I’ve been “checked out” of blog writing
for a number of weeks. Whenever I sat
down to write anything I felt pangs of guilt for not having written for my
blog. I felt as though I was cheating
those who have been reading my musings.
The problem is that I didn’t want to write anything and the few post
that I have made during these weeks of absence were little more than apologies
for not posting.
Not good.
But, I was thinking about something that
was troubling me. When I get into one of
these “mood” projects I frequently lose myself in my thoughts and write these
thoughts down in one of my notebooks.
The whole process is part of a mental movement that begins with a mental
“tick.” Something that I’ve seen, heard,
or read, strikes me as odd and I find myself returning to it and thinking about
it. How long it takes me to resolve the
issue to my satisfaction, or at least to a point where I want to present it to
others, is not predictable. I’ve got many notebooks, not all of them full,
but into which I write my thoughts whether for something I want to write or a
problem I am wrestling with. A couple of
notebooks have notes, jottings, drawings and whatever else seemed to be relevant
to a problem that I first started writing about several years ago and I still
think about and write on.
My blog issue hasn’t been completely resolved
but it is something that I want to “bring out.” My mental twitch is that writing a blog as “The
Thinking Hunter” is somehow incomplete.
Besides hunting I am an avid angler and this spring I will be putting my
boat back in the water and hopefully spending more time on nearby lakes. Should I expand my blog from “The Thinking
Hunter” to “The Thinking Angler & Hunter”?
Or, as some of my notes suggest, would writing about both angling and
hunting in one blog confuse readers? The
pages of my notebook on this topic seem equally divided with thoughts that
adding angling would be confusing pages of notes that explore reasons for
making the change.
Now, to some readers this may seem like
a trivial topic, but I believe it begs the question of whether there truly is a
strong link between angling and hunting.
We know that Wayne Pacelle and his crowd, the sworn enemy of all anglers
and hunters, has a life mission of ending hunting and fishing. That alone should create a strong link
between angling and hunting.
I am not sure it does.
At the SHOT Show I had the pleasure of
having dinner with a small group of bloggers, mostly gun bloggers, and as I listened
to them I realized the distance between the hunter and the gun enthusiast is
real and often wide. That gap is created
by the number of issues between the two groups; therefore a similar gap,
between hunters and anglers, exists and is equally wide.
What troubles me, and is driving my question
is that by these gaps we are allowing ourselves to become segregated by our
activities rather than united by them.
By focusing my Internet musings on hunting I tend to believe that I am
contributing to the problem. There is
an old truism about who’s ox is being gored and suddenly all of us in the
outdoors seem to be thinking more about our personal ox, that is the ox of
shooting, the ox of hunting, the ox of bowhunting, ox of shooting, ad
infinitum.
I believe that those of us who have
opted to focus our work on the issues that surround our preferred outdoor activities
should consider stepping back from that gap we’ve created by the “single issue”
approach to the preservation of our outdoor activities and lifestyle. The divisions between shooting, hunting, and
fishing, are providing openings through which our opponents are driving wedges to
weaken us.
This is not a new problem but one I’ve
been aware of thought about throughout my career, but it is being exacerbated
by the explosion of social media and the gaps are becoming wider.
When I think about what I value in my
outdoor activities I cannot separate my hunting from my fishing as favoring one
over the other. Nor can I separate the
values I put on shooting, whether casual plinking or shooting at known distance
targets, from my hunting. I believe the
outdoors is a lifestyle that runs the entire spectrum of emotions. Casting a fly to a feeding trout in a beaver
pond produces as much excitement and accomplishment as a center bull’s-eye shot
from several hundred yards or finally shooting a deer that I’ve hunted for
days. In the outdoors have too much in
common, too many shared emotions, too much to lose, to allow those gaps to grow
and perhaps become festering wounds between us.
Do you agree?
glg
