An Unlikely But Authentic Patriarch

The Turtle Lives Twixt Plated Decks
--By Luke

Luke (left) and Matt

Photo by their Uncle John

Many years ago in Alaska, when my brothers and I were children, and our father and mother were still young, our grandfather spent many summers at our cabin in the woods. The place was overrun. Sled dogs barked and howled at all hours. Rabbits roamed the house with impunity, alongside several generations of hamsters. The parakeets and budgies were less fortunate: they were constantly falling sick.

Wild snowshoe hare looking into the window during
a Gakona, Alaska Christmas.

The property was also home to countless wild animals habituated to us. Especially favored were the snowshoe hares, whose population swelled under our protection, and whose vast numbers, in the end, summoned from the wilderness an impressive force of predators. Attacking on foot were foxes, martens, and coyotes, while great-horned owls hooted ominously from the treetops – death from above. Grizzly bears occasionally traversed the property at night, leaving surprisingly large tracks to wonder at in the morning. Small boys also had to watch for moose, which might stomp on them if they got too close. 

Tim, Luke and Grandpa

Into this menagerie came Grandpa Bob, our summer resident humanist and the designated representative of a distant civilization to which our parents had once belonged. Grandpa’s learning was impressive, but he also knew what it was to grow up in a state of nature. My brothers and I

Tim, being feral.

must have seemed feral to him, and I think this gave him delight. He tempered our wildness with a dose of grown-up learning. He explained the difference between “who” and “whom.” A local expression popular with us, “I got’s it,” was not proper English, he said, though a descriptivist might find it acceptable. He inculcated respect for literature and writers, and curiosity about the motives and talents of Swedish ladies. During the winter, he sent recordings by post, on cassette tapes, of poems old and new – humorous verses about childhood and about our Alaska pastoral.

Luke & Grandpa

He was a man of few affectations. But it was obvious even in those days, from the way he spoke and carried himself, that he felt older than his years, like Bob Dylan or Jude the Obscure.  Noting the pleasure he took in his (at the time) imagined infirmity, and thinking I might please or, at least, provoke him, I asked him once about a poem by William Yeats, “The Coming of Wisdom with Time.”  The poem goes:

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

I pointed out that the coming of old age, in Yeats’s poem, is not without certain consolations, such as ready access to truth, and asked if he agreed. I recall him grunting with disapproval  – or was it approval? I couldn’t tell. But I may have been too young for the poem in question, or he may have found Yeats too pretentious. 

His real appreciation, in any case, was for light verse. One of his favorites, which I remember him reciting on numerous occasions, was Ogden Nash’s “The Turtle”:

The turtle lives twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.

He always chuckled at the end. I didn’t understand the joke at first. Turtles aren’t native to Alaska’s interior. It was only years later that I saw turtles face-to-face, or gained an inkling of what they did below decks.

But I could tell that Grandpa identified, somewhat mischievously, with the turtle of the poem – that practical, plated, half-concealed, clever, and fertile creature. We, a clutch of far-flung grandchildren, were among other things proof of his potency, his creation in more ways than one.

In the end, Robert Wysong was an unlikely but authentic patriarch. I believe it gave him satisfaction to live, like Job of the Old Testament after his reward, to see “his sons, and his sons’ sons, even four generations,” and finally to die “being old, and full of days.”