Stories From Under The Sky

A Place To Loaf

a place to loaf IFMY INCOME ever exceeds my outgo, I'm going to have a special room. It'll be in a house just below the crest of a hill that breaks the northwest wind - a room above a bright, brawling river that I can hear in the evening when I hoist my feet up on the desk, scratch where I itch, and smoke my pipe. The room will be on the east side of the house so that it catches the morning sun but not the afternoon glare, and there'll be a sort of French door that opens out on a trail shaded by rock maples. It'll be a big, airy room with windows all along the outer wall; not picture windows, but ones that can be swung open to let in the breeze and the noise of the river. That room will be a cache of my favorite junk arranged just as I want it. One wall will be a book case, a floor-toceiling library with papers and books on conservation, mammals , birds, snakes, fish and dogs. The bottom shelf will be fun books by Twain, Cobb, Kipling, Bill Adams and Tom203 linson, and cartoon books by Punch, J. R. Williams and Charley Russell. I'd like to make the floor of either puncheon or flagstone, and partly cover it with a big braided rug. At the window will be the desk that isn't a desk at all, but a massive trestle table of walnut made of a lightning-felled tree from Allamakee County. On the table will be the driftwood lamp I made from an Arkansas sassafras root that smelled like rock candy when the saw was put to it. And beneath will be an old Pima rug for Kelly - the huge, worthless Irish setter that has raised three children and likes to sleep where they can't step on him. Across the room will be a stone fireplace. I'm not being rustic, but a neat brick fireplace wouldn't be fair to that room. I know just the stone, too - part of a ledge tempered and stained by a trout stream that has gone dry. There will be many pictures. Frank Miller's cartoons of his wonderful weather prophet, Chief Fabulous Feather, and Dycie's moonlit painting of massed snow and blue geese rising from the Plum Creek Washout on the Missouri. There'll be snapshots of friends holding fish with wisecracks written beneath them, and pen and ink sketches of dammers' johnboats on the river. But the place of honor will be held by that picture of the lecherous old raccoon leering at his lady love in a tree, with the Dutchman's caption "Old John Madson Coon" that makes me laugh and think of walleyed pike whenever I look at it. Beside this will hang the stuffed canvasback drake, his head dangling from a string and labelled: "Blowed his haid plumb off, but hain't he a dandyll" In the corner will be a pine cabinet for my rods and my shotguns and rifles, plain work guns whose stocks glow with tung oil and endless rubbing. There'll be a deep leather chair for you, and an old scarred bench where we can slop coffee and no one will care. There'll be a big coffeepot in the fireplace, the kind granddad kept on the back of the wood range when he told roaring sea stories about the old whaling days out of Bergen. For once we'll have 'all the black coffee we can drink, and maybe a bait of smoked sturgeon or lutefisk to go with it. And I know what will happen. The womenfolk will find my room just as they always do and although they'll poke fun at it, that's where they'll gather to sit and listen to the river. But don't let that stop you; come on out. We'll shoo the ladies away and sit by the fire and talk of many things, honing our knives and watching Old Kelly twitch as he breaks forty-bird coveys in his sleep. 205 The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa Edited by David Hudson, Marvin Bergman, and Loren Horton The Butterflies of Iowa By Dennis W. Schlicht, John C. Downey, and Jeffrey Nekola A Country So Full of...