aunt reba's shanty

when i was a kid duck shooting was my passion.  ducks seemed, to me, to be the essence of wildness.  they were varied, occupied different places in the bird world, migrated - didn't stay in one place all year - flew fast and straight, and could be brought to false representations of themselves [a little corn as an additional enticement didn't hurt].  i loved them all from the little teals and ruddy ducks to the big black ducks and canvasbacks - and i loved to hunt them.

you can imagine my excitement when - in casual conversation with my mother [that unusual in itself] - i discovered that our family owned two islands and a bit of mainland in the magothy river, a tributary of the chesapeake bay, not far from baltimore.

on the mainland - besides the caretaker's house and docks - was aunt reba's shanty.  it was situated, precariously, at  the end of a little spit of land fronted by the river and backed by a pond.  one reached it via a rickety boardwalk about fifty yards long.  it was electrified but not heated - except for a little pot bellied stove which glowed a dusty red  when charged on a cold winter's night.  stretching towards the big island in front of the shanty was a shallow sand bar which i heard a game warden's boat [i can only surmise] hit at high speed just before dawn one morning...on a mission to drive the ducks off the river before we hunters could get a crack at them...and which resulted in a most satisfactory, bearing burning high revolution whine.

aunt reba's shanty hosted a number of enthusiastic, young duck hunters - all slightly drunk as they tipped into bed, and all very cold  at 4:00 a.m. when they awoke.  the bravest got up to fire the stove.  i soon learned to shove my long underwear to the bottom of my sleeping bag before i fell asleep...while pondering the stars that flickered through the holes in the roof.

from aunt reba's shanty we sallied forth onto the magothy into river blinds - little cedar covered boxes in the middle of the stream - and blammed away at the ducks, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.  one day i saw two flights of about a hundred ruddy ducks each fly into one another.  it took us an hour to pick up the casualties.  on another day the river iced up and in our efforts to reach the blind we chopped a hole in our boat and began to sink.  a pair of eagles nested, for years, on the bigger of the two islands though they never brought off a clutch.  in other words, all a boy could wish for.

aunt reba's shanty is gone now - it fell into the river as tides and erosion took their toll.  so is the property for that matter - sold to some developer who has built a house on the big island and is now plagued all summer by drunken teenagers and their sodden girlfriends.

too bad things change the way they do - but you can always count on change.