Be drunk,” the poet said. It might have been Ben Jonson; I don’t remember. Whomever, though, he was right.
I suspect I’ve been drunk on just about everything that can be brewed, fermented or distilled. The aftermath hasn’t always been pretty, but getting there was fun at the time.
Some forms of intoxication, on the other hand, are just as good after the fact. I’ve been drunk on the smell of newly cut red-clover hay, on the thick fume of honeysuckle, and the milky fragrance of little puppies. Pine forests and clear, cold air smell as enchanting to me as warm brandy. So does the scent of just-fired gunpowder, especially from a paper cartridge case. And Hoppe’s No. 9, the classic banana oil, which makes cleaning guns something more than just a messy chore. I love the smell of dog food fresh out of the bag. (I like the taste of it, too, but that involves a different sense.)
I’ve buried my nose into the breast feathers of just-shot grouse and quail and can at least begin to understand why dogs are so entranced by the scent. Ground coffee, newly plowed earth, chopped garlic cooking in olive oil, bread right out of the oven, a friend’s pipe smoke, the northern Minnesota woods in October – all can send me off to la-la land.
“Be drunk,” the poet said.
Every sense offers its own intoxications – the sounds of wind and rain, spring peepers, water flowing over stones, the bobwhite’s covey call, loons, cardinal songs, geese talking to one another high overhead, sandhill cranes that sound like rusty iron gates. A bugling elk is to my ear the voice of wilderness incarnate, just like coyotes keening on a cold night. I even get a bit loopy listening to coyote pups just learning to howl. The whole litter sings together, and it’s a cacophony. I think of it as coyote doo-wop.
I’ve never heard wolves and don’t suppose I ever will, but what I know from recordings tells me that I’d likely slide away to somewhere beyond mere imagination.
Music is one of the great passions in my life. A guitar, saxophone, piano, or just about anything else well played is thoroughly captivating. So is the crispy shuffle of dry leaves underfoot, and the crunch of snow when the weather is really cold.
“Be drunk,” the poet said.
The nifty thing about wind is that you can feel as well as hear it. Apart from its destructive potential, wind can be as soothing as a maiden’s kiss. It isn’t quite so nice when it’s driving rain or sleet into your face, but in more civil modes it’s as pleasing as the silky feel of my wife’s skin next to mine.
Sunshine’s warm caress can sometimes be immensely welcome, at other times not. I’m paying now for a lifetime of sun exposure that has made the skin on my forearms and the backs of my hands so thin that the slightest bump, or even a hard look, leaves a bruise. I’ve peeled off patches of epidermis just putting on a shirt or getting into a car. It’s a pity there was no such thing as sun-block when I was younger. Some older guys get leathery; I’ve become papery, liable to tear on a moment’s notice.
The feel of fur and hair is an excursion to Nirvana. I have a buffalo robe that zones me out. I tried sleeping under it, once, and quickly decided that lying on it was much preferable. The sucker must weigh 50 pounds; I just wanted to sleep, not suffocate.
Running my hand across a beaver pelt or a bobcat skin is hypnotic. The feel of a dog is better yet. And I don’t really care about the texture of the hair – thick and fluffy, thin and slick, wavy, curly, whatever, it all feels good to me. Seems to feel good to the dog as well.
Having a bath in a river or a spring pool is exhilarating – momentarily miserable but exhilarating nonetheless. It prompts a quick wash. You feel clean, and getting warm afterward represents precisely the opposite sensual pleasure. Two for one ain’t bad.
“Be drunk,” the poet said.
I recently talked about the pleasures of eating game and fish, so I won’t rehearse it now. There are, however, some tastes to be found out there that have little to do with your quarry but much to do with where you find it. Hunting quail along the margins of a soybean field, I love to complement a break by picking a dozen or so pods, shelling them as I sit, and savoring the taste along with sipping at my pipe and bottle of water.
That’s just a snack. It can get a lot more serious. My grandmother used to make a wonderful concoction from elderberries. My job was to gather them and to pull the stems. It was tedious work because elderberries are about the size of No. 2 shot pellets, but it was worth the trouble. A big spoonful of her elderberry butter on a thick slice of her yeasty-tasting bread was a grand treat. Elderberries probably would make good wine, but being a vintner was not in Grandma’s repertoire.
I’ve closed out days of fishing in Alaska with desserts of tundra blueberries, freshly gathered. It can be a chore because they don’t grow taller than about two inches, are tiny, and you’ll need a lot of them. But doused with cream made from powdered milk and some spring water they are delicious. I well understand why the bears are so fond of grazing on them.
Closer to home, wild gooseberries – “goozeberries,” my grandmother called them – are a treat. They need to be sweetened, like rhubarb, but a gooseberry pie puts a lot of other recipes to shame.
I love mushrooms, but the only ones I’ll eat from the wild are morels. I know some professional mycologists who feel the same way, as distinguishing one species from another can be monstrously tricky – and so is the result if you make a mistake. As with pilots, there are old mycologists and bold mycologists but damn few old, bold mycologists.
Morels are much more benign. They are quite distinctive, so identification isn’t a problem. Hard-core morel lovers usually are as closed-mouthed about their gathering places as grouse hunters are about their favorite coverts. If you stumble onto a real trove, you can preserve morels by stringing them with a needle and thread and hanging them to dry; they re-hydrate readily in water.
I suppose morels would reward all manner of exotic preparation, but my favorite ways are much simpler – slice them in half lengthways and sauté them in butter, or cut them into quarters and scramble them with a few eggs. The flavor is rather delicate, so you don’t want to cover it with any spices except perhaps a very light sprinkle of salt, though even that isn’t necessary.
Coming across an old apple orchard while hunting grouse can be a blessing. The birds love apples, and so do I. If no grouse happen to be in residence, you can console yourself with the fruit.
Cider is another form of apples that truly shines. In the West Country of England you can find farmhouse cider in nearly every village pub – but I warn you, it is some stout stuff, delicious but able to put you right on your butt. It’s best supplemented with a healthy measure of moderation.
If I could have only one wild fruit I’d choose persimmons in a flash. Picked before they’re fully ripe, they can taste like a mouthful of alum, but once the natural sugars have developed, the flavor is beyond description. Put me under a persimmon tree at just the right time and I can eat myself stupid. ’Possums love persimmons, so perhaps they aren’t as dull-witted as they appear to be.
When I lived in Missouri, where persimmons are common even along roadsides and in highway medians, I loved to gather a couple of bags or buckets at a time and then press them for the pulp. This can be an all-day job. Wild persimmons seldom get any larger than golf balls, and the seeds are proportionally huge. I used an old potato ricer that I found in a junk-shop; it worked, but I had to stop after every press to clear out the seeds and skins. Labor-intensive, persimmons are. Then I’d measure out the pulp in one-cup increments, put it into plastic bags, and bundle the bags into the freezer.
But talk of reward. The pulp is superb as a topping to vanilla ice cream, and my wife used it to make an English-style baked pudding that tipped me over. Because they are more southerly fruits than are widely found where I live now, I haven’t had persimmons in years. I also haven’t had that particular wife in years, and to be honest, I miss the persimmons more.
I see that I’ve visited four of our five senses, all except vision. I suspect we each know what’s most appealing to our eyes, so there’s no real need for me to go there. I further imagine that we all have some special delights among the myriad things to be found out there where we all love to be. Enjoy them and their intoxications whenever you can.
“Be drunk,” the poet said.
Editor’s Note: The sporting world lost one of its finest writers and most charismatic ambassadors on August 14, 2010 when Michael McIntosh passed away. He was 65.
Michael wrote his first Sporting Classics article in 1983 for our May/June issue. “A Legend Called Uncle Dan” detailed the long and illustrious career of Dan Lefever and his innovative rifles and shotguns. Over the next 26 years Michael would write more than 70 features for the magazine, including three works of fiction.
He penned his first Firearms column in our January/February, 1985 issue, then turned exclusively to shotguns beginning with our March/April, 1989 magazine. Nineteen years later, admittedly “worn out” from writing only about shotguns and shooting, Michael approached us on doing a column in which he would write about anything and everything in the outdoor world.
Michael was a wonderful friend whose writings were a constant source of inspiration not only to me but to his loyal following of Sporting Classics readers. We worked together for 28 years, though mostly by phone, on his columns and articles in addition to two books. My biggest regret is that we didn’t spend more real time together, especially in the gamefields that he loved so passionately. – Chuck Wechsler