"Perpetual Guest"

When it comes to land, a good friend of mine has a saying. “Better get yours while you can. They ain’t makin’ any more of it.” Truer words may never have been spoken. There was a time in this country, particularly in the Southeastern quadrant of it, when land was, well, dirt cheap. Literally. Once upon a time, vast parcels of land were sold for pennies on the dollar, won and lost in card games, and bartered for goods and services.

Those folks whose ancestors acquired large sums of real property – and managed to hang on to some of it and pass it down through the generations – are today among the wealthiest and most fortunate individuals. The suburbanization of America since the birth of the Baby Boomer generation has been nothing short of staggering. For more than fifty years, whole chunks of the population have fled the metropolitan centers to live in suburbia. As the demand for more and more land upon which to develop suburbia rose, so too did its value and its price. Demand has outpaced supply, and today the same acre that might once have gone for a simple will preparation or the forgiveness of a petty poker debt now goes in many instances for tens of thousands of dollars or more. Land has become today’s gold.

My land holdings, and indeed my empire, consist entirely of eight-tenths of an acre in Baldwin County, Alabama. If the sun never set on the Union Jack, then I guess I should consider myself darned lucky the sun hits my little fiefdom at all before going back down. A land magnate I am not, and my prospects of becoming one are about as good as my prospects of throwing a 27 up 27 down perfect game on Opening Day at Turner Field in Atlanta next season in front of a sold out crowd that includes among it attendees the President, the First Lady, and all the Heisman Trophy winners – living and dead – from The University of Alabama. Alabama’s never had a Heisman Trophy winner so that ought to give you an indication of my prospects in this regard. It just ain’t going to happen.

One of the greatest assets a decent parcel of land can bestow upon its owner, aside from the appreciation potential and the timber value, is the completely unfettered access to hunting it provides. I consider myself mighty fortunate to belong to a good hunting club on an excellent lease, but I must contend still with a slurry of rules and other members and their guests, not to mention the ever-present possibility that the owners could wake up one day and decide to cut all their timber or worse, outright sell the place and leave us without anywhere to hunt at all.

The landowner has no such problems. He can do with his land what he pleases, and can hunt when he wants, how he wants, and with whom he wants, so long as he can afford the property taxes. The State of Alabama even has more desirable hunting regulations for private property than public property.

When you don’t own your own property in the country, but like to hunt and are very, very lucky, you end up getting a lot of invitations to hunting camps by folks who do own property in the country. This allows you to enjoy exquisite company in a whole lot of different places every season. I am blessed to be among these lucky commoners and have dubbed myself and others of my ilk Perpetual Guests.

The perpetual guest enjoys the best of both worlds. He gets frequent – albeit not permanent – access to exquisite privately held land. Private land typically is very well managed and often has onerous game management standards designed to insure that everyone has an opportunity to enjoy really great hunting year in and year out. Well managed private land often receives nomenclature such as “honey hole,” “petting zoo,” and “game preserve.” The flip side to all of this of course is the corresponding responsibility of owning a tract of land. Someone has to maintain it, run prescribed burns through it every few years, pay the property taxes annually, keep it thinned out to knock back the pine beetles, oversee the cutting of timber, clean it up after hurricanes blow through and knock down a sizeable portion of the merchantable timber, and maintain the insurance in case someone gets hurt on the place. But not the perpetual guest. He has no such worries. His duties end when he helps sweep the camphouse, bag the trash, and lock the gate behind him.

Along with the freedom from the responsibilities of owning land, however, comes an inversely proportional lack of benefits that flow from owning land. The perpetual guest owns nothing and cannot rely on a hefty influx of income every twenty years or so from cutting timber from his land holdings. Nor can he sell his holdings and realize the capital gains. The perpetual guest is, to a large extent, wholly dependent upon invitations from others to do any serious hunting, especially if he does not belong to a hunting lease of his own. This makes planning hunting weekends quite tenuous. While he would never stoop so low as to invite himself, he cannot help being silently disappointed when an invitation does not come, even though he recognizes he’s already received more than he deserves.

There is a dark side to this relationship, too. If a perpetual guest spends enough time hunting a particular piece of property he begins to establish a certain illicit bond with the place, like a lecherous infatuation with a married woman. The perpetual guest has no ownership interest in the property, has no right to be there any time his host is not present, and rarely if ever has the chance to spend extended periods of time there. The perpetual guest nonetheless in some quiet, philandering way begins to think of the place as his own in some respects. He knows it isn’t and he knows he should not harbor such thoughts but he cannot help it. After all, he knows his way around and could find his way blindfolded in the dark if he had to. He knows all the roads, all the fields, the best places to hunt, where the turkeys roost, where the deer bed down, and when the water’s high. He has spent a great deal of time and has made priceless memories there. The movie of his life that runs constantly in his mind contains panoramic backdrops filmed on location there. He begins to feel an emotional connection to the place. This connection is strengthened by the fact that he spends his time there in the company of the dearest of friends; clearly so or he would not be there as frequently to begin with. All this combines to tempt the perpetual guest into feeling as if he has rights, some stake in the property.

But it’s not the land and the improvements after all that lend such feelings of attachment and fondness. For at the end of it all, it’s just a piece of land, an excerpt of the earth, carved out by lawyers and their dotted lines and archaic descriptions buried in dusty books at the probate clerk’s office. The perpetual guest is grateful not simply for access to land he does not own, but for his trips to such special places, because they allow him to spend time and make memories with the closest of friends in the warmest of places. It is because of all this, the perpetual guest is perhaps the most fortunate of all.



(c) Roger Guilian 2006

"It's A Pleasure"

Someone asked me recently, “Why do you write? I mean, who are you; what makes you think people want to read what you have to say?” Honestly, I had never thought that much about it before I was asked that question. I simply started writing because I love the subject matter and have something to say. Yet I have never stepped back from it far enough to think to myself what the reader might want to know about the author. Indisputably, however, the reader has every right to know something about the author, and the question that was posed to me is a legitimate one.

So who am I? Why do I write? And why do I hope and think you care what I have to say?

I am a father, a husband, a son, and a friend. I am also a sportsman. I am your every day average guy who loves the outdoors and lives to hunt. Truth be told, I am not even all that great a hunter. My obsession, however, runs as deep as any.

Every trip to the camp is something special. I cannot leave soon enough and cannot wait to get there, even though I will be the last to arrive because I drive so slowly. When I pull up, it will have been too long since I’ve seen you, even if we were there just the week before. I want to see your hunting photos and want to show you mine. I will tell you a lot of stupid jokes and laugh too loudly at yours. I will not let you drink alone. I am the romantic in camp, the guy who sees all the beauty and mystique in the hunting experience and talks too much about it. I don’t take myself too seriously, though, and will laugh harder at myself than you can.

I have made long, outstanding shots and missed close, easy ones. I cannot hit a crossing shot, especially from my right. Rarely do I keep my barrel moving when I pull the trigger, even though I know I should and remind myself to do so the same way I remind myself to keep my head down before teeing off and looking up just in time to watch my ball slice off into the woods. There is in all Creation no safer place for a wood duck or a mourning dove than under the bead of my shotgun on a crossing shot. I am a farce on the sporting clays course but a pro at hand thrown trap. That’s fortunate because I would prefer to stand down at the river with you and sling trap to each other all day than shoot 85 on a clays course anyway.

I shoot left-handed, so when we set up on a gobbler together, let me sit down on your right and cover 11 to 4. You take him if he approaches from our left. Of course, he probably won’t come into gun range in the first place. I am a well-known turkey repellant and quite effective, too.

I have fallen prey to ground shrinkage. Heavy, 4 ½ year old bruisers that must have begun regressing after growing mammoth 3x3s have shrunk right before my very eyes down to spindly 2 ½ year old 6 points that barely outweighed the does brought into camp.

Chances are I won’t know what kind of tree that is. But if it’s in a good spot near promising sign, I will want to climb it.

I am more anxious to hear a good story than to write one. I would skip a hunt to sit in front of the fire and listen to your children tell me about one of theirs. After they’ve gone to bed, I will stay up with you for another couple logs to smoke a cigar, polish off a bottle of wine, and hear your stories. Forgive me if I yawn a lot – I’ll hang in there as long as I can.

I will lobby for building a fire any time the temperature dips below sixty.

I believe there are three kinds of all-nighters: the ones you have when you stay up all night studying before an exam; the tall, stout whiskey you pour after dinner to sip until bed; and that huge log you put on the fire when you turn in to keep it going while everyone sleeps.

I believe there is nothing wrong with hunting. In fact, there is a lot more wrong with opposing hunting than engaging in it. I believe we as hunters have an obligation to set a positive example and carry ourselves with class and dignity in a world growing increasingly opposed to hunting and the shooting sports. I believe we need to introduce more kids and first-timers to hunting and all it has to offer.

I think folks who leave deer guts on the side of the road for John Q. Public and his family to drive past on their way to church don’t deserve to hunt and should have their licenses revoked – assuming they bothered to purchase them in the first place. I believe there are too many poachers and not enough punishment. Those folks who “hunt” from their computers hundreds of miles away and five states removed from the game (most of which is baited) via a digital camera and a computer mouse have done more to harm hunting than PeTA. The practice should be stopped and now. So should PeTA.

I have always dreamed of having children. Now that I do, I cannot wait for them to join me at the camp.

Your repeated invitations to your camp are as valuable to me as the countless memories we’ve made there, and mean more to me than you’ll ever know. I don’t know how I can ever repay you, but I’d like to stick around and try.

Come Monday, we will need two cups of coffee apiece to exchange the stories of our trips. Three if you killed something. I hope you did.



(c) Roger Guilian 2006

"Just A Little Bit Sensitive"

Being passionate about something tends to make one predisposed to a heightened level of sensitivity to matters concerning that which fuels the passion. As an avid hunter and sportsman, I find myself hypersensitive to issues related to hunting and fishing, property rights and land use, conservation, environmental stewardship, and gun rights. I am therefore drawn on occasion to magazine articles and news stories dealing with these and related issues. Topics pertaining to hunting hit particularly close to home. Regardless whether I seek them out or not, articles discussing hunting and its legality, popularity, ethics, or future tend to jump right off the page at me.

Every now and then I get the unfortunate challenge of being confronted by an anti-hunter who wants to debate the propriety of hunting and, as is more often the case than not, why it is cruel, barbaric, and (most shockingly to anyone with the slightest sense of perspective) unnecessary. The most frequent argument I hear being made by the Antis is that hunting is abhorrently barbaric and indisputably obsolete. After all we are a civilized people who, thanks to Evolution Almighty, have used our opposable thumbs to invent and construct grocery stores, complete with their butcheries and meat markets where we are able to procure the neatly plastic-wrapped portions of formerly living animals for our dinner plates. It is simply, in their minds, wrong to kill a live animal that was moments before happily frolicking about the country side or flying through the air thinking of its family and its future (“Where shall I lead my doe-eyed children through this danger-free Utopia to bed down for the night?”), blithely oblivious to the presence of the evil hunter lying in wait to snuff out its life, while Disney music plays softly in the background. The human predator, don’t you know, is the only danger the animal would have faced in its life and if left alone the animal would have lived a long, happy, pain-free existence until it decided on its own to exercise its Animal Right to pass away and enter deer or duck heaven.

The all too salient point that the meat on their fast food sandwich, the slab of ribs on their barbecue grill, and the fish filet tumbling in their roiling canola oil was once attached to a living, breathing creature that had to be put to death – in the most ghoulish of fashions in many cases – in order to render the meal seems to be lost on most people who oppose hunting. I speak not of the lunatic fringe, pseudo-militant vegan animal rights activists; I expect more commitment from them. I speak rather of the soccer mom, the tee-ball coach, the suburban housewife, and the guy down the street who think nothing of excoriating hunting and all those who engage in the sport before taking another large bite out of a bacon double cheeseburger. Such upstanding and ordinary people tend to make up the base from which the greatest number of anti-hunters emerges, at least so far as I can tell. It was one of their number who tabled the most astonishing argument in support of banning hunting I have heard to date: Hunting wipes out the populations of those animals being hunted; if allowed to continue, hunting will bring about the extinction of whitetail deer, wild turkeys, ducks, and other game animals.

Please take all the time you need to absorb the enormity of that statement and to locate the nearest solid object upon which to rest yourself as you wait for your ears to stop ringing and the pressure behind your eyes to subside. All physical sensations to the contrary, your head’s not really going to explode.

The argument, as best I could glean, was that hunting threatens the animal population and if left unchecked will some day be responsible for the appearance of postage stamps commemorating the extinction of the whitetail deer and the replacement of folksy one-liners such as “Dead as a Dodo Bird” with “Gone like Bambi.”

I unwittingly broached the subject when I placed a hunting magazine on the check-out counter of a retail pharmacy years ago with the intention of buying it. The cashier looked at it, looked disgustedly at me, then read aloud the teaser from the cover, “Do whitetails dream?” She then said, “I don’t know how people sit there and shoot those innocent little things.” We were off and running.

Moments later when she made the comment, and I paraphrase, that modern hunting leads to extinction, I could not immediately discern whether she was stringently advocating a deeply held belief or simply floating a position to gauge its acceptability, the way political campaigns leak ideas and rumors to see how they’ll be received by the mongrel hordes that pull the levers in the voting booths before deciding whether the candidate should adopt them or oppose them. Either way, it was evident she did not know what the hell she was talking about. After she completed verbalizing her opinion – and it amounted to no more than an unsubstantiated opinion – I was immediately put in mind of that biting piece of dialogue from the Adam Sandler motion picture Billy Madison, “What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points. May God have mercy on your soul.”

With a customer waiting behind me and a truck idling outside, I knew I had neither the time nor the stamina to invest in trying to convince this individual of all the good hunters have done for wildlife and its habitat throughout North America. I did, however, take the time to tell her that hunters were in fact the first conservationists, dating back to the early 20th Century when market hunting had nearly eradicated many game animal populations. It was hunters, I explained, that policed themselves and lobbied for legislation to limit and control the use of the natural resource that is wildlife so the resource could rebound, flourish, and thrive for generations to come. I referenced the untold millions of dollars generated in each state by the purchase of ammunition and hunting licenses, all of which go toward preserving and expanding habitat and natural resources thanks to the Pittman-Robinson Act. I may have found a chink in her armor when I mentioned the billions upon billions of dollars hunters and sporting enthusiasts pump into the national economy every year ($730 billion to be exact as of the date of this writing).

Next I chose to go the other way. I did my best to count up the total number of animals I had harvested in the five years previous as an attempt to illustrate my individual impact on the wild game population. At the time I had this conversation, I estimated that I had harvested a half-dozen or so deer, one wild turkey, one feral hog, and hundreds of fish of varying species. Such was my personal contribution to the destruction of the wild game population in North America at the time.

She was unimpressed and we politely completed our transaction. If someone invented a time machine and traveled back to collect the single-most inventive torturers from the Gestapo, the North Vietnamese Army, the Spanish Inquisitors, and the KGB, and brought them all into a cold, dank room to go to work on the individual who uttered this nonsense, they would all days later be sent back to their respective time periods in the unfamiliar position of having to explain the brand new “1” that had suddenly appeared in their loss columns. Stated more pointedly, there was no convincing her otherwise. She was not changing sides.

Since then, I have removed another half-dozen or so deer from the herd, four more feral hogs, a few more freshwater fish, a handful of bobwhite quail, eight mourning doves (I'm not the best wing shot), and no turkeys (I'm an even worse turkey hunter). I am incapable of coming up with a similar estimate of the numbers of hunts I have had where the only thing that ended up getting killed was time.

Most of the people with whom I socialize are sportsmen. None of them can boast garishly disparate numbers than those referenced above. In short, most hunters I know are in about the same bracket as I, which is to imply that the majority of hunters and fishers are responsible for a roughly equal amount of diminution in the numbers of wild game animals from season to season. Numbers which, by the way, replenish themselves every year through procreation. The phrase "a drop in the bucket" comes to mind but then again I am no statistician and cannot positively say whether this truly amounts to the mathematical equivalent of a single raindrop falling into a bucket full of water. Yet lo and behold, North America’s whitetail deer herd is bursting at the seams and wild turkey numbers are the highest they have ever been on this continent. I am capable of making such a statement thanks to the work, volunteerism, self-restraint and dollars of hunters, fishers, and other outdoor enthusiasts, as well as the tireless work of the separate and several states’ fish and game departments.

It occurs to me that perhaps the real lesson to be learned is sportsmen and women need to do a better job marketing, educating and recruiting in order that non-hunters and even anti-hunters may gain a better understanding of our contributions to wildlife, natural resources, and habitat for game and non-game alike. Regardless, you will have to forgive me for reacting so strongly to such attacks on sportsmen and the rich tradition of hunting in America. I’m just a little bit sensitive.



(c) Roger Guilian 2006