A FOGGY, DISTANT MEMORY

SUNSET IN THE DEER SWAMP

Friday,  9:00 AM.  23 degrees F, wind westerly, variable with some moderate gusts.  The sky is clear.  The humidity is 79% and the barometer is up for now, at 30.15".  It is a chill but beautiful day.
   It looks like it will be a brutal first day of the Wisconsin gun deer season and I had better dress warmly.  Posts will be few and written in the evenings for at least a few days.
   A lot of older Americans, myself included, are spending some time turning the calendar back fifty years this morning, trying to remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news that President John F. Kennedy had been shot to death in Dallas.  If you are not old enough to have your own memories of that time, I will lend you mine.
   Since Thanksgiving is always on the fourth Thursday of the month the date changes with the years, but the calendar days of the week line up exactly this November as  they did that fateful November of 1963.  And in Wisconsin the deer season always includes Thanksgiving, so it was Friday, the day before the  Saturday opening of the gun deer season that JFK was shot, and today, the 22nd of November,  is also the day before the season  opens this year.
   Fifty years ago I was readying my gear and checking out my deer stand, and I am performing the same rituals today.  This time I will be doing so by myself, whereas a half century ago I was doing so with my buddy Bill Ballering.  At that time we were both working for a pipeline contractor and the whole business shut down for deer season, including the Friday before opening day.
   Bill and I were going to hunt in a large swamp near the little village of Mapleton, Wisconsin. A portion of the swamp was then, and still is, owned by another old friend Bill Peebles, with whom I still goose hunt each September.  The swamp is nearly inaccessible and we spent several hours in the morning   tramping around looking for deer sign and fallen trees to stand on.  In the afternoon, driving back to Milwaukee, I turned the car radio on and we were mystified by the somber, funereal music that was being played on every station.  After a few moments the announcement was made that the President had been shot and killed.  We were of course stunned, as was everyone else.  But that didn't mean we weren't going to hunt deer the next morning. Neither of us were married as yet so we had few personal obligations, and I have to admit we took the assassination sort of in stride as well.
   We got back into the swamp at first light on Saturday, and by then Lee Harvey Oswald had been apprehended and was in the Dallas jail,  Vice President Johnson had been sworn in as President, and  President Kennedy's body was back in Washington, DC.  Neither of us saw a deer on Saturday.  I certainly had plenty of time while sitting in a tree to think about the tragedy, but except for some fleeting feelings of sadness and  confusion I can't remember much else about the day.
    I was somewhat apolitical at twenty-seven years of age (I had just celebrated that birthday) and being who and what I was, I was not much of  an  admirer of the Eastern elitist,  Camelot crowd.  I guess Bill was about in sync with that attitude, and undeterred, we made plans to hunt again on Sunday.
   As I recall, the weather on Sunday morning was bright, sunny and a bit cold.  I think it was about eleven o'clock that Bill shot an enormous ten point buck.  The deer had magically appeared in some marsh grass about a hundred feet from where Bill was standing and he killed it outright with one slug from his twelve gage shotgun. Right through the neck and the jugular vein.  Bill had never hunted deer before and would never do so again. He  always said afterward that it was too easy. But I suspect it was because we almost killed ourselves getting that monster, that weighed almost two hundred pounds field dressed,  out of the swamp.  And we were both young, healthy and strong.
  So there we were, on the edge of the swamp with the buck hanging out the back of my station wagon.  It was almost noon, we were hungry and thirsty and still had to register the deer. There was a little country tavern that served lunch about a mile away, so we headed there.  The news surrounding the assassination was all that was on the black and white TV in the tavern, and as we sat there drinking  beer and eating hamburgers...it was 12:20 PM in both Dallas, Texas and Mapleton, Wisconsin...we saw Lee Harvey Oswald shot by the small time mobster Jack Ruby as he was being escorted through the basement of the Dallas Police Department.  We and millions of other viewers could hardly believe what we had seen, and a tragedy suddenly escalated into a conspiracy, one that has not been laid to rest in a half century.
   Bill and I could well believe that a single gunman, Oswald, was able to kill the President with a couple of well-placed and maybe lucky shots.  Either one of us, at that time, might have been able to do  as much, so why not Oswald?  But Oswald able to be shot by Ruby in front of a national TV audience?  That stretched credibility a bit too far.
   The Kennedys, national nobility though they were, had many, many mortal enemies.  Kruschev and Castro were obvious, but the Kennedys had also made and broken alliances with the mob, the CIA and the Cuban counter revolution, all of which hated both JFK and RFK.  One of the reasons I myself did not mourn much  that fateful long-ago weekend was that I felt that the President had betrayed the Cuban freedom fighters by denying them promised air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion at the last moment, leaving them to die bleeding on the sand, or spend the rest of their lives in Castro's gulag.  Bill felt pretty much as I did.
   Bill and I still keep in touch, and I called him yesterday to  reminisce about that long ago deer hunt and the historic events surrounding it.  He said again that deer hunting never did appeal to him, and as for that big buck, it is only a foggy, distant memory. Like that of JFK himself.