You're Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck

by Bill Heavey

  You’re Not Lost

  if You Can Still

  See the Truck

  Also by Bill Heavey

  If You Didn’t Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat?

  Misadventures in Hunting, Fishing, and the Wilds of Suburbia

  It’s Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It:

  Misadventures of a Suburban Hunter-Gatherer

  You’re Not Lost

  if You Can Still

  See the Truck

  The Further Adventures of America’s Everyman Outdoorsman

  Bill Heavey

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2014 by Bill Heavey

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  This book is published by arrangement with Field & Stream magazine, in which many of the book’s pieces originally appeared.

  “Shopping Is Fun, but Not for Men” (September 1994), “The Girls of Summer” (1996), “It’s a Bass World After All” (August 1998), “Alone with a Pretty Woman in a Small Room with a Big Mirror” (April 1988), and “Truce and Consequences” first appeared in the Washington Post. “Suddenly, She Was Gone” (February 2001) first appeared in Washingtonian.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2302-2

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9186-1

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For Mom

  The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.

  —Mark Twain

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part I: Taking the Bait, 1988–1999

  Partners

  Fallback Flats

  Shopping Is Fun, but Not for Men

  Monster in a Box

  The Girls of Summer

  A Chip off the Old Root

  Can I Tell You Something?

  A Bowhunting Obsession

  The Waiting

  It’s a Bass World After All

  A Morning in the Blind

  Alone with a Pretty Woman in a Small Room with a Big Mirror

  Birth, Death, and Doves

  Truce and Consequences

  Part II: It’s Always November Somewhere, 2000–2004

  Worthy

  American Scene: Rod and Reel Repair

  Tree-Stand Day

  Finally . . . Uncle Danny

  Suddenly, She Was Gone

  Killing Time

  Bubble Boy

  A Sportsman’s Life: Drum Roll

  Spring Canoe Tricks

  The Kid in the Photo

  None Dare Call It Happiness

  Snoop

  Paradise Lost

  Only So Many

  As Good as It Gets

  Camp Rules

  All Alone in Tarpon Paradise

  Good Cop, Bald Cop

  Part III: Not Entirely Untrue Stories, 2005–2009

  The 2005 Elmer Awards

  On Track

  Lost in the Woods

  Stalking the Highlands

  Daycare Fishing

  Always on Call

  The Wild Card

  Good Grief

  A Sinking Feeling

  I’ve Been Caught

  Unsinkable

  Have Gun, Will Travel?

  What I Believe

  You Can’t Touch This

  Current Crazy

  Clay-Bird Brain

  How to Be the Man

  Part IV: I Wouldn’t Try That if I Were Me, 2010-2014

  The Last Mountain Man

  Handy Man

  Salute to Turkeys

  None for All

  Lizard Lust

  School’s Out

  My Late Season

  Making the Cut

  Casting a Spell

  Caulk This Way

  Rash Words

  Unholy Mackerel

  Son of a Gun

  The Old Warrior

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Have you ever experienced one of those days when every cast seemed to land right in front of a willing fish or your arrows flew toward the target like guided missiles or you crushed fifteen clay pigeons in a row at a skeet range?

  Neither have I. In fact, whenever some bright-eyed geek is recounting such a moment—people who have experienced “flow” are always dying to tell you about it—I immediately ask if they’ve experienced the opposite phenomenon, which one groundbreaking behavioral psychologist (me, although I don’t share that part) has called “flu.” No? Quite understandable, I tell them. It’s a recent discovery.

  Flu, I explain, is the vague but unmistakable sense that, while you’re sort of immersed in the moment, you’re pretty much doing everything wrong. Further, although you’re aware that you’re screwing up, you feel powerless to do much about it. If you’ve ever spent six hours in a tree-stand without seeing a deer, started your descent, and then startled a big buck that has been bedded for hours right beneath you, that’s “flu.” Maybe you’ve sat in a boat with a bunch of lures at your feet, tied one to your line and then tossed it out, the better to reel it up to the proper height for casting. Except that you didn’t toss out the lure you tied on—but rather the one next to it, which has just sunk and is gone forever. That’s flu.

  I’m telling you all this so that you, dear book buyer, can make an informed decision about the outdated media format currently in your hands.

  If you’ve ever experienced flow or are in any way interested in learning more about it, this is not the book for you.

  If, on the other hand, you’ve ever experienced flu, or—like me—felt as if most of your life has taken place under its influence, you are in the right place. Here you will find aid, comfort, and validation.

  Why do you need this? It’s because the public has been hoodwinked into believing that being good at what you like to do is of great consequence. It’s not. Enthusiasm is a lot more important than skill. On numerous occasions, for example, I have traveled thousands of miles to catch certain types of fish, failed utterly, and had a hell of a good time doing so. A competent person who did likewise—even the competent get skunked occasionally—would have been miserable.

  I’m able to fail and have a good time simultaneously because I am—by nature and by preference—an amateur rather than a professional. The sources of those two
words are instructive. The root of “amateur” is the Latin amaˉtor, or “lover.” The root of “professional” is the medieval Latin professioˉ, “the taking of vows upon entering a religious order.”

  If the question is whether I’d prefer being a lover to becoming a monk, I can tell you the answer right now.*†

  * (Scary asterisk warning) Several women and children appear in this book. One is my first wife, Jane. Another is Michelle—to whom I hope to be married by the time this appears—who appears as my girlfriend. Our kids also appear: my daughter, Emma, and Michelle’s two boys, Jack and Cole. Jane’s daughter Molly—my stepdaughter—is here as well. None of these children were seriously harmed in the making of this book.

  † (Don’t-say-I-didn’t-warn-you warning) Although this book is mostly about hunting and fishing, it contains a few other pieces: stories about my dad, my fear of dancing, why I hate to shop for clothes, and one about losing my baby daughter, Lily. In all cases, I have operated under the assumption that there is nothing particularly special about me, and that if it happened to me it has probably happened to other people. If you recognize your own experience in any of these stories, rest assured that it is strictly on purpose.

  I

  TAKING THE BAIT,

  1988–1999

  PARTNERS

  “Think they might be moving,” says a voice on the phone. It’s Greg. We last spoke four months ago, but he talks as if the conversation has been interrupted by someone burping instead of winter. Every spring when the sun reaches a certain angle and the water’s edging up toward 60 degrees, Greg and I seem to find each other. It’s been like this for six years now.

  “I’m working a job nearby,” he continues, not waiting for me to say hello. “Primer’s got to dry for at least five hours. I got the boat on the car, and if I pick you up in fifteen—”

  “’Preciate all this advance notice, bud,” I interrupt sarcastically.

  “Why?” he asks, his voice full of innocent surprise. “You busy looking through GQ to see how many pleats your pants are gonna have this summer? Want me to call you back in July?”

  I’m already smiling. These are ritual insults, our way of saying we missed each other over the season of antifreeze, catalog fishing, and despair. Greg is an artist and self-employed floor refinisher who drives what’s left of a midseventies station wagon the size of Brazil. In his part of town, the guy at the corner store passes your donuts through a Plexiglas wall with 9 mm spiderwebs on it. I, on the other hand, labor with the tips of my fingers in an office with windows that can only be opened by throwing heavy furniture through them, and live in an area where espresso shops have suddenly begun to grow like shower mold. In a universe without fish, we would probably not be friends. As it is, there are times when we’re almost telepathic.

  “Think they’re still deep?” I ask casually.

  “I’m thinking shallow. Find someplace the sun will have warmed some rocks near—”

  “Like that riprap below the ferry where it—”

  “Nope. Motor-accessible. That’ll be a mob scene.” He thinks for a moment. “’Member where that carp hit on a red shad Slug-Go last—”

  “Too open,” I tell him. “No structure. What about that skinny water up—”

  “Okay,” he agrees. “Yeah.”

  “Make it twenty minutes,” I tell him. “I got three rods to string up. And, uh, Greg?”

  “What?” he asks impatiently.

  “Park up the street. I don’t want any of my friends seeing me get into your car.” I hang up before he can get a word in.

  The fact is, of course, we enjoy each other. Greg routinely and publicly tells me I’m spineless yuppie scum who has sold his soul for mammon. (He especially likes to do this in the dives we stop in for coffee on the way home.) I return the favor, explaining that he digs the starving artist act because it lets him simultaneously dress like a slob and feel superior to people like me who have full-time jobs.

  But that’s just the surface noise. Here are the important things I know about Greg: He will be ten minutes late; he will park right out front; and his car will smell like it always does—a mixture of resins and solvents, unwashed dog (a 140-pound bloodhound with minimal saliva control), and Berkley PowerBaits (the car doubles as a tackle box). Out on the water, he is one of the best guys with a spinning rod I’ve ever seen. Because he’s wiry to start with and because waltzing a 250-pound floor sander has given him wrists like twin boa constrictors, he can throw a 1/16-ounce rig thirty yards back into overhanging trees and never have the lure rise five feet off the water, the fishing equivalent of hitting a one-iron three hundred yards. He’s an aggressive caster, and he loses more lures than I do. But when he’s hot, he can throw from his off side around a tree and drop a plug into an opening the size of a shoe box as if that lure wasn’t even considering landing anywhere else.

  Like all fishermen, we both have our odd proclivities. I, for example, am fond beyond all reason of the four-inch white grub. I’m comfortable with it, I believe in it, and I generally make the fish prove they don’t want it before I take it off one of my three active rods. Greg, on the other hand, is just plain bent. He will throw any crankbait in the book, as long as it’s a Countdown Sinking or Original Floating model Rapala in silver or gold. These, Greg maintains with the demented reasonableness of people who only shop on Mars because everything is always on sale there, are the only hard-bodied lures that look like real fish. And yet he routinely throws plastics in shades they won’t sell to minors except in New York City. One favorite crawfish ­pattern—hazardous-waste-orange claws on an about-to-be-sick-fuchsia body—could only have been thought up by someone deep inside the penal system of one of those Scandinavian countries where everybody goes crazy six months a year due to light deprivation.

  All of this is especially galling because Greg catches more fish than I do. Actually, I can handle that part. (I’m five years younger and ­better-looking.) The real problem in the relationship is that he can fish whenever he wants and I can’t. This has necessitated my developing a number of chronic-but-unspecified medical problems that flare up on short notice April through November and seem to be related to barometric pressure and water temperature. (I think people at work know I’m faking, but as any criminal prosecutor will tell you, knowing and proving are two different animals.)

  Greg and I once tried getting together socially, that is to say with our girlfriends. But I think we did it more because we felt we were supposed to than because we actually wanted to. The results were predictable: a dinner of lasagna and long silences that neither of us has ever mentioned again.

  Last year, however, I heard a local gallery was having a show of his work. He didn’t invite me; I just decided to show up. One of the paintings was a memorial triptych for a friend who died when a drunk’s car jumped a curb and drove through his windshield. It was painted on a piece of ancient wood he’d gotten off the front of a boarded-up store in his neighborhood and combined some strange images: a detailed calendar of the waxing and waning of the moon over several months; painstakingly rendered bits of the cotton plant shown as seedling, bud, flower, and withered stalk; a fireman’s yellow boot and, off in a corner, a larger image of the full moon in whose shadows you finally saw the face of the dead man smiling faintly at you, his name, simon, scratched below. It’s a haunting piece, unflinching, charged with the knowledge of how quickly what we take for granted passes into nothingness. It’s too bleak for people who want something that matches the green sofa in the den and doesn’t take up too much wall space. It’s like one of those books people admire but don’t read. And Greg knows this, of course. But it’s like the way he is about Rapalas—he’s just not the compromising sort.

  The critic in a major newspaper the next day lauded the show, praising its “elegiac power” and calling my fishing buddy “a master of metaphor.” I didn’t say anyth
ing about all this to Greg. He’d seen me that night and nodded, but I’d left him, dressed in clothes only slightly more stylish than what he fishes in, surrounded by men in black silk shirts buttoned up to their necks and women who had gone to great pains to make themselves look as if they’d been freeze-dried, brought back to life, and then painted by undertakers.

  But the next time we went fishing, Greg uncharacteristically threw a large silver Rapala high into a sycamore, where it spun around a limb four times, sealing its fate. “Damn,” he said. “Just threw five bucks up a tree.” We looked at it for a moment, waiting as if it might fall. It didn’t.

  “Look at it this way,” I finally said. “At least you’re a master of metaphor.”

  He looked at me to see if I was consoling him on the loss of a lure, acknowledging his art, or simply pulling his chain. I think he realized it was all three about the same time I did. He smiled, then bit the line, laid his rod across the thwarts, and began to paddle.

  “Running outta daylight,” he announced. “We got time for one more stop on the way back. The big eddy by the island or the bar off the point?”

  “Your pick,” I told him.

  He pondered. “The sandbar,” he finally murmured almost to himself as I picked up my paddle and fell to under the failing light. “I’m betting they’re moving into the shallows to feed.”

  FALLBACK FLATS

  It’s the place you can get to in under an hour, the place that gets pounded like a dead tree at a woodpecker convention, the place big fish avoid, the place where the waters are stocked with compromise. It’s the place you go when time is short and the act of fishing is more important than the catching. In short, it’s your fallback.

  My personal version is a scenic portion of a good-sized river fifteen minutes from my front door. I could draw you its features in my sleep: the two-foot ledge running diagonal to the current; chunky little islands in the middle where some resident Canadas have opened their own fertilizer farm; a line of celery grass off a sandbar that tapers into the current the way the last hairs of your eyebrow peter out into the skin on your temple. While I’d hardly ever been skunked here, neither had I ever unhooked a smallmouth over thirteen inches in the ten years I’d been visiting. Until last Friday, that is.