Enjoying the great outdoors one drive-thru at a time
By Burton W. Cole
You wouldn’t know it, but I grew up among outdoorsmen.
Most of my neighbors were sportsmen. At this very minute, a great deal of my uncles and cousins probably are tromping through some marshy timberland or are splashing about some stream in an overly optimistic quest for game for the dinner table.
Through some apparent mutation of my genes, I lost my way to the great outdoors. Mom warned me that all those comic books I stayed indoors to read would scramble my senses.
As a boy, I could hunt black bear in the woods behind our family farm any time I wished.
“But Burton, no bears live around here,” one of my he-man cousins would snort.
“That’s the best time to hunt them, when they ain’t there,” I said. “I’ve only got a cork gun.”
“That water pistol won’t help much either.”
I suspect that if I ever caught up to a real live bear, the critter might become confused over which of us is dinner and which of us gets to hold the fork.
Besides, we always had one beef in the freezer and the next one in the on-deck circle in the barn. And if the garden ran dry, McDonald’s and Kroger were a quick car trip away.
So why stumble out of a warm bed at 4 a.m. to join uncles, cousins and neighbors, who were mostly just catching colds anyway?
Besides, have you priced a good rifle, compound bow or rod-and-reel lately? Between the equipment, the camo gear, a four-wheeler or two and a boat, it’d be cheaper to buy a month of meals at Outback Steakhouse, Red Lobster or Golden Corral. And you don’t have to gut, clean, scale or dress anything.
My first wife hailed from the mountains of southeastern West Virginia. Her extended family also is chock full of hunters and fishermen.
It seems to be some sort of law there. Grabbing a gun, a pole or a mess of traps to put a meal on the table is just second nature.
My wife told me a joke about this — and I must stress here for any politically correct readers that it was my wife, an actual hillbilly stuck in the flatlands of northeast Ohio, who said this:
“What is a seven-course meal in West Virginia?
“A ’possum and a six-pack.”
Ha, ha. What a sense of humor those wild, wonderful West Virginians have. I hope.
I made some attempts to rectify this lack of the outdoors in my life. On one visit to Uncle Junior’s farm in West Virginia, I fired some mighty fine pistol shots into a feed box nailed to a fence post. I gutted it and grilled it. It wasn’t the best meal I ever had. Too grainy. But, to its credit, it definitely did NOT taste “just like chicken.’”
This is a favorite prank of outdoorsmen. They will drag home most anything out of the woods, skin it, cook it and tell you it tastes “just like chicken.” It never does. Not even the Kentucky Colonel’s secret recipe can make that meat cluck.
But it’s too late. You’ve already bit. And the outdoorsmen can barely wait to dive back into the woods to burst into fits of laughter before rousting out some other weird critter and proclaiming it tastes “just like chicken.”
My next trip outdoors will be to the KFC drive-through for a big bucket of friend chicken. It’s about time those outdoorsy jokers learned what chicken tastes like. They obviously have no clue.
There is one major drawback to this kind of hunting. You can’t get a fine trophy feed box to mount on your wall from a drive-through window.
When Cole says he’s gone fishin’, he means he’s taking a nap. Again. Hunt him down at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.