And Now We Shall Do Manly Things by Craig Heimbuch Read Free Book Online

point—a paranoid walk, a frigidly long sit in the woods, and a few birds that may as well have been tied to a tree.
    It’s possible that my hunting aversion has something to do with never needing to do it—for sport, entertainment, or provision. When I was looking for fun on a Saturday, I went to the movies, to a museum, to a coffee shop.
    My conception of hunting has always been a bit, well, simplistic.
    Step 1: Outfit yourself with a device designed to accelerate a projectile at an alarming rate.
    Step 2: Position yourself in a place where animals like to hang out—either to eat, sleep, or breed.
    Step 3: Identify creature with a beating heart and instinct to flee.
    Step 4: Remove heartbeat.
    Step 5: Serve with potatoes.
    The subtleties, strategies, complexities, and, even, potential enjoyment of hunting have, for most of my life, been lost on me. I never got it. I never understood why my dad got so excited to go deer hunting with his brothers. I didn’t get it in the same way I didn’t get weight lifting. It all seemed so caveman to me, so midwestern and simple. Me make boom-boom. Me lift heavy rock. Me beat on me chest. I thought myself to be more sophisticated than that, more urbane.
    A big part of that has to do with my youthful longing to be more sophisticated than that, to be more urbane, to be more Eastern. I thought being from the Midwest was akin to being an athlete born with legs of two different lengths. I thought being successful would be harder for me because I was from the Midwest. I wanted the ocean. I wanted New York and Maine. I wanted to feel like I was from somewhere instead of the nowhere that actually was home. And if not New England, what about the Pacific Northwest? Portland: land of hippies and homemade everything. The Cascades, a place so beautiful it takes your breath away. California even. Talk to someone from California and they will tell about their youthful proximity to really interesting places like Los Angeles or San Francisco.
    Then, in college, it was the South. Walker Percy and Faulkner. I was fascinated by the strange dignity of the place, despite having never really been there. I managed a minor in college in the history of the American South, but I have never been to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, or Arkansas (unless you count a brief layover at the Little Rock airport on my way home from my bachelor party in Las Vegas). I’ve managed brief visits to both Carolinas and Georgia. I’ve driven through Tennessee on a couple of occasions and, now that I live in Cincinnati, I often find myself having lunch in Kentucky. After college, I took a job writing for a newspaper in Winchester, Virginia, a tiny but historic hamlet in the northern thumb of the Old Dominion. I have to say I adored living there. I fell madly in love with the Shenandoah Valley, with biscuits and gravy, and the patois of the people, all friendly as an afternoon rain. I loved driving through the Blue Ridge and, after a couple of months living there, I vowed to never again live above the Mason-Dixon.
    That lasted less than a year when marriage and a job (along with its relative proximity to family) brought me back to Ohio. Once again, I felt like a man stranded, a man who wanted no place else but someplace else. I had neither mountain nor city, neither ocean nor charm. I come from Wisconsin. I come from Ohio. I come from cornfields and the Rust Belt. How could I ever be interesting coming from places like that? How could I ever be happy?
    Something happened in my late twenties, though. I began to appreciate where I come from, to love the Midwest. It used to be, when I was a child, boring and arduous to drive to Iowa to visit my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins. There’s nothing but cornfields, there’s nothing but nothing. And when you get there, it’s boring. There’s no mall or distraction. There’s only outside, and outside isn’t that interesting. But when I