Waiting in Line (Blogophilia 36.12)

It is my birthday month. It’s time to get my license plate renewed. For once, I didn’t wait until the last minute. I got my emissions check, made sure my insurance was up to date, and went down the office. Being early on a Friday, no one was there and it only took about 10 minutes. It wasn’t always this way.

Back in 1983, the State of Georgia didn’t do renewals by birthdays. Instead, they were due April 1, even if the day hit on a Saturday like this year. I had bought a car about a month before and because of no insurance, I wasn’t ready to get my plate until the last day. When I get there I found out the place was only open until 1. Pulling into the parking log, I saw the line wrapped around the building. I’d be lucky to get in the door before they closed. I backed my plateless ride into a space locked up.

Wishing I could spend my weekend doing something else, I found the end of the line. The motley crew reminded me of the giraffe cage at the zoo. Up close to the building was a proto-punk with a rainbow mohawk and mirrored sunglasses. I guess he thought he was cool. A little closer was a young couple passing the time with public displays of affection. The older woman behind looked like she wished either they would get a room or she could join in.

The man in front of me laughed at crowd. He was in hunting gear and a grimy baseball cap, just your typical working man. After a few minutes of standing, I decided to ask him why he was there. He showed me the paperwork on a brand new truck and told me how he came to buy it. He lived on a farm about 20 minutes north of town and was a carpenter, when he wasn’t hunting or fishing. I laughed and said I had relatives that were the same way.

The previous fall he had been invited to hunt a piece of land about an hour from his house. He didn’t say how he knew the owner, but the guy said deer were tearing up his corn fields, trophy sized bucks ready for the taking. That was a ringing endorsement in the man’s eyes, and for him to be the beneficiary of misfortune was not a problem. He called off work the next day, called a couple of friends, and made plans.

The friends piled into the man’s truck the next morning and drove out. The property turned out to a pasture dotted with hay bales. A wood line ran on the right side from the road back about 200 yards. If there were any deer, that is where they would be. It wasn’t the best set up. Deer normally don’t like being in the open. They shrugged and parked the truck. Maybe they’d get lucky and it wouldn’t be a dead zone.

After offloading their stuff, they scouted the tree line just a bit from the road, spraying scent bait and scattering salt cubes around. As they walked, they noticed there weren’t any signs of deer, no rubs, paw marks or scat. They shrugged. A bad day hunting was better than a good day at work, they all agreed. One the men set up a tree stand back from the edge of the woods, while the others set up a blind behind a stack of bales about 30 yards from the road. They waited to see if anything showed up, but it was all in vain. The deer got the memo it was hunting season and went somewhere other than where they were. About 2 O’Clock, they gave up and headed home.

It was almost dark by the time the man had dropped off his friends. As he turned his truck on to the road for his house,a buck chasing a doe popped out of the woods to the right. He caught the doe on the left fender and the buck on the right, totaling his truck. It had taken all this time to finally get the check from the insurance company to get the new one. Seems like they had never heard of hitting two deer at once.

The moral of the story is, now that hunting season is back, be careful. You don’t want to ruin a deerly good time.

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Topic-Jay Sole

Pic-Jonathan Harvey

Pic guesses” Mirrored Sunglasses (in blog), giraffe (in blog) cool (in blog), dress up, zoo, silly faces