Category → Family
Good luck today, deer hunters
Like many Pennsylvania families today, ours went afield for the morning. My son, having watched an enormous buck run past us in the early morning dark, minutes before shooting light, decided his feet were cold enough and it was time for him to head in.
None in our hunting party got a shot off, yet, but we are gearing up for an afternoon drive, usually productive.
Good luck today, deer hunters! Hunt safely!
Ode to bear camp
Not too long ago, just a few years, actually, a couple hundred thousand Pennsylvania hunters would gather together for the three days before Thanksgiving.
They’d meet under old tar paper shacks, new half-round log cabins, and “camps” both fancier and more rustic. Wherever they gathered was “bear camp,” the place from which they would sally forth in the state’s most rugged topography in search of a lifetime trophy, one of Pennsylvania’s big black bears.
This 100-year tradition that spawned many long Thanksgiving holidays and peaceful family gatherings among the quiet outer fringes of civilization was inadvertently destroyed by the introduction of a Saturday opener for bear hunting.
Now, pressed for time, bear hunters can get out on one day and say they tried. Lacking Sunday hunting for bears, these hunters might hang out, cut some firewood, and then return home to watch a football game Sunday evening. Fewer hunters make camp together for the remaining Monday through Wednesday season. Sure, hunters are out there, and some camps have tagged incredible numbers of bears in recent years, but the momentum of camp itself is gone, fragmented by the introduction of Saturday hunting and the absence of Sunday hunting.
To say that bear camp was a unique amalgamation of individuals is a gross understatement. Used to be that only the crazy die hard bear hunters would be so driven as to take off of work. Now, so many guys come and go on Saturday that the flavor and chemistry of bear camp is changed, and for the poorer.
I’m an advocate for Sunday hunting. Lots of reasons why, but the loss of that bear camp feeling is a good one by itself. If bear season opened Saturday and continued through Sunday, the old experience would be resurrected. I miss it, because I miss the guys who come up now to only hunt Saturday, and by the time I arrive Sunday, they’re packing up or already gone. Gone are the easy times catching up about our kids, families, and work.
Now, bear camp has evolved two “shifts,” the Saturday hunters, and the oddball crew made of guys who can think of no better way to spend time than out in steep, remote areas, hanging off cliffs, falling down steep ravines, and sitting around with buddies back at camp at night to laugh about it. Two shifts, same camp. Same roof, different people.
Sad. I want that old feeling back. Gimme Sunday hunting for bears, please, so I can reconnect with the old friends I hunted bears with for over a decade before the advent of a Saturday opener.
UPDATE: Well, plenty of people have weighed in on this essay. Seems that Saturday has opened up bear hunting to more kids than ever before, and more hunters in general. Concentrating most of the hunters on one day is a fact of lacking Sunday hunting. And no one disagreed that the momentum has now been lost on the week days.
Didn’t I get to keep my health insurance?
We were told we’d keep our current health insurance, if we wanted to.
That is untrue and it was probably a lie.
Over the past two weeks, our family has received a dozen calls from our insurance company, trying to get us to agree to allow major changes to the plan we’ve had for many years. This is the result of ObamaCare, which really has at its core a goal of forced single-payer insurance, which afflicts most social democracies. You know, three times the cost, half the service.
Self insurance is not allowed by ObamaCare, oddly, as though even those who choose to spend their money on healthcare must share in the same mediocre misery as everyone else.
As usual, old friends who assured me they’d call out Obama if he went off the path are nowhere to be heard. They won’t or cannot admit what a catastrophe ObamaCare is.
When Obama said we’d be able to keep our insurance and our doctor under ObamaCare, he was lying. The test is in this moment now, when he can honor his pledge, or break it. Obama is breaking it.
Are you Obama fans happy?
Diary entry for a day in Central PA
With two business meetings up north and a pile of work to do even farther, the drive up the Susquehanna Valley the other day was enjoyable because so many of the trees still held color along the river banks and out on the islands. Yellows and oranges reflected in the water, and so did the blue sky. Quite peaceful and serene. Not a bad way to spend time driving. Especially when I consider how most Americans spend their time on the road — miserable gridlock, hideous urban concrete jungles, rude drivers. My driving is mostly a Zen experience. That is quintessential Central PA, after all.
Catawissa, PA, is not really on anyone’s destination planner, being snug between ragged coal country, fertile farm country, and pretty river bottom land, and well off the beaten path. To go to Catawissa, you really have to want to go, or have a real clear reason for going. The one horse there moved on long ago, and is now pulling some Amishman’s buggy across the river. Catawissa is daggone quiet in a countryside that is…well, really quiet.
But Catawissa is worth visiting for one simple reason: Ironmen Arms & Antiques is located there.
Jared and Tom have recently opened Ironmen Arms, what is and would have to be the nicest gun room in Pennsylvania (with apologies to Joel in Ligonier), filled with militaria, historic artifacts, and of course, fine firearms. The finest firearms, for the most discriminating collectors. Really high quality guns, like matching pairs (yes, pairs, not just one pair) of Parker shotguns, sequential pairs of high grade Parkers, and high grade LC Smiths, European double rifles, and on and on. For those of you bidding on the mint condition Remington 700 BDL in .223, I can tell you after holding it and inspecting it at length, it is every bit as perfect as it appears on line. If you are a serious collector, that gun is as good as it gets. The Remington BDL is becoming a collector’s item, oddly, because plastic stocks and stainless steel seem to be all the rage now, as soul-less and devoid of personality, art, and craftsmanship as those combinations are. I have no idea how someone hunts with these new guns, because I, myself, have deeply personal relationships with each of my firearms. To achieve that, they’ve got to look good as well as function properly. I’m not disgracing some wild animal by terminating it with anything but the highest combination of form and function. Aesthetics are necessary, because hunting isn’t just killing. It’s a statement about one’s values. Maybe I’m an “artiste.”
Or maybe it’s just a sign of my advancing age, or the arrival of The Age of China and All Things Plastic. I refuse to give in to sterile surgical steel and hard plastic, when I can hold the body of a beautiful tree in my hands. Apparently I am in good company with Jared and Tom, because they, too, like old wood and new steel, and old wood and old steel, too.
In this economic environment, entrepreneurs like Jared and Tom are brave. But they offer things that are not easy to get by any standard, and which are in high demand. And they are both nice men, interested in the fellow gun nerds of the world, and willing to share their bounty and knowledge with you.
So, if you find yourself traversing Pennsylvania on I-80, and you are passing by Bloomsburg, call ahead and set up an appointment with Ironmen Arms. Stop in and spend a half hour, or an hour, make some new friends, and buy an old Japanese sword, a rare bayonet, or a new rifle for that hunt of a lifetime. I know I will be back.
Ironmen Arms: 570 356-6126, jjvpo@verizon.net, 561 Numidia Drive, Catawissa, PA 17820. Their excellent website is at http://www.ironmenarms.com/
When a family has a birthday
When a family’s oldest child arrives at the age of 18 years, it’s not just that young person’s birthday. Given how much effort, struggle, work, exasperation, growth, learning, mistakes, love, late night affection, cuddling, coaching, and sacrifices have been made and done with that one person alone, it is really a birthday for the whole family. We all arrived here together.
Happy Birthday, my love!
50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr march
On the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s nation-changing march, let us look closely into what has been achieved since that time, and what has failed.
On the list of achievements we have the definite growth in black voting and a far-reaching acceptance, even embrace of dark skin color among European-Americans. The Negro saga in America is both a painful story, and also a story of redemption, as blacks have found their way into any and all professions they desire, including baseball, football, tennis, track and field, medicine, technology, theology, law, academia, entertainment, and government.
That said, there is a key failure that King would have never imagined, and that is the self-segregation of much of the black community, and the seeming desire for perpetual victim status contrary to the facts and opportunities presented. Today, despite enormous advances on every front, black unemployment is three times higher than whites.
I say this in the wake of months of debate about Martin and Zimmerman, and newly surfaced and long-suppressed news items about black-on-black violence and nakedly racist black-on-white violence.
The failure of much of the black community is no secret, and people like me are not going to stand by idly and watch it happen, and we will not fear being called “racist” for identifying the problem and proposing solutions. Nor will I become a racist in reaction to someone else’s racism.
Racists believe in racial determinism. Racists believe that skin color is an indication of both physical and mental ability. Like the vast vast vast majority of European-Americans, I reject those goofball notions. I do embrace a color-blind America that rewards citizens for the quantity and quality of their work, and for the content of their character.
My commitment to the success of the black community is to say that good, well-meaning people like me are here to help, to lend a hand, to support you and your local institutions. I will say that the anti-white racism in the black community is both sad, and alarming. But I will not say that America is a racist nation. Racism is a corrosive, destructive, evil thing, and it eats the people who live it.
When I watch MLK’s speeches, I am overcome with feelings of inspiration and love. MLK saw an America that had potential, whose equal opportunity was the signature of a free society that the American dream promised. Call me naive, but I am sticking to my silly ideas of equality and brotherhood. MLK wanted it that way.
Last day of summer…so sad
It is tough to know who enjoys summer time more, me or my kids. Every summer we emphasize time together camping, on day trips to historic sites, beach trips and saltwater fishing, and both day camp and sleepover camp. We spend lots of time together, and by the end of each summer I feel like a big kid.
I admit that it’s hard to say goodbye. But it’s necessary.
Race Relations in America, Justice for Chris Lane, etc.
Guest writer Patrick J. Buchanan says it best about the issue of race in America, in the piece below. Buchanan has plenty of his own baggage, but in this piece he hits the nail on the head. It’s an excellent read, originally published at http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/dead-souls-of-a-cultural-revolution/
Dead Souls of a Cultural Revolution
By Patrick J. Buchanan
August 22, 2013
Last Friday, Christopher Lane, a 22-year-old Australian here on a baseball scholarship, was shot and killed while jogging in Duncan, Okla., population 23,000. He died where he fell.
Police have three suspects, two black and one white. The former said they were bored and decided to shoot Lane for “the fun of it.”
As Lane was white and the shooter black, racism has surfaced as a motive. Thursday came reports that killing a white man may have been an initiation rite for the black teens in joining some offshoot of the Crips or Bloods.
What happened in Oklahoma and the reaction, or lack of reaction to it, tells us much about America in 2013, not much of it good.
Teenagers who can shoot and kill a man out of summertime boredom are moral barbarians, dead souls.
But who created these monsters? Where did they come from? Surely one explanation lies in the fact that the old conscience-forming and character-forming institutions – home, church, school and a moral and healthy culture fortifying basic truths – have collapsed. And the community hardest hit is Black America.
Black mobs routinely terrorize cities across the country, but the media and government are silent. Read the detailed account of rampant racial crime in “White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Race Riots to America.”
If we go back to the end of World War II, 90 percent of black families consisted of a mother and father and children raised and disciplined by their parents. The churches to which these families went on Sundays were stronger. Black schools may have been largely segregated, but they were also the transmission belts of patriotism and traditional values rooted in biblical truths and a Christian faith.
Though such schools graduated hardworking, law-abiding and productive citizens, today they would be closed as unconstitutional.
Indeed, all of those character- and conscience-forming institutions of yesterday are in an advanced state of decline today.
Seventy-three percent of black kids are born to single moms. Black kids who make it to 12th grade may often be found reading at seventh-, eighth- or ninth-grade levels. In some cities the black dropout rate can hit as high as 50 percent.
Drugs are readily available. And among black males ages 18 to 29, in urban areas, often a third are in prison or jail, or on probation or parole, or walking around with a criminal record.
Where do the kids get their ideas of right and wrong, good and evil? In homes where the father is absent and the TV is always on. From radios tuned in to rap and hip-hop. From films where Hollywood values prevail and the shooting never stops. From street gangs that sometimes form the only families these kids have ever known.
Still, crime has fallen since 1990, we are told.
And so it has. But that is only because the baby boomers, the largest population cohort in our history, passed out of the high-crime age group a quarter of a century ago, and because the jail and prison population in America has tripled.
What kind of leadership do we see today in Black America?
What can be said for an NAACP that was lately demanding a Justice Department investigation of a rodeo clown running around a bull ring in rural Missouri in an Obama mask, but cannot find its voice to address a black-on-white atrocity in Middle America?
When Trayvon Martin was shot to death in a murky incident in Sanford, Fla., Jesse Jackson rushed there to declare: “Blacks are under attack. … Killing us is big business.” Trayvon was “shot down in cold blood by a vigilante … murdered and martyred.”
After Chris Lane’s cold-blooded murder, Jesse tweeted: This sort of thing is to be “frowned upon.”
If I had a son, said President Obama, he would have looked like Trayvon; 35 years ago, I could have been Trayvon. Can the president not find his voice to speak to the parents of Chris Lane?
Since Lyndon Johnson took office, 50 years ago, we have spent trillions on his programs for health care, housing, education, food stamps, welfare and civil rights. Are we living in that Great Society we were promised?
In that same decade, we were told that the social, cultural and moral revolution bursting forth on the campuses would rid us of the repressive old-time morality and Old Time Religion, and lead to a more equal, just, humane and better America, a beacon to mankind.
Yet, are not the killers of Chris Lane who shot him for the fun of it the “do-your-own-thing!” children of that cultural revolution?
The death of Trayvon was said to be reflective of the real America, a country where black folks live in constant fear of white vigilantes and white racist cops. What nonsense.
In the real America, interracial violence is overwhelmingly black-on-white. Even if the media will not report it, everybody knows it.
And journalists will not dig into the numbers that prove it, for the truth would undermine their ideology and contradict the narrative that governs and gives meaning to their lives.
For liberals, America is always “Mississippi Burning.” It just has to be that way.