Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
We live in a world of foil wrappers, expiration dates, “best consumed by…” labels and foods so laced with additives that you need a chemical engineering degree just to decipher what’s hidden inside.
I find it interesting that for thousands of years, humans ate bread with no mention of gluten intolerance, but that in the last 10 years, especially among women in the United States and Western Europe, an epidemic of gluten intolerance has reached epic levels.
Is there a connection between all those additives pounded into a substance that for millennia was simply flour, water and yeast and a sudden surge in sometimes horrendous symptoms among segments of society when they consume it? You make the call.
I know that no one ever complained of any side effects in eating my Grandma Gasser’s homemade bread. We all relished it, and I can still smell and taste it though she’s been gone from us for three decades.
I enjoyed grandma’s bread so much, that as construction worker during the summer months of college I purchased 50-pound bags of it, along with the specific yeast she requested, just for a taste of her bread, with her homemade preserves, and real butter. Each workday at five, after my roommate Frank and I left the jobsite to drop in on her before driving home to my parent’s farm between Kinnear and Pavillion she had a loaf of fresh baked delight waiting for us.
Natural food, devoid of alternations.
It might seem a jump, but I harvested a nice pronghorn buck a little after noon on Sunday deep in the apparently barren wastes of the Gas Hills and Rattlesnake Mountains. When you are a carnivore, it’s hypocritical for you to simply eat steak, pork chops or chicken without realizing what goes into the process of bringing those neat, plastic wrapped, chilled cuts of meat to your shopping cart.
We’ve all heard comments made by clueless city dwellers about food coming from the supermarket, and not from animals, or the work of farmers to bring that food to their table.
This afternoon, (I’m writing this Sunday evening) my son Brian and I enjoyed the time-honored tradition of father and son hunting together. He filled his tag a few weeks ago on South Pass during black powder season but was an excellent guide as we searched for a nice buck to harvest.
The roles were a bit reversed from the first time Brian and I hunted together back in 1999. I wrote about the experience for the Denver Post a quarter-century ago.
I was an invincible, experienced 42-year-old hunter, and he was a 12-year-old novice. I can still trek up and down the hills at altitude, but I don’t cover ground as I once did, and surely can’t keep up with Brian when he wants to move.
Here is the piece I wrote for the Post back in 1999.
It was the kind of day you have to experience to truly appreciate. The weather was changing. You could feel the air pressure drop and the looming clouds on the western horizon reminded you that it was October in Wyoming.
After several years of target shooting, a successful hunter safety class, and riding around with me while I hunted, my son Brian was about to embark on his first deer hunt.
We didn’t have a lot of time but living in Fremont County has its advantages when it comes to deer hunting. There are dozens of good hunting areas within 50 miles of Riverton and we had permission to hunt on one of them.
His excitement was hard to contain inside the cab of the truck. He read the regulations and examined the area map again and again and speculated on the size, sex, and species of deer we would see. We decided we were after whitetails, a species I had never hunted before, a unique experience for both of us.
Matt was our guide, a former student of mine. Brian’s interest was piqued when we saw a huge 5×5 mule deer hanging from his dad’s front-end loader. It was a very nice buck but we were after the flighty whitetail, the deer family’s answer to jackrabbits on amphetamines.
We jumped deer within 10 minutes of starting our hunt but they were mixed in with cattle and we didn’t have a shot. Our guide moved us about five miles up the valley into an open meadow that looked like it fell right out of a Sports Afield photo spread.
Perfect deer habitat, running water, an open hay meadow with a lot of willow thickets, and a border of shallow hills to the south. I almost expected to see a camera crew setting up for a hunting segment on the Outdoor Channel.
A two-minute walk and we spotted a whitetail trio. We put Brian in front and he sighted a small spike buck. One shot and his hunt was over. The 125-yard shot from his .243 wasn’t the longest ever taken and the little buck was far from Boone and Crockett but he had joined the ranks of the hunter.
There is something primitive and atavistic about big game hunting. You feel closer to nature than you do when fishing or hiking. I’ve heard some people explain that it’s almost a spiritual experience. Just the experience of hunting with my son would have been enough. Harvesting an animal was an extra bonus.
This kind of father and son experience is disappearing rapidly in America. Anti-hunting groups are gaining strength and the misguided, myopic gun control advocates are targeting the wrong groups. I’m still waiting for the bumper sticker that says, “People don’t kill people, guns do.”
Indirectly the break from our hunting tradition affects agriculture as well. With a growing segment of our population believing that food comes directly from a supermarket or is produced in a factory it’s difficult to explain the need for import quotas and BLM grazing contracts.
Shooting, cleaning, skinning, and cutting an animal doesn’t allow the illusion of food appearing magically. It’s not a clean process but it’s a good one for everyone to know.
It’s also a valuable lesson in the power of a gun. Killing on television is neat, clean, and quick. Dirty Harry can blow away 15 people in an hour and never bat an eye. Perhaps if more of our society still hunted and raised their own food the respect for our environment would increase and the number of gun related deaths would diminish.
What was true 25 years ago, remains true today. The experience of father and son working together in the wilderness is a tradition shared by the Masai, the Oglala, the Aborigine and remains within our grasp today, if we only reach for it.
Thankfully, public land allows this to happen, and hopefully it always will.