And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (16 page)

I never sleep all that well on the road. Uncomfortable beds, strange sounds. I was in Freeport, Maine, the place where I proposed to my wife, the place I held up so highly in countless memories from childhood and college road trips. And yet, I woke up to a drizzling sky and a knot in my neck. I worried that my class was going to be canceled, so I grabbed some coffee and headed over to the home of the L.L.Bean Outdoor Discovery Schools, a small farmhouse set on the other side of I-295 called the Fogg House.

I arrived a half hour early and was met by one of my instructors, Amy. She was a ponytailed blonde in a khaki-colored hat, shooting shirt, field khakis, and thick hiking boots. She was younger than I would have assumed—I'd place her in her mid to late twenties—and a third-grade teacher. She also happened to be the Maine state sporting clays champion. Friendly and broad-smiled, she was the very picture of the L.L.Bean woman—happy, outdoorsy, free of makeup and pretense. We made small talk in the front room of the old farmhouse, and she greeted the nine other students in the class as they rolled in and we busied ourselves sipping supplied coffee, signing release forms, and ordering sandwiches for lunch to be delivered to the shooting range later in the day.

We were introduced to the other two instructors. Bernie was a retired field scientist from New Hampshire and a passionate hunter. He spoke with professorial confidence and ease and, with his cargo pants, shooting shirt, Bean boots and jacket, and khaki hat, he looked every bit the wise woodsman. John was tall and oddly symmetrical. Standing around six foot four in the same outfit as Bernie, he was a skyscraper of a man. Salt-and-pepper hair, a Down East accent, and a broad smile. He's a math teacher. Was Amy's math teacher in fact. And between the three of them, they have twelve years' experience teaching this course.

After an introductory safety meeting, we all pile into our cars and drive to the back of the property where, set in a clearing surrounded by thick stands of pine and balsam, is the shooting range. Five small covered stands in a row looking out onto a mud and grass field a hundred yards deep and speckled with blaze-orange specks of broken clay pigeons. The sky is low. Wispy strands of clouds like an artificial ceiling that seems almost close enough to touch. We meet under a tent on picnic tables, where Amy gives us more safety instructions and admonishes us to never, under any circumstances, shoot at an animal that may wander onto the range. Groundhogs, deer, moose, maybe even a bear. They've all found their way onto the live range at one point or another, and L.L.Bean takes its responsibility to conservation very seriously. We get more instruction from Bernie about the proper operation of the school-supplied shotguns and are quickly broken up into two groups of five. My group—composed of myself, a fellow Ohioan named Mike, a recently civilianized navy pilot named Matt, a fourteen-year-old Boy Scout named Ed, and Ed's dad, Tom—heads to the stand on the far right with John. The rest go to the far left with Amy. Bernie, the senior instructor, is going to roam in between, acting like an art teacher who watches his students mold pots, interrupting only to offer experienced advice.

At first, I'm tense. I've never shot in front of people other than my relatives. I'm also still tired and feeling the effects of the previous week. We start with some easy comers—targets launched from the other side of the field at an upward angle. The clay pigeon comes toward you, reaches an apex, and pauses for a moment before falling more or less straight to the ground. I've shot enough that this should be easy. With shotguns, we're told, it's all about the mount. Once you have the gun tucked into the pocket of your shoulder and your cheek is firmly on the comb of the stock, you don't need to aim. Just focus on the target and track its movement with your front arm. Don't look at the end of the gun, just the target. Focus on the target and your body will move in one smooth motion. You pull the trigger when you see the target the best. That moment is the apex, when the clay disc pauses before succumbing to gravity and falls to the ground.

I'm second in line. Matt, the pilot, goes first. He's just been told that he's left-eye dominant. A lifetime as a righty and now the instructors want him to shoot from the left shoulder. He does what they say and misses the first couple of targets before getting the hang of it and breaking two out of the last three. I step up into the stand, and John covers the things Bernie told us about safety and pointing (not aiming) a shotgun. He loads a shell into the bottom barrel of the twelve-gauge over-under I've been assigned (the only one big enough for my outsized frame) and tells me to call the “pull.” I call it and am trying to remember everything I've been told all at once. My focus is back and forth. Front of the gun, edge of the target. I'm trying to remember to be smooth, and it only makes me jerky. My left eye blinks uncontrollably as I pull the trigger and I miss. Then I miss again. Then I miss again. And again, and again. All the hours in Grandma's back acres in Iowa amount to nothing. I feel incapable of hitting a clay pigeon and am suddenly struck that it is going to be a very long day.

We try a few different targets as the morning goes on. One that launches from behind us, some that come in from the side, even one shot across the ground that they call a rabbit. I am consistently inconsistent and have hit perhaps 15 percent of those clay pigeons I have called for before lunch. The ones that I did hit were usually the second target of a double—when two pigeons are launched simultaneously. You have time to find the first one and track it, but the second one is already midflight by the time you turn to shoot. The second shot is instinctive. You don't have time to do much thinking or preparing. It's turn your head and shoot. Bernie tells me that most times the second shot of a double is better than the first because you don't get to think. Shotgun shooting is about instinct and trust. It's about blocking out all your thoughts and emotions and concentrating on nothing but the edges of that target.

I am thinking too much. I am too worried I will do something wrong, trying too hard to do it perfectly. And that's why I'm missing. It is the story of my life. I worry about things I don't need to, analyze things better left unanalyzed, think when I should act.

After lunch, I try to convince myself not to think, which only makes me think harder. As all the other students in my class are demonstrating marked improvement, hitting more targets, I am stalled. I stumble my way through crossing shots and more doubles. I feel comfortable and yet uneasy. Mac had promised me this was fun, but for some reason, I am not having much. It's no fault of the instructors. They are doing a fantastic job, but with every missed target, with every jerky motion or switched focus, I feel an opportunity missed. I feel myself thinking about being away and feeling guilty. I feel the pressure of providing for a family and the need to fix any problems that might be waiting for me at home. And the more I think about this stuff, the more I try to write that narrative in my head, the less clear it becomes.

Finally, we reach the last hour of the class. As a whole, we've done well. I've gotten a little better, but many of my classmates are ten times the shooters than they were at the beginning of the day. As a reward, Bernie offers us a game of five stand.

Now, assuming you have no idea what five stand is—as I did not—here's a primer. Each shooter takes a position at a stand. They are numbered one through five. Hanging to the right of the stand is a metal sign with three lines on it marked “Single,” “Report,” and “Simo.” Each of these lines has one or two numbers next to it corresponding to the number of the launchers that will be used during that particular round. The launchers are spread around the range, each offering a different kind of shot—comers, goers, crossing left-to-right, crossing right-to-left, and a rabbit. There are three rounds at each stand—the aforementioned “single,” which is the first round and consists of a single target being launched from the specified launcher; “report,” which launches the first target on the shooter's call and the second on the sound of the first shot; and “simo,” which launches two targets from two launchers simultaneously. Each stand has a different combination of launchers for every round. When all the shooters have shot from their first stand, they rotate to the right. The one on the far right rotates to the one on the far left. But in every round, the person who started on the far left is the first shooter, regardless of position. So with five targets at each of the five stands, a full game is completed when every shooter has shot at twenty-five targets.

Believe me, it seemed a lot more complicated at the time. Because there were ten people in the class and only five people could participate in the game—one shooter for each of the five stands—we were broken into two groups. I was in the second, which meant I got to sit in the drizzle for a half hour while the first group played the game. I watched as the first shooter called nervously for the first target and joined the cheering as shooters eventually settled into a groove. Tom, the Boy Scout's father, was the first to hit a target and the first to break both clays of a double. The women in the class shot really well, and all earned a hearty whoop from Amy when they broke clay. Watching them, all the people of the first group, I felt a little weight lift from my shoulders. When they hit something, they smiled. When they didn't, a look of determination came over their faces. I found myself smiling for them, becoming determined on their behalf.

Bernie stood behind me when it was my turn to step into the stand. I was second in line, and my first single was a crossing shot from left-to-right. I got myself comfortable on the gun and just before I called for the target, I tried to remember to relax and not think. When I yelled “pull,” that clarity went right out the window, and I was back to the nanosecond second-guessing, the shifting of focus back and forth, listening to my own thoughts. Bernie yelled from behind me after I missed. “Stop thinking and shoot!,” he said, like a high school wrestling coach. The message was clear: get out of my head and get out of my own way. I took two deep breaths as the shots went down the line, muttered “just focus on the target,” and made a conscious effort to do nothing consciously. I hit my first double of the day and the whole world changed. I stopped trying to manage the shooting. I stopped thinking about the carpet and ceiling. I stopped worrying about taking notes in my head and focused on nothing more than the edge of the target. The gun, which had been heavy and unwieldy all day, became an invisible extension of my body, weightless.

I didn't hit all the rest of the twenty-two targets that made up my round of five stand, but I hit enough to more than triple my morning percentage. The ones I hit felt as natural as a flinch, instinct. The ones I missed I forgot about instantly. No berating. No second-guessing. I missed one—whatever. I'll get the next one, and half the time I did. By the time the game ended, I wanted more. I wanted to keep shooting. I felt like a different person—confident, awake, unfazed for the first time in a long time.

John put his hand on my shoulder as I was walking away from the stands and back toward the tent. “Great shooting today,” he said. He was right. I may not have hit very many targets, but the shooting was fantastic. I asked an older student to take a picture of me with the instructors, and in it I'm smiling in a way I haven't for a long time. For all the guilt or anxiety I feel about fixing things, about being away, about work, I realized right then how important it is to have an escape, to have something to change your focus. It's pretty easy to get wrapped up in the everyday. A guy like me (and so many others I know) has to go in a lot of different directions, to keep a lot of balls in the air. The constant demand for multilensed focus, the strident pressure to handle so many things—it can break you down, make you lose sleep and a piece of yourself. Sometimes you just need to forget about all those things. To focus on something new—to see the edges of the target and concentrate on nothing else. You need to let your body move without thought, to allow your instincts to take over.

Sometimes you need to stop thinking and just shoot.

I
was on a high of sorts as I snapped a few photos on my phone and climbed back into my rental car, having no idea what I was going to do. I had been in Freeport for eighteen hours, the longest I had ever been in that perfect little town without visiting Bean's flagship store, and I was tempted to head straight there. But I was also wet from the persistent drizzle, my feet hurt, and I needed a shower, so I headed back over to my hotel for a fresh set of clothes, a steaming hot rinse, and some Advil for my aching joints. I remembered reading about these classes in the catalogs of my youth and having just completed one, it felt like a circle coming to a close.

The sun was already almost down in the gray New England sky by the time I got back out to my rental car. I always forget how much earlier it gets dark when you're that far east, and the rain had returned, this time in full, big drops that
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ted on my coat as I sprinted across the parking lot. I followed the main road into town and found it awash in the soft glow of store windows. From the outside, Bean seemed to glow like a warm fire and I had a feeling like nostalgia. The last time I had pulled into the parking lot, I was in a spat with the woman who was about to become my fiancée. It had been ten years and four days earlier and a lot had changed. Bean had gone from a single rambling store to a campus of buildings housing individual departments. The town, which had been small and felt like a Main Street, had grown tremendously, if not in size, then in commercial prestige. The old schoolhouse was now an Abercrombie & Fitch. The little shops along the main thoroughfare now bore the emblems of Gucci and Patagonia. It amazed me to think that a hundred years before, the real Leon Leonwood Bean had just wanted to make a better hunting boot and he had spawned a retail destination.