by Bill Heavey
“Listen, Richard. Did I ever tell you about the home theater system I carved out of a pumpkin? Nine speakers, 400 watts, great big flat plasma screen …”
Richard just chuckled and shook his head, amused by how some people get themselves all worked up over the simplest things. “You’re a hoot, Bill. I swear. You really are.” Five minutes later, he told Jack to pull over. “Oughta be some birds in this one,” he said. He opened the box and Dusty hit the ground running.
Why Knot?
Like many ineffectual people, I am addicted to the transitory endorphin buzz that comes from impressing somebody besides my own mother. Such moments live in my memory for decades—mostly because they are so few in number. Here’s one. Driving back from a canoe trip 30 years ago, our party suddenly noticed tackle boxes, pots, and stuff sacks bouncing off the blacktop behind us, courtesy of a burst zipper in our canvas cartop carrier. While the braver souls dodged traffic to retrieve gear, I scrounged pieces of rope from the trunk, joined them with sheet bends, and tied a bowline loop in one end. Cramming everything back into the carrier, I tossed the line over and around the rack and cinched the whole thing down with a taut-line hitch, the knot you use on tent pegs. It was not the best knot for the application, but it was all I knew. More important, it got us home. And for a few memorable minutes, I reveled in the quiet awe of my companions. I suspect this is how the inventor of the glazed doughnut felt.
In today’s world of duct tape, quick-release belts, and bungee cords, no skill demonstrates manly competence so quietly but conclusively as the ability to make rope do your bidding. Knowing this, I recently began buying books on the subject: The Klutz Book of Knots, The Morrow Guide to Knots, and others. Eventually, I discovered The Ashley Book of Knots: 640 pages, 3,854 knots, and 7,000 illustrations. Published in 1944, it has reigned unchallenged ever since. It is the bible, encyclopedia, and mother of all knot books.
It’s also the kind of tome that any guy with mild obsessive-compulsive tendencies (i.e., any fisherman or hunter) might take into the bathroom, along with a piece of rope, fully intending to be back on task momentarily. Days later, he could emerge to discover that his wife had taken the kids to her mother’s, the phone had been cut off, and two guys from the electric company were pounding on the door. Such is the hold that knot knowledge can exert.
I began honing my skills immediately on the subjects at hand: my daughter and my dog. Emma, only 6, was so hypnotized by the televised adventures of SpongeBob that it scarcely registered as I loosely wrapped a constrictor knot around her ankle. This simple arrangement exerts a ratchet-like grip when tightened on any curved surface. And tighten it is exactly what Emma suddenly did, returning to her physical body and flailing with great energy. The knot performed as advertised, my daughter went bonkers, and it was only by immobilizing her in a scissors grip with my own legs that I kept her still long enough to undo the aptly named knot. In return for a dinner consisting solely of raspberry Fruit Roll-Ups and Fudgsicle pops, however, she agreed not to inform Mommy.
Thereafter, I confined my efforts to the dog. I secured Snoop’s initial compliance with the hobble knot (No. 226), long used by cowboys. My ultimate goal was the double diamond hitch (No. 416), the gold standard among packers for lashing side packs and a riding load, such as a barrel, to a mule. Not wishing to overload the dog, now 12, I substituted sofa pillows for packs and a 72-ounce Quaker Oatmeal cylinder (available at any Costco) for the barrel. Again, unforeseen difficulties arose. After the sixth crossing, I had to consult the book for the next step. Snoop, who is at an age when she no longer suffers fools, sensed her opportunity and administered a small but authoritative bite to my hand before hobbling off to her lair under the sideboard.
I next attempted No. 442, by which a game animal is lashed to a tote pole with clove hitches, useful to know in country too rough for dragging. The perfect stuffed animal in Emma’s inventory for this purpose was a lavender unicorn about the size of a yearling doe. The arrangement was a success, but even I had to admit a unicorn looks sad bound and hanging upside down from an old broomstick. I felt as if I’d trussed up innocence itself and freed the mythical beast without showing my handiwork to anyone.
I was in despair over my prospects of ever impressing anyone again when a strange thing happened. One night, over at my parents’ house, Emma and I went into their garage for a pump to inflate her new Bounce-oline, an injury-inducing toy my sister had bought. Noticing that the garage door had been left open yet again, I pulled the rope and shut it. Emma had never even been in a garage before. To see an entire wall of a room suddenly appear, slide shut, and slam into place was, to her, a revelation. “Whoa!” she cried. “What knot was that?”
I paused, but only for a moment. “A very special one,” I said as endorphins began bathing my brain in a sense of well-being. “That is the ancient and powerful daddy knot.”
The Enforcer
An Internet dating service would never have paired us. There’s me: married with kids, heavily mortgaged, and semi-gainfully employed. There’s Paula: none of the above. Gruff, gravel-voiced, somewhere in her mid-50s, Paula Smith dresses like a river rat and has all the charm of a sawmill foreman. But come spring, I’d gladly take a date with her over Angelina Jolie, because Paula is the best shed hunter I’ve ever met.
She is a woman of mystery and some danger. I first met her about 10 years ago, when she washed up at Fletcher’s Boat House like an unmoored canoe on the spring floods, and the regulars, smelling the woods sense on her, took her in. She fishes the river and tramps the woods in season for berries, mushrooms, nuts, and greens. On busy weekends at the boathouse, they press her into working the dock. Even the rowdiest anglers know better than to mess with Paula. But her real job is custodian and protector of the local bucks from poachers working the woods. She keeps year-round tabs on both. And if she has to sneak past warning signs or under fences, if she has to get threatened or yelled at, so be it. The only place she will not go is the CIA campus across the river in Langley. “Don’t even think about it, honey,” she once told me. “Trust me.”
Sometimes she wrecks poachers’ blinds. Sometimes she just places telltale vines on their paths to pattern them before she acts. Last year she found a stashed bow and turned it in. The year before, she told a warden friend how best to stake out another illegal hunter. They arrested that guy. Deer hunting, she says, is nothing compared to hunting poachers.
She stubs out a cigarette as I drive up to where she is boarding, slides in, and shows me photos of her latest finds. There are matched sets of the trophy sheds she routinely collects, plus an unusual number of roadkills this year. One is a honker 12-point (“21 with stickers”) with a yardstick in his rack to verify the spread: 24 inches. “Found him a few yards off a yuppie trail in Rock Creek Park,” she says. In Paula’s world, yuppies are just another species in the urban forest, like raccoons or possums, only less alert.
We drive into Rock Creek Park. In the woods behind a park police substation she quickly locates a big 4-point shed. It’s fresh, traces of cartilage still rimming the pedicel. But she is unhappy with the area. “We should be finding more. Somebody beat us to it.” We relocate a mile away. She crawls through a hole in a fence into woods belonging to some huge mansion or embassy. “Look big,” she whispers. “There’s a monster here if somebody didn’t kill him.” She finds two chewed little sheds, last year’s. I find the dried-up carcasses of a doe and a raccoon, and one dead Samsung cell phone. Then Paula holds up half a carbon shaft with a rusty broadhead. “Shot from the ridge across the road,” she whispers. “Even the poachers don’t come in here.” We keep looking, eventually exiting via another hole in the fence. She shakes her head. “An 11-pointer was living in there. We should have found his sheds.” We finish by working our way down into thicker cover, briers and honeysuckle by the creek. She whistles me over to see a blind. I don’t buy it at first.
“I’m telling you, honey. Smart poachers never cut stuff, they rearrange what’s already there. And
branches don’t fall like this.” I’m thinking maybe Paula has had her oatmeal in the microwave too long, that she has poachers on the brain. Then I see the salt block sitting in a shooting lane at 15 yards. I am—to put it mildly—blown away. For a guy in my life situation, I spend a scandalous amount of time in the woods. Comparatively, however, I’m a greenhorn. Crazy, cranky Paula is playing the deer game at the grand-master level.
Meanwhile, pulled by some intuition, she has disappeared. I locate her 90 yards upstream, kneeling over a small mound of brown fur and white bone. “Bastard just took the head,” she says, poking the remains with a stick. She stirs the pile and reveals a crossbow bolt. “They usually don’t leave the arrow. Might have gotten spooked.” The good news is that the hooves are too small for it to have been the 11-pointer. The bad is that the poacher might have gotten him, too. She’ll give the arrow to her warden friend. The salt block goes in the trunk.
She is silent on the way back. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that she’s right, that an invisible army of poachers is beheading deer 10 yards from major roads.
“Sorry we didn’t find more,” she says, getting out and handing me the 4-point antler as a present. “But there’s one good thing. I know who I’ll be hunting this fall.”
Death and Fishing
Did you ever have one of those days on the water when you happened to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time and caught fish until you were sick of it? Me neither. I used to think I’d do pretty much anything to get a day like that. But when the chance came this season, I passed it up. Twice, actually. Once was an act of simple economic self-preservation. The other, darker and more mysterious, involved death, a lawn mower, and the unspoken obligations a man takes on if he wants to look himself in the eye while shaving.
The first time, friends who are seriously dialed in to the annual run of white perch up the Potomac invited me out. There are a couple of days a year when—tide, sun, wind, and thermometer aligning—the river may turn into a “silver tide,” with schools of perch so thick that the water changes color.
“Tomorrow could be the day,” Paula said. “Meet me and Gordon at the boathouse dock at 10 A.M.” As a freelancer, I am absolute sovereign and master of my time. Until I am late filing a story, that is, at which point I turn into Chicken Little, sure that the evening sun will find me standing by the highway with the tools of my new profession: a squeegee, a plastic cup, and a cardboard sign reading, GOD BLESS AND HAVE A NICE DAY. Such being the case at that moment, I said I’d try to be down by 1 o’clock.
When I finally got there, I was told my friends had just left with a cooler full of fish. The tide was slackening, not a good sign for the perch fishing. But I was there, so I rented a boat, rowed into the current, and dropped anchor. I tied on a tandem rig of brown bucktail jigs with a 1-ounce weight, and something hit the moment the sinker touched bottom. Thirty seconds later, I had a jumbo flapping in the bottom of the boat. It was nearly a foot long, a meal in itself. I bumped its head on the gunnel and cast again. Ten minutes later, another. My hands were shaking. I couldn’t believe this was happening. In an hour, six very big perch were splayed around my feet. It wasn’t the silver tide, but it was the best perch fishing I’d ever had.
Then it stopped. I lost a few jigs in the rocks without even getting a bump and got back just in time to meet my daughter Emma as she stepped off the school bus. Filleted, lightly breaded, and fried, the perch made a splendid dinner.
It rained for two days straight thereafter, ruining the fishing and darkening my mood. Then word came that the mother of our next-door neighbor Dave had died suddenly. A routine checkup a month earlier had turned up a rare heart ailment. She passed away almost before she understood what was going on. After the funeral, Dave stayed on at her house for a few days to make some arrangements as her executor.
Meanwhile, the river had cleared, and it looked like I would get one last shot at the silver tide. Paula called. “Get your butt down here if you still want some perch. They won’t be in for long.” No longer on deadline, I headed for the car. Then I saw my neighbor’s lawn, which had grown tall and lush almost overnight from the rain.
Like most people in the suburbs, Jane and I aren’t really tight with our neighbors. We chat across the fence about our kids, but I don’t think either family has had the other over for a meal in the 10 years we’ve lived here. But I remember a day nearly eight years ago, returning home from the funeral for Lily, our daughter who died of SIDS one day shy of her fourth month. When we pulled into the driveway, Dave was there, his face wet and contorted in grief. He walked over and gave me a fierce, wordless hug. That had meant more to me than all the flowers and cards and casseroles we received in those awful days.
Now it was Dave’s turn to absorb the hammer blow of sudden death. And the first thing he would see when he pulled into his driveway tomorrow was an overgrown yard. I took my gear back inside, fired up the mower, and cut his lawn. It didn’t take much time, just enough to miss out on the fishing. Dave had probably forgotten that long-ago moment, but it will stay with me forever. I was grateful to be able to repay the debt. As I finished, his wife, Beth, drove up with the kids. “You didn’t have to do that, Bill,” she scolded.
“Actually,” I said, “I did.”
Invent This
Every year, Field & Stream publishes its gear issue, when the otherwise-unemployable “experts” at the magazine review and recommend stuff so silly you’d think we’d all be doing major time at Club Fed for waste, fraud, and abuse. Strangely, that doesn’t happen. What happens instead is that seminomadic hunter-anglers in barbershops and outhouses come across what we have written and—far more often than you would believe possible—go buy the stuff. Meanwhile, somewhere on a beach in the South of France, the guys who thought up and marketed this junk receive the latest sales numbers and laugh so hard they wet their thongs. (Like I said, it’s France.)
This got me thinking: Why doesn’t somebody come up with new gear that would actually enhance the outdoor experience for us regular guys? A few modest proposals:
Do-it-all broadhead. It can take hundreds of hours on stand before you send an arrow into a deer. When you finally succeed, your reward shouldn’t be more work. That’s why you need a broadhead that not only kills cleanly but also guts, dresses, butchers, and wraps your deer meat. Wouldn’t it be nice to arrive at the end of a blood trail to find a perfectly caped buck and a stack of wrapped, labeled venison ready for the freezer? The new arrowhead would come in steak-cut or roast-cut models. Possible name: the Butcherator.
Exploding-scent Frisbee. Look, they already make silly string in an aerosol can that smells like buck or doe urine. That’s fine as far as it goes (and a superb addition to any long car trip involving children). But a guy in a tree stand needs more reach than what you get from a can. We need flying disks made of a scent-releasing polymer that shatters explosively upon impact. You’d get the ability to deliver scent-bomb payloads up to 100 yards away without spreading your own scent and, because of the banking flight characteristics of the disk itself, the ability to navigate around thickets, large trees, etc. Possible name: Urine Orbit.
Automated lure rescuer. The average angler loses about $600 worth of lures annually to the kleptomaniacal woody plants known as “trees.” Ideally, Congress would pass a law imposing a $1,000 fine on any shrub, domestic or imported, found in possession of a fishing hook. For now, at least, lure-snagging timber is getting a free ride. That’s why we need Lure Un-Snagging Technology (L.U.S.T.) robots on every bass boat. A consortium of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania has actually developed a small, tree-climbing robot. And the boys in white coats obviously looked to nature when designing the thing because it has six little motorized legs and a tail that helps it balance. If each of us buys one, the economy of scale could drive the price below $5,000 in no time at all. Possible name: the L.U.S.T. Possum.
The stand-in. Any guy—married or single—knows
a successful relationship with a woman of the opposite sex requires an ungodly amount of face time. I personally have several friends who required hospitalization for stress exhaustion after exceeding their intimacy threshold. (One, sadly, was never the same again. He went back to school, became a psychologist, and joined a local theater group that has been performing Cats twice a week for eight years.) This is all the more tragic in light of new research showing that females primarily require the mere physical presence of their partner, punctuated by occasional oral and physical cues that indicate he is paying attention.
Enter the remote-controlled, adjustable, full-body spouse decoy. The stand-in ships to your door dressed in jeans and an untucked flannel shirt. Cranial hair can be adjusted for length and male-pattern baldness, and comes with an easy-to-use dye kit. The face features a three-day stubble. Up to 50 pounds of attachable stomach padding allow the substitute to be customized to resemble users with waist sizes from 28 to 56 inches. Its lifelike rubber hands are molded to grip a TV clicker that automatically channel surfs every 15 minutes. Motors in the face randomly portray a range of emotions: approval, interest, surprise, and concern. When activated by the sound of female speech, the digitized voice emits phrases such as: “That sounds like a great idea, babe!” “Tell me more about that, honey.” “Imagine that!” “So how did that make you feel?” Programmable for up to two weeks. Comes in married and single versions. Possible names: Dream Daddy and Better Boyfriend.
I have more ideas but can’t share them just now. The sales figures should be here soon and I need to go thong shopping.
The Bonehead
Saying “bonefishing in the Bahamas” to the average fly-fisherman is a little like saying “naked touch football with Jessica Simpson” to the average adolescent male. The eyes glaze over, the face assumes a dreamy expression, and drool may begin to form. Having just returned from three days of this exact experience (fishing, not the other one), I can report that it was indeed memorable. And should you currently lack the five grand or so the trip requires, fear not. You can get a surprisingly accurate feel for this kind of angling right at home.