I can't recall exactly when it was, but it was some point while I was in university. As I don't remember it being right when I first went down to UW, I suspect it was when I went to law school, which I would have started in the fall of 1987. I was supposed to start in the fall of 1986, but I had reservations about it, so I held off for a year, and my mother was also deathly ill as well, so I had reason to return home.
I'll leave that story for some other time, but what I recall is that I went back down to UW and at the start of law school I was under the impression that it was going to be really hard. Truth be known, law school, and I suspect any law school, is an incredibly easy course of study. Indeed, one of the first deflating things about becoming a lawyer, at least for me, was to realize how easy law school was. [1] I'd just gone through an undergraduate course of study in geology, and that was very hard. Law school involved readsing cases and knowing what they held. Any idiot can do that.
Anyhow, the first year I didn't come home much to my old hunting haunts as I thought the finals as the end of the semester were going to be really hard and I couldn't afford the time off. M'eh, they were not. That did establish a course of conduct, however, in that throughout law school I didn't come home for Thanksgiving. It was right before finals and I always used it to study for finals. I didn't go home for Spring Break either.
Somewhere in there, I came home and found to my surprise that my father hadn't gotten his antelope. He had gone out after I had come home and got mine, but he didn't get one that time and didn't get one at all. It was a shock. Even my mother, who was quite ill, remarked on it, and she'd gone out with him, whihc was also very surprising.
More surprising is that he hadn't hunted waterfowl at all.
It concerned me as it didn't seem like him.
When I returned from law school, he was much his old self, but slowed down. He still fished regularly when the streams opened back up. He went with me when I hunted antelope and sometimes deer (he never took weekdays off to do these things ever, but back then I would). He helped, and by that I mean did almost all the work, butcher a moose and an elk I shot back then. But he also was getting a little absent minded, enough that I noticed.
The year he turned 62 he was too sick to go antelope hunting with me and my good friend Tom. I knew he must be really sick, as he'd never cancelled on anything like that ever. He died the following April, never recovering from what started off like a cold.
This has been on my mind.
It's not on my mind as I'm missing hunting season. I'm not. But it has occured to me that I've become so busy in recent years that I'm now like my father. I don't take weekdays off to go, unlike when I what I did when I was younger. At some point my father went from a schedule that was six days a week, with half a day off on Wednesday and half a day off on Saturday, to all of Saturday off, and retaining the half day off on Wednesday, but he still started work incredibly early. For my part, over the years I've reached the point where I work six days a week nearly every week and sometimes seven days a week.
The past year, or indeed ever since the onset of COVID, I've been really busy. Things may have slowed down for oether people, but they sure didn't for me. So I've had my whithers to the yoke the entire time. So I'm a bit tired right now.
Which is what my wife tells me is going on here.
Well, during the really busy run up to a trial I started waking up early, as in 4:00 a.m. Recently that retreated back to 3:00 a.m, then a couple of times after that, it started crowing 2:00 a.m. At that point you have to do something and so I'm not back to sleeping into 5:00 a.m., thank goodness. But I'm just back to that.
Deer season has been wrapping up.
I didn't make the weekend before last out, as I had to work one of the days (I ended up working on Sunday) and we shipped cattle on Saturday.
No problems there, up at 3:00 a.m., worked all day, came home, ate out, and then up for Mass the following morning. And off to work after that.
That meant that I didn't go out for deer that weekend, but I met my son in a new area that we tried the following weekend. And that went fine. Up at 3:00, drove to Medicine Bow, met him there and hunted all day, without luck.
That takes me to this past weekend.
It was a frustrating week for a lot of reasons, some of which I'll not go into detail with but which make me feel a lot like John Daly, the saddle maker, in the 1920s. Anyhow, I had to work again on Saturday, which I did until a little after 2:00 p.m. About that time I knocked off and stopped by Our Lady of Fatima for confession. That took a little longer than I'd anticipated as the pastor was ill and a substitute priest came from downtown, but he was a bit late. I stopped at the sporting goods store after that, thinking about getting a replacement 15 watt gmrs radio for the Jeep to replace one I'd recently bought which was defective. I went home after that, getting home a little after 3:30.
I'd thought about going to Mass that night, and asked Long Suffering Spouse about going, but in the end we went to the across town sporting goods store instead. I was just pretty fatigued by that point for some reason, with the suspect being that I"d bee up since about 2:00 a.m. I'd have been better if I went that night, as that would have given me all the next day to go deer hunting, but I was simply worn out. I ddin't even get ready to go the following day.
The next morning I slept in to about 4:00 a.m., much later than I'd bee doing, and felt pretty good. While I was tempted to skip breakfast (I think eatinng three meals a day has contributed to my earlier rising for reasons I'll skip going into), I intead made two breakfast sandwiches with eggs, Canadian bacon and cheese, which is a gigantic breakfast for me. I don't really know what I was thinking, quite frankly.
I continued to feel fine until about halfway through Mass.
About that time, I was hit by a wave of fatigue that's difficult to describe. I attributed it to eating a big breakfast, but about the same time I began to feel odd. By the time I left Mass I was definitely feeling odd. At home, I briefly considered staying home for the day or switching to nearby duck hunting, but that was conceding I didn't want to, so I loaded up and got ready to go. By that time, I didn't just feel sleepy, I had a toothache where my one remaining wisdom tooth is located.
Now that might require a little explanation.
I was born with wisdom teeth, having a full set of four. When I was a teenager they started to "erupt", and my father pulled out the top two when it was convenient to do so. We always think of oral surgeons doing that work, but he did it for me as a result dentist. And both of them were removed without pain or inconvenience. I amazed at the time when people complained about how painful this process was, as it wasn't for me.
But he didn't get to the bottom two before he died. For the most part this hasn't been much of a problem. They'd erupt from time to time, but generally that would pass with there being only a little pain while they were erupting.
Once I was in my fifties, however, I began to break molars. And I broke one that was near my back left wisdom tooth. When that one was pulled by the oral surgeon (it was cracked right to the base in three pieces), the wisdom tooth in that area was removed as well.
That left just one.
This wasn't a problem until just the other day. I cracked the molar over there, and it was crowned, just like its opposite on the other side, leaving one molar between it and the wisdom tooth. The crown came in just last week.
All of a sudden, on Sunday morning, the wisdom tooth made its presence very much known.
It started hurting, and that went from annoying to really noticeable. I ignored it however, hoping it would go away. I packed up, and drove off. By the time I left the gas station, I had an incredibly dry mouth, and it was really hurting. This grew worse and worse as I drove out to where I wanted to hunt. I finally reached a place I wanted to check my maps and stopped.
By that time I was incredibly sleepy and in a huge amount of pain. I got out a canteen of water I had with me, checking its appearance (I filled it up about two weeks ago), and took a drink. The drink tasted good and I sat in the truck for a while contemplating the maps. By now it was foggy and wet and had snowed, I was tracking mud, and we still had a very long ways to go.
Normally I would have done that without hesitation.
Well, I hesitated. I felt so sick, I turned around to head back in.
Driving back in quickly became dicey. I was driving much slower than normal just due to the fatigue and the pain. To add to it, my tongue started to swell up on one side, the side that the wisdom tooth was on. I began to worry a little, but just a little, that I wouldn't be able to make it all the way back in, but then I was calmed by the double realities of being in far too much pain to accidentally fall asleep and that I had no other choice. No other choice really focuses a person.
I hit the highway finally, by which time I took the truck out of four-wheel drive as it seemed like the weather had improved. I started coming on in the hour-long highway speed final leg of the trip, still keeping my speed down. I was doing highway speed, but not high speed, which was in part because of the road still being wet. As I crossed the road where the bridge over the Power River is, I realized it was more than wet.
As I approached the accident scene, I knew what had happened. The Dodge truck, just like mine, had slip on black ice, its sudden disaster created in part because it was towing a trailer. It had happened on the bridge. It' had made it over the bridge, by which time the disaster was on. It had gone off the road and the trailer had rolled. One of the truck's windows was out.
I was headed towards the bridge myself of course and I knew that it had black ice, and I was in two-wheel drive. I'll go into four-wheel drive at the drop of a hat, but there was no time to do it now. Normally this would be pretty tense for me, but it wasn't. Just hurt too much. Up the hill I drove through what I knew to be a fatal accident site in bad weather from just a couple of years ago. I stopped in Powder River and went into four-wheel drive.
By the time I got home, I didn't feel so bad, but I didn't feel great. My wife recommended I take some Tylenol, but the tongue swelling had gone way down. About 4:00 I drank a glass of Irish whiskey, very slowly. I had a second over dinner, very slowly, and started to feel a lot better. I stayed up as long as I could, but when it was obvious that no Trick or Treaters were going to common in the 20F weather, I went and took a shower and hung on for bed.
On Monday I mostly felt a lot better. The mouth pain still comes and goes. I probably ought to call the dentist. I recall my father telling me that oral infections have the risk of being fatal, simply due to their location. The plan was, after all, to take that tooth out.
So, what of this experience, and those leading up to it? When I was a kid in the 70s I recall watching in math class in junior high, for some inexplicable reason, a Disney cartoon that was filmed in the 40s, probably for industrial workers, reminding them to stay home if they were sick. The film took the position that a cold was nature's way of making you take a day off.
Maybe.
Or maybe it's an opportunist predators chance to take something out, as it's worn down. Slow moving member of the herd so to speak. Or, more accurately, somebody who have worn themselves down through long hours and stress has a bit of a weakened immune system, maybe.
Still, maybe that means take some time off. That's hard to do, however, with things rolling on by. Or at least so I imagine. Perhaps it's often we imagine things that way. Not like a month or anything, but a day or two.
World War Two Office of Defense Transporation poster. Vacationing at home was no doubt easier prior to the cell phone and all of its electronic intrusions.
So perhaps none of this is as ominous as a person might suspect. At 58, I'm in a lot better shape than many, probably most, my age. But other than trying not to pack on too much weight (something I've always tried not to do, but I've always had to be careful about it), and being the beneficiary of my father's strong genes and my mother's athletic ones, I haven't been as active in any fashion as I used to be. I don't have a regular exercise routine like I once did, which was based simply on the 1980s Army Physical Fitness Test and walking or riding my bicycle to work. [2] And that's not really good. For some time, I've thought I should get back at it, but that's difficult when there are reasons you need your car at work and that you don't feel like doing much when you get home.
Still, as noted in a prior entry, the scene from No Country For Old Men put in above makes more and more sense to me as time goes by, and like Servant of God Black Elk, I agree "“Death? There is no death, only a change of worlds.". That's pretty evident.
And I'll be back out there next weekend. Probably for waterfowl. Deer has closed.
Footnotes.
1. There are a whole series of things like this.
Being a lawyer is really hard work, but you soon find as a lawyer that the field isn't populated by super genious of a Wil E Coyote level. There are huge intellects in the law to be sure, but you also encounter some folks whom you know aren't Albert Einstein or Richard Oppenheimer.
One of the big deflating things is the poor quality of oral argument, I'd note. I've been to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals twice, and when you do that, you sit there waiting for your turn, listening to the prior arguments. As a rule, they aren't great. Indeed, all in all the arguments I've heard at the Wyoming Supreme Court have been much better.
2. I'm not a "gym" guy and simply couldn't bring myself to do that, even though some of the gyms around here have swimming pools.
My mother was a fanatic swimmer and bicyclist which probably helps explain her remarkably physical condition after she recovered from her long illness. She basically went from somebody on death's door to somebody in their high 70s who was incredibly fit. Indeed, her really fit condition helped stave off, in my view, her ultimate mental decline, and when she suddenly quit her physical activities, I knew that something was very badly wrong.
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