“O Death, won’t you spare me over to another year?” — RALPH STANLEY
The first time I met Joe Don Sawyer, I didn’t see him. I only heard his laughing voice, stretching familiar words into odd-sounding shapes as he spoke in his lilting Down East brogue to his best friend, Tonnie Davis of Roxboro. It was in pre-dawn January darkness four years ago. We were in a field near Scranton in Beaufort County. Joe Don and Tonnie were setting up tundra-swan decoys, handing out white plastic coveralls to about a dozen hunters and showing them how to hunker down in a black-earth ditch so the swans wouldn’t see them after daylight.
“You get in the ditch next to Joe Don,” Tonnie said. “You’ll hear and see something amazing.”
About 30 minutes after daybreak, we heard the eerie “whoo-eee” calls of the swans. They’d flown off the waters of Lake Mattamuskeet, the Pungo River, and Pungo Lake where they’d spent the night and now were winging toward local grain fields.
“Joe Don’s the best I’ve ever seen at calling swans,” Tonnie said. “And he uses his mouth, not a call. Not only that, he wears glasses and can see a swan before I can with binoculars.”
“There’s some (swans),” Joe Don said, pointing at the horizon.
I saw nothing.
“Whoo-eeep,” he called, his hand cupped beside his mouth.
Six swans, dots in the air, turned and headed toward us. They’d been a half-mile away when Joe Don first called to them.
That day each hunter bagged one of the beautiful large birds, lured within shotgun range by Joe Don’s magical voice.
“He was a natural man,” Davis said. “He earned his living from nature.”
Later the hunters descended upon his late mother-in-law’s two-story frame house at Scranton where Joe Don served as a rollicking host and cook. Each year, he left Friday evening and returned with a couple bushels of salty Rose Bay oysters. He also served corn on the cob he’d frozen in the husks during summer. His wife, Phyllis, added wild pig and deer roasts. Steamed shrimp, seafood stew, flounder and other Down East delights filled our bellies as well.
Last year during a deer hunt, he was slung off a truck tailgate and slammed into the asphalt. Seriously injured, he was flown by helicopter to a hospital. Although Joe Don thought he was covered by his wife’s insurance policy, he wasn’t. With his shoulder’s muscles and tendons damaged, he refused an operation. “I’m getting better,” he said, lifting his arm to shoulder height last January.
A man who always had a smile on his face, Joe Don was a salt-of-the-earth human being. He’d give you the shirt off his back and his shoes, too, if you asked. Apparently, a lot of people asked for his help, considering the size of the funeral procession that stretched Sept. 19 from Bryan Funeral Home in Swan Quarter to Epworth United Methodist Church at Sladesville.
More than 150 friends who arrived 30 minutes before the service couldn’t find seats inside the church to hear three pastors preach his funeral.
It’s a cliche, but men like Joe Don Sawyer aren’t made today.
His friends, family and community will miss him sorely.
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