Mellowing Like Whiskey…with Age

In my younger, salad days I think I could have been (in fact I often was) described as ‘reactionary’ or ‘combative’.  Maybe even ‘passionate’ or ‘reckless’ or ‘wild’.  And in some ways I guess that I still have my moments in that idiom.  But a minor miracle of metamorphosis (alliteration, anyone?) is happening.
I’m settling down…or more accurately, I’m changing and I’m refocusing.
There was a time when I was cynical, angry, defensive, self-righteous, and downright ornery when it came to talking about hunting.  That others disapproved of hunting, or threatened the long term viability of the tradition politically or socially, or eroded the high ethical standards that we should all aspire to as hunters, or even did things in a different way than I did them made me upset and all ranty.  For some reason I took the differences of opinion that others had as a personal slight, or a judgment of my personal worth.  Maybe it was the pride and idealism of youth but I spent the better part of my teen years and basically all of my twenties living as a judgmental, loudmouthed a-hole.  It was a habit that became and consumed my identity.  Better psychological analysts than I could probably tell you why I was that way, but I attribute it basically to some futile attempt to define myself as an individual within a set of traditions, actions, beliefs, and philosophies…or something like that.
Then something started happening.  Those feelings began to go away.  It was a three step process really.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that this first step occurred right around the time my son was born.  It is hard to have time to be a cynical jerk when a new life demands your undivided attention.  Even harder when that new life is just so dang awesome, what with their knack for seeing the world simplistically through eyes that are almost constantly happy and innocent.  Simply put, being a happy Dad makes for a happy kid.  Also being an angry victim all the time is draining…and I needed to focus my energy on other things…notably making sure my son was safe, warm, and healthy.  Sure, I still get mad at political, social, and environmental actions that are jeopardizing the future (hunting or otherwise) for my son and by extension the futures of other people’s sons and daughters, but simply complaining about it does not a problem fix.
Secondly, and perhaps this is where I saw real progress, was that I came upon an epiphany.  Being an angry, opinionated person that spouted off my own beliefs and agenda related to hunting to anyone that cared to tune in really made me no better than those who use similar tactics to attempt to disabuse the hunting community of our outdoor privileges and traditions.  Also, feeling like a martyr all the time really sucks…I realized that it just wasn’t doing anything positive for me.  It may be a positive life choice for some people, but not this cat.  I have bigger, tastier fish to fry.
And finally, I realized that positive outlets (as I hope this forum will be) can have a much more positive impact on the direction of debate.  In a recent post I made reference to hate mail, and I’ll delve much deeper into that later on in related posts, but for now I’ll just say to those of you who follow Get Out & Go Hunting and that are still vociferous and impassioned drum-beaters for the hunting community, I urge you not to stop if you don’t want to…but at the same time, please do stop telling me (as one emailing fan of this site did) that I’m a “sell-out” or that I’ve “gone soft” or worst of all that I “don’t really give a damn about the future of hunting”…because I do.  I just don’t use militant tactics or rhetoric.
It requires no justification on my part (so I won’t bother with a rambling justification) because I’m comfortable with where I am with this site, and I think that aside from being semi-entertaining and pseudo-informative, this blog has the opportunity to share my genuine love and passion for hunting (a passion and pride that is the common thread I share with millions of hunters in North America and around the world, regardless of how we choose to express it) in a positive way with stories and thoughts that represent (for me) the core of why hunting is great and why I hope to be able to pass this tradition down to my son and the next generation at large.  There’s still passion and commitment (especially when it comes to stamping out illegal or negatively representative actions), it is just that now I don’t lament and shout about it all the time.
Ten years ago I wanted to be the voice of hunters everywhere.  Thanks to the mellowing factors of experience, perspective, and yes plain old growing up, I now only desire to be one of the voices of hunting.
You have your own voices too, so don’t be afraid to use them…just don’t make the mistakes of my earlier days and spread your message in ways that might actually be detrimental to the hunting traditions we all value so much.

That’s experience talking.

New Year’s (Hunting) Resolutions

I was pleasantly surprised to note that today was April 4th.  Somehow, and without me really knowing it, March slid quietly away to leave us with exactly three weeks to go until the spring turkey opener here in Ontario.  I blame this niggling cold that has been hanging on to me for the last week or so for using a Vicks induced haze to blur my normally acute perception of time.
Initially it appeared that the weather was wanting to cooperate as well; then we had a small blip last night in the form of five centimetres of snow over four hours.  It’s all gone now though because it was followed fast by a midnight thunderstorm…now it is 16° above zero with drizzle and it looks as though we’ll be experiencing a solid string of days above freezing.  Ahhh spring in southwestern Ontario; the place to be if you want to experience five different seasons of weather in less than 24 hours.
So barring another spring snowstorm or cold snap (because seriously, I’ve had enough of them) things should start coming together soon in terms of scouting, nailing down plans, and increased bird movement.  For me, the opener is in a way my real New Year’s Day.  I get to begin another year of hunting, and it starts with spring turkeys.
According to many unconfirmed and anecdotal sources, it takes 21 days to make or break a habit.  So in that spirit, here is another list (see I told you it was a sickness I have) of the 10 habits I intend to make or break for the 2011 spring turkey season.
1.      Stop calling so damn much
As I’ve said in previous posts, I love calling.  I can hear some of you now saying “I call all the time, and I’ve had lots of success” or “I read an article that touted the advantages of constant aggressive calling” and I don’t doubt you at all.  However, this is a the top of my list because this approach has only taken me so far, and this year I’m resolving to only call twice after a turkey stops answering me.  If he answers I’ll keep putting the wood to him, but if he clams up so will I.  I’ll report back here on how that goes.
2.      Learn to sit still
‘Nuff said.
3.      Calm down
I think a significant part of my hilarious ineptitude stems from my excitability.  Thankfully I’m not one of those yahoos that gets excited and shoots at movement or gets so jittery so as to be generally unsafe, but I am admittedly a bit high-strung in the turkey woods.  The euphemistic word would be ‘intense’.  When I’m intently listening for a distant gobble or concentrating on scanning the bush for any signs of movement I get startled easily.  Three years ago a sparrow landed on my gun barrel when I was not expecting it and I almost soiled myself.  Last year some very fresh bear sign in my hunting area had my nerves stretched extra taut.  And so on.  I still enjoy turkey hunting (almost too much) but perhaps if I can take a deep breath and live in the moment, maybe I’ll enjoy it that much more.
4.      Be patient
This is directly related to the “sit still” resolution.  My dear old dad has told me a hundred times that I abandon my stands too early, in all hunting scenarios, turkey or otherwise.  So this year if I hear a gobble and the bird doesn’t rush right in to my serenades (because, after all, they usually don’t) then the bird gets two hours by the clock before I get creative on him.  If I’m not hearing anything…that’s a different and much more difficult scenario.  With limited time to hunt, I often feel that I have to “make something happen”.  Three times in the past this tendency has resulted in me bumping gobblers.  I can’t commit to a time (because again, I don’t have a surplus of hunting opportunities), but I’ll try to hang out on stand a bit longer this year and try to wait out a silent tom.
5.      Pay attention
Twice last year I looked up and saw turkeys that had “materialized” in a place where they weren’t before.  Once it was two hens who apparently had not noticed me yet.  The other time it was a jake that trotted away, and was never really in gun range to begin with.  I’ve had the same experience while deer and waterfowl hunting so I’m really going to try to expand my field of view.  Like most, I tend to focus on key areas that I think look like probable places for a turkey to show up in; this approach has mixed success at best.
6.      Try new things
Last year was my first year of having a fighting purr routine in my calling repertoire.  While it was not the magic bullet that some product marketers might have you believe it is (I found no truth in the statement that “everything comes to a fight”), I did have some success using it to get gobbles out of turkeys, and in the case of that dastardly Pines Gobbler, it almost led to his demise.  This off-season I’ve put in some time practicing a couple of calls and have pretty much mastered the arts of kee-keeing on a pot call and of using a mouth call to gobble to turkeys.  The latter skill should come in handy as a “kitchen sink” tactic for hung up old toms, especially since I usually hunt on private land where this call can be used with relative safety.  I would strongly advise against gobbling on public land or any place else where another, less responsible, hunter could mistake you for the real thing and try to sneak in on your calling.  A face full of lead #5 is not an experience I would relish or wish on another hunter.
7.      Record every hunt (within reason)
Part of the fun of having this blog is the ability it gives me to share the hunting experience with others (seemingly on a worldwide basis).  So this year I’m going to give it my best shot to record every hunt here on Get Out & Go Hunting.  Please stay tuned for stories, lies, photos, cameo appearances from my hunting buddies, and maybe even some video from my 2011 Spring Turkey Odyssey.
8.      QTIP (Quit Taking It Personally)
I’m a very competitive individual, so failure does not sit well with me.  That said, I was raised with the ethic (and I still strongly believe in it) that hunting is not a competitive sport, it is recreation and it is best enjoyed as such.  It is nice to shoot the biggest bird or the trophy buck, but those goals should not be the sole driver of the hunting experience.  Reconciling these two opposing pulls on my personality has led to some hilarious outcomes, and it has deepened my overall understanding of the hunting experience.  Like everyone else, I’m always learning more every time I go out into the forest.  A soccer coach of mine once said it perfectly.  To paraphrase, he said “Winning isn’t everything, but then again, who likes losing?”  To put it another way, the ultimate goal of hunting, obviously, is to bring home some game.  Failure to do so does not necessarily make the hunt worthless, but then again, besting a perfectly adapted wild animal in its natural element, when all of nature’s advantages are tipped in the game’s favour is a pretty special feeling too.  If you’ve been following this blog at all, you probably have a feel for my personality, and I do consider it an affront to me as a hunter that I don’t shoot more game.  That said for 2011, I’m going to put aside the small shred of pride I still have left and just accept whatever hands are dealt me.  Much like resolution #3, this may make the experience even more enjoyable.
9.      Share with my readers
Like I said above, in my efforts to record all the hunts from this year, I likewise intend to put as many of them up here on the blog.  I’ll share what works and what doesn’t work, but this will serve as a proactive disclaimer to state that doing anything I do does not necessarily mean that you’ll be successful.  In fact, given my track record with spring turkeys, quite the opposite is the more likely outcome.  That said, with these tales of hope, failure, and possibly success I hope that can give some incentive for readers to pop in here throughout the season.
10.  Make some new friends
Since I’ll be sharing with you, I encourage anyone that feels so inclined to contact me here with any hunting stories or photos that you may want to share with this little corner of the hunting community.  I’ll apply the filter of the Comments and Terms of Use policies (I don’t think they’ll prevent me from posting anything) and post your experiences up here.

The Lessons of Childhood Boredom

So it’s official…I’m a rock star.  How can I tell?  Because I receive fan mail, that’s how.  Global fan mail.  Apparently my blog has taken off in parts of the world where the hunting tradition is far removed from my own comfortable little pocket of Ontario, and people have written me to tell me about it.  Two emails from Japan, one from Singapore, three from the U.S.A., and one from India.  None from Canada yet, but it is obvious that I’m becoming a global sensation that is unappreciated in his homeland.  And I say it is about time.
Of course, my tongue is planted firmly in cheek and my ego is far from that large.  It is flattering to know that, thanks to the international reach of blogging and the Internet at large, that people around the world are reading my diseased ramblings (over 70% of my readership is still in North America, but you just can’t help but go global in today’s day and age).  It is even more flattering that these globally diverse readers subscribe and follow my writing, let alone that they take a moment to ask me questions or drop a line and say they like what they see.  I’ve also gotten hate mail (more on that in a future post) but I guess that is the risk one runs when you put your thoughts and opinions out in the global blogosphere.  So where am I going with all this?  I’m getting there.
One letter I received from a reader in Japan (written in impeccable English I might add…I have friends and coworkers that I wish could write that well) inquired about why I write, where I got my ideas, and when I became interested in writing about hunting and the outdoors.  I actually have not responded to that email yet (I meant to I swear) but I thought I’d put my answer out there with a post instead and kill two birds with one stone.
I’ve always had an interest in reading and writing (not so much with arithmetic, but that’s another story) and at an early age was found to be an obsessively anal retentive speller of words.  So I guess I come by my wordsmithing naturally.  So that covers off the first question: I’ve been interested in the written word for as long as I can remember.
To the second and third points, I can frame these with a flashback.
When I was a much younger person I spent a lot of time visiting the family farm.  We would go there at Christmas for a few days, some years we would spend March Break there, for three or four years before I was a teenager I’d spend a week or two there in the summer, and in the fall we would go there every year for Thanksgiving weekend in October.  These regular visits were also punctuated with occasional weekend trips throughout the year.
With the exception of the week at March Break, most of these trips involved hunting in some way.  In the Christmas season I could be found following my Dad around while he was hunting varying hares with a beagle and .22 rifle.  Thanksgivings were book-ended with waterfowl hunts on the Saturday and Monday mornings (this was before Sunday gun hunting was legal in this part of Ontario), and in the summer we would travel scanning the fields of local farmers looking for woodchucks (a.k.a. groundhogs).  Helping out with chores was also on the menu, from loading wood to occasionally helping pitch hay bales into the barn, there was always lots to do.  Of course, as kids do we also fooled around and got into mischief; some of which was very unsafe.  While playing tag in the orchard in the fading light of a summer evening or tossing a Frisbee around in the front yard were pretty benign, excavating extensive, ramshackle tunnels in the hay loft or tobogganing down huge hills at break neck speeds with nothing but a page wire fence and some hay bales to stop you at the bottom were slightly more reckless pursuits.  I learned to drive a tractor (slowly, jerkily, and overall terribly) in one of those summer trips and I learned gun safety and how to shoot a rifle.  Mostly I learned to understand and cherish the rural and wilderness places of the worlds, and I gained a deep respect and love for the people and animals that call those places home.
So how do these pastoral remembrances factor into an interest in writing about hunting and outdoor pursuits?  I told you, I’m getting there.
Of course with so much to do, it was amazing that a young boy could find boredom, but I did.  Rainy days, blizzards, or days when the air was so hot, heavy and still that you could almost swim through it did not really lend themselves to robust physical activity.  And this is where writing and reading came into play.
The farmhouse was (and to a degree still is) a veritable library of anything that an interested and open-minded person would want to read.  From classic children’s books such as The Wind in the Willows and the Tale of Peter Rabbit to field guides of birds, to huge collections of hunting and fishing magazines, there was a lot to read on the farm.  It helped that television was basically non-existent, with the TV picking up just three channels up until the late-1990’s.  I read Slaughterhouse Five on the farm one rainy summer weekend when I was ten years old, and Brave New World over a series of three very cold days the following Christmas.  But most of all, and most pertinent to the question of my acquired interest in outdoor writing (finally!) I remember the collections of magazines: piles upon piles of back issues of Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, and North American Whitetail to name but a few.  I read these voraciously; and most, if not all, of the issues were from the golden age of outdoor writing.  Jack O’Connor, Ed Zern, Nash Buckingham, Robert Ruark, and dozens of other seminal names in outdoor writing became my would-be mentors.  These were authors who just wrote hunting stories. 
They told you what happened to them when they were hugging trees in an Arkansas swamp waiting for mallards, they took you on a deer hunt through the swamps, forests, and fields in the Deep South, or they dragged you reluctantly into the taiga on a grizzly bear hunt.  One tale that sticks out particularly in my mind was a story by Jack O’Connor that related his adventures hunting Bighorn Sheep in the Rocky Mountains.  You felt the ache in his hamstrings as he slogged up and down mountains looking for a ram, and you could smell the cowboy coffee percolating in the cookhouse tent in the crisp mountain mornings.  While it was not a book I read at the farm, as a boy I read my father’s copy of Death in the Long Grass by Peter Capstick Hathaway and it profoundly affected my outlook and ultimately writing style with its true adventure tales of the unpredictability and excitement of being a professional hunter and game ranger in the heart of Africa.  I’ve never looked at hippos the same way since I finished that book.
Ready for the rant part?  Good.
These writers just simply told the stories they had lived through.  They were all brilliant; they spun a yarn that combined great descriptive prose with relatable life experiences, and all without so much as a whiff of the pedagogical ego of the self-appointed ‘expert’ that is seemingly so prevalent in almost every magazine article you can read today.  Somewhere along the line it seems as though market research indicated that people bought magazines not for entertaining tales that they could relate to but rather they wanted a ‘professional’ to tell them how to do things, where they ought to go to do it, and what they should buy to do it with.  The exigencies of profit and sales have ambushed and killed the hunting story, and by extension the type of author that wrote them.  Not to sound reactionary or alienate the outdoor writing community (a club that I am not a part of anyways…I doubt they’d want me after this anyhow) but no one out there at the major magazines, and yes I still read them, can hold a candle to the writers of the my father’s generation in terms of their ability to arrange an engaging hunting story.  Jim Shockey was close, but he doesn’t do much writing anymore.  The rest are too busy telling you what guns to shoot, how to shoot them, and what decoys/calls/clothing/boots you absolutely have to own in order to be ‘successful’, items that not coincidentally are marketed by the primary sponsors of whatever publication you happen to be reading.
Whatever happened to figuring it out for one’s self through old-fashioned trial and error?  Furthermore, whatever happened to a story about going out, spending some time in the wilderness, and maybe shooting dinner or catching a fish?  When told by a more skilled craftsman than I’ll ever be this kind of story was once wildly popular…why not now?
Of course, tips and tricks have always been a part of the hunting publication.  In the old Outdoor Life they had field guides galore, and I clipped and memorized most of them.  I still know how to read a compass or build a lean-to tent (skills I learned from those field guides) but my field-dressing of a deer is still something that requires some supervision (not that I’ve had much practice…I am admittedly a generally atrocious deer hunter) and the This Happened to Me! section of the same magazine gave further insight into some things to do in the field via the shared relations of everyday readers.  The department editors had a couple of paragraphs (far less than most of them currently do) and they usually just gave their opinion on something they were familiar with or related a story that may have happened to them themselves.  This has given way to oodles of what I call ‘niche editors’.  Instead of an overarching Hunting Editor that had a little knowledge about everything you now have a Turkey Hunting editor, a Gun Dogs editor, a Deer Hunting editor, a Bow Hunting editor, etc, etc all portioning out their expertise from their fiefdoms.  I’ve historically found this at best repetitious and sometimes even condescending to the point of insult.
Sorry, things got a bit opinionated there…I could go on and on but why bother?
Let’s circle the wagons back to the question from our loyal Japanese reader and try to wrap up this literary diarrhoea.
To recap, in response to your email, I’ve always loved reading and writing, and I have a long-standing family tradition of hunting and time spent in the outdoors so this blog has sprung out of an unholy marriage of those two loves.  In terms of my ideas, I guess I’m just trying to do some justice (albeit in a small, and awkwardly ham-fisted fashion) to an area of writing that has become watered-down and mediocre in the last twenty-odd years.  I write about things that I enjoy, and I try to enjoy writing about them.  Almost nothing is off-limits and I want what I put out there to be interesting to the reader…so all that goes into where my ideas for what I’m writing come from.
Thanks for the letter, and thanks to all the others who tune in here regularly, write me encouraging words, and generally keep me going in this endeavour.

Counting Down to the Opener, 9 Minutes at a Time

In the last few months I’ve noticed that, given the time of year, I now seem to be able to get through most nights without dreaming about turkey hunting.  This is a marked improvement from my first few turkey seasons when my dreams were guaranteed to be some bizarre, nightly hodgepodge of clips I’d seen in turkey hunting videos superimposed upon areas I was familiar with, all the while starring yours truly in various throes of success.
Yes, the lunatic mind of this particular hunter is a complex and frightening thing.  But perhaps I’m mellowing since in the last couple of months most nights drift blissfully past with my subconscious engaged in dreams about other things. 
No I won’t tell you what those things are.  Quit asking.
Still, the more common and possibly even more torturous experience lately takes place during those brief moments of drowsy, semi-lucidity that start when my alarm goes off every morning.  Invariably my mornings for the last month have each gone something like this:
6:55am: Alarm goes off blaring Led Zeppelin’s “The Immigrant Song”.  Drowsily hit snooze button.
6:55am to 7:03am: Think about how I’d rather be turkey hunting.  Consider several locations and set ups for stands in areas of the Bruce Peninsula.
7:04am: Alarm resumes, this time with an ad for some local window repair shop.  Hit snooze button again.
7:04am to 7:12am: Back to thinking about turkey hunting.  Relive horrifying failures from past turkey seasons, resolve not to be a failure in 2011.  Cat jumps on groin.  Convulse instinctively and then kick the cat.
7:13am: Alarm once again goes off.  Mindless announcer banter.  Smash snooze button backhanded this time.  Momentarily fear that I may have broken the alarm clock; will find out in 9 minutes.
7:13am to 7:21am:  Have mini-dream about scenarios that will never happen.  Decide what to do if my cousin and I set up on a double.  Picture topo maps of local county forests and start figuring out where I should be set up.  Think about how you score a triple-bearded turkey.  Do budget quickly in head to see if new decoys are an option this year.  Realize that based on my hasty calculations they aren’t and double check my math.  Still a no go.
7:22am: Alarm re-engages.  Experience momentary relief that I haven’t broken it, which is replaced by rage that the alarm continues to disrespect me by continuing to go off again and again.  Guns & Rose’s “Patience” is playing.  Enjoy the irony briefly before tapping the snooze button in a jaunty fashion.
7:22am to 7:30am:  Realize that one more use of the snooze button will negate time usually required for basic hygiene.  Experience brief mental conflict before doing turkey vest inventory in my mind.  Cat licks my eyebrows.  Make mental note to sharpen knives (not for use on the cat…yet) and to also check the mail to see if turkey license has arrived.  Plan to buy conditioning pad for my slate call and strikers…silently berate self for absent-mindedly losing same item last year.
7:31am:  Alarm goes off with last part of 7:30am news and sports report.  Decide that since I have cologne, I only need to brush my teeth.  Massage snooze button into submission one last time.
7:31am to 7:35am: Have crisis of conscience before ultimately deciding that the cologne route is a poor decision and drag my ass out of bed.  Various joints click, pop, and creak.
7:35am to 7:55am: Have hurried shower while cursing the slow approach of turkey season.  While brushing my teeth, also engage in brief tirade related to the realities of capitalism and their conspiracy to prevent me from hunting everyday as I was obviously meant to.  Wife yells at me for not turning the alarm off…appears that she likes The Band’s cover of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” much less than I do.  Apologize while getting dressed.  Eat quick bowl of cereal, pack lunch and hit the road.  Realize ten minutes later than I only hit the snooze button and in fact forgot to turn off the alarm.  Decide that wife ought to be getting up by now anyways.
I’m trying to find a way to break this cycle, with the ultimate goal being a more efficient morning routine i.e. one that does not take an hour to get me ready and on the way to work.
To date I have made little progress, but then again, I’m not really trying that hard.

Hunting. Not Hype.