The Story of Delta View and the "7 year old"

There is an old Jesuit maxim, "Show me the boy at 7 years old and I will show you the man!", attributed to St. Francis Xavier.  In the United Kingdom a documentary film series, 7 UP was made, to try and prove the premise that we are all products of class struggle by following individuals from the time they were 7 as they grew into adults of 49 years.  The series was actually pretty accurate in proving that there is truth to it and my own story, I think, bears it out some too.

I was a "free range" 7 year old.  That's the way kids were raised in the 60's, and I am thankful for having had that freedom in my youth.  I came along late in life for my parents, they were both 42 when I was born.  I was a "surprise" to them.  My brothers grew up hunting and fishing with my Dad, but he had given all that up by the time I came along, largely due to his health being poor, due to a life of hard work and hard smoking. My nearest brother is six years older than me and my oldest brother is eighteen years older than me, so my brothers were usually off on their older boy exploits.  With my parents almost fifty, not in great health and tired after raising my three brothers, at 7 years of age, I was often on my own.

With the freedom to explore the neighborhood on my own, without a "helicopter parent" hovering over me, my travels would often take me to the end of our street.  There, I would often be hailed to come to the screened in porch of the home of an older gentleman.  Luckily for me, he was a nice and harmless older man with a sweet and wonderful wife.  He had suffered an injury somewhere in his past and was very limited by his disability.  His injury had left him with what must have been a difference in the length of his legs, forcing him to use a cane and wear one shoe with a very thick sole.

This man, for some reason, (I figured out the reason after I was an adult) took it upon himself to mentor me some in living the outdoor life.  And literally, that is what he used to mentor me with, the magazine "Outdoor Life", giving me his copy when he was through reading it. But he didn't just give me his copy, first, we would sit on his porch, looking through and enjoying the magazine together.  Sometimes we would go out to garage where he had an enormous assortment of fishing gear which he would show me.  He would tell me in great detail about each piece of gear and of course, include some stories.

After a visit, I would take the magazines home, reading the stories over and over again and marveling at the photos and artwork.  In those days, Outdoor Life had great outdoor stories, before it changed to the "how-to" articles that it mostly consists of now.  With writers like Earnest Hemingway and Zane Grey as contributors, truly the articles deserved to be called literature. 

And so the writing seed was planted. I began drawing my own crude depictions of outdoor scenes and wildlife, and even began writing some short, fictional stories.

As an adult I was absorbed in my computer software business for most of my life.  In my fifties I  dabbled with outdoor writing as a hobby for a local paper and some outdoor magazines.  Writing the book Delta View, was a lark.  I just had to get some of that 7 year old out of me and as a grown man with a lot of experiences, it seemed like a good time.

Windsor ruins, the Freeland cemetery, Longwood, Mont Helena, the Shaifer House, my nearby hunting club in the loess hills, Panther Swamp, the Mississippi River, the delta of the Mississippi/Yazoo rivers, the Civil War,  the wildlife of the region, not any one of these things is the inspiration for the book, but, rather, all of them.  And I owe it all to a gentleman at the end of the street that I later found out from my Mother just a few years before she died, was once my Dad's fishing buddy before he had his accident.

Of course, some may say that this all makes sense, that they suspected the book was written by a seven year old...   and that's OK, because I am sure most of those folks are my friends!