Celebrating the essence of being “out there.”

By Roger Emile Stouff

Not getting out much. Who can stand it? Polar bears, I guess. Grouse and ducks, and foxes.

Not me. I go outside for a cigar and that’s about it. Even then, I try to stay in the workshop where a little ceramic heater is laboring futilely to warm even so small a space. But after a bit, the smell of smoke hangs motionless in the shop, so when the sun comes out I’ll go stand in the yard and watch the horizon for signs of spring, though I’m bound in a thick coat, double-socked and hands clenched against the cold in padded pockets.

Mostly, I’m in the house, watching the tube, playing on the computer. I thought about tying flies, but last winter I tied gobs of the few flies that I can’t get commercially, and I lost so few of them last year I have oodles remaining. Not much point, except as a time-killer. I sit sometimes at my piddling desk in my piddling room, and the two windows that face the bayou are like a voyeuristic look on some far away place, far beyond my back yard.

Of course, I know it’s too early to be looking for signs of spring, by a long shot. No, it’s my imagination that conjures the season ahead, though many months away. Thank goodness for it. I am gripey and short-nerved. Foul moods hang over me like a cloud. Cabin fever, the worse I can ever remember, is threatening to drive me nuts. Every night for a week now I’ve gone to turn off the water, drain the pipes…in the morning, turn it back on. Repeat, repeat, repeat ad insania.

But in my mind’s eye, hope springs eternal. As I gaze out across the browned grass and naked trees, an overlay of saturated colors reveals the bristling pines of Kisatchie, and the little creek in those low-slung hills flows fast and clear over sandstone terraces and white sand point-banks along its shoulders. I can, in my daydream, hike along Caroline Dorman Trail, named after Louisiana’s premiere naturalist who was instrumental in creating Kisatchie National Forest in 1930, and the first woman employed by the Forest Service.

Through this temporal looking glass, I can journey past the white, sharp-edged frost and ice in the mornings to see the dull and the bright round stones of the Buffalo River, the gray bluffs in Ozark National Forest, the crystalline flow of Crooked Creek, the White River and the Spring River.

Once cold like this gets into your bones, it’s almost impossible to get it out. I used to relish a long, hot bath, but now all I have is a shower in the house, which helps a little but not like a long, hot soak. Suzie tells me I am much more tolerant of cold than I was eight years ago. I guess she’s right, but I still don’t like it worth pecan.

My vision is pretty much monocular, I virtually have no use of my left eye. Or as my dad used to say, I am “blind in one eye and can’t see out the other” which is a bit of an exaggeration, but a well-made point. Like looking through a telescope or a monocle, though, I am not burdened with perspective, for once, and I can see the green-black water of Grand Avoille Cove, the back ends of dark canals where irises are struggling to bloom, and they rustle against each other, but there is no breeze. Neka sama, the feared spirit of my ancestors, may have moved through them, but that dread creature is so emasculated by disbelief it can only pass by and relish the chill it put up my spine.

All I want to do, while trapped in my little wooden house is eat. I scour the cabinets and the fridge for something, anything, to give me comfort. As if, should I eat enough, I can make off like a bear, drift into slumber and stay there until the spring, living off my body fat and dreaming of bee hives laden with honey.

Daisy, our dozen-year-old black Lab, twitches in her sleep. We put her in the workshop with a little space heater on low, just enough to warm her, and she sleeps there nights when the weather is below freezing. She sleeps hard, deep, and her fore and hind legs move erratically sometimes. She has grown arthritic and slow, and I can tell the cold pains her joints, but her eyes are bright and as expressive as always, and her tail as capable of conveying delight as ever. In her cavernous dreams, she is perhaps chasing squirrels across a springtime back yard, launching off after a ball. She, too, is dreaming of spring, the spring of her youth.

Do I twitch my legs in my sleep, in my dreams hiking up Caroline Dorman Trail or wading knee-deep in Kisatchie Bayou? Probably, but it might be mistaken for restless leg syndrome, so who can tell? My dreams usually elude me: I am sure I have them, but rarely recall them and then, they blow away so quickly. Much as I try to hold them, remember them, they have an uncanny power of forgetfulness and within moments of waking from one, I can only recall scant details.

But I dream of youth, the present and the future. Like the old dog, I am footloose and fancy free again, exploring the bayou side behind the old house. My knees don’t pain me, as they do after a day spent wading Kisatchie’s tugging, coercing flows, climbing its steep, treacherous sandy bluffs back to the trail. In my deep, sullen dreams, all the trout in the Ozark Mountains are big and all the rivers magical.

Winding through the months ahead is a trail that leads to warmth and green and budding colors. Yet it is dark as Mirkwood Forest at this juncture, and the blackness ahead is nearly impenetrable. But there is, after all, an end, and I’ll get there eventually, hopefully with my wits about me, hopefully sane.