From The CC Vault: My Thought Stream Is Polluted…

By Chris Robinson

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “stream of thought” as a literary style in which a character’s thoughts, feelings and reactions are depicted in a continuous flow uninterrupted by objective description or conventional dialogue. This is what happens to your brain after several hours of sitting in a duck or goose blind. Actually, it starts before you even crawl into that blind, or at least it does for me mainly because my competence level at 0400 hours is somewhere south of complete ineptitude. And, if I should happen to mutter any of those uninterrupted continuous flow thoughts aloud, even the dog looks at me like I’m more than a full bubble off plumb.

Sitting in a goose or duck blind sometimes requires the patience of Job. You can sit for several hours staring at empty skies and, when this happens, my mind goes off on a journey of its own. The Hindu sage, Mararishi Mahesh Yogi, called this Transcendental Meditation. Most of my hunting partners refer to it as daydreaming and they tend to yell at me when I drift off into La-la Land during a hunt especially when a flock of waterfowl comes directly over me and I fail to fire a shot at any of them. The dog, being more politic, merely gives me THE LOOK! So, with apologies to James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust–practitioners of this literary style–here’s what happens during a goose hunt in Saskatchewan when a hunter’s mind shifts into overdrive chasing vagrant wisps of thought like a puppy pursuing a butterfly.

Alarm goes off. Rats! I just fell asleep two minutes ago. Wait for heart rate to settle down. What time? Big hand’s on the 12 and little one’s on the four. Recognize only one of those hours in a day and this isn’t it. Dark and cold. Sit on bed edge with dismal thoughts about mental state. Insane to be up at this hour. People are diurnal, not nocturnal. Get up, dog. If I have to roll out, so do you and don’t give me THAT LOOK! This is supposed to be FUN! It is fun, right?

Clothes stiff and cold as their wearer, boots more so. Clomp off to kitchen. Turn on coffee maker. Glad I did the “fixins” last night. Couldn’t figure out how to do it now. Put tea water in microwave. Even darker and colder outside. Lotsa stars. Damn! Bluebird weather again! No wind either. Geese’ll be two miles high coming off the river. Could just as well stay in bed. Mind wandering. What’s the matter with me? Ah, whatthehell, goose hunters are nuts anyway!

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134 – September, 2020

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