Simplicity

by Tom Kelly

Nothing is more aggravating than listening to the senile maunderings of an obnoxious old crock who wants to tell you how good things were back in the spring of 1924. You were not there, you get the distinct feeling that his performance then was not nearly as outstanding as his reminiscences are now, but you can’t prove it and neither of you can go back.

Whatever sins I may have committed, and you may rest assured that I will go to the grave without revealing a single one of them, I have never been guilty of claiming turkey hunting used to be better than it is now. It may have been better in 1886, or in the year before Columbus landed, but it has damned surely been uphill all the way ever since 1950, which adds up to 60 years of continuous improvement.

If, as some religions believe, hell consists of inflicting a personal set of circumstances that are especially repugnant to the individual being punished, then sending a dedicated turkey hunter back to 1950 would qualify on all counts.

The only advantage we had at all in the spring of 1950 was the advantage of simplicity.

A typical spring catalog for one of the major mail order houses today weighs 17 ounces and has 700 pages. It offers for sale every piece of hunting and protective equipment that the mind of man can devise, beginning at the skin of the hunter and reaching to the feathers of the turkey, and most turkey hunters I know have a representative sample of nearly every item.

It is almost the middle of the spring season, and the season in my state is seven weeks long, before I can remember which one of the dozens of pockets in my clothes holds the particular item I want at the moment. We really need checklists like those in the cockpit of a major airliner, and a co-pilot, so somebody can read off the details that should be verified before takeoff.

In 1950, I was the junior timber marker (we only had two) for a major southern pine sawmill. I worked every day in boots and surplus army fatigues. In cold weather I added a surplus army field jacket. Every morning when I left the sawmill boarding house to go to work, I carried a pocketknife, a compass, a paint gun to mark the trees, the tally book and a diameter tape.

On days when I left the boarding house to hunt turkeys, I dressed the same way but left the paint gun, the tally book and the diameter tape at home and substituted in their place my shotgun and four shells, an aspirin box with two yelpers in it, and a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine to sit on. If I had to operate with the same spread of equipment today I could do it, except that I would use a substitute magazine.

Cosmopolitan is still printed and generally features a scantily clad lady on the cover, along with a partial list of the articles inside, articles with titles that look as if they had been extracted verbatim from the “Kama Sutra.” You are left with the distinct feeling that you might contract a social disease simply from sitting on the magazine and elderly gentlemen do not need to be seen carrying a copy of it under one arm as they leave the newsstand.

We kill a great many more turkeys today than we did in 1950, and are far more comfortable while we do it. The last thing I want to do is to return to the days of Spartan simplicity. If you had told me in 1950 that a day would come when I would be able to say to a difficult turkey, “The hell with you, I am going to leave and go find one that is more cooperative.” I would have answered, “Maybe, but it won’t happen on this planet.”

In a very lengthy career of being wrong in many of my judgments, being wrong on this subject is delightful. It is like getting money from home without writing for it.

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