Tears formed in the corners of her eyes and we embraced. She went to the restroom and used her cell phone to call her best friend. Operation “He Finally Asked” was set into motion. While she was off doing that, I asked a woman who was working in the section how much the table and chairs were and the price was slightly out of my budget.
“What about just the chairs?” She told me their price and offered to call the warehouse and have them dropped off for me to pick up. “Here’s the thing,” I said, and I recounted the story of what had just happened. The woman took heart and made a few phone calls. It was against store policy to sell the floor models, but she understood their sentimental value and made arrangements anyway. She had them boxed up and sent to my apartment in Virginia and you can find them today in our home.
We returned the next day to register for the table only to find out that Bean had discontinued its wedding registry just months before. After the greatest weekend of my life—eating, lounging, dreaming, and roaming with my new fiancée—I wrote a letter to the then chairman of the company, a grandson of the man who gave it its name. He responded with a handwritten note of thanks and congratulations. He apologized for the cancellation of the registry, but wished us well in our life together. If you visit our home, you’ll find that letter there too.
By that point, I was living in Virginia and had taught myself to fly-fish (I even worked, for a short time, in a fly-fishing shop after graduation and before my move south), something too snobby and New England to ever be considered by my deeply midwestern sportsmen relatives. Fly-fishing was for the fancy class, as was L.L.Bean. No, the Heimbuchs were Cabela’s people. Cabela’s is like a prairie version of Bean. Its catalog, I remember, was thick and utilitarian. There were no pictures of families camping along an inland lake, no campsite ice cream makers, just pages and pages of guns and camo and gun cases, locks, and cleaning kits. Cabela’s was, and is in large part, for hunters and serious fishermen. I tried hard to get into it the same way I did Bean, but it wasn’t the same. There was no nuance, no story. The Cabela brothers were real people, but you never got a sense of who they were. Bean prided itself on tradition. L.L. was a real person. Babe Ruth was a customer. Cabela’s had, what? A myriad of options when it came to fish finders and floor mats for your truck, but no romance.
Fly-fishing and Bean represented a certain divergence from family sporting tradition for me. I liked the idea of backpacking the Blue Ridge more than of taking a buck from an Iowa cornfield, or of casting a weightless fly to a graceful trout instead of a heavy lure to a gnarly toothed muskie. And then there was the hunting thing.
My anxiety about hunting came from the fact that I had never, really, done it before. On three occasions, I had been privy to a hunt. The first was when I was around eleven or twelve. We were visiting my Iowa family, and my dad wanted to go pheasant hunting. He, my uncle Paul, a cousin, and I walked with a couple of dogs through a cornfield that had been partially harvested, hoping to scare some birds up. My uncle Mark stayed on the other end of the field with a black powder rifle waiting for any deer that might get scared up by us walking through the field. It must have been about three degrees outside, because I remember my breath condensing in the scarf my mom had wrapped around my head and freezing. My dad had told me that you almost have to step on a pheasant in order to get it to flush up out of the corn. He told me this so that I wouldn’t be surprised when I stepped on a crushed stalk and it came alive with flapping wings, but what it actually did was make me terrified to put my feet down. I didn’t have the same relationship to wildlife that my dad had growing up. He grew up hunting those Iowa fields, raising livestock, and engaging in other pursuits that allowed for hands-on interactions with beast and fowl. I grew up in the suburbs. We had a family dog and got our meat from the supermarket a mile or so from our house. The closest I had ever been to a pheasant was seeing Funk’s G seed signs on the ends of cornrows when driving out to visit my grandmother near Mason City. We had a clock in our basement, a wooden clock with the Funk’s G logo on it, and burned into the face was the image of three pheasant rising from a row of corn.
Understanding this, you can probably guess what an anxious afternoon that was, walking through a cornfield. Every step tightened my intestines, every footfall shrunk my sphincter. I wanted to leave and go back to the car, but I was afraid that, if I did, Uncle Mark might mistake me for a deer and blow me away. He wouldn’t have, of course, but I was young and my youthful imagination often got the best of me, so I pictured my family standing around my lifeless carcass, staring curiously at my body and then silently and collectively coming to the conclusion that, “Well, it would be a shame to let this meat go to waste . . .”
My second experience hunting was around the same time, perhaps even on the same trip. Dad and Uncle Mark colluded and decided it was time for me to go deer hunting. I don’t remember being excited, but I wasn’t opposed to the idea. Not at first, anyway. Mark and I got bundled up into thirty-five layers of clothes and drove to a nearby wood abutting a cement plant, where we ensconced ourselves atop a ridge looking down through trees to a shallow ravine.
“Great,” I said. “What’s next?”
“Next,” Mark said, after giving me instructions on where and when to shoot a deer, “we wait.”
And so we did. For what felt like hours. We waited as the sun began to go down in the winter sky and the woods took on a cool, gray look. We waited, sitting on the hard ground in zero-degree temperatures. We waited and waited, then waited some more until it got dark, too dark to hunt, and time to go home. When we got back to my grandmother’s house, my dad asked how I liked deer hunting and, though my opinion on the sport had been murky prior to going out with Mark, it had begun to crystallize after. “It sucks,” I said. “I don’t ever want to do that again.”
And so it was. I was never again invited and never asked to be.
My third experience hunting was significantly more recent. I was in my late twenties and already a father. I was visiting my folks in Cleveland for a weekend. Dad told me he had been asked by a client to go pheasant hunting at a private club twenty minutes away. He took me and my little brother, Kosta, with him. I don’t want to take away from the experience—especially because I did actually get three or four birds—but this club was the perfect combination of country club and petting zoo. There was a clubhouse, complete with requisite mounted animals and card tables, a bar, and photos of victorious men bearing arms.
The pheasant were kept in a pen, a low-ceiling chicken-wire circus tent. You tell the man at the front desk how many birds you’d like to shoot, a transaction is made, and you are given a field assignment. While you, the hunter, are sorting out your gear and, perhaps, enjoying a drink from the bar, workers from the club place your prepurchased birds in the field. I can’t be sure, but I suspect this involves dosing the pheasant with adult-sized portions of NyQuil, then laying them among the scrub grass of the football-field-sized hunting lanes. Then, mighty hunter, you go out and wake the birds enough for them to jump in the air and, following a deft maneuver with your shotgun, die. It was not perhaps the most sporting of efforts, but I did manage to get a few birds, all of which were defeathered and prepared by the same club staff that placed them in the field while I toasted with a posthunt beer.
Those were my experiences with hunting to this point—a paranoid walk, a frigidly long sit in the woods, and a few birds that may as well have been tied to a tree.
It’s possible that my hunting aversion has something to do with never needing to do it—for sport, entertainment, or provision. When I was looking for fun on a Saturday, I went to the movies, to a museum, to a coffee shop.
My conception of hunting has always been a bit, well, simplistic.
Step 1: Outfit yourself with a device designed to accelerate a projectile at an alarming rate.
Step 2: Position yourself in a place where animals like to hang out—either to eat, sleep
, or breed.
Step 3: Identify creature with a beating heart and instinct to flee.
Step 4: Remove heartbeat.
Step 5: Serve with potatoes.
The subtleties, strategies, complexities, and, even, potential enjoyment of hunting have, for most of my life, been lost on me. I never got it. I never understood why my dad got so excited to go deer hunting with his brothers. I didn’t get it in the same way I didn’t get weight lifting. It all seemed so caveman to me, so midwestern and simple. Me make boom-boom. Me lift heavy rock. Me beat on me chest. I thought myself to be more sophisticated than that, more urbane.
A big part of that has to do with my youthful longing to be more sophisticated than that, to be more urbane, to be more Eastern. I thought being from the Midwest was akin to being an athlete born with legs of two different lengths. I thought being successful would be harder for me because I was from the Midwest. I wanted the ocean. I wanted New York and Maine. I wanted to feel like I was from somewhere instead of the nowhere that actually was home. And if not New England, what about the Pacific Northwest? Portland: land of hippies and homemade everything. The Cascades, a place so beautiful it takes your breath away. California even. Talk to someone from California and they will tell about their youthful proximity to really interesting places like Los Angeles or San Francisco.
Then, in college, it was the South. Walker Percy and Faulkner. I was fascinated by the strange dignity of the place, despite having never really been there. I managed a minor in college in the history of the American South, but I have never been to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, or Arkansas (unless you count a brief layover at the Little Rock airport on my way home from my bachelor party in Las Vegas). I’ve managed brief visits to both Carolinas and Georgia. I’ve driven through Tennessee on a couple of occasions and, now that I live in Cincinnati, I often find myself having lunch in Kentucky. After college, I took a job writing for a newspaper in Winchester, Virginia, a tiny but historic hamlet in the northern thumb of the Old Dominion. I have to say I adored living there. I fell madly in love with the Shenandoah Valley, with biscuits and gravy, and the patois of the people, all friendly as an afternoon rain. I loved driving through the Blue Ridge and, after a couple of months living there, I vowed to never again live above the Mason-Dixon.
That lasted less than a year when marriage and a job (along with its relative proximity to family) brought me back to Ohio. Once again, I felt like a man stranded, a man who wanted no place else but someplace else. I had neither mountain nor city, neither ocean nor charm. I come from Wisconsin. I come from Ohio. I come from cornfields and the Rust Belt. How could I ever be interesting coming from places like that? How could I ever be happy?
Something happened in my late twenties, though. I began to appreciate where I come from, to love the Midwest. It used to be, when I was a child, boring and arduous to drive to Iowa to visit my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins. There’s nothing but cornfields, there’s nothing but nothing. And when you get there, it’s boring. There’s no mall or distraction. There’s only outside, and outside isn’t that interesting. But when I had kids, I came to appreciate the nothing as being something. I found myself wanting to go there, wanting to drive among the cornfields for hours on end, to smell the earth and eat the food and be among the people who mattered most to me. I wanted that connection to the people and places that I come from, and I began to see the Midwest as something else entirely. I began to see it as home.
And yet, it is not home. Not really anyway. I come from the suburbs, the manicured outskirts of once-great cities. While I tend to tell people I am a Wisconsinite—having been born in the north-central region of the state and living there almost entirely through my first-grade year—I am really an Ohioan through and through. I claim cheese and birch forests, but I bleed the west side of Cleveland. I complain about the suburbs, with their matching minimalls, sidewalks, and above-average schools, yet the suburbs are the only place I feel at home. So even when I am among family in Iowa, I feel separated, from the place, from the legacy, from the two-dozen cousins. They all seem to fit in there, while I feel like a tourist.
I’m not fully midwestern. Instead, like the Starbucks/mattress store/Target/Claire’s boutique combinations that seem to exist in the twenty-mile concentric circles that surround American cities, I am somewhere in between. I am the suburb personified. I am bland and predictable. I don’t require a lot of work to understand, and I don’t offer too much by way of insight or fascination.
So, if I am to reconcile with where I am from, if I am to become a real Midwestern Man, I have to up the ante. I have to learn the essential traits and inhabit the role; I must do something bold, brave, something I would never have considered when I was young and dreaming of elsewhere.
I have to hunt. It’s the only way. There was, of course, more to it than that. I wanted to stand above a still-steaming carcass and think, I did that. It wasn’t bloodlust or a need for wanton destruction; it was a desire to feel fully formed as a man, to go off into the woods and kill an animal, provide sustenance for my young family, accomplish something I had always been too afraid to try.
5
Coming Out of the Hunting Closet
Try telling someone these days that you’re going to learn how to hunt and see what kind of reaction you receive. You may as well tell someone that you’re thinking about taking up self-mutilation or dabbling in the study of classic New England witchcraft. Up to this point, my mission had remained secret. I trolled websites late at night after Rebecca had fallen asleep on the couch watching recorded soap operas. I was giving myself private lessons in what it would take, what I would need, what it would mean to be a hunter.
In the world in which I lived, the comfortable world of suburbia, hunters were rare. At parties, Little League games, and family events, the men were much more likely to talk about the market and how the president’s latest tax proposal/health care initiative/foreign policy initiative was playing havoc with their portfolio. Being a journalist, I could follow the headlines, but when it came to relating to their personal economic upheaval, I was blessedly unable to relate. My portfolio consisted mainly of savings bonds my grandmother had sent me every year on my birthday and the retirement account the HR director at work set up for me on my first day on the job. There were, of course, other topics of conversation—sports, other businessy stuff, and the dilemma of choosing between golfing at their country club or a friend’s country club the following weekend. It’s the curse of living in the toniest, newest suburb in town and spending time almost exclusively with people ten years your senior. It’s not that I don’t like these people. Quite the opposite in fact. I like them very much. It’s just that I don’t often have a lot in common with them. And in this world of twenty-four-hour grocery stores and health clubs, the idea of sharing my plans to take up arms and stalk animals didn’t seem like the right thing to do.
Except for John.
John is the husband of the best friend Rebecca has ever had. We’d met five years earlier, after our wives had met and become instant friends. After a few months of getting together with the kids or going out for coffee, wine, or dinner, the girls decided it was time for John and me to get to know each other.
“I want you to meet Anne’s husband, John,” Rebecca told me one day.
“Why?”
“Because,” she said, “he’s nice and I think you two would get along.”
“Really? What’s he do?”
“He’s some kind of engineer.”
“Well, that’s a lot like being a writer.”
“But you guys have so much in common.”
“Like what?”
“He likes sports and you like sports. You’ll have a lot to talk about.”
She didn’t point out that John is a football fan and I’m a tennis fan, but in the strictest sense of the word, I guess she was right. It was a man date and there was n
o getting around it. It was lucky John and I did get along. Sure, he’s an engineer who grew up in a small town—or near it—in western Indiana. He’s an athlete and he drinks beer where I prefer gin, but we had things in common beyond the usual hobbies and interests; namely, we were married to very similar women. I decided I would first tell John about my idea to learn to hunt, but I realized there would be some obvious questions I would need to answer. For what would I be hunting? Where? When?
I went to a used bookstore in a strip mall in our town and asked the woman behind the counter where they kept the books about hunting. She looked at me for a long moment. Was it disdain? Or was she searching her mental inventory? She pointed me in the direction of the sports books, a small shelf tucked away in a dusty corner. I got the sense that people who read about sports tend to buy their books new and keep them on their shelves because the selection was meager to say the least. There were books about football and rock climbing, a couple of rows dedicated to the martial arts, and a couple more about soccer. But in terms of the sports afield, there were very few titles; and a vast majority of those were about fishing.
I tried another bookstore, one that sold new books, and the local public libraries. It seemed there was not a great demand for hunting books in the suburbs north of Cincinnati, so I turned to the Internet. I began with a search for “Ohio Hunting Rules” and came across the Ohio Department of Natural Resources site and a page devoted to hunting regulations. I once read an article about hunters in Germany. Being at least half and probably more German, I have over the years come to respect that country’s innate sense of rules and order. Getting a driver’s license in Germany takes years, and those caught committing moving violations on the autobahn aren’t just slapped with a ticket; they have their privileges removed. Mind you, not for something like causing a ten-car pileup or repeated offenses of driving under the influence of massive quantities of German beer, but moving violations like failing to yield in the left lane for cars attempting to pass. Knowing this, it’s no surprise to learn that hunting is taken pretty seriously over there. Getting a German hunter’s license requires two years of training, apprenticeship, and overcoming bureaucratic hurdles that would drive an American libertarian to the brink of insanity. As such, most Germans who hunt are of the upper class. They are the ones who can afford expensive game tags and memberships at state-regulated game preserves. The result is an orderly and safe community of hunters and conservationists, well-trained outdoorsmen who are capable of not only surviving but thriving in the natural world and of preserving it.
And Now We Shall Do Manly Things Page 4