The Moccasins Felt Familiar

"The Moccasins Felt Familiar: An Outsider Recounts His First AMM Camp Amongst a Brotherhood of Men" 

Published in "The Tomahawk & Long Rifle" (Vol 44, No 1), the official publication of the American Mountain Men.

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If Larry Mayes had his way, I’d have run into the AMM camp naked, hollering about a band of angry Shawnee in hot pursuit.

“It’ll help you get your mind into the period,” Larry said as we stood at the rear of his truck. “Here’s the scene. You’ve been held captive. You escape. You run through the woods until you find us.” He gestured up the dirt road toward a ridgeline. “You run into camp bare-assed and that’s where I hand over your clothes.” He seemed satisfied with his scenario.

I pointed into the bed of his pickup. “You mean the clothes in that box? The one that says, ‘Clothes for Joe’? I appreciate your sense of drama, Larry. But I see my pants right there.”

Inhaling and Exhaling

My eyes are always seeking the raffle of turkeys along a tree line, the doe and her fawns gleaning corn in a harvested field, or skeins of geese moving from nesting to feeding, or back. My eyes will find the solitary red-tailed hawk hunting from its perch on a tree branch or a power line or a fence pole. I’m rarely at the right place at the right time to see the hawk’s patience pay off.

Fathers and Sons and Brothers in Montana's Bob Marshall Wilderness

Here is a three-minute highlight of a six-day, 50-mile trek into NW Montana's Bob Marshall Wilderness. 

We're submitting this as one of two entries to the 2nd Annual Public Land Owners Film Fest, sponsored by Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.

Haleakalā National Park in Three Acts

"Haleakalā National Park in Three Acts" is a three-minute exploration of three different landscapes in one national park. This is an entry to the 2nd Annual Public Land Owners Film Fest, sponsored by Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.

Ancestor #1717

David Anson Root (1849-1936) was our 

great-great-grandfather. One of his prized possessions was a nautical telescope crafted by Negretti & Zambra of London, sometime in the late 1800s. The telescope is single-draw, with a tapered brass tube and covered in a hard-grained Moroccan leather.

Much of what I know of this great-great-grandfather, I have my cousin Daniel Root to thank. A table of consanguinity shows that Daniel would be my “first cousin, once removed” -- my mother’s cousin. I'm happy to keep it simple, though.

27 Minutes Later

I traded notes with Martha Hoover on a Sunday morning. After the fourth email volley, I told her, “MasterClass should offer you Wolfgang Puck’s first-born in exchange for doing a ‘Martha Hoover Teaches...’ video.”

Photo: IBJ

Yes, I know... Wolfgang is near 70 and he’s probably out of the kid-making business. Plus, his first-born is already grown and is probably shaving by now. Plus, Martha Hoover wouldn’t have time to mess around with any little Pucklettes. She’s busy.

Steven Pressfield Dot Com: An Author's Site with Meat for Writers

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Barbara Shoup at the Indiana Writer's Center recently shared Tina Jordan’s New York Times article about the websites of bestselling authors. Publishers usually insist, Jordan says, that their novelists maintain a web presence. So she visited the sites of the current bestselling novelists and reported back on the most interesting thing about each one.

We writers might hope to find a few tools or useful tips from these successful novelists. Many of these sites, however, provide not much more than Q&A responses to overworked questions like “Where do your ideas come from?” or “How do you do research?” I couldn’t find any insights into the hard-hitting questions like “Is it better to write with a pen or a pencil?”

In the Bob Marshall Wilderness

A year of planning, six days and 46 miles on the Continental Divide Trail, and 16 minutes of memory. 

Strings and cello and fiddle harmonize with the landscape, and carry the emotion of being in the wilderness with friends, fathers and sons, and brothers.

Today's Special

These old boys ambled toward their table next to the corner windows in Miss Shelly’s Place. The sign by the two-lane just called it “The Place.” Underneath, the words “Country Cooking” had “Country” highlighted in quotes, as to make clear.

Inside, pies and cakes were lined up on the counter, each under a glass bell. The chalkboard listed today’s

special: 

Biscuits and gravy, two eggs, two strips of bacon, all the coffee you want -- $3.99.

T-boned

Two crosses, one with plastic flowers, are in the grass on the corner across from where this guy just got T-boned. I could see it coming. The courteous people just ahead of me were leaving a gap to let a small yellow Nerds-to-Go van make a left turn.

I looked in my side view and saw a Black Kia coming along in the third lane at what looked like normal speed. Neither one

of these guys could see they were on an intercept, but I could see the whole board. No amount of horn-honking or hand-waving was going to help.

They say that time gets distorted in moments like this. It’s

true. Pieces on the board are in motion, slow-motion. The outcome is inevitable. If Jill had been sitting next to me, she would have said “what’s wrong?” in response to what would have sounded from me like a slow, drawn-out combination of a groan and the word: “Nooooohhhh.”

The Kia laid on his brakes but it was a done deal. He hit the little yellow van a solid one. It got the van up on two wheels and spun him once, the van driver now facing me. I watched him as the little truck teetered and started to roll.

Imogene Pass

It was 27 years ago that I saw her see God. Twenty-four years since her mother Anna brought her ashes up here and spread them in this alpine meadow. It was now August and it had been 22 years since I'd been here to visit the bronze marker her mother had set at the foot of this boulder at 11,600 feet.

Before she died at age 21, Michelle took time to write down her wishes. She didn't want to be buried. Her daddy's horses needed the land to graze. She wanted to be cremated. She wanted to rise with her smoke back to her God. She didn't care what they did with her ashes, but she wrote, "A field of wildflowers near Ouray, Colorado is a wonderful memory for me."

Pursued by a Book

The picture on the magazine page looked like snowy TV static. Beads of sweat formed on my brow as I stared at the pattern. You remember Magic Eye 3D pictures, right? If you focused your eyes past the image on the page, a hidden three-dimensional shape was supposed to reveal itself: a sailboat or palm trees or winged birds in flight.

These 3D pictures were all the rage in the early ‘90s. Newspapers featured them in the Sunday funnies. They showed up as plot elements on TV shows like Seinfeld and Friends. Three different Magic Eye books spent a total of 73 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. Even the gentlemen’s magazines were getting in on it.

This may have partially explained the beads of sweat as I sat in my studio apartment, the summer of ’92 at age 31, trying to defocus my eyes on a magazine page with the banner:

“HEY! This page has bodacious 3-D Ta-Tas.”

After 10 or 15 minutes of crossing my eyes and moving the

page back and forth, I couldn’t see anything but what looked like a close-up of beach sand.

The oath of citizenship

A good friend raised his right hand and took an oath and became a naturalized US citizen. Brad was Australian by birth, and he was joined in that courtroom by 70 other people. They were from Russia, Burkina Faso, Vietnam, and Mexico, They came from Great Britain, Guatemala, China, and India. They'd been born in Japan, Peru, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Jordan, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Kenya, Chile, Venezuela, Eritrea, and South Korea. They'd migrated from Iran and Iraq. 

The world had come to that courtroom. They wanted to be Americans. They'd waited for it. They’d worked for it and they’d earned it.

Stuart Hart is another friend who can trace his lineage back to an ancestor who'd fought in the War of American Independence. He walked to the lectern, turned to the judge and asked permission to don his hat. He faced his fellow citizens and said:

Rooster

As I was stitching together pictures and memories into this video, it occurred to me that even the dogs are smiling.

Ownerless beasts

I kept my promise to the boys and quit my office job at the end of December. I grew up on a ranch outside Reliance so can't say how I ever ended up in a cubicle. Carol didn’t like it one bit that I was giving up a steady paycheck and benefits. She liked it even less when I told her what me and the boys had planned. She called me a fool.

Femur and Tommy quit their jobs that very same day. They’d grown up outside of town, like me. Hunting and fishing with their fathers, like I had. Femur had landed in pharma sales in Philly, and thought the alliteration of it was funny. He wasn’t married, so he didn’t have to answer to nobody.

Tommy had been a sheriff’s deputy in Larimer County, just

outside Fort Collins. When he came home that December and told Connie what he’d done, she left him. Went back to her mother’s. She didn’t sign up to be married to a 42-year-old loaf, she said, who up and decides at mid-life he’s going to quit his job and go play cowboy.

Meriwether Lewis and Two Tomahawks

I went to the Antique Arms show in Noblesville to catch up with my friend, gunmaker Marvin Kemper. We share an interest in Indiana's frontier sheriff and gunsmith Colonel John Small (1759-1821). I got lucky to write some magazine stories about Col. Small recently, and Marvin has crafted (or has plans to craft) reproductions of nearly every John Small rifle, pistol, and tomahawk known to exist -- including the "Grouseland Rifle," Indiana's Official State Rifle.

We talked at his table while he paused to chat

with passersby, answering questions about his work and the flintlocks he had on display. After 20 or 30 minutes, a tomahawk on his table caught my eye. I recognized this tomahawk.

"Is that...? Did you build a Lewis tomahawk?"

Road Ends in Water

The sun cut long shadows across the field as we hunkered down in a tree line. Our breath came in billows. Frost glazed the grass. Mike sat in a shock of thorny brush 30 yards to my right. He began working his coyote calls and I settled against a bare oak and awaited the appearance of a predator.  

This morning was our second run at coyotes in the 12,000 acres around Salamonie Lake in northern Indiana. The Miami Indians called the river O-sah’-mo-nee, or “yellow paint,” for the flowering bloodroot that grew on its banks. The Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Salamonie in 1965. At its low “winter pool” levels, the reservoir is drained, its capacity waiting to take the snow melt and spring rains that would otherwise flood the downstream river towns of Wabash, Peru, and Logansport.

Tubes of meat

We've been coming together every year for going on 16 years. Many of us have moved away from Indiana, off to every corner of the country. But we rendezvous every year to hunt or fish or just to sit around and eat meat and watch "Band of Brothers" for the eleventy-seventh time.

Sure, part of the draw is where we go or what we do. But part of it is listening to the conversations, taunts, schticks, and wisecracks... and trying to get them into a notebook before they drift away with the campfire smoke. We'd hope that outdoor writer and funny guy Bill Heavey, author of titles like If You Didn't Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat? would feel at home around our fire.

These are some of the best from over the years.

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"What are you bringing? I’m bringing some of those meat tubes. Tubes of meat. What do you call those?”

"Summer sausages?"

Snaps his fingers. “That’s it!”

Christmas Dinner

On Christmas Eve in the neighbor's kitchen, nine-year-old Kevin kept a finger through his father’s belt loop as strangers kept introducing themselves.

“Tom, is it?” they would say to the father. “So glad Jenn asked you and your boy to come over,” they would say. They'd

Photo: Craig Sanders, Flickr, Creative Commons

introduce themselves as Jenn’s brother or sister, somebody's mother or aunt. Kevin glanced up to see his father shaking their hands politely. The boy couldn’t keep track of the names. He clung to his father’s belt.

A three-hour tour, a three-hour tour...

Outdoorsman Steve Rinella wrote, “When someone asked us what we liked to do, we said huntin’n’fishin’ as though it was one word.” There’s been more of that in recent years for the group of us who choose to call each other brother. 

We’ve hunted mallard and pintail and teal from blinds on Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee. We’ve walked fallow fields in South Dakota

and Kansas for ring-necked pheasant and reclined in laydown

blinds for Canadian goose. We’ve cast for snook and speckled trout and sheepshead in the grass flats off Cayo Costa Island in southwest Florida. It brings a sense of connection to the land, eating what we catch. 

But for Timmy and me, a susceptibility to seasickness may mean that any deep-sea tuna, grouper, or swordfish on our plates may have to come from the menu at McCormick and Schmick’s.