Aug 5th
 |
| An perma-adolescent chick with a bow and a hunting dog...my kinda muse! Thanks Artemis! |
As I have gotten older I have begun to realize that
hunting…all aspects of hunting…are far more encompassing than I had ever
realized. The irony is that the
first flicker of this understanding took place on another more bucolic battle
ground….the golf course.
Years ago I was in Texas playing a round of “customer golf”
with one of my suppliers. The
gentleman in the cart with me was at the end of his long and storied
career. He was an export manager
for Chevron Chemical. I on the other
hand was just at the beginning of mine.
He was a nice older man. Slim and quiet.
He had grown up in the oil fields of west Texas and was a cowboy who
years ago traded in his spurs for oxfords. He wore the regret of that decision in the deep creases on
his face. He had made sacrifices
for his wife and grown kids and had understood the magnitude of those
sacrifices, but refused to dwell upon them. Decisions had been made, and that was that. No use dwelling on the past.
He was also a fairly good golfer. Not great, but a hell of a lot better than me…and since I
was, in a sense at least, his customer he was doing his best to let me keep my
score as close to his as possible.
I was still young, and (foolishly) thought I had a chance in mastering this game. Each blown putt or sliced drive was
welling up in me with anger and embarrassment. I slumped back to the cart and the Old Man decided to give
me some advice:
“Ya know Steven, Ya probably heard that Golf is kinda like
life….”
He paused to light up a cigarette before driving us down the
fairway to find my ball.
“That’s only partly true. Golf is like life distilled to its most basic parts and
placed on an artificial plane.
Golf aint like life…. it’s the way people with messed up lives would like
life to be…simple, with a defined task and limited authority. Ethics are needed, but among friends
can be discarded. You can learn a
lot from golf, but not too much.
When you leave the 18th hole that round is over and there is
nothing left to do but wait till the next. I like golf….learned a lot about people watching them
play…but in the end golf is golf…now you wanna really know about yourself, or
someone…take them afield and go hunting!”
I smiled and tried to understand what the hell he was
talking about. In the end I only
knew I was frustrated with the knowledge that I just did not have in me what
was necessary to make a little white ball do what I wanted it to do.
Well, I never had a chance to hunt with the Old Man. He retired many years ago and from what
I understand moved back to his original home in West Texas. Probably gave up on golf and switched
back to hunting varmints. Someone
told me that he loved to call in Coyotes.
What he said to me though did begin to really make sense, as
I got older and more involved with hunting.
Golf is “life distilled”….Hunting is life “with everything
added”. Hunting also does not end
when the bow or rifle is put away.
The power and grandeur of a
life afield follows us hunters everywhere, and Artemis whispers at us
always…reminding us that we are always on “the hunt”
Yesterday I drove with my wife up from Los Angeles to
Northern California for a little mid-way visit with our daughter who is
currently at an academic summer camp at Stanford University. She probably would have been just fine
staying there for the entire time without being bothered by us…but she is our
youngest, and damn it….I was missing her.
We decided to pull her out of the program for a couple of hours and take
her to dinner.
On the way up we were crossing the Tejon pass…a
semi-mountain pass that acts as the gateway from Los Angeles into the Central
Valley of California. After
stopping to refuel we jumped back on the highway and there….right after the on
ramp were three large bucks! A
pre-rut bachelor group just hanging out five feet from thousands of cars
zipping by at 70 mph. They had
really good genetics too. I was
moving too fast to count the points, but they definitely were in the
respectable class…and might have been in the OMG!!! Class.
My wife did not see them until I started screaming and
pointing. I noticed the other cars
were being driven by drivers who seemed oblivious as well. Only one other car slowed down and I
could see in my rear view mirror the driver and the passenger trying in vain to
get a look at the deer.
When they ended up passing us on the left I saw a Rocky
Mountain Elk Foundation sticker in the rear window….fellow hunters…of course they “saw” the deer.
This is the point.
We hunters are never not afield.
Artemis lives by our side and constantly tells us to keep vigilant. We have evolved (or “devolved”
depending on your perspective) into environmental participants. We are always on the hunt. And the hunt helps to define us as who
and what we are. We are ethical
not because we hold onto a set of values.
We are ethical because we are lethal, and the universe demands we hold
these strong ethics. On the golf
course if we forego our moral code we have a meaningless score…afield there are
far more cataclysmic consequences.
The Old Man and I never had the chance to hunt together…a
shame...I think I would have learned a lot from him. He did however teach me something very valuable about
hunting, and he did it from a golf cart on a private country club.
You just never know where the next lesson is going to come
from.
No comments:
Post a Comment