There's a lesson in Destry's Golden Plover gestation. The time taken shows.
Destry has a way with words, but like many of us he has too many to start. Thus he is a "taker-away" rather than a "putter-inner." The plover article started in a "I did this and that" diary format, which he reduced and reshuffled into a focused article about a most unusual hunt. And the refining of the story didn't cost any of the interesting good 'ol boy jargon and spin. Who else do you know who characterizes the total absence of light and color as: "black as a man's hat."
Destry does strange things and thus writes of the unusal, like his first article for
Parker Pages about shooting doves by my daughter's swimming pool in VA, using the picnic-table awning for a blind, and ParkerDog retreiving the soggy, chlorinated birds. His article about wildfowl shooting next to a Detroit area corrogated-iron seawall while making a boat-blind out of, you guessed it--corrogated iron, is an example of good writing, which is to say "different than the usual me and joe...etc.,
ad naueasum."
One of these days he's going to finish his "Goose Wringing at McDonalds" story that he told one evening in my living room while we were consuming adult beverages and puffin' on pipes. Destry didn't know at the time that I clicked on my recorder; Nancy typed up his rambling ruminations and I sent him a hard copy for revision and editing
two years ago. It's a hoot, but these things take time. I saw the scene of the crime this Labor Day. Someday when Destry is famous and probably deceased, the Southern Illinois Sportsmen will probably place a bronze marker to memorialize the transaction. Sort of like my old acquaintance Carol Doda (from my Navy days ca.1963-64) has in front of the infamous Condor Club on North Beach SF CA, although she was big in a different way. EDM
