FENCEROWS...Common Ground
My daughter and I have just enough common ground between us to come to a mutual understanding. The mutual part is often up in the air. Sometimes, even the understanding seems a stretch.
My daughter loves to dance. She is very good at it. I trip over my own two feet on the way to the refrigerator for a snack, which means anything that tastes like bacon, or looks like leftover bluegill fillets, or smells even remotely like questionable venison sausage that has been hacked off a piece at a time with a dull knife and gnawed at like a rabid field mouse.
She won’t eat anything that even resembles real food; fruits, yogurt and pasta without even the hint of spaghetti sauce. She will send back a restaurant steak three times because she deems it too pink in the middle, then when it finally comes back burnt to a crisp, she makes me eat it. She does eat cake and ice cream, so we at least have that father-daughter bond going for us.
The music she listens to doesn’t have a point. It’s all happy-go-lucky, live for the moment, dance, dance, dance kind of stuff. Unless your boyfriend breaks up with you, then it becomes cry, cry, and cry. Whatever happened to the good tunes, you know Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. She laughs at me and tells me I’m a geek, and she means it.
I gave her a compound bow for her birthday last year, a starter one, not too heavy on the draw and not very lethal, but good enough for target practice in the backyard without errant arrows sailing into the neighbor’s corn field. We began tearing up cardboard targets left-and-right. I mean, she tore them up. In fact, she became such a good shot that I moved off of the proud-parent pedestal and started to get a little jealous.
When she asked if she could try for live game and shoot a rabbit, I told her it was O.K. as long as it was on our property and I was watching. And then we would have to skin it out together. All the sensory sights and smells of cleaning a game animal would be ours to share. After roasting and eating it, I promised her she would never go back to eating yogurt again.
There would be Hunter’s Safety classes in the near future and she could move up to a real bow. Maybe she could give me some shooting pointers so I could hit the targets as often as she could. We would make a fine hunting team. There might be a best-selling hunting video series in our future too.
My daughter never loosed the killing arrow. “I don’t really want to kill that rabbit, he probably has a family somewhere,” she said when the time came. “I like shooting, but I’m not really interested in hunting. See you later. Can you put my bow away for me?”
The rabbit hopped off to safety and my daughter hopped off to her friend’s house to do whatever it is that young girls do.
Fishing doesn’t interest her much either. “Why do you want to kill fish?” she asks.
“Well, you don’t necessarily need to kill them, you can throw them back,” I tell her.
“If you just throw them back, then why bother going?” She questions, flipping her hair around like she has it all figured out.
Before I start droning on about the means being greater than the end, about pristine waters and tranquil settings of lakes and rivers, the phone rings and her door slams. She is off in her room, happily chatting or surfing the multimedia world of friends and follows. I can’t even figure out how an ipod works. She knows in her mind that she is right and I am wrong. There is not a lot of wiggle room.
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| Amanda Luthens exploring the rock ledges of High Cliff State Park. | John Luthens on the edge of a Winnebago shoreline jungle. |
My daughter and I found ourselves staring at each other in High Cliff State Park last Sunday. It was a family party with a lot of talking and a lot of her cousins (all boys) who were keen on a touch-football game. My daughter wasn’t into the football game and I’ve never been able to hold up my half of the family gossip. I’ve never been able to hold up my half in a football game either - a fact I don’t usually banter around because people might think I’m a geek.
We hit up the ice cream and cake on the picnic table, nodding our heads and shoveling it in. We looked at the towering rocks and inviting park surrounding us. High Cliff State Park has some serious limestone cliffs that break upward to a forest-top of ancient effigy mounds left by nomadic Native Americans. And stretching over the northeastern Winnebago lake shore are some of the best-climbing cottonwood and willow tress ever grown.
Talk...talk...talk...Touchdown…blah…blah…blah. My daughter and I fortified our supplies with another piece of cake and ditched the party. We set out for common ground together.
The forests of High Cliff were thick jungles of green. We moved off the trails and scaled cliffs to escape the beaten path. Spring creeks ran down from high in the rocks and we scrambled upward through pools of water, laughing and splashing. When a ravine blocked our path, we balanced across on a fallen log.
Some of the ancient burial mounds we came across in the cliff-top forest were shaped like animals. At least that’s what the park signs said. We scratched our heads and walked around the mounds, trying to piece together the shapes until we finally saw them.
We climbed trees. Leaning cottonwoods and fallen willows arched over the lake and we crept out on limbs far over the water. The cottonwoods were dropping their white and fluffy seeds in the breeze and it looked like snow covering the water. It was cold but we went into the lake anyway, collecting rocks and old pieces of washed-up boards, enough to build a house with, we decided.
In all, we were gone from the party for two hours and received a mild tongue lashing for going missing when we finally returned. When it comes to wandering and exploration for nothing but its own sake, my daughter and I decided we make a pretty good team. The tongue lashing was some more common ground that we found together, ground which I’d rather not dwell on.
So it goes with my daughter and I; Father’s Day coming up and me on the road heading north to haunt a lake for a week. School will be done by then, the swimming pool open and my daughter haunting the deck chairs with her friends. I don’t understand her world any better than she understands mine. But if she promises never to grow up, I’ll promise the same.
At least we’ll always have that common ground going for us.