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

by Bill Heavey

  Clearly bored with this process, the bass in question—a solid 4-½-pounder with a Rapala Jointed Shad Rap (fire crawdad pattern) hanging from its lip—flapped its tail. It was one of those I-hate-to-intrude-but-I’m-getting-a-little-short-of-breath-here shakes. I unhooked the biggest bass of the summer so far, lowered it back into the water, and watched it dart, unrecorded, back into the depths.

  Welcome to Code Orange fishing.

  It’s not that Greg and I are national security-site junkies. It’s just that the bassiest place we know of at the moment is a wall along the Potomac River that borders Fort Lesley McNair, a secure facility that is part of the Military District of Washington and the location of high-value targets like the National Defense University.

  In order to access this honey hole by canoe, you launch from behind a green dumpster in back of the U.S. Coast Guard Headquarters, another secure site, which is ringed by concrete barriers. If you smile at the cops as if you do this all the time, they’ll generally leave you alone. I don’t think they have any specific guidelines for dealing with canoe traffic.

  Paddling into position, we were nearly swamped by the wake of the 87-foot cutter Ibis, which was in the process of anchoring in such a way that its gun covered anything moving in the channel. Two orange-vested cops in a 25-foot inflatable with twin 200-horsepower Yamahas grumbling on the stern idled by and gave us the once-over. As we approached the wall, the pair of guards with M-16s on their shoulders nodded, as if to say, don’t plan on getting back any lures that land on government property.

  The tide was coming in and pushed us steadily up the channel past poles holding hooded surveillance cameras. Pretty soon we were approaching a buoy marking an underground cable, a place that generally holds fish. Just then, one of the guards walked over and announced, “Gentlemen, I’m going to have to ask you to keep at least 30 meters away from that buoy.” We said that wouldn’t be a problem. He went back to his buddy, and we let the current push us away. Then the other one came over.

  “That stuff that guy just told you? I’m going to have to ask you to comply to that right now.” We pointed out that the current was accomplishing this fairly quickly. “Yeah, but you’re not allowed on this side of the buoy at all. You have to stay at least 30 meters away on the downstream side.”

  I looked at Greg, who has authority issues under the best of circumstances. “Don’t say anything, dummy,” I hissed. “I’ve got to pick up the baby at five, and I can’t do it from some damn brig.” He put his rod down to pick up a paddle, and we repositioned.

  A few minutes later, I caught the big bass. In the next two hours, we boated three more smaller ones and two channel cats—not a bad afternoon’s fishing.

  “So,” Greg said, as we paddled back toward the dumpstercum-takeout point, “you want to come back Tuesday?”

  “Yeah,” I said, smiling and waving to a coastguardsman wiping down the gun mounted on the bow of the anchored cutter. “Tuesday’s good.”

  Summer Survival

  Things get kind of slow in my neck of the woods around now. Even the bass get bored. Average daily highs in the slow-roast range have pushed the fish into the deepest holes they can find. Slowly finning the coolest water for miles, a pod of big ones watch your lure fall and amuse themselves by competing to be the first to call out the page of the Bass Pro Shops catalog on which it appears. Meanwhile, 20 feet up, we diehards fish until we’re dehydrated, delaminated, and decisively skunked. Back at the dock, we swear on our Power Baits that we will never again go fishing in August. A few days later we’re back at it, showing just how severe certain learning disabilities can be.

  My summer has been further enhanced by a decision last March to enter the unofficial neighborhood lawn contest. That was the month I applied an entire bag of fertilizer (sufficient for 15,000 square feet of grass) to 6,000 square feet of earth. The result is a crop of crabgrass that is growing like hydrilla. If I miss a week with the mower, the Iraqi National Congress could be meeting out back and I wouldn’t know it.

  I thought I was the only one having a slow summer until I read an Associated Press article about the customers of the Sky Port diner near Schenectady, New York. They recently noticed that Dick, the 17-year-old goldfish in the aquarium behind the counter, was having trouble staying upright. Some people would say, “Well, I’m terribly sorry to hear that, but 17 is really pretty old for a goldfish.” Not these folks. They got involved.

  One of the regulars prevailed upon his daughter, who is studying to be a veterinarian, to research fish ailments. She decided that Dick’s symptoms pointed toward a swim-bladder problem, which she treated by hand-feeding him cooked peas three times a day. Other customers decided that nutritional support was a good first step but no substitute for a comprehensive course of therapy. They got together and built Dick a fish sling so he could recuperate in an upright position. They constructed it out of what any enterprising guy would use: fishing bobbers, soda straws, string, and gauze. Patty Sherman, who co-owns the diner, says customers like to relax at the counter and watch Dick in his homemade sling. Those are the kind of people who understand that the real purpose of summer is not to do very much of anything.

  It’s hard to imagine when the shingles on your roof are curling in the heat, but bow season starts in less than two months. Every article you’ve ever read about preparing for it says you must practice shooting in the same clothes you will wear when hunting. This is, of course, ridiculous. I usually hunt in a full Scent-Lok suit, including head cover. Wear that outside on a 95-degree day and you risk two disasters. One is death by heatstroke. The other is ruined hunting gear. The best charcoal-activated suit can absorb only so much body odor over its working life before it throws in the towel.

  Nonetheless, I pride myself on having developed an exacting practice routine. I figure that you’re probably only going to get one shot at a trophy deer, and it’s not going to be when your muscles are warmed up from shooting. So that’s how you practice. You march out with a single arrow to a spot in the backyard about 40 yards from your McKenzie deer, draw back, and shoot. If it’s a good shot, you go back inside satisfied. If it’s a bad shot, you go back inside anyway and mull over what you did wrong for an hour or so, then go shoot another arrow. It’s a demanding regimen, but I follow it religiously right up until I miss. Then I say to hell with it, get about eight arrows, and keep shooting until I’m damn sure my target deer no longer presents a threat to anybody in the neighborhood. A rigorous practice routine makes good sense during rigorous times. Summer isn’t one of them.

  The other day, I had a very close call. At 11 A.M., it was already 97 degrees out, 90 percent humidity, with air quality in the do-not-inhale-before-4 P.M. range. Nonetheless, I always make it a point to be actively engaged in some form of activity before noon—especially when I have nothing in particular to do—so that I can justify knocking off for the day right after lunch. I was busy at my desk when my wife came home unexpectedly and popped in my office door. Instantly, I swept the fishing bobbers, soda straws, string, and gauze into a drawer.

  “Whatcha doing?” she asked brightly.

  “Oh, you know,” I answered, trying to sound haggard. “Just trying to juggle a million things I’ve got to get done.”

  I Want My Bass TV

  Nobody was home to stop me last Saturday, so I watched bass shows on cable television for six hours. That’s right, six straight hours of rod-bending, line-stretching, heart-pounding action. And when it was all over, I was a new man. I had learned about structure fishing and finesse angling from the experts. I had learned about life on the tournament trail. And every six minutes I had learned about the recent advances in hair replacement and diet supplements that are so important to successful bass fishing.

  Perhaps the single most important thing I learned is that, on average, it takes a full 40 hours of raw sewage—sorry, footage—to make a half-hour program. So when the guy on camera finally catches a fish, it unhinges him a little, causing him to repeat
what he’s saying at least three times. Let me demonstrate with actual quotes (names omitted to protect the guilty):

  “Good fish. Nice fish. Healthy fish. And fat. That is one fat fish.”

  “That’s a gorgeous fish. Just a gorgeous, gorgeous fish.”

  “Oh, man. He just inhaled that spinnerbait. He crushed it. He hammered that thing.”

  * * *

  I also learned that there is almost nothing so obvious that you can’t say it on bass television. Let me elaborate with more genuine quotes. These are things people actually said. I mean verbally, using their lips:

  “If a fish hits your bait right under the boat, you may be too close to the structure. You need to back up.”

  “If they’re not shallow, don’t be afraid to look deep.”

  “Remember, the bass can be in, over, or just off the weed beds. Or any other kind of structure.”

  “The places where the lines get closer together on your topo maps, those are the places where it’s steep. That’s where your dropoffs tend to be.”

  Sometimes the obviousness transcends itself and approaches a kind of bassing epiphany, a Zen moment:

  “Those big dudes are in here to feed. And believe me, if they want it, they’ll come get it.”

  “The Classic is hard to win but very easy to lose.”

  “You’ve got to move, move, move. And when you find the fish, they’re there.”

  We’ll be right back with more eye-popping action. But first, lean in a little, so I can shout the following question directly into your ear. When is a diet pill worth $153 a bottle? The answer is, When it releases tiny army men directly into your bloodstream to take on fat cells in hand-to-hand combat. Lardbegone is much too expensive and much too powerful for the casual dieter who wants to shed 5 or 10 “vanity” pounds. But if you’re so fat that people think you’re backing up when your beeper goes off, Lardbegone might be for you.

  * * *

  A number of anglers have expressed concern about what bass fishing is “all about.” Fortunately, the experts are only too happy to share their wisdom:

  “It all boils down to execution. The final element in your success equation is execution.”

  “It’s all about timing. You might not be here when they’re feeding. But if you come back in two hours, you’ll catch one every cast. So it’s all about timing. And about boat positioning. And banging that cover with your lure. That’s what it’s all about.”

  Another thing I noticed is that many television hosts like to kiss the bass they catch. I don’t know who started this, but it has become epidemic. And it has to be hurting the catch-and-release survival rate. How strong do you think your will to live would be if the last thing you saw before being set free was an extreme close-up of Woo Daves’s lips?

  My favorite moment of the whole day came when Babe Winkelman and a friend were banging one largemouth after another on downed timber off a point in a Wisconsin lake.

  “Babe,” asked the friend, dutifully setting up his host for a sage observation, “does that current going through here have anything to do with why we’re catching bass?”

  Babe thought on this for a while. Finally, he answered solemnly. “It very well could, Jim.”

  I can hardly wait for next Saturday.

  Party Animal

  I went to a cocktail party the other night, an activity I don’t particularly recommend. For certain men, temporary incarceration in a small space with strangers pretending to have fun ranks right up there with a tax audit. I sometimes doubt that parties would exist at all if it weren’t for booze, since the very act of making small talk with people you’ve never met is so unnatural that you need to be slightly impaired to do it gracefully. But Jane says it’s good for me to get out and mingle, so, like a chained bear, several times a year I am dragged out for socialization.

  This particular party took place during the height of the pre-rut, and I’d been in the woods until the end of legal light, when I found myself pinned in my tree stand by a doe with two yearlings in tow. Not wanting to burn out the stand by announcing a human presence, I let my bow down on the rope and banged it softly in the leaves a few times. They didn’t snort, just stiffened up and moved slowly away. Satisfied, I descended and crept silently out of the darkening woods.

  I raced across town to the address Jane had given me, crouched down in the shadows between my car and a hedge, and changed into khakis, a button-down shirt, and loafers. Immediately upon entering, I identified this as a classic disaster-in-the-making: many people, bright lights, the din of forced merriment. Also, I noticed that all the other men not wearing ties had on shirts that buttoned all the way up to the neck. Where I grew up, wearing a shirt buttoned up to the neck without a tie sent out an urgent nonverbal signal: Please beat me up. Evidently this has changed, because none of the men seemed the least bit embarrassed by how they were dressed.

  I grabbed a beer and saw to my chagrin that Jane was engaged in a lively conversation on the far side of the room. Like many women, my wife finds talking to people she has never met invigorating. I sat down on one end of a sofa and tried hard to make myself invisible. But it didn’t work, and I soon found myself face to face with a brightly smiling woman wearing a turquoise necklace. She introduced herself, saying she taught mythology at the local university. “I understand from your wife that you’re a writer,” she said. “What were you working on today?” I told her that I hadn’t been writing at all today, I’d been in the woods hunting deer.

  The smile dimmed a few watts, and I could see the wheels turning inside her head. She was having what psychologists call an “Aha!” moment: She’d heard of people who hunted deer, and now she was actually talking to one. “And what do you use,” she asked, “some kind of rifle?” I told her that at this time of year I hunted with a bow. This completely flummoxed her. “Like a Robin Hood bow?” she asked. Sort of, I told her. A compound has wheels on it and is a bit more powerful and more compact than Robin Hood’s. “Is it electric?” she asked. No, I explained, you pull the string back with your arm just like other bows. I was trying to be helpful, just as she was trying to be cordial, but I was beginning to wish I’d said I was in software.

  Just then, she looked away for a moment, pursed her lips, and turned back to me. “I suppose you find it hard to explain why you hunt to people who don’t,” she said. I do indeed, I told her.

  “I read somewhere—I think it was an American Indian elder who said it—that whatever a man hunts, he’s ultimately hunting himself,” she said. “Is that true? Can you explain that to me?”

  I said I thought it was true, though I didn’t fully understand it. I told her that for some men, hunting is a kind of discipline, a way of peeling back the layers of mistaken identity that daily life piles up on you. It’s a way of discovering who you are, or maybe remembering who you really were before modern life mixed up who you were as a man with what you did to make money. In that sense, at least, every man who hunts is hunting himself. I asked if that made sense.

  “Yes,” she said. “It makes a lot of sense. Maybe too much.” We talked for another couple of minutes before she said she had to go rescue the sitter from her children. She shook my hand and left. I took a pull on my beer and looked around the party. Suddenly I felt looser, a little less scared, like a rabbit who’d been reassured he wasn’t to be eaten that particular day. A few minutes later, fetching a second beer, I found myself waiting my turn at the refrigerator next to a guy with mousse in his hair and a dark-green silk number that buttoned up to the neck. “Cool shirt,” I said.

  The Art of Lying

  So it’s finally over. Either you’ve got a deer in the freezer or you don’t. You’re either doing the funky-chicken victory dance or deciding whether to throw your muzzleloader away outright or save it as a tomato stake.

  If you did get a deer—and I mean any deer—congratulations. You can sit back and tell the story over and over, until it takes on a life of its own. With each retelling, that deer
will get bigger, the shot distance will increase, and the temperature outside will drop a bit more. By about May, you will have killed an animal the size of a moose during a blizzard by blowing a soda-straw wrapper at it from 400 yards. And you will half believe the lies coming out of your own mouth. This is hunting’s oldest tradition. In fact, linguists now conjecture that language first arose among hominids to fulfill that most fundamental of impulses: the need to lie. “Korg, this is no bull. I was so close when that mastodon farted that it blew all the hair on my forehead straight back.”

  Any fool can cope with a punched tag. Venison, a rack to hang in the den—these are child’s play. The real test of a hunter’s skill is failure. That’s when a true sportsman looks into the depths of his soul to see if he can summon up a level of creativity to which a successful hunter can only aspire: It’s time to come up with a good excuse. Let’s review the options.

  (1) Equipment Malfunction

  Blaming bad gear is a perennial favorite. Psychologists (most of whom do not hunt) have a pejorative term for this. They call it blame shifting. I call it genius. Some samples:

  • I drew back on him and there was a rain bubble in my peep. All I could see was an optical illusion of six identical bucks standing side by side, and damned if I didn’t shoot the wrong one.

  • My scope fogged up. It’s like I was hunting in a steam room.

  • I was shooting handloads that a buddy swore were the best bullets he’d ever used. And they might be. But when I pulled the trigger, all I heard was click.

  (2) Tremendous Size of the Animal

  Success depends on the hunter seeming every bit as incredulous about the event as the listener.

  • You want to know the truth? That buck was so much bigger than I had ever seen around here that I figured it was only 200 yards away. Turns out it was 300 yards off—so I ended up shooting low. All I did was shave a few hairs off his chest. I’ve got them right here in my wallet. You want to see?