Danger and Vice and Veins Full of Ice, That’s What Outdoorsmen Are Made Of

     One morning last fall I was standing at the edge of a rock jetty in Port Washington, casting for trout and salmon. While I fished an elderly couple from Chicago gingerly approached, and we made small talk about the weather and the fishing and Lake Michigan. Meanwhile a small boat with camouflage-clad occupants slid by and past the breakwater onto the lake, where it bobbed in and out of sight on the swells.
     “What are they doing?” the lady asked.
     “Heading out duck hunting,” I replied.
     “Why?”
     “Because it’s fun.”
     They looked dubious.
     “But isn’t it dangerous?” they asked.
     Well, sure it is, after a fashion. But outdoorsmen and women in general are drawn to danger, and circle around it like moths at a street lamp. The wealthier among us go to Africa on safari and antagonize animals which can easily stamp us into paste. Those of us with less financial wherewithal attempt canoeing on the Madison Chain on Memorial Day weekend.
     Maybe a disregard for danger is the reason many of us have the habits we do. Ever notice how many smokeless tobacco ads there are in outdoor magazines, and how many there aren’t in, say, Good Housekeeping? I myself am currently a paragon of virtue, but in the past I have both chewed tobacco and smoked it, occasionally at the same time. I received my introduction to “chew” when I was thirteen, at a work camp in the Northern Highlands-American Legion State Forest, where my duties and those of my cabinmates consisted primarily of felling trees with axes to make way for red pine plantations. Our leader, a forestry student known to us as “Mr. Ewald,” was a devoted chewer of leaf tobacco. In delicate social situations, such as when we stopped for gas, Mr. Ewald would leave the camp van with his young charges sweltering inside. He would remove his chew, place it on the hood, and head inside. When he returned from his transaction he delighted in grinning at us through the windshield, taking the chaw from the hood, and then slowly stuffing the whole brown sodden mass back into his mouth.
     As an aside, I will mention that this camp is also where I turned our cabin’s white clothing pink by throwing it in with red sweatshirts when it was my turn to do the wash. I am to be excused. What I knew about laundry was that I threw dirty clothes down the chute at home every so often, and then through some process which I still don’t fully understand they ended up in my dresser drawers, not only clean, but also folded. The upshot of all of this is that our camp managers were a sadistic lot. As punishment for ruining my buddies’ clothes, I had to stand in front of the entire camp at dinner—wearing pink underwear—and sing “Tiny Bubbles” at the top of my lungs. Think that left any scars?
     When I was a kid I collected outdoor magazines—Outdoor Life and Field & Stream and the old Wisconsin Sportsman, mostly—and I still remember a cigarette ad from an early-80’s-vintage Outdoor Life. In it a man takes a break from surfcasting to light a smoke while a gorgeous woman in a bikini gazes longingly at him (why do you think smoking is so hard to quit?) Perhaps my younger brother Craig and I were inspired by the ad. Nowadays, if you can trust the newspapers, kids go straight from baby formula to hard drugs. But in our day, there was a different progression: bubble-gum cigars were followed by candy cigarettes which emitted little wisps of powdered sugar when you puffed on them. After these came sheets of my mother’s typing paper, rolled tightly into tubes and set on fire. Smoking these was every bit as satisfying as it sounds. Sometimes we stuffed the tubes with dried grass, and once we very nearly smoked pink insulation which we cadged from a construction site near where the neighborhood girls hung out.
     My wife Lori occasionally becomes puzzled by my behavior, and brings home books with titles like “The Man Cave, and How to Coax Him Out.” These books detail all of the supposed differences between men and women (or girls and boys.) Ha! There is only one real difference: Girls will not under any circumstance smoke insulation. Boys will enthusiastically smoke insulation if they somehow believe that it will impress girls.
     Lori and I do not yet have a child, so it’s easy for me to say that today’s parents are too cautious with their kids. If the time comes, maybe I’ll send my kid outside encased in fifty layers of bubble wrap, and a mountain bike accident I had a few years back for sure taught me the wisdom of helmet use where bicycles are concerned. This is in opposition to the general rule of bike safety when I was growing up: If you wipe out and both of your ears end up on the same side of your head, well, I guess you’ll pay a little more attention next time, won’t you?
     I don’t mean to equate mild juvenile delinquency with the activities of hunters and fishermen, but there’s a reason those guys were heading out on Lake Michigan last fall, and not all of it has to do with ducks. My mother and father will probably be shocked to see their parenting portrayed in so cavalier a manner, but I am glad they gave me and my siblings the freedom that they did. We were expected at the house for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but in between we were mostly free to do as we pleased: free to experience the thrill of causing youthful trouble, and to experience the agony of paying the consequences if we got caught. We were free to ponder the DO NOT INCINERATE warning on a can of hair spray, which of course leads young minds to wonder: “Well, why not?” (Important safety tip: They mean every word of that warning.) Speaking personally, I was free to feel the exaltation which comes with flying down a marina dock on a bicycle and launching high into the air—and the quiet satisfaction, later, of knowing that the bike on the bottom of the Fox River was not, in fact, mine, but instead my sister Sharon’s.