The other day I happened upon an essay entitled, "The Gun as a Weapon of Education," written by one Edward Cave and published in a 1918 edition of The Outlook.
The headline was intriguing, certainly, but the subhead hooked me:
"Lessons from the Long Trail that Goes 'Way Around Beyond the Bleak and Barren Mountains of Mere Marksmanship to the Happy Valley of Sportsmanship"
Knowing of the author's connection to Scouting, I scanned the piece for a mention. These lines jumped out at me:
"A couple of years before the Germans turned loose their war, for eight months I disturbed the pious and pacific calm of the National headquarters of the Boy Scouts with the rude idea that Baden-Powell, the British soldier who originated the Boy Scout idea, meant their slogan, 'Be Prepared,' to imply prepared to carry a gun, not a harp."
That, my friends, is absolutely priceless. Cave continued:
"Despite instructions, I drilled my troop of Boy Scouts, and drilled them hard. Since then I have had the satisfaction of vindication on both counts. In addition, I have had the satisfaction of helping a good many thousands of Boy Scouts and plain ordinary boys to learn how to shoot a .22 rifle properly. I joined the National Rifle Association of America and the United States Revolver Association, and recently induced the former to encourage boys to take up target-shooting outdoors with the .22 rifles."
Cave's assertion that he influenced "a good many thousands of Boy Scouts and plain ordinary boys" was no idle boast -- in 1915 he published Boy Scout Marksmanship, a seminal work on the subject and a valuable primer for boys within and beyond the uniformed ranks.
Later in the text, I chuckled at Cave's expressed intent to "square up some old accounts" -- that is, to needle certain types of people that he found particularly annoying. Specifically:
"Folks who are afraid of a gun, but otherwise all right.
"Folks who will not let a big-enough boy have a gun.
"Folks who are fond of roast chicken -- and, if necessary to get it, would chase a pet rooster till red in the face and chop his head off -- yet raise objection to all hunting, and are classified among wild life conservationists as sentimentalists.
"Pacifists -- the worst of the lot."
That passage is another keeper, for sure. Cave closed his engaging essay with this:
"Far away on the horizon you see what at first appears like a fog in some distant valley. It is the smoke pall above some city, and it reminds you, hunter that you are, of the vaporings of the city men you know who can never stand where you do, nor even rise above their droll little chimneys, yet presume to force upon their fellows their narrow conception of a world outlook.
"Poor little wall-warped and roof-stunted boys who were never allowed to have a gun!"
"The Gun as a Weapon of Education" is a fun read -- playful and unapologetic, relevant despite its advanced age. I recommend it.
It's been the strangest of winters 'round here -- no snow to speak of, lots of rain and temps climbing past 50°F once or twice a week. A cold front came through yesterday, bringing only a trace of the white stuff but steady 30mph winds gusting to (reportedly) 60mph.
Last night one of those gusts took down a long-dead 35-foot pine just east of our property. I've no idea what killed the tree or when, but it was dead and bare of needles when we moved in two years ago.
I strolled out back this morning to survey this casualty of the wind, snapped off a foot or so above the ground. As I approached it I noticed the glow of heartwood at the center of the bug-eaten pine.
I suspected that this golden core, which measures about four inches in diameter, might be what I described in an early installment of "Urban Resources" -- fatwood.
Sure enough, I now have a resiny reservoir of natural firestarter, aromatic and hard as a rock, within a hundred feet of my back door. I expect I'll harvest as much of it as I can, practically speaking, if only to hone the skills required to do so. Stay tuned.
Wellsboro', Tioga Co., Pa.,
May 23, 1884.
Mr. Editor: -- The long and bitter winter is past.
"H'it mos' killed me.
But it has gone down the back entry of time."
Summer has come. It always does. I have been here sixty-two years, and there has been a summer every year. Sometimes I thought it wouldn't, but it always did come. I have grown to have faith in it. My last and most beautiful canoe rests in the cool, dry cellar right under where I am writing. I spend about an hour daily sparking her. I lift her by her handsome stems, and whisper of the long summer outing we are to have on the prattling, rattling waters of the Tiadatton, and she quivers and squirms like a trout; or, is it my imagination?
Yes, summer has come, and the wood-thrush, the cat-bird, the oriole, the song-sparrow, the waltz-bird (the naturalists miss him), they are here. I said I would leave when the maples did. They are leaved, and I am left; but not for long. I shall go next week. Good-by, debts, duns, taxes, and deviltries. "Life is short, art is long." Just so. Nature is longer than either, or both, and a great sight better.
I rather think Outing has come to stay. I think it ought. I read indefatigably during the off-season, but never in the woods. And so, away for the woods!
Yours for Outing,
Nessmuk.
P.S. The same meaning wood-duck in the obsolete Narragansett tongue; more correctly wood-drake. See?
(From Outing, August 1884. To view it as it appeared in the magazine, click here or here.)
We've become accustomed to the variety of birds populating the wooded parkland adjacent to our house. Mostly we see species common to rural-suburban areas like this, but it's not unusual for waterfowl -- Canada geese, mallards, great blue herons -- to glide overhead. A pair of red-tailed hawks hunts the clearings nearby.
Late last evening my wife and I were surprised by a throaty whooo-hoo-hoo-hoo coming from a stand of hardwoods to the northeast. It had been years since I'd heard a great horned owl in the wild and this one, judging by the deep-toned call, is a male.
It was a very cool moment.
We summoned our 15-year-old outside to listen, even though he's typically unimpressed by such things. This time, however, he was as intrigued as we were, standing quietly and following the sound of our newly discovered wild neighbor as it moved through the trees.
That was a pretty cool moment, too.
Our resident squirrels have been busy knocking bristly acorns out of the bur oak that towers over the back of our lot. We've also seen a few stray acorns from our northern neighbor's red oak, smaller than those shed by the bur oak, almost dainty by comparison.
Strolling along the edge of the woods before dinner this evening, I spied a cluster of spiny yellow husks hanging from a vine-covered Ohio buckeye tree -- home-grown good luck. I picked 'em all.
We had an unusual convergence of weather phenomena here this morning -- dense, humid air and pre-dawn temps in the single digits. This "freezing fog" gave everything a light coating, and my wife called me from her commute to urge me to get outside with my camera before the shimmer burned off.
I didn't quite make it in time. Instead, I'm posting another image from Sunday morning's walk.
This unremarkable photograph has the benefit of bumping the former Mayor of Wasilla off the top of KintlaLake Blog.I stand by the commentary, but I grew tired of a mindless ideologue winking at me from my screen.Kinda spooky, actually.
With the mercury hovering near zero this morning, I pulled on my layers and ventured out toward our common space.A few small birds followed over my head, swooping and perching and complaining out loud. A light overnight dusting couldn't hide signs that rabbits, deer and a lone fox had preceded me to the otherwise silent winter woods.The creek wasn't frozen over -- that surprised me. Sunlight glinted off chunks of ice along the banks. I reached down and scooped up a handful of powdery snow, admiring its glisten for a moment before letting it slip out through my gloved fingers.This, I thought, is why I live where there are four seasons.By the way, don't talk to me about how winters somewhere else are harsher or colder, snowier or more picturesque -- of course they are. Climatic competition doesn't interest me, not in the slightest.This is our winter.
In the interest of full disclosure, I didn't take yesterday's morning walk in our nearby common space. It happened at a local wildlife refuge, the site of my "Sunrise Sojourn" last spring.
Since the area is part of Central Ohio's Metro Parks system, my leisurely trek hardly qualifies me for a bushcraft merit badge. All the same, it's a wilder place.
At one point, five whitetails burst from the tall grass scarcely 20 yards in front of me. Later, just ten feet to my right, a red fox pounced, missed, saw me and disappeared.
Herons glided overhead without making a sound. Migrating geese and ascending KC-135s, on the other hand, were less reserved.
A friend and former colleague of mine, a helluva photographer who left Ohio recently for a warmer clime, saw my images and commented that he prefers to watch our changing seasons from afar. I get that.Since he's a shooter himself, however, he also appreciates the challenge of entering a landscape of tall, dry grass, seemingly devoid of color, and the rewards of getting close.
He knows that delight is in the details.
Enjoy the beach, old friend, because it was damned chilly out on the marshes yesterday. I'll stay put, thanks -- I love this time of year.
We've been working hard lately, all four of us, so this morning we decided to treat ourselves to a day in the woods -- sort of.
Sort of a day, because we didn't leave the house 'til noon. (Please don't ask me why.) And sort of the woods, because a trip to Old Man's Cave on Memorial Day weekend is more like an assault on an amusement park than a walk in the wilderness, what with hundreds of untethered, unruly young'uns about.
Old Man's Cave is nestled in Hocking Hills State Park, near the town of Logan, Ohio. It's truly a spectacular natural feature -- a deep, mossy gorge with several waterfalls and, of course, dozens of recess caves. Walking trails, enhanced by old stone walls and arch bridges, criss-cross the gorge, several times disappearing into dark passages in the rock before emerging again into the damp air.
The place is popular, and it shows. The vegetation has been worn away 20 feet to either side of marked trails, leaving wide, muddy thoroughfares trodden bare by the thoughtless. Countless shortcuts testify to human laziness, and maintenance appears to be a casualty of the State of Ohio's ever-tightening belt.
Beyond the blight, however, the gorge remains a jewel. During my time there today, I did my best to ignore the out-of-control out-of-schoolers and tried to imagine what it must've been like when Old Man Rowe lived in a deep den near the Middle Falls.
To my delight, I found a few places where I could gaze across a pool at a waterfall, or up through the trees at the sky and almost feel like I was alone in the woods. Instead of trying to absorb the grandeur of the place all at once, I got close to small things, closer to the earth.
There was a brief moment when all I heard was the soft rush of water.
I'll go back to Old Man's Cave again one of these days, perhaps soon, but next time it'll be when the crowds are somewhere else. A football Saturday sounds good.A rainy football Saturday sounds even better.
It's a KintlaLake morning ritual -- at 5am I stumble down to the kitchen, fetch two cups of black coffee and bring them back to the bedroom for my wife and me to sip while watching local TV news.Today, the secondary story was about a fire that overnight had consumed ten acres of grassland near the wildlife refuge I'd visited Sunday morning. According to the report, a stolen SUV had been driven off the road and into a field, then set alight. (It's also conceivable, I think, that it simply had been abandoned, its red-hot catalytic converter igniting the tall, dry grass.)The news gave me a bad feeling. It bothered me that anything might threaten our small island of wildness, the park where my family and I have hiked and where I managed to find a moment's peace by the pondside a few days ago.I just got back from the site of the fire, and I'm glad to say that the wildlife refuge was spared. It looked to me like firefighters did a helluva job containing it, breaking the burn before it caught a stand of tall trees -- and had that happened, it might've jumped a road and spread into the park. Also, the scorched area stopped about 50 yards from a nearby house, which I learned had been evacuated briefly as a precaution.Right now the skies are giving us a wonderful, soaking rain. Fire's out, all's well.
One crisp morning many years ago, I was clambering about the scree above Glacier National Park's Lunch Creek Basin. Scanning the steep slopes, I spotted my photographic quarry -- an adult mountain goat and a pair of kids, perched impossibly on the side of a cliff.
I eased my knapsack off my shoulders, pulled out my trusted Canon and fitted a telephoto. Leaving the bag on a ledge, I moved slowly and quietly toward a better vantage point.
That's when my right foot slipped on a loose rock, putting me face-down in the alpine gravel. I began sliding, feet-first and untethered, down the slope. Reflexively, I went spread-eagle, halting the slide and avoiding what could've been a deadly fall.
It took me an excruciating hour to creep to relative safety, and still another hour to make my way back to my knapsack, a hundred yards away.
I never did get the shot.
The experience left me with my life and more than a few lessons -- chief among them my resolve to never again willingly separate myself from my gear.
But what if I'd found myself in a "Now what?" situation, whether unavoidably or through my own negligence, in the same kind of place and with the same assets? Inventory check: the clothes on my back, a pocketknife, cigarettes and paper matches, chewing gum, wristwatch, wallet, car keys and camera.
Moving down-slope, below the tree line and into the basin, I would've had access to snow and moving water that I could've collected in the camera body, the lens hood or even a boot. The alpine scrub offered pitch, tinder and fuel for a fire. Leaning cut boughs over a rock outcropping would've made for a tolerable shelter. My camera's lens might've been useful as a firestarter, a signaling device or a cutting tool. Being late summer, potentially edible creek-side vegetation was plentiful.
Despite being ill-equipped, I believe I could've survived.
When the SHTF, our only resources are the ones we have at-hand. Months of work stocking a TEOTWAWKI cache in the basement isn't much good if we're stuck in traffic miles away. That bug-out bag stashed in the trunk becomes useless the moment the car is stolen. Maybe we left our personal-defense handgun at home in the safe, because we never made the time to get a concealed-carry permit.
Spilled milk, that. The mission doesn't change. Survive.
Regardless of the situation, mindset is the key to survival. To reinforce that, the U.S. military has used the word SURVIVAL as a mnemonic device:- Size up the situation
- Use all your senses, Undue haste makes waste
- Remember where you are
- Vanquish fear & panic
- Improvise
- Value living
- Act like the natives
- Live by your wits, Learn basic skills now
Interesting, isn't it, that there's no mention of gear? That's because having the ultimate stuff in a bag is a whole lot less important than having the right stuff between the ears.
Preparedness begins, then, with mindset and skills. After that, we can consider the kind of gear that increases our chances of survival -- along with the best ways to ensure that we have it when we need it.
On that Montana mountainside, I made the mistake of leaving behind some of the gear that would've been helpful in a survival situation, but I still had a knife in my pocket. To this day, I always carry a serviceable knife -- whether it's a basic pocketknife, a multi-tool, a big folder or a fixed blade, and airport security notwithstanding, it's simply not negotiable.
Sometimes, of course, becoming separated from a well-stocked fanny pack or knapsack can't be helped, so I've learned to appreciate the value of carrying a minimal kit in my pocket whenever I head into the woods.
I highly recommend the Field & Stream article on building a simple kit that fits in an Altoids tin. Assembling such a kit is guaranteed to make you feel like a kid again, especially if you involve kids in the project. For some of the more unusual items, by the way, I've found Best Glide Aviation Survival Equipment to be a reliable source.
Back in 2004, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said,"You have to go to war with the army you have, not the army you want."
That assertion may have plunged Sec. Rumsfeld deep into hot water, but for those of us engaged in preparing ourselves and our families to survive under less-than-ideal circumstances, the principle is worth remembering.
Because when the worst happens, it's not about having what we need -- it's about using what we have. The mission doesn't change. Survive.
"Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow."(from Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig)
