Coonridge Digest: What we once held dear

Greetin’s from the Ridge.

Myra Rutherford could abide neither deer hunting nor the hunters. For years she manned a one-woman crusade against hunting of all kinds and deer hunting in particular. This may be an admirable stand to take on New York’s upper east side or around the Washington beltway, but in a small Midwestern town it’s cause for some suspicion if not outright banishment.

Herb wrote her off as "another nutty liberal" but she did have her secret admirers on the Ridge. I admired the lady’s sheer chutzpah. Taking a stand against deer hunting in Coonridge is akin to swimming nude at a Baptist church camp. You get attention but your tail may be in danger.

She’d print up bumper stickers proclaiming "Give the Deer a Gun and Make it a Real Sport!" and "Don’t Bear Arms! Arm Bears!"

This made her less than an outright hit at the town’s Jiffy Stop, which also served as the area deer tagging station. The happy hunters would pull their pickup trucks into the Jiffy with a bazooka-ed Bambi in the back and they’d be met my Myra holding a placard saying "Welcome to Death Row, Jethro!"

She considered actually lying down on the asphalt driveway to block the trucks’ entrance until Hooley Gibbs, anxious to show off his newly killed 14 point buck nearly creamed her with his Ford Explorer one November evening. It was at that point that Myra decided to make her protests more upright.

And her plan to sit out in the timber during deer season blasting a very large air horn was abandoned when a near-sighted fellow from Iowa mistook Myra’s orange jumpsuit for a doe. He missed by a long shot but it was enough to take Myra out of the woods for good. This idea of being a protestor, she discovered, was dangerous business.

But her protests continued and even achieved the intellectual heights one Sunday in November when she stood up in Sunday School class and proclaimed that hunting was unchristian. She was immediately shot down by Fred Twiney who rose to quote about twenty Old Testament references to the killing of animals then added, "Besides, it involves fellowship, communing with nature, much prayer, and it takes place mostly on Sundays."

Myra was miffed but undaunted.

She moved her crusade to the local newspapers as she fired off a tirade of letters ranting about the evils of hunting, the balance of nature, and growing tendency toward violence in Western Civilization. The letters were well written but too long. Nobody in Coonridge will read anything longer than a couple of paragraphs unless there’s a picture or two or maybe a free coupon attached.

It was a long uphill battle from which Myra never left the valley. I can’t recall a single hunter throwing down his gun at the altar of repentance. Not a solitary opinion was changed until one night last year toward the end of November when Coonridge saw the greatest turnaround in its history.

The evening was admittedly foggy and the Coonridge Jr. High Carps had just lost their ninth-straight basketball game. Myra was hurrying home to catch the latest episode of West Wing and had just rounded the long curve heading into town. She later claimed the deer stood over eight feet tall and was about the width of a John Deere six-row planter. The thing landed somewhere between the hood ornament on Myra’s ‘96 Cadillac Eldorado and her bladder.

What the deer didn’t mess up, Myra did.

She suffered a severely damaged hood, a broken windshield, a sprained wrist where she’d tried to hold back the deer single-handed, and a front seat that took a lot of scrubbing. She also missed West Wing.

Myra now has a newer model Cadillac and a whole new attitude toward deer hunting. It the flash of an instant the prejudices of a lifetime went out the window and across the hood.

Just last week I heard her mention to Flo Briggs that they should extend the deer season another two weeks. She said that were it not for the memory of that near-sighted lunatic from Iowa, she might take up hunting herself.

It’s funny how a little fear can work its way into our beliefs and attitudes. As I see our civil liberties slowly chipped away in order to keep our nation free of terrorism, I think of Myra and that deer. A little fear, a pinch of threat, and everything we once held dear — Well, it gives me something else to fret about.

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.