years as does everyone else, but you need only scratch his surface and you’ll find he has retained all the humor usually found in young men and the curiosity usually found in wives. Old outdoor types smile more. They don’t know they’re old.
Polite society tends to treat the sportsman with caution, if not respect. They’ve got good reason to be skittish when he’s around. They’re not afraid he might use the wrong fork for the desert. What makes them tremble and panic is the fear that he might grab it with both hands and eat it the way he does at deer camp. He might do so just to see the look on the hostess’ face.
The dedicated hunter/fisherman is courageous and doesn’t hesitate to step out into the unknown if the act has any reasonable chance of furthering his enjoyment of the outdoor world. This is another way of saying he is foolhardy. Few entirely rational people will get into a leaky skiff at 5:00 a.m. and break ice to paddle a half mile through two foot waves in order to sit in a blind in sub-zero temperature in the hope of being able to entice a bluebill into gun range - and when the stratagem is successful, the hunter may very well miss.
If sanity is your game, stay away from trout streams on the opening day of the fishing season. It’s hard to justify trout fishing during a snow storm, but the sportsman doesn’t have a suspicion that such acts are anything but standard, usual and normal.
I don’t know how to define “sportsman”, but I know one when I see one. Here are six examples.
(NOTE: You have just been conned into reading the Author’s Preface.)
Hypertension
Our astronomically knowledgeable associates advise us we experience the longest day of the year sometime around the 21st day of June. I don’t know about you, but Jim Zimmerman is sure the longest day of the year was August 19th.
On that morning, his dreamless and serene sleep (experienced only by the innocent and pure of heart) was rudely interrupted by a pandemonium which, for a split second, convinced him he had somehow gotten himself into the center of an attack by the Valkyries.
He saw what might have been a whirling dervish swinging a turban sash. The sight and the tumult and the caterwauling that accompanied the scene not only called him abruptly into the wakened world, but also scared the hell out of him. No Wagnerian heroine nor Persian dervish, it was his wife, Carna, causing all the commotion.
The first words he could pick out were delivered at both a high velocity and decibel level. Here was his bride, pointing and shouting: “How did these get into your car?”
She’d discovered the pair of panty hose Clayton McHugh hid in Jim’s fishing gear when he wasn’t looking. Thinking fast, Jim answered: “Oh, you mean those experimental, extra-light, stocking foot waders?” It didn’t do him a bit of good. His dream girl has absolutely no sense of humor when she is rattled.
From that auspicious beginning, Jim’s day continued, every moment replete with a full measure of wrath, indignation and bile, occasionally lapsing into acrimony, rage and choler. Every modest inconsideration of which he may have been falsely accused during the previous thirty years was dredged up, dusted off and hurled at him.
He spent the whole day with an almost tangible apprehension that he was about to be physically assaulted. He jumped at every loud noise and there were many of them. To be on the safe side, he locked the gun cabinet and hid the shells and cartridges.
The moon had risen on that long, long day before Carna was finally convinced the panty hose must have been planted. She concluded (a) Jim wouldn’t be that stupid; (b) he had a naturally honest look about him and, alternatively; (c) just maybe there was some truth in the story about them being left over from last fall when they were taken to the South Dakota hunt and intended to be used to carry pheasant specimen to the taxidermist without the risk of damaging their feathers.
With a calm and civilized atmosphere restored to the domicile, Jim’s review of the events of that longest day of the year provoked a serious reflection on the pressures, hardships and adversities inflicted upon mankind simply because of the times in which we live.
Consider the extent to which our lives have been dislocated by that complicated series of yes/no switches we call the computer. A reservation clerk at the airlines may make an error all by himself and put an extra passenger or two on a flight. Give a computer a chance and it will try to put twice the capacity of the airplane on board.
Then there’s that marvel of the age - television. Give any hardened criminal the choice and he will opt for capital punishment rather than be sentenced to ten years of watching TV commercials.
Ain’t science wonderful? A generation ago we managed to get by without cordless and mobile telephones which, each day, allow more people you don’t want to talk to to talk to you. Some people, I am told, actually arrange to have telephones put into their cabins. Incredible!
Thanks to the development of modern technology and probably mega-dollar governmental grants over the last fifty years, fishermen have been able to advance from the use of split bamboo to steel, to fiber glass and to graphite boron fly rods. Now that we’re friendly with China and can again get the right material, we are again able to make split bamboo fly rods.
Half the people in the country will die of some kind of heart problem. Now, due to advanced medical carpentry, we can give them sound transplanted hearts. Of course, we have to kill off the other half of the population in order to get the healthy hearts.
It’s a tougher world than that of auld lang syne - that yesteryear before the sensibilities of the human race were deflowered by such things as the form of musical expression known as punk rock. It’s no wonder the blood pressure, like Hemingway’s sun, also rises. When I was a lad, life was much more comfortable. The stresses and complications of today were absent. It was a simpler time.
For example, there were mud turtles and snapping turtle and no other kinds of turtles to clutter up the genus. There were only two kinds of snakes - pine and grass. Pine snakes were long and black. Grass snakes weren’t. Birds were a bit more complicated, but any small bird that wasn’t a wren or yellow and, hence, a canary, was a sparrow. Anthropomorphism hadn’t captured the hearts and minds of the non-sportsman.
(I apologize for that. You see, I’ve always wanted to use the word “anthropomorphism.” I’ve also wanted to use the word “antidisestablishmentarianism.” I suppose I’ll never cause the word “antidisestablishmentarianism” to appear in print.)
In that simpler time, people died of old age, not hypertension. A duck stamp and a fishing license cost one dollar. A Chrysler cost $777, F.O.B. Detroit. A dozen decoys set you back $10. Today you can sell the same used blocks for $100 a copy.
They were halcyon times. Wisconsin had a fifteen duck per day bag limit and no unmanageable point system. The water in trout stream ran 9 degrees cooler. The hatches extended throughout the entire season. There were no aluminum beer cans marking deer stands. The racks on bucks were thick and heavy at the base. Pheasants’ tails were all over 18 inches long.
What triggered the change from those happy times? What transformed our lives into this pressure tank, boiler factory existence? Was it the rise of Adolf Hitler? Or creeping socialism? Or the Department of Natural Recourses? No, friends, none of the above. According to Jim Zimmerman, the advent of stress and hypertension, the decay of ethical standards and the breakdown of time honored moral values all started with the invention of panty hose.
