And Now We Shall Do Manly Things

by Craig Heimbuch

  13

  Preparation

  I returned from Maine more excited than ever to get hunting. In a little less than four weeks, I would set to the field with my relatives in pursuit of my first game, and I still had some things to take care of, namely gearing up. I suppose I have always been a bit of a gear junkie. I love specialized items designed for specific purposes. For many, and here I mean mostly real adventurers and enthusiasts, gear is a means to an end, the accoutrements of a lifestyle. But for me, the gear has always been central to any endeavor.

  My mom likes to tell people that when I was a little boy, I loved to play baseball. I loved spending hours and hours in the backyard hitting my dad’s pitches or pretending to hit pitches when there was no one around. But I could not simply grab a glove or bat and head out into the street. Even at a young age, I understood the importance of proper attire and would only spend hours playing baseball if I were wearing my baseball shoes, batting glove, uniform, and hat. Not just any hat. It had to be a real baseball hat, which in my youngest days was a Milwaukee Brewers cap Dad had given me for a birthday or some other like occasion. If I were to play make-believe soldiers with my friends, I would only do so if wearing my dad’s old army canteen and ammunition belt. I suppose that I would have required full padding and helmet for a toss of the football. It wasn’t that I was soft or even particularly attuned to my appearance so much as my imagination would not allow me to undertake anything without the requisite gear.

  I see this in my sons, Dylan especially. When he was three, he watched my favorite movie, The Sandlot, with Jack and me, and it has changed him ever since. The sweet story of a boy who moves to a new town and tries to fit in with a misfit baseball team seems simple enough. But the movie’s hero, Benny “the Jet” Rodriguez, does amazingly athletic things while wearing jeans and Chuck Taylor sneakers, so Dylan requires the same outfit for his everyday life. Every night before bed, he asks me to lay his jeans out on his dresser. At four years old, he has more than a dozen pair of the simple canvas sneakers. It is his uniform and my wife doesn’t quite understand it. She thinks he’s just too picky. She doesn’t understand, as I do from my own youthful experiences, that his devotion to those articles of clothing has much less to do with a sense of personal style than it does a need for fulfillment and preparation. What would happen if he were playing ball with friends and accidentally knocks one over the neighbor’s fence? How would he be able to retrieve the ball and evade certain death at the furry paws of a legendarily vicious dog if he weren’t wearing jeans and a pair of Chucks? Well, he certainly doesn’t want to find out and neither did I. I mean, how would I ever become the first eight-year-old to play for the Brewers if I weren’t wearing my official cap when the team’s scout peered over our fence to see me hit home runs off my dad? I shudder at the thought.

  When I was nine or ten, at about the same time I was beginning to fully absorb the L.L.Bean catalog as my reading material of choice, I came across an article in Sports Illustrated for Kids about Phil Knight and Tinker Hatfield, the founder and head designer of Nike and its products. I was simply enthralled. I devoured the article, reading it three times before heading into the basement for some typing paper and colored pencils. Every day for more than four years I sat down and designed a pair of shoes. I’d start with a profile outline and then filled in details, worked through color schemes, and pushed the envelope of design. After about two months of doing this, I swiped a brown mailing envelope from my dad’s desk, scribbled a note, and shipped off a package of designs addressed to Hatfield. A few weeks later, I got a note from someone in Nike’s public relations department thanking me for my submissions and politely telling me that the company does not accept unsolicited designs. But the person thanked me in that “keep up the good work, slugger” kind of way and included a cheap, neon pink Nike painter’s cap for my trouble.

  To a lot of kids, this would have spelled the end, the logical outcome of a small social experiment; to me the message was quite different. What I got from all of it was that I could continue to draw shoes and mail them off and, in return for my efforts, I would get free stuff. So I doubled my efforts. I began sending packages to Nike on a monthly basis and expanded my scope to other shoes companies: Reebok, Adidas, New Balance, Converse, even the practical business casual shoemaker Rockport. All told, I probably submitted a hundred packages of hand-drawn shoes over the course of late elementary school and junior high. I would find an advertisement in the Sunday newspapers and trace each company’s trademarked logo until I could reproduce it with something resembling accuracy, then set about designing a pair of shoes for that company. Hundreds and hundreds of pairs of shoes. I then expanded further to include tennis rackets, sunglasses, casual sportswear. And the free hats, stickers, and T-shirts began piling up.

  It wasn’t until I fully discovered girls that my fetishistic devotion to footwear finally abated. But my instinct for gear never really did. And before I had told anyone about my desire to learn how to hunt, I snuck hours late at night to troll the websites of popular hunting outlets like L.L.Bean’s, Cabela’s, Gander Mountain, and Bass Pro Shops. I made exhaustive comparisons of style, fabric, and cut of hunting boots, coats, shirts, and specialized upland pants that feature reinforced nylon patches on the legs to repel briars, thorns, and other potentially sticky flora while traipsing through fields in pursuit of game. I would have little debates with myself on the relative merits of waxed cotton outerwear versus Gore-Tex-coated nylon. I was that twelve-year-old kid again obsessing over Air Jordans. After months, I had narrowed my choices down to coats, shirts, shoes, socks, gloves, boots, and pants from Bean or Cabela’s, but after my trip to Maine, it would have felt somehow dishonest or unfaithful not to order from Bean. So, one day in mid-October, I picked up the phone on my desk and called the number Mac McKeever had given me for placing orders through the company’s Pro Hunting program. Apparently, as a writer with an interest in learning how to hunt, I was given the same privilege as Bean’s professional guides. I was walked through the sizing and ordering process and even got a significant discount on my order. The moment I hung up the phone, I began waiting—waiting for the moment when that big box would arrive and I could finally try on the new stuff, the adult equivalent of that old Brewers cap.

  The waiting seemed to take forever, so I busied myself in other ways. I sent an e-mail to Steven Rinella telling him about my upcoming trip and this book. He replied almost as soon as I hit send, expressing how happy he was that I had decided to give hunting a try.

  “I’m a little nervous,” I wrote. “Got any advice?”

  “Just have fun,” he wrote. We exchanged a dozen or so messages in an hour—I’m still not sure why I didn’t just call him—and by the end, he had invited me to join him in California in January for a wild boar hunt on a ranch belonging to a friend of his.

  “That seems pretty hard-core,” I wrote.

  “Man, it’s fun as shit,” he responded.

  I called Mark and confirmed plans and called my dad to make sure he was going to be able to make it. It turned out, he couldn’t. Something had come up. I was crestfallen and more than slightly heartbroken. I had planned out this whole trip in my mind. I imagined making up for lost time with my dad, finally joining him in doing something that he had always loved to do. I felt let down. Cast aside. It took me days to realize that proving to Dad that I could be a hunter may have been the initial impulse behind the trip, but it had morphed into something else entirely. I may have wanted to feel accepted as a man by the man I’d always held as the standard before, but after nearly a year of pouring all my free time into this project, I realized that me going hunting for the first time had little to do with him and everything to do with me doing something adventurous, something that scared me, something that I never would have done before.

  I won’t say that made everything better. It didn’t. Of course I wanted him to be there. But Dad backing out at the last minute
to deal with the priorities in his life was exactly the kind of thing a confident man would do. So I needed to be confident and not allow all this effort to rest on his calendar availability. I needed to do this for me and only for me. But I didn’t want to do it alone.

  My friend John jumped at the opportunity. After discussing the Iowa trip with him in the spring, I hadn’t done much to firm up plans and had almost forgotten about it. But I called him after I talked to Dad and he made the arrangements to get a couple days off work to join me. He was genuinely excited and I was looking forward to having him along for the long drive and for my first time out in the field.

  The Bean box arrived while I was at work, and Rebecca and Jack moved it into our bedroom so that it was there when I walked in around dinnertime. It took everything I had not to run past my waiting wife and children and straight to my new gear, but I managed to hold off on ripping into my package until after the kids were in bed. Turns out, I had already grown up more than what I would have imagined.

  After the dishes were done and the kids were asleep, I went straight to the bedroom to take stock of my haul. It was all there, neatly packaged in plastic bags and I laid it out on the bed like a sailor packing his steam trunk for a long deployment. There was: a waxed cotton field coat with orange pads on the shoulders, an orange vest with slash pockets on the breast that fed to a rear game bag, a pair of upland pants with reinforced patches, an orange Gore-Tex ball cap, a gun-cleaning kit, a Boker Upland bird knife, a pair of Bean’s signature Maine Hunting Shoes, two pairs of socks, a pair of upland gloves that reminded me a lot of baseball batting gloves, a manly shirt with breast pockets and loops on the shoulders, and a waxed cotton floppy hat for use après-hunt. I stared at all of it for long moments, discarding the sea of plastic bags that had piled on the floor, then stripped off my work clothes and began trying them on in earnest—different combinations of shirt and coat, shirt and vest, coat and vest, both hats. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and even snapped a few self-portraits with my iPhone. I must have been at it an hour before Rebecca called in from the living room asking if I was still alive. The truth was that I was more alive in that moment than I had been in weeks. And it wasn’t just about getting new stuff; it was about preparing and feeling ready. With each new combination of gear, I practiced the gun mount and movement I had learned in Maine, using a personalized Louisville Slugger my friend Rob had given me as a groomsman gift in place of the Winchester Supreme over-under Dad had given me months before.

  After perhaps ninety minutes of pantomime and playing dress-up, I folded everything neatly and tucked it back into the shipping box, emerging from the bedroom with what must have been a shit-eating grin on my face and a sense that I was ready.

  The next day, I stopped at the local used bookstore and bought back issues of Field & Stream magazine to supplement my reading on the topic of pheasant hunting and butchering and patiently waited for the days to tick off the calendar and my moment to finally arrive.

  Two nights before I was to leave, Rebecca, the kids, and I went out to dinner at Bob Evans. The kids, Jack especially, were excited to hear about my plans and I told them what I was going to do in as much detail as I felt comfortable. I still wasn’t a gun guy or a hunter and I had tried to be careful not to glorify firearms too much in the presence of my kids for fear of creating an unhealthy or potentially dangerous curiosity. But Rebecca asked Jack and me to stop at the grocery store on our way home from dinner and I couldn’t help but feel excited for what was to come.

  “Daddy?” Jack said from the backseat. “You’re going to Iowa, right?”

  “Yes sir, I am,” I said.

  “And you’re going hunting?”

  “You better believe it.”

  “Are you going to bring home a bear?” he asked, and I could sense a bit of wonderment in his tone. I thought maybe Jack was looking forward to having a stuffed bear, like the one in my parents’ basement, too.

  “No, buddy, I’m not hunting a bear. I’m going after a pheasant.”

  “A pheasant? Is that like a deer?” he asked and I could tell he had a vision of me stalking large game with a spear.

  “No, buddy, a pheasant is a bird.”

  “Do you eat it?”

  “Yeah, buddy, you eat it. It’s like a chicken.”

  Here there was a long pause as he tried to work out the implications of what had just been said.

  “Dad,” he said—and his tone had gone from “you’re my hero” to “you’re an idiot”—“you’re going hunting for a chicken?”

  I felt my shoulders sag and the air bleed slowly from my lungs. It sounded so ridiculous when he said it, all this anticipation, all this new stuff and hard work for a bird very similar to one we could pick up at the grocery store.

  “Well, it’s not just me,” I said by way of justification. “Uncle Mark and Tommy will be there.”

  “Dad,” he said, putting his little foot down, “it’s going to take three of you to hunt a chicken?”

  He was right. I was being ridiculous.

  “It’s called a pheasant, Jack, and some of them have very sharp claws.”

  “Whatever you say,” he said. “I think we should get some ice cream sandwiches at the store.”

  Okay, so maybe my big manly adventure was neither big nor manly and it might not even be all that adventurous, but I tried not to let Jack’s dimmed hopes of having the kind of father who wrestles bears to submission dash my hopes for my big trip.

  The next night, I stopped by John’s place to pick up my gun (where I had been storing it in his locked gun safe) and make final arrangements. He met me at the door with some bad news.

  “You know that job in Memphis I was talking about at the beach this summer?” he said. “They called me today and they want me to come down for an interview Monday morning.”

  It was Thursday night. The plan was to hunt Saturday and Sunday and come back Monday. John was trying to let me down easy and he seemed really broken up about backing out. I knew this job was important to him, that the opportunity was one he’d been dreaming about since college. So I couldn’t be mad at him. I couldn’t hold it against him.

  “Maybe I can get them to fly me from Iowa to Memphis for the interview,” he said. But it was too late. I couldn’t expect him to pass up an opportunity just to join me on my first hunting trip. I collected my gun, shook his hand, and told him not to worry about it, that we’d just go some other time.

  No Dad, no John. It seemed that for my first big hunting trip, I would be on my own. Just me and the manliest group of relatives possible and yet I remained excited. I would be leaving early the next morning and I didn’t have time to feel any other way.

  It was just something I had to do.

  14

  The Drive to Iowa and My Missing License

  My in-laws were in town to help with the kids while I was gone hunting, so Rebecca and I decided to let them have our bed and, with no guest room for the offering, we blew up the air mattress we use on camping trips and set it up in the living room. When we lay down, my intention was to get some sleep, call it an early night in preparation of an early morning. But instead, we did what we always do. Much to the detriment of a well-rested mind, we flipped on the TV to watch one of my wife’s favorite shows, a teenage drama about the sex lives and torment of centuries-old vampires and their human friends. Anticipating a narcotic effect, I set the alarm on my cell phone for 4:01 A.M. and put it in the kitchen of our tiny condo, then nestled down next to my wife.

  I’ve never understood the vampire craze that swept through American pop culture in the early part of the twenty-first century. The idea of a bloodsucking boyfriend and his naive love interest just never carried a whole lot of water. And yet, for my wife, it was catnip. The woman who took more than four months to read my first book managed to read all four books in a popular vampire series in less than tw
o weeks. She waited on line for midnight premieres of new movies from that same series and was constantly on the lookout for entertainment involving forbidden lust and craven wanting. I came to understand that vampire stories were an upstanding suburban mom’s secret pleasure, like men who troll the magazine racks at bookstores looking for that lone copy of Playboy that someone has removed from the plastic wrapping and tucked furiously—presumably due to the sudden arrival of wife or child—behind a stash of photography and clay modeling magazines.

  “These things are all about sex,” I told her as we tucked into our fourth episode of The Vampire Diaries (she had borrowed an entire volume of DVDs from a friend) during our blow-up bed watch-a-thon. “Why don’t they just say it?”

  “They are not all about sex. Why would you even say that?” she retorted, an odd sense of offense in her tone.

  “This girl wants to be with her boyfriend. She loves him. But he’s a vampire and there is, therefore, a chance he will get excited and tear her heart out. It’s all about the questions surrounding a girl’s decision to lose her virginity to the evil and timeless beast that is the teenage boy.”

  “Shut up,” she said dismissively. “It’s not about sex. It’s just about vampires.”

  “Do you think vampires are sexy?”

  “Some of them are.”

  “Then it’s about sex. Sex, sex, sex, sex.”

  She threw a pillow at me and turned the volume up on the TV and I decided not to press the issue anymore. I checked my watch. It was already after midnight and in order to make it to Iowa by midafternoon, I needed to be up in less than four hours, so I rolled over, turned off the light, and left my wife to her vampires.

  It felt like my eyes had just closed when the annoying bleep-bleep of my cell-phone alarm clock woke me. I’ve always been amazed by Rebecca’s ability to sleep through an alarm, particularly this one. I had set it to the loudest, most-eardrum-crinkling sound I could and nearly leaped off the air mattress to shut it off. I turned to see that my wife had not so much as flinched, looking peaceful with visions of vampires dancing through her head.