“Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof…” Ecclesiastes 7:8.
Autumn harvest is more joyous than spring ground-breaking. Covering the last hill of corn is a happier task than dropping the first seeds into the open row. Homecoming is the sweetest part of a trip. Clocking out at the end of a productive day’s work is more pleasant than rising from bed to go.
This column ends what began on Saturday, February 3, 2001. This is the last time my likeness and name will appear on this page for the foreseeable future, perhaps forever. Nineteen years and almost two months amount to only a droplet in the time sea of eternity, but is long in the lives of men and in the flow of history. It has been a profound personal journey for me that has produced almost 1000 regular outdoor columns and special features—roughly a million words by conservative estimate. That this body of words, as another casualty of current events, will now cease growing is not a decision of my making, and though I view it with sadness, it is something I do not regret. Placed in the context of the economic misery, illness, and death that is occurring, it is nothing.
Like all passages of almost two decades, these 19 years have brought good and ill. I have buried friends and a son. I have myself stood at the sharp edge of eternity. I have taken innumerable steps along streams, ponds, lakes, bluffs, and in the trackless woods of the hills to which I lift my eyes every day, shot some game, and caught a few fish. I have recounted many of those steps in what I have written in my effort to explain the dichotomy of how some of us seek to slay individual beings for whose kind we hold deepest love and reverence. I have endeavored to write of the outdoors for the thinking person, to chronicle exploits of anglers and hunters in a context of history and faith while mixing in some poetry here and there.
My father first took me fishing in Cabin Creek when I was 9 and squirrel hunting in the holler here behind our home—it was my grandmother Lutie Bette’s then—when I was 13. When I was 18 we underwent the long parting, leaving me to begin the fifty-years of hill-walking he predicted for me as mostly a solitary soul, striving to learn on my own what he did not have time to teach me about the wisdom of woods and waters. When I was 53 I began to write about the crafts of the rod and gun, and it has been a remarkable experience that enabled me to reinvent myself. I convey gratitude to the persons of and to the Ledger Independent organization under its changing proprietorships for providing an avenue and inspiration that has pulled so many words from me, words which I never foresaw until the moment early in 2001 when Elden May, who was Sports Editor then, advertised for someone to write an outdoor column. Without this opportunity there would not have been three books. The fictional Lee family, Colonel Dale, John Hunter, and their friends would not have their existence in print, nor would real persons living and dead been brought to attention and remembrance. I recall Jimbob Williams, my squirrel hunting pal, telling about meeting a man in a store who recognized him. I had recently written about one of our hunts.
“You’re Jimbob Williams,” the fellow said to him. “You’re famous.”
I did a column featuring a retired minister who is also an avid outdoorsman. Not long afterward he received a surprise in the mail, a Legislative Citation. Hearing about such things has added much satisfaction to the writing.
The million words were within me, but it required this column to draw them out, because—believe it or not—writing, though very fulfilling, is not always fun. It is often difficult and the difficulty has increased as I have gotten older and even my beloved neighborhood right around me has changed so radically that I now have only limited opportunities to experience things worth narrating. I regret that I am not by nature a traveler because as a traveler I could have written so much more.
As I stride off into the mists of morning woodlands, I part with prophecy that is not optimistic for the future of hunting. I do not envy the young, who must find their place and gain their experiences in an outdoor milieu with only a semblance of the egalitarianism I knew in my youth, when there were places to hunt everywhere. The opportunities of the present and future are mostly treasures for the elite as access to land becomes increasingly beyond the reach of many. There is no politically viable solution to this other than for state wildlife agencies to institute aggressive and competitive land acquisition policies to make more acreage available for public use. But public land will never replicate the conditions under which we old ones came of age.
The future of angling is brighter, with our wealth of lakes and rivers such as the Ohio, but fully utilizing these fishery resources demands large expenditures in boats and vehicles. Rather than building monstrous reservoirs, fishery authorities would serve the average angler better by saturating the state with small two-to-five acre impoundments open to public fishing from the bank and strictly managed. The ideal goal would be to have quality trophy fishing available to those who do not own their own waters and who are not inclined to cruise mega lakes in multi-thousand dollar watercraft.
As this journey ends I am thankful to park in the home driveway without having wrecked and to have finished the course without an excess of self-plagiarizing. A good beginning, a good ride, and a good conclusion make a blessed gift. There have been instances when the keyboard was moist and that tears blurred the words on the monitor screen, and I count those moments as among the most profound, though not always happy. I cannot deny that this has occurred during the composition of this parting essay.
I intend to do the best I can for as long as I can, striving to retain some small relevance in the scheme of ages. I will still be doing what I do, posting fish and game photographs on Facebook, defending the Second Amendment without apology, walking the hills in this fifth Epilogue season beyond the fifty, and for as many more as God keeps me here on this side of the shining gateway rift between worlds. I hope to cross trails with some of you occasionally at the Washington lake, or maybe we can hook up for an outdoor adventure, though I will no longer occupy this “bully pulpit” in which to make you “famous”.
So until we meet along some shoreline or forest path, good readers, thanks and farewell. You have been the current that has powered the word processor. Without readers a writer is nothing, his words inconsequential and unnoted babbling.
Keep praying. Stay well. And as our late son Aaron used to say, “Catch you later”.
