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February 2006 NewsletterJim Casada
Web site:
www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com Wintertime Armchair Adventure My Grandpa Joe, although barely literate, was a free-flowing fount of folksy wisdom, a fireside philosopher who never lacked an opinion on issues which interested him, and a great teller of sporting tales. He was at his best in the latter capacity during the depths of winter. In my mind’s eye I can still see him, comfortably seated in his favorite rocking chair drawn up close to the old wood burning stove, ready to launch another session of sharing with his wide-eyed grandson. While poor as the proverbial church mouse when it came to world goods, Grandpa had a world of riches when it came to that truly priceless commodity, time. He shared countless hours of that time with me, and I now know that his doing so made my life richer. At this time of the year Grandpa was given to what he called “philosophizing,” and two of his favorite pronouncements ran to the effect that “January is for reliving joys” and “February is for figurin’.” The better part of a half century has come and gone since I listened to his rich fund of tales, and he would have found the fact that he eventually died during the lean, mean days of winter a delightful irony. Grandpa was a living testament to the enduring Southern adage which holds “’tis a poor piece of cloth which cannot use some embroidery,” and no matter how often he told a given story, it never palled and was never quite the same. My reminiscences of Grandpa and his love of describing his hunting and fishing exploits are doubtless similar to those of countless other Carolinians who enjoyed the good fortune of growing up in a rural area or with meaningful childhood exposure to the outdoors. One such individual was Robert Ruark, who immortalized this type of family linkage, with one generation intervening, in his timeless tales of “The Old Man and the Boy.” Anyone who hasn’t read Ruark needs to do so, and rest assured you have a singular treat awaiting you. Ruark’s maternal grandfather, the “Old Man” of the tales, was Captain Edward Hall Adkins, a sage if salty figure full of an endless store of outdoor lore which he patiently shared with his protégé, the “Boy.” According to Ruark, the Old Man knew “pretty well everything,” and certainly theirs was a timeless partnership sure to ring welcome bells of recollection with anyone fortunate enough to have had close contact with his grandfather in an outdoor setting. Ruark’s works reward reading and rereading in any season, but this time of year, with turkey hunting and decent trout fishing still distant, elusive dreams, the books hold particular appeal. No American writer has captured the essence of the outdoors in more meaningful fashion, and to join Ruark vicariously on one of his jaunts with the Old Man is to learn sporting ethics, sound conservation principles, and much more. He wrote about the joys of camp cooking in such convincing fashion that one’s mouth literally waters as he describes a game feast, and his knack for putting the deep and frequently intangible values of experiences in the outdoors into meaningful form was uncanny. Ruark grew up in the Southport/Wilmington area on the North Carolina coast, but his literary legacy knows no geographical bounds and forms a national treasure. Sometimes known as “the poor man’s Hemingway,” he actually, in the opinion of many authorities, was superior to this giant of American letters when it came to material relating to hunting and fishing. After graduating from the University of North Carolina while still a teenager (the Old Man had died when he was fifteen, leaving him little in the way of material goods but so rich in mentorship and memories that his grandson commented, “all he left me was the world”), Ruark pursued a number of dead-end paths. Eventually he became a highly successful journalist who was, in the grudging estimation of a co-worker, “brash, ambitious, cocky, fast, and good.” He gained fame as a reporter in World War II and became a columnist for the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance. Over the years he produced upwards of 4,000 columns – an estimated 2.8 million words – for them In the late 1940s he turned his hand to books, with his first four works being satirical in nature. They were Grenadine Etching, Grenadine’s Spawn, I Didn’t Know It Was Loaded, and One for the Road. In the early 1950s he discovered Africa and was mesmerized by his first hunting safari in the “Dark Continent.” Out of this experience came “Horn of the Hunter,” a book many consider to be superior to Hemingway’s famed Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Green Hills of Africa. It also marked the beginning of a lasting love affair with Africa. The continent also furnished him with the raw material for a blockbuster novel, Something of Value which was subsequently made into a movie. It was later followed by Uhuru: A Novel of Africa and the autobiographical Poor No More. Meanwhile, Ruark had begun an immensely popular series of columns for Field & Stream magazine, The Old Man and the Boy. Some of these tales, which ran for several years, eventually furnished the basis for the two books which make him so beloved by outdoorsmen. The first bore the same title as the series while the second was The Old Man’s Boy Grows Older. These are works which should be read by every youngster interested in the outdoors. Sadly, Ruark failed to follow the Old Man’s advice in some areas, particularly when it came to alcohol. Burning life’s candle at both ends and constantly guzzling gin, he drank himself to death in 1965, still several months shy of his fiftieth birthday. Yet he wrote, almost frenetically, right up to the end. Ruark once confided to a friend: “I started out to be a man . . . glad, sad, occasionally triumphant.” In the sense that he shared tales of the wonderful boyhood with every lover of nature, every hunter and fisherman, he was triumphant, for he gifted posterity with a bountiful legacy. We are infinitely richer for his hundreds of articles and four sporting books (Use Enough Gun was published posthumously). Since his death, considerable further work has been done in collecting obscure Ruark articles into books. These include Robert Ruark’s Africa by noted outdoor writer Michael McIntosh and my own anthology, The Lost Classics of Robert Ruark, which contains ten of his “Old Man” stories, along with seventeen other pieces, that had never previously appeared in book form. I have signed, inscribed copies of the latter work available through this Web site, and if you are a Ruark fan I can also offer quotations on most of his books. Armchair adventure with Ruark as a companion is a grand way to spend a winter’s day, for rest assured he will take you down darkening avenues into the Carolinas’ sporting past in a fashion which warms the cockles of the sportsman’s heart. Much the same holds true for other sporting scribes from this part of the world. Last week we looked at the literary career of the great Tarheel sporting scribe, Robert Ruark, and with that coverage promised further glimpses of other noted sporting scribes from the Carolinas. In truth, many book authors from both Carolinas come to mind in this context. Indeed, when one mentions Ruark and the Carolinas, two other writers of comparable stature immediately come to mind – Havilah Babcock and Archibald Rutledge. Both called South Carolina home and each, in its own distinctive fashion, made a lasting contribution to sporting letters. Babcock was a much-loved English professor at the University of South Carolina who first turned to warm, witty tales on his bird hunting and bream fishing experiences as a way to fight chronic insomnia. As one might expect, given his academic background and training, he proved to be an exceptionally adroit wordsmith. He was at his best when writing about quail hunting and bird dogs, and he remains a revered figure in the circle enamored of this uniquely Southern sporting tradition. Virtually all of his work first appeared as articles in major sporting magazines and then was subsequently collected in books with intriguing titles. These include I Don’t Want to Shoot an Elephant, Tales of Quails ‘n’ Such, Jaybirds Go to Hell on Friday, My Health Is Better in November, and the posthumously published The Best of Babcock (edited by Hugh Grey). Babcock’s only full-length work was a beautifully written book on the making of a bird dog, The Education of Pretty Boy. Delightfully eccentric, Babcock had an exceptional vocabulary and used it to telling effect in his writing. It also speaks volumes about his abilities as a teacher when one learns that a vocabulary course he taught, “I Want a Word,” was so popular with undergraduates at USC that there were waiting lists of as long as two years for those wanting to be enrolled. My own favorite Babcock story suggests why a seemingly dull course drew so much attention. He was notorious for canceling classes during the bird hunting season, and on one such occasion he rushed into his classroom in hunting attire, hastily scribbled the message “Dr. Babcock will not meet his classes today,” and left. A few minutes later he returned, having realized that he needed a box of shotgun shells which were in his desk. When he entered the room, he immediately noticed smirks and outright giggling among a gaggle of students who were still present. Looking at the blackboard, he learned the reason for their mirth. Some student wag had altered his message to read “Dr. Babcock will not meet his lasses today.” Barely breaking stride, Babcock grabbed his shotgun shells with one hand and an eraser with the other, and a single swipe of the latter, removing the “l” in lasses, left a powerful and quick-witted message. Babcock’s contemporary, Archibald Rutledge, was likewise a teacher. Born at Hampton Plantation on the Santee River in South Carolina’s Low Country, where his family traced their roots back to pre-Revolutionary War times, he spent much of his career (33 years) teaching at Pennsylvania’s Mercersburg Academy. While there he began producing hunting and nature stories to supplement his rather meager income and as a way to earn much-needed funds to help restore the crumbling glory of Hampton. As a prose writer, not to mention a poet of renown, he proved highly successful and amazingly prolific. In the course of his long life, which stretched over almost 90 years, he produced scores of books and thousands of articles. Among his most enduring works are An American Hunter, Days Off in Dixie, Tom and I on the Old Plantation, God’s Children, Home by the River, Hunter’s Choice, Old Plantation Days, and Plantation Game Trails. Many of his books of poetry also remain popular, and for decades he held the position of South Carolina’s Poet Laureate. Relying primarily on income from his writing, Rutledge spent the final decades of his life endeavoring to return Hampton Plantation to its former glory, and the final result was a treasure which should form the focus of a pilgrimage for every lover of hunting literature. This is possible thanks to the fact that Rutledge, as a final act of devotion, deeded his ancestral home and its lovely environs to the state of South Carolina. Rutledge’s writings, redolent of timeless sporting traditions and the beauties of nature, have become treasured collectors’ items. Almost all of his books are now out of print, as is an anthology lovingly compiled by his son, the late Judge Irvine Rutledge, Fireworks in the Peafield Corner, but several recently published anthologies I was privileged to compile and edit have brought together much of his finest work. They include Hunting & Home in the Southern Heartland, Tales of Whitetails, America’s Greatest Game-Bird, and Bird Dog Days, Wingshooting Ways. All of these are currently available on this Web site, and I am also working on a fifth anthology. It will focus on his many delightful stories on the Christmas season, most of them set at Hampton Plantation, and will conclude with a chapter on Christmas cookery as it was sampled and savored at Rutledge’s beloved “Home by the River.” Along with Ruark, Rutledge and Babcock form a Carolina triumvirate which gives this region a heritage of sporting literature perhaps unmatched by any area of the country. Certainly armchair sessions with any of these grand writers as a companion promise a full measure of reading pleasure. Thank you for subscribing to the
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