.  Barney knelt on it, put on the rubber gloves, took the trowel in his hands and began to dig a hole in the ground.  For reasons not clear to me, this couldn’t be just an ordinary hole in the ground; it had to be dug at a 45 degree angle and, of course, be large enough to accommodate the trap that Barney had carefully laid on the canvas.  As he dug the hole, Barney carefully took each trowel full of dirt and sifted it through the screen device.  He explained that the dirt would later be used to bury the trap, and care had to be taken to remove any pebbles or other objects that could jam the mechanism.  I noted that everything involved in this operation was done with extreme care so as to not leave any human scent for wily coyote to sniff.

When he judged that the hole was of proper pitch, depth and dimensions the trap was set and carefully placed in the hole.  He then sprinkled the mysterious scent powder over it, and covered it with waxed paper, another precaution taken so that dirt couldn’t jam the mechanism.  Still wearing the rubber glove, Barney used the trowel to carefully place the filtered dirt on the waxed paper covering the trap.  Last, he broke a limb from a nearby evergreen tree and used it as a broom to smooth the dirt over the trap.  We were done.  

Barney stood up and I helped him pack the equipment back into the knapsack.  Feeling every bit a fully chartered member of the society of those who set traps for coyotes, I cleared my throat, and, as is the custom of men when they have completed a manly task, I spit—on the ground—the freshly smoothed ground that covered the trap.

To his credit, Barney didn’t get a gun out of the pickup and shoot me on the spot.  He simply sighed, shrugged his shoulders, leaned over, dug out the trap, and loaded it in the truck.  “Time to go home,” he said.  We didn’t talk much on the way home.  I didn’t think it was a good time to try to impress him with my qualifications as a future son-in-law.  

Fortunately, his daughter Gwen, the love of my life, was an adamant foe of trapping; she and I were in agreement that it was cruel and unnecessary.  She didn’t think that I was a bad person for doing what I did; in fact, she got a good laugh out of it.  

It would be 30 years before Barney took me on another trapping excursion with him.  It would have none of the drama of my first episode with him, but would be far more poignant.