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

by Bill Heavey

  June 30, 2009: At 11 p.m., I am back in the terminal, performing the same pantomime in the same spot. As my fingers close around my little knife, I feel a surge of satisfaction only a fellow knife guy could understand. Or maybe an extinct little hominid banging rocks together on the African savanna.

  SALUTE TO TURKEYS

  In spring a sportsman’s heart quickens to the gobbling of Meleagris gallopavo and the primeval pull of the hunt. Okay, in my case hunt may be the wrong word. It’s more like an ancient spring ritual in which I am drum major for the Bad Luck Parade. First, I head into the greening woods with a high heart and a tightly choked but largely ceremonial shotgun. Second, just when it looks as if I’m about to rewrite the old story with a load of No. 5 Xtended Range HD shot, I get bamboozled once again by a feathered dinosaur with a brain the size of a walnut. Third, the ensuing frustration sends me into a state of altered consciousness. From high above Earth, I see all of creation, of which my living, breathing failure is one small but essential part. At that moment, I no longer desire to hunt turkeys. What I want is to make a pilgrimage to the nearest hardware store and have an employee guide me to the special kind of hammer you’d use to nail your own forehead to a tree.

  To date, I have had the good fortune to hunt turkeys in Virginia, West Virginia, New York, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, and Oregon. Those are just the states I remember. Repeated disgrace can hamper the mind to the point where you misremember things of a highly unpleasant nature. I have hunted alone and in the company of experts. In all that time and travel, I have killed a total of . . . let me see here . . . one turkey. And my role on that bird was to stick my gun barrel out of the blind and apply pressure to the trigger. If you could train a three-legged squirrel to do something, it doesn’t really count. What I’m saying is that a person could walk blindfolded into the woods, fire three shots skyward, and expect to kill more turkeys.

  Pop quiz: Wild turkeys exist in 49 of the 50 states. Which state has none?

  Answer: I bet you said “Alaska.” The correct answer is “Whichever state I’m hunting in now.”

  Extraneous side note: One bit of trivia that gets trotted out each spring is Benjamin Franklin’s opinion—disclosed in a letter to his daughter in 1784—that the wild turkey would have made a better national bird than the bald eagle. I disagree. For one thing, there is no historical evidence that Franklin ever attempted to hunt wild turkeys. For another, we’re talking about the same guy who gave the world the flexible urinary catheter. I rest my case.

  Last May, I went hunting with a friend, Gordon Leisch, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Gordon is a lifelong outdoorsman and a gentleman of the old school. He remembers when you could sight in a deer rifle on an open tract of land inside the Capital Beltway. Judging by the turkey fans scattered about his home, he knows how to close the deal. Within moments of setting up, once Gordon had made his first calls, we had two gobblers hammering back. Meanwhile, the ants from the hill I’d had the foresight to sit on had established a base camp inside my collar and were preparing an assault on Mount Nose. I allowed them their little expedition. Unable to contribute to our success, I had vowed to avoid detracting from it. Soon, one of the gobblers was wearing out his voice just over a slight fold in the hill. He couldn’t have been forty yards away. For the better part of an hour, he and Gordon each tried to talk the other into moving. Eventually, he gobbled his way back up the mountain. “I don’t understand it,” Gordon said. “Two steps our way and I’d have nailed him.”

  That afternoon, we hunted for three hours and heard nothing. “I’ve never seen these woods so dead,” he said as we headed back to his vehicle. “Not a songbird stirring.” Ten miles later, warning lights for both the engine and transmission came on. Within minutes, the drivetrain and transmission had finalized their divorce. We were now two guys standing on the shoulder of the road in full camo with a dead truck and eighty miles to go. I noticed Gordon looking at me hard. “If I were the kind of fella who believed in such things,” he said, “I’d say you were bad luck.”

  I told him that was nonsense. Then I asked whether he thought there was a hardware store within walking distance.

  NONE FOR ALL

  Every so often, I take stock of the jerks, losers, and whack jobs who are my friends and resolve to associate with a higher caliber of people. There are just two things that get in the way: that I chose them as friends, and that they’re undoubtedly thinking the same thing about me.

  I recently spent a couple of days quail hunting with two such men. One is the distinguished illustrator of this page, Jack Unruh—my mother calls him “that awful man” for his caricatures of me. The other is the distinguished Kansas farmer Richard Stucky, who has been going broke for so long that it’s almost a career in itself and who—this is the really unforgivable part—nonetheless seems happier than I am. When they invited me on a quail hunt on Jack’s lease in Texas, I accepted immediately.

  Looking at a quail hunt on a cost-per-bird basis is a sucker’s game. It leads to gnashing of teeth and misses the real point, which is to undergo financial and physical hardships so that, by walking around with a shotgun in the company of other men after dogs and birds, you may affirm your continued presence among the living. The hardships incurred this time for Mr. Bob included the following:

  •round-trip airfare from Washington, D.C., to Dallas for yours truly, including airport cabs, meals, and—since I was on the company’s dime—most of my Christmas shopping;

  •a thousand-mile round-trip drive for Richard through record snowstorms both ways;

  •three nights’ lodging at the Cinder Block Inn, proudly offering in-room cold-water service from both taps; and

  •three meals a day at which everything—check included—came chicken-fried.

  Actually, now that I run the numbers, our per-bird cost was surprisingly low. Here’s the scorecard: two full days of hunting, three guns, four dogs, zero birds. That’s right, none. But since any number divided by zero is zero, we now come up against a mathematical paradox known as Unruh’s Conundrum: Even though money flew from our pockets at every turn, our per-bird cost remained at zero.

  In fairness to Jack (more than he gives me on this page), there have never been many quail on the place. He had a decent first year in 1995 and has been holding on ever since in hope of another. Jack has many flaws, but learning from his mistakes is not among them. This may be why we are friends.

  Quail hunting is a bracing and tradition-rich affair. First, you load your shotgun. Next, the dogs bound from their boxes, trembling with excitement, and pee on the nearest vertical object, quite often your leg. Then they rocket away and out of sight, prompting lusty shouts of encouragement from their owners: “Back, Daisy! Back, dammit! Back, you dumbass!” You blow a whistle and punch buttons on the shock-collar transmitter, neither of which affects the dogs.

  Hark! One of the dogs has locked up on a bush in the distance. Quickening your step, you plow through thorns designed by Nature solely to puncture your new $170 upland boots. By the time you arrive, limping, the quail have hotfooted it into the next county. The dog remains on point, completing the timeless tableau of the quail hunt: three armed men executing a citizen’s arrest on a dangerous shrub.

  The surprising thing about a disastrous hunt is how much fun it is. The three of us have knocked around together long enough that it’s a pleasure just to be walking unbulldozed country with guns, dogs, and the possibility of birds.

  Back at the Cinder Block after another birdless day, we sipped whiskey and reflected on our lives. Jack confessed amazement that people pay him to draw pictures, something he’d do whether it paid or not. I said that my luck in the writing dodge—both getting paid and having yet to be exposed as a fake—was equally wondrous. But Richard, who has lately gone into scouting and managing hunting land for wealthy clients, had the most telling perspective. He said that many of the pe
ople he worked for “have got money, but some can’t enjoy it. They’re always worried that somebody else has more land or better land. Whereas me, hell, I’m happy with what I got.”

  Lest the moment get too weighty, I said, “Oh, I don’t know that I’d go that far.”

  “Heavey, you really are an idiot,” Jack said. “So we gonna do this again next year?”

  We were quiet for a moment. “Oh yeah,” I said. “Hell, yeah.”

  LIZARD LUST

  A lot has to happen before every long-awaited issue of this magazine rattles through your mail slot and gets shredded by the dog. This October column, for example, is actually being written in July. Of 2007. That’s right, it takes three years—including story planning, fieldwork, and literally thousands of hours of online Sudoku—to produce a single issue. I anticipate great things in the next three years. By 2010, the following will have come to pass:

  •Our troops will have finally come home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

  •Gas prices will plummet to $1.50 a gallon, thanks to a bonanza in offshore oil production from deep wells in the Gulf of Mexico.

  •The shaky American economy will resume roaring along like a Hummer H1 (whose ingenious front and rear helicopter airlift hooks will by then come standard on all cars).

  •In sporting news, 2010 will be the year bowhunters finally say “Whoa!” to archery manufacturers and their product cycle. Currently, a new compound goes from “state-of-the-art” to “junk-it-for-parts” in less time than it takes to hang a scent wick. No more will guys like me be suckered out of a thousand dollars for a bow with a cable roller guard made of the same carbon fiber as astronaut toothbrushes and new string silencers that harness the sound-absorbing power of Gummi Bears.

  Update: Sadly, this last prediction was no more accurate than the others. Many of us bowhunters would rather be caught wearing our girlfriend’s Snuggie and watching When Harry Met Sally than be seen with last year’s bow. This is understandable. I, personally, would love a new bow annually. Maybe a bow’s life ought to be measured in dog years. That would make my five-year-old Hoyt thirty-five. Thing is, it still shoots better than I do. In the bow-human interface, the human—me—is almost always the weakest link.

  But I still want a new bow. Maybe psychologists are right about discretionary purchases being governed by the reptilian brain rather than the rational one. Fine. Then the lizard in me wants a new bow.

  Money aside, one other thing gives me pause: Somewhere up there, Holless Wilbur Allen Jr., the guy who invented the compound bow, is looking down and busting a gut at today’s consumer-bowhunters. Allen (1909–1979) was a Missourian, a born tinkerer, and an outdoorsman. Frustrated by the ease with which whitetails sidestepped arrows from the fastest bows of the day, he began to experiment. And experiment. Using a borrowed physics book, he boned up on the leveraging principle of a block and tackle, then took a sawed-off recurve and added pulleys to both ends. It was crudeness itself: wooden eccentrics, a handle of pine boards, and oak flooring for the limb cores; the whole contraption held together with T-bolts, epoxy-impregnated fiberglass thread, and Elmer’s glue. But the thing could throw an arrow. Imagine. The bow’s design had remained essentially unchanged for forty thousand years. That’s two thousand generations of humans before one came up with the idea of putting wheels on it. Allen’s compound blew the doors off of everything else, forever changed archery, and gave rise to modern bowhunting. As well as the bowhunting industry.

  Here’s the thing. Allen didn’t like to throw money around. According to a story told by his son, Wilbur was a counselor at a Boy Scout outing along Missouri’s Osage River when word came that the white bass were biting. His fishing gear at home, he wasn’t about to buy a whole new outfit. Instead, he picked up a 49-cent rod, a 39-cent eggbeater, and a small package of fishing line. He rigged the eggbeater up to a coffee can, attached it to the rod, and proceeded to limit out on bass. The few photos of him available show a tough old cuss. In one, he’s sitting in the rear of a johnboat with a well-stocked tackle box, rods stowed and ready. He’s wearing white socks and smoking a pipe. His expression says, Get in the damn boat already. And there’s something in his eyes that makes him look—like virtually all country boys of his era—as if you’d need a posthole digger and a crowbar to get his wallet out to replace something before it wore out.

  I feel him looking over my shoulder when I’m online browsing hot new bows. I picture a determined country boy failing again and again before rewriting history with wooden eccentrics and Elmer’s glue. And then I go out back and shoot a few arrows with my old bow.

  SCHOOL’S OUT

  I hadn’t initially wanted to chaperone the fifth-grade outdoor overnight, chiefly because I enjoy sleeping. Two things changed my mind. Although there were four moms signed up, the lone dad dropped out at the last minute, perhaps because he has a real job. Basically, I saw a chance to look like a hero and jumped on it. The other thing was that Emma—eleven and delighted with my participation—teeters on the very brink of adolescence. Within six months, this same child will sooner join a convent than publicly acknowledge any relationship with me.

  I felt something amiss when, arriving late at the site, I found the woods silent. Same with the pond. Only the occasional lazy rise of a bluegill dimpled the surface. Canoes lay stacked on the shore. There wasn’t a drop of water on them. I checked.

  When I finally found Emma’s class, they were being hustled off a creek, where they had briefly been allowed to collect aquatic specimens. They spent the next hour hunched over their paperwork—classifying, measuring, drawing, and describing. Then it was off to a lecture on the three types of rocks. It was as if the goal of getting out into the country was to replicate a normal, indoor school day as closely as possible. When I asked one of the site’s instructors when there might be time for a child to paddle a canoe or fish, the answer was “Maybe tomorrow. If we get through everything else in time.”

  He said something about the after-dinner schedule, but an army of irate neurotransmitters had hijacked my brain and I could no longer process speech. Fearful of what might escape from my mouth, I pivoted and left. The intensity of my anger surprised me. As I walked, still shaking, my thoughts coalesced: For adults to take young, city-bound children out into the natural world and then refuse to allow them to engage that world in ways other than those that demonstrably boost their scores on computer-graded multiple-choice tests is an act of such negligence that it rises almost to a kind of violence.

  Then I was driving and realized I’d reverted to what has become my default setting when children and water combine: I was looking for the nearest bamboo. Finding a stand, I cut eight lengths of it and secured them to the roof. Back at the pond, I began measuring line and tying on hooks. Whether these kids would get to fish was uncertain. But it damn sure wasn’t going to be for a lack of poles.

  The next morning, one of the moms performed a small miracle. Stephanie Uz—mom, U.S. Naval Academy graduate, and ­oceanographer—approached the same teacher, asked the same question, and got the same response. Unlike me, Ms. Uz kept her poise and pressed the case. The instructor attempted a flanking action, noting that parents always had the option of returning with their children another time for recreational experiences. Ms. Uz countered that many parents were immigrants who spoke little English. Others had no transportation. Others were single parents with multiple jobs and children. Still others had never fished or been in a boat themselves. How likely was it that such people could exercise this “option”?

  Shortly afterward, the children were given free time until lunch, for boating, fishing, or just playing. I ran and fetched my poles just ahead of a tide of kids. “Every angler needs to get a worm!” I said, pointing at the nearby compost pile. Two minutes later they returned with worms: in bare hands, cups, and—in one boy’s case—all four pants pockets. I began threading worms onto hooks. Shouts, screams, an
d laughs began to ring out as fish were hoisted into the air. I was too busy baiting, untangling, and unhooking to note any particular child. I didn’t need to. I could feel and hear the change in the air. I do remember the indignant looks of children approaching with stripped hooks, incensed that at least one fish in these waters was a thief. I didn’t see Emma. I was too busy being a father to children whose names I didn’t know: fist-bumping successful anglers, rotating in those who hadn’t had a turn, and complimenting the patience of those who hadn’t caught anything.

  Something was constricting my thigh. My lost child was touching base. She pressed her face into my side. “Daddy,” she breathed, then ran away. And then it was time for lunch.

  Ms. Uz, by your actions, you may have lowered the scores of numerous fifth graders on the standardized tests by which the commonwealth of Virginia assesses its children. On behalf of the parents of those children, I find it necessary to say: God bless you.

  MY LATE SEASON

  I should be sitting twenty-eight feet up and just downwind of a deer trail, not in some doctor’s office with so many diplomas on the walls that I’m half expecting him to speak Latin if he ever does show up. But my back has been giving me trouble lately. I can barely bend over far enough to pull my shorts on each morning. If this gets any worse, I’ll be getting dressed with one of those aluminum pole grippers that old people use to whack their grandkids.

  Eventually he breezes in, MRI film in hand, and says I’ve got “disk degeneration consistent with that of a normal fifty- to seventy-year-old man.” My first impulse is to pop the little dude in the nose. I’m fifty-six, 6 feet, 172 pounds. I can crank out fifteen pull-ups, bench most of my weight, and run an eight-minute mile (although that really tightens up my back the next morning). I’m insulted to even be included with seventy-year-olds. But saying so won’t do much good, so I don’t.