Into the Deep

Earlier this week I was invited to attend a lecture concerning the stewardship and preservation of local geological features with an eye toward public history.  It had been quite a while since I sat in a classroom and watched a PowerPoint, but I was interested in the subject matter and happy to have been asked to attend.  The presenter, a family friend, was deeply knowledgeable and committed to his subject matter, and I came away from the lecture not only with a deeper understanding of my geologic surroundings, but thoughts of the web of connections we outdoorsmen and women can take part in when we see fit.

While none of us, professional guide to occasional weekend warrior, can truly take part in the entire twirling kaleidoscope of interconnectedness that surrounds us while we pass our free hours afield, some of us do try.  Others do not, and that's fine too.  To each their own and all that.

Take, for example, "Don the Deer Hunter."  Don is a guy I just now made up, but he seems like a pretty amiable chap.  He's a good dad and husband.  He hoards his vacation days to hang out in a tree stand with a bow or rifle, and hunt big bucks.  Beginning sometime around Memorial Day each year, he sits entranced by deer hunting articles and TV shows.  The post counts of Rackstabber169 (Don's internet alter-ego) soar on BigRacks.com and CervidAssassin.org, his chosen whitetail internet forums.  His truck is a rolling billboard for makers of specialized hunting gear and equipment.

He hunts quite a few days in the fall, a dedicated man this Don, and does very well for himself.  The walls of his den are adorned with many trophies, testaments to the majesty of nature in antler form, and to Don's commitment to his chosen passion.  He scouts year-round and dreams of the rut at night.  Don is a highly skilled specialist, and quite content being just that.

Don, by the way, cannot recognize a single constellation outside the Big Dipper or any dangerous or edible plants. He starts his fires with lighter fluid, gas, or not at all.  His knots are of the Swiss navy variety.  He has some experience identifying the flora a whitetail browses on throughout the year, but only because that is vital information to his specialization.  He has no idea how the lake he can see in the distance from his favorite tree stand got there, how old it is, or what's in it.  These questions may not even have occurred to ol' Donny, face painted and bow hanging on the $30 "proprietary" (the maker painted it camo) extreme, lightweight space-age screw hook in the tree next to him.

Even though he makes a dumb joke every time he hears the term "climax forest," and has never heard of forest succession as a concept, I hold no ill will toward our good fellow, Don.  He is, without a doubt, a more accomplished whitetail hunter than I am or will ever be.  His entire life's purpose outside of work and family is to put a drop-tine on the wall.  He is a specialist.  A deer hunter, not a woodsman.  That is a point of distinction, not a point of contention or derision.  There is a difference, and that is all.  Spatting over how we choose to spend our time in the woods is ridiculous and uncalled for.

I know a few of these Dons in the deer hunting world, and a few more in the realm of fly fishing.  They are completely comfortable narrowing their focus down to one species or technique or body of water.  In the testosterone-fueled check this shit out! world of today's internet fly fishing, to be recognized as one of the the tribe, one has to specialize.  To fish 300 days a year behind designer shades, throw perfectly tight loops out to 100 feet at all times, and have designed at least three fly patterns with names not fit for repetition in mixed company.  Or have a pink reel and cleavage erupting from an implausibly strained Columbia fishing shirt.  And sadly, that seems to be the entire point a lot of the time -- to get noticed.

I will never be recognized at the fore of most tribes because I'm not an extreme specialist.  I am decidedly not an expert in any single outdoor endeavor other than falling asleep in blinds.  Whether through lack of commitment or the simple urge to learn the next thing (maybe they're the same), I have become a happy generalist.  I would like to sit down with Donny, however, and pick his brain on the subject of whitetail hunting for a while.

Perhaps it's because I am not a joiner by nature.  If you've been reading here long enough, you know by now that I take joy from harvesting my protein well, cooking it with some modicum of respect and care, and sharing it with family and friends when I can.  But all the organic locavore, glossy farm-to-table onanism going on lately makes my skin crawl sometimes.  Not that the terms or concepts bug me.  Quite the opposite happens to be true.  I'd simply like to shoot a couple rabbits and make my gnocchi, or pickle a passel of ramps for my gimlets, without having to attend a club meeting to pat each other's backs over it afterward, thank you.

To my great dismay, I do occasionally feel a petty, initial tinge of jealousy in the face of those we deem to be expert-specialists in the fields I wander through.  The lauded oracles of fly fishing, foraging, and convincing animals to tip over for the pan.  The rock stars.  It's completely ridiculous and unfounded.  When I first came upon MeatEater and Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, to name but a couple, my initial, admittedly shallow and embarrassing reaction to them was an over-critical, sotto voce muttering... who are these knuckleheads doing what I love?  Only better.  Of course, almost immediately I began to enjoy and appreciate their blogs and books, my knee-jerk (emphasis on jerk) immaturity not withstanding.  Their efforts, in part, have not only improved my foraging and hunting, but have also paved the way for hundreds, maybe thousands, of outdoor blogger-types like yours truly.  I will never again be without reading material as long as my phone is charged.

Not that I'm writing in a vacuum here.  Truthfully, I get a charge out of watching my readership here grow, there's no denying that.  And I understand that products have to be sold, money has to be made, and that there apparently exists a glut of Dubstep music out there, written entirely for the the purpose of being lain under fly fishing videos on YouTube.  I'm just asking: What happened to going fishing without a GoPro duct taped to your every appendage, then having a beer by headlamp on the tailgate and heading home?



While still a dirt-covered youngster, I was exposed to, and the recipient of great gifts from, a comprehensive outdoor education program in elementary school.  Dad and Brian, and most of my aunts and uncles were also lead through this science curriculum, sometimes, in one of those quaint circle-of-life small town circumstances, by the same teachers I had.  In "OE," as we called it, every science class of a 5th-grader's school year was dedicated to learning about the outside world.  We learned our birds, fish, wild flowers, rocks, and mammals.  We gave stuttering presentations on environmental concerns and mumbled tours of the school's arboretum with our new-found knowledge to parents, family, and local dignitaries.  But more than that, we were introduced to the bigger concepts.  Evolution and adaptations, patterns, the cycles of water and carbon, the ice age that shaped our surroundings... even isostatic rebound, come to think of it, though they didn't call it that to us back then.  All that, combined with a bushcraft enthusiast father, led to my tremendous head start in not only knowledge of flora and fauna, but thinking of the entire works as one big system, and I am forever grateful for that.

"Practice while you're warm and dry, so you can do it when you ain't" ~Dad

Years later, I was introduced to the concept of "deep mapping" in a eureka moment when I stumbled across a copy of William Least Heat-Moon's PrairyErth at the Frugal Muse bookstore in Madison.  His massively immersive tome is a deep look into the geological, natural, and human history of a single county in Kansas.  From the folklore to the history and formation of the soil itself, it's all in there.  The author spent six years obsessively familiarizing himself with every nook and cranny of the place, and I'm not the only reader to have deemed his work a masterpiece.

This concept of deep mapping -- the act of collecting multiple qualitative and quantitative data as it relates to a place in order to create a near-complete spatial picture and narrative -- struck a heavy chord with me as it relates to my outdoor pursuits.  That a person could become immersed in the seemingly unconnected minutia of a place to build a more complete picture of the whole... when applied to tromping around outside with a gun or gunny sack, that thought still gets me going.

Back to what brought us here, that geology presentation earlier this week.

The unique geology of Wisconsin alone is a subject worthy of study and admiration, even to a simple layman carrying a pheasant gun and a bruised-up apple in his vest.  We have a treasure trove of accessible and easily researched areas and formations here, and just because we choose to spend our time chasing turkeys and mushrooms in and on them, that does not preclude some of us from wanting to learn more about them, geologists though we'll never be.  The Kettle Moraine, smushed up between two lobes of an ancient glacier that bears our state's name, on which I have passed nearly my entire life; the far-reaching Niagara Escarpment, the Baraboo Hills and Devil's Lake, the verdant Driftless area with untold miles of burbling trout water, the staggeringly beautiful Dells -- all of them appeal to me, not only as they relate to my weekends shooting behind woodcock and jumping the hookset on topwater bass, but as individual parts of the larger whole.

Top o' the world, Ma!  On 1.7 billion-year-old Baraboo Quartzite at Devil's Lake. Photo cred: Spanky

I meet these things under my boots and as vistas before me.  They've helped to mold who I am because I exist in the biome they support.  And that's just the flashy geology I, a member of the lay general public, am acquainted with through books read in anticipation of hunting, foraging and fishing trips.

At the opposite end of the same great spectrum from our single-minded specialist buddy Don, I am a generalist outdoorsman.  Duck misser and faller-downer.  Occasional practitioner of coercing fire from rocks and sticks and getting lost just to get un-lost.  And a deep mapper of my small part of the world.

Here's to us, we curious life-long students of the outdoors.  We experts of nothing, we who fish and hunt, navigate with map and compass, forage and paddle.  We who start matchless fires in the snow for practice, who stop to read historical markers on the shoulder of the road and consult the tattered copy of Roadside Geology of Wisconsin stashed behind the truck seat; all with a pittance of expertise and an abundance of awe and enthusiasm.

Hikers, and Bikers, and Birders! Oh, my!

It's human nature to divide ourselves up into comfortable little groups.  A friend of mine says that if you were to take a group of perfectly homogeneous people -- same race, religion, social status, interests -- and lock them up in a room together, they'd still find a way to segregate themselves.  By foot size or freckle density, perhaps.  It's one of the things we probably need to work on as a species.

It happens out in the field as much as anywhere else people wander.  I've gotten the hairy eyeball from the occasional spandex-clad suburban hiker while walking on public land, gun or rod in my hands.  Nothing serious, but the implied judgement is there.  And I'm just as guilty.  I encounter a gaggle of crunchy Teva-sporters on the trail while decked out in camo or blaze, and my internal defenses instantly creep up just a notch, warranted or not.  Oh, shit... here comes the PETA lecture...

We even clan up inside the confines of our self-same groups of interest.  I'm a fly fisherman.  After years of trial and error, fun and not so fun, I've stumbled upon my preferred niche as a fly fisherman.  I'll fish for anything, but I enjoy fishing for smallmouth bass the most, and I can get a little rankly about it at times.  I like to do it using topwater flies, especially those that I've spun myself out of dyed deer body hair.  And I prefer to do it in small wadable rivers. So if we follow the evolution it goes something like, fly fisherman --> warm water fly fisherman --> river smallmouth bass fly fisherman --> topwater river smallmouth bass fly fisherman --> deer hair topwater river smallmouth bass fly fisherman.  That's one stupendously long way to go to differentiate oneself from the other dudes out there waving a stick around in the river, but it's it worth because, as we all know, those trout guys with their wimpy little rods and microscopic bugs, they're weirdos.


The funny thing is, we're all out there for the same fundamental reasons.  We want to take in nature.  We want to escape the rat race, decompress, and take a little time to breathe.  The only difference is that my friends and I include the gathering of food in that practice.  From morels to moose, asparagus to walleye, if I can catch it, pick it, or kill it within the limits of the law, it's going in the gob, along with some taters and gravy.  You can't get more free range organic than whitetail on the hoof.

Because of this, I often catch myself thinking of "us" as part of the active food chain, out there actually participating.  We protein gatherers are in the game, getting after it, while "they" are stuck watching from the sidelines in way-too-clean zip-off tech pants.

How very self-righteous.

It's obviously a narrow mental stance to take, not to mention sort of ugly in general.  I do attempt to curtail it as much as I can, but it's an ongoing battle.  In reality, I'm sure many of those people are a lot more similar to me than I think.  Maybe they merely never had anyone to introduce them to the joys of chasing rabbits behind a baying beagle or make them a delicious squirrel pot pie.  A spotting scope and bird books don't predispose a person to rampant veganism any more than a shotgun and waders predispose a person to Anaditae genocide.

All this is slightly disconcerting to me because I don't come from a strictly hardline hunting and fishing family.  Far from it.  My dad didn't even hunt much other than a handful of squirrel trips as a kid and a couple fateful gun deer seasons during which they spent more time seeking out chocolate malts and cheeseburgers for his father than they did actually hunting deer.  He was a counterculture, Mother Earth News subscribing, back-to-the-land child of the Sixties with jarringly long hair in some of those old pictures.  He had no moral or ethical objections against the harvesting of meat anymore than the harvesting of potatoes, and was a better than average wingshot.  He simply had little interest in doing it himself.  We paddled flat water and whitewater almost obsessively.  He taught me how to navigate cross country by map and compass and how to start a fire with a bow and drill.  I learned to identify almost every plant and bird, edible or otherwise, in our little corner of the world.  And, just by way of a son's pride, anyone that knew him will tell you that he truly was one helluva world class story-teller around a campfire or dinner table, a skilled purveyor of the family narrative.

So why do I fall into the trap of prejudging those people who most outsiders would guess to be the product of my own childhood much more often than they would surmise I eventually stumbled out of it covered in zits and a mean stinging nettle rash?  This is the question that went rocketing through my head as I took a nice long, sweaty walk in the woods today.

The short answer: I have no idea.  Peer pressure?  The politics of conservation?  Laziness?

Another one of the sins that we, the hunters and fisherman, often commit outside is the sin of tunnel vision.  We get so involved in the task at hand that we often forget to remember where we are and how lucky we are to be there.  I fall prey to it most often during a hot bite, especially ice fishing.  More than once, I've plunked down on my bucket in group of ice fishermen, all of us like so many Thinsulate button mushrooms sprouting incongruously up from the ice, only to glance up some time later and realize that it's getting dark, and I'm one of the last remaining bumps on the frozen log.  That's concentration, I guess, but it's also a shame to sit with your head down a hole during a perfectly good sunset.  Sometimes it's like staring slack-jawed at a slideshow of fish and game on one side of the stage while the Rockettes are knocking out an impressive kickline on the other side.

I walked today, sans weapon, partly in an effort to get back to the mindset of simply being out there.  Taking it all in.  No rods, no guns, no bolas or fire hardened spears, and no blinders.  Strictly open eyes and ears.  Of course I stopped to look for deer tracks and puffballs.  My eyes scanned for the telltale whitewash and bore holes of the woodcock in appropriate areas.  I slowed to the cryogenically torpid pace of the sloth at times, just in case that was a deer or a coyote my Spidey Sense just pinged on.  Splatter vision and forced stillness were employed.  That will never change, it's too cemented in the synapses and tiny little folds of my oft-confused brain.  It's simply how I'm trained to take it all in now.  I was decidedly not there to hook or harm anything.  It was just a simple walk, but I returned home with a resolution.

I hereby resolve to open my damn eyes a little more often out there.  I resolve to pay a little more attention to my surroundings even when my fingers go all pruney from hastily taking bluegills off a double jig rig two at a time.  And I resolve to talk to the nice couple in the clacky clip-on biking shoes at the trail head, instead of just grunting and walking by.  Maybe.