Our trip was halfway over before I got a chance to sit for an extended period on the beach, beer hidden from sight and buried in the sand next to me, to read. I had made a promise to myself that I would finish the volume of Hemingway’s The Nick Adams Stories that had sat on my bedside table for more than four years. It felt somehow appropriate and important. My parents were in the midst of buying their retirement home in northern Michigan, less than fifty miles from the place where Hemingway spent his summers and where his most famous (and some argue autobiographical) character, Nick, was born and raised.
I’ll admit that I have for a long time been enamored by the Hemingway mystique. In my younger years and in college, this feeling was something I would never admit; certainly not to my friends or the liberal feminists in my English classes. Hemingway represented the stoic old misogynism, the drunken depressive chauvinist we’ve all worked so hard to move past. And when one of my professors or classmates would launch into an anti-Ernest tirade, I would find myself nodding and making polite sounds that indicated at least tacit agreement. But I loved Hemingway, or at least I loved the idea of him.
I first came across his work in high school. I was a junior and already a fan of Henry Miller and some of the other American expats (though I wouldn’t admit that either since Miller’s books were all very graphic and sexual and not something I was willing to discuss with anyone) and was assigned a project in English class to read and report on Hemingway’s last and unfinished-by-him novel, Islands in the Stream. There had been a list of books to choose from—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Canterbury Tales, and others, the random selection of which probably says something about the quality of a public school education at the time—and the title sounded familiar. Of course, I was disappointed later when I realized the book had nothing obvious to do with the Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton song. I procrastinated like all good high school students do, so long in fact that two nights before the paper was due I had yet to even locate a copy, let alone begin reading. I panicked. I began calling libraries in the area looking for a copy of the book and ended up driving more than forty-five minutes—halfway to Toledo—to get an audio recording of the book and drove around town for more than three hours trying to listen to it in a single sitting.
I believe I got a C- on the paper.
So my introduction to Hemingway was inauspicious at best, but it did plant a seed. In college, I picked up a used copy of his collected short stories—“Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” quickly became favorites—and even skipped studying for a history exam because I made the mistake of beginning to read The Sun Also Rises and didn’t stop until I was done. After graduation, I bought a copy of The Old Man and the Sea for a dollar and have read it every March since. But I had never read the Nick Adams stories, not all the way through anyway, so I sat on the beach for a couple of hours, not noticing the severe sunburn rouging my shoulders or the fact that a tiny, spiderlike crab had taken refuge in the hole left by my long-empty beer, and read.
I couldn’t stop turning the pages. The writing was so dense and heavy, so serious and without a trace of whimsy, not exactly your typical beach reading, but I wasn’t in the frame of mind to plow through a mindless novel. Vacation had relaxed me, but that relaxation only clarified my focus on learning to hunt. When I came to the last story in the collection, “Fathers and Sons,” it was as if this long-dead and personally denied writer were speaking to me directly, laying out the ideal of a youth I had never had but was now picturing as if it were a fond memory. Nick is driving with his young son, returning to the Michigan of his youth and remembering what it was like to grow up there with his own father, a doctor and outdoorsman. It’s only a few lines, but Hemingway writes about how Nick learned to hunt pheasant from his father, how to shoot and how to be a sportsman. I began to feel a pang of regret. My own dad would have loved to have taught me all those things, but I was too unwilling to learn. I began to wonder what I had missed out on, but more than that, what I had denied him by not taking any interest in what he wanted to show me. And I understood that his random gift of a gun, his encouragement when I told him about my plans to learn to hunt, all of it, was him feeling like he might get to make up for lost time and there was still a chance to have those kinds of experiences together.
I hoped there was.
Regret quickly morphed into renewed vigor, but not before I put down the book, grabbed a fresh beer from the cooler, and, after a long slug, ran into the ocean to play with my sons. What had started off as an inkling, an experiment—learning to hunt—was now a multigenerational pact and I needed to keep it.
We spent a few days in Iowa before July was over—a family reunion—and I finalized my plans with Mark and Tommy to come out at the beginning of November. We did some shooting and Mark began to pressure me to get in the game.
“How are you going to do all this and not buy a gun?” he asked.
“Well, Dad gave me one to use,” I told him.
“Yeah, sure, but are you really gonna get into this using your old man’s gun?”
“Um, yes?” I said.
“Well, you seemed to like that Buckmark (a semiautomatic pistol) at the NRA show.”
“I did,” I said, though in that moment I was having a hard time figuring out what the hell he was referring to.
“I got one I’ll sell you,” he said. “Why don’t you come out tomorrow and we’ll shoot some guns and see what you like.”
I was, of course, in no way prepared to buy a gun. The thought had not really occurred to me, not since Dad gave me one of his. But, at the same time, I knew he was right. I did need to buy a gun. I needed to make that investment, but more important, that commitment if I was going to not just play at being a hunter and sportsman, but actually become one.
The next day, he, my uncle Roger, and I shot together at the range in the back end of the property, the same place where I fired my first gun and the place I have always associated with guns. I tried a couple different models and wanted so badly to be able to shoot the sleek and sophisticated semiautomatic Browning Mark had referred to the day before. But the truth is that I could not have hit the broad side of a barn with that thing if I ever found myself in a situation that required me to shoot the widest part of a storage building in order to, say, save a busload of orphans from a fire. Okay, it is admittedly hard to imagine that situation, but you take my meaning. Plus, the way I hold a pistol, the position of my arms and the angle of my elbows were not what Mark described as “a strong enough base” to facilitate the semiautomatic action. These kinds of weapons require resisting force in order to reload properly and my arms, hands, and upper body simply gave too much with every shot. I was, in other words, too much of a weakling to fire a small-caliber weapon and make it work. He recommended I try out a couple of revolvers.
“Roger and I prefer revolvers,” Mark said. “We just think they’re cool.”
“Yup,” acknowledged the seemingly always quiet Roger. “We’re old school.”
I felt like an old-time Chicago cop stepping up to the line with the nine-shot Taurus .22-caliber revolver, like I should have an Irish accent and be on the lookout for whiskey runners. Sort of ridiculous actually. But I cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger and it felt good. I emptied all the chambers and walked down to the paper target to discover I had shot a nice grouping. It was love at first shot. I couldn’t buy the gun at that moment, but I made a weak promise to Mark that I would buy it someday.
Getting back to Cincinnati, we quickly fell back into real life after our vacations and more than three thousand miles driven. Rebecca and the kids made the most of the last days of summer and I settled back in at work, a little tanner and a whole lot less stressed. I continued to look for opportunities to improve my essential hunting skills, and though they were few and far between, I managed to find some.
One night, Rebecca was tired and didn�
��t feel like cooking or ordering a pizza, so she called me on my way home and asked me to stop at the grocery store to pick something up.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Oh, whatever, just bring it home quick. We’re starving.”
I was walking through aisles of frozen food and couldn’t help but think of what I had learned about the McRib, which made every single scrap of it repelling to the point of revulsion. I didn’t feel like grilling since the idea of standing over flames on the hottest day of the year was as appealing as a tax audit during a community theater performance of The Lord of the Dance, and I was just about to give up and order Chinese when a smell came to me like a smoke signal from God. I followed my nose and soon found myself in front of a warmer oven chock-full of rotisserie chickens. And they looked as good as they smelled, all wrapped up in cellophane and paper bags, dripping with their own juices and glistening under the heat bulbs. I quickly grabbed one and the makings for a salad and went home to surprise the family.
The directions on the package said to remove the bird from the bag and place it breast up in a pan, heating it for twenty minutes or so. And as I was situating the carcass in the foil-lined pan, I realized something—this looked familiar. Very familiar. I had seen this before and not just under these circumstances. I wiped chicken grease off my fingers and went to the bookshelf in the living room to retrieve my copy of Field Dressing and Butchering Upland Birds, Waterfowl, and Wild Turkeys by the exquisitely named Monte Burch. I flipped to a dog-eared page that contained step-by-step line drawings demonstrating how to remove meat from bone on a pheasant. It looked about the same as the chicken, so when the timer went off and the pan came out of the oven, I held the book open with a salt cellar and a bottle of gin and followed the directions. I felt so smart, so innovative, so much like a surgeon practicing on a cadaver.
“What are you doing?” Rebecca asked me as I slowly slid my knife between the breast meat and wishbone. “Hurry up, we’re starving.”
I tried to hurry, but I wanted to make sure I got it right. I felt like I had an opportunity and didn’t want to waste it. It took me nearly as long to carve the bird as it did to cook, but when I was done I admired my serving dish of moist, succulent chunks of chicken and my trash bag full of neatly and near-completely cleaned bones.
Take that, hunting season. Who’s the man now?
There was something else I wanted to do before the summer was over, another source I wanted to turn to. I’ve mentioned my childhood obsession with the L.L.Bean catalog. What if, I thought, I called up L.L.Bean and asked if they would teach me how to hunt?
I knew I wouldn’t know everything by the time I went to Iowa. There is, after all, only so much you can learn from reading books and dissecting rotisserie chickens. But I wanted to be more prepared than someone who had never done this kind of thing before. I wanted to close the gap between the twelve-year-old me who didn’t know anything and the thirty-three-year-old me who should know something by now, and I had a hunch that L.L.Bean could help me.
To my pleasure and everlasting gratitude, I was right.
I sent an e-mail to the general inquiry inbox listed on their website explaining that I am an author and the editor of an online magazine, outlining my goals and asking whether they could point me in the right direction to get some advice, either over the phone or through content—books, videos, websites—that Bean may have prepared. Less than two hours later, I had an e-mail in my inbox from a man named Mac McKeever. He was a hunting and fishing public relations specialist for Bean and he asked if I would call him to discuss how he could help. I was stunned to say the least. I hadn’t expected a response, let alone a personal one and so quickly. I wrote the number down on my hand and stepped out of the office and into the enormous parking lot to make my call. I work in a creative environment full of young hipsters and didn’t want to be discussing my desire to learn how to hunt in front of them for fear of recoil or, worse, attention.
“This is Mac,” he said.
“Hi, Mac, this is Craig Heimbuch. I just got your e-mail about . . .”
“You’re the guy who wants to learn how to hunt,” he said. “Was it pheasant in Nebraska?”
“Iowa, actually,” I said, impressed that he had actually paid attention.
“Iowa pheasant, that’s legendary,” he said. “How can we help?”
“Well,” I said and tried to fight my voice from sounding too much like a groupie, “I’ve never done it before. I’ve shot guns, but not a ton and I’ve always loved Bean and I thought maybe you had a guide or somebody I could talk to for some advice.”
“I’ll do you one better,” said Mac, and he told me about the company’s Outdoor Discovery Schools program, which is basically a series of workshops in Maine teaching skills from kayaking to dogsled racing. “You’ve got to take one of our Wingshooting classes. I’ll comp you the admission. I just think it would be perfect for what you’re trying to do.”
I thanked him aggressively and hung up. Had I just been invited to Maine by L.L.Bean so they could help me learn how to hunt in order to impress my Iowa relatives and feel like a man? I believe they just had. We set a date over e-mail for early October, and I went back upstairs to begin looking for flights.
Look out, Maine, here I come.
12
Instruction
It had been a rough week. Late on a late September Monday night, a severe rainstorm weaved its way through a gap in the bushing around a vent on the roof and opened up a backwater creek down the plaster of our vaulted (and mercifully sloped) living room ceiling. This prompted a call to the landlord, who we’d been trying to get to come out for weeks to take a look at the cracking linoleum floor in the kitchen and a strange gap in the padding beneath the carpet. Or, more accurately, it prompted several calls. Rebecca would call me, I would step out of a meeting or interrupt my writing to call the landlord who would not answer. I would then call Rebecca to tell her that no one had answered and she would call me back twenty minutes later to see if anyone had called back and ask me if I thought it was strange that no one would return our calls. I would tell her that, yes, I thought it was strange and the whole process would repeat again, seemingly ad infinitum.
I finally got a call from the maintenance guy who said he would come Wednesday or Thursday, though what a three-day wait for service did for a leaky roof, I could not be sure. I told him I needed to confer with my wife on the schedule and call him back. I called Rebecca and we agreed that Wednesday would work just fine. She had some things to do with the kids, but I had a relatively meeting-free morning and could stay home for a couple of hours. I called him back and left a message saying as much, satisfied with my manly handling of this precarious situation.
That Monday at work had been a blur. Meetings forgotten, deadlines missed, and the constant interaction with my phone. It seemed I could do no right. Tuesday wasn’t much better. There were too many places to be, too many commitments with the kids. I found myself alone on the high school track just before midnight, huffing and puffing my way through a three-mile run listening to a podcast about the various techniques of fitting a gun to a larger-framed man without hearing a word. I had hoped the run, the fresh air, the podcast would help me relax, help me sleep, help me let go of the stress at home and the stress at work.
It did not.
The next day was Dylan’s birthday and I barely got to see him. I put Jack on the school bus and walked back to the condo to wait for the maintenance man. Rebecca had made plans to take Dylan and Molly to meet some friends at one of those indoor inflatable gyms, the kind with air-filled slides and bounce houses that serve the dual purpose of entertaining children and serving as host to dozens of flesh-eating communicable diseases.
When I had spoken to Joel, the Kentucky-mumbling oddly dusty maintenance man, on Monday, he had told me he would be out between 9:30 and 11. So having the rare opportunity to be h
ome alone on a weekday morning, I did what any self-respecting husband and father would do, namely drank coffee and watched SportsCenter in my underwear, waiting until 9:29 to pull on a pair of jeans and a sweater. One must always be presentable for guests after all. By ten, I’m getting restless, so I do the breakfast dishes, vacuum the carpets, and fold some laundry. At eleven, having cleaned the bathrooms, checked my e-mail, made all the beds, and refolded all the T-shirts in my middle dresser drawer, I call Joel and get his voice mail. I call Rebecca and get hers. I have a meeting at noon, one I assumed I would be able to make given the times Joel had laid out. I’m beginning to dread what was to happen next—namely, Rebecca getting mad at me for somehow failing to make this all come to fruition—when just before 11:30, Joel calls.
“Yeah, it’s Joel,” he said. “You called me?”
“Yeah, Joel, hi,” I said. I’ve never been the kind of person to seek confrontation. I’ve never sent back the wrong order. I’ve never asked to speak to a manager—except under the direst of circumstances and only then over the phone with a customer service representative whom I assumed was based somewhere closer to Kuala Lumpur than Cleveland, and only then if something was actually on fire. I’ve always subscribed to the distinctly Lutheran precept that you get more friends with tuna hot dish than you do by shooting their dogs. (Okay, maybe it loses something in translation, but if you say it with an Upper Wisconsin accent it sounds much less menacing.) So I go the nice route. “Joel, it’s Craig, the guy with the leaky roof? Just wondering how long you were going to be?”
“Huh?” he says, and I could hear his confused mouth-breathing through the phone.
“We had an appointment,” I demurred. “You said you could come out between 9:30 and 11 and I took the morning off work. You remember?”
“I never did got no call back from you,” he said.
“I called back within five minutes of hanging up,” I entreated. “I left you a voice mail.”
And Now We Shall Do Manly Things Page 14