You're Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck

by Bill Heavey

  And then she asked that I take her fishing.

  I paddle us out to the head of a long island in the center of the river and run the boat up on a flat rock, kneeling and steadying it with both hands as she steps out. By prearrangement, she will sit, read her book, and watch. If this were solely about fish, I’d be spinning. But for her first time on a river, fish are not my primary goal. And it is hard to romance a woman while using a six-foot, medium-heavy Ugly Stik and root beer–black fleck Yamamoto Hula Grubs. So I’m toting a nine-foot five-weight and a handful of streamers. Take that, Brad Pitt. I saw the movie.

  I start casting a Black Woolly Bugger. I’m just beginning to feel as if I’m regaining the hang of flycasting when I drive the streamer into the back of my head. “Are you okay?” calls a voice. She has put her book down and is shielding her eyes from the sun, her face a mask of concern and fear. “It’s nothing,” I say, facing her to hide the hook, yanking it out too quickly, and pressing the spot hard with my thumb before she sees any blood. “I just like to do that sometimes to keep from getting cocky.” Her face changes back. She rolls her eyes. She’s showing concern, and I’m being a jerk. “Right,” she says evenly. “Don’t wanna get cocky.” She returns to her book.

  Seeing no way out of my jerkdom, I go back to casting. I miss a strike, then catch and release two bluegills and a seven-inch smallie. When I next look up, I realize I have lost track of time. During which I failed to check on her, to ask whether she’s enjoying herself.

  I smile a hangdog apology her way. “Sorry,” I call. “I sort of got distracted there.” She holds up a hand, indicating that I should cease talking. The gesture scares me at first, but then I see that she’s smiling. “Not distracted,” she says. “More like really focused. I got to see something I’d never seen before.” Her tone, and that smile, have me completely bamboozled.

  “You mean you’ve never seen flyfishing before?”

  “No,” she says. “I’d never seen you before. I’d never seen you not doing whatever act it is you do. I liked it.”

  I stand there on my rock, fly line tangled about my feet, and look at her. She looks right back. Her words hover strangely in the air. Suddenly I feel disarmed, transparent. Don’t let anybody tell you city girls can’t fish. This one already has me hooked and knows it. “What now?” I ask. She stretches and smiles. “I want to watch you fish some more. Then you can take me to dinner.” She goes back to reading.

  I’m headed for a world of trouble. Which could be exactly what I need.

  UNSINKABLE

  Now that gas prices exceed four dollars a gallon in some places, my canoe is looking better to me every day. I recently took it out on the river again for the first time in a few months and marveled at its design, a perfect marriage of form and function. Anything you could add to it would be superfluous. Anything you took away would be disastrous. In this way, the canoe, the archetype of the aboriginal boat, closely resembles the archetypical aboriginal drink, beer. Some brewers add cherries or peaches to beer. Others remove alcohol or calories. But then the end product is something other than beer. If you want to drink it, that’s your business. Just don’t do it in my canoe.

  One of the great things about a canoe is that you can leave it upside down on sawhorses for years at a time with no decline in performance. It will still attain a top speed of 2.5 mph and burn about two hundred calories per mile. This is also one of the terrible things about a canoe. Anglers, particularly those who chase bass, are lustful creatures, and virtually all of us yearn for something young, sleek, and ridiculously expensive. In short, we want bass boats. The object of my current fascination is the Allison XB-21 BasSport with a 200 Optimax Mercury. It comes with everything you ever wanted on a boat, including remotely adjustable headlights with Lexan covers that fit into molded cavities so they are flush with the bow. Never again will you be late getting back to the dock and lose a tournament because of headlight drag. A specially designed windshield allows you to wear your hat with the brim forward at top speed, which is 82 mph. You need that kind of speed, mostly to get from one gas dock to the next and still have time to fish.

  In my heart, I lust after the XB-21. In my wallet, I find that I’m about $68,000 short. So, I’m sticking with the canoe. Mine is a seventeen-foot Mad River Explorer, about twenty years old and made of Royalex, the miracle fiber of its day. I know little about Royalex, but I will say this: In all the time I’ve owned my canoe, it has never once needed ironing.

  In fact, in the decades I’ve had it, the canoe has needed only two repairs. One came after the first three years, when both cane seats gave out within days of each other. I am not a big-butted man, and I had expected greater durability from the seats. Then it occurred to me that a bony-butted man might be harder on seats due to a concentration of weight on the ischial tuberosities, or “sit bones.” I have rather angular tuberosities. And these had been applied regularly to both seats. Some canoe owners insist on sitting in the stern as an assertion of dominance, since the stern man decides on the directional heading. I’m just as happy in the bow. You get first shot at the fish and are spared the mental labor of deciding where to go next. I tried to repair the seats with clothesline wrapped tightly around the frames, but that resulted in a numb butt and spaghetti-like indentations that remained for hours after canoeing. I ordered new webbed seats.

  The other repair was about ten years ago, when I saw that repeated encounters with boulders, gravel bars, docks, and garage doors had combined to damage the “skin” at either end of the keel. I dropped about a hundred dollars on a skid-plate kit, which came with Kevlar felt pads and a two-part polyurethane resin that you mix up, inhale, and then apply to your eyeballs because you are hallucinating that the devil is about to materialize out of the ground and turn you to stone if you meet his gaze. Somehow, I had the presence of mind not to glue my eyelids shut, though it was tempting at the time.

  Actually, the only effect of the fumes was to exaggerate my inherent cheapness. Having spent a hundred bucks for the kit, I thought it wasteful to leave any portion unused. I skipped the “trim to fit” phase, so that the Kevlar felt pads nearly met on the keel of the boat and extended six inches above the waterline at each end. I performed this operation at night, using my car’s headlights for general illumination and a mouth-held flashlight for detail work. The next morning, I discovered that my boat looked as if it were wearing a helmet.

  A fishing buddy razzed me about my canoe’s ugliness and said I’d been stupid to add weight. I said that the modifications were deliberate and meant to discourage potential thieves. Further, I claimed to have reinforced the keel of my boat “the same way that the Vikings did theirs.” This was total bull, yet it leapt from my lips so decisively that by day’s end I halfway believed it myself. Self-deception can be a positive thing. My fishing buddy is generally a better angler than I, but that day I outfished him, catching five bass to his two. My biggest was about three pounds—just the right size for a Viking canoe.

  HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL?

  Because I want to do my part to keep the country safe from terrorists, I’m speeding toward Reagan National Airport carrying a rifle and no plane ticket. I’m doing this to register my gun with U.S. Customs before heading to Canada for whitetails next week. This step is mandatory, I’ve been told, if you want to bring your gun home. Late for my appointment, I worry about being pulled over for speeding. (“In a hurry today?” the officer will ask. Yes, I’ll answer. “What’s in that case?” A rifle. “Where you headed?” Airport. “Sir, I need you to step out of the car and place your hands on your head.”)

  Once inside the airport loop, I find full signs up at both the daily and hourly parking lots. This leaves a) economy parking, an asphalt wasteland two time zones away or b) valet parking, just forty dollars per day or fraction thereof. The attendant at hourly is unmoved by my plight, but I manage to sweet-talk my way into the daily lot.

&
nbsp; The airport is designed so that the only way to cover the two hundred yards to the terminal is by shuttle bus. I decide to bushwhack instead. Using dead reckoning, I cut through the rental-car terminal. My Doskocil case, tan with fake-alligator texturing, is the choice of budget-minded gun owners everywhere. It thumps against my leg at every step and fairly screams Gun! The desk attendants call out “May I help you, sir?” in concerned voices, but I keep going. Outside, I lumber over a chain-link fence and find myself facing a wall of ornamental grass taller than my head. I could be following up a wounded lion on the African savanna for all I can see. Parting the grass, I sidestep down an embankment to where four lanes of traffic are zipping past at NASCAR speeds.

  By now registering my firearm has become a quest, so I wait for an opening, scoot, and find myself playing dodgeball with the traffic. Reaching the far side, I crash through more savanna grass, climb over another fence, and jog through a landscaped parking lot reserved for the exclusive use of Supreme Court justices and members of Congress.

  At last I attain the main terminal. I am directed upstairs to the administrative offices, a parallel universe of tranquillity. The linoleum floors here are buffed to a high sheen, the universal sign of a powerful bureaucracy where no purposeful activity takes place. I finally relax. It feels safe here. I want to stay.

  The customs lady in Room 245 sees my gun case and passes me U.S. Customs and Border Protection Form 4457, Certificate of Registration for Personal Effects Taken Abroad. Form 4457 is a small slip of paper with boxes for name, address, and “description of articles.” I write that I have a Winchester .270 bolt action. “I have to see the gun, hon,” she says. I try to hand it over. “Oh, I can’t make out those little numbers on the barrel,” she says. “Just read ’em to me.” She signs and stamps the document. “There ya go,” she says. “It’s good for life.”

  I sit there turning Form 4457 over and over in my hands, trying to make sense of what just happened. I now have a piece of paper certifying that my rifle is “registered.” On the other hand, the word registered has just been rendered meaningless. No one has confirmed my name, address, or citizenship. No one has verified anything about my rifle: make, model, caliber, or serial number. The customs lady has kept no copy of the form, logged no information in her database. There is, in fact, no record of my ever having been here. I search the fine print on the back of the form for an explanation. It says that the Paperwork Reduction Act requires that I be told that Form 4457 has been “provided for your use, strictly at your option, in lieu of or in addition to bills of sale, appraisals, and/or repair receipts to show the CBP officer proof of prior possession of the article(s) in the U.S. The completion of this form by you is strictly voluntary.”

  Apparently I have risked life and limb bushwhacking my way across the airport grounds all so that I may prove that I owned my American-made firearm prior to visiting the anything-goes discount arms bazaar that is modern Canada. I am so confused that I make the mistake of asking a direct question. “Ma’am, what’s the real purpose of this form?” The customs lady stops in mid-keystroke, alarmed. “Why, it’s to prove that you owned the rifle before you left.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But if it’s strictly voluntary and you don’t even keep a copy, why was I told I had to have it?” I am immediately sorry I have said this, because now she looks at me as if I probably shouldn’t be allowed to own a firearm. “Well, because if you don’t have the form they could confiscate your gun or make you pay duty fees on it.”

  It’s clear to me now that I will be locked up if I continue this line of questioning. I nod, smile, and make a quick exit. Outside, the sun is shining brightly. I can see the parking garage, just two hundred yards distant. I decide to wait for the shuttle bus.

  WHAT I BELIEVE

  At a dinner party recently I was confronted by a woman who said, “I believe that hunting is indefensible and ought to be outlawed. What do you believe?” I believed she looked like a red-haired cream puff left out in a hot car and then stuffed into a green dress. But I didn’t say this, of course. And since I can’t remember what I did say, I intend to be better prepared next time. Here, then, is a list of what I believe:

  I believe that God does not deduct from a man’s life the hours spent fishing. On the other hand, He is really strict about overdue library books.

  I believe that hunting and fishing are too important to be left to the experts and that enthusiasm trumps skill. Sure, I’ve been so delaminated by the sight of a big buck that I tried to kill it with a rangefinder instead of a rifle. I’ve swamped full canoes on mirror-calm waters. So what? If you’re having fun, you’re doing it right.

  I believe that after the nuclear holocaust that destroys all other life, whitetail deer will shake the fallout debris from their backs and head for the blast sites to feast on radioactive browse. When that’s gone, they will thrive on vinyl siding, construction rubble, and auto parts.

  I believe that people who eat meat but condemn hunting have that right. But the next time they hit the drive-through window they ought to be magically sucked into the speaker and taken on a brief journey where they would see, hear, and smell all the steps by which a living, breathing creature ends up on a bun inside a paper bag.

  I believe God sees us watching hunting or fishing TV shows and thinks, Don’t they know that’s all there is to do in Hell?

  I believe that every bit of “breakthrough technology” that will be introduced for the next twenty-five years in hunting and fishing gear has already been designed and manufactured. When some suit decides the moment is ripe, it gets released and we millions of outdoorsmen wet our pants with excitement.

  I believe that you should never pass the muzzle of any firearm over anything you aren’t willing to destroy. In other words, should I ever meet the guy who recorded the “Your call is very important to us” message you get just before your call is dropped, I hope for both our sakes that I am not armed.

  I believe that any man who initiates a boy or girl to the eternal mystery of the woods—even if by nothing more than having the child stand in a forest and hear the hand of the wind through the trees—deserves the honorific “father.” Especially if the child in question is not his.

  I believe that the Remington 870 is all any man truly requires in a shotgun and that anything beyond that is purely discretionary. Having said that, there is a $100,000 20-gauge side-by-side at the Holland & Holland store in New York that I would not mind having the next time I go sit on my bucket in a dove field.

  I believe that every man encounters in his life both a David E. Petzal and a T. Edward Nickens, and that both must be opposed. Petzal, because anyone who so openly harbors an affection for cats is clearly in the service of Satan. Nickens, because he’s one of those men who are so honorable and devoid of guile that I almost regret putting that cross-dressers for PETA bumper sticker on his truck.

  I believe that camouflage makes you more easily detected by deer, mostly because all camo fabric sold in the United States is used as bedding for the workers’ dogs for ninety days before it leaves the mill.

  I believe that with more than twenty years of hunting experience, I could now walk into any deer woods in the country, locate and read deer sign, set up in a tree stand, and be asleep within half an hour.

  I believe that if a guy like me can have a successful column in a magazine like this, it means very few people are paying attention.

  I believe that truly dedicated flyfishermen represent the highest expression of a fine and noble art. Just kidding.

  I believe that if your bass jig hits bottom without any sign of a strike, and you notice after giving it a tiny “test pop” that the lure feels “mushy,” “tight,” or “sticky,” it’s a sign that you have an enlarged prostate.

  I believe that the versatility and potential of the drop-shot rig is so great that it will stay in the bottom of my tackle box until the
estate sale following my death.

  I believe that if you thought I was kidding about the cable hunting and fishing shows, you should read William Faulkner’s “The Bear.” It describes hunting as “the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter.” I believe these words are true.

  YOU CAN’T TOUCH THIS

  Two things happened last week that I’m still trying to reconcile: I picked up a roadkill deer, and National Geographic Kids magazine showed up at our house.

  First, the magazine, which I subscribed to hoping it would arouse Emma’s curiosity in the natural world. Instead, she just rifles through the pages for photos of cheetahs—her current favorite animal, one she is convinced would make an ideal ninth-birthday present—and tosses it immediately if there are none. The interesting thing was that it came wrapped in a four-page ad for Purell Instant Hand Sanitizer, whose slogan is “Imagine a Touchable World.” You need to imagine a touchable world because the one we live in is seething with highly motivated germs the size of Clinton Portis that will infect your children with horrible diseases. All that stands between your child and certain death is Purell, which they should use about every eight minutes. The Purell website lists ninety-nine common places where these germs lurk, including school bus seats, crayons and, of course, library books.

  The deer I encountered one morning just after dropping Emma off at school. Traffic slowed to a crawl as it passed an antlerless deer lying in the road. Judging by the police cruiser behind it, the animal was very recently deceased. I was seized by what would be a logical thought to any hunter who lives in a touchable world: Backstrap! I parked and approached on foot. I couldn’t see through the cruiser’s tinted glass, so I stood there, waited for the officer to lower his window, and asked, “You mind if I take that deer?” He was a nice-looking young man, slightly lumpy in the way that anyone wearing a bulletproof vest while seated would be, and he looked startled at my request. He looked me over long enough to decide I didn’t match any recent wanted lists, shrugged, and said, “Sure.”