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Real Men Don’t Use Tin Cans
Posted on September 17, 2003 in Book of Days Irony & Sarcasm Reading
Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.
Today’s topic: Write about a purchase.
I bought a book entitled The Lost Lore of a Man’s Life : Lots of Cool Stuff Guys Used to Know But Forgot About the Great Outdoors. To understand my purchases, you must know me. I like reference books. I read references books from beginning to end, absorbing what knowledge I can. I keep them in a line over my desk top where I can reach up and refer to them. This book struck me as an excellent buy because it told how things were done in the wild in the days before SUVs, gas grills, and frozen rock cornish game hens.
From the biographical information, I gather Denis Boyles’s “a real man” as opposed to us wimps who only hike on weekends and buy freeze dried food when we go camping. He lives on a farm by which fact we are to assume that he is totally independent from the rest of the world. So much so that when I checked the URL given for his webzine “A Man’s Life” I discovered that the domain was up for sale.
The text in this book comes from various out of print books and pamphlets. Plagiarized as the author unapologetically admits, the book contains much material of value for anyone seeking to describe outdoor life as it was before conveniences. When I need to know how to hit a flying target (crows are very slow compared to canvasback ducks, sparrows, and hawks), catch a pig, make a canoe out of paper (though it doesn’t tell me which kind to use), send a smoke signal, or play golf on a five acre meadow, I can turn to this book.
Looking through it, however, I see many signs of dependence on industrial civilization. The lore of the West is full of tales of self-sufficient men who survived on canned beans, using rifles and shotguns made in Massachusetts, chopped with steel axes, and carried water in tin buckets. “I’m free of civilization,” you can hear them say as they thread their line through a wire hook they bought by the pound. The handle of their fishing rod is made of Spanish cork. Their rope is made of Bengalese jute. They carry military surplus canteens, mess kits, and they eat with a knife, a fork and a spoon.
Pfah! These are not real men! They are counterfeits, reenactors of the advance guard of industrial civilization as it swept across the continent. Real men don’t cook with mess kits. They make their hooks from bone. They hunt with arrows. Stealth is the key to catching waterfowl. Boyles’ writes of pansy men who would collapse in the wild without a pack mule laden with supplies purchased at a general store.
If you want to read about real survival by real men out here in California (another fault of this book is that it is written as if the whole world were like New England), try The Natural World of the California Indians. You’ll not only find survival techniques used by real men of limited resources, but you will also learn how real women helped their husbands and their children eat well without canned beans to hold them over through the winter months. Pshaw! I bet Denis Boyle has never eaten acorn gruel! That’s a real food of the land.
Want to participate? First either get yourself a copy of A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves or read these guidelines. Then either check in to see what the prompt for the day is or read along in the book.
Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: It’s raining now.
