The digital age continues to put hard copy newspapers and
magazines in a bad way. My mailbox is no longer stuffed with
must-have subscriptions. Yet there was a time when even children
read magazines, an amazing fact on its face.
To open the mailbox when I was a kid and see a fresh new
issue of Field & Stream (F&S) was a small
joy. I had a subscription to that premier Hook and Bullet,
as I did to Outdoor Life (OL) and
Fur-Fish-Game (FFG). In the days before cable
nature television these magazines gave a kid growing up in the
borderland of the outer suburbs of Gotham and the hinterlands of
upstate New York a window into a sought-after wilder world. Throw
in the novels of Jack London and Kenneth Roberts and that kid was
adventure-struck.
F&S, founded in 1895, with a
circulation today of one million, was the original gentleman’s
sporting magazine. One famous contributor was the prolific Canadian
Roderick Haig-Brown, whom I envied because he got paid to go
fishing. OL (founded 1898; current circulation 800,000) in
a 1930s heyday featured the writing of Ernest Hemingway and Zane
Grey, both obsessed fishermen. OL also had on staff the
great Jack O’Connor — hunter and gun expert — who had the
desirable job of wandering the world’s remote regions in search of
big game, bagging it and writing well about it.
But the real keeper was FFG (1925; current
circulation 116,000), though its production values compared to the
previous two were rudimentary. Printed on cheap stock and at the
time featuring a non-glossy photo format, FFG was
essentially a trapper’s how-to manual, and ran stories about
homesteading misanthropes living in remote cabins in Alaska or
elsewhere. A typical photo showed a grizzled guy posing with the
season’s take of pelts stretched on boards, or lining the outside
wall of a cabin or barn. Scores of beavers, lynx, bobcats,
muskrats, and foxes with their bushy tails. I planned to head to
Alaska upon my high school graduation to live this life, though it
didn’t quite happen that way. Today FFG is more in the
mainstream F&S/OL magazine mold rather than a
trapper’s bible.
The Hook and Bullet — along with exciting
adventure fare — was also big on the how-to stuff. How to caulk a
leaky canoe. How to start a fire in the rain. How to stalk a deer
depending on landscape and weather conditions. How to catch bass on
a hot day. How to train a hunting dog. Even how to properly fold a
topography map.
But nowadays these publications are not your father’s
Hook and Bullet. They all have a web presence designed to
attract readers with such literal fare as recipes for gourmet game
cooking, and a Green milieu of stories and videos about preserving
prime hunting land and riparian (rivers and streams) areas. They’ve
also by necessity become politically-active with pieces and blogs
on 2nd Amendment rights, hunting rights, and in-general goings-on
in Washington or the state capitals dealing with related pending
legislation. PETA is a particularly demonized adversary.
I also had a subscription to National Geographic,
an annually renewed Christmas gift from a relative. Its arrival
every month meant that I would take an armchair journey to places
both exotic and wild, though the tropical parts of the globe held
no interest for me. I liked cold, snowy mountains and
conifer-carpeted wilderness. One issue transported me to the North
Pole on a snowmobile expedition; another to Yellowstone to study
grizzly bears with the legendary wildlife researchers John and
Frank Craighead.
National Geographic is famous for its photography, of
course. The selection regimen obviously remains rigorous. But even
in the non-digital 1960s the photos were known for their crisp
lucidity. Before the advent of cable nature television,
National Geographic offered the best medium as to what the
Earth’s remote regions actually looked like. And the first uses of
satellite shots were the antecedent of “Google Earth”.
Then there were the maps. Just about every issue provided
one, usually related to one of the articles. I had piles of them,
they fascinated me, and helped get me straight A’s in Geography.
Alaska, Canada, the Rockies, the Himalayas. I memorized them: the
mountains, the rivers, the tiny towns that in places such as Alaska
were nothing more than outposts in the wilderness. But these
microscopic municipalities were on the map. What did they look
like? And who lived there?
A National Geographic article first led me West
in 1975. Titled “Golden Ghosts of the Lost Sierra,” it sent me and
two friends to the banks of the Middle Fork of the Feather River in
Northern California for a month of camping and futile gold
prospecting. Though I came home with empty pockets, I’d had the
experience of seeing some of the American West for the first
time.
So here I sit in Salmon, Idaho with the snowy Continental
Divide visible from my bedroom window. Nice view. But I’ve seen it
before.
