"HAAAAAYAAAAA!" I yelled. "GET OUTA THERE!"
"Did you run the beggar off?" my wife asked.
"I'M YELLING AT YOU! GET OUT OF THE TENT AND INTO THE CAR! I THINK WE'RE NEXT ON THE MENU!"
Not only would a little bear repellent have saved our camp cooler, it would have saved me the repeated tedium of having to listen to my wife regale my so-called friends with an account, including excessively exaggerated pantomime, of my reaction to the bear.
Inventors have made great strides on the problem of reducing the weight and bulk of backpacking equipment, but they haven't gone far enough.
What I would like to see them come up with is a fully loaded backpack that is freeze-dried. When you had hiked into your campsite in the mountains you would merely have to take your backpack out of your pocket, soak it in a little water and, presto, you would have a reconstituted sleeping bag, tent, trail ax, cook kit and, of course, all your food.
When I told a backpacking friend about this idea, he scoffed at it.
"Why not a freeze-dried log cabin with a flagstone fireplace?" he suggested, expanding on my concept.
"That's not bad," I told him.
"Hell," he said, "you'd be the first one to complain about missing the weight of a good pack tugging at your shoulders, the soothing, rhythmical squeak-squeak of the frame and harness."
"For the past five years," I told him, "the rhythmical squeak-squeak of the frame and harness has been drowned out by the rhythmical squeak-squeak of my back."
I also have several suggestions for new sleeping bag designs. One is primarily for use in small two-man tents. This consists primarily of a time-lock on the zipper so that once your tent partner is in his bag he can't get out of it until morning. My friend Retch spends most of the night crawling around, looking for one thing or another. This does not include his answers to nature's call. (On an average night Retch and nature conduct a regular litany between themselves.) Here is a typical verbal exchange he and I had in a tent recently: "Watch out," I yelled at him. "You're kneeling on my glasses!"
"Sorry," he said. "I thought you still had them on."
"I do, you idiot!"
Another of my sleeping-bag inventions would be primarily for kids who are practicing "sleeping out" in the backyard. The bags would contain leg holes for running. This would save the kid the time required to strip off his sleeping bag in order to sprint for the house. These would be valuable seconds saved.
Speaking of children, I would like to see someone invent a small portable lie detector for use on kids while camping in remote wilderness campgrounds where the sole sanitary facility is a privy located at the far end of a quarter-mile trail intersected by logs, several small streams, and a skunk crossing, and frequently occupied with strange creatures that screech murderously at you in the dark.
(Usually, these creatures are simply other parents you surprise hauling their tykes down the trail, but you never know.) The lie detector would work like this: just before their bedtime I would line the little ones up outside the tent and, one by one, attach them to the anti-fib device.
"Is your name Erin McManus?"
"Yes."
"Do you have a dog named Fergus?"
"Yes."
"Have you gone to the bathroom within the last fifteen minutes?"
"Yes."
"Hit the trail to the old privy, kiddo!"
Some kind of detector should be developed for the purpose of determining whether camp cooking is fatally poisonous. My own system, far from reliable, is to observe whether the plat du jour is killing flies and mosquitoes beyond a fifteen-foot radius. Some kind of chemically treated paper, on the order of litmus, would be perfect and a lot less expensive than seeing if the concoction will dissolve a spoon. I certainly could have used some of this poison detector a while back when Retch whipped up his infamous stew consisting of canned pork and beans, cabbage, beef jerky, and the miscellaneous leavings of a five-day hunting trip. Crammed into a tent with Retch and two other guys, I spent the night moaning in agony and praying for a quick end to it all. I don't know what would have happened to my present or future if I'd been dumb enough to eat any of the stew myself.
There are a number of life preservers for use by stream fishermen on the market now, but like so many other inventions designed for the outdoorsperson, their creators have stopped short of the mark. The basic idea of these life preservers is that if you fall in the water they can be inflated by blowing into a tube. With the kind of water I generally fall into, I don't want to waste any time blowing on some dumb tube. On some of the falls I've taken, I probably could have blown up a seven-man life raft before I hit the water if mere floating had been my chief concern. To hell with floating--what I need in the way of a life preserver is something that really preserves my life. As I see it, this would be a recording device installed in fishing vests.
While I was contemplating whether to cross a peeled sapling over a sixty-foot-deep river gorge or possibly to make a running leap to land on a moss-covered rock in the middle of some rapids, the life preserver would activate automatically and shout through two stereo loudspeakers set at full volume, "DON'T TRY IT, YOU FOOL, DON'T TRY IT!"
The Purist
Twelve-year-olds are different from you and me, particularly when it comes to fishing, and most of all when it comes to fishing on Opening Day of Trout Season.
The twelve-year-old is probably the purest form of sports fisherman known to man. I don't know why. Perhaps it is because his passion for fishing is at that age undiluted by the multitude of other passions that accumulate over a greater number of years. Say thirteen.
Now I am reasonably sure that I can catch a limit of trout faster on Opening Day than the average twelve-year-old, but any angler knows that speed and quantity are not true measures of quality when it comes to fishing. It's a matter of style, and here the twelve-year-old beats me hands down. You just can't touch a twelve-year-old when it comes to style.
Preparation is the big part of his secret. If Opening Day of Trout Season is June 5, the twelve-year-old starts his preparation about the middle of March. He knows he should have started earlier, but at that age he likes to put things off. With such a late start, he will be hard pressed to be ready in time.
The first thing he does is to get his tackle out and look at it. He removes from one of his shoe boxes a large snarly ball of lines, hooks, leaders, spinners, flies, plugs, weeds, tree branches, and a petrified frog.
He shakes the whole mass a couple of times and nothing comes loose.
Pleased that everything is still in good order he stuffs it all back into his shoe box. The next time he will look at it will be on Opening Day Eve, fifteen minutes before he is supposed to go to bed. The tackle snarl will then provide the proper degree of wild, sweaty panic that is so much a part of the twelve-year-old's style.
The next order of business is to check his bait supplies. The best time to do this is in the middle of a blizzard, when it's too cold to be outside without a coat on or to have all the windows in the house open. The large jar of salmon eggs he has stored next to the hot-water pipes that run through his closet seems to look all right, but just to be sure he takes the lid off. He drops the lid on the floor and it rolls under something too large to move.
Something must be done immediately, he knows, because uneasy murmurs are rising in distant parts of the house, and besides he won't be able to hold his breath forever. The best course of action seems to be to run the jar through every room in the building, leaving in his wake mass hysteria and the sound of windows being thrown open. Later, standing coatless with the rest of the family in the front yard while a chill north wind freshens up the house, he offers the opinion that he may need a new bottle of salmon eggs for Opening Day.
Occasionally the young angler will do some work on his hooks. There is, however, some diversity of opinion among twelve-year-olds whether it is better to crack off the crust of last year's worms from the hooks or to leave it on as a little added
attraction for the fish. The wise father usually withholds any advice on the subject but does suggest that if his offspring decides to sharpen his hooks on the elder's whetstone, the worm crusts be removed before-hand. Nothing gums up a whetstone worse than oiled worm dust.
The twelve-year-old takes extra-special pains in the preparation of his fly rod. He gets it out, looks at it, sights down it, rubs it with a cloth, sights down it again, rubs it some more, and finally puts it away with an air of utter frustration. There is, after all, not much that you can do to a glass rod.
The reel is something else again. A thousand different things can be done to a reel, all of which can be grouped under the general term "taking it apart." The main reason a kid takes his reel apart is to take it apart. But most adults can't understand this kind of reasoning, so the kid has to come up with some other excuse. He says he is taking his reel apart to clean it. No one can deny that the reel needs cleaning. It has enough sand and gravel in it to ballast a balloon. During most of the season it sounds like a miniature rock crusher and can fray the nerves of an adult fisherman at a hundred yards.
For Opening Day, however, the reel must be clean.
There are three basic steps used by the twelve-year-old in cleaning a reel. First it is reduced to the largest possible number of parts.
These are all carefully placed on a cookie sheet in the sequence of removal. The cookie sheet is then dropped on the floor. The rest of the time between March and the Opening Day of Trout Season is spent looking for these parts. The last one is found fifteen minutes before bedtime on Opening Day Eve.
Some twelve-year-olds like to test their leaders before risking them on actual fish. Nothing is more frustrating to a kid than having a leader snap just as he is heaving a nice fat trout back over his head.
Consequently, he is concerned that any weakness in a leader be detected beforehand. There are many methods of doing this, but one of the best is to tie one end of the leader to a rafter in the garage and the other end to a concrete block. The concrete block is then dropped from the top of a stepladder. The chief drawback of this method is the cost involved in replacing cracked rafters.
Eventually the big night comes--Opening Day Eve.
The day is spent digging worms. Early in the season there is a surplus of worms and the young angler can be choosy. The process of worm selection is similar to that used in Spain for the selection of fighting bulls. Each worm is chosen for his size, courage, and fighting ability. One reason kids frequently have poor luck on Opening Day is that their worms can lick the average fish in a fair fight.
Approximately four hundred worms are considered an adequate number.
These are placed in a container and covered with moist dirt. The container is then sealed and placed carefully back in the closet by the hot-water pipes, where it is next found during a blizzard the following March.
The twelve-year-old angler really peaks out, however, during that fifteen minutes before bedtime. He discovers that his tackle has become horribly snarled in his tackle box. No one knows how, unless perhaps the house has been invaded by poltergeists. The reel is thrown together with an expertise born of hysteria and panic. Four cogs, six screws, and a worm gear are left over, but the thing works. And it no longer makes that funny little clicking sound! Finally, all is in readiness and the boy is congratulating himself on having had the good sense to start his preparation three months earlier. As it was, he went right down to the last minutes. Only one major task remains: the setting of the alarm clock.
Naturally, he wants to be standing ready beside his favorite fishing hole at the crack of dawn. The only trouble is he doesn't know just exactly when dawn cracks. He surmises about four o'clock. If it takes him an hour to hike down to the fishing hole, that means he should set the alarm for about three.
On the other hand, it may take longer in the dark, so he settles on 2:30. He doesn't have to allow any time for getting dressed since he will sleep with his clothes on.
Once in bed he begins to worry. What if the alarm fails to go off? He decides to test it. The alarm makes a fine, loud clanging sound.
After all the shouting dies down and his folks are back in bed, he winds up the alarm again. As a precautionary measure, he decides to set the alarm for two, thus giving himself a half-hour safety margin.
He then stares at the ceiling for an hour, visions of five-pound trout dancing in his head. He shakes with anticipation. He worries. What if the alarm fails to awaken him? What if he shuts it off and goes back to sleep? The horror of it is too much to stand.
Midnight. He gets up, puts on his boots, grabs his rod and lunch and brand-new bottle of salmon eggs, and heads out the door.
It's Opening Day of Trout Season, and there's not a minute to spare.
The Outfit Years ago the Old Wilderness Outfitter started sending me his catalog of surplus outdoor gear: slightly battered canoes, scruffy rucksacks, dulled trail axes, tarnished cook kits, saggy tents, limp snowshoes, and the like. I spent many a fine winter hour thumbing through his catalog. Indeed, such was my enjoyment that occasionally I would lose control of my faculties and actually order some of the stuff. One surplus wilderness tent arrived with authentic wilderness dirt still on the floor, not to mention a few pine needles, a fir cone, a sprinkling of fish scales, and a really nice selection of squashed insects. The Old Wilderness Outfitter never charged for any of these extras, and in numerous other ways revealed himself to be a man of generosity and all-round good character--He put out a fine catalog, too.
The catalog arrived each winter with the same regularity as the snow, and at about the same time. Then it stopped coming. I thought maybe the Old Wilderness Outfitter had died, or was peeved at me because I had sent a letter telling him I would just as soon furnish my own fish scales and squashed insects, and there was no need to include any with my orders. I hadn't intended to offend him though, and if sending the extras meant that much to him it was all right with me.
A few days ago, I was surprised to find in the mail a new catalog from the Old Wilderness Outfitter. Happily, I licked my thumb and started flipping through the pages. I was flabbergasted. There wasn't a single scruffy rucksack in the thing, let alone a slightly battered canoe. The Old Wilderness Outfitter had filled up his catalog with glossy, color pictures of beautiful people.
Glancing at the prices, I thought at first the beautiful people themselves must be for sale. There was one blonde lady who looked well worth the seventy-five dollars asked, and I would have been interested, too, if I didn't already have one of my own worth almost twice that amount.
Then I determined the prices were for the clothes the beautiful people were wearing. The seventy-five dollars wasn't the price of the blonde lady but what she had on, something described as "a shooting outfit."
(I can tell you with absolute certainty that if that lady ever shot anything in her life it was a sultry look across a crowded room.) The men were almost as beautiful as the women, and dressed in a month's wages plus over time. Their haircuts alone probably cost more than my shooting outfit, if you don't count my lucky sweatshirt with the faded Snoopy on it.
Most of the clothes were trimmed in leather made from the hides of Spanish cows, which was appropriate, I thought, because most of the catalog copy was American bull.
After about ten minutes of studying the catalog I could see what had happened. Some unemployed high-fashion clothes designers had got to the Old Wilderness Outfitter and persuaded him to chuck his rucksacks and the like and replace them with fancy clothes. The old codger should have known better. if American outdoorspersons were interested in fancy clothes, outdoor magazines would be written like this: " Doc stood up in the blind and squinted his eyes at the jagged rip of first light beyond the marsh. His closely woven virgin-wool shirt with the full sleeves and deep cape was beaded with rain.
"Hey, Mac," he said, "it's starting to rain. Better hand me my sage-green parka of water-repellent, supertough eight-ounce cotton canvas duck with the handstitch
ed leather flaps."
"Right," I said. "But first I'm going to drop that lone honker, which you'll notice is attractively attired in 100 percent goose down."
The truth is we outdoorspersons just aren't that interested in high fashion. Our preference runs more to low fashion. I myself have turned out a number of outstanding low-fashion designs. There was, for example, my free-form stain made by dropping an open bottle of dry-fly dressing in a shirt pocket. This design should not be confused with the one originating from a leaky peanut butter sandwich. My own favorite is the ripped pant leg laced shut with twenty-pound monofilament line, split-shot sinkers still attached.
Striking as these designs may be, I am just too old to design really first-rate low fashions. I no longer have the time, patience, nerves, or stomach for it. As a matter of fact, low-fashion designers usually reach their peak about age fourteen. From then on they undergo a gradual decline until their last shred of self-respect is gone and they will think nothing of going out wearing, say (shudder) a brand-spanking-new red felt hat.
A Fine & Pleasant Misery Page 9