And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (11 page)

To this point, my shooting experience, my time handling guns has been akin to spending years at the driving range without ever playing nine holes or reading the
Joy of Cooking
cover to cover without making a meal. There's no substance, no pudding to bare the proof—pistols are still, by the way, completely a loss to me—but, for what?

I'm not trying to say that the only reason a person picks up a gun is to kill something, but in our family, it does go hand in hand. And the idea that I have gone this long, these three and a third decades without ever becoming a part of that family tradition seems a little ridiculous. We don't talk about the definition of manliness among the family. We don't stand around discussing a man's role in the world. There's no Charlton Heston–like monologues about a man doing what a man's got to do. But, standing on the outside, being separate from something that seems so central to the other men in the family's lives, I feel like I'm not a part of the conversation. An outsider. I mean, what's the big deal? I love to shoot, love being outside, love to eat.

10

Education

T
he Fairfield Sportsmen's Association is tucked into the extreme southwest corner of Ohio, just a dozen miles or less from the Indiana and Kentucky borders. It's a rural section of Hamilton County, one of Ohio's most urban areas. Driving down the narrow, two-lane road in search of the club's entrance, I was surrounded on either side by lush, dense forest, broken only by the occasional single-wide trailer set back fifty or sixty feet with rusty cars in the yard and, inevitably, a large American flag tacked directly to the siding.

This kind of landscape—an up-from-the-holler warren of feral dogs, unbiblical sex, and, one assumes, methamphetamine production—always gives me the creeps. In its way, it's beautiful, verdant. But it's also the kind of place that sets my often overactive imagination off in unsavory meanderings. Once, in college while working as a delivery boy for a pizza restaurant, I spent an hour searching for an address in a place that looked very much like this, only to be greeted at the door by an indignant man in a stained white undershirt and wearing a pistol in a leather holster on his hip. I was terrified, more terrified than I had ever been to that point in my life, and when he said, rather blandly, “You're late,” I took it to mean that I was about to die. I thrust the pizza in his hand and ran away without taking his money. I covered the hundred feet from the door to my still-running car in giant bounds and backed down the long, narrow gravel driveway at a speed that might have qualified me for a poll position in a NASCAR race. I hit the tarmac and backed across two lanes without pausing for oncoming traffic, threw the stick shift into gear, and hardly slowed down until I arrived back in the delivery bay of the restaurant. It was only once inside that I realized I had not waited for payment, so, wanting to avoid discussing my own cowardice, I paid for his pizza out of my tips. This was only to find out weeks later that the armed customer had sensed my fear and called my manager, offering to pay by credit card. They apparently had a good laugh at my expense and the manager didn't make him pay, telling the armed and disheveled man that I had “taken care of it.”

It's not as if I've ever really been harmed by anyone who lives in these places. Yet every time I find myself in an unfamiliar, not-quite-rural place with deeply shadowed woods and unkempt homes, I somehow assume death is imminent. Add in my general discomfort with not knowing precisely where I am at every moment and you can begin to imagine the sense of nervous dread, the clenching stomach nerves that washed over me when I circled back for the third time, instinctively knowing I had missed the entrance to the Fairfield Sportsmen's Association but having no real idea where it was.

Plus, I was worried about being late. For one thing, I hate being late. But I also felt much the same way about attending this weekend hunter's safety course as I did on every first day of school. I didn't want to be the center of attention. I didn't want to be the brainiac or the jock, the stoner or the princess. I didn't want to fit any
Breakfast Club
stereotype. I just wanted to be completely forgettable, which wouldn't work if I were the last person to walk in.

When I realized I must have missed the turnoff for a fourth time, I saw the clock on my dashboard read 8:58. Two minutes to find where I was going and slip silently into class. My nerves frayed a bit more, and a bead of nervous sweat formed on my temple. Finally, I saw a road leading off into the woods—one that had definitely
not
been there moments before—between two mobile homes that had seen better days and decided to give it a shot. There was no sign that I could see, and pulling down the winding path, I began losing faith that I had found the right road until, crossing a small stream, I saw a small collection of cinder-block buildings and heard the distant pop of guns being fired on an unseen range.

I parked in the middle of the lot between the two largest buildings and, not exactly sure where I was supposed to be, began walking toward one. An older gentleman, dressed in head-to-toe khaki with a shotgun slung across his arm, pointed to the other without saying a word.

I must have stood out rather boldly from what the man—obviously a member of the club—was used to seeing around the facility. While most of the people I saw darting in and out of buildings or lingering around the shotgun ranges were dressed in some form of khaki, camouflage, or denim, with thick-looking boots and masculine hats, I was wearing the loudest pair of madras shorts I own—all yellows and reds—a T-shirt with a cartoon piece of smoked pork and the slogan
BACON IS MEAT CANDY
screen-printed in a flourished font, and flip-flops.

You'd think I would have known better after my experience at the NRA convention. I had seen firsthand how costume and tradition dovetail with safety and a shooter's particular sense of identity. Hunting and shooting are sports in which people who participate often look the part, and, at that moment—running late and ill-clad—I certainly did not. So, somewhat sheepishly, I waved at the older gentleman and received his nod before stepping into the tan cinder-block building that would be my home for twelve hours over the next two days.

Relative to the sport, hunter's safety courses are a new development. The first was organized in 1944 in Frankfurt, Kentucky, and the first volunteer course in Ohio was taught in 1961. They weren't made mandatory for hunters seeking a license until more than two decades after that. Prior to the introduction of the courses, hunting and trapping were learned pastimes, something a father passed on to his son or, historically less likely, daughter. In the days before the supermarket, suburbs, or refrigeration, hunting was less about recreation than survival. Old dad would teach his young son to hunt so that he could pull his weight, literally helping to put food on the table. That's not to say that hunting's sporting roots do not run deep. Indeed, the English have been hunting for sport and recreation since the seventeenth century. But in frontier America, hunting tended to have less to do with ornate costumes and gun handlers than it did survival and provision.

This was truer later in the Middle American states than almost anywhere else. I once spoke to a World War II U.S. Army veteran who said that recruits from the Midwest and Deep South were taken for granted as having rifle-handling abilities and were thus subject to two weeks' less firearms training than their more urbane and coastal brethren. I've never been able to confirm the man's story, but it makes sense, really—certainly the idea that hunting for sustenance was more common in agrarian cultures than in coastal or urban communities follows my own family's experiences. My dad and his five brothers were taught to shoot by my grandfather while growing up in rural Iowa. This wasn't for sport: shooting a pheasant or a deer was a nice way to balance out the larder.

My dad was never forced to take a class like the one I was about to, though once when I was in my midteens, I mentioned that I might like to go with him on an upcoming deer-hunting trip. He immediately told me that in order to do so, I needed hunter's education and left for that trip without me. Neither of us ever brought it up again. However, he did enroll my younger brother, Kosta, in the class when he was seventeen, and when I told Kosta that I was taking the class, he was quick to point out that he had scored a 98 out of a possible 100 on the written final exam.

“Beat that, bro,” he taunted.

As brothers, we are not Cain and Abel, but I have always felt a bit of a rivalry with Kosta. My parents adopted him from Russia just as I—their youngest—was getting ready to graduate from college. And from the start, Kosta took a much greater interest in the outdoors than I ever did. He barely spoke English by the time he shot his first deer with Dad. Soon, he'll be off to the army, an organization my dad credits with making him a man—and one, like hunting, that I never showed much interest in.

So, for three months leading up to my arrival at the Fairfield Sportsmen's Association, I had a voice in the back of my head.
Beat Kosta on the test,
it said.
Your manhood and possibly your inheritance depend on it.

I became fixated on achieving a perfect score. I downloaded the course book to my iPad and spent hours trying to commit it to memory. Never before had I experienced such a keen sense of competition. I was not a great athlete growing up. The only sport I played in high school was tennis. Most of my time was spent practicing for the marching band or singing in choral ensembles. On paper, I was the definition of a geek, and Kosta, a closed-mouth football player who bears a striking resemblance to the actor Daniel Craig (only my brother has bigger muscles), could not have been more opposite.

We have only ever lived under the same roof for a couple of months and yet it is as if we grew up together. He sleeps in my old room. Uses my old furniture. Hangs his dashing clothes in my old closet. Beating him on this test was not only a matter of personal pride, but of reclaiming my territory. It was, in an odd way, like the movie
Can't Buy Me Love,
in which Patrick Dempsey plays an industrious geek who, by fate and a set of circumstances involving wine-stained suede, has an opportunity to run with the cool kids. When he gets there, he doesn't just want to fit in, he wants to be the coolest of them all.

That's very much how I felt about becoming a hunter. I didn't just want to participate, I wanted to excel if for no other reason than to make up for years of being left out. And it all started with beating Kosta's near-perfect score on the safety exam.

S
afety is something hunters talk a lot about and with good reason. Unlike, say, basketball, in which a bad day might involve a sprained ankle or jammed finger, the consequences of a misstep while hunting may include death or dismemberment. So it is understandable why hunters (good ones anyway) pay so much attention to safety, and why, as a person interested in the sport, you are forced to learn proper procedure and precaution before being allowed to participate.

Over more than half of a century, 35 million students from the United States and Canada have completed the courses, and every year, another 750,000 enroll, according to the International Hunter Education Association. An impressive number to be sure, but perhaps even more impressive is that every course is taught by volunteers—70,000 of them to be precise. That's roughly the same number of people who work as volunteer firefighters in the United States. And the courses are free to anyone who wants to learn.

In 1937, Congress passed the Pittman-Robinson Act, which is essentially an excise tax on hunting and outdoor equipment. Every time someone buys an article of hunting apparel, a rifle, a shotgun, or a bow and arrow, they are charged an 11 percent tax (10 percent for all handguns, lower because, one assumes, they may be used for hunting but also nonhunting activities like scaring lost pizza delivery boys). That money is earmarked for conservation and hunter education. It's a remarkably smart system. Hunters pay for future generations of hunters not only to learn how to do it safely, but to have areas where they can hunt.

And it seems to be working. One thousand hunters are injured in accidental shootings every year in the United States, according to the IHEA, and 10 percent of those are fatal—a relatively small percentage, given that, according to the 2001 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Related Recreation, there were upward of forty-five million hunters in the United States alone.

Although a hundred deaths from hunting-related accidents are tragic, consider the relative safety of hunting to another sport popular in America—golf. There are roughly the same number of people who identify themselves as golfers and yet, curiously, the American Orthopedic Society of Sports Medicine reports that 40 percent of amateur golfers report golf-related injuries every year. These injuries range from repeated stress injuries, strains, pulls, and those related to carrying a heavy bag full of clubs to, more dramatically, lightning strikes. Factor in the odd heart attack suffered by an elated older player, and other injuries—perhaps sustained while drunkenly driving a motorized cart—and you get a figure of around twelve million annual golfing injuries.

So, comparatively, hunting seems downright safe.

Today, a hunter's education course is required for obtaining a hunter's license. Doesn't matter the species you're going after, states will not issue a permit to hunt unless you have completed the course. However, the states are forward thinking enough to allow hunters who complete the training in their home state to get a license in another, as long as they can prove that they have completed the course. Since my plan is to hunt in Iowa, I was relieved to know I could complete the course in Ohio and still get credit.

While I liked everything about the system in theory, I became a bit disconcerted when I looked in to the particulars of the program. I've never put a lot of stock in the academic rigidity of state-sponsored teaching—after all, I know how hard I worked in order to get a driver's license, and that was not very hard at all. Answer a few almost insultingly easy questions and drive home with a learner's permit. Watch
Blood on the Asphalt
and
Green Means Go
in a classroom above a pottery shop and walk away legally permitted to operate a two-ton, two-hundred-horsepower killing machine.

I'm not sure why I expected more rigorous instruction when it came to an activity that by its nature involves some sort of weapon, but I did.

I
entered the classroom, which bore a strong resemblance to the cafeteria at the Lutheran church camp I attended for a week during the summer between seventh and eighth grades. It was slightly rectangular—say forty feet by thirty-five feet—with bare painted concrete walls, wide banks of windows that opened by turning a handle and angling them out, and dull, flaccid overhead lighting that usually gives me a headache. Closing my eyes, I could almost smell the prepubescent odor of unwashed and creek-trodding boys and half expected, based on the room, to be asked to join in on a chorus of “Kumbaya.”