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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 2 6 your last thoughts most where they've always been. Thinking about it, though I'm greatly enamored with the dogs- and-quail prescription, a nice fishing departure would be attractive as well. Death-by-bucketmouth. I've always had a thing for largemouths. Big, ol' pot-bellied behemoths that create a bulge the size of a '58 Pontiac bonnet under your topwater plug, beneath some cypress stump, at the first breath of day. Before they really wind up and blow up under it in a shatter of water with the force of a nuclear depth charge. Scaring you plumb into next Sunday. If you like, you can include the ones down south in Brazil, the whopper-stoppers that look like they were painted by Grandma Moses. As for me, though, really, I'll take the resident local: Billy Bass. I want to go close to home. It'll be easier on the wife and kids. It'd go this way: In my mind, I'll be in Carolina—South Carolina. Santee, middle of Lake Marion, the Late Great Sixties. A little Sweet Baby James on the radio during breakfast, with flapjacks and maple syrup, to set the mood there at Harry's Landing. A smidge before first light, I'll leave out in a camouflaged 14-foot Starcraft vee-bottom pushed by an antique 20-horse Merc. Hire my grizzled old black friend by the boat landing to steady me in, to go along and set the tiller. It'll be a beautiful morning in early May, with the wonderful, sweet, slightly briny and fishy spoor of the water on the air. The redwings will be courting in the backwaters, the fish crows weakly gabbling along like they've got laryngitis, while a little ribbon of gold grows at the bottom of the eastern sky. There'll be anhingas pulling lazily by overhead, the belling of happy geese somewhere in the distant northern haze. rampant as flood water, I can hear the PSA from the state health department now: "Attn. Seniors and Approaching Elderly (that's us): "the State Health Director has determined that the following seasonal CMD phenomena pose serious threat to your health and well being, and can lead to instantaneous depletion up to and including fits of nausea, anxiety, hyper-extensive blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, and in physiologically exacerbated cases, instant death." • Skulking bobwhite quail (C. virginianus) exploding through jack-oaks. • Sudden, unexpected eruptions of ruffed grouse (B. umbellus) from mountain rhododendron. • The unpredicted, pre-dawn, thunder of an Eastern wild turkey (M. gallopavo) in the roost tree you sat under. • The flare and hiss of a big cottonmouth water mos-acin (A. piscivorous) resting on the outboard steering handle. • Two well-separated, burning eyes in the top of a swamp gum (L. styraciflua). • The acute buzz of a prairie rattler (C. viridis) upon your last footstep. • The sudden crack of a stick in the Devil's Club (O. horridus), accompanied by popping teeth and deep heavy breathing in the dark, shadowy forests of Admiralty Island. • Impromptu explosions of mangrove snook (C. undecimalis) under Zara Spooks, while "walking the dog" (see McClane's Standard Fishing Encyclopedia for definition.) For additional perils too numerous to list, go to www.fldph. com/outdoorperils.fatalwarnings. Additional Cautionary Advisory: "Persons subject to the above hazards are advised that these risks are frequently attended by seemingly innocent appurtenances, such as English setters, Plott hounds, Labrador retrievers, cell phones, GPS units, and pocket knives. Those who choose to participate, especially those 55 and older, must exercise constant precaution." Well, there you have it. Joke is: Who the hell do they think would care? If they develop a vaccine so it won't affect you any more, I won't take it. Will you? The possibilities are too fertile otherwise. Now it's official and the insurance will pay, how could you conjure a better way to go? Make it a part of your estate planning. That's a whole lot tidier than ending up in the ICU of some hospital ward, or maybe a die-day-after- tomorrow hospice—where the trees don't grow—suffering from a croaking gizzard and the distal mal-alignment of the left frontal globe while wolfing down meds that give you the morning runs. To heck with the ICU, Doc, give us CMD. W hen we get too decrepit to shoot or fish any more, or face foreclosure from a feeble ticker, won't it be nice just to call up the nearest plantation manager, have the funeral home deliver you in a black limo, smoke a cigar, sip a Glenfiddich, ride the mule wagon one last time to the dogs' first stand, have two double guns hard by to join in a parting salute, and get it sublimely to hell over with when the birds go out. Good thing is, you can choose your own demise. Puts a whole new dimension on "places of the heart." Rather than demise-by-quail, you might opt for terminal great- horned owl, alone in a deep mountain hollow, at the last gasp of twilight, when he sounds like a maniac amok in the woods with a machete, looking to chop you up under the moonlight. Just lean back against a big oak, make your peace, and when the pacemaker stutters, let it happen. Any way you come at it, it'll be a "good death." You'll check out gloriously and not feel a thing . . .