Duck Blind: Helen Chappell

Duck Blind

by Helen Chappell

They call it progging. You’re wandering the shoreline, looking for this or that or whatever artifacts man or nature has cast up from the water. It might be an especially large oyster shell or a shard of some long-ago broken dish, or maybe a piece of machinery. Or, indeed, almost anything. I have a friend who has one of the best collections of arrowheads and other native objects outside a museum. On the other hand, I’ve never as much as seen a piece of knapped stone, but I have some great pieces of old Blue Willow and Gaudy Dutch.

As a kid, I could spend a lot of time progging the shores around our farm down on Ross Neck. And we had plenty of shoreline to prog, if you didn’t mind wading here and there when the tide came in. Just walking the dreckline, eyes down, you could get lost in solitude. There was no one around for miles, just ploughed fields or grazing Herefords or high rivershore, no sound but the tide lapping at the mud and the birds calling overhead.

It was a great way to be a kid all alone, especially when the house was full of relatives or we were in one of our full-bore Adolescent vs. Mom battles, such as all kids have. Probably about why I couldn’t bring a friend that weekend or one of my aunts being One of My Aunts.

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My mother and her three sisters were a formidable quartet, and getting away from them was the only defense. The men could go ducking or fishing or whatever, but my only escape was progging.

I could cut east and follow the tidewall out of the old cemetery, filled with the people who’d owned the house a century before, all overgrown with vines and weeds. Tombstones thrust up out of the woodbine like old teeth, and a coffin or two had rotted out, leaving deep depressions in the ground. My mother said to stay out of there because it was filled with snakes, including copperheads, but I mostly avoided it because it gave me the whim whams. I wasn’t afraid of snakes, but ghosts, well…the curse of a good imagination and I walked around that plot and mostly gave it a good leaving alone when I was by myself.

Here and there, I might find a stretch of sand beach, and maybe an oyster shell about a foot long, the kind that used to be common

around here before it got settled and oysters got overharvested. John Smith remarked upon huge oyster middens when he first came up the Bay during Contact. So I’d either keep the shell or skip it. It’s amazing to me now how good I used to be at skipping shells, and how that talent somehow got lost in the adulting process like so many other really cool kid skills I once had.

Before I got to the neighbors’ house, where I would have to interact and be social with other humans, I would turn around and walk back the way I’d come, hopefully ignored by any relatives who might see me down on the shore, and head toward the fields and forests. Duck Blind far I dragged it back out in the creek. A weird surreal battle that would have made a good Katherine Anne Porter short story. That toadfish was dying and, perhaps in its sentient brain, wanted to die, and, busybody that I am, I was not going to let it go peacefully into that gentle toad heaven until I finally realized it wasn’t up to me. Then I let the poor thing alone. It had probably had a good toadfish life. Maybe she had laid her eggs and it was time to go, as it is with some animals. I have no idea what the lifespan of a toadfish is. I know only recently they’ve started marketing them as monkfish, and everyone says they’re good eating. But not for me. When we were fishing, they were trash and we cut them loose. And sometimes you can’t change your opinion. Maybe after my failed attempt to rescue a toadfish, I just gave up. I don’t know. Didn’t know then and don’t know now. My progging would take me past high banks where the roots of pines were sticking out over the beach as

If I was really unfortunate, I might run into the skeletal remains of something. What was left of a muskrat, all bones and fur, was enough to horrify my poor sensitive soul. A dying toadfish that I would try to prod back into the water, only to have it wash ashore, too weak to swim, no matter how

the land slowly eroded. The stubborn trees, evolved to survive in brackish water, were tilting at an increasingly crazy angle, land losing the eternal battle with wind and water. I suspect by now it’s receded back 50 feet or more. On a recent trip to Taylor’s Island, I noted that what had been an apple orchard when I was a kid is now several feet underwater.

After I climbed over the tree roots and followed the shoreline a little farther toward the Little Choptank, I noticed a lot of empty crab shells. Crabs probably liked to shed in this warmish shallow lagoon where they’d be safe from predators.

A friend of the family used to collect and clean these shed shells, spray them with gold and glitter and make Christmas wreaths with them, so I’d pick up the unbroken ones to take home to her. I thought this was a great idea, but my mother thought it was tacky. When the arts and crafts movement hit big in the ’90s, both ladies had passed away and were unable to appreciate the irony.

Just around a bend in the woods, I would come upon my destination. A deserted duck blind.

We had blinds all over the farm. My father was, after all, a sportsman in an age when gentlemen were supposed to hunt and fish and have adventures. And he had a lot of friends with the same interests, so, yeah, duck blinds.

Happily, gunning season hadn’t started yet, so I was able to swing into the blind, settle myself on the wooden seat and open the book and the cheese sandwich I’d brought for myself. No one would worry about me because I wouldn’t go off our farm, and I was, for heaven’s sake, outside getting some fresh air instead of sitting around with my nose in a book. I could have been casting spells in the woods and no one would have noticed. So it was perfect for someone being hit from behind by the hopping hormones of adolescence.

Out of gunning season, duck blinds are rather like treehouses. Natural, quiet, made of natural fibers and perfect places to hide.

Someone’d been hiding there before me, I noticed. There was a half-drunk pint of Jack Daniel’s on the seat. I had a sneaking feeling one of the local boys who ran his muskrat traps around here might have been using this as his hideout, too. But I’m no snitch.

It was a beautiful autumn day. Cold weather and gunning season hadn’t started yet, the sun was warm on my face, the tide was coming in and flocks of migrating songbirds were dancing through the air on their way south.

Peace at last, and I settled down to read my book. I think I was in the Bronte/Austen phase then, virginal and costumed romantic as any newly teen girl.

Overhead, I heard the first lonely calls of the Canada goose coming south for the winter. We hadn’t gotten to foreboding in English class yet, but those geese were signaling the end of my childhood.

All these years later, I’m still floundering to learn how to adult.

Helen Chappell is the creator of the Sam and Hollis mystery series and the Oysterback stories, as well as The Chesapeake Book of the Dead. Under her pen names, Rebecca Baldwin and Caroline Brooks, she has published a number of historical novels.