"Raising Money"

Right about this time every year, a few worthwhile organizations in my neck of the woods host sporting clays tournaments in conjunction with the approach of dove and duck season. The purpose, of course, is to raise money for needy causes. What better way to ensure a good turnout of generous attendees than to package up altruism with a few warm-ups for mourning doves and the early arrival of bluewings!

I began frequenting a handful of such contests five or six years ago. Over that time, I have come to grips with the reason I keep getting invited back: I am a warm body with a shotgun and an entry fee, and nothing more. I am no threat to anyone hoping to take home a trophy.

At first, I took myself and the spectacles quite seriously. I showed up early and warmed up on the practice range. The night before the events, I cleaned my shotgun and stood in my bedroom swinging the barrel from one side to the other, keeping the bead on a plane with the crown molding to practice moving through the target. I researched target loads and tried to match the best ones with the make and model of my shotgun.

Once, I even tried on one of those black mesh Bob Allen trap shooter’s vests and gave serious consideration to buying one, along with some yellow-tinted shooting glasses. I soon came to my senses, however, and realized they wouldn’t improve my shooting any more than a pair of argyle knickers and a St. Andrews golf cap would better my golf swing, and I’d look just as ridiculous. I hung the shooter’s vest back on the rack with “All hat and no cattle” whispering through my head.

That all lasted about two or three years. Finally, after yet another shoot in which I’d struggled to break 50, I determined I was a better philanthropist than a shotgunner when it comes to charity sporting clays tournaments. I altered my outlook on these events, and started to think of them not as semi-serious competition, but more like tee-ball games where every child gets to bat every half-inning. There are no losers here.

That’s good, too, because if it wasn’t for the soothing balm of charity and goodwill, I’d be pretty darned despondent over my inability to hit crossing shots coming from my left, or rabbits with their black undersides facing me. If quail ever evolve to the point that they can roll across the ground with their bellies facing me, randomly bouncing up in the air every so often, I’ll never kill another one for the rest of my life.

The other good thing about shooting for charity is the apparent immunity from ridicule it provides. Normally if I shot 48 around my buddies, I’d catch an unconscionable amount of grief from them (although they should be used to it by now). On the other hand, folks seem to hold their tongues when you’re shooting poorly for a good cause. This subtle benefit does not get the advertising attention in the flyers for these shoots that it deserves; but it should. Lots more folks might attend if they knew going into it that, after shooting a 2, their teammates would quietly collect up their shell bags and scatterguns and walk down to the next stand, as they would after someone breaks all 10.

I figure over the past six years or so since I started getting invited to these charity clays tournaments, I’ve donated 600-something shells and at least twice that in entry fees. Curiously, though, my shooting hasn’t really improved at all.

Still, I’ve met some neat folks and made some good friends at these events. And I’ve helped raise a little money for some really deserving people who’d love nothing more than to be able to miss 61 out of 100 targets like I usually do. So I try to keep my perspective better than I typically keep my eye on my target, and bear in mind that raising money, if not my score, on a clays course is a guaranteed way to spend a great day outdoors.



(c) Roger Guilian 2009

"Somewhere Still Out There"

The seasoned hunter steps onto the porch of the cabin, wraps both hands around the barrel of his Marlin .243, and leans against the gun while he tries to catch his breath. The mile-and-a-quarter walk from his stand to the camp has left him winded. He heaves under the weight of his pack and under the weight of sixty-one seasons spent in pursuit of something he has never been able to fully explain to anyone else. Hell, he can’t even explain it to himself some times.

His wife fought it at first, all those many opening days ago. She didn’t understand it and therefore, like so many people who thought that marriage would change their partner, waged war against it. After a handful of tumultuous seasons that tested their resolve and their wedding vows, she tried to love it out of him. But while this certainly helped the storms to subside, his need to pursue “whatever the hell is out there,” as she put it – and she insisted that whatever it was, he’d never find it – didn’t subside. Finally, she came to accept him and his repeated absences from their life; even if she never came to understand it over the course of their marriage, which ended, in this life at least, four years previous.

He winces at her memory as he pries off his second boot with the boot jack in the mud room. The pressure he applied to the jack coupled with leaning all his weight forward causes the bench he’s sitting on to rock forward and slam back hard on the cedar plank floor. He kicks the rubber knee boot across the tiny mud room. It flops to the floor after bouncing off the side of the green wooden gun cabinet.

The cabin’s great room is cold and quiet. Smiling children gaze out at him from thirty-some-odd-year old wooden picture frames. His sons holding up a limit of wood ducks slain on the very lake down the hill from the cabin. His daughter, now a mother of four in Houston and married to that city mouth who always made fun of the cabin and the camp, shines at him from a photo on the bar; her round face smeared with the blood of the spike buck she’s proudly displaying in her little hands.

And of course, above the mantel, the oil portrait of his wife and their old golden retriever, Tipsy, now both departed.

He puts on a pot of coffee and ambles over to the fireplace. There he peers into the firebox, its bricks black with decades of smoke from light wood, water oak, cherry bark oak and hickory. The midmost racks of the andirons are almost entirely burned through, and are only a-third the diameter of their counterparts. How many stories have been told, shirttails snipped, lies concocted and laughs bellowed around this fireplace, he tries to imagine. The firebox doesn’t answer him in words.

He rolls up some strips torn from the classifieds of a two-year old newspaper and stuffs them under a stick of light wood. After constructing a crisscross stack of split water oak logs, he sets fire to the ends of the newspaper strips and takes a step back, pressing his left hand against the mantel so he can lean slightly toward the firebox.

Moments later, the writhing line of black pitch smoke that is escaping from the light wood gives way to flames. The water oak cracks and pops as the fire comes to life and lights up the room.

How does the hiss of green wood know just where to speak to our souls, he thinks to himself as he becomes mesmerized by the flames. How does it know just what to say? To sound exactly like the whistling of teal wings through the marsh four feet above our heads just minutes before shooting light. Or how the crack and pop of seasoned hickory know just how to put us in mind of the twig breaking under the heavy hoof of a shooter buck on an otherwise silent morning.

He folds himself into the chair beside the fireplace and lets the fire speak to him in their private language that those who don’t spend their time at the bases of trees when the turkeys are gobbling and beside hearths when fires are roaring can never fully understand. Before long, he is hushed to sleep by the gentle whisper of the fire’s soft lullaby.

A few hours later, the alarm on his square black Timex digital watch which, like he, was once sleek and modern and cutting edge, jolts him from his sleep at quarter-to-two. A glowing bed of embers throbs unobtrusively in the firebox beside him. Surveying the tops of the trees which line the lake through the window behind his chair, he takes note of the fact that the wind seems to be blowing ever so slightly out of the northwest. A good sign, he tells himself. He unfolds himself out of the chair and leans back to stretch with both hands on his flanks. His back pops more than it used to. He runs two fingers over the canvas of his wife’s portrait, pauses momentarily, and then turns to fill his Thermos with coffee.

A handful of minutes later, he walks out of the mud room and onto the porch, his .243 slung over his shoulder. He pulls the front halves of his jacket tight and zips them together. Then he steps off the porch and onto the road that will take him to his evening stand.

Because, he believes, it is somewhere still out there.



(c) Roger Guilian 2009