And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (24 page)

When you're a journalist, you understand that you won't make as much money as an engineer or a financial planner. You understand this as a teacher too. But when you're a journalist who marries a teacher for the money and are surrounded by engineers and financial planners, it's like being locked in a candy store and only being able to buy brussels sprouts. It's not that you envy the people who can have candy, it's that you get tired of feeling like you can't. We had made a lot of sacrifices to follow our dreams and to raise our kids, to be able to have Rebecca stay home, and the one that we felt so close to overcoming after a decade of it being a pipe dream was owning a home in the town where we lived.

Rebecca cried for a half hour and we talked for another one after that. I lay in Will's bed and wondered if I were doing the right thing. Wouldn't my time have been better spent delivering pizzas at night or working at a bookstore on weekends to save up our down payment a little more? Probably. But I was here now, lying on a bed in Iowa and thinking about what was to come. I did my best to comfort my wife and put her mind at ease, bidding her a fair night's sleep and going to bed thinking nothing about the next day's hunt.

S
unday morning came with a little less fanfare. I was up before Mark knocked on the door, then dressed and ran into town for a cup of coffee, which Mark and Linette don't keep in the house. That morning had been the fall time change, so my system, already set for Eastern time in this Central time state, was two hours ahead of the clock. I sipped my coffee and read the morning paper, waiting for the others to get up. We had cereal for breakfast and drove down to the farm in Thornton without stopping at the gas station for drinks. Ben and his friend had gone back to Waterloo the day before, leaving me, Mark, Tom, Rob, and his friend and his friend's young son to work the dogs and hike the fields. The wind was a lot stronger that second morning and the conversation thinner while we watched Jaeger and Zeke do their best to pick up scents in the rapidly moving air. It felt different from the day before. The expectation and excitement were gone. I knew long before the end of the day that I probably wouldn't get a bird. I had had my chance the day before and blown it. But I tried to remain vigilant.

We stopped among a stand of pine trees on the leeward side of a small hill and took a break from the wind. Mark, Rob, and his friend started talking Republican politics, while Tom, the young boy, and I watched the dogs.

The conservatism that tends to run in my family is nearer libertarianism than anything that comes out of the GOP headquarters. Especially with the men. Mark and Rob covered a lot of ground—guns, resource management, education, the deficit—but the central theme was that government should stay out of their minds, their hearts, their wallets, and their gun cases. I've never been one to talk a lot about politics. Maybe it was my early training as a newspaper reporter on government beats that made me realize nothing good can ever come from spouting off. Rail against taxes, and the Democrats you cover will clam up. Rail against Wall Street, and the Republicans link you to the “liberal media.” Plus, I've never been sure enough in my beliefs to come out of the closet as a moderate Democrat among those I love. My cousin Heather is a flaming liberal, as flaming a liberal as Mark is a staunch conservative. And when they talk, they both hold their ground. I can't imagine doing that. I'm just wired to be conciliatory, to avoid a fight when a fight is coming. So I didn't chime in as Mark, Rob, and his friend talked about deregulation and the welfare state with a tone suggesting they had just bitten into a chocolate cake and gotten a mouth full of lemon juice. Instead, I just took it all in.

There's something beautiful about wide-open spaces, something people don't often get when they live their lives in the suburbs. I was standing on a two-rut road that hadn't been used in years, near a small grove of short, dense trees and looking out across a nearly endless expanse of Iowa. From an elevation of no more than thirty feet, I felt like I could see sixty miles. No interstates. No subdivisions. No office buildings or on-ramps. Just space. The sky felt low with blue-gray clouds that looked stitched to the brown and black earth. I thought about how lucky some people are to have all this, the waving grain, the long blowing wind, the subtle undulations of earth as it meets sky in their backyard. And I thought about what it would be like to move there. When he was alive, Uncle Don always made a point of telling me about opportunities in Iowa. He'd help bankroll me if I came out and bought a small weekly newspaper with a circulation of roughly ten that was having trouble keeping the lights on. Or wouldn't I be interested in taking a job as the lifestyle columnist for the
Mason City Globe Gazette
? And I think part of me always thought I might enjoy that. But I couldn't live out here, not with a wife and kids and job that I love in Cincinnati.
Rebecca would go crazy being out here,
I thought as I watched the seemingly endless clouds roll over my head. Plus, how would I ever really make a living?

I considered the life of a country gentleman for a few minutes until the boys decided they'd had enough politics talk and were ready to get back to the hunt. We followed the same track we had the day before only in reverse. As we walked, I paid close attention to the dogs as they worked back and forth and especially when they stopped moving. Every time our line of walkers paused, my thumb instinctively flipped the switch on the safety and I shifted my weight in anticipation of a bird popping up before me. It never did. While I heard Rob at the other end of the line call out a few hens, I never actually saw one, and when we finished up and headed home, I knew my first hunting expedition was over.

I would not kill anything in Iowa that year.

I
felt an odd numbness heading back to Mark and Linette's. I felt like I had studied really hard for a test and showed up to find out it had been taken the day before. But any feeling of sulk, any self-pity, was quickly erased when, after the noontime meal (which is called “dinner” in Iowa and on Sunday is the biggest meal of the weekend), Tom offered to take me out back shooting for the afternoon. Mark and Linette had to go out of town unexpectedly for the afternoon, so my youngest cousin loaded up four or five .22-caliber rifles and handguns into the bed of Mark's pickup and we drove across the enormous lawn to shoot.

You'll think I'm padding the numbers, but Tom and I managed to shoot almost a thousand rounds of .22-caliber long-rifle ammunition in under two hours using a five-shot rifle, a nine-shot semiautomatic pistol, and a nine-shot revolver. Had you been listening from across the street, you might have imagined a war was taking place in the backyard. One of us was shooting as the other was loading and vice versa. I liked shooting Tom's small rifle and even one of the semiautomatic handguns, but it was the nine-shot revolver, the one I had shot with my uncles Mark and Roger, that took my heart. It felt good in my hand and, unlike any of the other guns, I was able to hit targets with it.

Later that evening, when Tom and I were retelling our afternoon to Mark, he got a glimmer in his eye as I mentioned the revolver.

“Well, I think you should buy it then,” he said.

“Really?” I said. I had not really considered buying a gun before (except briefly when Mark had mentioned it to me back at the family reunion). I knew I needed one for hunting, but that was a shotgun, not a revolver, and I ended up having one of those given to me.

“I'll cut you a deal,” he said, and when he offered me a very reasonable price and offered to throw in a case, I was sold. I gave him all the cash I had as a down payment and promised to send the rest the next time I got paid. I loaded the gun, case, and box of ammunition into my backpack and put it in my trunk. I had just bought my first gun. And I figured having a handgun in the house would be good for the day when Molly started dating. I left early the next morning and had put Mason City long in my rearview before the sun came up.

The trip had not been a total waste after all.

17

Hunting Alone

I
think I was just glad I wasn't hungover when the alarm went off at six on a Sunday morning in early December. We'd been out the night before, a Christmas party for a group my wife belongs to for Catholic mothers. It's one of those kinds of groups that was probably started to provide support for stay-at-home moms and an entrée into the local community for new women in town, but it's grown into a near-constant commitment of outings, parties, and events. They even went to the trouble to begin scheduling events for all the husbands to get together. And those are awkward.

“Sweetie, I think you should go,” one imagines a wife saying. “All my friends' husbands will be there and don't you want to get to know some new people?”

“What do I need to get to know new people for?” replies the husband—me in this case.

“But, honey, you have so much in common.”

“Like what?”

“Well, Bonnie's husband will be there and he likes sports. You like sports. It will be loads of fun!”

And so it was that I ended up knowing this group of men, some of whom have become actual friends; others are the kind of acquaintances you can spend a night with at a party never really knowing a thing about—what he does, where he's from, if his name is actually Brian or Jeff. Which is what I did, for the most part, at the Christmas party. I mingled. I moved from bored husband to bored husband and sipped my favorite scotch, checking in every once in a while with my wife, who was drinking vodka and cranberries like Kool-Aid and chatting excitedly with the same group of women she talks to or hangs out with every day as if they had all just come home from decades on separate, but equally deserted islands.

“Hey,” said my friend John, who, like me, does not especially enjoy being in a room surrounded by a loud group of mostly strangers and expected to mingle, “I don't think I'm going to be able to go with you in the morning, but I'll get your gun ready and you can pick it up tonight or early tomorrow.”

I knew John wouldn't make it even in spite of the fact that he had called me the day before to confirm that he was coming. His parents were in town, and I had a hard time believing that his wife, Anne, would be thrilled about him leaving her alone with them and their three kids to go tramping through the woods with me. I had even told Rebecca in the parking lot on our way into the restaurant where the party was held that I had a feeling he would back out.

“Why would you think that?” she asked me, accused me really.

“Just a hunch.”

“Well, that's not very nice.”

I felt like going over to where she was standing, highball glass waving with each increasingly drunken gesticulation, to laugh in her face after he backed out, but discretion, when wives and their friends and friends' husbands are concerned, is always the better part of valor. Plus, I know John would have gone in a second if the opportunity had been better timed.

We stopped by Anne and John's house after the party and he handed me my gun and case and told me for perhaps the thirty-second time how sorry he was that he couldn't come along.

“Don't worry about it,” I said and went home to catch a little less than four hours of sleep before the alarm woke me with a sudden jolt and the instantaneous relief that my head felt fine. A little tired, but no real worse for the wear. I pulled my reinforced upland field pants, socks, a bush pilot shirt, and a soft shell jacket on and headed out into the predawn darkness.

Hunting alone was something I knew I wanted to try if for no other reason than to reinforce my own impetus. It was all well and good to go to Iowa to hunt with Mark and his boys, and I could see a time when I might join my dad in Michigan to tromp through the woods in search of ruffed grouse. But hunting on my own would mean I had done it; I had become a hunter. Instead of, like the little kid on the playground tagging along with the big guys for a game of pickup basketball, being the consummate guest, the outsider, the pretender. I also knew that I wanted to wait to go on my own until after I had experienced hunting in the safety and comfort of experienced family. Without that, my knowledge was academic. Book learning. No substance. I had spent whole hours watching videos on YouTube and studying diagrams in guides explaining how to field dress a pheasant, but had I not experienced it in Iowa, I would never have thought to bring zipper bags with me for the meat. Some things you just can't learn in a book, and some things you have to do on your own.

When I got back to work after the Thanksgiving break, I googled “public hunting ground in Ohio” and discovered, to my pleasant surprise, that there was indeed hunting in a state park not far from where we lived. The pheasant were stocked—or released, since “stocking” is really more of a fishing term and tends to take all the masculine self-delusion out of the whole enterprise for me—three times in this park every November, the last instance happening on Thanksgiving Day. Discovering this, I realized I should have tried to muster a hunt before the holiday and worried that the birds might be picked fairly clean by hunters with more knowledge of the area. But I had, at this time, been hunting before without shooting anything, so I was willing to give it a shot.

I've gotten so spoiled having an iPhone. Time was I could read a map and would actually plan my trips before I got in the car instead of punching in an address or landmark at a stoplight and waiting impatiently the six or eight seconds it took for the GPS app to tell me where to go. I had been to this not-to-be-named-here-for-fear-of-making-local-hunters-mad park before, but never to hunt. And it's a big park, built around a Corps of Engineers–created lake. Just because I knew roughly how to find the boat ramp didn't mean I knew where to go to hunt or even where the pheasant might be. But, pshaw. Nothing to worry about. I'll find my way and be just fine, thank you very much. Besides, I could feel that this was my lucky day. This was the day I would go from guy in funny clothes walking around with a shotgun to masculine purveyor of protein. This was to be my vision quest, the day I went boldly and alone into the woods to become a man. It had to be. It was going to be. I was ready.

I
followed a two-lane country road north as it skirted its way around the park. From what I could remember from the topographical map I'd looked at on my work computer five days earlier, that section of the park was more grassland than forest and since pheasant like grassy cover and since I didn't want to be mistaken for Bambi's father on the last day of deer season, I thought staying to more open areas was not only good hunting, but good self-preservation. So I meandered around, navigating by instinct and passing at somewhat regular intervals pickup trucks pulled off onto the shoulder of the road. Each one, I figured, belonged to a hunter who either lived closer or was up that much earlier than me, and each represented at least one more gun in the park.

I drove another couple of miles and pulled into a gravel parking lot on the side of the road. There was a truck parked there already and I wondered for a moment or two if I should move on. The last thing I wanted to do on my first solo hunt was charge headlong into a thick bramble of underbrush only to be mistaken for a trophy buck and have my brain removed from my skull by a bleary-eyed hunter who'd been staking his claim to the area since long before dawn. I must have sat for whole minutes, allowing the sky to lighten, before looking back toward the road and noticing a field through a thin stand of trees on the other side. I figured I'd be safe out in the open with my blaze orange hat and vest. Should I be disowned of life and organ, it could only be ruled as homicide as long as my body is found in a field and not in the woods. So, I popped the trunk and began the process of getting ready.

When I first began fly-fishing on my own for steelhead in the rivers and creeks that feed Lake Erie, I came to appreciate the little rituals of preparing for a jaunt into the outdoors. I liked sitting on the lip of my trunk and pulling my waders over the fleece pants and wool socks I wore for warmth. I liked checking the pockets of my wading vest or waterproof jacket to be sure I had the flies I needed for the day. I liked the process of assembling and threading line through the eyelets of my nine-and-a-half-foot, eight-weight steelhead rod and double-checking the trunk to be sure nothing was left behind. It felt like I was getting ready for a contest, a gladiatorial struggle that I'm sure, had I played high school football, would have been similar to the pregame ritual of an athlete. It's like putting on the gear was a way of taking off the world I was trying to escape in order to get myself ready to trek into someplace else.

I had a similar feeling when getting ready for that first hunt with Uncle Mark, Tom, and my cousins. My hands had trembled the first time I assembled the Winchester in the field—or very near it—and once I had made sure all the tags were pulled off my new vest and hat, I enjoyed putting them on. It's ridiculous, I know, to take such a thing seriously, but I did. And I was taking it seriously as I carefully arranged the items in my trunk on my first solo trip.

First, I checked the pockets of my hunting vest to be sure I had the right shells. Then I untied and retied the laces of my Bean boots until they felt comfortable without feeling constrained. I was careful when I opened the gun case and slid the barrels onto the action and fitted the forearm into its proper place with the satisfying
thwap
of Play-Doh being pancaked onto a table. I was all set to go. I just had to use the key on the ring holding my car and office keys to unlock the trigger guard—a medieval-looking contraption that locks around a gun's trigger in order to prevent, say, little kids from being able to fire the weapon—and I would be on my way. Key goes in lock, does not turn. Well, it budges a little, but it's not really going anywhere. I struggled with it for a half hour, feeling like a monkey trying to get into a jar of peanut butter. How could I not open a lock? It's like I was back in middle school trying to get my locker open before Stephanie Hagan walked by and left me speechless. It was one of the cruel ironies of my younger life that the girl whose locker was always next to mine, who always sat in front of me in homeroom and who, I'm quite sure, was made by angels out of clouds and sunshine was the one person to whom I most wanted to speak yet was completely unable to because I was, in short, terrified at the mere thought of doing so. Every time she walked by, my palms began to sweat, my heart began to race, and the numbers on my combination lock became blurred and illegible. Even the simplest of fine-motor skills were out of the question, something that continued until high school when she started dating football players and I settled into life as a burgeoning band geek.

My heart pounded, my palms sweated, as I fumbled with the key, turning it a micron to the right and to the left. It wasn't just about having come all the way to the state park and possibly not being able to hunt; it was about the gun. I really didn't want to break or scratch it, and I certainly had no intention of handing it back to my dad with a stuck lock and a clean barrel.

I grew increasingly desperate as the second half hour came to a close and I still hadn't made any progress. I began sorting through options—call a locksmith. How the hell do you get ahold of a locksmith? And would one come all the way out here? I could call the police, but then I realized they probably aren't too keen on the idea of unlocking a gun for a guy who has no proof that it is his. They'd probably think I was nuts. Besides, this was a powder-coated steel lock, what were they going to do? Pull it apart with that little jimmy they use to open car doors? No. I decided I was on my own.

In a lot of ways, it was shockingly like an experience I had had in first grade. I was trying to be so cool. So fashionable, or as fashionable as a first grader can be mindful of being. I wanted to impress, to show off. After all, I had left, moved away, and now I was back. Growing up in north-central Wisconsin, you don't often get in early on trends. Not in the mid-'80s anyway. With the Internet, Facebook, and MTV, it's a little easier. Geography isn't the barrier it used to be. Now, you see something on the Web or in a magazine and you hop on Amazon to buy it for yourself. But, back then, things took time to percolate and proliferate. Having gone away and come back, I felt a certain need to share the cultural wonders my journey had afforded me. I was feeling a bit like a nineteenth-century explorer having headed off into the great unknown of the Indian countryside. Upon return, that explorer felt a need to share in the things he had seen and experienced. It was his right, but also his duty.

Parachute pants were my duty. I had to share them.

They were red—as was the custom—with all manner of zippers and snaps stitched at exotic angles into the fabric. They made a very slight swishing sound as I walked and had the bonus curiosity of being convertible pants. With the simple unzipping and snapping of a couple of closures, they would change from pants to shorts and vice versa. How novel. How deliciously cosmopolitan. There could be little question what I might wear on my first day of school. That had been decided the moment they were purchased, the instant I realized we were moving back to Wisconsin.

When the bell rang for recess, I remember my classmates pushing the limits of the no-running rule to get outside while I sidled at a manly gait. No rush. Recess waits for cool like this.

I'm not sure if you've ever encased your body in cheap nylon, but there's a certain lack of breathability that can grow rather uncomfortable. In fact, wrap your legs in cheap nylon and step out onto a sun-warmed blacktop playground and it feels as if you have put your legs into a steam room and are letting them parboil in advance of a good roasting. It took perhaps five minutes for my legs to get uncomfortably warm and sweaty. One boy, a neighbor, noticed my discomfort and began making fun of me.
Well,
I thought,
I'll show him.
I asked the recess monitor for permission to use the restroom and went back into the school with the intention of unzipping my highly engineered pants for greater outdoor comfort. I found a first-floor boys' room and took my place in a stall. I tugged on the zipper and it moved perhaps two inches before stopping. I tugged again, nothing. Again, again, and again. Still, it would not move. I tried to reverse the process, put the legs back on and, still, nothing. Tiny beads of sweat began falling from my forehead as I worked the zipper to no avail. More than ninety minutes of stricken effort passed before I was found in the restroom by a teacher.