LOCAL SHOW FOCUSES ON FAMILY, EXPERIENCE

In an age of rapid population growth, LCD overload, and unprecedented cultural disassociation from nature and the outdoors, when mass marketability rules, often in favor of more traditional, refined values, outdoor television has been stolen from the everyman. A family of family and friends from Central Virginia is stealing it back. 

The Mason-Dixon Experiment focuses on providing viewers the raw experience of a family-oriented outdoor lifestyle, over adrenaline-soaked cut-shots and badassery.

    Back in 2013, hunting partners John Miller and Britton White were sitting on a tailgate of a truck having lunch when they came up with the idea of trying to put together an outdoor TV show. They conceived the idea and the name, The Mason-Dixon Experiment (MDE), but life and full-time jobs got the best of their forward momentum until 2015, when White began talking to church friend, Eric Umstead, a graphic designer, about how to get things up and running. White’s wife, Jessica White, and father, Junior White, both got involved, and the idea started to gain traction.

    “We want to bring a different side of the outdoors to TV that will show folks that it’s not always about your catch or harvest, but about the experiences you have, good or bad, in the great outdoors,” said Britton White. 

    The Mason-Dixon Experiment team, family people who promote the tagline “Shoot straight and get your kids outdoors,” also promote a strong family and conservation ethic. 

    “The Mason-Dixon Experiment is all about the next generation of outdoors-person,” said Umstead. “Our children and grandchildren are becoming more dependent on a system that might one day let them down. Being self-sufficient—hunting, fishing, camping, cooking, etc.—shouldn’t be dying skills, but basic human rights that enable us to provide for our families no matter what comes to pass. Our goal is to promote outdoor pursuits and to educate everyone on the benefits and enjoyment of a sustainable outdoor lifestyle.”

    Right off the bat, the team started filming every time they went out in the field.

    “We got some good, some bad, but again, it’s about the experience,” said Britton White. 

    After filming for a full season, they had compiled enough footage for five episodes—enough to start—and each subsequent season brought more and more footage and more episodes. Today, The Mason-Dixon Experiment can be viewed on Gen7 Outdoors and The Hunt Channel, both online, digital media platforms. 

    “We chose digital media because we found that the majority of our followers—males 18 to 44 years old—were consuming information differently than back in the 80s and 90s,” said Britton White. 
   
    “It seems all signs pointed to streaming and digital media.”

    The show airs both live and on-demand on Gen7 Outdoors, airing live Mondays at 11 AM, Tuesdays at 7 PM, and Fridays at 11 AM. The Hunt Channel is currently on-demand only. And short episodes will be airing on CarbonTV starting in 2018. 

    Though the show’s primary subject is hunting, the team does film fishing and other outdoor content, too, often in the form of live videos from the field. 

    “We have aspirations of adding a food preparation aspect to it, too,” said Jessica White. “We want to show that this is not just a sport to us, but that we use it to provide for our families. Britton and I haven’t bought beef in four years.”

    Along with the success that The Mason-Dixon Experiment has seen in its short time, there have also been the quiet struggles that face any entrepreneurial endeavor. 

    “Another aspect of this is money,” said Britton White. “It takes money to do what we do, and it’s not cheap. Trying to manage personal expenses with the expenses associated with MDE can be stressful.”

    “In the home, it’s difficult because Britton and I both work full time jobs and MDE takes up additional time,” said Jessica White. “Ultimately, we really feel like we have something special, so to be able to put the time in is worth it.”

    “MDE has been a blessing to all of us. Our pursuits with MDE have become an extension of our daily lives, our interactions with each other and with those we come in contact with at work, school, church, and community,” said Umstead. “We have made strong connections with other outdoor teams, our sponsors and followers, and the benefits far outweigh the challenges.”

    To support pure, local outdoors, follow the team on social media, watch the show, and reach out and give feedback. And take a kid hunting. 

    “We want to build a community around what we are doing,” said Britton White. “The tradition of hunting and the outdoors goes back further than any of us, so trying to keep that legacy going is our main goal. Our youth is our means to keep that tradition alive and moving forward.”□

*Originally published in The Rural Virginian

OTHER PEOPLE'S RIVERS

The allure of the outdoors has many different flavors, angles, reasons people strike out over land and water.

Photo by Matt Reilly.

    There are the fish that live in striking settings. An eastern small stream devotee will hike miles through mountainous terrain to meet the spritely brook trout, a species whose trophy specimens could, in most cases, be measured with a standard caliper. They’ll invest many late nights tying imitations of insects onto hooks, fold maps into oblivion, and purchase four-wheel-drive vehicles just for the chance.

    And I like to believe that most who set their sights on the brook trout do it equally for the chance to tangle with one of the Earth’s most beautiful creatures and for the associated opportunity to explore through the senses the East’s most quintessential setting. Appalachia, the hollows and springs and wild foliage blazes, are in the flanks of the brook trout, and if you’re the kind of human I’m talking about, you understand my logic.

    Similarly there is the game. The whitetails that Americans so highly tout, both for their cunning and their beauty. Hunters infected by whitetail fever will spend the better part of a year making purchases, scouting, and dreaming, all in an attempt to make more decadent their existence during the few weeks or months that pursuing their infatuation is legal. Biology is important in any game that requires the participant to become a part of it for a particular species. And so there are the books and papers and camera trap surveys that hunters fill their off-season with, if only to make themselves more familiar with their quarry, to become more capable predators.

    Through this comes the oft misunderstood paradox of hunting. How could one love the animal it intends to kill? Love, in my experience, is largely made up of respect and appreciation, with a little bit of chemical obsession for longevity. The whitetail hunter comes to love the whitetail and the place it lives—the field edges and hardwood groves—and learns to live for the day when breathe becomes opaque, when dream becomes reality.

    These traditions are often solitary endeavors—exercises in individuality made richer by the absence of people and the elements of the unnatural world we imbue ourselves in daily. But collectively, there is a community of individuals who walk on the same plane, who love the brook trout and the whitetail, the hollows and fields, and the sight of ripe persimmons and yellow hickory leaves and breathe condensing into a fog in the morning. There is a conglomerate who feels and hears the same things.

    And in those people there is another angle to the outdoor experience. For the more I come to know and love my own waters, and the more I travel and explore others’, the more I find myself pondering the stories of the people who call these places foreign to me theirs.

    On a small spring creek in western Montana, I encountered a group of college friends, long since graduated and geographically dispersed, reunited over beers and the nostalgic potential of their home water. Some brought their kids. Some wished their fathers could be there.

    I fished the evening away thinking of those relationships, with each other and the river. I thought about the slaving fly shop owner and guide I knew in the town over who invests his time on the bigger rivers for his customers, but yearns for the soul-refreshing joys of wading alone the small creek that dissolves the stress of small business ownership into something worth it. I thought about the kid not much older than me who was cutting his teeth on the river as a part-time guide for a local outfitter. And my evening was richer for it.

    I’m reading Hemingway, currently, as I have several times before. I’m re-reading his short stories, actually, as an appreciative courtesy to a friend with whom I’ve shared water in spirit, who sent me the collection just the other day. I met Irv in a pizza joint parking lot after I noticed our vehicles shared similar stickers from far-away waters. He grew up on a river in north-central Pennsylvania I’ve grown fond of, a place I’ve learned lessons and made stories. We’ve shared other waters, too, it turns out, but his story is most rich in north-central Pennsylvania.

    And so I was driving to my own home water, thinking about Up in Michigan and Irv’s river and mine. A hulking, white-nosed fox squirrel darted in front of me, but made the last-minute decision to scramble up the nearest post oak. And then I thought about fox squirrel hunting and how fall was coming, and the way evening autumn light looks in an old farmstead being reclaimed by oaks and maples, and the people who would have lived there and done it and thought about it all before me.□

*Originally published in The Rural Virginian

DISCOVERING A TROPHY SMALLMOUTH FISHERY

“I’d just like to learn something, get a better bearing on what these late-summer fish are doing,” I said over my right shoulder, delivering a passive prod to Jared Tuck, a seasoned smallmouth angler from Wytheville, as he slung another cast to the bank from the back of the raft.

The author releasing an trophy smallmouth to fight another day. Photo by Matt Reilly.

    “Yeah, it’d be nice to catch one, though,” said Tuck.

    

    “We’ll catch a couple,” I said, attempting to anchor the fate of the day with the optimism and confidence necessary in hunting trophy fish.

    An osprey launched itself into flight from a prominent pine along the long, rocky shoreline, the rhythmic sound of air under large, beating wings syncing with the whirling baseline of oar strokes pushing up-lake against a light but steady breeze.

    Zach Taylor, also of Wytheville, and a virgin to the smallmouth bass that famously fin the New River near his home, cast from the bow, silently wishing too for that first fish of the day.

    On the first day of our junior year of college, Zach and I met as roommates, and quickly established common ground in fishing. Upon learning of his uninitiated smallmouth career, I made his introduction to the hard-fighting bronzeback a priority, and we endeavored to float the New at the next opportunity.

    Tuck, who grew up fishing the waters of the New, was our across-the-hall neighbor, and one of the 20 freshman residents I was charged with advising. We talked about fishing and smallmouth and the New River more often than not when we didn’t have work to do, and when we did.

    But it was a year before the three of us found time to fish together, and, ironically, we weren’t on the river, but a foreign water of which little is publicly known. Its potential as a smallmouth fishery made me eager to discover its secrets, to learn to catch its fish so as to be able to guide anglers to trophy smallmouth on it. When I pitched the fishery to the boys, they were eager, too.

    Tuck swapped to a topwater lure. It landed with a splash next to the bank, and he began working it to the boat in a zig-zag powered by short, upward jerks of the rod tip.

    “My dad caught a nice smallmouth on this thing on the New,” said Tuck, without confidence.

    As we approached a small creek mouth, Tuck fired his lure to the bank under a small overhanging limb. Before he could begin his retrieve, a V-wake pushing parallel to the bank sprouted a bucket mouth and inhaled it with a loud splash.

    Tuck cranked down and set the hook. I dropped the oars. In a few seconds we all saw a large flash of bronze. I grabbed the net, and, being in just a few feet of water, hopped out of the boat. A few tense seconds passed before we saw the flank of the fish again. Tuck raised his rod tip, and I shot the net underneath of the fish and around its head and lifted.

Jared Tuck with an 18-inch smallmouth taken on topwater. Photo by Matt Reilly.

    We all celebrated as I pulled the fish from the bag, handing it to Tuck. The first fish of the day—about 18 inches—was the fish we were looking for—a day-maker, and a trophy fish in just about anyone’s book, especially for a foreign body of water.

    Tuck traded me my camera for his fish, which he held up for me to photograph. We measured the fish and I snapped more photos as he lowered it back to the water.

    Zach caught my attention with an excited grunt from the front. I looked over my shoulder to see his rod bent statically. He was snagged.

    But he was reeling. Then the rod throbbed and the fish jumped. As I stood in the water dumfounded, Tuck tried to hold on to his fish to complete a double, but lost his grip in excitement. Zach’s fish bull-dogged around the boat for almost 30 seconds before he succeeded in turning the fish’s head towards the surface. As the brute flared its gills in preparation for another head shake, I caught it with the net and pulled it from safety.

Zach Taylor with a 20-inch smallmouth--his first ever. Photo by Matt Reilly.

    “Dude!” I yelled at Zach as he stared in disbelief at his first smallmouth ever hanging in the net.

    Catching up to the events that had unfolded, we shared fist bumps all around. We measured Zach’s fish, which taped at just over 20 inches—a trophy smallmouth, a citation certified by the game department, and a hell of an introduction to the species. I took my camera back from Tuck and handed the fish to Zach, his hands shaking.

    We snapped photos and released the fish, and celebrated those fish for the rest of the day, made complete in just a few short but memorable moments.□

*Originally published in The Rural Virginian