Our ritual began simply. We hopped into Pop’s yellow LTD, he hit play on a Jerry Clower or a Chuck Wagon Gang cassette tape, and we were off. There was no need to load up our fishing rods, tackle boxes, or minnow bucket. They all resided in the trunk of that LTD. The extent of our preparation was to stop at Mitchell’s Bait & Tackle or Arrowhead Store to buy minnows. We never set an alarm, never had a lot of gadgets, we just drove out to the farm, went fishing off the dock extending out into Lake Blackshear at the mouth of Limestone Creek, and caught crappie. There may have been variations on these steps from time to time, but generally this was our procedure for going fishing when I was growing up.
My other grandfather and I fished together as well. Usually on Sunday afternoons, we would walk down the road to Mr. Bledsoe’s pond and cast our lines from the bank. I, being young and impatient, would walk the entire circumference of the pond in search of a bass, but Pop just fished from the same area the whole time, puffing on his pipe and watching the world go by. As I reached driving age and Pop’s eyesight began to fail, I drove us out to a larger and better stocked pond belonging to his friend, Mr. Charlie Williams. There, Pop and I climbed into a john boat and rowed around the pond, catching fish, without so much as a trolling motor. I don’t remember a lot of words being passed in between the fish biting. Pop just puffed on his pipe and took it all in. He understood what it took me a lot of years to learn.
The simplicity of those endeavors has made me a minimalist when it comes to my outdoor pursuits. This was extended to hunting when I got into my early teens. We hunted mostly doves and quail around the fields and wooded edges of the farm back then. Most of the time you didn’t have to rise early. These pursuits were a lot more leisurely. You just grabbed your shotgun, a box or two of shells, a dove bucket, and went to the field. Quail involved a little more effort, mostly on the part of my Uncle Bill, who raised and handled the bird dogs. But there is no more enjoyable leisure activity than walking the field edges from mid-morning to late afternoon, following a pair of pointers or setters.
Aldo Leopold’s essay, “A Man’s Leisure Time”, extolls the virtues of spare time spent afield. Anyone growing up in a rural setting, as I did, likely learned to take pleasure in casting a line, pursuing wild game, or simply taking long walks through the woods. These were, for many of us, never deeply intentional pursuits requiring a lot of extra effort. They naturally fit into the cycle of our lives and our place. Hunting and fishing were just the ways in which people in rural places spent their spare time and these activities blended seamlessly into our daily lives.
I realize not everyone grew up this way and Lord knows, we need more outdoor sportsmen, hunters and fishermen—to carry the torch of funding conservation into the years ahead as our predecessors did—no matter their background. What many of them don’t realize is that they don’t need all the gadgets being thrust upon them by our consumer culture.
At around 11 years old, like many boys, I fell under the spell of a book called “Where The Red Fern Grows”. Sure, it has perhaps the saddest ending in all of children’s literature, but there’s a lot more to this book than the ending. I identified with it strongly because of its rural setting and because I recognized myself and my loved ones in its characters. Though the book’s events took place in the depression-era, the atmosphere of the book felt familiar to me in the early 80s because I could still recognize the book’s themes and the frugal people I knew and loved who had lived through that time.
All the book’s protagonist, Billy Coleman, needed to pursue his dream of coon hunting was a pair of hounds. He worked for the money to buy them, trained them, and set out across the river bottoms and countryside around his Ozark home at night chasing raccoons with nothing but an axe, two of the finest redbone hounds money could buy, and a lantern, usually barefoot and dressed in the only pair of overalls he owned. That’s all that was needed because, living where and how he did, he naturally had the most important tool he needed, a knowledge of the woods and the habits of its creatures.
I fear the next generation of outdoorsmen are losing that type of woodsmanship, and worse, the capacity for observing the natural world, just as I fear our culture may lose the ability to interact socially and develop normal life and cultural skills, thanks to text messaging, social media, and the abuse of artificial intelligence. We hear a lot these days about how people, especially kids, need to put down their games, screens, and gadgets, and get in touch with the natural world. The same can be said for hunters and fishermen. When we lose certain skills ingrained in the human experience, whether that be the ability to construct a coherent sentence, draw a picture, or read the natural signs on the landscape, we are losing a lot more.
Sure, game cameras are neat. They have their place and give us a glimpse into the world and habits of wild animals that we wouldn’t otherwise see. They allow hunters to more easily pattern animals and as a result, gain an advantage. But, when game laws allow you to set up a timed feeder to dump out corn in front of your deer stand, how much more advantage do you need? I’ve used game cameras and feeders myself in the past, but over time I noticed that following a successful hunt, they made me feel dirty. As if I had cheated. I’d now rather create better habitat, learn about the ways animals use the land I hunt on, and how all these pieces fit together. The only gadget needed for this is inside of our own skulls. We just need to slow down enough to use it, to observe, and process the information our senses and the world are telling us about. Where is the cover, where is the food source, which way is the wind blowing? I, for one, am convinced that learning the ways of the natural world and its creatures and having a successful hunt as a result of that knowledge, is a lot more fulfilling than dropping a Boone and Crockett buck with his nose in a pile of corn.
We are now offered scent-blocking clothes with conducive grid pattern to block bio-electric emissions and improve undetectability. Seriously? I’m sure there are situations in which such things are useful. For example, when you’re hunting in the backcountry where humans are an alien presence to wild animals. But, I see hunters in farm country like my own, hunting deer who see and smell people every day using this technology. When I go to the deer stand, I wear whatever clothes I wore to work that day. I have learned that the best cover scent when hunting farm country is a little hydraulic fluid and diesel fuel spilled on your boots.
Fishing, which should be the most leisurely of all outdoor pursuits, has likewise been sullied by consumerism. When I think back to the simplicity of how I fished with my grandfathers and the joy found in it, I am left dumbfounded at the seeming gullibility of fishermen today. Expensive boats, cameras, GPS-enabled tackle, sonar, power poles, drones, virtual guides, and heaven forbid, AI are all offered to the tech-savvy angler. To each his own, I suppose. But, I fish for relaxation, and I still prefer to fish the same way I did growing up because I’ve yet to have a fishing experience that a gadget enhanced more than the leisure time I spent at the water’s edge with my grandfathers and later, my own children.
Consumerism and gadgets, left unchecked, rob us of the connection to the living world that used to come naturally to kids growing up in rural areas by making people over-reliant on such material tools. Tools of all sorts are designed to make life easier. There’s nothing wrong with that in the abstract. But when they interfere with our understanding of our place in the world, our sense of wonder and awe about it, meaningful experience is easily diminished. We only get so much leisure time in life. Only so much time as adults to garner experiences in the outdoors. Do we want to spend that time staring at a screen, changing the batteries in a camera, filling feeders, reading the operating manual for the latest electronic gadget?
Most technology has its place if it can be used with the proper perspective. The predatory consumerism entrenched in social media, television commercials, magazine ads, and plain old, peer pressure all insert the same social engineering upon our minds designed to remove that proper perspective and they all say the same thing—that we must have the latest product to be successful in life. Its an old message, as much of a lie today as it ever was.
When I think of my outdoor experiences, especially the early ones that shaped me, I think of the people I spent time with in these activities. Gadgets or not, I hope these types of memories are still being made at some level. I hope that the latest gear doesn’t prevent people from looking around and appreciating their time in these quiet places.
It’s hard for me to imagine that those material things and the experiences they provide can compare with coming along the edge of a field beside a stand of planted pines, a shotgun in the crook of your arm, watching a bird dog quarter out ahead of you on a sunny winter afternoon with the warm sun on your face. Your brain idled down by the walk, you pause to watch the glow of angled light on the fields and the patches of woods ahead, a gentle curiosity welling up at the sound of a bird calling from the brush or a flock of sparrows startled up from the grass. There are no words to describe just what such a moment is, but the more we are attuned to such moments, the less we are attuned to gadgets, our minds free of the rot of consumerism, the more of these moments we will have.
Thoughts From The Orchard 