Handmade Decoys and Hand-Tied Blinds Recall Old Waterfowling Fling

   While rearranging tools and lawn-care gear in our backyard shed last week, I paused to inspect the duck and goose decoys stacked high and wide along the shed’s south wall.

   My hand-crafted decoys aren’t works of art, and I doubt they’d sell for much if dumped at a garage sale. Still, I built 99% of them back in the early 1980s, a time when I counted down the days till duck season with the same zeal I still have for deer season.

   Back then, I considered myself an aspiring waterfowler.

   But I was mistaken. It was more likely just youthful indiscretion.

   Though my waterfowling passions are now distant memories, I’m proud that I handcrafted nearly 100 duck and goose decoys between 1982 and 1983. I also built a 14-foot lake skiff for hauling all my dekes, and then hand-tied nearly 36 feet of 4-foot-tall wire-grass blinds to surround my 14-foot Lund V-hull. And 40 years later, I still recall my wife’s annoyance when I forever hid the Lund’s cherry-red finish under several quarts of matte-brown marsh-grass paint.

This 1982 photo shows duck and goose decoys that Patrick Durkin made when he considered himself a fledgling waterfowler. — Patrick Durkin photos

   Penny and I even had a hard-charging black Labrador we trained ourselves. Silas was a duck-retrieving machine who thrived on the blasts of 10- and 12-gauge shotguns. He remains a legend in my mind 35 years after he retrieved his final goose while dying of cancer.

   By the time we moved from Omro to Waupaca in 1992, the only ducks I shot each fall were incidentals. That is, if a flock of mallards flew past while I hunted Canada geese over cut cornfields, I took a poke or three. That made me an opportunist, not a duck hunter.

   Even so, I never lost my respect for duck hunters and duck-hunting’s heritage. The best waterfowlers not only love hunting the duck, they love and covet duck-hunting’s sundry calls, decoys, shotguns, clothing and equipment. They even find joy in the endless puttering to maintain all those toys.

   These folks also love reading the works of Gordon MacQuarrie, Nash Buckingham and Robert Ruark; and their tales of historic waterfowling on the likes of Poygan, Chesapeake Bay, the Mississippi River and the Eastern Shore. Real waterfowlers even discuss the nuances of the Atlantic, Mississippi, Central and Pacific flyways, even if they’ve seldom hunted anything but nearby puddles and backwaters.

   Heck, these guys can watch flocks a half-mile or more away in their binoculars, and identify the duck species by studying a flock’s shifting formations, its height over the water, and the rhythm of their wingbeats.

   When Penny and I lived on Lake Poygan during the early 1980s, I fell under duck hunting’s influence and tried hard to become a duck hunter. Duck hunting’s literature is wide and deep, and reading it simply requires time and appreciation. Other requirements, however, involve skill, money and experience. I was attending college on the GI Bill, so money was scarce. To own decoys that could fool divers, mallards and Canada geese, I had to make them myself from the cheapest material possible.

   To be better prepared for Wisconsin’s 1983 waterfowl season, Patrick Durkin built this double-ended duck-hunting skiff.

   I scavenged old 2-by-4 lumber, and sawed, filed, shaped and sanded the blocks to resemble the heads of geese, mallards, scaup and canvasbacks. For the decoys’ bodies, I bought 4-by-8 sheets of 2-inch-thick Styrofoam insulation, and sawed them into rectangular blocks. I then stacked and glued everything into bigger blocks — two high for ducks and three high for geese. After the glue dried, I sawed, filed and sanded the Styrofoam chunks until they resembled divers, geese and puddle ducks.

   I spent Summer 1982 sculpting and painting decoys while listening to radio broadcasts of the Milwaukee Brewers’ march toward their lone World Series appearance. The next summer, 1983, while working as a copy-editing intern at the Norfolk Ledger-Star newspaper in Virginia, I tracked down an old Navy buddy, Chuck Fisher, and built my duck skiff in his backyard.

   When summer ended, I loaded my plywood/fiberglass skiff atop my 1977 Datsun truck and somehow made it back to Poygan, the truck’s 4-cylinder engine straining up every hill.

   My chief accomplishment as a wannabe duck-hunter, however, was my wire-grass blinds that encircled my 14-foot Lund. During September 1983, I cut the long grass-like reeds from generous neighbors who let me take whatever I needed from their ditches and marsh edges.

   Next, I piled those bundled reeds in my parents’ boathouse at Poygan. Then I strung three long, green-dyed nylon cords through evenly spaced screw-eyes that my brother-in-law, the late Maynard Christensen, torqued into the boathouse’s north and south walls. After that, I spent every free hour for three weeks painstakingly tying all that wire-grass to those three cords. All those hundreds, perhaps thousands, of double half-hitch knots still hold tightly four decades later.

   I recall customizing a pair of leather Fleet Farm gloves to protect my hands and fingers from the repetitive abuse of all those knots. In fact, I spent so many hours tying my wire-grass blinds while listening to Oshkosh’s WOSH radio that I’ll forever associate the Kinks’ “Come Dancing” and David Bowie’s “Modern Love” with my autumn 1983 project.

   Unfortunately, despite my homemade skiff, decoys and blinds, I still couldn’t call ducks worth a damn, and I seldom folded the dumb ones I fooled into range. By the time Penny and I left my parents’ Poygan property with our first newborn daughter in September 1985, I sensed waterfowling’s spell weakening. When we moved into our first landlubbing home seven miles south in Omro, I reverted forever to my deer-hunting roots.

   Although I continue to enjoy and respect waterfowl hunters who occasionally make room for me in their blinds, I see no evidence that waterfowling mourns me.