by Bill Heavey
Jerry phones from his truck, and when we get back to Bass Pro Shops, there’s already a photographer waiting. They put a baseball cap on my head; I climb back on the trailered boat, pull my fish up out of the livewell, and smile. By this time I’m starting to have second thoughts about the whole thing. Fish don’t look right in parking lots.
Then one of the aquarium guys comes and takes her away in a cooler filled with water to transfer her to a holding tank while she acclimates to her new home. I watch them push the cooler away in a shopping cart. Suddenly I have a fleeting impression of what it might feel like to commit my mother to a rest home against her will.
Two days later I went back to the showroom near the athletic shoe section. My fish was in a shallow pool—an intermediate step on her way to the big aquarium. The pool was artfully landscaped with rocks and logs. There were turtles on the rocks and bass and catfish in the pond. All were resting quietly under the fluorescent lights, oblivious to the people and the carpet of pennies and nickels beneath them.
I couldn’t find her at first. Then I spied her off by herself, nose turned into the farthest corner, refusing to cooperate. I stood at the edge of the pond. With their leathery necks extended from their perch on the rocks, the turtles looked like trustees. The dark shapes of the fish looked like sleek, docile inmates.
I suddenly realized what I’d done. I wanted to scoop her up and run, but it was too late. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
THE GIRLS OF SUMMER
It takes us a little over three hours to drive from Arlington to Ocean City, just enough time for two giddy girls in the backseat to perform the Macarena . . . about six thousand times. No sooner have our suitcases hit the floor in the 120-year-old Atlantic Hotel, near the town’s south end, that Molly—my girlfriend Jane’s daughter—and her best friend, Carsie, are sprinting down the long second-floor hallway to the porch overlooking the boardwalk. Ten feet below are two perpetual countercurrents of humanity strolling the boards in flip-flops and tank tops. The timeless smells of this oldest of Ocean City institutions waft up: popcorn and salt air, suntan lotion and steamed crabs, fudge and anticipation. There are racks of colorfully spangled T-shirts, glowing signs for “Dolle’s Original Salt Water Taffy,” “Kohr Bros. Frozen Custard Since 1919,” and “Q-ZAR, Earth’s Favorite Laser Game.” As Jane and I arrive, the girls turn toward us, eyes shining. Molly struggles momentarily for the words to fit her feelings. “I mean, who wouldn’t love this place!” she crows. “Let’s go!” Add two more names to the list of the seduced.
We walk directly from the hotel lobby onto the boardwalk, turn right, and find ourselves swept along onto the Pier, the Times Square of O.C. (It’s the only pier along the ten-mile beach; it’s been here forever; it doesn’t even stoop to advertise in the Sunny Day Guide, the coupon-rich visitors’ guide.) We enter and pass the Whac-A-Mole and the Shoot-Um-Up, a huge Ferris wheel and a small roller coaster, dart games and squirt gun games, and horizontal ladders on swivels that flip you upside down as soon as you are halfway across and the attendant lifts her steadying finger from the cable.
“C’mon folks, you didn’t come here to start a savings account,” calls the young sharpie who’ll guess your weight, age, and birth month (within two). “Can’t win it unless you’re in it,” says a raspy-voiced guy at the Bowler Roller. For those especially slow on the uptake, there is a sign at the Softball Toss beneath the red plush bulldogs and yellow Tweety Birds: “Have fun . . . spend money.” We shell out $22.95 for a book of one hundred tickets and are soon in line to buy more fun.
At ages ten and eleven, Molly and Carsie are enjoying what may be their last summer before adolescent self-consciousness sets in, flying along just beneath the radar of boys with fledgling goatees and the visors of their caps all shaped to a special roundness. They break into a hyper version of the Macarena while we stand in line for the 1001 NACHT, a flying carpet ride that came from Stuttgart, Germany, and rides around on an enormous steel arm. Waiting to get on the Hurricane, their skinny arms spell out the letters to the Village People’s “YMCA” over their heads.
There are strange moments of human poignancy going on all around here. I watch as a crew-cut little boy sandwiched between two bulky men emerges from the darkness of the Ghost Ride. The metal bar holding them in their seat rises, signaling termination. “Ah,” the boy says with infinite regret. “A pity.” A huge fellow in Harley-Davidson nylon shorts and a menacing Fu Manchu mustache waves tenderly to his little girl on the Ferris wheel. He holds a rough hand up next to his eyes and waves just the tips of his fingers at the light of his life as she ascends into the night.
The Bottle-Up game is simplicity itself. You hold a stick with a string attached to the tip. At the end of the stick is a ring. Slip the ring over the neck of a prone beer bottle and stand it up. The aging hippie attendant does it effortlessly in four seconds. “Did it on my second try, how I got the job,” he says. “It’s easy. You wanna try?” It’s two bucks a shot or three for five bucks. I give him two and watch as the bottle pivots wildly like a compass at the North Pole and falls off its Formica pedestal as soon as I begin to lift. “You can’t give up that easy,” he says, seeing my crushed expression. “Tell you what. Give ya two tries for four bucks.” I’m so confused by now that this sounds like a special deal. This time it’s over in six seconds. “This game is stupid,” I explain to Jane. The girls, ecstatic at this show of adult frustration and ineptitude, break into the Macarena.
The next day, sitting on the beach, I watch two people being pulled around the sky in parachutes attached to speedboats. “Isn’t that just the silliest thing you ever saw,” a woman three towels over says to her husband, who is wearing a tennis hat and shielding a can of beer from the beach patrol. Instantly I decide I must go parasailing or die.
Three blocks behind the hotel, on the bay side, I find a booth for Island Watersports. The attendant tells me, “We have a four-hundred-foot, an eight-hundred-foot and Ocean City’s highest ride, twelve hundred feet. The question is, how high do you want to go?” To fully appreciate this moment, you need to understand that the attendant is a young babe and that I am a pale forty-one-year-old bald man who won a Kewpie doll last night when the age-guesser pegged me for forty-seven. “Gonna, uh, gonna go all the way up,” I stammer, handing her a credit card from which she deducts fifty-five dollars (with a ten-dollar coupon from the Sunny Day Guide) for a ten-minute ride.
Half an hour later, I’m standing on the rear platform of a speedboat slamming through the waves while a tanned young guy shaped like an inverted pyramid fastens a mountain climber’s harness around my hips as if I’m his incontinent grandfather. He clips the harness to the guylines of the parachute and tells me to sit down on my butt. The boat speeds up and goes away, and I am rising up in the air like Icarus in rubber sandals.
It’s effortless, dream-flight. The roar of the boat fades to a distant mosquito buzz, the wind rocks me gently in my harness, and I am looking down at the white backs of gulls below me. I wave placidly to some people who are looking up at me from a sailboat and they wave back. I arch my back into the harness to tilt my chute to catch more air. I want to go higher. I want this to last forever. This must be how it is when your soul rises up, freed at last from its mortal suitcase.
From here Ocean City and its mighty high-rises look puny, the whole shebang built on a narrow spit of sand that one good wave would wash back into the sea. The wakes of boats look like long white feathers ever growing and fading in the water. The line reels me in, and I land standing up from exactly where I left.
That night, back at the pier again, Jane wants to try the Bottle-Up. She can’t do it, either. “How ’bout you, sir,” the guy says, lazily righting her fallen bottle with the stick. I tell him he already got me last night. “Oh, yeah, I remember,” he says, his face brightening with recognition. “You the guy almost won it.”
A CHIP OFF THE OLD ROOT
All I kno
w is the tug in my blood that announced itself suddenly in my late thirties must have come from someplace. I can’t lay it at the feet of my father. In the seven generations since we left Ireland, there has been not a single hunter recorded among the Heaveys. On the other hand, there had to be a few guys back in the deep end of the gene pool who had a talent for bringing home meat or I wouldn’t be here, right? Maybe I’m just atavistic, a chip off the old root.
The way the urge hit reminded me of that ad on television where the guy answers his doorbell to find the pizza delivery man there with a smile on his face, pizza box open with the fragrant steam rising up out of the box. He didn’t order the pizza, but now that he’s got a whiff of pepperoni and mozzarella, there’s no way that pie is leaving his porch. Same thing happened to me. On a whim, I went along with some guys going duck hunting one morning, and as soon as the first bird flew overhead I knew it wasn’t binoculars I wanted to be holding. Some neural switch had been thrown, some connection made. And now I’m sitting with a stiff back against a tree, a Polar Heat seat under my butt, and a rifle in my lap. It’s opening day of deer season, and I’m hoping to get lucky.
Some guys hunt smart, some guys hunt stubborn. Being a late entry in the game and self-schooled to boot, my learning curve has been on the flat side. Sure, I’d like to be one of those guys who grew up steeped in the finer points of hunting lore, waiting in ambush for a buck with a rocking chair on its head, which I’d been stealthily patterning for months. I wish I could look at a patch of woods and break it down into deer subdivisions: restaurant, bedroom, escape route, and commuter line, knowing that just after shooting light, old Mr. Many Tines would come waltzing through the acorns. Heck, I wish I could get into a tree stand fifteen feet off the ground without killing myself. But I can’t. (I’m not stupid. I’ve seen them in my local gun shop. If you wanted to design a baitless mousetrap for humans, this is pretty much where you’d start.) So I’m going at this thing freestyle, hunkered down behind a tangle of vines twenty-five yards from where two deer trails intersect along a little stream. My boots smell like a fox with serious bladder control problems. I’ve got six little tufts of cotton doused with doe-in-estrus urine arranged in a circle around me. And I’m waiting for something with horns on its head to walk by.
What I lack in smarts I hope to make up for in persistence, what a friend calls the middle-linebacker mentality. The deer have me way outclassed in woods savvy. I’m as green as the cheese in the back of your refrigerator. But they have to be right all the time, and I only have to be right once. I arrived by flashlight, freshly showered with scent-killing soap and wearing a camouflage face mask that would get you handcuffed within thirty seconds if you put it on in an airport. I’m prepared to leave by flashlight, too. I have a set of cheapo binoculars that make my eyes feel like they’ve been doing twenty-five-pound curls, aspirin to counter that pain, an ample supply of cookies, a quart bottle of water, and an empty quart bottle with a tight cap to pee in. You can lose the battle all day long and still win the war with one shot.
Distant fire sounds all around me. Sometimes it comes in volleys of three, which I imagine to be a miss, a wide miss, and a final gunpowder curse from a greedy hunter. I suppose I should thank those guys. Maybe one is sending a buck my way right now. The squirrels that crash through the dry leaves seem oblivious to me, approaching within ten feet and giving me reason to be cheerful. A flicker hops backward down the trunk of a pine tree thirty feet in front of me, cocking its head to one side as if deciding whether to believe the wood when it swears there are no bugs beneath its bark. Around ten thirty a red fox comes trotting boldly up the trail, with a gait that is neither dog nor cat. Sixty feet away it pauses, thinking for a moment. I hold my breath, trying to melt into the scenery. It lowers its nose and resumes its weightless amble through the dry leaves and is gone. Hey, bubba, things are looking up.
Only they’re not. For the next four hours, the woods close for business. Nothing stirs. Maybe the garlic in last night’s spaghetti has begun to seep from my pores. Maybe the deer have cordoned off a circle with a radius of a hundred yards, using me as the center. Maybe they’re talking amongst themselves, saying, “You know, I love the smell of commercially bottled fox urine. It always reminds me of fall.” I scrunch my toes in my boots to ward off numbness, arch my lower back to fine-tune the ache. Hey, it could be worse. I could be playing golf.
At three o’clock, contact. The faintest shuffle of leaves. I slide my eyes to three does along the top of the far ridge, 125 yards away, and adrenaline floods my body. They are dainty and tentative: heads down and sniffing, stopping and starting incessantly, tails lowered but twitching. I move the glasses up to my eyes in slow-mo. My hands are shaking, but I can make out the does’ dark muzzles and a white patch across each throat. Seeing deer is still magic to me, like a cave painting becoming animated, a contact with the spirit world. My blood remembers things my head has never even had the chance to forget. The deer quarter away and dissolve into the trees.
The sighting is enough to keep me on full alert for the next two hours, sure that at any moment something is going to happen. By five the day is already turning to dust, the light soaking back into the ground. The wind rises for a few minutes and dies away. The woods are absolutely still. At last I lean away from the tree and fall back slowly until I’m flat on my back and looking straight up. From a hollow in a tree fifty feet above my head, the night shift is reporting for work. Two raccoons poke their noses out for a sniff, then lumber out and spend the next five minutes rubbing their heads with their hands, scratching themselves, then grooming each other. They walk out and back along several of the larger limbs to stretch their muscles. As the last of the light leaves, I can just make out two shapes inching down the trunk headfirst. I wait till they’re down and gone before I switch on my flashlight, shuck the cartridges from my gun, and begin the walk out. I’m stiff, bone-tired, and strangely happy. I’m making friends with my ancestors.
CAN I TELL YOU SOMETHING?
“Can I tell you something?” the famous outdoor writer asked suddenly. We’d been in his Jeep for about a hundred miles on our way to a tidal river on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to fish for largemouth bass. I’d called him up because I was a smaller fish in the same pond and hoped to learn a trick or two at the feet of a master. I’d been surprised when he immediately invited me along on a fishing trip. He checked the rearview before continuing.
“I don’t like fishing and hunting that much anymore.” I looked at him closely. This was not some retiring aesthete, but a tough old bull with an ego to match, a guy who’d outhustled a lot of competition to get his job, then cut a wide swath doing what the rest of us dream about. He’d been all over the world fishing for brook trout and marlin, crappie and tarpon, bass and bonefish. Closer to home, he had his pick of blinds in duck and goose season, and access to private clubs where he could hunt trophy bucks each fall. And now he was telling me his heart wasn’t in it.
“What I mean is that I don’t like killing animals anymore. I still love being out there in the woods or on the water. That part never gets old. But the shooting . . . I haven’t told anybody this but I had a big buck in my sights at forty yards last November and I just let it walk.”
“What about fishing?” I asked, buying some time to think all this over. “I’m sure you release just about everything you catch.”
“I do. I hardly ever use anything except a fly rod and barbless hooks. But that’s not the point. I’ve started feeling like I don’t even want to bother the fish unless I’m going to eat them. I just want to let them go about their lives. Does that make any sense to you?” He looked as if he’d already told me more than he’d intended.
Sure it made sense, I told him. Part of the problem was political. As hunters and anglers, we must constantly justify our sport to people who think we’re witless barbarians. It’s hard to explain to someone whose mind is already made up that you hunt beca
use of how it connects you to the natural world. Someone who has never taken up a gun, bow, or rod will never understand how that act suddenly transforms you from an observer to a participant in life. We who possess that knowledge count ourselves a lucky but beleaguered minority. So it seems almost treasonous to deviate from the code, even when that’s what a man’s feelings are telling him to do. I know of more than one hunter who, after decades of filled tags, went down to his workshop one day and, without telling anybody, replaced the barrel on his rifle stock with a telephoto lens. Now he shoots pictures instead of bullets. He is neither better nor worse than his friends. He does what’s right for him.
We talked about how a young man wants passionately to make his mark upon the world, to see how he measures up. Over time, a certain kind of man will develop more than a good roll cast and an instinct for where a big buck might lie up on a windy day. He’ll also be wondering how he stalks. He’ll kill cleanly or pass up the shot. He’ll land and release a fish before exhaustion threatens its recovery.
But for some men, there comes a time when even that isn’t enough.
The outdoor writer and I went out on a small tidal river near the Chesapeake Bay under perfect conditions, fished hard for nearly seven hours, and got skunked. It was a beautiful place. There was almost nobody else around and we were casting well. As dusk turned to dark, we reeled in and headed home.
“I’m not gonna tell you I’m happy we didn’t catch anything,” my companion noted, “in spite of what I said before.”
I liked this guy. I liked his honesty, how he matched his words to his feelings, even if they contradicted something he’d said earlier. On the drive back we talked about writing and swapped stories. Neither of us mentioned what we’d talked about on the way down.
My own predator instinct is very much intact. The only hope for a big buck in my sights at forty yards is that I’m shaking too much to shoot straight. My girlfriend Jane says I have two driving speeds: regular and on-the-way-to-fishing. I love this urgency, this thing that pulls at my blood like the moon pulls at the oceans. But I can imagine a day when I look at a wild trout with my hook in its mouth and suddenly feel that I’ve caught enough trout. I can picture a buck locking eyes with me in what it somehow knows is its last moment, and discovering that my finger doesn’t want to pull the trigger. I’m not looking forward to that day. But to be a hunter is to have the courage and humility to honor your instincts, even if they tell you the time to hunt has passed.