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

had kids, I came to appreciate the nothing as being something. I found myself wanting to go there, wanting to drive among the cornfields for hours on end, to smell the earth and eat the food and be among the people who mattered most to me. I wanted that connection to the people and places that I come from, and I began to see the Midwest as something else entirely. I began to see it as home.
    And yet, it is not home. Not really anyway. I come from the suburbs, the manicured outskirts of once-great cities. While I tend to tell people I am a Wisconsinite—having been born in the north-central region of the state and living there almost entirely through my first-grade year—I am really an Ohioan through and through. I claim cheese and birch forests, but I bleed the west side of Cleveland. I complain about the suburbs, with their matching minimalls, sidewalks, and above-average schools, yet the suburbs are the only place I feel at home. So even when I am among family in Iowa, I feel separated, from the place, from the legacy, from the two-dozen cousins. They all seem to fit in there, while I feel like a tourist.
    I’m not fully midwestern. Instead, like the Starbucks/mattress store/Target/Claire’s boutique combinations that seem to exist in the twenty-mile concentric circles that surround American cities, I am somewhere in between. I am the suburb personified. I am bland and predictable. I don’t require a lot of work to understand, and I don’t offer too much by way of insight or fascination.
    So, if I am to reconcile with where I am from, if I am to become a real Midwestern Man, I have to up the ante. I have to learn the essential traits and inhabit the role; I must do something bold, brave, something I would never have considered when I was young and dreaming of elsewhere.
    I have to hunt. It’s the only way. There was, of course, more to it than that. I wanted to stand above a still-steaming carcass and think, I did that. It wasn’t bloodlust or a need for wanton destruction; it was a desire to feel fully formed as a man, to go off into the woods and kill an animal, provide sustenance for my young family, accomplish something I had always been too afraid to try.

5
    Coming Out of the Hunting Closet
    T ry telling someone these days that you’re going to learn how to hunt and see what kind of reaction you receive. You may as well tell someone that you’re thinking about taking up self-mutilation or dabbling in the study of classic New England witchcraft. Up to this point, my mission had remained secret. I trolled websites late at night after Rebecca had fallen asleep on the couch watching recorded soap operas. I was giving myself private lessons in what it would take, what I would need, what it would mean to be a hunter.
    In the world in which I lived, the comfortable world of suburbia, hunters were rare. At parties, Little League games, and family events, the men were much more likely to talk about the market and how the president’s latest tax proposal/health care initiative/foreign policy initiative was playing havoc with their portfolio. Being a journalist, I could follow the headlines, but when it came to relating to their personal economic upheaval, I was blessedly unable to relate. My portfolio consisted mainly of savings bonds my grandmother had sent me every year on my birthday and the retirement account the HR director at work set up for me on my first day on the job. There were, of course, other topics of conversation—sports, other businessy stuff, and the dilemma of choosing between golfing at their country club or a friend’s country club the following weekend. It’s the curse of living in the toniest, newest suburb in town and spending time almost exclusively with people ten years your senior. It’s not that I don’t like these people. Quite the opposite in fact. I like them very much. It’s just that I don’t often have a lot in common with