High tech red neck by John C. Street

The first deer gun I ever owned was also the first gun I ever owned.  It was a store brand, 12 gauge, bolt-action shotgun with a generic poly-choke device affixed to the end of the barrel and with it I hunted everything from rabbits and squirrels to grouse and, yes, like I said, I hunted deer with it as well.   

It was clunky and heavy and there wasn’t a comfortable way to carry the dang thing but to a young boy who wanted very badly to believe in the warning, “Beware the man who only has one gun, he likely knows how to use it,” I thought it was everything I needed. 

Within days of taking it out of the box I found under the Christmas tree, my father affixed a home-made peep site on the back of the receiver and, while no one would consider it a “tack-driver,” it could tear up a four-inch bulls eye at fifty yards and that seemed plenty good enough for me.  Honestly, though, I was awfully glad it only took a few pumpkin balls to tear that big a hole because that was about all the recoil I could take. 

Not too many years later I graduated to a used 30.06 and it too wore a peep site albeit of the “store-bought” variety.  Can’t remember for a certainty how many deer that rifle accounted for but it was quite a few and I can never remember feeling handicapped because it didn’t wear a scope.  

It wasn’t till a passable number of years later when the elasticity of the muscles of my eyes started to harden (and all the rest of the muscles in my body started to go the other way) that attaching glass to my rifle became an issue. And even that momentous occasion is far enough in the past now that I can’t remember exactly when it happened.  Just seems like I went hunting one season with a decked out rifle and felt that something had changed although I couldn’t put my finger on it until a friend, amazed at seeing glass atop my rifle, commented that I was turning into “a high-tech redneck.” 

Like many of you, I’m sure, I began my career in the field with the everyday clothing at hand. Florescent orange requirements were years in the future and if you wore water-proof clothing it was coated with rubber and made you sweat like crazy.  The hunting boots I owned were also the only boots I owned and if my feet were dry at the end of the day it was because it hadn’t rained or snowed.   

Back then there was a stinky concoction – I think we called it “mink oil” – sold by a company named Herters that we liberally smeared on our foot wear but, while it kept the leather soft and supple, its water repelling properties didn’t last too long. Within a few years I graduated to calf high rubber boots but they weren’t a whole lot better; sweat or rainwater, wet feet were wet feet.  

Can’t honestly remember when that new, space-age material came along that kept everything dry but it was many years after they started making it into outdoor clothing before I could afford it.  But then I went hunting one sleety winter day and it suddenly dawned on me that I was staying warm and dry because I was covered from head to toe (hat, coat, pants and boots) with Gore-Tex.  By golly my friend was right, I thought, I really was becoming a high-tech redneck. 

When I was still at a tender young age, my father introduced me to the pleasures of fishing with a fly rod, a clunky old, three-piece bamboo affair (that I wish I still had) that couldn’t keep itself from getting tangled up in the stream side bushes but that could derrick anything from a miniature brook trout to a big lipped carp onto the bank. When my skills advanced past the stage where my casting looked less like batting practice and more like I was actually throwing a bit of line, I got promoted to a bargain basement piece of fiberglass and things got surprisingly better from there 

Once again I can’t remember when the transition got started but the stuff I take ‘a fishin’ nowadays is – literally derived from - rocket science compared to what I toted around as a boy.  Both my rod and most of my reel, to say nothing of the fly line itself, are constructed of materials that weren’t commercially available way back then and the tinsel and trinkets I weave into some of my flies nowadays would have made the old-timers howl.   

There’s precious little I do in the great out of doors anymore that hasn’t been affected by this high-tech revolution and there’s a lot more stuff available that I haven’t discovered a need for yet.  But this year I’ve been sharpening my knives on some space-age material instead of that old piece of stone that was dug out of an Arkansas quarry.  And I’ll be confirming the work of my nearly fifty year old compass with one of them global positioning units that’s guided by a flock of satellites.  Knowing I could find the road I parked on was always a comfort but walking directly back to the car will make that little gizmo worth its weight in gold.   

An astute person once observed that “You can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy” and I can’t disagree with that.  I was under the spell of big city life long enough to know that even exciting times in the fast lane couldn’t scrub all the country boy out of me 

I’d hazard a guess, though, that if that philosopher looked around today, he’d sum it up a tad different. “You can take the redneck out of a high-tech city,” he’d probably say, “but there ain’t no way you’re gonna’ get all that high-tech stuff away from the redneck.”