Speaker 1: Hey, everybuddy, welcome episode number forty five The Honey Collective.
Speaker 1: I'm better Brian, and today we are joined by two
Speaker 1: of my favorites to meat Eater originals. I'm talking about
Speaker 1: Steve and Ronella and Ryan Callahan and we're into Noora,
Speaker 1: Mexico for this podcast. We're hanging out after a good dinner,
Speaker 1: a few drinks. Of course, Steve other drinks. He didn't
Speaker 1: have any, but I had a few. Cal had a few.
Speaker 1: He did a couple of push ups, cranked out a
Speaker 1: pretty interesting podcast. Of course, like any late night podcast
Speaker 1: might go, this one didn't really have script. We just
Speaker 1: let it rip. Well. We had a lot to talk about,
Speaker 1: first beers, first guns, first cars, and a bunch of
Speaker 1: other stuff, our love of Jim Harrison and like I said,
Speaker 1: other stuff which makes this one fun. We didn't take
Speaker 1: her too seriously and I always enjoy talking to and
Speaker 1: recording with Ryan Callahan and Stephen Roanella. For episode number
Speaker 1: forty five, check it out, here comes Ryan Callahan. How
Speaker 1: many push ups is that? Bud? Two hundred for the
Speaker 1: day for the day, the two club, the two Hundo Club.
Speaker 1: You feel like that's a bit excessive, are you excited
Speaker 1: about that. No, because I U was like, I should
Speaker 1: try to be healthy. Um, eating five to six pounds
Speaker 1: of free holidays a day down here, and I kind
Speaker 1: of wanted a second beer and I'm kind of regretting it.
Speaker 1: So I was like, well, I'm gonna do two hundred
Speaker 1: push ups today? How many push ups per backup? You're
Speaker 1: trying to lose weight? No, just stay healthy. Oh what's
Speaker 1: that to do with drinking beer? Oh? Just just extra
Speaker 1: calories for nothing, for the lake and the taste of beer.
Speaker 1: Huh yeah. I mean, I'm just trying to be somewhat healthy.
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm living life on the road long
Speaker 1: and listen, I'm all four doing pushups. Man, I just
Speaker 1: didn't understand the beer part. Is there a push ups
Speaker 1: per beer you feel like you have to do to offset? Well,
Speaker 1: now I'm at a hundred push ups per beer today.
Speaker 1: Now that that's a healthy man? Is like, if my
Speaker 1: Boddy Ron you did that, you're like one thousand, one
Speaker 1: hundred and I don't have heard any counting. That's ad number.
Speaker 1: Miller Light would write him and say, whatever you're doing,
Speaker 1: please stop. He would have giant arms. You know, I
Speaker 1: used to have a girlfriend um bless her heart, and
Speaker 1: her grandmother had drank the same kind of beer whole life.
Speaker 1: I think she drank old Mud, Old Milwaukee. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: might have been Old Milwaukee. It was one of the
Speaker 1: swill beers, which I have a theory that they make
Speaker 1: it all on the same plant. I just like it
Speaker 1: all they make it and they switched the labels out
Speaker 1: throughout the day. Do you have any anything to back
Speaker 1: that up? Is that just just haven't drank at all?
Speaker 1: Like when we're in high school, you know, you kept
Speaker 1: like you know those bottles what you call those the
Speaker 1: big glass bottles. Well, I was like thirty two ounces
Speaker 1: and yeah, like you know you have like a black
Speaker 1: label at Old Mill half drank under your truck seat,
Speaker 1: drank drag it out now and then anyways, Uh, my
Speaker 1: old girlfriend, her grandma drank the same beer whole life,
Speaker 1: and the and the family got together and wrote the
Speaker 1: beer company um a letter about her, and they sent
Speaker 1: her like a big care package with a custom sign
Speaker 1: thanking her for her service. Yeah, and then they had
Speaker 1: her birthday party and unveiled this all this and the
Speaker 1: in there because she had been drinking that beer for
Speaker 1: you know, seventy years the was they thanked her first
Speaker 1: serve us service to the way back when when I
Speaker 1: was bartender in Missoula, Montana, reds Bar, Um, my buddy,
Speaker 1: Uh two shains, I worked with two shains there, um
Speaker 1: and Uh. Unbeknownst to the owner of the establishment, we
Speaker 1: decided that nobody was drinking Olympia. We had the same
Speaker 1: twelve pack of Olympia in the fridge forever, and so
Speaker 1: we started selling Olympias for um a buck of peace.
Speaker 1: All the other beers were two fifty or two twenty
Speaker 1: five at that point. Um, all of a sudden, Olympia
Speaker 1: started selling, like you want to believe. And then we
Speaker 1: started throwing a lime wedge in there, calling him Montana
Speaker 1: coronas um. And we just didn't think anything of it, right,
Speaker 1: And in very short time we became the number one
Speaker 1: seller of Olympia beer and all of western Montana, and
Speaker 1: the Olympia Beer rep came in and gave us like
Speaker 1: Olympia tackle boxes, Olympia sweatshirts, all sorts of beer swags.
Speaker 1: You were like an ambassador, like an athlete kind of yes,
Speaker 1: yes we were. We were highly tuned to athletes. Um
Speaker 1: and uh, what was well, it's funny is nobody really
Speaker 1: cared about Olympia beer. But all that stuff was so unique, uh,
Speaker 1: because nobody else had it right, um that it was
Speaker 1: just pretty much immediately pilfred and stolen. So you're still
Speaker 1: running Olympia tackle box. You're still running it. I would
Speaker 1: I would love to have that Olympia tackle box. What's what, Steve,
Speaker 1: what's the first beer you ever remember drinking? Man? You know,
Speaker 1: I don't even remember. I remember my brothers. They were
Speaker 1: way ahead of the game on this. They were making beer,
Speaker 1: Man when you know, almost been in junior high, right,
Speaker 1: and they were like they were near not nearly old
Speaker 1: enough to Yeah, they made beer and they made this
Speaker 1: crazy beer. So this would have been in ninth this
Speaker 1: would have been in the late eighties, way ahead of
Speaker 1: the game. Um, And they bottled it up and it
Speaker 1: kind of like it kind of came about in this
Speaker 1: way like mile man. You know, you know what the
Speaker 1: white Elephant Sale is? Yes, So my old man he
Speaker 1: helped volunteer at a white at a white elephant sale
Speaker 1: for the wise like a like a uh fraternal organization
Speaker 1: sort of thing that raise the money for the y
Speaker 1: Okay y f C, A y m C a all
Speaker 1: that and they throw this white elephant sale. So somehow
Speaker 1: my old man comes into to a pop machine, and
Speaker 1: the pop machine was we couldn't manipulate the price. It
Speaker 1: was just sold pot for thirty five cents of bottle.
Speaker 1: So he took us to a bottle plant where they
Speaker 1: where they like bottle Solda pop. They had like grape, orange,
Speaker 1: Roubier cola, all this stuff and reused bottles. So these
Speaker 1: bottles were like all scratched up in gnarly. But we
Speaker 1: could buy these things for for you had to bring
Speaker 1: the bottles back so you could buy these bottles for
Speaker 1: like I can't remember we pay. We were getting them
Speaker 1: for ten cents a piece or something. Once you brought
Speaker 1: the bottle back and we put them in our own
Speaker 1: pop machine and plugged our pop machine. And we didn't
Speaker 1: we didn't live in a town. We just lived on
Speaker 1: a lake with like the neighborhood kids would come over
Speaker 1: and buy our pop. So somehow another the bottles. And
Speaker 1: then also my brothers were making beer, and and the
Speaker 1: beer they would make would get like a quarter inch
Speaker 1: of the yeast settled down the bottom, just a simple
Speaker 1: fact of like opening the beer would if you it
Speaker 1: would stirball that and it would come up, so you
Speaker 1: have to like very gingerly get that lid off and
Speaker 1: you could drink the beer. And like even though it
Speaker 1: wasn't you know, we weren't you know, we weren't supposed
Speaker 1: to be out drinking, but somehow because they made the beer.
Speaker 1: My dad didn't he didn't really regard it as drinking
Speaker 1: because it was all made. Everybody listening to this it
Speaker 1: was a perfect argument. It was just like this totally separate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was weird. So they just had We just had
Speaker 1: beer that they would make, you know, um yeah, and
Speaker 1: we drank yeah old mill you know the thing in
Speaker 1: Michigan people drank old mud and um that was you know,
Speaker 1: everybody drank uh, mountain dew for pop. Do you say pop?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, what do you say pop? Soda? What do
Speaker 1: you say cal? It was it was always pop pop yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: you know the original mountain dew like slogan catchphrase it'll
Speaker 1: tickle your innerdy you go, which I always quite enjoyed.
Speaker 1: There wasn't a lot of drugs, Like, there wasn't a
Speaker 1: lot of drug taken. Didn't do a lot. You didn't
Speaker 1: do a lot of drugs. And we didn't do drug taken.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there was, because it turns out there was
Speaker 1: plenty of drug taken around my neck of the woods,
Speaker 1: but I was just totally oblivious to us. It was
Speaker 1: like there was weed around, you know, but like the
Speaker 1: like drugs there weren't. I don't think there was main
Speaker 1: drug And this is in a micro area, and our
Speaker 1: micro area, drug taking, like hard drugs weren't really prevlem.
Speaker 1: People drank alcohol. Now I got kids, like now, my
Speaker 1: bodies that have kids that age, they talk about that
Speaker 1: like weeds. The normal thing of course it is opioids though, man,
Speaker 1: now it comes into pillaform dr PC. Also, like Montana
Speaker 1: and Michigan are two very heavy drinking states. Like if
Speaker 1: you look at the statistics nationwide, uh, Montana Michigan are
Speaker 1: always very high on the scale of like perk capita
Speaker 1: alcohol consumption, and so to kind of like write it off,
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, folks were just drinking. Maybe, uh that
Speaker 1: might be a little The consumption of drinking may shocked
Speaker 1: a lot of folks in other areas. Yeah, my, my,
Speaker 1: the people my dad hung out with and ice fished with,
Speaker 1: big drinkers. Remember guy coming over one time, and he
Speaker 1: came over. He was all drunk. He took one of
Speaker 1: our hamsters and put it inside his snowsuit and like
Speaker 1: you got didn't have any clothes on. Understand the story.
Speaker 1: I did see a hamster in a snowsuit anywhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just a lot, yeah, a lot of just so much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right, man, A lot of booze. Man, I don't
Speaker 1: I don't know why I were even talk about the
Speaker 1: tails doing hunter push ups for every Beery drinks. What
Speaker 1: I like the subject? When I was growing up, I
Speaker 1: was I was kind of one thing. Like I I was.
Speaker 1: I endeavored to like I would try every drug, you know,
Speaker 1: like just one time, just field questions from your children, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's it like? Well, let me tell a story. It
Speaker 1: was a second. So I did did a lot of
Speaker 1: none of the hard stuff, but all the stuff that
Speaker 1: you know people do when you're a teenager and you're
Speaker 1: looking to try stuff. Never got. I never never took,
Speaker 1: never took too much. But I had a good time
Speaker 1: doing it. I remember we got our hands. I remember
Speaker 1: being in high school and getting some no doughs and
Speaker 1: feel naughty. They feel like I need to tell my
Speaker 1: kids in my school, My kids in my high school
Speaker 1: used to drink robatus. They call it tussing. Would be
Speaker 1: like you tussing bro drinking robutassing out of the bottle. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because they go to wood shop. We go to wood
Speaker 1: shop work on our stuff, and you had to go
Speaker 1: to your next class. And people bring like a little
Speaker 1: ball of wood putty. Her dudes well like just having
Speaker 1: wood putty in their hand. They just be like couping.
Speaker 1: And you know, you're sitting in like social studies or
Speaker 1: something like that, because we're just rolling out of wood
Speaker 1: shot making big wooden mallets or whatever I laid. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: guys in my world, they would huff the duster you
Speaker 1: can buy. It makes your voice really low. You suck
Speaker 1: it in, makes you high really quick, and then your
Speaker 1: voice gets really low and then you pass out. Yep,
Speaker 1: a couple of real quick one. Jim Harrison chanchan yeah um,
Speaker 1: and then later in life Livingston Montana dude. But Harrison
Speaker 1: got out of life just in time. I think the
Speaker 1: times would have caught up with them. Oh like the
Speaker 1: women stuff, the women's stuff, and please elaborate on the
Speaker 1: women stuff for those of the folks who aren't aware.
Speaker 1: Just like the you can know go ahead, kil I
Speaker 1: will later, but please do I mean, I will circle
Speaker 1: back to it. I got Buddy Mine gave me this
Speaker 1: is exactly to your point. And Buddy Mine gave me
Speaker 1: UM the book a really big lunch, like his collected
Speaker 1: short stories and UM and some of his unpublished stuff too.
Speaker 1: I believe UM came out after he after he passed away.
Speaker 1: But and he wrote in the book he's you know,
Speaker 1: he said, uh, hey, here's here's a guy who lives
Speaker 1: by lived by his few rules that you do like,
Speaker 1: doesn't doesn't follow the mainstream, plays by his own rules,
Speaker 1: plays by his own rules, and did always say about
Speaker 1: my brother and his wife. He yeah, uh yeah. I
Speaker 1: I do think like if he was just kind of
Speaker 1: coming into his own let's say he's like forty right now, um,
Speaker 1: he probably wouldn't when hit it. He'd probably be hushed
Speaker 1: right out of the the spotlight, you know, because all
Speaker 1: of his stories are about drinking too much and um,
Speaker 1: well it's like old, it's like you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: male fantasy stuff. And this listen, man, I say this
Speaker 1: with great reverence. Right, Jim Harrison changed my life, Like
Speaker 1: Jim Harrison helped me become a writer, but I'm from
Speaker 1: reading his stuff and then you know he would a
Speaker 1: little Michigan connection all blurred my work and like you like,
Speaker 1: very influential, Okay, but a lot of the stuff that
Speaker 1: you think is cool when you're younger, you get older
Speaker 1: and you look at it and it just it stops
Speaker 1: being cool. It gets sadder by the year. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so this male fantasy stuff and it really like permeates
Speaker 1: his work. Um, and I get it. But you know
Speaker 1: it's like this older guy, you know, he's divorced or whatever,
Speaker 1: but you know he never ceases to be getting lucky
Speaker 1: with the with the young ladies. Right. It's just it's
Speaker 1: just like one of those things where the the like
Speaker 1: the national conversation is such that when you read it now,
Speaker 1: things that used to like you read it now and
Speaker 1: you kind of like, you can't sometimes you can't help
Speaker 1: a cringe a little, but you have, you know, reading
Speaker 1: it when you're coming up, you didn't have a daughter,
Speaker 1: but you didn't have kids, you didn't have somebody to
Speaker 1: project that onto. Yeah, you're like, oh fuck, having a
Speaker 1: daughter changing stuff. Man, that Harrison had gout rhet real bad.
Speaker 1: And this is a repeating story in this really big lunch.
Speaker 1: Uh and and this book had me like laughing out
Speaker 1: loud and very envious of certain things and and just
Speaker 1: some of the experiences that this guy had. And uh
Speaker 1: and I kind of like his consistency of like he
Speaker 1: he portrays himself in a way that says he's always
Speaker 1: been the same, and he's been richer than rich and
Speaker 1: poorer than poor, but he's just he's never never changed
Speaker 1: his his tune on his own drum um. But the
Speaker 1: doctors like, you gotta quit drinking, like terrible gout, can't
Speaker 1: even move. He said, well, doc, what do I gotta
Speaker 1: do to balance this out? Because I'm not going to
Speaker 1: quit drinking. And the doctor said, you gotta get exercise.
Speaker 1: And he said, well, how much exercise per bottle of wine?
Speaker 1: He's like, we gotta walk for two hours and so
Speaker 1: he'd walk six hours a day. And so to your point,
Speaker 1: the man is influential because I was like, well, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna have a do a hundred push ups per beer.
Speaker 1: I want to walk it back a little bit, man,
Speaker 1: because I don't want to one. I don't want to
Speaker 1: speak ill of the dead too. I don't want to
Speaker 1: to to to say something bad about the master. But
Speaker 1: it is just a thing that I noticed now and
Speaker 1: I'm sensitive to it for various reasons. I think one
Speaker 1: of them having having a daughter maybe that. But um
Speaker 1: as a writer, like like if you just isolate sentences,
Speaker 1: if you isolate Harrison sentences there, you can pull him out,
Speaker 1: and he's written thousands of them, of the ones that
Speaker 1: you're looking like, no other man on earth would be
Speaker 1: able to make that sentence. It's like a it's diagnostic.
Speaker 1: It's like you could you could pull it out and
Speaker 1: and put it somewhere out of its context, and you
Speaker 1: look at me like I could tell you with certainty
Speaker 1: who wrote that sentence. And there's not many writers that
Speaker 1: are like that diagnostic quality, like just he's like amazing.
Speaker 1: Then you hear the guy talk. He doesn't like quite
Speaker 1: talk like how he writes. But he just had a
Speaker 1: way to do it, and he did it a lot.
Speaker 1: It was good at it and made people where I
Speaker 1: was from, speaking of being from Michigan. Man, it made
Speaker 1: like there was a time we were kind of coming
Speaker 1: of age when uh, he made us real proud to
Speaker 1: be from, proud of where we were from, you know,
Speaker 1: real proud of where we were from. What kind of
Speaker 1: you know, as a writer, what did you take from him?
Speaker 1: One of the things I picked up from Harrison how
Speaker 1: unapologetic he was about, uh kind of like his love
Speaker 1: for the natural world. You know, in his his he
Speaker 1: was disgusted by waste and destruction of nature. You know,
Speaker 1: Uh that you could that you could feel that way.
Speaker 1: And you know because a lot of people are like
Speaker 1: will feel that way, but they don't want to be
Speaker 1: called a tree hugger or whatever. But you could feel
Speaker 1: that way and just and make it like angry, you know,
Speaker 1: because the recurring thing was his character, especially his early
Speaker 1: stuff like Brown Dog and all like some of those
Speaker 1: early characters. And then and then my favorite is that
Speaker 1: his book Wolf like a false memoir. You know, um yeah,
Speaker 1: how pistols Like his characters are like drunks and anti heroes,
Speaker 1: but they're just outraged by the trashing of the landscape.
Speaker 1: You know. And remember that, uh, those years of realizing
Speaker 1: that that was uh an okay way to feel you know.
Speaker 1: In other parts bottom to just that he talks. So
Speaker 1: he spoke so lovingly in Michigan, and there wasn't like
Speaker 1: people you know, I mean, Montana is how many you
Speaker 1: go like Wyoming or Montagna, Like how many people have
Speaker 1: been writing and singing the praises of those states for forever?
Speaker 1: Colorado had John Denver. You know, it's like it's easy
Speaker 1: to shoulders, easy to get poetic. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: states it's easy to get poetic about. But you didn't
Speaker 1: in Michigan. You didn't. Um, you know, there wasn't the
Speaker 1: you didn't have like the the ballads about it. I
Speaker 1: felt his Michigan ratting specifically, Like what resonated with me is, uh,
Speaker 1: he held food. He always held food in very high regard.
Speaker 1: But the Michigan stuff was like, yeah, wife, kids, like
Speaker 1: in this shack that was gonna tumble down shack um,
Speaker 1: and they were like destitute basically. But He's like, but
Speaker 1: we had wild duck on the you know, France, super
Speaker 1: hot on the stove, and I'd finish it in the
Speaker 1: oven and I'd have uh, like currants off the tree
Speaker 1: and make a sauce and um, you know, cooking fish
Speaker 1: and stuff. And it was like all this other stuff
Speaker 1: doesn't matter as long as you focus on the things
Speaker 1: that do type of thing and that really hit home
Speaker 1: with me, like you can as long as you just
Speaker 1: gotta have some points of reverence. I think is kind
Speaker 1: of what he was able to romanticize things that weren't
Speaker 1: always romantic. Like you said, it's easy to to look
Speaker 1: at the rocky mountains and sing, But rocky Mountain in
Speaker 1: Montana poaches they pay that guy to do that stuff.
Speaker 1: What about West Virginia. Who's saying West Virginia mountain Mama John?
Speaker 1: Is that John Diver two? Like damn? He was Like
Speaker 1: Montana coach Steinbacker travels with Charlie Um. Steinbecker sings the
Speaker 1: praises of Montana. But you know, he's not a Montana guy.
Speaker 1: He's a California guy. And he wrote very beautifully about California.
Speaker 1: But when he came through Montana and it's a hunting
Speaker 1: specific quote in Montana just like stole it like Steinbeck's ours, right,
Speaker 1: because he travels through Montana um and uh. He happens
Speaker 1: to be going the length of Montana, which is a
Speaker 1: long long distance um during hunting season, and he, for
Speaker 1: whatever reason, he comes to the conclusion that he's like, yeah, boy,
Speaker 1: like folks in Montana they're they're doing what they're doing
Speaker 1: for like a pure reason basically, like how they're going
Speaker 1: about it. Just seemed to resonate with him. Um And
Speaker 1: when I first read that, and I was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: Montana said the best. I'm from Montana, right, John steinbe
Speaker 1: So have you read Canary Row? No? No, is that
Speaker 1: is that? That's about the wharf down there misfits and
Speaker 1: you know, during during the depression, like just misfits living
Speaker 1: in Monterey Bay. Yeah, yeah, No, I haven't read it.
Speaker 1: What's funny about it is even then, so he's writing
Speaker 1: about the twenties, he's writing about people poaching abalone. You
Speaker 1: know at that point in time. That's a goodass book. Man.
Speaker 1: They wanted me to go out and catch a bunch
Speaker 1: of bullfrogs. That's a great book. Canary Row. Can you
Speaker 1: That book kind of changed my life a little bit.
Speaker 1: Imagine the poaching in the depression era, Like, I can't
Speaker 1: say I blame them. No gloves are off, man. Anybody
Speaker 1: would do it. Anybody would do the same thing. If
Speaker 1: you're hung if you're hungry, is it poaching if you're hungry?
Speaker 1: I don't think so, because I guess it depends why
Speaker 1: you're hungry. If you're hungry, because just because you're general derelict,
Speaker 1: then maybe not. But if you've exhausted all If you've
Speaker 1: exhausted all possibilities, Um, you can't go kicking your way
Speaker 1: through the beer cans in your yard. Yeah, I feel
Speaker 1: like I do feel like there's a point at which, um,
Speaker 1: I feel like there's a point at which you could
Speaker 1: achieve a level of um, you know, a level of
Speaker 1: freedom to to feed one's family without needing to be
Speaker 1: cracked down on too hard by the law. That all
Speaker 1: kinds of things I want to talk about in this podcast.
Speaker 1: But I like where we're going. Oh no, go ahead, man, No, no, no, no.
Speaker 1: I like the first beer? What was your friend? We
Speaker 1: didn't get it? The cow? What's your first beer? Man? Um?
Speaker 1: My dad wasn't a drinker growing up, uh, and he
Speaker 1: he was very very clear as to what would happen
Speaker 1: if I were to be caught drinking. But occasionally, like
Speaker 1: the only thing in the refrigerator would be a non
Speaker 1: alcoholic beer, and I'd come back from uh tramping around.
Speaker 1: We lived right off of Rattlesnake Creek, UH in the
Speaker 1: upper Rattlesnake, which is UM quite a bit different uh
Speaker 1: than when I quite a bit different now than and
Speaker 1: then it was when I was growing up because there
Speaker 1: just wasn't the amount of development. You know, the trees
Speaker 1: I've trimmed up that creek. Oh I bet about bunch Yeah?
Speaker 1: Um uh so I'd snagg a non alcoholic beer every
Speaker 1: once in a while. Uh well, remember duels, duels, that's
Speaker 1: like and there was caliber with a k um but yeah,
Speaker 1: I guarantee you it was. It was Budweiser. Bud Light.
Speaker 1: Montana is always big, big bud light state. I remember
Speaker 1: Keystone ice remember that coming in. Remember then, I remember
Speaker 1: everybody getting all excited about ice house because percentage of beer. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Who's the poet that wrote Jabberwocky, oh ship Not E Cummings, No, no,
Speaker 1: Lewis Carroll. Yes, when I was in high school, you
Speaker 1: had to write. You had to take the same cadence
Speaker 1: and structure and write a different poem, I remember, but
Speaker 1: you had to call like something something waki. So I
Speaker 1: wrote bonfire burning Wakee, and it was like a poem
Speaker 1: about burning bond, throwing on tires and whynot making big
Speaker 1: bonfires set to the cadence of jabberwock And I was
Speaker 1: always jealous of a buddy mine who came up with
Speaker 1: he did his those old Milwaukee it was a poem
Speaker 1: about drinking all mud. I thought you were gonna Regale's
Speaker 1: jabber walking? What about? What about from? Yeah, I drank
Speaker 1: like keystone ice growing up, but uh, I don't remember.
Speaker 1: I remember I used to get together my friend's house
Speaker 1: and it would mix up all kinds of different liquors
Speaker 1: and we drink it and throw up. Yeah, combat juice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: who knows what was in there? Combat? Combat about? Okay?
Speaker 1: What about? I like, I don't want my kids to
Speaker 1: do all this. Man, they're gonna do it. I tell them,
Speaker 1: they're gonna do it. I don't want you to do
Speaker 1: these things. By just stay wid eyed about this. I
Speaker 1: didn't touch a drop alcohol until uh the last week
Speaker 1: of my senior year of high school. Really, yeah, you
Speaker 1: feel like you were a good kid. He was Irish
Speaker 1: and he knew he had the curse man, the Great Curse.
Speaker 1: So yeah, there was a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: familial lessons there, Yeah for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I had
Speaker 1: I had a uncle dive liver strosses itself to death. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we had that floating around my my family, but
Speaker 1: it was never and it I mean it was when
Speaker 1: I was in my formative years that happened. But I
Speaker 1: feel like my parents, like, if you're gonna do it,
Speaker 1: just do it here much rather you do it here,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be running around doing some crazy ship somewhere
Speaker 1: as else. So we just did it a lot there.
Speaker 1: That's a good idea, really, because it's not the Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not the drink and it's the trouble. It's what
Speaker 1: comes with the drinking. So if your kid wants to
Speaker 1: stay on the couch, you could watch him drink and
Speaker 1: get all it's then you're fine. Well, you don't want
Speaker 1: is driving around fornicating. Al right, first car, first car,
Speaker 1: let's do that. I like this, like this track round um.
Speaker 1: The first car was a ninth teen eighty two short box,
Speaker 1: two wheel drive blue Chevy pick up three on the tree,
Speaker 1: three six cylinder real ship truck. Oh like Chevy love no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no no, it's like a half ton of Chevy. And
Speaker 1: I bought it for I think four hundred bucks, six
Speaker 1: hundred bucks. Where did you get that? Six hundred bucks?
Speaker 1: As you raise it, we always had jobs, man. I
Speaker 1: started work when I was thirteen. I washed dishes out
Speaker 1: of summer camp for the damn campers roller and I
Speaker 1: was mixing kool aid with a canoe paddle and a
Speaker 1: garbage can scraping plates for hog slop. Yeah, start working
Speaker 1: and then uh I bought that. Then then driving down
Speaker 1: the road talking about drinking beer, driving down a two
Speaker 1: track mana stee Nashville forest hauling, asked on a logging
Speaker 1: road and my buddies in the back, and then trying
Speaker 1: to hand a beer out to him out with a
Speaker 1: little sliding window, and I got distracted by trying to
Speaker 1: get the one thing unlatched bam into an oak tree. Oh,
Speaker 1: total it out. This dude named Matt Jones, who I
Speaker 1: voted for most likely to succeed, buys it from me
Speaker 1: for a hundred bucks. It's like two days later, some
Speaker 1: bitch drove it to school. He like fixed it himself,
Speaker 1: And my god, how was I pissed about? Because this
Speaker 1: guy's a mechanical. These dudes, like these dudes back then
Speaker 1: him and these other guys, they would like take they
Speaker 1: would tear a truck down and put all the bolts
Speaker 1: in a five gallon bucket. I mean everything from like
Speaker 1: the sheet metal panels, everything just into a five gallon
Speaker 1: buckets and then they would rebuild cars all the time
Speaker 1: and just pull dump the bucket out and not like unique,
Speaker 1: not like taking picture's labeling. It just be like everything
Speaker 1: to go into springs and ship. And the five got
Speaker 1: a bucket. Then they dump it on Jim. They dump
Speaker 1: it out and just put it back together again. As
Speaker 1: long as it's a mechanical geniuses. Man. So this guy,
Speaker 1: like I thought this truck was totaled, and he very
Speaker 1: quickly has it up and run and so you had
Speaker 1: to watch him driving. And then I went out and
Speaker 1: bought another. I didn't get a four wild drive to
Speaker 1: my third pick up ship cal first all Cheves, all Chefs,
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty three Chevy celebrity sedan. It's a Google what
Speaker 1: he told me before. It's fu It is bench bench
Speaker 1: seats front and back, all brown interior, all brown exterior.
Speaker 1: And it had one of those uh uh uh spedometers
Speaker 1: that went like literally from the left hand side of
Speaker 1: the dash all the way to the right hand side
Speaker 1: of the dash. You know, it took it a while
Speaker 1: to get across the younger generation that that would be
Speaker 1: like a stick that moves like a like a forgot
Speaker 1: about that um and it kind of looked like a
Speaker 1: clock to they laid it out, Yes, and it was
Speaker 1: turned out to be just a phenomenal vehicle. And the
Speaker 1: trunk was like you could put twelve or so people
Speaker 1: in there, and uh, it was a really hilarious car
Speaker 1: to drive around. Uh, because it was it was actually
Speaker 1: front wheel drive, and um, it took a while for
Speaker 1: the front of the vehicle to catch up to the
Speaker 1: steering wheel when you'd make a turn, you know, and
Speaker 1: being a kid, like, you're just not worried about anything,
Speaker 1: and as long as you had some speed up, you
Speaker 1: could drive that thing through all sorts of conditions, right,
Speaker 1: and you just you really you kind of felt like
Speaker 1: you were just kind of toboggining the vehicle around, and
Speaker 1: it was it was pretty funny. But to answer your question,
Speaker 1: I got it, uh because my dad decided to take
Speaker 1: it as a partial payment for some legal work he did,
Speaker 1: so that one I did not actually pay for. And uh,
Speaker 1: oh you mean your old man did some legal work
Speaker 1: for someone else. Yeah, I thought I meant for you,
Speaker 1: And then I consequently had to pay for um this
Speaker 1: series of things that just like kept going wrong with it.
Speaker 1: One time I was driving back home and had a
Speaker 1: buddy of mine, right, and shotgun and the vehicle conked
Speaker 1: out on me. Again. He's like, man, I bet you're
Speaker 1: out of gas. I'm like, dude, I'm not out of gas.
Speaker 1: And I'm poking around and there can't get it figured out,
Speaker 1: have to get somebody else. Told me to a shop
Speaker 1: and then they're like, yeah, man, you need a new
Speaker 1: fuel pump. And my buddy chimes in, He's like, I
Speaker 1: told you it was something to do with the fuel.
Speaker 1: Then first vefo man uh nine Summit Eagle car van
Speaker 1: periwinkle blue. I looked up to the picture of this
Speaker 1: also Google image. This vehicle. What's it called again, the
Speaker 1: Summit Eagle. I called it, we have I believe called it.
Speaker 1: We called it the car van because it looks like
Speaker 1: a car and a van had sex. And this came
Speaker 1: out as the baby and it is as it is
Speaker 1: a lot of utility in the in the in the
Speaker 1: Summit Eagle car van. You saw what I mean, what
Speaker 1: did you feel like the ladies might enjoy that? I
Speaker 1: feel like it's a specialty maintenance vehicle for some sort
Speaker 1: of like vacuum sales, fleete. It had like a real
Speaker 1: boxy exterior kind of had like a sedan maybe like
Speaker 1: a chevy celebrity front end almost in a van back end.
Speaker 1: Picture a stubby hearse. Yeah. I used to take the
Speaker 1: seats out to get a lot of action going on
Speaker 1: back there. Well you know, sometimes ladies, other times just equipment.
Speaker 1: Put equipment back there. I lied because my I messed up.
Speaker 1: My first truck was eighty two. Then I had to
Speaker 1: go back after then I then I went eighty two,
Speaker 1: seventy n all chefs, No nine afford. Let me I
Speaker 1: got another. I think and tell you guys, tell me
Speaker 1: if you think this is weird to do or not.
Speaker 1: When I was coming up hunting, when I was like sixteen, well,
Speaker 1: each you a buck, and bucks were they weren't rare.
Speaker 1: We shoot a buck every year, but be a spike
Speaker 1: or a forky or something like that. We would in
Speaker 1: effort to use all of the animal, cut the nutsack off,
Speaker 1: cut the ball, sack off, dump, dump out the contents,
Speaker 1: remove the contents, and then stretch the sack over a
Speaker 1: coke can. And at this time I was for poker.
Speaker 1: Money could be to make a money bag. Well at
Speaker 1: that time I was shooting patching roundball, So I put
Speaker 1: my round balls in the in the ball, leave the
Speaker 1: hair on. Leave the hair on, so you got basically
Speaker 1: got a tan. You know eventually as time when a
Speaker 1: little draw string on their string on there. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you I'd feel real good. I get my patches out
Speaker 1: and get my ball sack out of my sall like.
Speaker 1: So I didn't do that. I carried this on till
Speaker 1: when I got the car van. So you can fit
Speaker 1: a beer can, you can fit you fit a white
Speaker 1: tails ball sack over a beer can. No, kid, Yeah
Speaker 1: you should try it. He let it drive for a while,
Speaker 1: drive and be like a little cup and you do
Speaker 1: whatever you want. I can't leave. I haven't done this.
Speaker 1: So when I got the car van, I realized that
Speaker 1: these were kind of like they kind of look like
Speaker 1: fuzzy dice. And so then I took the two sacks.
Speaker 1: I tied them together like fuzzy dice, and I put
Speaker 1: them on the rear view mirror of the car van.
Speaker 1: And when ladies would get in the car van or anyone,
Speaker 1: I say, they'd say, what's that. I'd say that those
Speaker 1: are fuzzy dice, and I'd say, just tickle them, tickle them,
Speaker 1: tickle the underside of them, just tickle them, and um,
Speaker 1: I would laugh I would laugh. Eventually they started to
Speaker 1: shed enough where my my car van was full of
Speaker 1: ballsack hair and it just got to be too much
Speaker 1: that could I had to remove him. But for a time,
Speaker 1: for a time it was a big deal, and I
Speaker 1: would One time I did paint the inside of one
Speaker 1: green because our school colors South Akerstound High School were
Speaker 1: green and white, and the exterior of a ball sack
Speaker 1: is white. So if you paint the interior green, you've
Speaker 1: got school color ball sack. Fuzzy dice, Good deal, Ben,
Speaker 1: that's impressive that that doesn't strike me as um doesn't
Speaker 1: strike me as weird. No, I could see, I could play.
Speaker 1: I could see having done that you have you would
Speaker 1: have done. I had no idea about it, but I
Speaker 1: could see them because we did a lot of stuff,
Speaker 1: like a lot of things like that, lots of the
Speaker 1: animal parts. Yeah, give us some examples so I feel
Speaker 1: a little bit more normal. Oh you know, like guys,
Speaker 1: would you know you'd save your squirrel tails and do
Speaker 1: stuff with them, um, grouse feet, You just kind of
Speaker 1: hang them on stuff. Remember getting in trouble for having
Speaker 1: stuff like that hanging in my locker because they do
Speaker 1: locker inspectrum. Remember getting called down to the junior high
Speaker 1: getting called down to the principal's office to account for
Speaker 1: why why I had bird feet hanging to my locker.
Speaker 1: They thought it was like some devil worship or stuff
Speaker 1: or something. You know, I don't know what they thought.
Speaker 1: And you're like, I just want to try to use
Speaker 1: use them. Yeah, we like stretched chipmunk skins out and
Speaker 1: dry chipmunk skins. They'd be like a little playing cards. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's like a lot of stuff with animal parts, man,
Speaker 1: or like savings stuff like David stuff off stuff like
Speaker 1: my dad a butcher snapper turtle. You want to dry
Speaker 1: the head out and and have the head to whatever
Speaker 1: carry around with. I don't know, my man. My kids
Speaker 1: are the same way. They want wings and feet and
Speaker 1: like heads off stuff. They it just speaks to them.
Speaker 1: They like, I think they see it like it's kind
Speaker 1: of beautiful. And then they recognize from hanging out with
Speaker 1: me and their uncles and all the guys are exposed
Speaker 1: to that people put a high value on these things,
Speaker 1: and so they feed off that, like they understand that
Speaker 1: these are valuable things. And like in my garage, I
Speaker 1: have pull you know, you gotta pull the rings to
Speaker 1: get the shop lights on, and one of the strings
Speaker 1: you get the pull, it's it's a mackerel's jaw, one
Speaker 1: of the ones you gotta pull. It's a bunch of
Speaker 1: turkey spurs on a rope. So they just see this
Speaker 1: stuff around and they wind up liking it. It's like
Speaker 1: little talisman's, you know, like I encourage it. I see
Speaker 1: how people could look and think it's gross or something,
Speaker 1: but I don't think that. I think it's like a
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a it's a way in which it's respectful,
Speaker 1: not disrespectful. Yeah. Well to me, yeah, I look back
Speaker 1: on that on the ball sacks there, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: some people might think that's weird, But when I look
Speaker 1: back at that, it's the time I was. Me and
Speaker 1: my dad. All we thought about was deer. That's all
Speaker 1: we did. But my dad would take the deer legs,
Speaker 1: the deer hoofs and turn them, pack him and pack
Speaker 1: him and salt or borax or something, and then he
Speaker 1: then he'd run to he put him on a board
Speaker 1: and drill in through the wood into the bone of
Speaker 1: the deer foot, and then you have that's where you
Speaker 1: paying your guns. And bows. Was these dear feet sticking
Speaker 1: out an upward angle just animal parts, man, they're all
Speaker 1: But I remember so like just you saying that, like
Speaker 1: the locker inspection thing, I had lots of stuff, um
Speaker 1: where be like why would you ever do this? And
Speaker 1: prior to some adult, you know, from outside of my
Speaker 1: circle asking me that, I had what seemed to me
Speaker 1: a perfectly good explanation like well, why wouldn't you keep this?
Speaker 1: But then it would be like, oh my God, like
Speaker 1: I know, I don't have an answer that's going to
Speaker 1: satisfy this person. I'm gonna tell about your the way
Speaker 1: you're approaching this, you're not gonna like my answer. Am
Speaker 1: I very much value this dear's dick? So I have
Speaker 1: stretched out on this piece. Yeah, we used to There's
Speaker 1: a fur trapper that was real fur trapper and taxermost
Speaker 1: of a lot of text misused fur trappers named Bob Ferris,
Speaker 1: who's always real helpful to us when we were young,
Speaker 1: and we'd sell them a little bit of fur. But
Speaker 1: he had a vaculum collection. You wouldn't believe it. Tell
Speaker 1: it's a pecker bone like people used to use. Uh,
Speaker 1: people used to use whale vaculums and walrus baculums as
Speaker 1: canes and sticks and stuff and drink stirs like I
Speaker 1: have vaculum like blackberries have. It's funny as a big,
Speaker 1: big bore raccoon has a vaculum just about as long
Speaker 1: as a black bear's baculum. Badgers they got a big back,
Speaker 1: and they got a big So you know, you make
Speaker 1: little swizzle sticks, little drink stirs. I keep in my
Speaker 1: medicine box. So I'll take them, and there's an end
Speaker 1: on there and I'll and I'll take white out and
Speaker 1: let's put a little spot of white out and I
Speaker 1: let it dry, and then I take a fine pen
Speaker 1: and I write like a date or location, and I
Speaker 1: let that dry, and then I put lacquer on it
Speaker 1: and let that dry and throught my medicine box. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think those uh, when I was guiding
Speaker 1: a lot of black bears. Um, you know that um
Speaker 1: the baculum. It used to be like everybody would get
Speaker 1: the vacuum the penis bone off their bear. Um. And
Speaker 1: then that kind of went out of fashion, I guess.
Speaker 1: And um, all the old cadres I hang around with.
Speaker 1: UM is where I picked it up from him. So
Speaker 1: when I started guiding a lot of black bears, um,
Speaker 1: I'd always be like, hey, do you want your people
Speaker 1: would be like, no, well should I yeah, And so
Speaker 1: I boil it out and uh and give it to
Speaker 1: him and I'm like, well, yeah, I mean this is
Speaker 1: the only like portable part of your black bear, you know,
Speaker 1: like that's a good enough reason to hack it around.
Speaker 1: I'm like, you could if you wanted to, you could
Speaker 1: cut it in half and put it on your key
Speaker 1: chain or something. But why why do you think that?
Speaker 1: Is that there's certain animals that have certain little totems,
Speaker 1: right elk Ivers, I was just think about Okay, every
Speaker 1: turkey turkey spurs kind of falling in the old days. Uh,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't have any personal familiarity with this,
Speaker 1: but I understand that it's true. Is the old days
Speaker 1: when you caught a big tarp and you pluck a scale. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I have turkey feet in just a laundry list of
Speaker 1: rental houses and crash pads from my younger years because
Speaker 1: that was one of those things, like it always turkey feet,
Speaker 1: these things are so cool dinosaurs and then throw them
Speaker 1: on the dashboard of my truck and then I'd like
Speaker 1: stuff them, you know, like on a window sill or
Speaker 1: in a garage, like on the wall or something. Every
Speaker 1: time I clear a freezer at if I'm moving or
Speaker 1: something off find like a turkey wing or something, and
Speaker 1: I know that I sometimes I'll write it on there,
Speaker 1: like for wingbone call or whatever, And a lot of
Speaker 1: times I never get to it. But I have the
Speaker 1: intention of doing those types of things. The only thing
Speaker 1: I do with turkeys, the only thing I keep off
Speaker 1: from now. As I take the spur and and take
Speaker 1: a hack saw and cut above and below the spur,
Speaker 1: you get a little loop, and then you got that,
Speaker 1: and then the marrow pushed the marrow out of there,
Speaker 1: and so you got a hollow birds of hollow bones,
Speaker 1: they have a hollow bone and it's a spur loop
Speaker 1: and you throw it on a rope and I don't care.
Speaker 1: I'll me turkeys you kill, you're not gonna wind up
Speaker 1: too many of those. They're pretty compact. Did you ever
Speaker 1: wear that as a necklace? You know, I haven't. My
Speaker 1: kids like to do it. And then I had, uh,
Speaker 1: I killed a turkey one time. I had a real nice,
Speaker 1: real uh. It's kind of like beautiful spurs, and I
Speaker 1: had them. I took him to a jeweler, the same
Speaker 1: jeweler where I bought my wife's uh engagement and wedding
Speaker 1: rings from. Took him to a jeweler and had the
Speaker 1: jeweler set those spurs in the kind of setting picture
Speaker 1: like a person that wears like a crystal like a
Speaker 1: like a hippie kind of crystal. You know, that little
Speaker 1: metal the little metal top, a little metal cup that
Speaker 1: kind of clasps the crystal rod. I had the turkey
Speaker 1: spurs set in that. But the crystal folk would be
Speaker 1: like a eagle talent holding the crystal, right, Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking of a different kind of crystal folk. It's like
Speaker 1: a little metal cup. It's like yeah, it's like just
Speaker 1: a attached that that pinches. So I had the spurs
Speaker 1: set in those. And my wife wears him now and then,
Speaker 1: and I really like it. Now. I encourage her to
Speaker 1: wear them, and um, she'll generally wear them two places
Speaker 1: where people might be like, hey, that's cool, and not
Speaker 1: like what the hell is that? Right? Well, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean you Steve, you talked a lot about your love
Speaker 1: for you know, pioneers and Davy Crockett and all those boys.
Speaker 1: You like some of that's rubbed off on you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you want to have that connection. Yeah people, Uh adorned.
Speaker 1: It's all the stuff like you can look at wardrobes,
Speaker 1: costumes from the plains, tribes everyone A man. I mean
Speaker 1: it's just like decorate your I don't wear jewelry, right,
Speaker 1: but but I like that stuff because like you decorate
Speaker 1: your home and decorate your body with animal parts. Man.
Speaker 1: To me, like I could see the people would look
Speaker 1: and think it's creepy or something, But to me, it's just,
Speaker 1: like I said, it just to me, it's um just
Speaker 1: to have that stuff around. Uh, it feels good. It's
Speaker 1: just one of the many super complex things that we
Speaker 1: do that. Yeah, and I like my kids to be
Speaker 1: exposed to it. A friend of mine was telling me,
Speaker 1: relating to me as trials and tribulations circling around perch
Speaker 1: sing a engagement wedding ring scenario for for his gal
Speaker 1: and uh talk about ship that I just had had
Speaker 1: no clue existed. And uh a person like apparently like
Speaker 1: there's a thing out there that exists where you it
Speaker 1: is expected that you put aside like X percentage of
Speaker 1: your pay is supposed to be. Well, what like what
Speaker 1: you spend on a wedding ring. There's I can't remember
Speaker 1: what's the percent or something. I can't remember for how
Speaker 1: much period of time, just whatever your annual salary is,
Speaker 1: like a percentage of your salary, like you're tithing to
Speaker 1: the church, but it's a but it's for a wedding ring. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's the expectation that you'll spend this much money
Speaker 1: on the ring based on how much you make. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's right at all. No, I think
Speaker 1: it's majorly screwed up. But I don't believe that anybody
Speaker 1: actually pays attention to that. Dude, I don't there's some
Speaker 1: pretty traditional folks. I've never heard anybody saying, hey, check
Speaker 1: this out. You know it's eight thousand dollar ring. That's
Speaker 1: also to find something like unique in things. And I'm like, man,
Speaker 1: I just don't have the mental capacity for I mean,
Speaker 1: some guys supposed to be like, kay, I make fifty
Speaker 1: grand year, I need to. So let's say it's like, yeah, yep,
Speaker 1: I don't know what the numbers are. Somebody can tell
Speaker 1: us what they are. But people do something ask well, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett like his appealing,
Speaker 1: his opinion on what's ridiculous, like the in Vogue fashion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but those guys had long braided hair ya, meaning they
Speaker 1: had long braided hair. They had more plated the long
Speaker 1: long plated hair like Steve might be chatting me about
Speaker 1: your hair situation. No, I'm just saying they might look
Speaker 1: at stuff we do and think it's squirrelly, but you
Speaker 1: look at them like, dude, why don't you just cut
Speaker 1: your hair? Why don't you just have a butch? Why
Speaker 1: do you have long why do you have long plaited hair?
Speaker 1: Wouldn't be just to have a butch? O? Just especially man,
Speaker 1: the upkeep exactly would oil. It was barre oil man.
Speaker 1: They had like things they would they were like And
Speaker 1: I'm not like, I'm not a Davy Crockett guy at all.
Speaker 1: And I know maybe you know, I know those guys
Speaker 1: get lumped together, but it's just very different people, different times,
Speaker 1: different people. Crockett's interesting, Yeah, yeah, he's interesting, interested dude,
Speaker 1: but he's no danger Boon. But um, yes, let me rewind.
Speaker 1: I meant to say Daniel fucking Boone, not Davy Crockett.
Speaker 1: So you know why I said you know that's your song.
Speaker 1: Your song got me Janie the love. Uh oh. Anyways,
Speaker 1: Like maybe I'm taking your point, but I feel like
Speaker 1: you were going to say that, like Boon would be
Speaker 1: like what has gotten into these people? Yes? Absolutely, of
Speaker 1: course he would. But they did strange stuff too, they
Speaker 1: did they did what was the the I just had
Speaker 1: what was the character? And um Jeremiah Johnson who had
Speaker 1: the shaved head? So and then he reverts there at
Speaker 1: the end or do I have that he kept his
Speaker 1: hair shaved because it's because no one would wanna people
Speaker 1: wouldn't want to scalp him. Yeah, but then later he
Speaker 1: grows his hair out. You okay, next one? Okay, transition,
Speaker 1: first rifle. I like the way we're going. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: it's complicated. First one that I owned out right, I
Speaker 1: want to say the first one and you owned out right.
Speaker 1: It's probably your first rifle. The first rifle I owned
Speaker 1: out right. My old man, one of my mentors as
Speaker 1: a child, was made by the name of Eugene grots
Speaker 1: and my brother Danny uh very graciously named his own
Speaker 1: son Eugene. Um. Eugene Grotors was it was the avid outdoorsman,
Speaker 1: and he believed in having a gun for every year
Speaker 1: he'd been alive on earth. And he got to be
Speaker 1: quite old, and he kept all these guns in a
Speaker 1: rack in the ceiling. At some point in time he
Speaker 1: realized that he had more. He was like, whatever the
Speaker 1: hell he was. He realized there's seventy nine of him
Speaker 1: up there, and pulled down and gave to me a
Speaker 1: Model nine four lever action two trapper trapper. And you know,
Speaker 1: I saw I stupidly sold that to uh. I stupidly
Speaker 1: sold that to a guy that sold wood stoves and
Speaker 1: use guns. Um. So Eugene Groders pulled this gun down
Speaker 1: and gave it to me. And I had a peep
Speaker 1: site and I had to reduce or you could screw
Speaker 1: into the peep site. And and I shot first bunch
Speaker 1: of year. I shot a shot with that lever action,
Speaker 1: shooting a peep site. And then I got all onto
Speaker 1: the bolt action bad wagon. And and then like everybody,
Speaker 1: you know you wanted the thirty out six bolt action, um,
Speaker 1: if you were from where I was from, and and
Speaker 1: and and yeah, I went down and sold that thing
Speaker 1: for three hundred bucks. Man I got I just know
Speaker 1: I got screwed. Wow, you got a lot of like
Speaker 1: that shocks me about you. I don't I don't see
Speaker 1: as that type of gay or the trading up I
Speaker 1: was always selling. I was always selling guns man, because
Speaker 1: it was like you were selling it just to get
Speaker 1: money to get a different one. Like I remember wanting
Speaker 1: to like wanted a twenty two mag real bad and
Speaker 1: had to sell some of myself to get twenty too mag.
Speaker 1: And I wanted a savage trapper like what c or whatever,
Speaker 1: uh twenty gauge like twenty too long, twenty gauge thing
Speaker 1: and needing to sell whatever I had to go get that.
Speaker 1: Um all just like really low end things. But that
Speaker 1: gun I really should have hung out of that thing,
Speaker 1: that lever action rifle, you know, Eugene grotors. And the
Speaker 1: thing too is he gave he gave it to me.
Speaker 1: Then it was just a really bad thing to do
Speaker 1: to sell it and to be like to to prove
Speaker 1: your proficiency. I'm every march out across the yard or
Speaker 1: my dad, and they set a full gallon juggle water
Speaker 1: out whatever sixty five yards. If you hit that juggawatire
Speaker 1: right on, you can poke hole and train it. If
Speaker 1: you could hit the ghetto gallon milk juggle waters like,
Speaker 1: let's go, you can do it. Love it. Well, you
Speaker 1: got rue twenty two man, Yeah, yeah, oh I didn't know.
Speaker 1: We're well yeah, I mean what we can go back.
Speaker 1: We can go back because we come back the I
Speaker 1: got a hunt with a series of rifles long prior
Speaker 1: to ever actually own anyone. How old were you when
Speaker 1: you owned it? Well, I had the Rugy ten twenty two,
Speaker 1: like you know, twelve or something like that. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: might not count, like I like where Steve's going with it,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I mean I didn't own my own deer
Speaker 1: rifle until sophomore year in high school. Just shot family guns. Yeah,
Speaker 1: something like. That's just kind of how everybody, like I
Speaker 1: don't know the brothers like actually had one people would
Speaker 1: have when we were real big on Two is those
Speaker 1: look through over under scope mountains where you could have
Speaker 1: your iron sides, iron your iron sides for deer drive,
Speaker 1: you know, shooting buckshot or we need an iron sight.
Speaker 1: It's not buckshot, but you alla believe, like we alla
Speaker 1: to believe that they're like brush guns, you know, so
Speaker 1: you had your iron sights and over there made out
Speaker 1: of like plastic, then you can still have like scope
Speaker 1: all at the top of what a terrible setup. Funny,
Speaker 1: And I remember the first guy I really like hunted
Speaker 1: with that had like an actual you know, like a bull.
Speaker 1: He had a saco some you know relative He comes
Speaker 1: out with like a sako with a Nikon scope on it,
Speaker 1: and just being like it's like a work of art.
Speaker 1: Just be like holy smokes, you know, and like these
Speaker 1: guns that could like shoot groups and stuff. You know.
Speaker 1: I remember thinking like just being blown away by that.
Speaker 1: He can hit he can hit the milk jug three times. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if a deer was all the way across the field,
Speaker 1: you can still shoot at You didn't need to be
Speaker 1: like dah, I got it. I started hunting with I
Speaker 1: didn't own this, but I started hunting with a hawking
Speaker 1: fifty cow. That's that goes back to my patching roundball situation.
Speaker 1: But then upgraded quickly to uh, what was my first
Speaker 1: rifle Savage one ten to forty three bold action, one
Speaker 1: of them fancy fancy you guys were shooting two forty
Speaker 1: three deer. Yep, I don't know that was prescribed. I
Speaker 1: was twelve thirteen at the time for somewhere in there,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't very big fella, and so I think
Speaker 1: that was it was the caliber choice was more about
Speaker 1: the recoil than it was wing else. But it was
Speaker 1: quickly went to thirty at six. I think thirty at
Speaker 1: six was was what anybody was shooting in the woods
Speaker 1: deer hunting by storm. Yeah, everybody like that had to
Speaker 1: shoot some old gun. Had a thirty thirty and anyone
Speaker 1: that bought a new one was buy a thirty ots.
Speaker 1: I remember vividly like I wanted a thirty thirty really bad,
Speaker 1: and I had like this kind of brush gun thought
Speaker 1: because I was gonna go hunt where nobody else was
Speaker 1: hunting anyway, you know, which is like get getting there
Speaker 1: amongst them in the timber um. And uh, I used
Speaker 1: to just torment freaking gun buyers or you know, the
Speaker 1: the gun counter people at a couple of shops in Missoula,
Speaker 1: And uh, I have no clue what I was doing,
Speaker 1: because it's not like I had any money, right, But
Speaker 1: I'd be like yeah, and I just have this vivid
Speaker 1: conversation or vivid memory of this conversation in my head
Speaker 1: about going in and talking to this guy and be like, well,
Speaker 1: this is what I mean. You know the you know
Speaker 1: those big Aspen patches on like the outside of a
Speaker 1: Showdow or Augusta, like you know, I like to, you know,
Speaker 1: get in there and hunt, hunt the deer in their
Speaker 1: beds and stuff. And I just knew he was like
Speaker 1: gonna be like, yeah, man, thirty thirty, because that's what
Speaker 1: I wanted, right, was a third lever action thirty thirty.
Speaker 1: And I think specifically because like Jimmy Stewart and you
Speaker 1: know the Western win Chester seventy three and uh and
Speaker 1: or win Chester seventy win Chester seventy three. Right, here's
Speaker 1: seventy six model the one I have. I feel like
Speaker 1: I could be messed up. I think it's Model and
Speaker 1: the D and he goes to like the consignment side
Speaker 1: of things, and here's like like big pronounced iron Sights six,
Speaker 1: which now sitting where I am now, I'm like, yes,
Speaker 1: that is a much more appropriate gun than than what
Speaker 1: I was after. But I was just like crushed. I'm
Speaker 1: like this guy to know what he's talking about. What
Speaker 1: I want. I want you to exactly exactly. Yeah, so funny,
Speaker 1: I think we ought to, uh we gotta this first
Speaker 1: thing can be can be tiresome, but we should probably
Speaker 1: say first, let's let's end the first thing with the
Speaker 1: first thing you killed. No, I have no idea. Chipmunks
Speaker 1: probably first first, Okay, man, I'm like real squirrels, So yeah,
Speaker 1: it would have been like yeah, I'm sure like chipmunks
Speaker 1: were just litoks. We just hunt with bb guns. You know,
Speaker 1: we'd go out and hunt chipmunks, because chipmunks were regarded
Speaker 1: in my area, at least, they were regarded as very destructive. Um,
Speaker 1: and you could even like like the neighbors would pay
Speaker 1: out money on them. Lots of people pay out money
Speaker 1: on chipmunks, But we just hunt them in the woods too,
Speaker 1: you know, but like it would be better case you'd
Speaker 1: have a deal where you get a couple of bucks
Speaker 1: a piece from someone to get chipmunks out of their
Speaker 1: garden or whatever. And then, um, we had a lot
Speaker 1: of squirrels, so we hunted squirrels and then and then um,
Speaker 1: and then a lot of trapping for fur bears and
Speaker 1: then from squirrels and rabbits and grouse. I mean it's
Speaker 1: pretty much you know, then up to deer. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: then I had I would you know, I killed my
Speaker 1: first do you when I was thirteen? And then I
Speaker 1: wouldn't I didn't kill another kind of big game animal
Speaker 1: for a decade after that, really just hunted deer. We
Speaker 1: just lived in Michigan hunted deer. Yeah, that's what That's
Speaker 1: the thing about our industry and what we talked about. Man,
Speaker 1: that's what most people do. That's what I did. I
Speaker 1: didn't travel off the East coast to hunt until I
Speaker 1: was in the industry. It would have been laughable that
Speaker 1: when I was a kid that we would have gone
Speaker 1: out like this is no way in the world. So
Speaker 1: we were gonna go out and hunt, like go out,
Speaker 1: drive out west to go hunt, which just wasn't gonna
Speaker 1: happen my old man. When I remember my old man
Speaker 1: going out on a archery LK hunt, you know, but
Speaker 1: we're little, but no, it's just we hunted deer. And
Speaker 1: then then my brothers they went up to moved up
Speaker 1: to the Upper Peninsula and H very quickly drew black
Speaker 1: bear tags up there and got a little bait station
Speaker 1: going and H killed some bears. And then that was
Speaker 1: then we were kind of off off off and running
Speaker 1: on on crazy big game hunting. Yeah. Uh, man, I
Speaker 1: was just like the absolute King and the red writer
Speaker 1: bb gun and I had two that I broke, like
Speaker 1: shot out, broke and repaired myself, which was looking back
Speaker 1: on it was like somehow totally acceptable for me to
Speaker 1: be like gun smith and bb guns. Um. And uh
Speaker 1: so I had a lot of customization my my red riders.
Speaker 1: But I shot, I mean decimated small mammal populations and um,
Speaker 1: my uncle ran a feed lot and you could go
Speaker 1: into that feed lot and just shoot mice and rats
Speaker 1: for as long as you could possibly stand it. But
Speaker 1: I mean thousands and thousands and thousands of babies over
Speaker 1: the course of it, just you know, a month. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, barn pigeons were like big, big game um
Speaker 1: because they were always just like roosted up a little
Speaker 1: bit too high to like you'd hit them and then
Speaker 1: they'd kind of shake it off and be like whoa
Speaker 1: and uh and then uh oh man. My family, the
Speaker 1: folks in my family that hunted, they were super into
Speaker 1: geese and that was it. And you didn't hunt ducks
Speaker 1: and it was just geese. Um. And this is like
Speaker 1: a traditional type of deal on And uh. I had
Speaker 1: a single shot break action twenty gauge hammer hammer gun,
Speaker 1: and um, I had you know, uh, several attempts at
Speaker 1: trying to get my first bird with that thing. And
Speaker 1: finally my uncle and I went up and jumped some ducks,
Speaker 1: and he stooped low enough to hunt ducks or go
Speaker 1: jump these ducks with me, and I shot a golden
Speaker 1: nye and uh, it was one of those things where
Speaker 1: we jumped the birds and I missed, and then somebody
Speaker 1: else knocked one down. They were trying to do that.
Speaker 1: And then out of the corner of my eye, I
Speaker 1: see this bird comes zipping down the river and I
Speaker 1: just swung going and I just swung through and pounded
Speaker 1: it and was like absolutely shocked, right, and I just
Speaker 1: I remember to this day like everybody being like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, great shot. And then they were like, it's
Speaker 1: god damn cold night, Jesus screw girl. And it's all
Speaker 1: my uncle's buddies, right, and they're dun and them trying
Speaker 1: to feign excitement all the way to like dropping me
Speaker 1: off back home, and and it's like, oh yeah, right,
Speaker 1: shot night, Yeah, well you know how to cook man?
Speaker 1: Oh it the mouncles, I mean, the come a long way,
Speaker 1: come a long long way. That's probably I think about kids,
Speaker 1: how we used to hunt chipmunks real real hard on chipmunks,
Speaker 1: hard and other stuff you read about indigenous cultures and
Speaker 1: the kids, Um, they're the same way. Francis Parkman's Oregon
Speaker 1: Trail when he goes out and he had and I
Speaker 1: think it was eighteen he traveled with and spent time
Speaker 1: with the Iguala Sioux and comments on um vicious. The
Speaker 1: children are with their bows and arrows, shooting birds and
Speaker 1: then killing the bird and hanging it up and shooting
Speaker 1: it more. You know, when I was watching a documentary
Speaker 1: about Amber Indians in South America and yeah, and the
Speaker 1: kids just like when they're learning to hunt, it's hunting everything, yea.
Speaker 1: And they hunt bugs and you'd shoot a blog on that, right,
Speaker 1: it's like any little mammals, any little birds, it's uh
Speaker 1: and uh. And I sometimes look back when we were
Speaker 1: kids and we were like that, and I'm like, you
Speaker 1: know what's going on? But then it's like you're you're
Speaker 1: kind of like training for something, you know, but what
Speaker 1: it's got to be and it scares some parents. Well,
Speaker 1: I always I always think that is it just like
Speaker 1: I try to make it more than it is. I think, like,
Speaker 1: is it the curiosity with the natural world? But that's
Speaker 1: not what's going through your head when you're twelve year
Speaker 1: old popping chipmunks. It's fascination, you are, you're fascinated with it,
Speaker 1: but it's domination. Also you want to like, we just
Speaker 1: wanted to hunt. We want to be hunt. You just
Speaker 1: want to be outside. You want to be doing something.
Speaker 1: You want to achieve something. I mean, you heard if
Speaker 1: you heard off, you hear a chipmunk every grab the
Speaker 1: be gun ran on the trying to go find him,
Speaker 1: crawl up on it. It's one. It's you wonder about that,
Speaker 1: like whether that's an advantage for somebody who starts hunting
Speaker 1: when they were a kid, because you have the like
Speaker 1: the gloves are kind of off and your kids, you
Speaker 1: cal gets to bb gun goes out and shoot ship.
Speaker 1: Nobody's talking about should he be doing that? Bringing Morning
Speaker 1: Dobs home to your mom thinking she's gonna be all proud. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you already allowed to you know, Michigan, you can't hunt
Speaker 1: Morning does you know? We'd go out and try to
Speaker 1: get him off the power lines because they like to
Speaker 1: roost up on the power lines or perch up on there.
Speaker 1: And now I had my kid out, we're hunting squirrels
Speaker 1: and there's crows popping around the trees overhead, and he's all,
Speaker 1: you know, wants to shoot the crow and I, Hey,
Speaker 1: do you wanna shoot the crow for? And um He's like, well,
Speaker 1: we'll eat it. And I said, yeah, yeah, I could
Speaker 1: eat it, you know, but let's not shoot the crow.
Speaker 1: Were you're waiting for squirrels. And I wouldn't let him
Speaker 1: shoot the crow when I was a kid. He would
Speaker 1: have popped that crow and then you shot the crow.
Speaker 1: And so I'm like, wonder, like what I'm depriving them.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you, like, there's something about that. There was
Speaker 1: a fella I can't remember his name, and I won't
Speaker 1: that wrote about the five stages of hunting. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: familiar with this, and the first one is just like
Speaker 1: something like and a butcher this one as well, but
Speaker 1: it's like killing, just killing. It's the first stage. Whether
Speaker 1: it's you know, whether it has to do with power,
Speaker 1: like exerting some power over the world around you, or
Speaker 1: you know, marksmanship, learning a skill, all the things that
Speaker 1: that just kids are subconsciously doing that they probably should
Speaker 1: be allowed to do because it seems like a function
Speaker 1: of being, of coming up in the outside world done it.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's the Indians are doing it. We're doing it.
Speaker 1: Our kids probably won't be as free to do it
Speaker 1: as we were. Yeah, I mean my my brothers, I
Speaker 1: mean they were right there in it with me, and
Speaker 1: they were hardcore chipmunk hunters and they grew up to
Speaker 1: become a cologist. Yeah. I'm not saying that everyone that
Speaker 1: kills chipmunks comes to college. If you want your kids
Speaker 1: to be coming to college is get him out there,
Speaker 1: because would be too many ecologists. Um. But there's no
Speaker 1: correlation between that activity and some kind of like one poaching.
Speaker 1: Later on, I thought a lot different of it when
Speaker 1: I realized that when I started to see references to
Speaker 1: it with with people from a long time ago hunting cultures,
Speaker 1: hunter gatherer groups whose children um and this happens in
Speaker 1: the Calahari Amazon great Planes where these hunter gatherer groups
Speaker 1: or nomadic hunters, they're little kids, little boys particularly are
Speaker 1: just are expected to like learn their craft at a
Speaker 1: young age. That book asked her that a friend of
Speaker 1: yours penned um, they have a description of getting kind
Speaker 1: of tagging in, falling in with a group shoshone and
Speaker 1: one of the grews that they're following there's a two
Speaker 1: year old kid, uh tied onto a horse, and these uh,
Speaker 1: you know, white dudes are who are the toughest sons
Speaker 1: of bitches that may have ever walked the planet according
Speaker 1: to this book. Man, Um, they're just being so blown
Speaker 1: away by how you could tie your kid onto a
Speaker 1: horse to have I'm learned how to ride. But that
Speaker 1: was like you look at the mortality rates people in general,
Speaker 1: and then people in those planes tribes, and then kids
Speaker 1: in those plane tribes, like it was like man sink
Speaker 1: or swim. Yeah. Well, I mean there's a lot of
Speaker 1: hunters nowadays that's that are you know, or you know
Speaker 1: what we call them adult onset hunters that don't get
Speaker 1: the opportunity to to kind of shirk the intellectual conundrums
Speaker 1: that we've got gone. Yeah, they got to dive right
Speaker 1: in with all the heavy stuff. Yeah, they gotta get
Speaker 1: that heavy stuff right on, right on at the beginning.
Speaker 1: But when you're a kid, you don't need that. Man,
Speaker 1: When I was a kid, it was just about being
Speaker 1: with my dad, you know, It's just about being out
Speaker 1: there running around with him. And I was it. I mean,
Speaker 1: it wasn't. It was simple as it could possibly be.
Speaker 1: There was nothing to it. Yeah, I think that it's
Speaker 1: it's perfectly good and acceptable in my opinion, just to
Speaker 1: grow up with it and like it and not ever
Speaker 1: feel the need to really like poke at it and
Speaker 1: think about it. Yeah you know, I mean, it's nice
Speaker 1: to have the luxury to do that. And if you're
Speaker 1: the kind of person that tends to overthink a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff, then you wind up looking at this thing,
Speaker 1: you know, be a hunting like look at it and
Speaker 1: be like, you know, what is this thing? What is it?
Speaker 1: What is it about it? You know, because you're talking
Speaker 1: to an over tothink it right here? Yeah, so you're
Speaker 1: like you you you accept that you'd like it, You
Speaker 1: said that it means a lot to you, and then
Speaker 1: you get into this long job of sort of asking
Speaker 1: why why why? Why? Uh not? Ever like do I
Speaker 1: want to keep doing this? Because you know that's going
Speaker 1: to happen, but just you start, yeah, you start pondering
Speaker 1: the what is it? Does that have its place? I mean?
Speaker 1: Or is that just spinning tires? Because you know you're
Speaker 1: gonna continue to do it. You know that it's not
Speaker 1: that you won't one day come to a oh shit,
Speaker 1: I'm a back office well, for me, it became tied
Speaker 1: to uh, it became tied to profession. Yeah, you know
Speaker 1: we're in in some way. You get paid to in
Speaker 1: some way. Well I don't wanna say you get paid
Speaker 1: in some way. You find a way to to earn
Speaker 1: pay by thinking about it, kicking it around. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: I have a lot of I have a lot of
Speaker 1: friends that just don't feel the need to weigh it
Speaker 1: all out. There's million I don't I don't, I don't,
Speaker 1: don't think less of them, for there's millions of people
Speaker 1: who just want to hunt and have a good time,
Speaker 1: and they don't want to be told that it's wrong
Speaker 1: or it's right. They just want to hunt and do
Speaker 1: it the way they do it, and that's how it's
Speaker 1: always been, or that's how they've created it to be.
Speaker 1: And hell, yeah that's great, that's fantastic. Will beat anybody
Speaker 1: up for that. But I sit around looking at at
Speaker 1: any point in my life, I look at what I
Speaker 1: was doing ten years earlier, and you just get curious
Speaker 1: about it. Yeah, like the hell's going on there? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Why was I doing that? It's interesting, but it's it's
Speaker 1: something that people have been talking I'm sure talked to
Speaker 1: You've got you both about but that have been righting
Speaker 1: in and asking me a lot about lately and around
Speaker 1: when we talk about ethics, is is killing ship not
Speaker 1: eating it? Killing the killing the critter not eating And
Speaker 1: it connects. It's in my mind right now because it
Speaker 1: connects to being a kid because you're not eating. I
Speaker 1: mean all the animals you just named yet you were
Speaker 1: popping with a bb gun or twenty two or whatever.
Speaker 1: I could count on one hand the number of chipmunks
Speaker 1: we ate. Yeah. Yeah, when we were playing survival, we
Speaker 1: would eat them maybe like three times, right, but they're
Speaker 1: the prairie dogs Eastern Montana prairie dog cleaned one. I
Speaker 1: mean the amount. There's a lot of blood on these hands.
Speaker 1: Do blood? Now? What were you still using the Red
Speaker 1: Rider for that? Did you break out something that's not
Speaker 1: Red Rider? You could kill you now, you couldn't know.
Speaker 1: It was interesting is that it had a pretty quick
Speaker 1: escalation into high calibers. You know, see you could reach
Speaker 1: out further and then eventually I just went back to
Speaker 1: the ten two because I just that's so eventually a
Speaker 1: quick I found out that it really doesn't matter if
Speaker 1: you hit them, and uh, I had so much fun
Speaker 1: just arc in those little tiny bullets around. You know,
Speaker 1: they little poison dogs for sure. Yeah. My uncles, you know,
Speaker 1: they always had that big poison contraption on their four wheeler.
Speaker 1: It's it's literally like a big hopper with a you know,
Speaker 1: probably a two inch diameter tube that just goes straight
Speaker 1: down and you can just drive that, drive your four
Speaker 1: wheeler over the top of the prairie dog hole. You
Speaker 1: hit the button there, you pulled a little slide thing
Speaker 1: which is on a spring, and it drops a dose
Speaker 1: a poison down the hole and then you just put
Speaker 1: her over the next one. Yeah. Yeah, you gotta think
Speaker 1: that prairie dogs wasn't all they were killing. No, hell no, no, no,
Speaker 1: but you can. I mean, what's the Yeah, what's the
Speaker 1: percentage of ship nowadays that it's not ship of animals
Speaker 1: that you kill that you don't eat. I don't have
Speaker 1: anything I don't eat now unless I wanted the fur
Speaker 1: off something now and then. But no, generally not because
Speaker 1: that you had to evolve into that. I don't even
Speaker 1: think of it as an evolution. It's just like there's um,
Speaker 1: you know, I used to trap stuff because I you know,
Speaker 1: for trap to sell the hides and then use the
Speaker 1: carcasses for baits, sell carcasses a sleddog. People just make
Speaker 1: like a little carcass dump to try to lure other
Speaker 1: stuff in muskrats whatnot. And I had I had a guy,
Speaker 1: you know, one guy that I grew up around that
Speaker 1: would want some number of muskrat hams, but not enough
Speaker 1: to keep up with how many I produced. Um, it
Speaker 1: was just like that was like the thing of value
Speaker 1: on them. Now it's just I just it just doesn't mallard.
Speaker 1: Occasionally you get that mallard that's got all the cists
Speaker 1: in the in the breast meat not familiar, like yeah,
Speaker 1: big worms in the brass meat. I can't then you don't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's that's not something that there The intention was
Speaker 1: to eat it. Yeah, But for me, it's like, uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just I'd rather go I'd like to go out
Speaker 1: and get the food. So that's a big part of
Speaker 1: the enjoyment for me is to go out and get food.
Speaker 1: So and I only have you know a certain number
Speaker 1: of hours in your life if I'm going to go
Speaker 1: and do something. If I'm gonna go fish, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go fish for a fish that we regard as good
Speaker 1: to eat. And if we're gonna hunt, I like to
Speaker 1: go hunt for something that me and my family regard
Speaker 1: is good to eat, because that's like a big part
Speaker 1: of it for me. So it's just like what your
Speaker 1: it's your personal value system or you I don't even
Speaker 1: want to put it is a value system. It's it's
Speaker 1: a thing like that. But it's also it's just what
Speaker 1: makes sense. Yeah, that's just the sensical part. And I
Speaker 1: want to go get stuff and bring it home, and
Speaker 1: especially when the kids, I want to go get stuff
Speaker 1: and then we're going to call home and cook it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But I mean you've learned how to and and become
Speaker 1: an expert in how to cook a whole variety of
Speaker 1: things fish, small game, big, all kind of stuff. Mayn
Speaker 1: we eat, pine squirrels. Goddamn cookbook, all this stuff in it.
Speaker 1: Um so yeah, so which is now in stock? Um bam.
Speaker 1: We have a little checkbox here on these podcasts where
Speaker 1: we advertise, yeah I have we you know down here
Speaker 1: in we cooked coyled up down here in Mexico. One time.
Speaker 1: I didn't like it. I've never touched another one since. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just you know, cal. I mean, what's your You
Speaker 1: don't you can you eat everything you're killing now? Right? Oh? Yeah, man,
Speaker 1: I mean it is. Maybe maybe i'd go help some
Speaker 1: some kids, like with with shooting some prairie dogs, but man,
Speaker 1: it'd just be hard. Like my there's just no will.
Speaker 1: There's just zero will anymore. But we had I had
Speaker 1: to exterminate some some feral cats out of my mom's
Speaker 1: place the other day. Give your feral cat statistics two
Speaker 1: point six billion birds a year. And this isn't feral cats,
Speaker 1: this is outdoor cats. Oh here's the yeah, here's the
Speaker 1: thing though, something like that, or if I remember I
Speaker 1: had a buddy that had a you know, raccoon up
Speaker 1: in his barn, or feral cats they're getting in trouble,
Speaker 1: or if something, if I had a friend who had
Speaker 1: a chicken coop, say yeah, and fox kept getting in there.
Speaker 1: That's just I don't think of that is. I don't
Speaker 1: think that's not I don't think it is it is,
Speaker 1: But you know, it's not like there's not a lot
Speaker 1: of enjoyment in that, right, I'm like, just more more
Speaker 1: like dirty jobs done dirt cheap. Oh yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: if there's like a feral cat cleaning house on a
Speaker 1: bunch of stuff someone wanted to have done any feral
Speaker 1: cat working. My mom raised these two ducks that somebody
Speaker 1: just people know she's got a real soft heart for animals,
Speaker 1: and so she ship just shows up at their place.
Speaker 1: And she raised these two domestic ducks and it was
Speaker 1: just heartbroken that they weren't being real friendly to her
Speaker 1: for months and months, and she built them like this.
Speaker 1: She had like this grotto by the end of like
Speaker 1: duck baths and uh these and uh sunflowers like hanging
Speaker 1: overhanging sunflowers, and and uh they were happy ducks. And
Speaker 1: just about the time they warmed up to her, the
Speaker 1: uh cat explosion happened in some cat eight Both the
Speaker 1: ducks killed both the ducks, and uh that's that's when
Speaker 1: it was a season on the barn cats. Yeah. People
Speaker 1: have emailed in and messaged in about crows, about coyotes,
Speaker 1: about prairie dogs, which we've talked about. It seems like
Speaker 1: that comes in a lot. I don't know, if do
Speaker 1: you get a lot in your inbox there at the
Speaker 1: meat eater shooting crows? No, Um no, if my kids
Speaker 1: shot a crow, I would make him eat it, but
Speaker 1: he wouldn't think it was. But he would he wouldn't know.
Speaker 1: They eat so much stuff, he wouldn't think it was. Like,
Speaker 1: he wouldn't register it as a punishment. No, he'd just
Speaker 1: be a great another thing to eat. He say, what
Speaker 1: else are we gonna do with it? You know? So No,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't you know, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
Speaker 1: I mean I didn't let him do it that one time,
Speaker 1: just because I didn't want him to. Like I talked
Speaker 1: about this before, because we're doing something different. We're like
Speaker 1: waiting for a squirrel to come out. And I was teaching, like,
Speaker 1: let's stick with their playing here, not just go willy
Speaker 1: nilly shooting everything. Yeah, because we're like here for a purpose.
Speaker 1: We're waiting for something to show up. But if you
Speaker 1: do that, it's not gonna show up. Um. And we
Speaker 1: used to Yeah, we used to go out. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I have a double standard, man, because we used to
Speaker 1: go out instead of call out to get him get crows,
Speaker 1: just for just to get him. And and but now
Speaker 1: know if my kid got a crow, now, i'd make
Speaker 1: him cook it. And I'll probably you know, I'll let
Speaker 1: him get a crow and he can see what it's
Speaker 1: like to eat it. You ever eating a crow cow? Nope,
Speaker 1: no desire too. I haven't one of the handful things
Speaker 1: I've never eaten. You know what, I'm certainly not unquote
Speaker 1: right there, not above it, not above it at all.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know we were talking about was earlier.
Speaker 1: I have no real desire to just go out and uh,
Speaker 1: I guess I do have a desire to go hunt wolves.
Speaker 1: I don't I have a real hesitation to go hunt wolves,
Speaker 1: and and uh if they don't taste good. You know,
Speaker 1: if I were to get a wolf, I damn sure
Speaker 1: to be eating that. Stephenson. I've talked about this all
Speaker 1: the time. The Arctic explores Stephens instead of his favorite
Speaker 1: meat like the better and sheet learn caribeu better than
Speaker 1: cheap favorite wild meat better. So yeah, man, they ate everything.
Speaker 1: They ate whale tongue from everything from carrie with to
Speaker 1: whale tongue. And he liked he liked wolf meat the most,
Speaker 1: go out of his way to get wolves. I did
Speaker 1: some deep digging on the internet the other day, to
Speaker 1: the bowels of the Internet, um and found one published
Speaker 1: that's in quotations Wolf recipe um, and that was on.
Speaker 1: Some dudes blog that boy he killed that wolf seven
Speaker 1: or eight times by the time he declared it edible.
Speaker 1: I think more out of fear than anything else. There's
Speaker 1: no way it's gonna taste bad. I can't imagine it.
Speaker 1: Does people need wolves forever? Yeah, I would say, stay tuned.
Speaker 1: That's something we're gonna have to do. Yeah, we're gonna
Speaker 1: have to kill a wolf and eat it. I'd like
Speaker 1: to I'd like to you you want to hunt wolves? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I do. I find out people not to do with that.
Speaker 1: But a thing that troubles me is I think some
Speaker 1: people become real sensitive about their practices and and they
Speaker 1: take it like if you don't want to do something,
Speaker 1: they take it like you're making a value judgment on them. Exactly.
Speaker 1: This is not a reflection upon you. Yeah, you're gonna say,
Speaker 1: you know what, like there's all these other things to hunt,
Speaker 1: so I don't hunt that thing and don't feel like
Speaker 1: hunting that thing, and they'll get hurt, hurt their feelings
Speaker 1: because they like to do it. I'm like, dude, sure,
Speaker 1: why does not wanting to do it? Why does that
Speaker 1: body that I don't want to do it? And I'm
Speaker 1: not like I could name all kinds of stuff that
Speaker 1: that I like to do that you don't do. I
Speaker 1: don't feel bad that you. I'm not hurt that you
Speaker 1: don't do them as well. Well, there's not. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: there's a lot of other are very sensitive. Man, that's
Speaker 1: just the thing that we do. There's just not one
Speaker 1: set of values. There's not one shared There are shared values,
Speaker 1: but there's not one set of them that says, like,
Speaker 1: here all the things that we do that are acceptable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm talking about. Though, if you're like, oh, man, no,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't. I don't hunt prairie dogs. I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't hunt prairie dogs. You're too good for that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: better than me? I do you better than me? Steve,
Speaker 1: and I would be like, no, no, it's just that
Speaker 1: I'm doing something different. I guess that day. I'll tell you, man,
Speaker 1: by the end of November, Chase mule here and high
Speaker 1: snow and sleeping on the ground, on the ground. You
Speaker 1: saw that ballad of buster scrugs. Very good, very good? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: it's a lot. It's you can't say it's very because
Speaker 1: it's so many of them. Some of them are extremely good.
Speaker 1: This them, the homesteaders, you know the wagon train, that
Speaker 1: trainmastered keeps talking about his his partner. That's kind of
Speaker 1: getting over the hill. It's like, imagine being that age
Speaker 1: and doing this job, sleeping on the ground, on the ground,
Speaker 1: sleeping on the ground. That struck me. But as a
Speaker 1: man who does a lot of sleeping on the ground,
Speaker 1: as a man who does a plenty of sleeping on
Speaker 1: the ground. But yeah, man, by the time and the
Speaker 1: November rolls around, there's something very appealing about just going
Speaker 1: on half day huns, just like being able to return
Speaker 1: home and uh not sleep on the ground. So uh,
Speaker 1: that's my brother in Alaska is he gets jealous of
Speaker 1: people living in the lower forty because everything will lask
Speaker 1: is such a expedition. It's just his man's like just
Speaker 1: to be able to go out and like mess around.
Speaker 1: But it's not. It's like it's just everything is a
Speaker 1: big damn deal. Yeah, you feel like that some trucks
Speaker 1: and you're gone ten days. It's like you can't just
Speaker 1: go do something. Yeah. So anyway, by the by the time, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm I'm very to your earlier point, like
Speaker 1: I'm doing other stuff. I'm very preoccupied Um, it's just
Speaker 1: like us out here in Mexico. We all have Halina
Speaker 1: tags and nobody we've all seen Havelna and nobody's chased
Speaker 1: a single one because he's been really focused on COO's here.
Speaker 1: And I have wolf tags in my pocket and I
Speaker 1: saw some wolves and it was just like, man, it's
Speaker 1: really gonna take me away from Mule here or Elk
Speaker 1: right now. Um And so yeah, by the time those
Speaker 1: other distractions are through getting around to the wolf thing, like,
Speaker 1: I just don't have the drive for it, I guess so,
Speaker 1: but you still you know, no, I would like to
Speaker 1: make it happen. I love the idea that you can
Speaker 1: call them. I have called a few in over the years. Um.
Speaker 1: And I love talking to animals. Man, that that's cool stuff.
Speaker 1: So why I think there's just something for me where
Speaker 1: we're always measuring each other. We're always measuring ourselves against
Speaker 1: each other as hunters, always measuring what do you do,
Speaker 1: how do you do that? You know, how fast do
Speaker 1: you go up the mountain? Well? Mostly, but yeah, we
Speaker 1: always end up measuring. No matter what it is we're doing,
Speaker 1: we're always kind of whether we want to admit it
Speaker 1: or not, measuring ourselves, you know, whether it's based on
Speaker 1: the pursuit or based on how you do something, or
Speaker 1: based on what you do or don't do. Like we're
Speaker 1: always just measuring or sometimes just flat out who's is bigger? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: who's bigger? All the time we are measuring? Well we are.
Speaker 1: We didn't even tell people are we are? We're in Mexico. Hey, yes,
Speaker 1: we are here. That if you hear the gentle hum
Speaker 1: of a generator over the last hour and change off
Speaker 1: the grid Mexico. We're off the grid with a generator
Speaker 1: in the back. We got a fire going here. It's
Speaker 1: real nice, ok man oak something around here. We had
Speaker 1: a good week in Mexico. Phenomenal man calchot of deer today.
Speaker 1: Love love this place. I um, I was telling everybody today.
Speaker 1: I was like, Man, I am damn proud of this
Speaker 1: buck and and very very happy of this situation. But
Speaker 1: had I eaten this tag, I would have enjoyed every
Speaker 1: every day of this hunt. I hate a tag. I
Speaker 1: gotta leave tomorrow. And I sat on a ridge top
Speaker 1: today and just enjoyed the sunset. Man, that seems cliche,
Speaker 1: but an amazing one. It seems like they come off
Speaker 1: and around here. Um, for sure. Mark Kenyon, who's here
Speaker 1: UM described this hunt as a look and watch hunt
Speaker 1: as opposed to was spotting stock hunt. UM. I thought
Speaker 1: that was pretty good. Yeah. You look at a lot
Speaker 1: of bucks far off that are traveling fast and you
Speaker 1: just kind of they come in and out of your
Speaker 1: life and you never see him again, like a good
Speaker 1: car first rifle. Um, Well check out the rest of
Speaker 1: the coverage from this stuff one. Um. There's a television
Speaker 1: show called Metator TV. But there's also a podcast called
Speaker 1: The Mediator Podcast and that comes out every week too.
Speaker 1: Just check that out. But that's all I got. You guys,
Speaker 1: have any we should do concluders. Since this is uh
Speaker 1: Steve Ornelli is here, we should conclude with a thought.
Speaker 1: Man I concluding thought. Um, it's an auspicious time to
Speaker 1: be down on the border. Thank thanks for bringing that up,
Speaker 1: because I feel like coming down here and not bringing
Speaker 1: it up. You're looking at like we're in Mexico and
Speaker 1: you're looking at mountains right in Arizona, and a lot
Speaker 1: of discussion about the border and and uh movement to
Speaker 1: and fro right, it's just an interesting time of beer.
Speaker 1: It's like, you can't I've commented on this a number
Speaker 1: of times, where the landscape, you know, I've hunted cuise
Speaker 1: deer in Arizona not far from here, and I've hunted
Speaker 1: him here and uh, the same plants, you know, same ground,
Speaker 1: same animals, same wind blowing. But everything just a few
Speaker 1: miles south of that border. Everything feels so different, but
Speaker 1: it's not. It's like on the ground and the birds
Speaker 1: and it's just the same, right. These things don't know
Speaker 1: what side of that line they're on. But you can't
Speaker 1: help you can't get away from this sense of viewing
Speaker 1: it as somehow other, and it just it impresses me
Speaker 1: with the way in which your geo political sensibility is
Speaker 1: very ingrained, you know, and you're like, when you're walking
Speaker 1: up a hill, you're not just walking up a hill
Speaker 1: in Mexico, hill in Mexico, man, and that's a cous
Speaker 1: deer in Mexico's like, you can't it doesn't escape your head.
Speaker 1: And I keep wondering, like why is it that you
Speaker 1: don't forget, Like, oh I forgot that I'm in another
Speaker 1: It's very I mean, we were talking about it today.
Speaker 1: It's very when you cross the wall there and acquaprita
Speaker 1: over it from Douglas, Arizona, over into Mexico. You can
Speaker 1: look through the steel bars and see the McDonald's golden arches.
Speaker 1: You can look through the steel bars and see like
Speaker 1: the wall kind of like the Walmart parking lot right there,
Speaker 1: and m It's like, you know, you know, you have
Speaker 1: this understanding at that point that that these are this
Speaker 1: wall is more than just a barrier between two countries.
Speaker 1: It's like this. It makes it all the more real
Speaker 1: that these worlds are are what they are. You know,
Speaker 1: it's amazing. I don't need to describe what occupate looks like,
Speaker 1: but it don't look like McDonald's and Walmart's at all.
Speaker 1: It is different. And then I guess you go through
Speaker 1: that transition, then you come out and like a purely
Speaker 1: natural landscape like here you're in. You know, I was
Speaker 1: remarking to Caldany when he got that bok. It's like,
Speaker 1: these are white tailed deer. They're living outside of any
Speaker 1: real human influence. I mean they're not they're not exploiting
Speaker 1: agriculture right there, just you know, they're just mountain deer.
Speaker 1: And um, I was saying to calic Man. Even if
Speaker 1: humans have never colonized the western hemisphere. I feel like
Speaker 1: this buck would have been standing here right now, but
Speaker 1: he doesn't know that anything has happened, you know, which
Speaker 1: is you know, someone could shoot a lot of holes
Speaker 1: in that argument. But um, but it's yeah, it's still
Speaker 1: it's like a deer in Mexico. But that's you hit
Speaker 1: on a good point there, right, It's it's us, man,
Speaker 1: We're the difference. Yeah, you can't. You can't see we
Speaker 1: are the difference because you can see that when you're
Speaker 1: in in you know, when you're in the town where
Speaker 1: that we've settled. You can look across and see the difference.
Speaker 1: When you remove the human interaction, it's the same damn thing,
Speaker 1: exactly the same thing, wall, no wall, whatever. So that
Speaker 1: that it simplifies this this trip for me personally simplified
Speaker 1: and complicated the idea at the same time. Yeah, for sure,
Speaker 1: it's it's interesting to it's interesting to be here right
Speaker 1: now and just kind of be able to sit and
Speaker 1: look at that line and think about it. That's my concluder. Yep,
Speaker 1: gal uh, Steve, I guess to your point, I did
Speaker 1: have like a very like interesting thought pop into my
Speaker 1: head when I was after our hunt this morning. It's
Speaker 1: like how like there is a giant disparity and the
Speaker 1: amount of Americans that come to Mexico and the amount
Speaker 1: Americans that come to Mexico and fire a rifle in
Speaker 1: Mexico than amongst relatively, not saying that it's been done many, many,
Speaker 1: many times, but um proportionately, very very different groups. The
Speaker 1: party crowd going to Cancoon. As Rick Smith said, this
Speaker 1: is not the Margharita Mexico. Yeah, I think very relatively
Speaker 1: very few people cross down and hunt here in northern Sonora.
Speaker 1: And yeah, you have many people a year you think
Speaker 1: do that? Well, I have no idea. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: it's been long and stay tries to hear this less
Speaker 1: than a thousand Yeah, yeah, I would be there. But
Speaker 1: a man, I love the country and I love this
Speaker 1: setup like the and it should definitely say it. Thank
Speaker 1: you to h Jay Scott Outdoors, who this is the
Speaker 1: only uh do learn and Scott out like Jay Scott,
Speaker 1: Jay Scott as his his Yeah, he guides under Colburn
Speaker 1: and Scott do it yourself hunt like her range helps
Speaker 1: your range is actually a do it yourself hunt like
Speaker 1: he sets you up for success. But oh my god, man,
Speaker 1: like the freedom you enjoy an extraordinary freedom among us
Speaker 1: of my land spoiled kids. Man. And it's just it's
Speaker 1: not that different. It's like you just you just get
Speaker 1: to go hunt. It's great. I know, I know. Maybe
Speaker 1: maybe that's my concluder. Are your your concluders concluded? I'm concluded. Uh,
Speaker 1: I'm a notorious overthinker. But at the same time, I
Speaker 1: feel like that, you know, running around here like unfettered,
Speaker 1: nobody telling us you can't do this, you can't do that,
Speaker 1: you can't shoot this buck, you can't shoot that buck.
Speaker 1: Like you just run on feeling, just running on feeling.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's the title, but you're just running on like
Speaker 1: whatever you feel like, doing whatever you want to do.
Speaker 1: And um, you know I has a feeling. I like, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I appreciate that feeling. And so when I get
Speaker 1: to do something like this and then you know, call
Speaker 1: it my job at some level, man, fun am I
Speaker 1: grateful for that? Goddamn it is that awesome feeling. Grateful man,
Speaker 1: you gotta My wife reminds me a lot about that stuff.
Speaker 1: I feel grateful, I really do. I complaining about something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: first world problems. We have three beautiful, healthy children. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I know, but still I traffic. I conclude by saying
Speaker 1: that I do feel uh, I feel grateful to to
Speaker 1: have been able to run around and us see what
Speaker 1: we've seen and do what we've do done this weekend
Speaker 1: and any other time. And um, the meat Eater cruise together. Man,
Speaker 1: that's you know, last year Steve and I were here
Speaker 1: and there wasn't a meat Eater incorporate. Man, there was
Speaker 1: no Director of Conservation Round Callahan at all. And uh,
Speaker 1: that's pretty cool, very cool, very cool by oak fire.
Speaker 1: Yes you're fire. All right, boys, Thank you, thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you. I'm gonna turn this generator off. That's it.
Speaker 1: That's all. Episode number forty five in the books. Thank
Speaker 1: you too, Ryan Callahan. Thank you to Stephen Rinella. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was only a year ago that when we started
Speaker 1: this podcast. Stephen Nell and I did episode number one.
Speaker 1: We sat on a glass and tit in Sonora, Mexico,
Speaker 1: not far from where we recorded this podcast. So we've
Speaker 1: come a long way since then. Thank you all for
Speaker 1: following along. Thank you to Stephen and Ryan for being
Speaker 1: a big part of of what we've done at the
Speaker 1: Hunting Collective. And and I'm grateful, as I said at
Speaker 1: the end of the podcast. I'm very grateful for what
Speaker 1: I'm able to do for a living, and I'm very
Speaker 1: grateful to anyone who cares to listen, follow along, comment, negative, positive,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter, Um, it's these are interactions that I
Speaker 1: care about. I care about them deeply, and I'm thankful
Speaker 1: for them. So also, that's what I'll say. And what else,
Speaker 1: what else? What else? What else? What else? Meat Eater
Speaker 1: Live Tour coming up, man, it's coming up not too
Speaker 1: long for now. We'll be in Sacramento. We will also
Speaker 1: be in Reno. I will be traveling to Boise later
Speaker 1: in the year with the team. It's gonna be great.
Speaker 1: You're gonna love it. So if you go to the
Speaker 1: meat eater dot com slash events, you'll find all the
Speaker 1: schedule there and you can buy tickets. I'm sure there's
Speaker 1: some left to most of the events. The boys are
Speaker 1: also going to Michigan and Dallas, and hopefully we'll be
Speaker 1: able to announce an Austin show pretty soon, which I
Speaker 1: will be attending as well. So go there, check that
Speaker 1: out come and see us. Would love to hang with you,
Speaker 1: shake your hand, um, and do whatever and do whatever
Speaker 1: you really want us to do. In those ways. What
Speaker 1: and there's more stuff. There's always more stuff. The Mediator
Speaker 1: newsletters there. Go to the website, the mediator dot com.
Speaker 1: Subscribe to that. You're gonna get all our podcasts, all
Speaker 1: our content every week. It's awesome. And then when you're
Speaker 1: done with that, you're gonna have a little bit of
Speaker 1: extra time. I'm sure. Maybe do this one weekend and
Speaker 1: you've got nothing going on. You go over to the
Speaker 1: store on the Mediator dot com. You poke around. There's
Speaker 1: lots of meat eat gear there. There's children's tease, all
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff for your kiddos. There's hunting collective hoodies
Speaker 1: or anti uh bullshit pro nuance shirts. There's all kinds
Speaker 1: of stuff over there ats whatever you can desire. Plus
Speaker 1: you can buy first leg here over there too, which
Speaker 1: just cool. So anyway, that's it for now. If you
Speaker 1: can do all those things, would be very grateful. Until
Speaker 1: next time, we'll be joining you from a lass of Vegas, Nevada,
Speaker 1: hopefully with one Donnie Vincent. So check out Donny. If
Speaker 1: you don't know who he is, I'm sure you already do.
Speaker 1: But if you don't, check in out and we'll see
Speaker 1: you then bye.