And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (17 page)

I parked and ran into the closest door I could find, the one leading to the brand-new Hunting and Fishing wing of the old flagship building. I had forgotten that there are no locks on the doors at Bean. The store is open 24/7/365, so there is no need. I don't want to get weepy or overly sentimental, but it felt oddly like a homecoming to return to this place. The last time I had been there, I proposed to my wife. Our life had not even begun yet. There was no Jack, no Dylan, no Molly. There was no credit card and college debt, no years of struggling just to get by and wondering if I would have enough money for gas or if I would have to call in poor to work. I had not yet left Virginia and we had not even considered a move to Cincinnati. So much had changed. So much had gone right and so much had gone wrong. So much had simply gone. It's funny that a store can generate such a feeling of milestone, such a sense of accomplishment and regret, pride and embarrassment. Of course it had nothing to do with the store itself. That was just a building. A rapidly expanding building. But that particular store had represented the dreams I had in my youth, the ideas I had had for my future, visions that did not, could not, and would not come to fruition.

I wandered aimlessly for nearly two hours before I realized I was hungry. Since I had left Cincinnati the previous afternoon, I had only had a few bites of bad airport Chinese food, a few cups of coffee, and the sandwich provided by the class. I wanted something good. I wanted lobster and found it a block away at a place that from the outside looked promising, but inside felt like an old Kentucky Fried Chicken. But they served fresh Maine lobster, local beer, and a chowder that had won a regional competition that very afternoon.

Tucking into my meal, which was brought to my table on a cheap plastic tray and in paper-lined baskets, I fell into listening in on the conversations taking place around me. There was a family I had seen earlier in the boot section. Mom, Dad, and three teenaged kids. It sounded like they were from Boston and were up doing some shopping for clothes. The entire booth next to them was filled with familiar brown Bean bags and the kids were talking about Adderall use among the members of the lacrosse team.

“I don't get what the big deal is,” said one of the boys.

“The big deal is that they are prescription drugs and should not be taken without a prescription,” said mom.

“I only do it when I have to study,” the boy said.

“Or when you want to party,” said the girl, who was probably the middle child.

“No,” he said.

“Honey?” said the mom. “Are you gonna chime in here?”

“Don't take drugs,” said the dad, who seemed much more interested and concerned with the last claw of his twin lobsters than his child's dalliances with prescription drugs. The whole conversation had been so casual, it terrified me. I remember not feeling that comfortable admitting to my parents that I was signing up for marching band, let alone telling them that I had scored some absconded drugs and was taking them to help me study. I had a terrified vision of my future. Would this be our family someday?

I shook my head and turned my attention to a couple from Ohio sitting at the table on the other side of me. They were young, perhaps in their midtwenties, and had gotten married the day before. They were spending their honeymoon in Maine, a place she had never been and he had always loved. They had that dewy gleam of potential about them, and that too felt familiar. I felt like I was having a Scrooge moment, as if I had just been visited by the ghosts of family future and past. For so long, I had assumed my love for Maine and Bean were unique. I had assumed our story of getting engaged there was special. But it could not be. The company would have folded long ago if it had been relying on my sales. I took a certain comfort in the realization though and sort of enjoyed the moment of “Craig Heimbuch, this is your life.”

So much to ruminate upon, so much fodder for cogitation, I drank two beers, finished my lobster, and stopped just short of licking the Styrofoam bowl my chowder had been delivered in. It was getting late, around ten, but I wasn't ready to go back to my cheap hotel room and watch
CSI
reruns, so I went back to the store and wandered around, picking up and putting down a million things I wanted to buy. I called Rebecca and over the phone we picked out a fleece jacket for her to replace the one I had bought the night we got engaged. I paid for it and walked around the store until my feet were tired, until after one in the morning, when I finally gave up and went back to my hotel to fall perfectly, comfortably to sleep.

T
he next morning, I had naively hoped to go for a long hike. Just before leaving the store, I had bought a guide book, a flashlight, a new pair of socks, and a couple of Power Bars. I woke and picked a couple of parks up the coast to check out, but when I went outside, the rain was heavier than it had been the previous day. Thick, deep, soaking rain, and the sky hung low, mingling with the tops of the everywhere pine trees. It was a Sunday and I had nothing to do. I wasn't flying out until Monday evening and I weighed my options. I thought about driving four hours up the coast to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park and considered the idea of doing nothing but walking around the store again. It was early. I was up and showered, dressed, and in the car by seven, which gave me an entire day of possibility. I stopped for a breakfast sandwich at a little bistro across the street from Bean and decided that even though the weather was cold and wet, I didn't want to be inside. I wanted to drive, just drive, and that's what I did.

I had been dreaming for ten years about having a day with nothing to do in Maine. Down East, on the coast. No schedule, no expectations. All alone with a rental car, limited only by my own willingness.

I drove for an hour and a half before a detour gave me pause to stop. I had driven through Rockland before. A decade ago. Five years before that too. But I can't remember ever having stopped. Hunger, boredom, a general need to get out and move around must have come over me, and I decided to stop and wander the rain-drenched streets of Rockland, Maine.

I looked at the menus hanging in the windows of all the little mom-and-pop shops, the sandwich joints, the corner bars that interrupt the street-side flow of art galleries and curio shops. Rockland is for the tourists, sure. It's right on US 1 between Portland, where people fly into or where the train from Boston arrives, and Acadia National Park—one of the busiest and most-visited in the country. During the summer, this stretch of road is one long tangled mass of cars with out-of-state plates. Same thing later in the fall when the leaves turn and the “peepers” come out like cockroaches to take pictures, buy maple syrup, and wear their new wool sweaters. But on this rainy day in early October, the leaves are still mostly green and the summer crowds have all but disappeared. So Rockland may be built to accommodate tourists, but the shops, the galleries, and the little restaurants are all still open. They are all still there. A local economy built on people from other places that has retained a semblance of soul, community.

I'm not normally one to scrutinize menus for very long. I'm not all that particular, to be honest. But I looked because I wanted something a little different at a place that accepted American Express. I was nearing the end of the central downtown block when I caught a sign out of the corner of my eye. A small, cottagelike building had a giant wraparound sign that read something like
TRY THE CLUB SANDWICH THAT BEAT BOBBY FLAY.

The owners of The Brass Compass Cafe are obviously very proud of the fact that the celebrity chef and host of, among other shows,
Throwdown
came to town one unsuspecting summer day to challenge them to a lobster club sandwich challenge. Even more proud that they won. So proud that the story of the affair is printed in bold type on the cover of their menu. Ordinarily this sort of opportunity to dine two steps from fame wouldn't mean much to me, but there was something about this place that drew me in. Plus, the menu posted on the window had the AmEx blue shield on the bottom. And the idea of eating a club sandwich piled high with Maine lobster meat while meandering up the coast of that state? Forget about it. I had to try it.

I ordered coffee to warm my chattering bones and told the server I'd have the special—the lobster club and fries. The place was small and cozy with a kitchen that opened into the dining room. It was still Sunday morning, so there were some leftover postchurch diners about and more than a couple of tables filled with the burly, thick-fingered kind of guys who looked like they made their living in the harbor, about two hundred yards to my rear as I sat with my back to the window, eagerly anticipating what was sure to be a unique dining experience.

I watched the cook—
chef
isn't the right word for a guy wearing a T-shirt that read something like
IT'S NOT THAT YOU'RE BORING, IT'S JUST THAT I'M AWESOME
—grab whole handfuls of precooked bacon and pile them on the homemade wheat bread that was still warm from the oven. A woman used what looked like a soup ladle to pile thick chunks of mayo-drenched lobster on top of that. When the server brought my plate out and set it down on the worn wood table, it made the kind of thump you'd expect to hear as a peg-legged sea captain paces the deck of a ship. It wasn't just that the plate was heavy, but the food—oh God, the food—was rich and thick and filling.

I half considered splitting the sandwich—taking the lobster and bread layer off the bottom bacon, tomato, and lettuce layer—but I decided I must soldier on to gain full appreciation of the pseudofamous sandwich. One messy, ill-executed bite—who hasn't dreamed of lobster raining down onto their plate like delicious manna?—and I understood immediately why this sandwich beat down Bobby Flay. In the story printed on the menu, Flay's recipe is described with derision as having included “exotic spices like cumin” in order to add a flavorful bump. And I thought, why? Why ruin such a perfect thing? The sweet, creamy lobster, the smoky and salty bacon, the savory burst of tomatoes impossibly fresh for the time of year. It was better than almost anything I had ever eaten. That the bread was homemade and delicious, that the portion was beanstalk giant, that the fries were fresh cut and steaming hot—bonuses all. This sandwich could have been served on a month-old hot dog bun with some freezer-burned Ore-Idas and still be wet-dream-inducing good.

After I was finished, I stared for a bit, absorbing the warmth of the small café, the rain clacking on the window behind me, appreciating the moment. I don't get away all that often. Not like this. I travel for work. I travel with my family. But rarely do I fully immerse myself in a sense of escape. I'm usually too hardwired for productivity, too worried about what needs to be done. But that moment, the rain, the coffee, the sated feeling and sense that I really had nothing to do, no better place to be, it was as if I were sitting in a daydream, a completely constructed reality I could never really have imagined.

I went to pay the bill only to find out The Brass Compass does not, in fact, take American Express.
Whatever,
I thought. I handed the woman some of the small stash of cash I carry when traveling, and when she asked me if everything was okay, I told her it was excellent. I say this all the time. I've said it at the cash register at Dunkin' Donuts and, really, has an experience there ever been excellent? But I meant it this time. I really did. I spent the rest of the day driving and wandering. Wandering and driving. Stopping when the notion to stop came to me. Moving on when I felt like moving on.

I felt the most satisfying sense of exploration, the kind of thing you can't do during your daily commute, between getting dinner on the table, the dishes done, and the kids in bed. I needed it. I think most of us do. But we have to be willing to wander, if only for a day. We have to be willing to follow a whim, not a schedule or a to-do list. It makes us better in the long run, better in our daily lives. That sandwich was the best meal I've had in a long time. Not just the food, the meal. It was the kind of thing that can only happen to an open-minded traveler—an experience better than the sum of its succulent parts.

I got as far north as Camden, maybe a little farther on, where I stopped and walked along a pebbly beach, took some pictures, and looked out across the water. The channel islands, the low sky, the lobster boats and sailboats moored in the rolling tide. It was a postcard. So enthralled was I by the whole scene, I hardly noticed that I was soaked and my skin was covered in goose pimples. Or maybe I did, but I just didn't care. I wanted to soak in every moment, every drop, and just before I turned around for my return trip to Freeport, I realized that I wished my family were there with me. I wish my kids were kicking sand on my boots and my wife was there wanting more coffee. I wished they had been there for that sandwich, that drive, the whole experience. But it needed to be this way. I needed to be alone in order to realize how much I appreciated them.

A lot had happened in the decade since the last time I had been in Maine and I had hardly taken the time to notice. That's the way it is with life sometimes. You get so focused on the stuff you need, the things you don't have, the stress, the ambition, the obligation, that you forget to look around. You forget to appreciate what you've got. I know that sounds schlocky and trite, but turning back onto US 1 South, I knew it was true.

PART IV

FALL

13

Preparation

I
returned from Maine more excited than ever to get hunting. In a little less than four weeks, I would set to the field with my relatives in pursuit of my first game, and I still had some things to take care of, namely gearing up. I suppose I have always been a bit of a gear junkie. I love specialized items designed for specific purposes. For many, and here I mean mostly real adventurers and enthusiasts, gear is a means to an end, the accoutrements of a lifestyle. But for me, the gear has always been central to any endeavor.

My mom likes to tell people that when I was a little boy, I loved to play baseball. I loved spending hours and hours in the backyard hitting my dad's pitches or pretending to hit pitches when there was no one around. But I could not simply grab a glove or bat and head out into the street. Even at a young age, I understood the importance of proper attire and would only spend hours playing baseball if I were wearing my baseball shoes, batting glove, uniform, and hat. Not just any hat. It had to be a real baseball hat, which in my youngest days was a Milwaukee Brewers cap Dad had given me for a birthday or some other like occasion. If I were to play make-believe soldiers with my friends, I would only do so if wearing my dad's old army canteen and ammunition belt. I suppose that I would have required full padding and helmet for a toss of the football. It wasn't that I was soft or even particularly attuned to my appearance so much as my imagination would not allow me to undertake anything without the requisite gear.

I see this in my sons, Dylan especially. When he was three, he watched my favorite movie,
The Sandlot,
with Jack and me, and it has changed him ever since. The sweet story of a boy who moves to a new town and tries to fit in with a misfit baseball team seems simple enough. But the movie's hero, Benny “the Jet” Rodriguez, does amazingly athletic things while wearing jeans and Chuck Taylor sneakers, so Dylan requires the same outfit for his everyday life. Every night before bed, he asks me to lay his jeans out on his dresser. At four years old, he has more than a dozen pair of the simple canvas sneakers. It is his uniform and my wife doesn't quite understand it. She thinks he's just too picky. She doesn't understand, as I do from my own youthful experiences, that his devotion to those articles of clothing has much less to do with a sense of personal style than it does a need for fulfillment and preparation. What would happen if he were playing ball with friends and accidentally knocks one over the neighbor's fence? How would he be able to retrieve the ball and evade certain death at the furry paws of a legendarily vicious dog if he weren't wearing jeans and a pair of Chucks? Well, he certainly doesn't want to find out and neither did I. I mean, how would I ever become the first eight-year-old to play for the Brewers if I weren't wearing my official cap when the team's scout peered over our fence to see me hit home runs off my dad? I shudder at the thought.

When I was nine or ten, at about the same time I was beginning to fully absorb the L.L.Bean catalog as my reading material of choice, I came across an article in
Sports Illustrated for Kids
about Phil Knight and Tinker Hatfield, the founder and head designer of Nike and its products. I was simply enthralled. I devoured the article, reading it three times before heading into the basement for some typing paper and colored pencils. Every day for more than four years I sat down and designed a pair of shoes. I'd start with a profile outline and then filled in details, worked through color schemes, and pushed the envelope of design. After about two months of doing this, I swiped a brown mailing envelope from my dad's desk, scribbled a note, and shipped off a package of designs addressed to Hatfield. A few weeks later, I got a note from someone in Nike's public relations department thanking me for my submissions and politely telling me that the company does not accept unsolicited designs. But the person thanked me in that “keep up the good work, slugger” kind of way and included a cheap, neon pink Nike painter's cap for my trouble.

To a lot of kids, this would have spelled the end, the logical outcome of a small social experiment; to me the message was quite different. What I got from all of it was that I could continue to draw shoes and mail them off and, in return for my efforts, I would get free stuff. So I doubled my efforts. I began sending packages to Nike on a monthly basis and expanded my scope to other shoes companies: Reebok, Adidas, New Balance, Converse, even the practical business casual shoemaker Rockport. All told, I probably submitted a hundred packages of hand-drawn shoes over the course of late elementary school and junior high. I would find an advertisement in the Sunday newspapers and trace each company's trademarked logo until I could reproduce it with something resembling accuracy, then set about designing a pair of shoes for that company. Hundreds and hundreds of pairs of shoes. I then expanded further to include tennis rackets, sunglasses, casual sportswear. And the free hats, stickers, and T-shirts began piling up.

It wasn't until I fully discovered girls that my fetishistic devotion to footwear finally abated. But my instinct for gear never really did. And before I had told anyone about my desire to learn how to hunt, I snuck hours late at night to troll the websites of popular hunting outlets like L.L.Bean's, Cabela's, Gander Mountain, and Bass Pro Shops. I made exhaustive comparisons of style, fabric, and cut of hunting boots, coats, shirts, and specialized upland pants that feature reinforced nylon patches on the legs to repel briars, thorns, and other potentially sticky flora while traipsing through fields in pursuit of game. I would have little debates with myself on the relative merits of waxed cotton outerwear versus Gore-Tex-coated nylon. I was that twelve-year-old kid again obsessing over Air Jordans. After months, I had narrowed my choices down to coats, shirts, shoes, socks, gloves, boots, and pants from Bean or Cabela's, but after my trip to Maine, it would have felt somehow dishonest or unfaithful not to order from Bean. So, one day in mid-October, I picked up the phone on my desk and called the number Mac McKeever had given me for placing orders through the company's Pro Hunting program. Apparently, as a writer with an interest in learning how to hunt, I was given the same privilege as Bean's professional guides. I was walked through the sizing and ordering process and even got a significant discount on my order. The moment I hung up the phone, I began waiting—waiting for the moment when that big box would arrive and I could finally try on the new stuff, the adult equivalent of that old Brewers cap.

The waiting seemed to take forever, so I busied myself in other ways. I sent an e-mail to Steven Rinella telling him about my upcoming trip and this book. He replied almost as soon as I hit send, expressing how happy he was that I had decided to give hunting a try.

“I'm a little nervous,” I wrote. “Got any advice?”

“Just have fun,” he wrote. We exchanged a dozen or so messages in an hour—I'm still not sure why I didn't just call him—and by the end, he had invited me to join him in California in January for a wild boar hunt on a ranch belonging to a friend of his.

“That seems pretty hard-core,” I wrote.

“Man, it's fun as shit,” he responded.

I called Mark and confirmed plans and called my dad to make sure he was going to be able to make it. It turned out, he couldn't. Something had come up. I was crestfallen and more than slightly heartbroken. I had planned out this whole trip in my mind. I imagined making up for lost time with my dad, finally joining him in doing something that he had always loved to do. I felt let down. Cast aside. It took me days to realize that proving to Dad that I could be a hunter may have been the initial impulse behind the trip, but it had morphed into something else entirely. I may have wanted to feel accepted as a man by the man I'd always held as the standard before, but after nearly a year of pouring all my free time into this project, I realized that me going hunting for the first time had little to do with him and everything to do with me doing something adventurous, something that scared me, something that I never would have done before.

I won't say that made everything better. It didn't. Of course I wanted him to be there. But Dad backing out at the last minute to deal with the priorities in his life was exactly the kind of thing a confident man would do. So I needed to be confident and not allow all this effort to rest on his calendar availability. I needed to do this for me and only for me. But I didn't want to do it alone.

My friend John jumped at the opportunity. After discussing the Iowa trip with him in the spring, I hadn't done much to firm up plans and had almost forgotten about it. But I called him after I talked to Dad and he made the arrangements to get a couple days off work to join me. He was genuinely excited and I was looking forward to having him along for the long drive and for my first time out in the field.

T
he Bean box arrived while I was at work, and Rebecca and Jack moved it into our bedroom so that it was there when I walked in around dinnertime. It took everything I had not to run past my waiting wife and children and straight to my new gear, but I managed to hold off on ripping into my package until after the kids were in bed. Turns out, I had already grown up more than what I would have imagined.

After the dishes were done and the kids were asleep, I went straight to the bedroom to take stock of my haul. It was all there, neatly packaged in plastic bags and I laid it out on the bed like a sailor packing his steam trunk for a long deployment. There was: a waxed cotton field coat with orange pads on the shoulders, an orange vest with slash pockets on the breast that fed to a rear game bag, a pair of upland pants with reinforced patches, an orange Gore-Tex ball cap, a gun-cleaning kit, a Boker Upland bird knife, a pair of Bean's signature Maine Hunting Shoes, two pairs of socks, a pair of upland gloves that reminded me a lot of baseball batting gloves, a manly shirt with breast pockets and loops on the shoulders, and a waxed cotton floppy hat for use après-hunt. I stared at all of it for long moments, discarding the sea of plastic bags that had piled on the floor, then stripped off my work clothes and began trying them on in earnest—different combinations of shirt and coat, shirt and vest, coat and vest, both hats. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and even snapped a few self-portraits with my iPhone. I must have been at it an hour before Rebecca called in from the living room asking if I was still alive. The truth was that I was more alive in that moment than I had been in weeks. And it wasn't just about getting new stuff; it was about preparing and feeling ready. With each new combination of gear, I practiced the gun mount and movement I had learned in Maine, using a personalized Louisville Slugger my friend Rob had given me as a groomsman gift in place of the Winchester Supreme over-under Dad had given me months before.

After perhaps ninety minutes of pantomime and playing dress-up, I folded everything neatly and tucked it back into the shipping box, emerging from the bedroom with what must have been a shit-eating grin on my face and a sense that I was ready.

The next day, I stopped at the local used bookstore and bought back issues of
Field & Stream
magazine to supplement my reading on the topic of pheasant hunting and butchering and patiently waited for the days to tick off the calendar and my moment to finally arrive.

Two nights before I was to leave, Rebecca, the kids, and I went out to dinner at Bob Evans. The kids, Jack especially, were excited to hear about my plans and I told them what I was going to do in as much detail as I felt comfortable. I still wasn't a gun guy or a hunter and I had tried to be careful not to glorify firearms too much in the presence of my kids for fear of creating an unhealthy or potentially dangerous curiosity. But Rebecca asked Jack and me to stop at the grocery store on our way home from dinner and I couldn't help but feel excited for what was to come.

“Daddy?” Jack said from the backseat. “You're going to Iowa, right?”

“Yes sir, I am,” I said.

“And you're going hunting?”

“You better believe it.”

“Are you going to bring home a bear?” he asked, and I could sense a bit of wonderment in his tone. I thought maybe Jack was looking forward to having a stuffed bear, like the one in my parents' basement, too.

“No, buddy, I'm not hunting a bear. I'm going after a pheasant.”

“A pheasant? Is that like a deer?” he asked and I could tell he had a vision of me stalking large game with a spear.

“No, buddy, a pheasant is a bird.”

“Do you eat it?”

“Yeah, buddy, you eat it. It's like a chicken.”

Here there was a long pause as he tried to work out the implications of what had just been said.

“Dad,” he said—and his tone had gone from “you're my hero” to “you're an idiot”—“you're going hunting for a
chicken
?”

I felt my shoulders sag and the air bleed slowly from my lungs. It sounded so ridiculous when he said it, all this anticipation, all this new stuff and hard work for a bird very similar to one we could pick up at the grocery store.

“Well, it's not just me,” I said by way of justification. “Uncle Mark and Tommy will be there.”

“Dad,” he said, putting his little foot down, “it's going to take three of you to hunt a chicken?”

He was right. I was being ridiculous.

“It's called a pheasant, Jack, and some of them have very sharp claws.”

“Whatever you say,” he said. “I think we should get some ice cream sandwiches at the store.”

Okay, so maybe my big manly adventure was neither big nor manly and it might not even be all that adventurous, but I tried not to let Jack's dimmed hopes of having the kind of father who wrestles bears to submission dash my hopes for my big trip.

The next night, I stopped by John's place to pick up my gun (where I had been storing it in his locked gun safe) and make final arrangements. He met me at the door with some bad news.