The Grasshopper Trap Read online

  Does the subject enjoy a good practical joke? Or does he sleep with a cocked revolver in one hand and a machete in the other? Such a mannerism can take much of the fun out of practical-joking. Try a few mild practical jokes on the subject. By “mild” I mean stop short of building a fire in one of his boots, for example. Sewing the rear flap shut on the subject’s longjohns should also be avoided. Should your hand slip, it is too difficult to explain to a relatively new acquaintance why you interrupted his sleep by poking him with a needle. Many promising new friendships have ended for lesser cause.

  That completes the psychological examination. If the subject passes all these tests, he will make the perfect hunting-camp companion. On that basis alone, he must be rejected. Who wants to spend a week in a remote hunting camp with some guy who’s perfect?

  Mean Tents

  I once shot three arrows through my cousin Buck’s brand-new wall tent. This may not seem remarkable to you, but it was to Buck. I can still recall several of his remarks, in fact, even though at the time they were made, I was vaulting a high board fence as he tried to tear off one of my legs. It happened like this.

  I was out in Buck’s backyard, practicing with his bow and arrows, when he showed up carrying a large bundle of canvas on his shoulder. Buck was four years older than I, or about twenty. He had a job and could afford to buy all kinds of neat hunting and fishing stuff. I could use his stuff anytime I wanted, provided Buck wasn’t around. His mother, my Aunt Sophie, who thought highly of me, was always eager to help the less fortunate, who in this case happened to be me. She would unlock the door to Buck’s bedroom and even help me disarm some of the booby traps her ingenious son had set to maim or kill me, should I sneak in to use his stuff.

  “What are you doing with my bow?” Buck snarled, even though it was perfectly obvious I was target-practicing.

  Pretending not to hear, I said, “Gosh, Buck, what’s that you got there?”

  Instantly his mood flip-flopped. “A new wall tent!” he exclaimed. “I just bought it. Wait till you see this baby. I’m gonna take it up into the mountains next fall and set up a hunting camp like you wouldn’t believe. I got this little woodstove I’m gonna put in it for heat, and a little table and chairs, and a couple of cots …”

  Having distracted him from uncharitable thoughts about my use of his bow, I helped him drag the tent across the backyard to a flat area about ten feet from the bale of hay I had been using as a target. We soon had the tent pitched, its canvas taut and gleaming in the sun. I had to admit it was a nice-looking tent. Buck thought it was beautiful. We stepped back to admire it.

  While he was in such a good mood, I said, “Yeah, that’s a terrific tent, Buck. Mind if I shoot a few more arrows?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, go ahead. Now, you see that canvas? It’s special canvas. That canvas is windproof and …”

  I casually let fly with an arrow at the target. The arrow curved like a boomerang in flight and, with a tiny phutt!, zipped through the roof of the tent.

  “ … waterproof.” Buck’s eyes widened. His jaw gaped slowly, as if held by a weak spring.

  “It was an accident, Buck,” I cried, snatching up another arrow. “Your arrow must have been crooked. See, I shot it just like this.”

  Phutt! The second arrow had zipped through the tent!

  I could not believe this was happening. It was as if the tent had a magnetic attraction for arrows. I glanced at Buck. He seemed okay, except for possible paralysis of his entire nervous system. His lips made little jerking motions, but otherwise he was immobile.

  “I can explain, Buck. Some of these arrows are crooked. They curve when you shoot them. Now this arrow is straight. Watch, it’ll hit the target. Those other two arrows were crooked. It’s not my fault you have crooked arrows. Here goes.”

  Phutt!

  It was the strangest occurrence I had ever encountered. Having considerable interest in science, I would have liked to study how not one, not two, but three arrows could be drawn ten feet off course and through the roof of a tent. By this time, however, Buck had come unthawed and unwrapped, cutting short any hopes I might have had for discovering the attraction of tent canvas for arrows. I took my usual escape route over the back fence, sacrificing only half a pantleg to the clawing hands of my crazed cousin.

  Thirty years later Buck would still be convinced that I had deliberately shot the arrows through the tent for no better reason than to aggravate him. But I was innocent. The guilty party was the tent itself, its motive nothing more than to cause me trouble. In fact, tents have always had it in for me.

  Remember the old Interior-Frame Umbrella Tent? The one with the contraption called the “spider” that was supposed to hold everything together? We used one of those tents for fifteen years. Every camping family in America owned one. Few people know, however, that they were originally developed by research psychologists as a stress test to determine the limits of sanity. Later, the U.S. Army got ahold of the I-FUT, as the Interior-Frame Umbrella Tent was known, and experimented with it as a means of training recruits in hand-to-hand combat. When it was rejected by the army as too demoralizing to the troops, tent manufacturers decided the I-FUT was perfect for campers. After all, they reasoned, campers go out seeking hardship and adventure. Pitching the I-FUT would provide the average camper with about all the hardship and adventure he could stand.

  Even though we last used our I-FUT more than ten years ago, before we moved up to the Exterior-Frame Tent, I can still recall vividly the typical routine of pitching it:

  I have just staked down the floor of the tent. The tent came with tough plastic stakes, which greatly eased this task, but of course all of the stakes have now been lost. I have substituted crooked pieces of tree branch for the plastic stakes, pounding them in with a flat rock. This results in my having to perform the Crouch Hop, a primitive dance in which the performer holds one hand between his thighs and hops about chanting “Hai-yi-yi-yi!” and other chants, while his wife holds her hands over the ears of the youngest child.

  Now comes the dreaded part. I must crawl into the shapeless mass of canvas to insert the interior frame. Powdery remains of last year’s insects come sprinkling down onto my face. The tiny, stickery legs are the worst, particularly when they go down the back of your shirt collar. I sneeze. As a cause of sneezing, powdered bug is just as bad as pepper. Some people think it’s a whole lot worse. Squeamish people almost always abandon camping during this phase of pitching the I-FUT.

  Not all the bugs are dead. At least one daddy longlegs will have survived the winter for the sole purpose of racing up under your pantleg. When you are standing in the dark with a collapsed tent around your head, a daddy longlegs racing for your vitals feels as big as a Dungeness crab.

  The part of the frame called the “spider” has four arms, each of which extends out to a corner of the roof tent. The upright poles, in theory at least, insert into the outer ends of the spider arms. A short, sharp-edged pipe protrudes downward from the center of the spider. The sharp end of this pipe is placed on top of your head to hold the spider in place while you attach the poles. This explains why all old-time tent campers have a series of little overlapping circles on the tops of their heads.

  I am now standing in the tent with one spider charging up my leg and the other “spider” cutting doughnut holes in my scalp. Quickly I insert the first pole into the spider, but it won’t stay in place by itself until another pole has taken the slack out of the tent. I balance on one leg and hold the pole up with the other.

  “Quick,” I yell to my little helpers outside. “Hand Daddy another pole.” I immediately hear the sound of scurrying feet, followed by heated argument.

  “I got it first! Leggo!”

  “Aaaaaah,” I say. “Just get Daddy the pole!”

  “Daddy wants me to do it! Give it here!”

  “Aaaaaahh!” I say. “Hur-reeee! Aaaah!”

  “Gimme that pole!”

  “Aaakkkk!” I say.

&nb
sp; “I got it! Here I come, Daddy!”

  I can hear little feet charging for the door of the tent. “Easy! Easy!” I yell, but too late. The pole comes through the flap of the tent like a spear thrust.

  “Just think,” my wife says later, “if we had just one more kid, you could stand one in each corner of the tent to hold a pole while you hook up the spider.”

  “That possibility has just been rendered academic,” I say. “So maybe we’ll buy a camper.”

  I still have our old I-FUT out in the corner of the garage, and it’s in surprisingly good shape. My wife says I should donate it to the Salvation Army so it can be passed on to a needy family. I point out to her that needy families already have enough problems without my inflicting an I-FUT on them. Besides, I like to keep the I-FUT around for old times’ sake. Whenever I get depressed, I can go out and kick it hard several times. Immediately I feel better.

  My very first tent was a tepee. I made it out of three crooked branches and a blanket when I was about six years old. It served me well for an hour or two, until I decided to take the chill out of the air by building a fire in it. Presently my father came wandering out of the house and saw me standing by my tepee, which was putting up little puffs of smoke. It is a traumatic experience, let me tell you, for a small child to see his father stomp out his tepee! To complicate matters, Dad never understood what it was he had stomped out. He thought I just liked to set fire to blankets.

  Speaking of strained relations between father and son, I’m reminded of the time a couple of years later that Crazy Eddie Muldoon and I made a tent out of gunnysacks. We had found the sacks in the back of the Muldoon barn. Although they were moldy and half rotten and flecked with dried cow manure, Eddie said they would still make a good tent. We obtained a large pair of shears and a curved sacking needle from his father’s toolbox, which Mr. Muldoon had thoughtfully left within our reach. By suppertime the tent was finished.

  I tried to conceal my disappointment over the appearance of the finished product. To me it looked more like a large, shaggy cocoon than a tent. Crazy Eddie, however, was delighted with it, as he was with all his creations.

  “We’ll set it up in the backyard and sleep in it tonight,” he announced.

  “Okay,” I said. Eddie and I had been trying to sleep out all night in his backyard for most of the summer, but our efforts had always been thwarted by the elements—torren—tial darkness being the most frequent. So far, our best time had been 9:30. But Eddie had recently discovered a secret weapon: his father’s powerful, six-battery flashlight. Furthermore, his father was away on a trip and not expected back until late that night. We would simply leave the flashlight on all night and return it to his father’s shop in the morning before he was awake and hovering about, eyeing us with suspicion. Mr. Muldoon would never know the difference. It would teach him a good lesson, too, for guffawing and teasing us about our failures at sleeping out past 9:30, even though we gave him detailed reports on the large, weird creatures we had seen prowling the yard.

  The disaster resulting from this innocent plan cannot be properly understood without knowing the exact sequence of events, which is as follows:

  7:30 p.m.: Crazy Eddie and I haul a quilt, a blanket, and two pillows out to our tent and make our bed.

  8:00 p.m.: We crawl under the quilt and lie there looking at the stars through the roof of our tent. We have routinely checked the laces on our tennis shoes for tightness. Kids we know have thrown a shoe coming out of the starting blocks on their way into the house on a dark night. The loss of traction on one side has caused them to waste precious seconds running in a circle.

  9:00 p.m.: The condition known as “pitch dark” has been achieved. Crazy Eddie flips on the powerful flashlight. The beam shoots out through our tent and illuminates the countryside for a hundred yards. It seems adequate. Eddie and I exchange smiles of confidence.

  10:00 p.m.: Mrs. Muldoon turns off the house lights and goes to bed. Only the feeble porch light remains on. A sense of apprehension fills the gunnysack tent. The beam of the flashlight has weakened.

  10:15 p.m.: Mr. Muldoon gets in his car and begins the long drive home. He turns on the radio to listen to country-western music.

  11:00 p.m.: The power of the flashlight has diminished to that of a firefly. The porch light provides some illumination. A dark shadow passes over the tent. Eddie and I dig starting blocks with the heels of our tennis shoes through the floor of the tent.

  11:05 p.m.: Mr. Muldoon flicks the radio dial to “The Creaking Door.” Tonight’s program is about a mummy that tracks down and takes revenge on an archaeologist for disturbing its tomb. Mr. Muldoon shudders at the dry, rustling sound of the mummy’s loose wrappings as they drag across the floor. The mummy says, “Urrr-uh! Urrr-uh!” which may not be all that articulate, but is pretty good for a mummy.

  11:25 p.m.: Mr. Muldoon pulls into his driveway. On the radio, the archaeologist is screaming, “No! No! Stay away from meeeee!” Then there’s the sound of wrappings scraping across the floor. “Urrr-uh,” says the mummy. “Urrr-uh!” Mr. Muldoon shuts off the radio, gets out of the car, and heads for the house. Then he goes back and shuts off the car lights. The wind rustles in the bushes. Mr. Muldoon rushes into the house and turns on the lights.

  Eddie and I have heard Mr. Muldoon drive in. Our flashlight is dead. Our tennis shoes are dug into the starting blocks, but now we must wait for Mr. Muldoon to go to bed. Otherwise he will tease us unmercifully. Outside, there is a strange rustling sound, coming closer and closer. It’s a good thing we haven’t heard the mummy program.

  11:35 p.m.: Mr. Muldoon shuts off the kitchen light and the porch light. He has no reason to expect his son and me to be outside after 9:30. He goes into the bathroom to take a shower, still thinking about the mummy.

  11:45 p.m.: The rustling around the tent has increased. Eddie is fumbling with the knots on the door, but can’t untie them in the dark. In a few minutes, Mr. Muldoon will be in bed asleep.

  11:46 p.m.: Eddie’s dog, Oscar, returns from a date at a neighboring farm and slumps down exhausted on the porch. Oscar has no reason to expect Eddie and me to be outside after 9:30.

  11:50 p.m.: Mr. Muldoon thinks he detects a sore throat coming on. He walks into the darkened kitchen, pours some salt into a glass of hot water, and begins to gargle. He is wearing only a towel, wrapped around his middle.

  11:50:30 p.m.: Eddie groans. “I can’t get these dang knots untied in the dark. Let’s go inside. We can take the tent off in there.” A shadow passes over the tent, accompanied by a rustling sound to our rear. We shove our feet through the burlap floor and, hugging the tent around us, hit the starting blocks.

  11:50:31 p.m.: On the porch, Oscar opens his bleary eyes. A large, amorphous shape is charging him! Almost on top of him! Probably going to eat him! He tries to bark but has momentarily swallowed his tongue. “Urrr-uh!” he growls. “Urrr-uh!”

  11:50:32 p.m.: Eddie and I crash through the door into the kitchen. Instantly we hear a horrible sound. We don’t know what it is, never before having heard a naked man surprised in mid-gargle by a gunnysack tent. Oscar follows us into the house, still trying to bark. “URRR-UH! URRR-UH!” Water splashes on the floor and there is the sound of naked feet frantically trying to get traction on slippery linoleum.

  “Gargle, gurgle, choke!” cries Mr. Muldoon. “St-stay—hack, gargle—away—choke—from meeeeee!”

  We didn’t get the mess all sorted out and reconstructed until the next morning. Mr. Muldoon seemed quite embarrassed by the whole episode, and never again teased us for abandoning a backyard camp in the middle of the night. Later, though, he enjoyed recalling the episode of the gunnysack tent and having a good laugh over it. I was away at college by then, however, and never got to hear him.

  Crick Ritual

  Retch Sweeney is on the phone. “Want to go fish the crick tomorrow?”

  “Oh, I suppose so,” I say. “What time you want to leave?”

  “Four sharp,�
�� he says. “You know the crick. The best fishin’ is always at first light.”

  “Okay.”

  Note the casualness of the conversation, the hint of indifference. The tone conceals any hint of reverence for the proposed undertaking—to go fish the crick. But both Retch and I know that we speak of solemn and elaborate ritual. We are talking religious experience here, mysticism, transcendentalism even.

  Yes, transcendentalism. What we hope to transcend is time—thirty, forty years of time, back to the days of ancient summers with the crick flowing through our fresh, untarnished lives.

  Rituals must be performed with precision. One flaw, one misstep, one missed cue, and the spell is broken. I must take care tomorrow to do everything exactly right. Otherwise, my one day of fishing the crick this year will be ruined, and I will be left with insufficient mental, emotional, and spiritual resources to sustain me for the next twelve months.

  “Where’s my black tenner shoes?” I ask my wife.

  “You mean those wading shoes you blew eighty dollars on? They’re in your closet.”

  “Not those. The black tenner shoes with the little rubber ankle patches that are starting to peel off. The ones that are worn through on the sides.”

  “Oh, no! Don’t tell me it’s time for you and Retch to fish the creek again!”

  “Crick,” I correct her. “The proper technical term for this sort of stream is ‘crick.’ A creek is something entirely different.”

  “Well, your tenner shoes, as you call them, are out in a corner of the garage where you left them a year ago.”

  “Good,” I say. “You haven’t seen my fish pole, have you?”

  “What do you mean? You have twenty or thirty fishing rods on the wall of your office.”

  “I know where the rods are. What I’m looking for is the fish pole. It’s steel and has three sections that telescope into each other, kind of green and rusty. It’s got the old bait-casting reel on it, the one that makes the horrible sound because of all the sand in the gears.”