The story of my first story

What's up there on the top shelf is Schaap stuff, lots of books I wrote. People sometimes ask me just exactly how many books I've written. Honestly, I don't know, and I'm not about to do a census. The answer is, I've written things for a long, long time--fifty years at least. 

These days I'm at the age when looking back allows a clearer vision than any other direction--and that's not saying much. My readership is minimal, as it has been, so I'm thinking someday, maybe, some great-grandchild will be interested in reading something about this odd ancestor from the old days. What was he like anyway? 'He wrote books,' you say?--no kidding? What's a book?

And how come? Whatever got into him to start writing stuff?

For him or her or them, here's the story of my first story.

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Maybe just sixteen--I'm not sure. Just a kid really, a boy growing up on the Wisconsin lakeshore, greatly taken with hunting and trapping and the woods all around. I was a town kid, but in the 1950s few of us really were. What was all around was by no means frontier, but there were endless untouched woodlots and the gigantic lakeshore, a hardwood forest just off the seam of sea and sky. 

I'm not sure I'd call myself a hunter, not even then. Real hunters abound in rural Wisconsin, where I grew up. Boys grow up with guns. When I was sixteen, I wanted to be that kind of hunter, but I'd have been something of an anomaly in my family. My father, a good, good man, never stepped out much farther than the edge of town. We didn't have a cabin up north where an entire family might go for the deer opener. He didn't hunt pheasants or pull on waders to hunt duck. He wasn't interested even in tramping through the sand dunes on the lakeshore woods. Never did, as I remember.

I don't blame him for that, never have. What dominated his time was important matters like town business (he was president of the village) and school boards, not to mention a job that frequently had him out of town. He was active, busy, and much beloved. I could not have been raised by a better father. 

Hunting--and trapping before that--was something I had to learn from someone other than my dad, and it was a boy's thing really. My early winters on the trapline belonged to bike-riding buddies who got up long before dawn to check traps no matter what the weather.  We took bikes out west to the river as long as winter held off. 

I don't know that kids today are granted the freedom we loved back then. My parents knew about where we were--somewhere on the Onion River west of town, but I don't think they even turned over in bed in the darkness when I'd get up to leave. 

I'm not at all surprised that when Mr. Eagan gave an assignment for each of us in sophomore English to write a short story, I chose something about hunting. It was, at that moment in my life, a big, big deal. 

Mr. Eagan was a foreigner among us. We knew--I don't know how--that he was cut from a different cloth. He wasn't one of  the local Dutch, not one bit. He hailed from Montana, way out west, but he didn't wear cowboy boots or don a Stetson, never said a thing about running cattle or fighting off wolves or chapped cowboys. We just knew he was from out west, and we knew he was single, and that he boarded at Elsie's place, where other single teachers boarded too.

And he wasn't young. If he had a family, they were nowhere to be seen. His being alone at his age made him more than a little mysterious. What we knew for sure was that we liked him. He was, bar none, the finest English teacher we'd had or would have in high school. 

Why?--I don't know that answer. Sometimes there's real mystery in determining who is and who isn't a good teacher. Egan, simply, was. I say that because the assignment he gave was one I took very seriously, not because I'd long ago determined I would someday be a writer: that thought never passed my mind. I took the assignment seriously because, like all good teachers, he made it clear that he took the assignment seriously because, I'm sure, he took us seriously.

Maybe that's it. He wasn't flashy. He was short and pudgy, not given to in-class dramatics, didn't cry through the last scene of Romeo and Juliet, didn't even act as if teaching was the one thing in his life that mattered. In every way as I remember him, he was convincingly ordinary. But we loved him.

Wish I could explain that somehow and impart the wisdom to undergraduates, but I can't. 

So, the assignment: write a short story. I don't know that he told us anything about how to do it; he just made the assignment, this guy we kind of loved. Write a short story. 

"Hunting," I told myself. Mine is going to be about hunting, but what?

Something really scary--a bear! Sure, a bear! There's this kid hunting, and, lo and behold, what should come out or the darkness of the woods before him but a bear. Yeah. That's it!

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Continued tomorrow.