Recalling Elmer's poems

Resting beside a Glacier Park trail one summer, someone in our hiking group remarked, “The guy who picked the route for this trail must have been drunk.” He was referring to the manner in which it wandered in and out of ravines, up where it could have stayed level and down where it soon had to climb back up. Someone else remarked, “Maybe we should see if the Park would like us to re-engineer this route so that it makes more sense.”

That’s when our late departed friend, Elmer Searle, reminded us that many of the first trails sort of followed old elk paths, then in his quiet manner, he began reciting a poem none of us had ever heard before. Elmer did that often:

“For men are prone to go it blind,

Along the Calf-path of the mind,

And work away from sun to sun

To do what other men have done.

They follow in the beaten track,

And in and out and forth and back,

And still their devious course pursue,

To keep the path that others do.

They keep the path a sacred groove,

Along which all their lives they move.”

I wondered to myself if Elmer had just made something up, but quickly cast that idea aside because he always came up with poetry that fit the occasion.

Asked about the source of this poem, he said it is obviously not just a satire on how people follow an already established route through the woods, but also how we do many other things a certain way because “That’s how it’s always been done.”

The poem here is “The Calf Path,” written in the early part of the last century by Sam Walter Foss, wherein he tells of how that first primeval path became, over three centuries time, the main street in a huge metropolis. It’s a long poem but the core of the message is clear, “For men are prone to go it blind, Along the calf path of the mind.”

Many years ago The Thursday Over-the-Hill Gang was having Wednesday coffee and I mentioned that I couldn’t go on the hike that week because of a business meeting in Missoula. Elmer recited the following:

“If you put your nose to the grind stone rough

And you hold it on there long enough,

Someday you’ll say there is no such thing

As a babbling brook and birds that sing.

Of just three things will your life compose,

Just you, the stone, and your bloody nose.”

Had doctors fix my rupture in 1998. At that time, there was a poem Elmer gave me and it’s worth repeating. I wrote it out on a piece of white paper and taped it to my stomach just before the nurses took me into the operating room. The poem was one apparently got from an Ogden Nash collection:

“There was a old man with a hernia,

Who said to his Doctor, ‘Gol’ durn-ee ya.

While repairing my middle, be sure you don’t fiddle,

With matters which do not concern-ee ya.”

If anyone ever ran into Elmer on the ski hill or on a Glacier Trail... wherever, and asked him where he had been, the probable answer went like this:

“Oh, I have been where the woodbine twineth,

And the Whang Doodle mourneth for its mate.”

I assume everyone knows what a whang doodle is... right?

George Ostrom is an award-winning columnist. He lives in Kalispell.