“How’s your day goin’?” the young woman tending the cash register in the Linton, N.D., convenience store  asked me Sunday afternoon as I laid my ice cream bar on the counter and reached for my wallet.

“I need some ice cream,” I replied, handing her some cash.

“That wasn’t what I asked you,” she said, somewhat cheekily I thought.

Then I quickly realized this was not some perfunctory question. She really wanted to know “how my day was goin’,” even if to just engage in some conversation because she’s stuck here in a small-town gas station on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and probably didn’t have more than half a dozen customers stop in her whole shift.

“Well, it’s one of the best days of my life,” I said, with no small amount of enthusiasm.

She stood up a little straighter, and her face lit up as she asked, “How so?”

“I shot a limit of ducks and now I’m driving the back roads home on a beautiful fall afternoon.”

“Oh. I hope you enjoy the REST of your day,” she said as she handed me my change.

 “You, too,” I said as I headed for the door.

That’s the short version of what really WAS one of the best days of my life. Sunday, Sept. 22, the Autumnal Equinox, the first day of Fall 2024. Here’s a little longer version.

It started at 4:45 a.m., almost exactly four hours before the official start of fall in North Dakota, with three pretty old men (total ages 223) gathering at a kitchen table in a small house in Kulm, N.D., deep in the heart of Prairie Pothole duck country, to drink coffee and talk about ducks. And geese. And what time the sun would come up and that we could legally shoot ducks half an hour before that. At exactly 6:54 a.m.

When the coffee pot was dry, we loaded up the decoys and the shotguns and shell boxes into a pretty old but pretty reliable Chevy Suburban, Jeff Weispfenning’s “hunting truck.”

We headed west a few miles under a picture-perfect sky, clear and bright, and as we were setting our decoys, I swear we could see our shadows from the light of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, and as bright as I have ever seen it — it’s true the stars are brighter out on the North Dakota prairie, far from any man-made lights — still high in the southeast. Well, OK, the shadows were from the bright, waning moon, still high in the west on this Equinox Day. But when you turned your back to the moon and looked up, Sirius, and Orion above it, were a real feast for city-boy eyes.

Jeff’s out checking the decoys as the sun comes up.

Wayne Carlson and I had scrunched into what available space was left in the Suburban and about 4 miles later, where the Soo Line railroad tracks cross North Dakota Highway 13, Jeff had spotted a likely field for a morning of shooting at ducks and geese. Notice I used the word “at” because that’s what Wayne and I mostly did, each of us burning up a box of shells before we reached our limit about 9:30. Jeff beat us by about an hour and waited patiently while wave after wave of ducks floated by us, but in a spectacular act of magnanimity, volunteered to retrieve the downed birds when we managed to drop one into the decoys spread out in the wheat stubble field alongside the slough where we were hiding in the cattails while we reloaded our guns.

That kind of looks like a hunter out there on the hill beyond the decoys, but it’s actually just an interestingly shaped tree off on the horizon.

A few small flocks of Giant Canada geese checked out our decoys, and we managed to drop just one of those just before we reached our limit of 15 ducks. All mallards. I told the boys that my dad, who was a pretty darned good duck hunter, used to say when we were sneaking up over a stock dam to jump a flock on the water, to look for the green-headed mallards. He believed they had fewer pinfeathers. “There are only two kinds of ducks: mallards and shit ducks,” he’d say.

By 11 a.m., we were at Jeff’s dad’s farmstead (now abandoned except for a few old buildings, a Quonset and a couple grain bins), where we cleaned the birds, divided them up, sipped a beer, and headed home.

And that was the start of the second half of one of the best days of my life.

Instead of heading due north for the Interstate, I decided to see a little bit more of the Prairie Potholes on two-lane roads. And drive through some little towns I hadn’t visited in a while. Fredonia, Kulm, Lehr and Wishek, where I bought some of their famous sausage at Stan’s Supermarket. And Linton, for ice cream.

Wishek, home of North Dakota’s most famous sausage.

Fredonia is Jeff’s hometown. I love their “Welcome to Fredonia” sign. Notice the names of the bar and cafe. Jeff told me their story. When they opened the bar, they named it “Third Base” because it’s “the last stop before home.” And when they opened the cafe, keeping with the theme, they named it “The Home Plate Cafe.” The bar is still open. The restaurant closed a few years ago.

Fredonia is kind of a baseball town.

Notice also the Welcome to Kulm sign. ALL of the town’s churches welcome you. Yep, that’s all of them. Notice there’s no Catholic church in Kulm. I found that strange. It’s not a big town, fewer than 400 people left there, but there are still quite a few farms. And the population has been predominantly German. But no Catholics. There must be some kind of story behind that.

Sorry, no Catholics here to welcome you.

And all along those two-lane roads were potholes and sloughs and lakes where the ducks that might have escaped our errant shooting in the morning were lazing away a sunny afternoon, with hardly a breath of wind disturbing the water under their floating feathers.

I managed to stretch a normally two-hour drive to four hours. It was one of those days when it was impossible to hurry to get inside when the outside was so beautiful.

And all the way down North Dakota Highway 13 and up North Dakota 1804, I thought of those words I spoke to the cashier in Linton. “One of the best days of my life.” I tried hard to think of a better one, but the deeper I got into the countryside, the harder that task became. I stopped a few times on gravel turnoffs, got out and smelled the air. As fresh as I’ve ever smelled it. And I couldn’t come up with a better day. In fact, I’m still pondering that.

Two sentinels standing watch over a North Dakota two-lane road. State HIghway 1804. I named the trees Lewis and Clark.

The sky was as blue as I’ve ever seen it. The water beside the roads, too. The hayfields had more of those big round bales than I’ve ever seen in them before. The mostly unharvested corn was 7 feet tall beside the road. The big dark heads on the sunflowers were so heavy they hung halfway to the ground, and they reminded me a bunch of misbehaving school kids standing in the corner of the principal’s office with their heads hanging down.

For the last 10 miles or so coming up 1804, I could look west at the green, green Hills of Huff, across the Missouri, and I flirted with the idea of driving right by my Bismarck house and keeping on going to Highway 1806 on the Mandan side of the river for an up-close look at them.

But I was tired. I’m not used to being on my feet at the hour I had started that day. I went home. Lillian, the woman I love almost as much as the ducks — just kidding, Honey — anticipating my arrival, had a slow cooker of chicken wild rice soup waiting for me on the kitchen counter. The smell that escapes through that tiny little hole in the cover of the crockpot had permeated the house, and there was a cold bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge. And after I had eaten and drank my fill, I pretty much did nothing else the rest of the day.

I watched the sun sink below the horizon from the comfort of my recliner, just as I had watched it creep up over our decoys some 13 hours earlier, and I tried to think once more of a day better than this one. And thought to myself “I am a 77-year-old man who may have just had the best day of his life.”

FOOTNOTE:

As I drank my first cup of coffee this morning I found two text messages on my phone, written Sunday, after I had shut my phone off to savor the day.

From Wayne: “I had a great weekend. I just woke up from a short nap. I had a smile on my face because I had a great weekend. I am just a bad shot — to be fair, Wayne’s beginning to suffer some pretty serious eye problems, but he doesn’t let it slow him down) — but I don’t care because I had fun scaring the shit out of ducks and geese.”

From Jeff: “My day was Grade A, too. I was going to say top 10 duck hunting day, but then I thought some more and I realized that we are talking top five, if not the best ever. Thanks for being my friend and thanks for playing with me today.”

Back at you boys. One of the best. Maybe the best. So far.