O' Pioneer

Are you ever surprised by a memory? Some recollection movie/slide show that hasn't seen the light of day or night in years or decades? It just appears, shimmers and slides back under your senses - a fish in a pond on a warm summer's day - you see just a brightening shadow then it's gone.

These thoughts were triggered by leftover turkey.

There hasn't been a Friday after a Thanksgiving in the past forty or fifty years that I haven't swung open some refrigerator door and picked around at the leftover turkey, looking especially for some especially juicy dark meat, what hasn't happened is my remembering the Pioneer Game.

I can't remember if it was me or my brother Brian who came up with the name. The concept was simple: take a nice big hunk of turkey, wrap it in a piece of the aluminum foil from the platter and head out for a long hike in the woods behind our house. The minute you crossed the baseball diamond you traveled back in time, sometimes you were scouts watching for Mohegans hiding in the pines, sometimes you were pioneer farmers coming back from some other adventure. You did a lot of sneaking, a lot of skulking, if you spotted anyone else in the woods they were not allowed to know you there even if you had to lay down in the leaves. (This was particularly dangerous for me because of my asthma. The dangerous part was not that I would get asthma, the danger was that my mother would find out I had been lying down in the leaves.)

Past the Sandpit, across Giant Hill, down Twin Hill and across the frozen brook the pioneer scouts would finally come to some place deemed safe enough to stop. Ah, then the feast would begin, only it wasn't turkey anymore. In our heads it was the kind of dried jerky we had seen Walt Disney's Davy Crockett eating out of a deerskin bag on Sunday nights -good ol' Fess Parker and his crusty sidekick, Buddy Ebsen sat there on the tree roots and ate their meager rations. (Wait a minute, I thought you said it was a feast? It was, but we were kids and pretending is complicated, feasting on rations is an okay idea when you are nine and making stuff up.) We ate and chewed and watched for lurking Indians.

So, ten minutes ago I went to the refrigerator to get some good dark pieces to put on a bagel with a little cold gravy and the Pioneers floated out and waved at me. There were the trees and the leaves and the tree root camp. I got out the Tupperware as Fess looked on, Buddy handed me the knife and waited until I had it all stacked together, then we all ate and chewed and wiped the extra crumbs from our chins. I could almost smell the woodsmoke from our invisible campfire.