One Easter, when I was five or six years old, my parents gave each of us boys a baby duckling. They were all yellow and fuzzy and we loved them. We named them Donald, Scrooge, Daffy and Daisy. They grew up to be the large white ducks with red around their beaks. At least some of them were females because they laid eggs. I don’t remember too many other details about the ducks except that somewhere along the line it was decided that we should kill and eat one of them. I can’t remember which one was sacrificed, but we refused to eat it. I can still vividly remember seeing that cooked duck’s carcass laying on a baking sheet with not a single bite eaten from it.
I’ll let that particular one rest in peace and tell you about the remaining three. We moved back to Heber in the summer between my kindergarten and first grade years. Mom and Dad had rented the rock house so we lived in Uncle Alma Bigler’s house for the summer. Their family lived at the Dude Ranch close to Airipine during the summer months so their house was available. When we moved there, the ducks moved with us. Uncle Alma’s house was conveniently located right at the bottom of the “West Hill”.
Being well educated boys, we knew that ducks liked to fly even though we had never seen ours fly very far. Not wanting to deny them the chance to see the earth from greater heights, we decided to carry the ducks up to the top of the hill and let them practice flying. We carried out our plan. We took the remaining ducks and carried them up to the top of the hill. We threw them up into the air so they could get a good start and watched them go! What a disappointment they were. They did flap their wings but instead of soaring into the sky as regal birds, they more or less plummeted to the earth. They managed to flap their wings and stay aloft until they got to the bottom of the hill, but then they crash landed on the road and waddled off home.
We were not to be denied and we knew that you couldn’t expect perfection on the first try, so we went down and caught them again and carried them back up to the top of the hill for a second attempt. The second try was not much more successful than the first. Again they flapped their way to the bottom of the hill, crash landed, and waddled on home.
After a few tries we decided to change the objective of the exercise. We decided to see which duck could fly the longest distance in the air before crashing. As I recall, we did that contest several times but I couldn’t tell you which flew the longest distance. Mostly they were glad to get home more or less intact.
We had those ducks for many years. They laid eggs and we ate some of the duck eggs along with chicken eggs. The ducks were pretty good at hiding their nests so we couldn’t find the eggs and as a result, we ended up with at least one or two sets of ducklings that I can remember. We enjoyed the ducks. They were fun to feed, fun to fly and just fun to watch as they waddled around or swam in the water. As my family will attest, I still enjoy watching ducks swim. I guess it all started when we got those “Mighty Ducks” for Easter when I was just a little boy.