Not just for the birds

Category: The Human Condition

  • Not just for the birds

    Not just for the birds

    It’s not at all “just” for the birds. It’s not “just” for any one thing.

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    It’s for Angus, whose rapturous pursuit of birds expresses the epitome of equivocal desire: his instincts draw him toward birds, but he knows I’m also interested and – because he checks on where I am, even when he’s birdy – wants to involve me in his game.

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    It’s for Leslie, who does not hunt and does not kill but is drawn by her awe of Angus’ abilities (athletic, olfactory, instinctual) and her love of connecting with landscapes unavailable any other way, despite her abhorrence of watching birds getting murdered.

    The easy part

    It’s for the getting-lostness of it, for the forgettingness of it, and what I get from that mental negative space in spectacularly positive physical space.

    It’s for putting meat in the freezer.

    It’s for what’s possible.

    It’s for dealing with unmet expectations.

    It’s for beauty.

    It’s for practicing grace in an imperfect world.

    And it’s for a lot of other stuff, good, bad, and unknown. It keeps us all going.

    We wish you peace, luck, and joy, and not just for 2015.

    Enjoy the video…

  • I Prefer Metric Shot

    I prefer metric shot
    I prefer metric shot

    So I’m playing my bagpipes at the Tilted Kilt the other night, and it’s nutty and people are shoving $1 bills in my arm garter, and this fetching woman comes up and puts some cash in there, looks me in the eye and says, “I prefer metric shot.”

    There’s only one other person on earth who’s ever uttered that sentence, and it was my friend Greg in our “Stuff Bird Hunters Say” video. The impact of his impromptu line clearly exceeded our expectations.

    “Who sent you,” I asked, feeling pretty freaked out, kind of like Fox Mulder in pretty much every X-Files episode.

    Talk about random coincidences. She and her husband are from Nebraska. They watch the video. They hunt birds. They’re moving soon to Boise, and just happened to be here for the weekend and just happened to decide to check out the new Tilted Kilt joint, and just happened to connect the video with me. I made another video once that was partly about my inability to construct a rational connection between my passions for bagpiping and bird hunting. I concluded that there isn’t a connection aside from me: it’s not natural, it’s human. This is another reminder.

    So if you want to join the rapidly expanding “I Prefer Metric Shot” subculture, consider picking up one of our new t-shirts…

    I prefer Metric Shot T-Shirt
    I prefer Metric Shot T-Shirt

  • What is this?

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    Q. What is this? A. A miracle.

    What an ungodly time to post anything about chukar. Right now, all here is mud. Now is the time to focus on the losing battles of keeping your house as clean as you in no way can. Now is the time to ignore dirt drying on carpet if at all possible. Now is the time to look at pictures of the fall in a silly, futile effort to pretend things are drier and cleaner.

    I just happened across this photo from last December. It appears to me now as some sort of miracle. Taken by my wife in a fraction of a second, one frozen moment of my 51-plus years here, followed by two boys a fraction of my age, traversing velvety-beige glowing, basalt-infested undulating slopes of cheatgrass choked earthfolds, its surrealness starts tears. How does this happen? What things had to align themselves for this one moment, regardless of whether – but only because – it was photographed? It is uncanny. And then you realize that every photograph says this much and more.

    Thank god. Thank god for life and memory. We do what we do, and – as long as we can – we remember.

     

  • Alectorisosis

    Is this real?

    We all have things in life that mess us up. Some result in really bad stuff happening. Others are less severe. I like to think my problem with birds lies in the latter category. But I guess that’s actually relative. Nevertheless, I regretfully and proudly would like to make the formal announcement of my (with any luck) terminal alectorisosis.

    This is a bad disease. Dis-ease. It sounds so benign, yet it’s poetically perfect in its efficient description of negating ease. There’s nothing easy about hunting chukar. Hunting chukar comprehensively disses ease: there’s no easy route, no easy approach, no easy way to locate the bastards, no easy terrain to gain footholds on, no easy stance when your dog is locked on point but still not exactly sure where the bastards are laughing at you non-avian life-forms from, no easy way to predict their launch (their flight schedules are far less reliable than any of the major airlines’, regardless of their putative on-time departure records), no easy shots, and – mos’ def’ – no easy retrieve if  you’re lucky enough to hit one.

    In the midst of an alectorisosis episode

    Worse, there’s no easy explanation for why this pursuit is so addictive. And all-encompassing. I’d be much better at what I “do” if I didn’t suffer the heartbreak of alectorisosis. I wouldn’t fabricate an excuse to spend all day with 500+ 16-year-olds just to ride on the Chukar Bus instead of teaching my classes (while wishing I were actually looking for chukar).

    I don’t even know where to begin with this…

    I wouldn’t find it so supremely funny and oh-so-ironic to see well-intentioned mascot-derived signs and – far worse – take pictures of them with my stupid phone and post them on facebook. I wouldn’t consider breaking the glass on the chukar diorama which explains in true death just what in the hell the mascot of this community college is (although most attendees aren’t sure how to pronounce the word, not to mention from whence their mascot originates; I can imagine the horrified facial expressions were they to learn that Al Qaeda and chukar aren’t super strange bedfellows).

    But I hope there’s no cure. I hope there’s no hope for me. The dearth of real chukar, for me so far this season, threatens an unwanted remission of terminal alectorisosis. Friends keep telling me not to lose faith, that the disease will re-intensify, or at least its symptoms will. I want to believe them. I want to believe. I want to keep this disease alive.

  • Gun as Guitar?

    man holding shotgun in ready position
    Gun as guitar?
    Bill Frisell holding guitar
    Bill Frisell: guitar as gun?

    It hit me like a D-minor 7th substituted for an F major chord: when Angus points, I hold the gun in the ready position like a guitar. I don’t play the guitar, but my favorite musician does, and I’ve been wondering for years why, on a good day in the hills, I feel like I’m living some of his more haunting tunes, like “Throughout” or “Strange Meeting.”

    I imagine most people supply their own soundtracks to whatever they do. Maybe not. But I got conscious of my doing this one day while elk hunting during muzzleloader season. I spent over five hours chasing this damned herd of cows through two feet of snow up and down hills I chukar hunt in better weather. Bill Frisell’s “Throughout” looped in my head the whole time, up until I missed the climactic shot, resulting in a nightmare experience related in another post.

    Driving home, pissed off, exhilarated, confused, I wondered about the soundtrack. WTF? I gave up thinking about it. Until the next time I went hunting. Every time I went out I got an unsolicited soundtrack, usually supplied unwittingly by Bill Frisell. His stuff, some of it, is my “desert island” music, and has been my friend for more than 25 years, so I guess it’s actually not too mysterious why I hear it when I’m out there. But why do I hear it when I’m out there, as opposed to while driving long distances or taking a shower or mowing the lawn? Is it because of the similarity of the two “instruments” and how they’re held? Am I subconsciously trying to channel Frisell, or Scofield or Abercrombie or Hendrix or Pastorius or Metheny or Django freakin’ Reinhardt?

    I should just let it go because this can get silly in a hurry, if it wasn’t before I even began. And maybe, if I stopped thinking about this stuff and learned to focus, I’d hit more birds. But maybe Frisell wouldn’t like that, so he’s sub-intentionally mind-stalking me so I continue my bad shooting. Or maybe I should just go do the danged dishes and go to bed.