Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/742011
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 53 Y ou can't ever hope to know a country till you hear it at night, till you nose the wind, till you walk the ground, hold the honest dirt in your hands. If it is good country, and if you are very lucky, you will learn to love it like the land of your birth. My heart is strung out across the continents. Who could have guessed the African bush smells like burnt oatmeal in mid- winter? Or that lovesick hippos grunt dusk till dawn in the shallows of the great Zambezi. Ever imagined the leopard's sawing cough from the Zimbabwe side? The bitter taste of fear, like a tarnished penny, when the Cape buff gives you the stink eye? Or how could you know they ran out of words in English and Cree before they ran out of lakes in Manitoba? And how now there are lakes half the size of Rhode Island with six-digit numbers, not names? How could you know how big lakes thunder as they make ice, rumbling and grumbling, shaking the ground like a thousand gravel trucks running empty? Or guessed the water in Minnesota sluicing three ways— coursing down the St. Louis to the Great Lakes, north via the Otter Tail and the Red to the Arctic Sea, south down the Father of Waters to the Gulf of Mexico? How could you feel the chilly current rippling at your ankles and toes as you wade the Mississippi at its source? Heaven is closer than you might think, if you have the eyes and nose and ears and heart for it. And you may find it in the most unlikely places, a lesson learned a good long while ago when I sputtered into Iowa City in a microbus running on fumes. W here is that you going?" Pappy asked. "Iowa," I said. "Why in the hell would anybody want to go to Ohio?" Pappy made a living on the river, building docks, hauling freight and such. When he knocked off you couldn't get him back in a boat for a salary. But he took me deer hunting, grand affairs on the old plantations—spotted hounds, horizons by roger pinckney Heaven is wHere you find it. hunters on horseback, buckshot thrown from Parkers, Smiths, and Foxes with deadly efficiency. The extravagant noon feeds under the spreading and loving oaks, the big house staff all up in white, ladling venison and wild-hog barbeque. I wrote a story about a doe I did not kill, and it won me a full ride. "Iowa, Pappy, not Ohio." "You still got that Texaco card I lent you?" "Yessir." "Well, hand it over." I did. Pappy joined the Army in 1942. They sent him off to Luzon, Saipan, Okinawa. He got shot at plenty, and he did not like being shot at. Twenty-odd years later he could point those islands out on a map in the dark, but outside of Carolina, Georgia, and maybe Florida, the rest of North America was simply an abstraction, a vague annoyance. By damn, he was home. But now his boy was fixing to wander. "And just what do you reckon you'll do with this PhD in English?" "Ain't sure, Pappy. Maybe I'll come Hill farm by francis lee jacques – courtesy the bell museum