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Something autobiographical, for no particular reason [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-28
In another geological era, when I started school, all grades rode the same bus. No matter what sort of mayhem was going on the driver would say “Y’all quiet down back there!” and continue on.
Soon after I got on the bus, a high school senior named Kent McIntosh and his two brothers Ed and Joe got on the bus. Kent seemed to take great joy in terrorizing me the rest of the way to school. Somehow, I survived first grade. Kent’s younger brothers weren’t bullies, so my life improved a little by second grade.
Once I got old enough to be allowed out of the yard, I soon became a rambler. Once in my rambles, I came upon an abandoned two story house. Didn’t see anything interesting on the ground floor. Climbed the stairs. At the landing, some steps were missing leading on to the second story. I leaped over that gap. Upstairs, I found a telephone directory that was a single, folded sheet. Its numbers had two digits. I saved it and many years later, donated it to The Logan County Library.
As I returned home from that ramble, a pickup truck approached. Among its three occupants was Kent McIntosh. One of the other occupants asked me what I was up to. I had too say something, so I said I was watching birds.
Here Kent joined the conversation. “Watching birds? Here’s what I do when I watch birds.” He then removed a high caliber rifle from the pickup and took a failed pot shot at a passing Red-tailed Hawk. They then let me continue on.
Decades later, I was invited to join a local Christmas Bird Count that included only two other individuals. I did join. Among our stops was a transient pond a mere three miles from my home. Before joining that count, I didn’t know the pond existed.
A few years later, both those other birders dropped out of the birding community. One due to alcoholism. The other due to a personal falling out with a leader in the Kentucky birding community.
I began to make frequent visits to that pond. In my reports, I simply referred to it as a pond on 739 Road. I saw so many shorebirds there that the KOS leader, with whom my other friend had fallen out said, “You need to name that pond.”
I had no clue, but with a little research discovered that it was owned by my long ago nemesis, Kent McIntosh, who by then headed a corporate entity named M&M Farms. I wasn’t about to attach his name to anything I had any connection with so I dug deeper and found that around a century earlier, the land was owned by a man named Joshua Parsons. It became Parson’s Pond.
Later, that land was placed in conservation reserve and planted in tall grass. It was ruined as a shorebird stop by.
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