"We set the world in order; it breaks down. We set it in order again and break down ourselves." Rilke, Duino Elegies
In the grand order of my hunting and fishing world, I once constructed a domain that would have pleased my old German shop teacher--a world where there was a place for everything and everything was in its place. In that shop everything was labeled and located including the dust bin to which we swept the shavings in the aisles at the end of each class period. It was a very tidy world. I have always envied that kind of order and often sought to replicate at least a portion of it in my personal life, at least as far as my gear was concerned. I have always been fond of boxes and kits and have constructed them for one purpose or another since I was four years old.
In the full system of all my outing gear, each functional activity was designated by name and subordinate to that activity was a series of rigs, systems, and kits that included every needed element in logical order. The kit was the simplest component; it consisted of items and a container. Kits [flyboxes, flotant kit] were organized into a system [tackle system], systems into a class of gear [fishing gear], gear into an overall rig [truck rig, boat rig] depending upon the location where it was stored. This organizational system was fully detailed in hierarchial lists that ennumerated everything needed for any activity from duck hunting to camping to fly fishing. Supporting this organization of activities was a bounty of equally well-organize supplies in the gun-closet, study/hunt room, and the truck.
The truck, an '85 Dodge Ramcharger 4WD, was perhaps the best organized with a series of stained and finished wood trays I built that began beside my knee with a small desk, coffee cup holder, and key tray and then extended along the interior walls with trays for shotguns and flyrods, tubes for maps, and behind the rear bench seat a large table divider on top of which went clothing such as vest and jackets and under which went crates containing extra clothing, the tackle boxes, the gun kit, the pantry box, the tent, sleeping bags, and truck gear such as tool boxes, flares, oil, and anti-freeze. In addition the truck had an array of emergency radios, weather radios, lights, and other equipment relating to emergency services. It was the kind of overall rig that would enable me to stay out all night in bad weather on a fire or rescue or to fish for days without having to come home or back to town for supplies.
The study was also well organized. I had appropriated one of the extra bedrooms of the house, built in bookshelves along one wall, covered the opposite wall in topographic maps and converted the closet to a gun locker. My son Mac and I built by hand the custom cabinetry that included a rack for twenty long guns and a locking cabinet for ammunition and handguns. Each gun was separated from the next by wooden pegs and the gun butts were kept in place by a finished rail mounted with brass hardware. Above the gun rack the closet shelves were converted by means of a series of labeled boxes into a storehouse of additional supplies such as wool socks, game calls, tools, surplus leather goods, extra reels, reserve flyboxes, backup lights, twine, and whatever else was needed to hunt or fish or camp. The space behind the door was converted to a universal gear rack by the building of wood bars with brass hooks to hold the hats, lanyards and whistles, binoculars, cameras, kit bags, and belts.
In many years of hunting and fishing and of leading outdoor trips, the system served me well. The checklists enabled me to have on hand both what was needed and what might be needed if the situation changed. In best Boy Scout fashion, I was always prepared. And once or twice in the back country and several times in conducting rescue operations this kind of organization has paid off in protecting me from danger and in minimizing injury where others had experienced accidents. My truck was a mobile command post, storeroom, and outfitters closet. It served well. I hadn't started sleeping in it, but it was a comfortable, familiar world. Exactly the kind of world a truck is supposed to be.
It is not that way anymore. In 1993 Alicia came into my world and eventually laid claim to the study as her nursery. Soon the field guides and outing books were mostly packed away or double stacked high on the top shelves while the lower shelves were given over to dolls and books and tea sets. The maps came down and have been replaced by Disney characters and Winie the Pooh. On the gear rack now hang little girl jackets and mittens, and the long guns are gone. From the pegs that once separated Franchi from Winchester from Ruger from Lamber now hang shirts and dresses and blouses. Tiny patent leather shoes are in a neat row propped on the butt rail of the gun rack. And the smell of gun oil and leather and reel oil has given way to Desitin and scented diapers and baby shampoo. Not all my gear disappeared, however. Alicia particularly liked the flyboxes and an empty fly reel so those were moved down to her toy shelf.
The truck has changed too. At first all I had to do was buckle in the car seat and throw the diaper bag on the floor and be gone. I changed my first diaper with Alicia on the banks of the Elk when she was three weeks old. As she grew she claimed more space. Eventually it just made more sense to move the vests and put a blanket on the rear table to convert it to a changing table. A year later Alicia's sister came along. That added another car seat, and now there was a permanent box of diapers and wipes and towels on the tackle table at the rear. The rods and guns came out of their long trays and were replaced by milk bottles, coolers and baby food jars. Most of the truck gear went into storage in bins in the workshop.
The girls see the truck as a kind of play house now. They will stand on the couch in the den and point to the yard, saying, "Truck, Papaw. Truck." That is my summons to take them to the truck where they will "drive" to the woods or river. They stand on the seat, twist the wheel and go through the contents of my key tray faster than a vacuum cleaner. Alicia mimics my command voice on the radio saying firmly and insistently into the mike, "Come. Right now!" "Send firetruck." Her sister is still teething so she mostly chews on the mike instead of summoning aid. They greatly delight in taking apart the socket sets and tool boxes tucked under the seat. And all the while milk dribbles over the papers and maps, and cookie crumbs work their way down into the ribs and vents of the radios.
Girls bring their own order into the world. It is not like our male order of grids and lines and charts and boxes. With them there is always the sense that the world does fit together, that everything has a place and will eventually find itself even it you won't be able to cast a grid over it or make an outline of it or put it in a box. Part of the wisdom I learn from these girls--and a part of river wisdom--is that cartesian order is ultimately not a truth but a falsification of the world. We don't finally know a river when we have named all its parts and have plotted them on a map. True knowing, knowing as understanding, cannot be plotted and woe to the angler or ecologist who would comprehend a river in a system.
Lately I have been reading James Gleick's book Chaos. Gleick and a number of other scientists have pioneered a new departure in scientific thinking by looking not at the regularities but at the regular irregularities of the world and trying to mathematically describe them. Part of their description involves those fascinating forms called fractals, forms that can be generated by mathematical formula but which produce visual arrays that help us understand everything from the swirls of clouds to the meanders of rivers to the branching patterns of trees and streams. These forms have an order that is knowable, understandable, but is not regular or predicatable; in fact, it is an order that is characterized by its regular, its systematic, unpredictableness. We can know a river, even anticipate its character, but never quite graph or plot it.
As I type tonight, there is beside my chair a quiet rustle of tiny toes and as I peek down past my elbow there reaches up to me a smile under dark brown eyes and fingers all gummy with Oreos--she learned that taste from her mother not her grandfather--reaching for the keyboard of this computer. This is Alicia's sister who is now eighteen months old and is adding her own unraveling to the delicious unorder of my world. She inherited the flyreel from her sister, laid claim to her own stack of fly boxes and already has her own tackle box. Never mind that it contains crayons and doll clothes and a couple of little people toys and pieces of old cookies. She is keeping track, making order in her own woman's kind of way. She has already singled out from among my field guides the volumes on reptiles and birds as her own. "'nake book, Papaw, 'nakes," she says when she can't find the Peterson reptile guide.
And she, too, has already had her time at the river, throwing pebbles and squealing like her sister. Already confident, she climbs this chair reaching for the keyboard, knows how to turn on the monitor, pulls the books and papers down to her level, tries to carry off the big tacklebox in the closet to her room. I don't think it ever occurred to her for a moment that my world wasn't hers. She has claimed it as fully as she claims light and air and smiles. I don't expect that I will really ever get organized again. Every trip will be an unpredictable adventure of one sort or another, and I probably will never quite know again where everything is, certainly never have it in neat kits tucked by outline and functional order into larger bags or boxes. Between the two of them it may be that all I can do is to keep their lines separate and their hooks baited and tie their flies on when they are ready for that.
She is pulling at my sweater sleeve, wanting to get to the key board. "Hol' me, Papaw. Hol' me!" As I reach down, her smile opens, the order of the world spirals and I realize in a flash: chaos has a name. I lift Amber into my lap.
Gerald L. Smith
Sewanee, TN 1996