“You just keep thinking, Butch; that’s what you’re good at.”

It remains as one of my favorite lines from great films.

The graphics impressed, for their day. But it was the story. That’s what mattered.

One buddy fancies himself the daredevil. He’s all bravado and swagger.

The other buddy is cerebral (or so he fancies himself).

It was long ago now. I have lost count of how many times I have watched it. Usually it was on long hot soft hot still summer Sunday afternoons, with the pond behind us, and my stepfather, a man from whom I learned many lessons as a boy, taught me when I did not grasp fully that I was being taught. We’d watch that or Cool Hand Luke or Eastwood’s spaghetti Westerns, especially The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly. We’d watch the films year after year. I learned Redford’s mannerisms and Newman’s smirks, and took them into me as cultural iconography.

My stepfather could build just about anything. He taught me to hunt and fish; he and his family built our homes; he laid block; he plumbed; he ran wife; he taught me how to lay shingles; he shot a recurve bow so well, he could halve pears with a broadhead at 35 yards. He cast a fly rod like as smoothly as the language of lovers. He coached basketball and taught school, too, where he was gentle with students who needed a father figure.

The pond behind us was my place, however. Not deep, but mysterious, and my seminary in youth. Sweet gums, dogwoods, maples, Eastern redbuds, and more, limned the pond’s edges. But it was the fallen timber that my stepfather had dragged into the pond when he and his dad carved it out, perhaps more than even standing timber, that drew me. Old scrub oaks and pines, their limbs protruding like twisted symbols from Poe and Hawthorne stories, summoned me to black waters.

The pond behind the house, where I was just a boy– a boy who fell headlong into swampy still mosquitoed waters, where the pines bent under May’s heavy rains and the bream smelled rich and fertile by the banks, and bass fanned sandy bottoms on the pond’s sandy unders, and the sweet gums would drop their thorny brown bombs atop the centipede grass, and the crosstie wormbed grew crawlers for Granddaddy’s channel and blue cats, and I inhaled the smells of bedding fish, piney southernness, and and richness amidst everydayness that perhaps only Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Larry Brown, and William Gay grasp fully in language.

It had to do with the pond behind–the way the sun set over the trees, the smell of water in hot GA days, the feel of the ground, the accent of Mrs. Will as she’d say, “Christopha, come home at dark, now!” in her tremulous voice, to her son, and we’d all go out–yet again–and ride go-carts, and burn pine cones, and I’d go off and fish in a spot I’d not shared with them, and I’d come in at dark–sweaty and happy that I’d understood Huck Finn in my bones. I’d give it all up to go back–to smell it all again, to see that there’s nothing better than to know one’s soil, to love it, to understand it as a gift to be shepherded–and to long for restoration.

If I could do it all over again, if I could ask God for any place to grow up, I would say, without hesitation, “Put me where the sun sets over the pond, where the West blinds me with golden brilliance, where I have to go under the treetops, along the edges of the pond, the pond behind, and smell those smells, and feel those birds’ wings as they lifted from the redbuds, their limbs bobbing in time to nature’s music, and the fecundity of bream and bass by the banks, and the swirl of their departure upon my footfall–yes, bring it, bring it all.