"Plain Jane"

     In Snap Shots there are 27 stories about various interesting people that I encountered during my globe-trotting days, both before and after Foreign Service.  However, those 27 stories are far from all of the pieces that I have written and published through the years.  One story that I published about 10 years ago in a hunting magazine had an interesting twist and deserves to be retold.  The story was titled "Plain Jane" and it was about a somewhat mysterious (at least to me, and at that time!) woman that I met while duck hunting in northern California.
     In the mid 1970's, when I was working at Chico State and we lived in the town of Gridley, I used to frequent the Gray Lodge Wildlife Management Area (5 minutes from my house!) to hunt ducks.  Gray Lodge is a huge federally managed wildlife area that is open to waterfowl hunting during the season for a fee.  It is a well known area  for duck hunting in California and very popular with California as well as out of state duck hunters. 
     Many duck hunters came from afar (not everyone lived 5 minutes away like me!) and would camp out in the parking lot.  There were quite a few out of state hunters as well as those from big cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles.  Some would even go so far as to pitch tents, but most simply drove up and slept in their campers.  Jane was one of those "campers" from LA area and drove up in her Toyota Chinook camper, one of those neat little jobs that I used to dream of owning.  What made her unusual was that she was alone, accompanied only by her two dogs.  Back in those days, it was highly unusual to see a woman hunting by herself, let alone camping!  But Jane drove up from southern California a couple of times during the season and camped and shot ducks over the weekend with her two dogs.
     What first caught my attention were her two dogs.  They were unusual.  Most hunters had their Labs or Goldens, some had their Chesapeaks or spaniels.  In other words, they were common duck retrieving dogs.  But Jane had a pair of Wire-haired Griffons.  The Wire-haired Griffons look a lot like the German wire-haired pointer (Drathaar), except that they tend to be shorter and stockier with a lot longer hair.  I had only seen Griffons in photographs before, but when I saw Jane walking the two dogs around the parking lot, I immediately recognized them.  So I approached her and struck up a conversation.  I introduced myself and she responded by simply saying, "I am Jane."  She seemed surprised and pleased that I recognized the breed of her dogs.  She commented that most people thought they were German wire-hairs.
     Jane looked to be in her mid fifties or so.  Actually, I couldn't tell, for all I knew she could have been in her mid forties!  She was a very attractive, striking woman, despite her baggy men's clothing that she wore for duck hunting.  She wore no jewelry or make-up, but had a men's old Omega Sea-Master wristwatch.  As we chatted, she told me that she came up from LA area a couple of times a season to hunt ducks.  She said there was no place quite like Gray Lodge in southern California. 
     When she noticed how I was drooling over her Toyota Camper, she opened the rear door and invited me to look inside.  It was a luxurious interior, compared to my bare-bones camper shell on my Ford pick-up.  I knew how much these Toyota Campers cost and I certainly couldn't afford one on my salary from Chico State.  I would have been tempted to rob a bank to get one, if I thought I could get away with it!
     Jane's shotgun was inside and I noted that it was an unusual gun.  It was unusual in a sense that it was a model that was not very common.  Also, duck guns tend to be hefty and rugged pieces, since they are normally treated somewhat roughly and have to fire stout loads.  Jane's gun on the contrary was a light piece, usually used for upland shooting of smaller birds like quail.  She saw the surprise on my face when I saw the gun.  She smiled and said that she didn't need a cannon, that she hunted for pleasure and not to punish herself with a heavy gun and heavy recoil!  That made sense, but I didn't say anything.
     I saw Jane a few more times after that.  She was always alone, and most male hunters who appeared to know her were very polite but kept their distance and she did not befriend them.  One of the old timers, a regular at Gray Lodge told me that she had been coming to Gray Lodge for over 20 years, that she used to come with her husband, but she was now a widow.  That was all that I knew about her.
     Much later, and quite by accident, I found a shotgun in a southern California gun shop that reminded me of Jane's gun of long ago.  When I asked the gun shop owner where he had gotten the gun, to my surprise he said he bought it from a woman that he knew for many years, a widow of a Hollywood big shot!  I asked what her name was, and he surprised me even more when he said that it was Jane! 
     I learned more about Jane from the gun shop owner.  It turned out that Jane came to Hollywood, from somewhere in the Midwest, to try her luck at the movies when she was young.  It must have been in the 1940s.  She had gotten a few bit parts, but before her acting career could develop, she met and married a wealthy Hollywood movie studio executive.  Her husband was an avid hunter and the two, who were childless, went about hunting all over the state as well as foreign countries.  Then sometime in the 1950s, her husband was killed in a plane crash and Jane became a widow. 
     Jane continued to live in the house that they owned in Beverly Hills, and became somewhat of a recluse, except for her hunting trips.  Her avid interest in hunting and for hunting dogs which she had shared with her late husband became her sole passion in life.  Apparently she died sometime in the mid 1990s.  According to the gun shop owner, he knew her for quite sometime.  Jane brought several shotguns and sold them to him when she decided that she wasn't going to hunt anymore.  She told the gun shop owner that she had no heirs, so she had no one to pass on the shotguns and other belongings, so she was either giving them away or selling them.  As he put it, "she was a real lady!"
     I only knew her as Jane, plain Jane.  I learned of her last name from that gun shop owner some 25 years after I had met her.  The last name just didn't seem to go together for me, having known her for all those years without it, so to me she will always be "Plain Jane."