Those of us who spend lifetimes hunting and fishing learn in time that skills attained wild serve very efficiently in the struggles that eventuate in tamer, but trying, environs of modern living.
Attributes of stoicism, self-discipline, perseverance, determination, endurance, transference and visualization wear wonderfully in times of need that seem ridiculously removed from challenging and unnerving moments with fish or game. In the sports vernacular of our age, I suppose you might call it a practical derivative of cross-training. We all have it, the trick knowing when and how best to apply it. When you do, it can see you through a myriad of troublesome and vexing situations—the latest episode in my quarters being magnetic resonance imaging, probably better recognized in acronym as MRI.
If you’ve never had occasion to suffer one (and I trust you never do), it’s a scanning apparatus and diagnostic tool of the medical professions that can produce detailed images of your organs and tissues. Basically in traditional form, it’s a magnet, a closed metal cylinder by appearance that you’re stuffed into – your one end or t’ other – while across the interminable period of anywhere from 20 to 90 minutes, it temporarily (we hope to God) realigns water molecules in your body. Meanwhile, by use of radio waves, it tickles these aligned atoms to produce faint signals. These are then used to create precise cross-sectional images, like slices in a loaf of bread, or in 3D, to depict what’s going on, or has.
Maybe you’ve been there. Muzzle-wise, the smaller ones look like a hollow, choked-down black gum log, though not nearly as pretty. Once you’ve been inserted, there’s no turning back, or forward, or most any other way, unless you want to have to endure it all over again (which believe me you don’t). Because it’s most claustrophobic and unsettling contrivance you’ll likely experience in your lifetime. I mean it can be like biting, scratching, clawing…“I’m being stung by nettle-worms, let me the hell out of here or else” kinds of claustrophobic.
Wait, there’s more…once you’ve been rammed into the muzzle end, obviously into the breech is chambered a magnum load of some of the loudest, (even with ear plugs) weirdest and most grating noises one human being ever perpetuated on another, that detonate incessantly throughout your incarceration. Just writing this, I’ve got gut quease and brow sweat.
Though, you can beat it…emerge triumphant and reasonably sane. Use your trade skills.
“Can I have my headphones? I asked Geoffrey, one of the two technicians.
“No, it’s a brain scan.”
There went my music. My plan had been to repeat “Ashokan Farewell” two-dozen times, and it’d be done.
Inside now, and to further establish parameters, I asked “Can I move at all?”
“You got to be still,” the other one admonished, “else we’ll get poor images, and have to do it all over again.”
Lord forbid.
“Ready? We’ll start now,” I was told.
Not really, but I wasn’t exactly going anywhere. Anywhere I craved too, that is.
To test the waters, I wiggled a smidgen.
“Be still.”
Well, the best still I knew was “turkey still.” So I flattened against an imaginary tree and for the 20 and more minutes the contraption did its wacky wizardry, I went turkey hunting.
Other than skill transference, I had one other weapon in my sanity arsenal. I pretended it was a mask:
“Put a washcloth over your eyes,” a knowing and compassionate friend had said, “to stymie the claustrophobia. What you can’t see, you can’t feel.”
Praise Hosanna. Between the mask and a turkey hunt, I knew after the first few minutes, I’d survive this atrocity of necessity. I’d tickled the call gently, and the Gobblemaster had lit up the bottom.
Wooo-haw!
I clucked and yelped anew like I’s in church, but it was then the unholy noises started.
BBRRT…BBRRT…BBRRT…blit, blit, blit, blit… BBRRT…BBRRT…BBRRT.
Well, that’s in semblance how I remember it anyway.
Though I just imagined he’d double-gobbled, and laying stone-still, kept on grinding. That bird’s comin’ I thought to myself! And he did, up from the bottom, thundering all the way. Never let up.
BBRRRT…BBRRRT…BBRRRT . . . blicka, blicka, blicka…blicka…BBRRT, BBRRT, BBRRT.
It was then I saw ’em. Their ol’ red heads tricklin’ up through the tree trunks. Ten minutes later, they stepped out onto the path. Three of ’em, black ’n’ blown up bigger than whiskey barrels, with all their appendages and equipment on parade. I clucked, an’ they stuck their necks out and gobbled again. All at once, like the comin’ o’ Jesus, so loud the ground (well, actually the machine) shook. ’Long then, I had the bead on the biggest one, and it’d been exhilarating, but was about to be over.
In fact, almost before I knew it, I felt myself being slowly ejected from the barrel of the thing like a spent shell (which I was), and it was over.
“That’s it,” they proclaimed. “We got it. Some good images.”
Happy Hallelujah, and the toms I figure had trickled on off, unscathed, back to the bottom. It’d been a fine hunt, and I’d gotten through the procedure much faster and happier than I reckoned I would. Thanks to the wander and wonder of the wilds.
I’d had one other such episode in my life, when I was younger, and went in innocent and raw. About five minutes in I thought I would have a clawing fit, have to kick and bite out—whatever it took. I warned ’em so! Then, that time last gasp, I shut my eyes and started running Pat, my Zip Zap dog, in a field trial. Absolute, only way I made it through. Truthfully.
In other periods of convention, when tension and aggravation seemed undefeatable, I, as likely you, have conjured the minuet of a happy spaniel through Minnesota bird cover, timberdoodles popping profusely sky-bound; the strength of a bow as a royal bull, roaring and fevered with lust, splintered brush and broke monumentally into a New Mexico mountain meadow; the jeopardy of a loaded rod at the soar and flap of a giant tarpon, mercurially sun-lit and terror-struck above Caribbean lean-water; the yonking double-notes of approaching geese, first glimpse of the distant flock, their flank to the flag, the rising magnetism and thrill of their dip, float, tack and settle into a Saskatchewan prairie spread. The fire in the Chessie’s eyes.
My, my.
Rust-red, wedge-headed canvasbacks sizzling across the roiled heave of angered waters, turning, swinging, the sting of sleet and gale stiff in your face, the commanding thump of the gun against your shoulder, the collapse and tumble of a drake to the foam; a serene wakening, a rockin’ chair on a plan’ation porch in Alabama with a first sip of java, a molasses biscuit, dogs anxious and barking, sun just up and mist lifting across a vast saffron savanna, at the barn horses under tack and the mule wagon being readied, the lilting voices of bobwhite, here, there, everywhere; the thumb-feathered delivery of an old wooden bait perfect center of a lily-pad pocket by an ancient black log, the great bulge and boil of the heavy bass you know is studying it intently below, before even you’ve twitched it the first time; the huge kudu wafting here—maybe there—through African bush at dusk; immobile, alabaster pointers or setters sculpted into a Canadian horizon by a bluff way-yonder; a startled, mama griz, a smoldering Cape buffalo at 15 yards, reeking with hate and disgust…unpredictable the next five seconds.
Play them out as you need. Our defenses run on and on.
In this increasingly harrowing and urbanistic digital age, when often we’re forced away from the places we love most, tossed into some briery and uncomfortable situation we’ve never known before, we’re better prepared to cope than maybe ever we believed. Next time you’re strained by stress, faced with a place or happening you think will have your back against the wall, it won’t.
We’ve trained across, and well, perhaps never even thinking about it.