And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (4 page)

4

My Sporting Life

I
know about fishing. I've been a fisherman for most of my life. Growing up in north-central Wisconsin, I remember cringing as my dad removed coarse black leeches from a Styrofoam container and put them on my hook. In the small aluminum boat with the Evinrude outboard, there was not enough room to slink away from the small beasts and I might not have ever been afraid of them had my dad not pulled one off his finger, exposing a small stream of blood.

“What happened?” I asked.

“They're bloodsuckers,” he told me. He didn't need to say much more. A certain feeling of disdain for the smallmouth bass that live in tiny Wisconsin lakes grew in me, simply because the fish will eat the leeches. How could I want anything that would eat a bloodsucker? To this day, I have never used a leech, though I have caught a lot of fish. There were semiannual trips to western Ontario for pike and walleye and, after we had moved from Wisconsin to California back to Wisconsin and on to Ohio, there were countless summer and early fall days spent fighting off low-grade seasickness as we bobbed up and down on Lake Erie in pursuit of walleye and perch. I had my own tackle box and rod and spent a good deal of time in the small hold of the ProLine boat my dad had always wanted, suffering from the sun and stagnant air.

I have always loved the outdoors and fancied myself an outdoorsman, though I don't have the experience to back it up. Behind our first house on the suburban west side of Cleveland was a dense woods of old oak and maples. The kids on the street would spend summer afternoons building forts and walking, running, biking, and simply wandering the twisted network of trails blazed by generations of kids who had come before us. I loved the woods. I loved the coolness, the shadows, and the dappled sun breaking through the leaves high overhead. I probably would have found a way to live in those woods had I not had an experience that soured me somewhat on being there.

We were playing a game of capture the flag. There were probably eight of us from the neighborhood, all spread out through the woods on one of those dreamy days that only exist in movie scenes when a character remembers something from their past fondly. I remember it being cool among the trees and running alone on a stretch of trail fifty yards behind our house. I heard something off in the distance and stopped to listen, to see if I could tell which direction it was moving. I didn't feel it immediately, so intently focused was I on eluding capture by the older boy from up the street. It was only after a couple long moments' pause that I had the sensation that the ground beneath my foot was moving, or struggling to move. I felt a tug and then a flap of something like heavy paper on my hairless shin. I looked down and there, pinned beneath my Nike, was a bat. It was brown and black, furry and lying on its back, its wing pinned to the ground and its other flapping as it tried to get free. I looked into its beady black eyes and saw its teeth as its jaw flapped up and down silently. I don't remember exactly what I said as I bolted out of the woods, through some low brush and into my backyard, but I imagine it was something like, “Shit! Shit! Holy shit! Fuck! Damn! Shit! Shit! Shit!” because I had only recently discovered the cathartic benefits of swearing and had been polishing my abilities at the bus stop and during games of pickup basketball with friends.

I vowed never again to return to those woods and managed to keep that promise until after I had graduated from high school, but the inclination toward nature, or at least the accoutrements of those who find themselves in the natural world, was ingrained in me. I knew early that my flat-footed awkwardness, pudgy midsection, and general aversion to exercise in any traditional, suburban form meant I would never play center field for the Cleveland Indians, shoot three-pointers for the Cavs, or strap on the orange and brown of the Browns—unless I was to be an offensive lineman and who, really, dreams of becoming an offensive lineman when they are a kid? But I had read Gary Paulsen's
Hatchet
and the issues of
Boys' Life
that continued to trickle in long after my Cub Scout den had disbanded from disinterest, and it was about this time that I discovered the L.L.Bean catalog and developed a fascination that lasts to this day.

I don't quite know what it was about L.L.Bean, but there was something about the catalog that left me transfixed. While all my friends were rushing home to get the new issue of a magazine called
Beckett,
which published values and prices of baseball cards—and some of the more developed ones were hijacking copies of the Victoria's Secret catalog and
Sports Illustrated
's swimsuit issue from the mailbox before their parents got home—I found myself rushing to the box at the end of our driveway hoping to find a new catalog from Bean. I read the descriptions of tents and anoraks as if they were literature. The twenty-five words used to describe the functions of a particular pocketknife were my prepubescent poetry. Years later, when Rebecca and I had one of our first dates, I told her about the trip, about the store, and about my dreams of moving to Maine and working there. I would have a cabin in the woods and spend my days writing thoughtful descriptions of water purifiers and first aid kits. Did it matter that my outdoor experience was generally limited to catalogs, some Hemingway books, and a whole lot of daydreaming? Not to me. Before I left for college, she gave me a gift. She had told a mutual friend of ours, an art student and painter, about my dream life and commissioned a small painting to hang in my dorm room and remind me of her. It was a cabin near a mountain and well done, even if it was obvious that the artist had never seen the rolling hills of New England and instead interpreted the mountain as Everest's big brother. It's hard to imagine what life was like before Google, but topographical inaccuracies didn't matter. I was in love with the idea of Maine and L.L.Bean.

After my freshman year of college, I took my roommate and best friend from high school on a road trip to Maine, to the Bean store and to Mount Desert Island. We were underage but managed a few beers along the drive. We went to the store twice, and it would be the last time I was there until more than a year after graduation, when I finally managed to get Rebecca up to Maine for a visit. I proposed to her on our first night there. Right there. In the furniture section of the same store that I had begun dreaming about as a kid.

Okay, it was a little more romantic than that. We had been arguing. Tensions were high because the airports had just reopened after the September 11 terrorist attacks. I had been planning the trip for the better part of a year, since long before I had bought the ring and asked her parents for their blessing. I wanted everything to go so smoothly. This place, this dream, had been central to our early relationship and a big part of my identity, so I was a little miffed when we arrived into Portland late and got into our rental car and she told me we needed to stop to see her cousin—a person I had never met and one she had not mentioned until that moment.

“Are you kidding me? No way are we going to drive around Portland at almost midnight to go find some cousin you haven't seen in five years,” I said.

“Why not? I'd do it for you.”

“I wouldn't ask you to. I wouldn't ask you to go meet a stranger in the middle of the night after seven hours in airports and on planes when you had been planning this trip for months and months.”

She wasn't pouting, but her silence told me I had said the wrong thing. Family is first with Rebecca, pure and simple. There is nothing more important. Here I was being a jerk when all she wanted to do is stop by to see a family member. It was, unfortunately, a fight we would have more than once during the course of our marriage and in traveling together. It seems no matter where we are going, there's always a cousin on the way or an uncle or an aunt or a great-aunt she's never met before.

We went straight to Freeport, where I booked a room in a hotel. The plan was to go to Bar Harbor the next day and after six years together and finally making this trip, she would have had to have been three points beyond stupid not to suspect that I had planned to propose. And I had. The next day, on top of Cadillac Mountain, overlooking the Atlantic and my favorite vacation spot in the world. But first we needed to unwind. The L.L.Bean store is open 24/7 365 days a year. There aren't even locks on the doors. I was too excited not to take her there for a little middle-of-the-night shopping. I thought maybe some retail therapy would thaw her icy mood.

Traveling in those first heady days after 9/11 was rough. Security was beyond tight, and it had taken every little bit of ingenuity I could muster to hide the engagement ring I had stashed in my pocket through security checkpoints and at the car rental place. Sometime between landing and checking in at the motel, I had stashed it in my backpack and very nearly left it there in the car when we parked in the lot behind the Bean store shortly after one
A.M.
But I got nervous. She rushed ahead to the bathroom and I ran back to our rented Hyundai to retrieve it, putting it back in my pocket as we walked around the store.

She was tired. She was a little angry and I did what many men try to do—buy her affection. Though I was living in Section 8 subsidized housing and making a meager $20,000 as a junior reporter on a small daily newspaper, I bought her two coats and a few other items hoping to make her happy. I paid with a fresh credit card and we wandered through the store, upstairs, taking a seat at a farmhouse table with green legs and matching ladder-back chairs—a staple of the L.L.Bean “Home” catalog.

“I really like this table,” I said. It was true. I liked the style and the fact that it seemed like it would fit well into my semirural life plan.

“Me too,” she said, still a little coldly.

“We should register for it,” I said. It came out on impulse, with no real forethought.

“We should,” she said, and the tone got a little tenser. “Except we're not engaged.”

“Well, what if we were?”

“But we're not,” she said, firmly, but with a brightening smile.

“What if we were?”

“But we're not!” This time more emphatically.

“But what if we were?” I asked, bending onto one knee, pulling the ring from my pocket, and sliding it across the table. “What if we were? Will you marry me?”

Tears formed in the corners of her eyes and we embraced. She went to the restroom and used her cell phone to call her best friend. Operation “He Finally Asked” was set into motion. While she was off doing that, I asked a woman who was working in the section how much the table and chairs were and the price was slightly out of my budget.

“What about just the chairs?” She told me their price and offered to call the warehouse and have them dropped off for me to pick up. “Here's the thing,” I said, and I recounted the story of what had just happened. The woman took heart and made a few phone calls. It was against store policy to sell the floor models, but she understood their sentimental value and made arrangements anyway. She had them boxed up and sent to my apartment in Virginia and you can find them today in our home.

We returned the next day to register for the table only to find out that Bean had discontinued its wedding registry just months before. After the greatest weekend of my life—eating, lounging, dreaming, and roaming with my new fiancée—I wrote a letter to the then chairman of the company, a grandson of the man who gave it its name. He responded with a handwritten note of thanks and congratulations. He apologized for the cancellation of the registry, but wished us well in our life together. If you visit our home, you'll find that letter there too.

B
y that point, I was living in Virginia and had taught myself to fly-fish (I even worked, for a short time, in a fly-fishing shop after graduation and before my move south), something too snobby and New England to ever be considered by my deeply midwestern sportsmen relatives. Fly-fishing was for the fancy class, as was L.L.Bean. No, the Heimbuchs were Cabela's people. Cabela's is like a prairie version of Bean. Its catalog, I remember, was thick and utilitarian. There were no pictures of families camping along an inland lake, no campsite ice cream makers, just pages and pages of guns and camo and gun cases, locks, and cleaning kits. Cabela's was, and is in large part, for hunters and serious fishermen. I tried hard to get into it the same way I did Bean, but it wasn't the same. There was no nuance, no story. The Cabela brothers were real people, but you never got a sense of who they were. Bean prided itself on tradition. L.L. was a real person. Babe Ruth was a customer. Cabela's had, what? A myriad of options when it came to fish finders and floor mats for your truck, but no romance.

Fly-fishing and Bean represented a certain divergence from family sporting tradition for me. I liked the idea of backpacking the Blue Ridge more than of taking a buck from an Iowa cornfield, or of casting a weightless fly to a graceful trout instead of a heavy lure to a gnarly toothed muskie. And then there was the hunting thing.

My anxiety about hunting came from the fact that I had never, really, done it before. On three occasions, I had been privy to a hunt. The first was when I was around eleven or twelve. We were visiting my Iowa family, and my dad wanted to go pheasant hunting. He, my uncle Paul, a cousin, and I walked with a couple of dogs through a cornfield that had been partially harvested, hoping to scare some birds up. My uncle Mark stayed on the other end of the field with a black powder rifle waiting for any deer that might get scared up by us walking through the field. It must have been about three degrees outside, because I remember my breath condensing in the scarf my mom had wrapped around my head and freezing. My dad had told me that you almost have to step on a pheasant in order to get it to flush up out of the corn. He told me this so that I wouldn't be surprised when I stepped on a crushed stalk and it came alive with flapping wings, but what it actually did was make me terrified to put my feet down. I didn't have the same relationship to wildlife that my dad had growing up. He grew up hunting those Iowa fields, raising livestock, and engaging in other pursuits that allowed for hands-on interactions with beast and fowl. I grew up in the suburbs. We had a family dog and got our meat from the supermarket a mile or so from our house. The closest I had ever been to a pheasant was seeing Funk's G seed signs on the ends of cornrows when driving out to visit my grandmother near Mason City. We had a clock in our basement, a wooden clock with the Funk's G logo on it, and burned into the face was the image of three pheasant rising from a row of corn.