Jim Casada Outdoors

July 2007 Newsletter

Jim Casada Web site: www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com
1250 Yorkdale Drive E-mail: jc@jimcasadaoutdoors.com
Rock Hill, SC 29730-7638
803-329-4354

The Changing Face of the Outdoor Experience

First of all, an apology (and an explanation) as to why this month’s newsletter is late seems in order. The explanation is a simple one—too many magazine deadlines and a great rush to read proofs of the Ruark book and handling all the seemingly endless little details connected with the production of a book. I’m delighted with the way the biography is shaping up, and if you are a fan of Ruark, whom I consider our greatest American outdoor writer, I hope you will be as well. The biography, which was written by Alan Ritchie, who served as Ruark’s secretary and right-hand man for the final twelve years of the life of the “Old Man’s Boy,” offers a great deal of new and interesting information.

The biography will have dozens of photographs and, if things go as planned, will be out in both a deluxe limited edition and a trade edition in October. It includes a lengthy Foreword by legendary African professional hunter Harry Selby and an Epilogue by George Saffo, who knew Ruark and spent some time with him in Spain. It will also include my Introduction and, where needed, editorial notes. I’ve managed to condense a vast amount of typescript into roughly 250 pages of text. If you want to be notified when the book becomes available (and I’ll be offering both the trade edition and the limited, numbered, and signed edition), just drop me an e-mail and I’ll put you on my notification list.

Now, with that explanation as to why this edition of the newsletter is late, here’s this month’s material. As I get older I harken back to the past with increasing frequency. I think that’s a natural human tendency, and while I by no means am so rooted to the past I ignore the present, there are countless experiences from my boyhood which convince me that in many ways those were the “good old days.” I’ve done some ruminating along those lines, and what follows is a THEN versus NOW scenario in which I compare what I knew and experienced as a youngster with the realities of today’s sporting world.

The nature of the outdoor experience, not just in the North Carolina high country but all across the country, has changed dramatically in my lifetime. Some of the changes, such as those involving advances in technology and improvements in equipment, have been welcome and fit my idea of true progress. However, such is decidedly not the case in many other areas.

Let’s take a peek at how things have changed, with a special emphasis on how they have affected the introduction of youngsters to the sporting experience. To me, far from representing progress, they mark a whole host of unwelcome steps backward as well as a somewhat sad commentary on the state of today’s world. You may condemn me as being a prisoner of nostalgia and someone obsessed with the good old days, but before doing so hear me out on THEN versus NOW.

THEN: Most boys had a role model and mentor, often several of them, who gladly introduced them to the wonderful world of the outdoors.

NOW: Caring mentors and folks willing to “pass it on” seem to be in short supply. This comes from a variety of circumstances such as far more one-parent families, far fewer adults who hunt and fish, and too many folks so obsessed with pursuit of the almighty dollar that they forget hours spent together in the outdoors have more value than any bottom line on a bank statement.

THEN: One of my favorite summertime activities was spending the day along the banks of the Tuckaseigee River, my home water. I might have tended a bunch of catfish lines at the Reese Hole or tried to catch knottyheads and bream at Devil’s Dip.

NOW: I almost never see boys fishing in that river or walking its banks, and the same holds true wherever I fish. They are too busy with their cell phones, palm pilots, watching movies or television, or playing as if their computer was an umbilical cord.

THEN: Deep Creek was another treasured destination, one which I could hike or bike to from town, fish all day for trout, and return home at dusk. There was no concern whatsoever for my safety, and chances were pretty good that on a week day once inside the Park I would see no more than a handful of souls.

NOW: I haven’t seen a boy fishing (by himself or with an adult) in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park portion of Deep Creek in more than a decade, and the few I have seen in state waters were, without exception, studies in angling ineptitude. What I do see are steady streams of tubers, far too many of whom are carrying enough weight to qualify for what were known as “TubBubs” in my youth, floating down the creek. Not one in a thousand likely knows the simple joys I enjoyed on a daily basis.

THEN: No self-respecting boy would have been caught dead without a pocket knife. It was a tool, a toy (for games of mumblety-peg), a conversation piece, and a source of pride. If school was in session you likely would see whittling going on at lunch break, and if a lady teacher asked “Who can lend me their knife for a minute?” likely as not every boy in the class eagerly reached in his pocket for his trusty folding knife.

NOW: Most boys don’t carry a pocket knife at all, fewer still find any practical use for one, and woe be unto the forgetful soul who owns one and has it on his person during the school year. At best he’s likely to face a visit to the principal’s office to be confronted by accusations that he intends to bring grievous bodily harm to classmates. At worst there may be suspension from school or even intercession by outside authorities.

THEN: When a youngster decided to go fishing, he dug his own bait, caught his own grasshoppers, picked a rainy night to seek night crawlers, turned over rocks to get a bunch of spring lizards, seined up a bucket full of minnows, or knocked down a couple of wasp nests to get the larva. Or, if you were a fly fisherman (as I was), you tied your own flies or worked like the dickens to buy them at a quarter apiece. Spinner fishermen got along quite nicely with a Colorado blade followed by a Yellarhammer fly tied on a long-shanked hook.

NOW: On those relatively rare occasions when a youngster ventures out fishing on his own, he buys worms or night crawlers in a Styrofoam cup or, even more likely, relies on a whole batch of high dollar artificials such as Mepps Aglias, Roostertails, or plugs of every color and description.

THEN: If you hung a trout fly or a bass plug in a tree, or for that matter even a bait hook, retrieval feats of engineering genius and acrobatic artistry were in order. I personally carried a piece of heavy cord with me at all times. When attached to a rock it could be thrown over the highest limb and allowed you to get the lure back.

NOW: Expensive lures are just broken off without a second thought beyond “I’ll just buy another one.” I see them adorning trees along trout streams like so many equivalents of angling Christmas tree ornaments.

THEN: Finding a fly or spinner in a tree was a source of pure delight. Procuring it was a matter of pride, no matter if it involved getting wet to your belly button or even taking a swim.

NOW: Not only do youngsters not look for these treasures; if they do see one chances are pretty darn good they just shrug and make no effort to get it.

Most of these changes involve too little gumption, too much money, too little willingness to find meaningful pleasure in the simplest sort of things, and yes, too few adults to help today’s youth call back the undeniable joys of yesteryear. Most of what I have mentioned thus far involves fishing, but if anything, the world of hunting has changed even more. It is now time to turn in that direction.

THEN: You could hunt almost anywhere, and on private land a simple request to do so invariably brought consent. In all of my adolescence I can only remember being denied access one time, although folks would often say you could hunt squirrels or rabbits but then add “Don’t shoot my birds.” Incidentally, the one instance of being denied permission came at the hands of a “flatland furriner” who did little to endear himself to locals thanks to his penchant for saying “We didn’t do it this way where I came from.”

NOW: Posted signs proliferate like kudzu, and the sad truth is that public hunting as we have known it may well vanish in the next half century.

THEN: Most hunters, boys and men, owned a maximum of three guns—a shotgun was most common, with a .22 not too far behind. Some added a centerfire rifle as well.

NOW: You would think, by reading the outdoor magazines (and I say this even though I earn much of my livelihood writing for them), that it is imperative to have a different gun for almost everything you hunt—a turkey shotgun, a waterfowling shotgun, an upland game shotgun, and rifles of so many calibers it would take a mathematical genius to keep up with them all.

THEN: Ammunition was affordable, and you could buy both shotgun shells and rimfire cartridges individually.

NOW: There are some shotgun shells (such as turkey and waterfowl loads) which cost as much per shell as two boxes of shells on sale would have cost in the 1950s.

THEN: You hunted ducks with lead shot, and few cripples were lost.

NOW: Duck hunters have to rely on frightfully expensive composite loads or else shoot steel shot, and the latter likely cripple as many ducks as lead ingestion ever sickened.

THEN: A boy could walk through the streets of town with a shotgun cradled in his arm without occasioning so much as a second glance from anyone. I personally did it countless times.

NOW: Although I don’t know it for a fact, that’s probably illegal in my home town and you can rest assured that if a lad tried it local law enforcement officers would receive a bevy of phone calls.

THEN: A boy could take a gun to school and leave it with the principal or in a car without anyone being concerned. It was a common practice, and if I’m not mistaken my brother, Don, who drove a school bus, would take a shotgun to school for use on squirrel hunting outings once he had run his afternoon route.

NOW: Having a gun anywhere close to school grounds will bring suspension, expulsion, or worse.

THEN: Hunting attire consisted of worn out clothing or durable Duxbak gear, with foot wear likely being a pair of second-hand combat boots.

NOW: There seem to be more camouflage patterns than there are species of trees in the South, you have special underwear of all sorts rather than a union suit, and it is easy enough to break the bank on accessories for the sportsman.

THEN: You didn’t need a hunting license until you were 16 years of age, and it was common for boys as young as 12 to hunt alone.

NOW: In some states simply clearing the path for a youngster to hunt involves a paperwork maze which would give a pointy-headed bureaucrat indigestion, hunter education is required everywhere, and licensing regulations are often quite complicated.

THEN: You could head a ways up any hollow or cove, whether just outside town or deep in the country, and find peace, quiet, and a few bushytails.

NOW: Summer homes seem to adorn every hillside, many of them in precarious places where common sense says they shouldn’t be, and discharge of a firearm is verboten in the town limits.

THEN: Most folks hunted or, if they didn’t, viewed it as wholesome recreation, and I doubt if you could have found a handful of folks in all of Western North Carolina opposed to the Second Amendment.

NOW: You can’t read a week’s worth of most any daily newspaper without seeing letters suggesting that banning all guns is the fast road to social salvation, individuals who wouldn’t know a pig’s snout from its curly tail tell us it’s wrong to eat meat, and city slickers with no real links to the land want to ban hunting as cruel.

THEN: Sportsmen were the real conservationists, and were rightly recognized as such.

NOW: Sportsmen are still the true conservationists, but all sorts of tree huggers who have never put their money where there loud and liberal mouths are want to control public lands and wildlife laws.

That’s but a sampling of the way hunting has changed over the last half century, and I’m sure most readers who were born before say 1970, to pick an arbitrary date, can think of other steps where moving forward in time has taken to hunter backwards in terms of his freedom to enjoy sport. There are two great success stories in this period—the restoration sagas of wild turkeys and white-tailed deer—but rest assured all those folks who worry about shooting Bambi or ask how could anyone hunt a turkey had nothing to do with those comebacks.

My conclusion? For young hunters and fishermen in particular and for that matter for sportsmen in general, the sporting life was much more widely accepted and acceptable THEN than it is NOW. That is sad but true.

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Feel free to contact Jim with your comments, questions or suggestions at jc@jimcasadaoutdoors.com.

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