Gear

     The other day I was sitting at home feeling downright disgusted with the state of the world we live in. New housing is being put in across our street, and the builders had filled in and paved over a tiny pond. The pond had always been populated with spring peepers which cheered our spring evenings, and I wasn't happy about seeing those frogs go. To make matters worse, my wife Lori and I had gone for a walk in the woods and found it strewn with trash-- every conceivable type of trash. There were beer cans, soda bottles, plastic bits of unknown origin, and what seemed like hundreds of Styrofoam fast-food containers.

     I fumed when we got home.

     "We live in a consumer culture run amok," I said. Well, I didn't say "amok," but you get the idea. "It always has to be more. More, more, more. Pave over that last piece of farmland, slap up those condos, buy the latest gee-gaw. Anything to increase the Gross National Product."

     I looked around me and got a malevolent glint in my eye.

     How many candles do you have?" I asked my wife. I didn't wait for an answer. "That one there's new, isn't it? The raspberry one?"

     "It's mulberry, and it's not new," she said. "We've always had it." (Sure. I tried that with a new gun last fall-- "I've always had it"-- and it didn't work for me.)

     You see, my wife collects candles. Well, she would say "collects," while I would choose a word more along the lines of "archives." Her collection is a living, breathing entity, like an amoeba; oozing and sprawling to fill every space in the house. I have to say here that I was kind of disappointed none of the Y2K calamities happened as predicted. I figured we'd make a killing selling candles on the black market. I pictured a survivalist hunkered in a candlelit bunker somewhere, awaiting the looting hordes, saying "Is that...is that a hint of soapberry I detect?"

     "Why don't you go fishing for awhile?" Lori said. "I can tell you're going to be a crab today."

     Ah, fishing. Relaxing fishing. "Perhaps she's right," I thought. "I have been meaning to get out for the early trout season."

     I went out to the garage to collect my ultralight spinning outfit.

     It wasn't there.

     It wasn't in the boat. It wasn't in the back of the garage, by the belly boat and lanterns and duck and goose decoys. It wasn't in the front corner, either, by the nets, the four tackle boxes, the pair of waders, and the ice-fishing gear.

     It wasn't under the raingear or stashed in the tangle of rods: the three spinning outfits, the two casting rigs, and the three fly combos.

     It had been stolen! This was some kind of day I was having-- my favorite spinning outfit; stolen right out of my own garage. I decided to calm down by undertaking a long-overdue review of the contents of my tackle boxes-- surely there were some things I could get rid of.

     There were, too. After much painful deliberation, I threw out a rusty three-way swivel, two old spoons lacking hooks and split-rings, and an old plug I had fashioned when I was a kid. Basically, it was just a whittled piece of bark wrapped in tinfoil. It had no discernible action, but still I had saved it for all those years against that tough-conditions day when I figured fish might just be looking for a piece of bark.

     I didn't touch any of the plastic worms, though. I have a hundred or so-- not as many as a lot of folks, I know, but still probably more than most, and in every color of the rainbow.

     "I don't want to throw any of these out, " I thought. "You can go through a hundred worms pretty quick."

     As I placed the worms neatly in their slots, I remembered a trip I had taken with my wife.

     We were out in a rowboat up North at my folks' place, and it was one of those magical still evenings when the water is dark and full of promise and the shouts of children playing carry all the way across the lake. We had caught a mess of bluegills for a late supper, and decided to try for bass for awhile. I opened my tackle box to the worm compartment.

     "Why do you have so many?" Lori asked.

     I thought it was a rhetorical question like "What's it all about?"-- the kind best answered with another question.

     "Why, indeed?" I mused.

     "Well, I'll take a brown one," Lori said.

     "It's not brown, it's motor oil," I sighed.

     "Whatever. A pink one, then."

     I monkeyed with the fish basket and muttered under my breath. "Bubble gum. It's bubble gum."

     But my wife is relatively new to fishing and can't be expected to absorb a lifetime of knowledge in the space of a few short trips.

     To get back to my tale of the missing ultralight rig-- I have now largely concluded that it was not stolen, but instead left streamside by me after my final trip of the season last September. I would prefer if it had been stolen, because then I would get to feel righteously indignant instead of merely stupid. But the important thing is that after my anger had subsided, I was secretly pleased, and pleased because I got to buy more gear.

     That got me to thinking about the nature of gear, and I have concluded that it is of only two kinds: gear you have, and gear you want. I almost said "need,"
 but I think that is not the case more often than we'd like to admit. And those categories can be divided into stuff which is usually relatively easily attained, like lures, and big-ticket items such as boats and firearms which require real sacrifice.

     Last year I thought I "needed" a salmon/steelhead spinning outfit. I enjoy casting for trout and salmon from Lake Michigan's beaches and piers, and get to do a little of it most years. I figured the extra casting distance offered by the long rod would pay off in terms of more fish. I took the rig to the mouth of the Pike River, near Kenosha, and found that I could cast, alright. The rod could launch a Krocodile spoon well over a hundred yards. I caught fish, too, a three-pound coho and a twenty-pound king, both of which had the nerve to hit the spoon only a dozen feet from shore. But that's the way with fish: you spend hard-earned money to outsmart them, and they prove themselves to be still just stupid old fish.

Guns are another matter, and for me, at least, they usually fall under the category of mercurial wants; wants which dry up like a seasonal wetland as soon as the rent payment or an unexpected car-repair bill arrives. I have to admit that I have enough guns-- a few "working" guns, and a few "luxury" firearms, like a dedicated clay-target shotgun and a cap-and-ball copy of the Colt 1860 Army revolver. There are a couple of perennial wants, though-- a Ruger Number One in .270 Winchester with a full-length Mannlicher-style stock and a 2-7x compact scope parked up top, and a lightweight 20-gauge for the popple patches and overgrown fencerows.

     I've been trying to justify the 20-gauge to myself for years. Never mind that I already have a 20-gauge-- the bolt-action Mossberg which was my first gun. It's very light, and holds the distinction of being one of the few shotguns I shoot well. And having essentially one shot has never struck me as being a huge handicap in the hunting fields. Still, the old Mossberg isn't specialized; it lacks a label as a dedicated grouse gun. All of the famous New England partridge scribes wrote about old L.C. Smiths and Foxes and Parkers. You never read, "I stopped by a woodland stream to clean a brace of birds and light my pipe, and there I received quite a shock. I noticed that the baling wire securing the forearm of my full-choked single-shot to its rusty, pitted barrel was completely missing."

     I'd like a large-bore centerfire revolver, too, for...well, for no good reason. I tried to convince myself that I could carry it in the deer woods. That line of reasoning didn't work-- my rifle and my slug gun and my muzzleloader all work just fine. So I thought that perhaps I would use it as part of a personal protection plan. That didn't work, either. I can't see any gun owned by me as a particular deterrent to crime-- after all, generations of wild game can attest to the fact that seeing me at the end of a gunstock is no bar to a long and happy life. Besides, in the town where my wife and I live, we are the criminal element. Just last year, for instance, at the beginning of what can only be called a "spree," we received a warning for having unauthorized patio furniture. Then, barely a few days later, I again succumbed to baser passions by leaving my car parked on the street on the last night of our town's snow ordinance.

     But there comes a time in every outdoors-minded person's life when he or she has to admit that they have enough stuff. Luckily, that period doesn't last long, for new interests arise, and with those interests comes the desire for more specialized gear. Such is the case for me and turkey hunting...after all, there are always calls to buy, and I do need new camouflage, and perhaps a short-barreled 12-gauge with the latest screw-in chokes...but here I have to mention that buying clothing-- any clothing-- has always left me cold (literally, too, and why I probably should have paid more attention to it.) I'm largely immune to the catalogs' depictions of rugged-looking models attired in English waxed-cotton as they cast flies or split wood at some rural retreat. My looks could never be desribed as "rugged"-- utilitarian, maybe, but not rugged-- and I already own a waxed-cotton jacket. I received it for Christmas a few years back. It got accidentally thrown in with a week's worth of laundry, and now it looks less like a jacket and more like a waxed-cotton halter-top.

     Writing all of this has depressed me. Like most sportsmen, I always thought of myself as a simple, straightforward type unimpressed with the trappings of the material world. But a look in my garage, and in my boat, and in my gunrack tells a different story. Thoreau said, "Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplify, simplify." Maybe he was right.

     I remember reading that in class once. At the time I was living the bachelor life in an old farmhouse. It hosted truly Biblical plagues of flies, but it was a farmhouse, and I could hunt geese right out my back door. I sat in my living room one day, recalling Thoreau's words and feeling pretty darned good about myself. After all, like most bachelor pads, my place was pretty spartanly furnished. Call it the feng shui of not much caring. I had a stereo, a few dishes, a "Great Lakes Gamefish" poster, and a chair (even Thoreau needed a place to sit.) I felt so good, so simple and Zen-master-like, that I decided to reward myself by going after geese in the fields behind the house. When shooting hours had ended, I packed up my decoys and went into the barn to put them away. I had to climb a pile of gear to find a space for them, and I tumbled down and smacked my funny bone.

     I remember that incident now, and I resolve myself: "Simplify, simplify." And I will, too.

     Right after turkey season.