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Hankering for the good ole days
Glynn Harris, Writer
07-21-2010
I’m still trying to figure out if today’s new-fangled world is better than the “good old days” you hear us gray hair/no hair/ear hair guys talk about.
Take a moment to look around and see all the stuff and gadgets and modern technology we have available to us at the flip of a switch or the manipulation of a mouse – the one on your computer; not the one that eats cheese.
There’s e-mail and Face Book and You Tube and Twitter and texting and this just begins to scratch the surface. For the aging outdoorsman; the one getting long in the tooth, all these modern things can be overwhelming if you try to keep up.
I must confess that I’m starting to identify with this generation of older outdoorsmen and sometimes finding myself longing for those times when things weren’t so complicated and plugged in. However, I find myself getting sucked into some of this modern stuff.
I’m a fan of You Tube – I love watching and listening to Chet Atkins play Windy and Warm - and I couldn’t get by without my e-mail and there is no way on Earth I could write my columns without my computer. A yellow legal pad, some #2 pencils, an old Underwood typewriter and a gallon of white out were tools of the trade before modern technology buried these relics in the landfill of memories I don’t want to revisit. If I had to go back to these primitive tools to produce columns, I’d quit writing, buy me a truck and a chain saw and start cutting pulpwood for a living.
I’m beginning to get the hang of this Face Book thing and have picked up on some neat hunting and fishing tips and I’m able to chat back and forth with writer buddies from all over. Also, I get to peek over the shoulders of my teen aged grandchildren, Face Book aficionados all, but I usually come away baffled and confused and realize I don’t know squat about the stuff they’re talking about.
I enjoy such modern things as my digital camera (a decade ago, who’d have thought you wouldn’t need film to take perfect pictures), my computer at home and the one sitting on my lap that I’m typing on right now down at my hunting camp. When this column is done, I’ll click a button to dump my column into something called Drop Box and it’ll be stored in a flash in my home computer’s Drop Box. When I get home, my column is there on my office computer to edit and change like I want to. I don’t want to have it any other way; I get nauseous at the thought of legal pads and white out.
I admit I do miss some of those things we took for granted during earlier times. It didn’t mean anything to me then but today, I get a special warm feeling when I remember seeing cane poles drying on the back wall of grand pa’s cow barn; he cut them and left them there so they’d dry straight and strong to enable him to wrestle buffalo fish down on Saline Creek.
I remember the moonscape of a cow lot spattered with patties and knowing if I took a sharp shooter shovel and flipped one over, I could practically fill a Prince Albert tin with fat feisty night crawlers.
When we got fish hungry, we had no fancy fiberglass high performance boat with enough horse power astern to launch a rocket. There were no depth finders, oxygen monitors, aerated live wells, or GPS on our boat. The first boat I remember fishing from was an old gray one my dad made out of rough hewn cypress boards. The seams were coated with coal tar to at least slow down the trickle that always seemed to seep in around your ankles. Dad’s old 5 hp Evinrude was cranked with a length of rope and when it started, a veil of blue smoke following us as we slowly puttered along. But we caught fish. Chinquapins, bluegills, goggle eyes and we caught them with the night crawlers we found under the cow patties.
Yes, things are different today and in many ways, that’s good. Sometimes, though, I get a hankering to go back, at least for a little while, to a simpler time when everything wasn’t plugged in and turned on. I don’t want to visit there too long, though, because I really need to get back to check in and see what my grandkids are talking about on Face Book.
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