In Maryland: Fowl Festival

By Gregory Jaynes

November in America is a time when certain sportsmen go mad for ducks and geese. The flyways are thick with, among other fowl, honkers coming down out of Canada. The season is on, and something rises in the blood of the hunter. It is a passion, remarked upon most lyrically by Ernest Hemingway, who once recalled, "That is the first thing I remember of ducks; the whistly, silk tearing sound the fast wingbeats make; just as what you remember first of geese is how slow they seem to go when they are traveling, and yet they are moving so fast that the first one you ever killed was two behind the one you shot at, and all that night you kept waking up and remembering how he folded up and fell."

Down the nation's East shore, down the Mississippi River, mornings in November are punctuated with the laughter-like calls of migratory fowl and the sharp reports of shotguns. While some people loathe the practice, hunters romance it, just as Hemingway did in that pretty passage. After all, even the argot of the sport is poetry: when a bird sets its wings to come in to feed, it is "whiffing," defined by Webster as moving "with or as if with a puff of air." The hunters themselves have a more evocative term--they call it "maple leafing," a lovely image. To boot, the very names of the birds roll off the tongue like a song: pintails, canvasbacks, eiders and green-headed mallards, snow geese, marsh wrens, white-winged scoters and cinnamon teal.

Here and there in the country this time of year, the waterfowl season is raised to the level of celebration. One such wingding, if you will, is held in the Maryland town of Easton, on the Delmarva Peninsula, and it probably reflects appreciation for the birds as well as any.

Catalog freaks would recognize Easton as an L.L. Bean kind of town. On second thought, that may be a little narrow. It is a Bean-Gokeys-Orvis-Eddie Bauer-Lands' End kind of town; it spreads its trade around. Topsiders, penny loafers, khaki pants, monogrammed sweaters, oxford-cloth shirts, lamb suede jackets and the ever present tweed, to say nothing of argyle socks, contribute heavily to the Easton uniform. Easton was preppie when preppie wasn't cool. Ducks embellish its mailboxes; there are ducks on its welcome mats. It is a place of fine old houses hugging tidy streets. Well-fed cats walk its alleys with the air of taxpayers; they do not prowl.

Fourteen years ago, Easton put on its first annual waterfowl festival. Today the town of 8,000 or so entertains roughly 35,000 celebrators during the three-day event. (The people who attend tend to dress like the people of Easton. A first-time visitor this year was struck by the thought that if a poor man could manage to obtain a chamois-shirt concession, all his envy of Croesus would cease.) The affair nets as much as $200,000, a sum the town divides among waterfowl-conservation groups. Some of the paintings for sale fetch as much as $10,000. Some of the delicately carved decorative decoys commonly bring $3,000. "Hell," explained one craftsman, defending his costly wares, "it took me a week just to do the bill." He meant his duck's bill, not his price tag.

The carver's trade is as tedious as his art is exquisite, it turns out, and this time-consuming aspect of his craft has opened a deep rift between the decoy man and his colleague the waterfowl painter. The man in the decoy dodge calls the man who employs canvas a "flat artist," putting a spin of denigration on the term. Flat art frequently commands a much higher price than the decorative decoy, which often takes much longer to produce. Therein lies the rub. The painter responds that if his work is any good, it is just as exacting--only his tools are different. If he is a cad he may call his work a higher art form.

The carver labors under a marketing burden the painter does not have. According to Scott Beatty, a big, strapping accountant in Easton and president of this year's festival, "Anywhere you have a wall in your house, you have a place for flat art. But you have to think hard about where you're going to put a bird."

In a church a few blocks away from Beatty's jury-rigged attic office in Easton's Tidewater Inn, some of the nation's finest decoy makers were explaining their techniques to a rapt audience. "Think egg, think oval, think round, think pleasant," said Tan Brunet, a championship carver from Galliano, La. "A bird has no corners." As he talked, a neighbor, Jimmie Vizier, another prizewinning carver, addressed a block of tupelo. Shavings flew. Brunet chalked a map of the United States on a blackboard, understandably skewing the southern dip of Louisiana so that it was more prominent than that of Texas, than that of Florida. He explained migratory patterns, different woods, paints, patterns of feathers, and as his listeners took notes, he threw in a little about the Cajun way of life.

"When it gets cold we'll get a sack of oysters, put some sweet potatoes on the potbelly stove, and put a nice tape on -- Willie Nelson, something like that --and then we chop and carve. That's where it's at. It's being happy." Brunet advised not to strive for winning ribbons; rather, he said, strive to please yourself -- something he apparently has accomplished. "I say, when I carve a pintail drake, you can set music to it. Everything swings."

The next carver up, Jim Sprankle, offered no-nonsense instructions, going down deep into all the arcana of his craft. His listeners failed to notice the humor in his remark on concentrating on the head area of your duck. "As far as I'm concerned, that's the focal point. That's what draws you in. You don't look at someone's tail first, so to speak."

Paradoxically, while the would-be carvers were being drilled in meticulous attention to detail, the true hunters in Easton were out in their blinds behind the crudest decoys in all the land. These were goose decoys, fashioned from old tires, plywood goose heads affixed to the rubber in various attitudes of feeding. They were not proving very effective, but this was not the fault of the decoy, nor of the hunter. There had been a full moon, and the birds had fed at night. Now, in the day, they had no interest in food.

In a lima-bean field a few miles from town, some Southerners had whiled away the hours with earthy observations. (For instance, Tip Dyrenforth of Atlanta, in answering a call for cocktails the evening before, said into the phone, "I'll be down in five minutes, soon as I get the Russian army out of my mouth.") There since the chilly dark, they had sought diversion in Snickers bars, peppermint drops, apples and apricot brandy. When conversation petered out, somebody would mutter, "Damn, I reckon," and everyone else would sigh. One among them fretted about his wife, who he knew was Christmas shopping for him on the sly. "She thinks I like anything with a duck on it. Every year a shirt with a duck on it, or a duck belt, or a wallet with a duck. To tell the truth, ducks aren't all that hot, far as your clothing goes."

Just then a V formation of Canada geese came honking down a flawless sky. The Southerners ducked under a mat woven of broom sedge, put their calls to their mouths and commenced a racket that is supposed to sound like geese gleefully feeding. The live geese, alas, would have none of this. Somebody said, "Damn, I reckon," and the others let out a sigh. In a while, Jack Bailey of Rocky Mount, N.C., allowed that "some of the happiest hunts I've ever been on, I've never fired a shot. They're just beautiful to look at." His companions agreed with the sentiment, which was, after all, the whole point of the festival.

-- By Gregory Jaynes