Ducks
In the Great Central Valley on farmland hard by the Feather and Bear Rivers, modest green signs adorn four posts, one at each end of A and Main Streets. If they bother, people driving into town can read the white print:
Barley, California
Pop. 4,127
Elev. 94
In 1888, Barley’s founders bothered considerably. They transplanted the entire town seven miles to a site along the anticipated Davis-to-Yuba City trunk line of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Completed in 1890, the line promised Barley progress and prosperity. Today the tracks remain, but no locomotive has dignified the line for more than a half century.
Main Street hugs the railroad tracks, running north and south. At the center of town, A Street crosses perpendicular to Main. The old streets east of Main are plotted on a grid. West of Main, some streets curve around for no good reason whatsoever and occasionally terminate in a cul-de-sac.
Barley once had its own movie theatre and two car dealerships. The movie theatre closed decades ago. Not long after, the Ford and Chevrolet dealers went bust. The dealers had kept nice homes on the cul-de-sacs, but they moved away. Most folks no longer remember them.
* * *
The Domingo family lives in Barley on Mayes Street in a neighborhood shaded by ancient sycamores. Their two-story craftsman home lounges comfortably near places everyone knows. Doan’s Bar on the corner of Main and A is a few blocks away. The First National Bank, three blocks, and the Carnegie Library, five. In winter, the sycamores are bare, and from her front door, Sally Domingo can see the twin steeples of Saint Ambrose Catholic Church on Third Street towering over Maud Doan’s shingle roof. Sally’s church, the Community Faith Church, graces Davies Street eight blocks away, a little farther than the High School and the Middle School, but not in the same direction. Walking to any of those places is typical.
Sally and Henry Domingo christened their first-born Willis. They sent him to public school but never missed church on Sunday. Willis sat between them in the back pew and regularly attended a half hour of bible study before services began.
Willis grew up good natured and gave almost everybody the benefit of the doubt. This trusting temperament, however, had an inconvenience: things some people said contradicted things other people had already told him. So, social life could be confusing. In time Reverend Popper’s Sunday sermons bestowed a evanescent solution: if God said it, it was true. Anything else was misinformed.
Young Willis also trusted his parents. Henry and Sally were reliable. Neighbors were generally deferential to them. Although, as Willis got older, his parents’ wisdom got nudged and tugged in school by teachers and kids. God too might face a challenge there. If truth be told, the trouble started among the tall thickets shrouding a duck blind. There the first seeds of doubt were sown into the garden God tended in Willis’ mind.
* * *
Henry Domingo and Hugh Gondry had been hunting buddies since their high school days. Shortly before Willis’ fifth birthday, for the first time, Henry brought Willis along on a trip with Hugh to the Sacramento Delta to hunt ducks.
On the road by five AM, the hunters consigned Willis to the back seat of Hugh´s Bronco. The radio off, Henry and Hugh mostly kept quiet. Henry poured the occasional cup of coffee from the thermos laced with Jack Daniels. Boone, Hugh’s young retriever, lay quietly in the back.
Willis rubbed his eyes but kept them closed. So much respiration fogged the windows, further obscuring the darkened landscape passing by. The groggy ride ended rudely at the last mile as the Bronco jostled over a bumpy and muddy levee road. The sun had not crested the Sierra to the east. In the pink dawn, Willis unfastened his seatbelt and opened the door. Henry reached back and grabbed him by the shoulder.
“Wait a minute. Put on those rubber boots first. If you come home with a cold, your mom will skin my hide.”
The boots belonged to Hugh’s son Brent, who had long since outgrown them. They were still two sizes too big for Willis. Sally had put an extra pair of wool socks in the boots for warmth and to take up the slack. Willis took off his sneakers and pulled on the wool socks and boots. They were still a lot too big.
Along the trail from the Bronco to the duck blind, Willis strained and stumbled. Matted down weeds and reeds tripped him. Muddy patches of delta clay snatched at his boots, so loose that his feet pulled free while the boots stayed put in the mire.
“Dad! Dad! I can’t walk!”
“Henry, didn’t I say your boy was too little for this trip?” Hugh quipped.
“He’ll be alright, Hugh. Won’t you, Sport? It’s not far now. I can carry you over the mud.”
At the blind, the hunters settled in. As the first flock of mallards flew close over the decoys, the men fired. Willis’ shivering hands covered his ears. Two conspicuous plops disturbed the slough. Ripples in the muddy water commemorated the fallen ducks. Boone waited and cocked his ear.
“Hiyawh, Boone!” Hugh cried.
Fearless, Boone leaped away, retrieved the ducks, and dropped each at Hugh’s feet. Wet and exhilarated, Boone sat and waited for the next command.
“Go shake, Boone. Go!”
Boone left the blind and shook from head to tail several times. Water droplets shone in the chilly air. He returned and lay quietly on the plywood floor with his blockish head elevated to receive the vigorous petting Hugh awarded to his beloved dog, the most obedient, friendly, skillful, and intelligent dog Willis would ever know.
“God wouldn’t a made these ducks so damn beautiful and so damn delicious if he hadn’t intended for us to shoot em and eat em,” Hugh gleefully proclaimed.
“Right you are,” responded Henry. “God made all things for man to care for and harvest in their season.”
“And right now, it’s duck huntin season,” Hugh added.
As they lay on the floor, even in death, the mallards were sleek and elegant with shimmering green and translucent blue feathers. From their orange feet to their yellow bills, they evoked the divine. Henry’s allusion to God’s bounty especially fastened this memory in Willis’ heart.
* * *
For five years, Willis kept faith in his father’s notion of the deity’s generosity. Then one morning his fifth-grade teacher woke up with morning sickness. Her boyfriend’s indifference compounded her nausea. Completing her lesson plan for Earth Science had become impossible. Instead, she substituted an old DVD she pulled off her shelf: Endangered Species in California: The Real Story.
The documentary focused on the loss and degradation of wildlife habitat and on endangered species in California. Pioneering environmentalists, including Rachael Carson and David Brower, testified to the destructive impacts of pesticides, herbicides, and unbridled development. They cited the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge as a prime example of society’s wishful thinking about progress. The grand plan had been to use agricultural irrigation runoff from the western San Joaquin Valley as a new way to expand habitat for migratory birds. The runoff flowed into a broad, shallow reservoir at Kesterson and attracted abundant waterfowl, but no one had accounted for the naturally occurring selenium in the vast farmlands upstream. The selenium leached into the runoff. A hundred thousand acres of cotton and sugar beet production concentrated the selenium in the sink that became the Kesterson Reservoir. Ducklings and other waterfowl hatched with gross deformities and died. The grand plan poisoned the birds.
“That was terrible, don’t you think?” Emma Stemberger asked Willis at recess.
Tall with long sandy hair, Emma faced her friend squarely. Her hazel eyes burrowed. Willis glanced at the book in Emma’s hand. She always carried a book around. Not the same book, but one after another. Emma pressed on.
“My mom told me about Kesterson last summer. She attended the ALA conference in San Francisco. One of the speakers gave a talk on California water quality. You know, they closed Kesterson a long time ago, but my mom says there are still problems. The environment is just getting so screwed up.”
Willis likewise was troubled by the documentary—especially the deformed hatchlings at Kesterson struggling to hold up their little heads. The lifeless mallards in the duck blind several years before also came to mind. He might have agreed with Emma immediately but authority intervened—his dad—environmentalists are just a bunch of kooks; don’t pay any attention to them.
“I think duck hunting should be illegal,” Emma moaned. “All hunting ought to be banned. It’s barbaric. Do you know how many species have gone extinct in the last fifty years?”
“Uh, no.”
“Hundreds. Thousands. Nobody really knows how many but a lot.”
“Really? That many?”
Willis fidgeted. Other kids would have ignored Emma, but Willis had a soft spot for her. He kicked a pebble into the playground. It spun away and left Willis to sort out whether to listen to Emma or to his dad inside his head. Wasn’t everything on earth for men to care for and harvest? Emma and the documentary were giving Willis second thoughts.
“I guess it is something to think about.”
“You guess?”
“Well, I don’t know. Yeah, I mean, sure. There’s lots of ways of looking at things.”
Willis’ diplomacy fared no better than the delta mallards. Emma’s eyes widened. Did she know what she was asking of Willis? How could Willis question his father’s wisdom handed down in a hunting ritual dating back eons.
“People are entitled to their own opinions Willis, but they are not entitled to their own facts. That’s what my mom says. And it’s a fact that thousands and thousands of species used to be alive and flourishing and now they’re all dead! And human beings killed them!”
Emma sounded like one of the radical kooks his father had warned him about. But her eyes, blazing and exasperated, launched Willis’s heart into the heavens. The stars in the firmament baptized and anointed him a disciple of the environment—whatever that might be—for a time.
On Sunday Reverend Popper delivered a sermon from Genesis 1:26-28.
Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.
Willis listened and struggled. Prayers failed to extinguish his thought. God’s plan for human dominion on earth might be a mistake. An unwanted pregnancy and Emma Stremberger’s wide eyes had seen to that.
