Florida and Guns
I was a sickly kid, broomstick skinny, nose running all the time, and with intestines perpetually in distress. Diarrhea was a frequent nemesis and I often wouldn’t make it the two blocks from my elementary school, PS 182, to my house without an accident. My fragile digestive tract was responsible for the fact that I was thinner than the other kids on the block – they outweighed me by 20 pounds. It also was a source of friction between my mother and my grandmother. Bubbe would regularly accuse my mother of neglect, imploring in Yiddish, “Why don’t you feed the child? His ribs stick out!”. Of course, this accusation didn’t sit well with my mother who, even without external encouragement, was continually trying, unsuccessfully, to force feed me. Meals were often a trial of wills, with my mother coercing me to eat every last mouthful. I resisted. But even when she was successful, the food didn’t remain in my digestive system long enough to add much to my bulk.
My parents’ concerns about my health led to trips into Manhattan where I was subjected to the stratagems of a procession of high priced physicians with multiple degrees from Ivy League medical schools. “Fats are causing the problem”, one would solemnly decree. Another would fault an excess of carbohydrates, and suggest that I be fed more protein. Still another prescribed a diet consisting solely of bananas and sour cream, a combination that I dutifully ingested for six months. This last therapy, like the others, didn’t help, but, surprisingly, the dish remains one of my favorites. After visits to countless physicians, heaps of contradictory advice, and no discernible improvement, my mother, without council, with no supporting scientific evidence, and with inspiration from an unknown oracle, proclaimed that she had discovered the solution to my problem: I needed to go to Florida for the winter. I don’t know what my father thought about this scheme but once convinced of a course of action, my mother was impossible to dissuade.
We packed our black 1949 Pontiac sedan with the necessities sufficient for a three month winter’s stay, and my father drove Elaine, my four year old sister, mom, and me 1,500 or so miles down Route 1 to the Sunshine State. It was slow going because the Interstate Highway System, begun in the Eisenhower administration, hadn’t yet been built. After four days on the road, a series of overnights at seedy motels, and a near miss from a tornado, we ended up in Lake Worth, then a modest village near West Palm Beach on the east coast of Florida. My parents had rented a small bungalow in a rural neighborhood several miles inland.
This move had serious repercussions. My dad couldn’t work as a furrier in Florida, meaning that he would have to drive back to New York and leave us stranded for three months. And school? Mrs Klintenberg, a diminutive tyrant of a second grade teacher whose idea of discipline was to lock misbehaving students in the closet for an afternoon, was adamantly opposed to the idea. When I returned to my classroom in April, she would regularly point out that my protracted “vacation” was responsible for the deficits in my education. However, my mother wasn’t concerned with my absence from the classroom. Even without a high school degree she felt that she could make up for any missing assignments. Besides, she thought that my health was more important than a few months without formal instruction.
She turned out to be right. For reasons unknown, Florida indeed seemed to offer a cure. It might have happened anyway, but my bowels improved. I put on some weight. And I didn’t suffer intellectually. In fact, I flourished. For several hours each day, my mother would use flash cards to grind the basic arithmetic facts into my head. To this day, I have a facility with arithmetic that many of my fellows who didn’t abandon school in the middle of the year don’t. And because there was a good library in Lake Worth, I began reading books that my classmates back in Brooklyn didn’t get to for another two or three years. In particular, the library’s collection of nearly 40 Oz books, which I devoured in their entirety, whisked me away to a fantasy world that suited me perfectly.
But, unexpectedly, the greatest influence on me during my sojourn in Florida turned out to be my uncle Carl. A burly, tough ex-soldier, he had just married my mother’s younger (but not youngest) sister, Gisela. While serving in the Pacific theater in WWII, he had been put in charge of a house of ill repute in occupied Japan where he boasted that he had lost 30 pounds in six months. Back home he had become a taxi driver, an occupation that he shared with one of my other uncles. When he learned that I was to spend three months in isolation in the tropics, he sent me two presents. The first came in an enormous carton shortly after our arrival. It turned out to be a treasure trove of 100 some odd comic books. From these I further sharpened my reading skills and stimulated my imagination. Superman and Captain Marvel were my heroes for years after. It’s too bad that I didn’t hang on to them. I would have been wealthy.
His second gift was a BB gun. I treasured that Daisy Red Rider air rifle. And I had plenty to shoot at. Our rented property was adjacent to a one lane asphalt country road that had become embossed with the flattened skeletons of dozens of dead snakes. Apparently the shallow creek that flowed by our house attracted the reptiles and the infrequent traffic did them in. Most of the live snakes I encountered were harmless although that didn’t prevent me from trying to gun them down, although with no success. The critters that survived the autos were quick and skinny, difficult targets all. But one cool February morning I chanced on bigger game.
The snake was enormous, three feet or more in length, thick as a mountain bike tire. It was slowly consuming a large cane toad on the opposite bank of the creek. From its markings I guessed that it was a water moccasin, also called a cottonmouth, a venomous snake that I had been warned about by Mr. Cassidy the owner of our rental property. It posed no immediate threat, but at about 30 feet away and preoccupied, it was a relatively easy target and I wasn’t going to let the opportunity for the kill pass me by. Approaching warily, I raised my trusty weapon to my shoulder, aimed carefully, pulled the trigger, and saw a tiny puff of sand rise about an inch from the snake’s head. I had missed, but not by much. The creature didn’t seem fazed, and remained fixated on its tasty victim. I shot again, and missed again. This time the shot landed less than a half inch away. Still, the snake ate on, unperturbed. My third shot hit the reptile just behind its head. It was not a killing shot, more like a wasp’s sting, but in distress it began thrashing about. I rushed to tell Mr. Cassidy of my exploits, and he ended up dispatching the animal with a hoe. I walked around for several days in glory, a hero straight from the pages of one of my comics. The incident marks the pinnacle of my hunting prowess.A Hunting Adventure
Many years later, while in college, I went on a second, less successful, hunting expedition. I was still living at home. My mother had finally prevailed upon my dad to get a place of our own. It wasn’t a big step up. We had moved three blocks away from the el to a modest two story affair that my parents had purchased from a real estate agent who had evicted a poor Puerto Rican family from the place because they had defaulted on their mortgage. It was in a prime location, just behind a gasoline station, within earshot of the intersection of Linden Boulevard and Pennsylvania Ave, two major thoroughfares. Every week day, I would walk the five blocks to Thomas Jefferson High School. Later, when I enrolled at Brooklyn College, I would climb the steps to the Pennsylvania Avenue station, about a quarter of a mile away, where I would catch the IRT for the short trip to the Flatbush/Midwood border where the school was located.
Steve and Teddy were fellow students who, like me, were majoring in Biology and were friends. Steve was to become my roommate in graduate school and Teddy would ultimately earn a doctorate and become an academic like me. But on this day, to relieve the tedium of school, Teddy suggested that we three go hunting. I was surprised, the idea had never occurred to me. Brooklyn wasn’t the Serengeti. The only wild animals that I ever encountered were squirrels, mice, alley cats, and an occasional sick rat.
Teddy apparently was more knowledgeable, although I never discovered where he came upon this information. He patiently explained that in order to hunt deer we needed a license, a rifle, and ammunition. He knew of a wooded area north of the City that was chock full of quarry. “It’s full of game. We should have an easy time bringing home some venison”, he argued. We agreed to go, although Steve said that he would just tail along. He didn’t want to shoot anything, whether out of conviction or good sense, I didn’t know.
Getting a big game hunting license was neither difficult nor expensive. Hung around my neck, the bright yellow placard entitled me to kill one deer, male or female, but nothing else (you had to pay an additional fee to be able to nab bigger game, like bear). My next task was to acquire a weapon. The Yellow Pages led me to an establishment that sold rifles and, for the modest sum of $10, I was soon in the possession of, what the salesman told me was a British Enfield rifle, circa WWI. He assured me that with the proper ammunition, I could use it to bring down the biggest buck in the state. I didn’t doubt it. It was a substantial piece of gunnery, with a full stock that terminated in a bayonet mount. Somehow it didn’t seem appropriate for a hunting rifle; I thought it more suited for shooting the Hun from the foxholes of France.
When I brought it home, I removed the bayonet mount and sawed off a foot of stock at its distal end. A few hours worth of sanding and a little oil soon made the rifle look presentable enough so that the deer wouldn’t laugh when I threatened them. I called Teddy and told him that I was armed and dangerous. A few days later, Steve and I got into Teddy’s ’53 beat up old Chevy and headed for the killing fields.
Teddy advised me to test the weapon before actually stalking our prey. He mounted an old tin can on a fence in front of a suitable backstop. I assumed a prone position, lined up the can in the sight, and pulled the trigger. The recoil must have slid me back two inches. My shoulder ached and I had a ringing in my right ear that lasted for a week. “It works”, I said too loudly, not actually hearing my own voice. The can remained untouched, exactly where it was placed, only a few yards away. “I’m ready.”, I shouted. I didn’t want to risk further injury.
We set out into the woods. Deer poop was everywhere. Teddy said that that was a good sign. But we didn’t see any of our intended prey. We quickly deduced that the loud noises that we made as we noisily traipsed through the forest were warning the wary creatures of our presence. There were other problems. After several hours hauling my heavy armament around, I was exhausted. Teddy and Steve were dragging too. The day was turning cold and damp and we were all uncomfortable.
“Let’s try a different strategy,” Teddy suggested. “We should find a spot overlooking a likely deer run and wait for them to come to us.”
Steve and I bowed to Teddy’s expertise and eagerly agreed. We took up positions some 50 yards apart on a ridge overlooking what we imagined a deer might likely stroll, hunkered down, and waited for our prey to make an appearance.
Let me pause here and offer some comments from the vantage of some 50 years after the event. In a word, we were unprepared. First, as I’ve emphasized, my expertise with my newly purchased blunderbuss was limited. I had fired only one shot at a can from point blank range and missed. The chances of me hitting something that was moving and a reasonable distance away approached nil. Second, if one of us had wounded a deer, we didn’t have the faintest idea of how to track it to finish it off. Even if we could, we certainly would have lost our way and would probably be still trying to find our way home. Finally, we didn’t know what to do with a dead deer even if we had killed it. There was no rope to tie the carcass to Teddy’s car, and it wouldn’t have fit in his trunk that was already filled with his old tires and tools. We had no knife to butcher the animal, and even if we did, we hadn’t the faintest idea how to perform the operation.
Back to the story. After an hour or two sitting on the hill shivering in the cold, thinking that hunting wasn’t the idyllic sport that it was made out to be, I heard Steve whistle. He was signaling that there was something moving in the trail below and heading towards my position. Casually trotting along, apparently on the way to a meeting with a colleague or a romantic interlude, was a beautiful red fox. I reached for my trusty Enfield propped up against a nearby tree. I knew full well that my hunting license only permitted the pursuit of deer. Killing a fox was strictly against the rules. But I was frustrated. I had spent hours making my rifle presentable, had hurt my shoulder and hearing testing it, and had endured the cold waiting for a suitable target. Against what should have been my better judgement, I pulled the trigger.
The fox loped on, without slowing or quickening its pace. Of course, I had missed. I hadn’t aimed carefully. It wasn’t a stationary target. There were branches intervening and it was more than 100 yards away. The shot was made in frustration. I felt that leaving the hilltop without a shot at something, anything, would have meant that my discomfort during the day would have been for naught.
I immediately felt sorry for what I’d done. Why did I shoot? What good would it have been to kill or injure such a splendid creature? What purpose would it have served? What was I thinking? In the years since, I have never attempted another shot at a living thing. In principle, I’m not against hunting. I think killing an animal for the purpose of putting its head on the wall is wrong, but as long as the animals aren’t endangered and have a reasonable chance of getting away, I have no issues with the sport. Nor am I bothered by shooting pests, like feral hogs. Or hunting to provide food for the table. My sons hunt, but I don’t. There persists in the back of my mind a faint guilty memory of a red fox running through the woods. And I still can vaguely feel the pain in my shoulder when I pulled the trigger.