And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (10 page)

“Who?”

“Mark Zuckerberg. I created Facebook.”

“Look, if this is one of them cults or Amway or some other foolish thing, I don't want any and Jane don't live here no more.”

“No, it's Mark Zuckerberg. I created a social networking site that is slowly putting CNN out of business.”

“Oh, you're the guy from that movie with Justin Timberlake in it.”

“Well, yes sir. There was a movie inspired by an unauthorized biography of how I created the single most important site on the Internet that costarred Justin Timberlake.”

“I love me some Justin Timblerlake.”

“Me too. Say, I'm working on a project in which I eat only what I kill myself and I was wondering—”

“You ever see him dance?”

“Who?”

“Justin Timberlake. Who the hell are you talking about?”

“You see, I was just wondering if I could come over and shoot one of your bison.”

“He brought sexy back, you know.”

“Yes, sir. He sure did. Now, about that bison.”

“Bison?”

“Yes, sir. I was hoping to kill one of your bison. You own the world's largest herd and I was hoping I might be able to kill one of them.”

“Oh, hell, I don't care, them things like alley cats to me. You ever see Timberlake on
Saturday Night Live
?”

“Yes, sir, he's very funny. So Saturday then?”

“For what?”

“Can I come over Saturday and kill a bison?”

“Fine. I love that ‘Dick in a Box' song. That is funny as hell.”

“Great,” says Zuckerberg. “I'll see you then.” He hangs up the phone then makes a call to his accountant to begin the proceedings of buying Ted Turner's brain.

I didn't want to go that far. Zealotry is not strong in me. But I was looking forward to the idea of eating something that I had procured. Of course, I've done this lots of times over the course of my life, but up until now procurement had always required a drive-through window or a trip to the grocery store. This was different. This felt historically appropriate, like the uncomfortable shoes worn by employees in Colonial Williamsburg. Learning to hunt was not just about bonding with my relatives or feeling like an adult. It was about feeling like a provider, a member of a tribe old as the millennia and dying out fast.

A 2006 study of hunters found that the number of American hunters sixteen and over dropped 10 percent in the preceding decade. That's not because hunters in midlife suddenly decided to quit. It's because hunting is not being carried on as family tradition in the numbers it once was. Despite more than 75 percent of Americans saying they support legal hunting, just 6 percent in 2006 claimed to actually do it.

Moreover, the line in the sand between hunters and nonhunters is growing wider and deeper. When Vice President Cheney famously shot a friend on a quail-hunting trip in 2006, nonhunters derided the practice as dangerous and Neanderthal. And yet, the work of Michael Pollan and the locavore, grow-your-own food movement has exploded at the same time. It's a troubling dichotomy.

To be fair, many hunters have only exacerbated the problem. Rinella told me that he believes the insular and defensive posture hunters (and gun owners) take makes the sport inaccessible to the curious. They are defensive about their sport and are thus not letting people like me, who may want to try it at an older age, into their club. He believes hunting is losing out on potential participants—and advocates—because the most vocal hunters come across as clannish and paranoid. Indeed, one only need read the headlines stirred up by the NRA to get a sense of the militancy its leaders promote in the name of defending their Second Amendment rights. It's a sign of the polarizing times we live in when former NRA president Charlton Heston stood before a gathered group claiming that the government could take his gun away when “they pry it from my cold, dead hands”; that polarized stance probably doesn't do that much to encourage those with a passing curiosity to try the shooting sports.

But I wasn't curious about shooting. I'd done quite a bit, as you'll see in the next chapter. I was curious about what it would feel like to roast, boil, fry, or fricassee something that had, until I put an end to it, been alive and blissfully unaware that I was on its tail.

In relative terms I didn't know anything about food. But I wanted to. I began reading books about game preparation and even went so far as to call a chef I had once interviewed looking for advice.

“Don't overcook it, use plenty of fat, and be sure not to break your teeth on a pellet from your shotgun,” he told me. “Game like pheasant can be a real pain to cook, but you do it right and you won't have anything better.”

I was months away from my first hunting trip and already my stomach was rumbling. I wanted to try it, to practice. I went down to my local Whole Foods and asked if they could order me a pheasant. They could not, but they could offer me a deal on free-range, hand-fed turkey that was bathed in angel tears and educated at the Sorbonne. I tried to find a farmer's market and even called a pheasant club in the next county wondering if I could buy one of the birds they stocked their hunting fields with.

“You can't keep them as pets,” said the woman on the phone.

“I'm not interested in a pet,” I said. “I'd like to eat one.”

“Well, they're a bit small right now, but if you call back in the fall, I may be able to sell you one.”

Alas, it appeared I was out of options. I would just have to wait for my opportunity to shoot a pheasant in Iowa, but I would never look at Swiss Cake Rolls the same way again.

PART III

SUMMER

9

Comfort Breeds Carelessness

I
love the smell of nitrocellulose. Metallic, but sweetly earthy, it hangs in the midsummer air like fog on San Francisco Bay. It's heavy and lingers on your fingers and in your clothes for a couple of hours, leaving a tang on your tongue and setting up shop in your nasal passages, like a reminder of the thing you have just done: the rounds you've sent downrange, the targets you've more than likely missed.

My left hand starts to tremble a little as the weight of the gun becomes noticeable. Is it possible I am really that weak? The boxy earmuffs block out almost all sound, leaving me with the sensation of my own breathing and an odd, unexpected sense of congestion—like a bad cold—though I feel perfectly fine. The sun coming through the branches of the old hemlock trees on the back of the property and the humidity rising from the deep Iowa soil creates a bluish camouflage of air separating me from my target. I close my left eye and rest my cheek on the stock of the old Winchester lever-action rifle, trying to line up the notch between the two rear posts of the site with the post at the muzzle of the gun. You want the post out front to fill the space between the two back posts, the tops of all three lining up to form a straight line. That's how you know the gun is level. Then, you want all three to line up with your target, twenty-five or thirty yards away.

At its best, it's an effortless dance. At its worst, something you become mildly obsessed with, this perfection. You begin to overthink things. You concentrate too hard. You begin to notice the sweat on the palm of your trigger hand, on your cheek, the lid of your closed left eye. Your left hand begins to waver. The gun starts feeling heavy and you wobble. You're thinking too long. Just pull the damned trigger.

Miss.

The eight-inch steel plate does not fall, its freshly spray-painted front, unblemished. I pull my cheek off the stock and cycle the lever action, the way I've seen thousands of cowboys do it in those great movies. They make it look effortless. It's not hard, but there is some resistance. Halfway down, the spent cartridge flings off and to the right. Pull the lever back up and I can feel a new one being rammed into the action in its place. The whole process starts over again—the closed eye, the cheek to stock, lining up the posts, the sweaty palm, the quavering hand. The whole thing takes just seconds, but it can feel like hours. Whole days seem to pass in the time it takes to shoot off ten rounds. It's the strange silence, the complete concentration. It might be and can be fun to come out here and burp off rounds like a tommy gun, but that's not important to me now. Nothing else is. Be safe, shoot clean. Knock that little white steel disc off its base. Teach it who's boss. Pull the fucking trigger.

Blam.
A puff of smoke, a distant
ding,
the swoop and pull of another round loaded, another chance to shoot. That sweet smell of powder filling my nose. My breath coming quicker with the excitement of having hit the target. Shouldering the gun, I take aim again. Close my eye, rest my cheek, focus on the poles and the target downrange, this time a smaller steel circle, this one mounted on a hinge next to a plate fabricated in the shape of a squirrel. Squeeze the trigger, don't jerk it.
Blam.
Miss. I rushed it. Jack the lever and rack a new round.

And so it goes for hours.

I don't want to give anyone the impression that I have never been around guns before. I have. Spend enough summers and vacations at my grandma's house and sooner or later Uncle Mark is going to have you on the back acre—out past the old barn where the pigs used to be and the garden where Grandma kept vegetables, wildflowers, and red raspberries—at his shooting range. When you're young—maybe ten or so, depending upon the permissiveness of your parents—you're shooting the Chipmunk, a single-shot .22-caliber rifle about two-thirds the length of an adult arm. It weighs a couple of pounds, you have to pull back a knob on the action to make it fire, and, when you squeeze the trigger, you get pretty much the greatest thrill and surprise of your young life. It's a starter gun, a kid's gun, the kind you hear octogenarian former Boy Scouts talk about using to terrorize the local woodchuck population back in those golden, more permissive days. As an adult, the Chipmunk—and here I have no idea if that's the brand name of the gun or just a pet name given by Uncle Mark to the trainer we all used—feels comically, toyishly unsubstantial. It's lighter than a Super Soaker, shorter than a T-ball bat, and leaves you with the impression that it would shatter at the slightest touch. But I can't count the number of rounds I put through that gun barrel.

It was also the gun Uncle Mark and Dad used to teach me gun safety. Never point it at anyone or anything you didn't want to shoot, maim, or kill. Never look down the barrel. Keep it pointed up in the air or downrange at all times. Check the action to make sure it is loaded or unloaded—depending upon which you want—and keep the safety on until everyone is clear, you have it pointed at your target, and you are ready to shoot. Guns are not toys. I repeat GUNS ARE NOT TOYS. I can't tell you how many times I heard that and other admonitions for safety as a kid—so many that, despite shooting nearly every time I was in Iowa (and that is a lot of times), I never became comfortable around guns. That's a good thing. Comfort breeds carelessness. If you are at least afraid enough to never take your mind off the fact that the thing in your hand is designed to kill, then you'll probably be inclined to follow the safety protocol. If, however, you stop thinking of a gun as something designed to impart destructive forces on that which is unfortunate enough to be directly in front of it—well, that's how people get hurt.

I cried the first time I shot a gun.

I was six years old, maybe seven, and we were standing in the back garden at my grandma's house outside of Mason City, Iowa. My dad and Uncle Mark were standing next to me, just behind and to the right. Uncle Mark had loaded the Chipmunk and given me some basic instructions. Hold the stock tight against your shoulder, and keep your face pressed firmly against the wood. Squeeze the trigger; don't jerk it. Remember that even if the safety is on, the gun can still go off. Take deep, smooth breaths and pull the trigger as you exhale. It was a lot to take in, a lot of instructions.

I had never wanted to fire a gun, but my dad and his brother had decided it was time for me to learn. My cousins had all learned at my age. The ones who lived in Iowa had learned even younger. This was my time, my rite of passage into this family of hunters. This was supposed to be my first step toward becoming a Heimbuch man. Of course, they didn't say it at the time, but they had been looking forward to showing me how with the hopes of sharing a whole lot more. Bigger guns, different guns. Shotguns. Deer hunting, bird hunting. Maybe someday there would be an elk or a moose. Dad had always wanted a bear.

That's why I pulled the trigger, because Dad and Uncle Mark were standing next to me, encouraging me. They weren't cheering me on, exactly. Cheering is too gregarious. But every time I told them I couldn't do it, every time I tried to hand the small rifle back to them, Uncle Mark put it back in my hands, and Dad told me not to be scared and to just try it.

I tried to settle my nerves, to calm my shaking hands. A hot tear formed in the corner of my left eye that quickly got cold in the crisp winter air. I tried to line up the sights the way Uncle Mark had taught me—center the front sight between the two rear posts; line up the tops and see the target in the background. I had heard them shooting before, that day and during other visits to Grandma's house, but the noise, the concussive snap when I pulled the trigger, startled me and I jumped a little. The force of the recoil, which could not have been harder than a friendly chuck on the shoulder from a family friend, hurt me and I let out a little yelp. My cousin Kevin was standing behind me to the left and he laughed when I quickly handed the gun to Uncle Mark and turned to run back to the house. Dad tried to call me back, but I choked out that I had to go to the bathroom. I ran into the steamy warmth of Grandma's house and into the bathroom near the mudroom door. My breath stuttered and I felt tears run down my face. I removed some layers of clothes only to realize I had wet my pants. Not all the way, not a full soaking, but enough to reinforce my embarrassment.

I tried to tell Mom that I didn't feel good, but she shooed me back outside. Walking the hundred yards back to where Uncle Mark and Dad were standing with Kevin, I made a decision to mask my fear, the sheer horror I had experienced firing that weapon. I wanted them to be proud of me, to embrace me into their world. Even at a young age, I had an instinct to diffuse discomfort with humor. Dad asked if I was okay as I crunched back through the thin layer of snow back to the shooting range.

“I guess,” I said, “it scared the pee out of me.”

He and Mark laughed; Kevin gave me an evil smirk and returned to shooting. Mark warned him several times to keep the gun pointed downrange as I leaned into Dad's side. He put his arm around my shoulder and asked if I wanted another turn. “Yeah, sure,” I told him and felt that empty sense of numb that follows a good scare, a cry, and a few drops of urine in your Superman Fruit of the Looms.

From the Chipmunk, you move to a shotgun. A .410—light ammo and enough kick to make you a little afraid. Then it's back to the pistols and more rifles. My dad has a .22-caliber Ruger sport pistol that I remember fondly from my early teen years. Bigger .22-cal rifles, more powerful handguns and shotguns. If you spend enough time and express enough curiosity, chances are pretty good Uncle Mark will have you handling, shooting, and understanding every kind of gun there is. I, of course, being the carpetbagging suburban kid from up north or back east, never got all the way through the armory. I never shot a black powder muzzleloader, never tried an assault rifle. But, whenever I visited Iowa—before kids, marriage, or other such distractions—I used to love shooting on that range.

When I was old enough, Mark would give me a brick of .22 bullets and my choice of armaments. “These better be gone before you leave,” he'd say. And I would make, what I thought was, a rather heroic effort to do just that. I would shoot until my fingers hurt from reloading, until I could smell nothing but the chemicals of the powder—the brass from the shells on my fingers. Unfortunately, I never shot quite enough to be able to hit anything.

I was in college when Dad and I went out to Iowa on our way to a fishing trip in Canada. Dad and Mark are competitive in the way older and younger siblings are. My dad, who is the fourth of the nine kids, is a pretty good shot, especially for a guy who doesn't get to shoot all that much. Uncle Mark, the youngest and something slightly more than a devotee of the sport, likes to try and show up his older brother. At times, I find myself in the middle of their armed pissing contests, taking shots between them. On this particular trip, we were shooting pistols—something of a specialty for Mark and also something my grandfather, a man I never got to know all that well, would have considered strictly verboten. “Pistols are for gangsters and crooks,” he might have muttered. And, it turns out, for his youngest son.

Mark's a great shot, especially with a pistol. Growing up, I used to think he was the best in the world, not that I had anyone to compare him to. So he was knocking his targets down pretty well. My dad is the kind of guy who can do just about anything if he puts his mind to it and, when it comes to beating his little brother at his own game, his mind gets put to things. When the time came for me to take a clip's worth of shots, I was lucky my rounds hit the backstop—stacked railroad ties—behind the targets, let alone the targets themselves. This caused Mark to chuckle and grin that childlike grin he gets at moments of pure mirth. You see, Mark may lose to my dad, but his kids—more than ten years younger than me—were already better shots and he could take rest in the fact that, if nothing else, he was a better teacher than my dad (if not one with better facilities, more access, and a more receptive student body).

“What's the matter, city boy?” he asked. “Got to be hanging out of a car window, going forty miles an hour in order to hit anything?”

Yes, Uncle Mark, growing up in the pressed khaki suburbs I am indeed more comfortable doing a drive-by than shooting at some secondhand bowling pins in Grandma's backyard. You get an idea of the relationship.

I love Uncle Mark and his wife, Linette, for a lot of reasons, not least of which is their hospitality. Whenever I come to Iowa for a visit, they always offer up their downstairs guest room and their home to my family and me. And we appreciate them for it. I had already had children before I made my first adult visit out there without the rest of my family—Mom, Dad, sisters, brother, and so on—and I was surprised by how at home I felt. On that particular side trip to Iowa with my dad, after a day or two of eating and loafing and walking the grounds of my grandma's place—where Mark and Linette had built a home to be nearer to her—I got up the nerve to ask if I could shoot. It was something, I gather, Mark had been waiting for me to ask all along. He ushered me into the basement, where I had my pick of a few weapons stored there. I went with the .22, then something a bit bigger and more exotic and, over the course of the next few days, managed to cure my jones for firing weapons—even if I didn't hit anything.

We followed a similar ritual two summers later when we visited again, saving the shotguns for the last day. This trip, Mark introduced me to cowboy guns—Winchester rifle models from the era of Reconstruction, old Colt revolvers with their eccentric loading requirements—and I ate it up. I shot the heart out of the Queen of Hearts from twenty paces and grew to love the
chick-chick blam
sound of the lever-action rifles.

Guns and shooting have long been a big part of Uncle Mark's life, but they were only a means to an end. It's hunting that seems to make him tick. The experience of being out in the field, among the elements in pursuit of one of God's creatures and food for his family table—these things are sacred to him. And I know that the best thing I can ever do, the best gift I can ever give him is to worship at the same altar.