A Well-Traveled Pair of Chest Waders
bet there’s never been a set of chest waders as widely traveled and at the same time as little used as the ones I bought for the Andros Islander, Saunders. Their story begins in Nassau in 1969.
“Up at 4:30 a.m.,” my hunting log that year reports, “to go out to Lake Killarney. No ducks. Talked with some Italian croupiers from Paradise Island who came to shoot, too. All but one of them had expensive Charles Daley superposed shotguns from that big ironmongery on Shirley Street…”
The only other hunter on the lake that morning was a slender black man with a well-worn old pump gun. That was the first time I spoke to Saunders. He worked in the airport control tower across the highway from Lake Killarney. This was his first duck season away from Andros, where he said “th’ duckin’ was quite good.” He was badly homesick. I knew the feeling.
Saunders led the croupiers and me to flooded woods on the other side of Killarney where we could wade thigh-deep and jump-shoot loafing birds. The water was mild compared to the water I used to wade wearing dungarees in north Florida. But Saunders broke into uncontrollable shivering in his soaked pants and squishing shoes as soon as he got out of the water. As described in my Nassau hunting log, he yearned for a warm pair of chest waders. I found out his size and asked my grandmother to buy a pair and ship them to me from Florida.
I had a history with chest waders. When I was fourteen, my family spent eleven dollars it really didn’t have to buy me the cheapest pair of stocking-foot waders available, so I could go on a goose hunt with my Sea Scout master. The trip never happened. By the time I got around to using those waders my feet had grown astonishingly and I had to scissor off the toes to use them in size 13 Keds. The water would rise inside until water pressure outside stopped it, and then warm up — a poor man’s answer to a wet suit. So I knew all about yearning for chest waders.
The package from Florida containing boot-foot chest waders cleared Customs in early January and I headed for Killarney the next morning. The Italian croupiers were there. They were there almost every winter morning. But Saunders wasn’t. They hadn’t seen him in several days.
I never saw Saunders again.
It was not unheard-of for native Bahamians to die from pneumonia after a winter soaking, preposterous as that seemed. The Nassau newspapers carried accounts of victims Over the Hill who had been caught in a winter downpour right in the city, sickened, and died.
Was Saunders a pneumonia victim because of his wading after ducks? Or did homesickness lead him back to Andros?
I never knew.
Almost nobody had a phone in Nassau. Certainly I didn’t and probably Saunders didn’t. The houses didn’t even have addresses — no home mail delivery. My one call from my office to the control tower got me a snotty British voice telling me that the likes of Saunders (meaning black islanders) could not receive personal calls at work.
So the pristine chest waders went back to the mainland with me when I moved to Pennsylvania. On our way north, my wife and I stopped at my father’s house in Louisville, Kentucky. My parents divorced when I was three, and this was only my second visit to my father’s house. I was just getting to know my second brother, of whose existence I had been ignorant most of my life. One of the things I learned was that, unlike my mother’s family with whom I was raised, my father and his brothers — and my “new” brother — all were duck hunters.
I gave Saunders’ waders to Jimmy. I didn’t mention that I purchased them for a black islander. In Kentucky, in those days, something that could be construed as a hand-me-down from a black man might have been unacceptable to a white child of privilege, even unworn. Jimmy was a happy-go-lucky, likable kid, but he had all the racial prejudices of that time and place.
I thought that I was done with Saunders’ waders.
I would have been wrong.
I was having a bad year in 1972. My maternal grandfather who taught me all I knew of safe gun-handling died New Year’s Eve, a few short days after I was rear-ended at 60 miles an hour while stopped.
Concussion, loss of hearing, whiplash — all on top of newly diagnosed bilateral carpal tunnel syndrome from a life spent pounding manual typewriters, which slowed nerve impulses in my fingers until I was missing ducks worse than I had in years.
Bad enough, but then in early 1972 came two surgeries, and a scary diagnosis of an insidious disease called sarcoidosis, of which even most of the doctors at the Hershey Medical Center had never heard. While hospitalized, I was a prize exhibit in their teaching classes, which did not fill me with joy.
Just as I was beginning to recover from surgery, Jimmy wrapped his blazing-fast 442 Olds around an immovable oak tree in Indiana after skidding on loose gravel. He died on the spot. My father had been trying to get me to come duck hunting with them since I moved to Pennsylvania. I fully intended to go, but hadn’t yet; I figured there was plenty of time to go hunting with my new brother.
Not anymore.
My father was stoic through the funeral — a D-Day veteran who went ashore with the Fourth Division at Normandy, he had endured the loss of many close comrades. The death of a son was immeasurably worse, but at least he had a frame of reference. Not so my stepmother. She went into a deep shock and never recovered. Jimmy’s fiancé had been following him in a separate car and saw him die. She was not in good shape either.
When we were leaving Louisville this time, my father gave my wife Jimmy’s hunting coat and me the unused waders — maybe I could find someone to use them in Pennsylvania. So Saunders’ waders were stowed in my new pickup truck as we pushed across the Turnpike into the teeth of Hurricane Agnes, gusting winds and pouring sheets of rain, alone on the road but for long-haul truckers. I found it ironic, a Floridian fighting a hurricane on the east slope of the Allegheny Mountains.
We got home to Central Pennsylvania just before much of the city of Harrisburg went underwater in what became one of the state’s worst disasters, stranding us on the hill where we lived until the waters started receding again.
I didn’t think about Saunders’ waders again for months.
We moved back to Florida late in 1972 when I changed jobs again. By September I wound up being transferred “temporarily” to Los Angeles. I was there without my wife for months on end, well into 1973, depressed and lonesome. Not to put too fine a point on it, I began an affair with another woman. I wasn’t thinking very clearly, but I thought having a woman on each coast was safe enough.
Perhaps it would have been, if our affaire d’cour ended when I left that job and California behind. My wife and I moved from Florida to Washington State in 1973. Saunders’ waders were just part of the household dunnage by then, unremarked.
But the woman from California, with whom by then I was in love, came to Washington to go hunting with me. Women who loved me were supposed to go hunting with me, the way I figured things then.
She had expressed willingness — reciting childhood memories of “those ducks with the big green heads” brought home by adult members of her Midwest family.
She was the first person who ever wore Saunders’ waders for their intended purpose.
First we hunted elk in a blizzard in Eastern Washington, camped in a tent in the snow overlooking the Columbia River, and had a number of adventures not exactly the Hollywood version of a romantic getaway. Then we went duck hunting on a magical day when storm-addled mallards tried to land in my handful of home-made cork decoys even as I stood in plain sight picking up an earlier kill.
(What, doesn’t everybody take at least a half-dozen decoys, a shotgun and hip boots — and waders for the love interest — on a romantic getaway? Never mind the elk rifle.)
We were hunting what they called a “seep” in Eastern Washington, wastewater from irrigation practices that was trying to freeze in the bitter cold. There was a rough track along the edge of the seep that kept looking familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Then, about an hour before dark, the only other hunter we had seen all day left the parking lot and came hurrying down the road with a bag of decoys and a worn pump gun. I was admiring his facial camouflage at a distance.
When he paused to see how we were doing, I saw that his skin camouflage was natural — and I had an instant sense of deja vu. He was black as Saunders, and his old gun was just as innocent of bluing. I realized then that the track along the seep reminded me of that Killarney levee a world away. He hustled away at an almost jog — just like Saunders — to find his spot for the afternoon shooting.
“Are you okay?” she said. “You just shivered like you had a hard chill.”
“Not from the cold,” I said. “He just reminded me of somebody I used to know — the man I bought those waders you’re wearing for.”
Of course she wanted to hear the story. Being of a largely liberal political bent, she liked it that Saunders was black. You didn’t hear a lot about black hunters.
I experienced the best mallard hunt of my life that day, and decided that was enough hunting for now. I put away my guns and we spent the rest of our remaining time in more conventionally romantic ways.
To battle my deepening depression when I dropped her off at the airport, thinking it was the last time we would ever be together, I gave her one of my cork decoys that she had insisted on giving a name, for a keepsake. And the waders; she was amused by me giving her Saunders’ waders. I thought of the Agnes flood and said you never know when they might come in handy.
I thought that was the final chapter for Saunders’ waders.
But they had one more lap to run.
Months later, when the misery that you can cause two women by loving them at the same time was taking its dreary toll on both of them, my girlfriend was back in the Midwest, moved there by my transfer-happy former employer. She told me on the phone that she was friends with a woman whose boy friend was an avid fisherman. The young couple was stony broke, and there wasn’t any money for luxuries like fishing gear. On top of that, the boy friend was black, like Saunders, so if she gave him the waders it might complete some sort of existential circle of life…
Sure, I said, thinking of that eleven-dollar pair of waders when I was fourteen; I understood poverty. Pass them along to him.
What I didn’t say was whether he’s her boy friend or actually yours, because I didn’t have the right to know that. And I agreed with her about the circle coming full.
