I did some spring cleaning recently. A primary objective was to clear out an old dresser in the spare room that had been serving as storage for all of the orphaned cruft that collects throughout a person’s life. Things that you don’t necessarily want to throw away, but are not exactly sure where to put. A fistful of tags — mostly unpunched — found themselves on the chopping block.
I’m not sure what most people do with their old hunting licenses and tags. Most probably toss them. Idaho sends out those neat, hard plastic licenses that are just too cool to dispose of… one day, they’ll make for a great wall hanger above the reloading bench. Perhaps a bit too sentimental, I cannot in good conscience toss these memoirs.
In this digital age (and even the age of digital tags), each square of thermal paper is hardcoded with memory, recall that comes flooding back the second you roll your eyes over it. A sense of place and time… an archive, a backup. A written record, something becoming so dangerously rare, of where you presumably went and what you were intending to do during a specific window of time.
Most of the trips weren’t even that productive. At press time, I’m batting well below 50% of all tags punched. Yet again, I’m not sure how that breaks down for most people. In the West, success rates seem to hover around 20-30% at the top end, so maybe I’m doing just fine, especially given the late blooming nature of my pursuits in this field.
Most of the time, to the outsider, I went somewhere and came back with nary a thing to show for it other than a few hundred bucks in gas on my credit card, and less a few pounds around the middle (not that I had any to spare to begin with). Nothing you can easily plaster on the internet or brag about to others at the next pint night.
To me, though? A wildly different story.
I have seen the Rockies shaking off winter’s heavy robe and the balsamroot and the lupine bursting forth from the ground. I have seen cow elk casually graze their way twenty yards in front of me while I sat leaning against a tree eating lunch and with the call of the springtime songbirds augmenting the steady white noise of the mountain wind. I have crossed Salmon in my socks against my better judgement. I’ve seen the sagehens out doing their primordial dance in the cold early spring, lit by the orange glow of a rising Great Basin sun.
I’ve seen parts of the country I otherwise would have no business being in. I’ve had memorable conversations with folks I’ll never see again. I’ve burned rubber and gas and have always loved the views of the new sheriff’s station and the still-snowcapped Schell Creeks from the Love’s in Ely, and I’ve laughed when I saw someone drive away from a pump there with the hose still in his truck.
I’ve spent days planning a fishing trip only to go too early and catch nothing below the rushing water of spring meltoff. I’ve driven hours to get handed a loss at the last two miles of the journey. I’ve spent weeks and weeks out during the spring trying to chase a wakening ursid and seeing no bears.
When they — whoever they are — lay me low and are rifling through the bin with all my old tags, it’s more likely than not that none of this will come to their minds. It’ll just be Granpa’s old junk, just like all the old car parts and the guitars and whatever else my empire of dirt looks like at the specific point in time that I croak. Even the mounts…
It’s such a shame that any level of globalized self-consciousness even enters our thoughts when we consider what exactly we’d like to do in the outdoors this year; where to put in for tags, where to fish… the menacing specter of “success” with the thumb heavier on the scales of satisfaction and satiation than it ever should be.
The derelict spirit of the fabled Trout Bum is still alive and very well in the hearts of more people than they even realize. A pursuit that is inherently extremely selfish, but pays the spiritual dividends that the uninitiated can ever realize.
Ideally, I have a good amount of decades left before I croak, but when I do, someone might have enough presence of mind to look around my place and compare the amount of tags to the amount of animal parts hanging on the wall and wonder just what exactly I was doing up there for so much of my life. He’s got nothing to show for it.
And you know what?
I couldn’t care less.
