A career cut short?

My career in conservation was even shorter than my career in banking.
(Faithful readers — both of you — will recall that my banking career ended soon after a car I was helping to repossess caught fire and burned to a crisp outside of Dunkirk.)
I was enlisted as a conservationist some time after my parents purchased a small farm in Jackson Township. The farm was on a lovely site in Magic Valley, and the cottage my parents built there was probably going to be their retirement home.
All that changed when they moved to Richmond, and the farm was later sold.
But for several years, it was a central focus of family life.
And part of that focus involved conservation.
My mother read tirelessly through U.S. Department of Agriculture booklets and pamphlets, always on the lookout for ideas and projects.
The cottage was constructed, and a pond of about an acre and a half was built.
From a topographic standpoint, the pond’s location made perfect sense. But it was some distance from the house.
It should be noted that not much of the farm was tillable acreage. There was some pasture land, and there was a nice woods. And there were a handful of acres at the bottom of Magic Valley that Paul Pinkerton farmed for us.
In other words, it was just the sort of farm that a family used to living in town might buy, hoping to retire to a bucolic lifestyle.
After the pond was built, my mother surprised me one day by telling me that I had to pick up an order of fish at the post office.
A shipment of fingerlings or something would be delivered, and my job was to take the family station wagon and get there as early in the day as possible to take possession. To do that, I would need a garbage can full of water.
The instructions were, as I recall, to open the package and put the USDA fingerlings into the water, then drive to the farm and dump the garbage can of water into the pond.
Now, if you have read that last paragraph, you’ll have realized that this plan was ridiculous on its face. Clearly, this was a job that should involve two guys and a pick-up truck at the very least.
But when you’re a kid you — sometimes, at least — do as you’re told.
So I put a clean, galvanized garbage can in the back of our Ford station wagon, put a hose in it, and filled it as far as I could safely.
By the time I had reached the post office, it was sloshing wildly enough that I wondered how slowly I would have to drive to Jackson Township.
The package was received. The fingerlings were dumped into the water, which by now was less than the recommended amount.
There was even less water by the time I arrived at the farm, although I had driven as slowly and cautiously as possible.
And when I arrived, I knew I had a serious problem: Getting to the pond over several hundred yards of pasture and hills.
I’m still not sure how I did it, though I am certain the fish were traumatized and I know a good bit of the water splashed out before the pond was reached. But somehow — perhaps the USDA knows how — enough of the fingerlings made it safely to their destination that we had bass and bluegill the next summer.
Chore number two as a conservationist came when my mother received delivery of several score of evergreen tree starts, little guys that would grow into trees over time.
Her plan was to have me plant them in a pasture beside the road so that they’d act as a sort of privacy and dust shield. But she didn’t want them planted in straight lines like a tree farm, so I was told to zig and zag a bit as I planted.
That might have made sense, but nobody told my father who, coming home with a new Wheelhorse, the first riding mower he had ever owned, cut almost all of my evergreen trees down a week later.[[In-content Ad]]