They Shoot Canoes, Don't They?, page 18
“Well, so much for woodcraft,” he said.
Right then I knew that Shaun was a master woodsman and that there was nothing more I could teach him—except possibly the feasibility of pitching one’s tent on high ground. He had said the perfect thing for the situation and, in so doing, had triumphed over it. Even his posture and facial expression were exactly right: body prone, limp, waterlogged; eyes telling mutely about the other side of despair; pale lips moving just enough to deliver the appropriate comment in a matter-of-fact tone: “Well, so much for woodcraft.” Perfect!
Since then I have found countless opportunities in which to use a paraphrase of his comment:
“Well, so much for mountain climbing.”
“Well, so much for scuba diving.”
‘Well, so much for flying lessons.”
“Well, so much for seven-X leaders.”
“Well, so much for sex.”
“Well, so much for shooting rapids.”
“Well, so much for sex while shooting rapids.”
As a service to my readers, I have put together a compendium of situations and appropriate responses. It is my hope that these recommendations will be studied carefully and will enable you to comport yourself properly in the outdoors and in a manner worthy of a sportsman.
SITUATION—You have climbed into your mummy-style sleeping bag, wiggled around to sort the rocks under your Ensolit pad according to size and shape, and finally are about to drift into peaceful sleep. Then you detect what appears at first to be a minor problem—the wool sock on your left foot has become partially pulled off.
A partially pulled-off sock does not pose a threat to one’s continued existence. On the other hand, it is not the sort of thing that can be totally ignored. It gives one the feeling that all is not right with the world, that everything is not in its proper place, performing its designated function in the prescribed and traditional manner. A partially pulled-off sock is an irritation, perhaps not one of the magnitude of, say, a mosquito walking around inside one’s ear or nostril, but an irritation nevertheless.
After twisting and turning in your sleeping bag for some time, telling yourself that the sock is of no consequence, you at last arrive at the conclusion that it will drive you absolutely mad if you allow it to continue its insubordination for another minute. The simplest way in which to settle the matter is to unzip your sleeping bag, sit up, and pull the sock back on with a firm and reprimanding jerk. The problem is that unzipping the bag will invite in a blast of cold air, which will then require turning your metabolism back on to get everything warmed up again, and that in turn will result in your staying awake until you are once more nice and cozy. Another problem is that your previous twisting and turning have relocated the sleeping bag zipper between your shoulder blades at the top and your peroneus longus at the bottom. You therefore decide to try pulling up the sock without unzipping the bag.
Your first thought is that you can simply raise your leg high enough so that you can reach the sock. But no, your leg wedges against the sides of the bag, keeping the sock just a few inches out of reach of your clawing fingers. This effort has caused you to become turned at right angles to your Ensolite pad, but no matter; the contest with the sock has now engaged your honor. Since there is more room in the top of the bag, you now reason that by tilting your head forward onto your chest, you should be able to double over enough to get a grip on the sock. As you execute this maneuver, the nylon bag squeaks from the strain and squeezes your shoulders in against your ears. You are now locked into a semi-prenatal position inside the bag, presenting a spectacle that an outside observer could not help but compare to a defective German sausage in need of recall. But at last you have the offending wool in hand and pull it back on your foot with a pained but satisfying grunt. All that remains to be done now is to extract yourself from your compressed posture. Alas, the gentle slope you selected for a bedsite begins to take an active and aggressive role in compounding your plight. You topple over onto your side. With herculean effort and gasped curses that would provoke envy in a Marine drill sergeant, you manage to roll onto your knees. This is immediately determined to be a mistake, since it leads to a series of flopping somersaults down the incline, which becomes increasingly steeper. You come to rest jammed under a fallen tree fifty feet or so away from your starting point.
In the morning your companions get up, stare with some puzzlement at your vacated Ensolite pad, shrug, and begin preparing breakfast. Eventually you are discovered under the tree and extricated. At this moment you can either suffer ridicule or you can make the appropriate comment and earn your companions’ everlasting respect and esteem. (“Everlasting” nowadays means approximately two weeks.)
What, then, is the proper response in this situation? Whining and inane jabber about a partially pulled-off sock simply won’t cut it, particularly if you insist upon hobbling about in the posture of a chimpanzee with lumbago. Here’s what you do: Smile, yawn, stretch luxuriously, and, as soon as your vertebrae cease their popping and pinging, say with a slightly lascivious chuckle, “Boy, I didn’t think they made dreams like that anymore!”
SITUATION—The bush pilot returns to pick up you and your companion after a week of fishing on a wilderness lake. “Now you fellas are about to enjoy some real sporty flying,” he says. “Did you notice how on my takeoff from here last week I had to flip this old crate over on her side when I went between those two tall pine trees and then how I stood her right up on her tail to get over that ridge?” He now doubles over with laughter and pounds his knee as you and your partner exchange glances. “Well,” the pilot continues, “with the two of you and your canoe and all your gear on board, the takeoff is gonna be a little tricky this time. What I was wonderin’ is if maybe I could get each of you fellas to straddle a pontoon, and if we come up a little short on the ridge there, maybe you could just sort of walk us right on over the top. How does that strike you?”
Naturally, it will be difficult for you and your partner to contain your joy at the prospect of being allowed in this way to assist in the takeoff. Since it is considered bad form to jump up and down and clap your hands in glee, you must restrict yourself to a few lip tremors and an eye twitch or two.
The important thing to keep in mind in selecting just the right response in this situation is that the pilot is probably joshing you. Therefore, you just shrug and say, “Which pontoon do you want me on?” If he isn’t joshing, remember to walk really fast as you go over the ridge.
SITUATION—Back when I was about fifteen, my stepfather, Hank, and I drove out to the neighboring county to fish a stream that meandered through a series of dilapidated farms, none of which showed any visible means of support. After the day’s fishing, we returned to our car to find that someone had stolen our battery. My stepfather was a gentle man of great kindness and understanding, and he said that the person who had taken our battery probably did so only because he was too poor to buy one. Therefore, Hank said, he would not place a curse on the thief that would strike him instantly dead but merely one that would make all his skin fall off. Suddenly. All at once. While he was square dancing Saturday night. And just as he was winking at the prettiest girl at the dance. As we trudged along the dusty road, Hank kept adding to and improving upon the curse until it seemed to me that the kinder thing would be to have the thief struck instantly dead.
Presently a car came by headed in the direction of town, and we waved it down. The driver was an elderly lady with a little flowered hat on her head. She asked if we would like a ride, and we said yes, but there seemed to be a problem. The lady had two large dogs in the car with her, and they were carrying on as if we were the first decent meal they had seen in months. Hank suggested that maybe he and I could just stand on the running boards, one of us on each side, and that way, “heh, heh,” we wouldn’t disturb her dogs. The lady said that would be just fine. “Hold on good and tight,” she warned.
We immediately discovered that she had not offered this bit of advice frivolously. She took off so fast our fishing lines came loose and cracked like whips in the air behind us. We were a quarter-mile down the road before our hats hit the ground back at the starting point, not that either Hank or I were concerned with such minor details at the moment.
The lady seemed to think she needed to explain the sudden start. She rolled down her window and shouted out, “Bad clutch!”
Hank arched what he called his “vitals” back from the snapping jaws of a dog. “All right!” he yelled. “Perfectly all right!”
As the lady rolled the window back up, Hank and I dug our fingernails deeper into the rain gutters on the roof of the car and clutched our fishing rods with our armpits. By then we were traveling sufficiently fast that grasshoppers were splattering on our clothes. And still the car seemed to pick up speed. Again the driver rolled down her window and the dogs competed with each other to see which would be first to get a bite of Hank’s belly.
“Bad gas pedal!” she shouted out, by way of explaining the speed with which we were hurtling down the road.
“All right! All right!” Hank cried.
She rolled the window back up.
A grasshopper exploded on the left lens of my spectacles. The air was being sucked from my lungs. My fingers were paralyzed, and I wasn’t sure how much longer I could hang on. Then the situation took a sharp turn for the worse. A deputy sheriff’s car sped by in the opposite direction. Upon seeing us about to break the world’s record for fastest ride on running boards, the deputy whipped a bootlegger’s turn in the road and came roaring up behind us with red light flashing and siren going. Hank released one hand and pounded on the glass to get the little old lady’s attention. When she looked at him, he pointed back at the deputy sheriff. She smiled and nodded and pushed the faulty accelerator pedal to the floor. The deputy stayed right on our rear bumper. Every so often he would try to pass, but the old lady would cut over in front of him and force him to drop back. Then the driver rolled down her window again and grinned up at Hank. “What’d you think of that? Pretty fancy bit of driving for an old lady, huh?”
“All right! All right!” Hank said, as one of the dogs clipped a button off the front of his pants.
“Wait till you see the way I handle my rod!” she yelled, cackling wildly as she rolled the window up.
“What’d she say?” I yelled at Hank.
“She said, ‘Wait till you see the way I handle my rod!’” Hank screamed back at me over the roof of the car.
“That’s what I thought she said. What do you make of it?”
“I think she’s going to shoot it out with the bleeping deputy,” Hank screeched.
“I thought that’s what you’d make of it,” I yelled back. “She must be some kind of criminal!”
“Yeah, the crazy kind!”
At that instant the old lady whipped the car over to the edge of the road and braked to a stop in a cloud of dust. Hank and I dropped from the running boards, coughing and gasping, and wiped our eyes with our deformed fingers. The deputy slid to a stop on the opposite side of the road, and both he and the old lady jumped out of their cars and went into gunfighter crouches, the deputy’s hand hovering over the butt of his revolver.
“Oh my gosh!” Hank moaned.
Then the dogs went for the deputy. Both of them leaped simultaneously for what I thought would be the jugular, but he caught them both in his arms and staggered backwards as they licked his face and wagged their tails.
“Heeeee heeeee!” the deputy laughed.
“Heeeee heeeee!” echoed the old lady. Then she pointed at the deputy and said, “That there’s my son, Rod! Ain’t he somethin’? I can still handle the big bugger, though!”
“Caught you again, Ma!” the deputy squealed.
“Only ’cause I had to be careful these fellas didn’t fall off the running boards, that’s the only reason!” Ma shouted back.
“Somebody stole my battery,” Hank said to the deputy.
“You don’t say,” the deputy said. “Well, I got to be going. Lots of crime in these here parts. Y’all be careful now, ya hear?” And he took off in pursuit of crime.
The old lady ordered the dogs back into the car, and they obeyed instantly, scarcely bothering to take a snap or two at Hank.
“Well, hop back on the running boards and hold on good and tight,” she said to us, “and I’ll haul you fellas on into town.”
“Thanks anyway,” Hank said, “but we can walk from here. Can’t be much more than five miles to the nearest town.”
“Fifteen,” the old lady said.
“Shucks, is that all?” Hank said. “Why that’s even better than I figured. Thanks again for the lift.”
That’s the sort of comment that not only saves the outdoorsman embarrassment but enables him to survive.
Journal of An Expedition
Rummaging through my files some time ago, I happened across the journal I kept as leader of the expedition to Tuttle Lake during the winter of ’75. I was immediately struck by the similarity the record of that momentous and heroic struggle bore to the journals of earlier explorers of the North American continent, and, lest it be lost to posterity, I immediately began editing the material for publication.
The other members of the expeditionary force consisted of my next-door neighbor, Al Finley, and my lifelong friend, Retch Sweeney. Neither man was particularly enthusiastic when I first broached the idea of a mid-winter excursion to Tuttle Lake.
“You must be crazy!” Finley said. “Why would we want to do a stupid thing like that?”
“Well, certainly not for fame or fortune,” I said. “We’d do it for the simple reason that Tuttle Lake is there.”
“Hunh?” Retch said. “Ain’t it there in the summer?”
“Of course it’s there in the summer,” I told him irritably. “What I mean is that it would be challenge for the sake of challenge.”
Finley pointed out that there were two feet of snow on the ground.
“We’ll use snowshoes,” I told him. “We’ll start early Saturday morning, snowshoe into Tuttle Lake, spend the night in my mountain tent, and snowshoe back out Sunday. It’ll be a blast.”
“Gee, I don’t know,” Finley said. “I’ve never been on snowshoes before. I better not go.”
“That’s a wise decision, Finley,” Retch said. “A man your age shouldn’t take any more chances than he has to.”
“What kind of snowshoes should I buy?” Finley said.
Thus it was that the three of us found ourselves at trail’s head, preparing for the assault on Tuttle Lake. The journal of the expedition begins at that point.
History of the Tuttle Lake Expedition Under the Command of Patrick F. McManus
JANUARY 18, 1975—9:22 A.M. The weather being fair and pleasant, the men are in high spirits as they unload our provisions and baggage from the wagon for the trek into the mountains. The drivers of the wagon, a Mrs. Finley and a Mrs. Sweeney, offered to wager two of the men that they would “freeze off” various parts of their anatomy. I warned the men against gambling, particularly with wagon drivers, who are a singularly rough and untrustworthy lot. The throttle-skinners hurled a few parting jibes in our direction and drove away, leaving behind a billowing cloud of snow. This cloud apparently concealed from their view the man Retch Sweeney, who raced down the road after the departing wagon, shouting “Stop, Ethel, stop! I left the fifth of Old Thumbsucker under the front seat!” It was truly a heartrending spectacle.
9:45 A.M. I have assumed command of the expeditionary force. The men informed me that this is a false assumption, but I will not tolerate insubordination, particularly at such an early stage in the journey. I threatened both of them with suspension of rations from my hip flask. They immediately acquiesced to the old military principle that he who has remembered his hip flask gets to command.
11:00 A.M. The expedition has suffered an unexpected delay. I had directed two of the men to take turns carrying the Snappy-Up mountain tent, but it made them top-heavy and kept toppling them into the snow. We have now solved the difficulty by obtaining an old toboggan from a friendly native, who seemed delighted over the handful of trifles he requested for it. On future expeditions I must remember to bring more of those little green papers engraved with the portrait of President Jackson, for the natives seem fond of them.
All of our provisions and baggage are lashed to the toboggan, and I have directed the men to take turns pulling it. I myself remain burdened with the heavy weight of command. Rations from the hip flask cheered the men much and, for the time being, have defused their impulse to mutiny.
12:05 P.M. We have been on the trail for an hour. Our slow progress is a cause of some concern, since by now I had expected to be out of sight of our staging area. Part of the delay is due to Mr. Finley, who is voicing a complaint common to those who travel for the first time on snowshoes. He says he is experiencing shooting pains at the points where his legs hook on to the rest of him. To use his phrase, he feels like “the wishbone of a turkey on the day after Thanksgiving.” I counseled him to keep tramping along and that eventually the pains would fade away. For the sake of his morale, I did not elaborate on my use of the term “eventually,” by which I meant “in approximately three weeks.”
1:10 P.M. We have stopped for lunch. Tempers are growing short. After kindling the propane camp stove, I had to settle a dispute between the men about who got to roast a wiener first. I narrowly was able to avert a brawl when Mr. Sweeney bumped a tree and dumped snow from a branch into Mr. Finley’s Cup-a-Soup. Mr. Sweeney claims the mishap was unintentional, but his manner of bursting out in loud giggles gives me some cause for doubt. I have had to quick-draw the hip flask several times in order to preserve order.
I sent one of the men ahead to scout for a sign to Tuttle Lake. He returned shortly to the main party, very much excited, and reported a large number of fresh tracks. I went out with him to examine the tracks and to determine whether they were those of hostiles. Upon close study of the imprint of treads in the tracks, I concluded that a band of Sno-Putts had passed through earlier in the day. Upon our return to camp, the band of Sno-Putts appeared in the distance, and, sighting our party, came near and gunned their engines at us. After the exchange of a few friendly taunts, they went on their way.
