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
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