He made the whole thing look so cool, so invitingly manly, and I was overcome by the need to buy hunting gear. A gun. Coat, pants, an orange hat. Boots with a gusseted tongue to keep out deer ticks and water. Specialty hunting gloves with slim-fitting trigger finger and tacky palm for gun control. A dog whistle—a dog for that matter.
That night, I dreamed about hunting for the first time in my entire life. I dreamed of a giant deer, like an animatronics dinosaur at one of those roadside walk-through theme parks, emerging from the woods gracefully and walking up to me with the sauntering grace of a ballet dancer. It looked down on me, its steaming breath covering me in warm fog. I looked up at it in awe, just before it raised an angry hoof and squashed me into the ground. The entire scene was painted in Surrealist Technicolor and it was, of course, absurd beyond belief. Yet it felt so real. I’m not one who puts a lot of stock in dreams and signs. I don’t believe that seeing a black cat will bring me bad luck, and I’m not the kind who runs out to the local gas ’n’ suds to buy a lottery ticket because a cricket made its way onto my dashboard.
But I couldn’t help but feel like an answer to my lack-of-manliness malaise was revealing itself the next day when I checked my e-mail at work and found a message from a publicist at the Travel Channel asking if I might be interested in interviewing its newest star, Steven Rinella, the host of The Wild Within. I get requests like this often, but usually it’s from the author of a terrible book on the intricacies of forensic stamp collecting or the inventor of a product designed to make the pesky task of storing Play-Doh a breeze who’s looking for a little publicity. It comes with the territory. At this time, the online magazine I edited, Man of the House, had a fairly loyal following of half a million readers. We’d just been featured in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and elsewhere, so the requests for stories and profiles had stepped up significantly and I had gotten in the habit of deleting most of them unread. But the Travel Channel? Here my favorite television network was offering me an opportunity to talk with one of their hosts. How could I pass it up?
I didn’t know anything about Steven Rinella or his show when I accepted the invitation, so I went on a research bender. I discovered that he was the author of two books about food and hunting. I watched the demo videos the Travel people sent me of his show, which was about his adventurers as a hunter and outdoorsman, and found myself fascinated. Never before had I seen a man stalk, shoot, and eviscerate a moose. Especially not on television. The closest I had come to ever seeing something like that was in an old horror movie. And yet, I wasn’t grossed out. I was interested. I read his second book, American Buffalo, which recounts his youth as a sportsman, his lifelong fascination with America’s most unique and once-treasured species, the bison, and his once-in-a-lifetime hunt for the animal in Alaska.
One line in particular struck me. Near the climax of the book, Rinella finds himself all alone in the wild north, lying prone and setting his sights on a buffalo roaming below and in front of him. Just before he pulls the trigger, he says to himself, This is how food is made. Such simple profundity, such clarity of purpose. I thought, Now there’s a man who knows exactly who he is, what he likes, and what he wants to do. In short, there is a man nothing like me.
We made arrangements via e-mail to chat on a Tuesday night. He’d call me. I’d ask some questions about the show and he’d answer. Half hour at the most. They always say that when you do these kinds of interviews, as if the celebrity has many more important things to do than talk to you.
I once did an interview with an actress who had a minor role on a popular cable show and had costarred in a movie with Sylvester Stallone. Prior to our interview—which was conducted over the phone late at night—I received no fewer than four e-mails from her publicist reiterating the importance of her getting off the phone within fifteen minutes. She was then more than twenty minutes late calling me, which made me wonder if I somehow owed her five minutes and how I would go about repaying it? Knock a cigarette out of her hand just before she flicked her lighter? Buy her a field greens salad? A round of Botox? When at last we did get on the phone, I found myself apologizing for taking up her time, which, I told her, I understood was so precious.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Your publicist told me you have something very important to do tonight.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. I’m in my pajamas and it’s only seven thirty here.”
“So publicists are liars?”
“Pretty much.”
This early experience interviewing the famous—or sorta-kinda-if-you-squint-in-just-the-right-light famous—took the fear out of the process for me. In subsequent interviews, I was cool and calm, knowing that it wasn’t about a brush with fame or coolness by association. It was a business transaction and would more than likely be about as interesting as depositing a paycheck in an ATM.
Yet I found myself nervous to talk to Rinella. My palms were sweating when I pulled into the parking lot of a Starbucks not far from home. I had decided to take the call there to avoid the inevitable interruptions that come when trying to do work around the kids (or my wife for that matter). When I’m at home, seldom do five minutes pass in the waking day when I am not being beckoned from another room. I wanted to concentrate, to focus. There was something about Rinella—in his books, on his show—that resonated in me. I didn’t want to pay him short shrift.
The e-mail came ten minutes after the time we were supposed to talk. It was simple and to the point. He had gotten the date of our interview mixed up. He apologized and offered to talk again at a time of my convenience. He signed it “SR” as if we have known each other for years. Two, maybe three sentences. He didn’t overelaborate or make up an excuse to make me feel better. I remember thinking, This guy even apologizes like a man. I sent a note back and suggested the same time two days later and so found myself sitting at a back table in the Starbucks, pen in hand, a spare nearby, a couple of notebooks and a copy of American Buffalo splayed about the makeshift workspace. I couldn’t believe how nervous I was to talk to a guy who a few days earlier I had never heard of, and I tried to calm my nerves when I picked up the call on the third ring.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Craig, it’s Steven.”
And so began one of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had with a complete stranger. We talked for an hour and a half and when we were done, I began writing furiously. I don’t normally do this. I usually wait a couple of days for an interview to sink in, but there was something about the guy that inspired me. It was his perspective. His belief that people willing to eat meat should be willing to harvest it; that hunters are too insular, too cliquish, too defensive. They don’t make room for the curious. They don’t make it easy for people to try. They don’t do a good job selling their passion as a viable pastime.
Interviewing Rinella, spending time with him on the phone and hearing about his complicated relationship with his father and how fatherhood has changed his perception of what it means to be a man, I felt like I was talking to a man further along in his evolution than me. And yet, I was inspired. I too had a complicated relationship with my dad. I too wondered if I could change enough to be the dad I wanted to be. I realized what I had to do that night. I had to learn how to hunt. I come from a long line of hunters—at least as far as I know. My dad is a hunter. His brothers are hunters. I don’t know a lot about my grandfather—either of them—as they were both gone by the time I was in third grade and my mom’s dad I never met. And yet I had resisted, but talking to Rinella, I became fascinated. It felt right, the exact thing my weary manhood needed. I would become a hunter. It was as simple as that. I would venture off into the woods, gun in hand, and kill something and then everything would be better.
Just wait and see.
4
My Sporting Life
I know about
fishing. I’ve been a fisherman for most of my life. Growing up in north-central Wisconsin, I remember cringing as my dad removed coarse black leeches from a Styrofoam container and put them on my hook. In the small aluminum boat with the Evinrude outboard, there was not enough room to slink away from the small beasts and I might not have ever been afraid of them had my dad not pulled one off his finger, exposing a small stream of blood.
“What happened?” I asked.
“They’re bloodsuckers,” he told me. He didn’t need to say much more. A certain feeling of disdain for the smallmouth bass that live in tiny Wisconsin lakes grew in me, simply because the fish will eat the leeches. How could I want anything that would eat a bloodsucker? To this day, I have never used a leech, though I have caught a lot of fish. There were semiannual trips to western Ontario for pike and walleye and, after we had moved from Wisconsin to California back to Wisconsin and on to Ohio, there were countless summer and early fall days spent fighting off low-grade seasickness as we bobbed up and down on Lake Erie in pursuit of walleye and perch. I had my own tackle box and rod and spent a good deal of time in the small hold of the ProLine boat my dad had always wanted, suffering from the sun and stagnant air.
I have always loved the outdoors and fancied myself an outdoorsman, though I don’t have the experience to back it up. Behind our first house on the suburban west side of Cleveland was a dense woods of old oak and maples. The kids on the street would spend summer afternoons building forts and walking, running, biking, and simply wandering the twisted network of trails blazed by generations of kids who had come before us. I loved the woods. I loved the coolness, the shadows, and the dappled sun breaking through the leaves high overhead. I probably would have found a way to live in those woods had I not had an experience that soured me somewhat on being there.
We were playing a game of capture the flag. There were probably eight of us from the neighborhood, all spread out through the woods on one of those dreamy days that only exist in movie scenes when a character remembers something from their past fondly. I remember it being cool among the trees and running alone on a stretch of trail fifty yards behind our house. I heard something off in the distance and stopped to listen, to see if I could tell which direction it was moving. I didn’t feel it immediately, so intently focused was I on eluding capture by the older boy from up the street. It was only after a couple long moments’ pause that I had the sensation that the ground beneath my foot was moving, or struggling to move. I felt a tug and then a flap of something like heavy paper on my hairless shin. I looked down and there, pinned beneath my Nike, was a bat. It was brown and black, furry and lying on its back, its wing pinned to the ground and its other flapping as it tried to get free. I looked into its beady black eyes and saw its teeth as its jaw flapped up and down silently. I don’t remember exactly what I said as I bolted out of the woods, through some low brush and into my backyard, but I imagine it was something like, “Shit! Shit! Holy shit! Fuck! Damn! Shit! Shit! Shit!” because I had only recently discovered the cathartic benefits of swearing and had been polishing my abilities at the bus stop and during games of pickup basketball with friends.
I vowed never again to return to those woods and managed to keep that promise until after I had graduated from high school, but the inclination toward nature, or at least the accoutrements of those who find themselves in the natural world, was ingrained in me. I knew early that my flat-footed awkwardness, pudgy midsection, and general aversion to exercise in any traditional, suburban form meant I would never play center field for the Cleveland Indians, shoot three-pointers for the Cavs, or strap on the orange and brown of the Browns—unless I was to be an offensive lineman and who, really, dreams of becoming an offensive lineman when they are a kid? But I had read Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet and the issues of Boys’ Life that continued to trickle in long after my Cub Scout den had disbanded from disinterest, and it was about this time that I discovered the L.L.Bean catalog and developed a fascination that lasts to this day.
I don’t quite know what it was about L.L.Bean, but there was something about the catalog that left me transfixed. While all my friends were rushing home to get the new issue of a magazine called Beckett, which published values and prices of baseball cards—and some of the more developed ones were hijacking copies of the Victoria’s Secret catalog and Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue from the mailbox before their parents got home—I found myself rushing to the box at the end of our driveway hoping to find a new catalog from Bean. I read the descriptions of tents and anoraks as if they were literature. The twenty-five words used to describe the functions of a particular pocketknife were my prepubescent poetry. Years later, when Rebecca and I had one of our first dates, I told her about the trip, about the store, and about my dreams of moving to Maine and working there. I would have a cabin in the woods and spend my days writing thoughtful descriptions of water purifiers and first aid kits. Did it matter that my outdoor experience was generally limited to catalogs, some Hemingway books, and a whole lot of daydreaming? Not to me. Before I left for college, she gave me a gift. She had told a mutual friend of ours, an art student and painter, about my dream life and commissioned a small painting to hang in my dorm room and remind me of her. It was a cabin near a mountain and well done, even if it was obvious that the artist had never seen the rolling hills of New England and instead interpreted the mountain as Everest’s big brother. It’s hard to imagine what life was like before Google, but topographical inaccuracies didn’t matter. I was in love with the idea of Maine and L.L.Bean.
After my freshman year of college, I took my roommate and best friend from high school on a road trip to Maine, to the Bean store and to Mount Desert Island. We were underage but managed a few beers along the drive. We went to the store twice, and it would be the last time I was there until more than a year after graduation, when I finally managed to get Rebecca up to Maine for a visit. I proposed to her on our first night there. Right there. In the furniture section of the same store that I had begun dreaming about as a kid.
Okay, it was a little more romantic than that. We had been arguing. Tensions were high because the airports had just reopened after the September 11 terrorist attacks. I had been planning the trip for the better part of a year, since long before I had bought the ring and asked her parents for their blessing. I wanted everything to go so smoothly. This place, this dream, had been central to our early relationship and a big part of my identity, so I was a little miffed when we arrived into Portland late and got into our rental car and she told me we needed to stop to see her cousin—a person I had never met and one she had not mentioned until that moment.
“Are you kidding me? No way are we going to drive around Portland at almost midnight to go find some cousin you haven’t seen in five years,” I said.
“Why not? I’d do it for you.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to. I wouldn’t ask you to go meet a stranger in the middle of the night after seven hours in airports and on planes when you had been planning this trip for months and months.”
She wasn’t pouting, but her silence told me I had said the wrong thing. Family is first with Rebecca, pure and simple. There is nothing more important. Here I was being a jerk when all she wanted to do is stop by to see a family member. It was, unfortunately, a fight we would have more than once during the course of our marriage and in traveling together. It seems no matter where we are going, there’s always a cousin on the way or an uncle or an aunt or a great-aunt she’s never met before.
We went straight to Freeport, where I booked a room in a hotel. The plan was to go to Bar Harbor the next day and after six years together and finally making this trip, she would have had to have been three points beyond stupid not to suspect that I had planned to propose. And I had. The next day, on top of Cadillac Mountain, overlooking the Atlantic and my favorite vacation spot in the world. But first we needed to unwind. The L.L.Bean store is open 24/7 365 days a year. There aren’t even lo
cks on the doors. I was too excited not to take her there for a little middle-of-the-night shopping. I thought maybe some retail therapy would thaw her icy mood.
Traveling in those first heady days after 9/11 was rough. Security was beyond tight, and it had taken every little bit of ingenuity I could muster to hide the engagement ring I had stashed in my pocket through security checkpoints and at the car rental place. Sometime between landing and checking in at the motel, I had stashed it in my backpack and very nearly left it there in the car when we parked in the lot behind the Bean store shortly after one A.M. But I got nervous. She rushed ahead to the bathroom and I ran back to our rented Hyundai to retrieve it, putting it back in my pocket as we walked around the store.
She was tired. She was a little angry and I did what many men try to do—buy her affection. Though I was living in Section 8 subsidized housing and making a meager $20,000 as a junior reporter on a small daily newspaper, I bought her two coats and a few other items hoping to make her happy. I paid with a fresh credit card and we wandered through the store, upstairs, taking a seat at a farmhouse table with green legs and matching ladder-back chairs—a staple of the L.L.Bean “Home” catalog.
“I really like this table,” I said. It was true. I liked the style and the fact that it seemed like it would fit well into my semirural life plan.
“Me too,” she said, still a little coldly.
“We should register for it,” I said. It came out on impulse, with no real forethought.
“We should,” she said, and the tone got a little tenser. “Except we’re not engaged.”
“Well, what if we were?”
“But we’re not,” she said, firmly, but with a brightening smile.
“What if we were?”
“But we’re not!” This time more emphatically.
“But what if we were?” I asked, bending onto one knee, pulling the ring from my pocket, and sliding it across the table. “What if we were? Will you marry me?”
And Now We Shall Do Manly Things Page 3