A Fine and Pleasant Misery, page 1
To Darlene and Mom
Table of Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Fine and Pleasant Misery
A Dog for All Seasons
The Modified Stationary Panic
Grogan’s War Surplus
The Big Trip
The Theory and Application of Old Men
The Two-Wheeled ATV
The Backyard Safari
Shooting the Chick-a-nout Narrows
The Miracle of the Fish Plate
The Backpacker
Great Outdoor Gadgets Nobody Ever Invented
The Purist
The Outfit
Kid Camping
How to Fish a Crick
Further Teachings of Rancid Crabtree
The Great Cow Plot
The Mountain Man
The Rescue
“I’ll Never Forget Old 5789-A”
The B’ar
The Rendezvous
Cigars, Logging Trucks, and Know-It-Alls
But Where’s the Park, Papa?
A Yup of a Different Color
Mountain Goats Never Say “Cheese!”
Also by
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
I WOULD LIKE to acknowledge my debt to Jack Samson, editor of Field & Stream, who is largely responsible for bringing this book into existence; to Clare Conley, former editor of Field & Stream, who first detected some faint promise in me as a writer and whose encouragement and direction sustained me in the early years; to my mother, as an inexpendable source of wit and good humor; to my sister (The Troll) for provoking me into writing; to my wife, who corrects my spelling, grammar and taste; to my friend and colleague Dick Hoover, who daily endures the indignities of close association with a humorist; and to my friends Lloyd Humphrey and Vern Schultz, who have lived many of these stories.
Introduction
I GUESS Pat McManus sort of sneaked up on me. I had been editing his stories for a couple of years—from back around 1970—and I really didn’t read Pat that much. Sometimes an editor is too busy editing to settle down and really enjoy the material.
Oh, I knew he was good and everyone on the staff kept telling me how funny he was. And there was the constant flow of reader mail demanding more of McManus in Field & Stream. A typical reader letter would go something like: “My husband and son have been subscribing to your magazine for years because they are both ardent hunters and fishermen, but I never read it because I am a golfer. But the other day I happened to read a story in Field & Stream by Patrick McManus. He is really funny! I think he is a riot! Now when the magazine comes in I look for McManus before I give the magazine to my husband or son. More! [Signed] Mrs … .”
Then one day one of Pat’s stories came in and I was not bogged down in some administrative chore; I put my feet up on the desk and began to read. The story was called “A Dog for All Seasons,” and by the time I had gotten to the third page I was, literally, doubled over. My secretary said she had never—in all those years—heard me laugh so hard—or for so long. The more I read the funnier McManus became.
The damned dog, which he had as a kid and which you will read about in this collection of his best stories, was called Strange. His name in the beginning had been Stranger, wrote McManus, in the faint hope that he was just passing through when they first saw him. Strange was that most wonderful of all dogs: a mutt. A mutt with no redeeming features.
According to Pat, the dog had only two chores around his house: to attack prowlers, especially those whose character bore the slightest resemblance to his own, and to protect the chickens. On the second point, Strange always thought it was the other way around. He was also constantly making snide remarks about Pat’s grandmother’s cooking.
He insisted on following McManus when he went hunting or fishing—something Pat claims he tried to prevent.
“An army of Cossacks could have bivouacked on our front lawn for the night without his knowing a thing about it,” McManus wrote, “but he could hear the sound of a shotgun shell being dropped into a flannel shirt pocket at a hundred yards.”
Strange made slightly less noise going through the woods than an armored division through a bamboo jungle. Nevertheless, says Pat, they usually managed to get a few birds, apparently because the birds thought that anything that made that much noise couldn’t possibly be hunting!
“My dog,” says McManus of Strange, “believed in a mixed bag: grouse, ducks, pheasants, rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, gophers, skunks and porcupines. If we saw a cow or a horse, he would shout ‘There’s a big one! Shoot! Shoot!’”
Well, by now I am sure you see what I mean about McManus and his sneaking up on you. I quickly did three things: wiped the tears from my eyes; called Pat at his home in Spokane, Washington; and offered him a full-time job as an associate editor of Field & Stream. I have never been sorry, and I am delighted the editors of my competing outdoor magazines were just enough dumber than I was about how funny Pat is. No, I did four things, come to think of it. I dug up all the back issues I could find in the office for which Pat had written and took them all home with me that night. I read every one of them, and my wife was so annoyed at me for completely ignoring her that she went to have dinner with her sister. I never knew she was gone until she returned home at about midnight to find me sleeping on the den couch—a delighted smile still on my face.
A number of you reading this will remember the great American humorist Robert Benchley. You younger readers may not, but you sure missed a funny man if you never read anything he wrote. He used to write for all sorts of magazines, especially the New Yorker. He also wrote books, and I guess a lot of his talent was inherited by his kids because a couple of them also write—including his son Peter who wrote Jaws.
Well, Pat McManus is the Bob Benchley of the outdoors. When I heard my close friend and associate Ed Zern say he thought Pat was one of the funniest writers he had ever read I knew we had a winner, because Ed—of “Exit Laughing” fame in Field & Stream —has got to be one of the deans of outdoor humor.
We all have our favorite McManus stories and I guess mine (along with “A Dog for All Seasons”) is “The Modified Stationary Panic”—also found in this collection which I have had the pleasure and privilege of editing. Pat was off on his own cloud nine about how easy it is to get lost in the woods and how the experts on survival caution everyone not to panic. Pat disagrees with this theory. He feels if one gets lost he or she should, especially if they are a panicker as is Pat, get the panic out of the system all at once. He claims that holding panic in may cause severe psychological disorders and even stomach cramps and baldness. Over the years, Pat says, he has been involved in several dozen panics, usually as a participant, sometimes simply as an observer.
“Most of my panics have been of a solitary nature,” he says, “but on several occasions I have organized and led group panics, one of which involved twenty-some people. In that instance, a utility company took advantage of the swath we cut through the forest and built a power line along it.”
Pat says back in the earlier days of his panicking he utilized what he refers to as the Full Bore Linear Panic (FBLP). This is where you run flat out in a straight line until the course of your panic is deflected by a large rock or tree, after which you get up and sprint off in the new direction.
“One time when we were kids,” says Pat, “my friend Retch and I panicked right through a logging crew and the loggers dropped what they were doing and ran along with us under the impression we were being pursued by something. When they found out all we were doing was panicking, they fell back, cursing, and returned to their work.”
Nowadays, Pat says, he will advise against undertaking a Full Bore Linear Panic unless, of course, one is equipped with a stout heart, a three-day supply of food, and a valid passport.
Only McManus could have thought up “The Great Cow Plot”—also contained in this collection. All of us have been harassed by cows while fly fishing for trout, but nobody but Pat could have realized the cows had gotten together and planned the war against us. Biologists and science-fiction buffs have speculated about the earth’s takeover by the insect world, but Pat suggests perhaps the bovine species poses a far greater threat. Even when he plans a fishing trip forty miles back into the wilderness, he says, a herd of cows usually will get wind of it and go on a forced march to get there before Pat does.
“If I was on the nineteenth floor of a department store and stopped to net a guppy out of an aquarium,” he says, “a cow would get off the elevator and rush over to offer advice.”
Beginning to see what I am talking about? McManus is not only funny, there are more than a few suspicions around the Field & Stream editorial offices that just maybe Pat ain’t wrapped all that tight! But if he has come unglued let us all hope he stays that way!
There is altogether too little humor in the outdoor field. What with all the protectionists telling us we are responsible for every endangered species from the Arizona pupfish to the California condor, we could use a few laughs—those of us who love the outdoors.
Like a great many fine writers Pat went into newspaper work upon graduation from Washington State University in 1956. Also, he has been a television reporter and later an English teacher. He earned an M.A. in English from his alma mater in 1962 and now teaches at Eastern Washington University—with the rank of professor.
But it is early life that prepared him for his outdoor writing. He was born and raised in Idaho where his mother was a schoolteacher. He grew up on a small farm with a creek running through it—like the creek running through so many of his stories. He writes about the outdoors well because he has done a number of things in it besides fish, camp and hunt. He has been in heavy construction work, a truck driver, high scaler, grease monkey, and a groundman for a power line construction crew.
You will never forget his cast of characters—from his boyhood pal Retch; his mentor, old Rancid Crabtree; Grogan, of war surplus fame; Grandma; and least of all Strange, the dog with no redeeming features.
Look out world. Here comes Pat McManus!
Jack Samson, Editor
Field & Stream
A Fine and Pleasant Misery
MODERN TECHNOLOGY has taken most of the misery out of the outdoors. Camping is now aluminum-covered, propane-heated, foam-padded, air-conditioned, bug-proofed, flip-topped, disposable, and transistorized. Hardship on a modern camping trip is blowing a fuse on your electric underwear, or having the battery peter out on your Porta-Shaver. A major catastrophe is spending your last coin on a recorded Nature Talk and then discovering the camp Comfort & Sanitation Center (featuring forest green tile floors and hot showers) has pay toilets.
There are many people around nowadays who seem to appreciate the fact that a family can go on an outing without being out. But I am not one of them. Personally, I miss the old-fashioned misery of old-fashioned camping.
Young people just now starting out in camping probably have no idea that it wasn’t but a couple of decades ago that people went camping expecting to be miserable. Half the fun of camping in those days was looking forward to getting back home. When you did get back home you prolonged the enjoyment of your trip by telling all your friends how miserable you had been. The more you talked about the miseries of life in the woods, the more you wanted to get back out there and start suffering again. Camping was a fine and pleasant misery.
A source of much misery in old-fashioned camping was the campfire, a primitive contrivance since replaced by gas stoves and propane heaters. It is a well-known fact that your run-of-the-mill imbecile can casually flick a soggy cigar butt out of a car window and burn down half a national forest. The campfire, on the other hand, was a perverse thing that you could never get started when you needed it most. If you had just fallen in an icy stream or were hopping around barefooted on frosted ground (uncommon now but routine then), you could not ignite the average campfire with a bushel of dry tinder and a blowtorch.
The campfire was of two basic kinds: the Smudge and the Inferno. The Smudge was what you used when you were desperately in need of heat. By hovering over the Smudge the camper could usually manage to thaw the ice from his hands before being kippered to death. Even if the Smudge did burst into a decent blaze, there was no such thing as warming up gradually. One moment the ice on your pants would show slight signs of melting and the next the hair on your legs was going up in smoke. Many’s the time I’ve seen a blue and shivering man hunched over a crackling blaze suddenly eject from his boots and pants with a loud yell and go bounding about in the snow, the front half of him the color of boiled lobster, the back half still blue.
The Inferno was what you always used for cooking. Experts on camp cooking claimed you were supposed to cook over something called “a bed of glowing coals.” But what everyone cooked over was the Inferno. The “bed of glowing coals” was a fiction concocted by experts on camp cooking. Nevertheless the camp cook was frequently pictured, by artists who should have known better, as a tranquil man hunkered down by a bed of glowing coals, turning plump trout in the frying pan with the blade of his hunting knife. In reality the camp cook was a wildly distraught individual who charged through waves of heat and speared savagely with a long sharp stick at a burning hunk of meat he had tossed on the grill from a distance of twenty feet.
The rollicking old fireside songs originated in the efforts of other campers to drown out the language of the cook and prevent it from reaching the ears of little children. Meat roasted over a campfire was either raw or extra well done, but the cook usually came out medium rare.
The smoke from the campfire always blew directly in the eyes of the campers, regardless of wind direction. No one minded much, since it prevented you from seeing what you were eating. If a bite of food showed no signs of struggle, you considered this a reasonable indication that it came from the cook pot and was not something just passing through.
Aluminum foil was not used much in those days, and potatoes were simply thrown naked into the glowing coals, which were assumed to lie somewhere at the base of the Inferno. After about an hour the spuds were raked out with a long stick. Most of the potatoes would be black and hard as rocks, and some of them would be rocks, but it didn’t make much difference either way. Successive layers of charcoal would be cracked off until a white core of potato was uncovered, usually the size of a walnut or maybe a pea. This would be raw. Sometimes there would be no white core at all, and these potatoes were said to be “cooked through.” Either that or they were rocks.
There were other fine sources of camping misery besides campfires. One of the finest was the old-fashioned bedroll. No matter how well you tucked in the edges of the bedroll it always managed to spring a leak in the middle of the night. A wide assortment of crawly creatures, driven by a blast of cold air, would stream in through the leak. Efforts to close the gap merely opened new leaks, and finally you just gave up and lay there, passing the time until sunrise—approximately thirty-seven hours—by counting off insects one by one as they froze to death on your quivering flesh.
My bedroll, made from one of my grandmother’s patchwork quilts, was an oven compared to the first “sleeping bag” I ever spent a night in. My inconstant boyhood companion, “Stupe” Jones, told me one September day that I would not need my bedroll on our outing that night because he had discovered an honest-to-goodness sleeping bag in the attic of his house and it was big enough for both of us to sleep in. Now when I saw what a compact little package a real sleeping bag could be folded up into, I became immediately ashamed of my own cumbersome bedroll, which rolled up into a bundle the size of a bale of hay. I was glad that I had not marred the esthetics of our little camping trip by toting the gross thing along. That night we spread the sleeping bag out on a sandy beach alongside Sand Creek, stripped to our shorts (we had both been taught never to sleep with our clothes on), and hopped into the bag. The effect was much like plunging through thin ice into a lake. Not wishing to insult my friend or his sleeping bag, I stifled a shrill outcry with a long, deep gasp disguised in turn as a yawn. Stupe said through chattering teeth that the sleeping bag was bound to warm up, since it was, after all, a sleeping bag, wasn’t it? No two lovers ever clung to each other with such tenacity as did those two eight-year-old boys through that interminable night. Later we discovered that some sleeping bags come in two parts, one a nice padded liner and the other a thin canvas cover. What we had was the latter.
One of the finest misery-producing camping trips I’ve ever been on occurred when I was about fourteen. Three friends and I were hiking to a lake high up in the Idaho Rockies. What had been a poor, struggling drizzle when we left home worked its way up and became a highly successful blizzard in the mountains. Before long our climbing boots (called “tennis shoes” in more prosperous parts of the world) were caked with ice. The trail was slowly being erased before our very eyes, and I was beginning to write news stories in my head: “The futile search for four young campers lost in a snowstorm has been called off … .” As we clawed our way up the side of the mountain, one of the frailer souls—never ask me who—suggested that the better part of valor or even of stark madness might be to turn back. But he was shouted down with such cries as, “When I come this far to fish, I am going to fish!” and “Who knows which way is back?”
Eventually we came to the tiny cabin of a trapper, who had either been a midget or had crawled around on his knees all day, for the structure was only four feet from dirt floor to log ceiling. We tidied the place up by evicting a dead porcupine, split up enough wood to last a month, and started a fire in a little makeshift stove. The stovepipe was a foot short of the roof and this resulted in the minor inconvenience of having the roof catch fire every once in a while, but nobody really minded.
