By Joshua R. Quong
My son recently discovered a British television series. I walked into the house after mowing brush along the hedgerows to the theme song blaring from the television.
“What you got on there, boy?” I asked him.
“‘Dr. Who,'” he replied.
“You know your grandmother used to watched that?”
“Cool.”
I stood at the kitchen counter with a glass of water and watched a few minutes with him. Despite having all new cast and computer-generated special effects, the mid-2000s revamp still held true to the intensely corny sci-fi spirit the 1970s version had and that my mother loved.
The interdimensional time traveler ripping through the universe in a blue police box on galactic adventures to save humanity and alien-kind alike for king and country had my son enthralled. I was propelled back to the scent of microwavable Orville Redenbacher and the grainy waves of laser beams zapping through the cathode tube TV in my parents’ living room.
For a moment, I surfed the cosmic ouroboros in a widening whorl of nostalgia. Then I patted the boy on his head and went back outside to muck out dog shit from the kennels.
Searching through Time
There isn’t one among us who, plodding through the tedium, hasn’t pined for a past happiness or longed to leap ahead into a future expedition. Part of the human condition is trodding time’s twisted ribbon and planting our banner in plotted adventures that instantly fade into memory the very second that banner unfurls and flaps in the breeze.
However, for anyone who bleakly believes that once we reach a certain age our best years lay behind us and that “all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death” take note:
Time travel is real.
The last whitetail shot and the last trout hooked are tethered to our first whitetail and our first trout by an invisible sinew that, if we are lucky, stretches back to adolescence.
None of this is new. But it bears recapitulation and reinforcement.
“You’re only as young as you feel” isn’t a cliché, it’s an axiom but one that requires action. As with all things worthwhile, one must get his ass up and then get his ass out. Fishing rods and rifles are levers that pull open a portal to boyhood for a brief moment and lift the world’s weight into the ether. And when the trip is over, reentry may be a bitch, but the machete we use to hack through the vines and tendrils of our jungle seems a bit lighter as reels from that most recent adventure replay themselves in our mind’s eye.
The Time Machine Awaits Outdoors
And for those who are dying to start these jaunts back in time, but are paralyzed at the prospect, never fear. There are time machines everywhere. In the era of instant connectivity, it’s no great feat to find outfitters and outriders, guides and PHs with time machines fueled, revved, and ready. High adventure awaits, and all one need do is to board ship.
Cynics will dismiss this as an unabashed advert.
Fuck ‘em!
The sad bastard socking money into his health insurance plan would do better putting that same amount into a “fishing fund” or “hunting account.”
A few years ago I received a phone call from the eldest son of one of my hunting clients. He informed me that his father had died while opening a gate to a cow pasture. The death wasn’t gruesome. The 87-year-old man simply sat down on the ground, rested against the gate post, and ascended to Glory.
A week after the funeral and amid cataloging and boxing the old bird hunter’s possessions, his sons found an envelope in his gun safe. Inside it was cash and written on the outside were the words “Quail Hunts.”
After my condolences, the son said, “I just thought you’d like to know that he always loved hunting with y’all. He said that it kept him young.”
