Fishing, bird hunting, and cooking for years had been his central obsessions. Stop one and they all stopped. It was a mystery of sorts but more caused more. When he had become interested in cooking in those teaching years his wife was thrilled. There is scarcely a housewife who doesn’t tire of coming up with something new every night for dinner. With him oddly it had begun somewhere between recipes and poems. In his usual state of hubris he decided to create original recipes that would amount to the size of a book of poems. Of course he quickly fell flat on his face. When questioned his wife would point out that his original recipe wasn’t original. She had a huge repertoire of recipes and a library of cookbooks that impressed all visitors. Not having thought the problem through he was humiliated that he wasn’t a great creative chef instantly. She, meanwhile, was highly amused to the point that he easily became quarrelsome. And to his despair he discovered that cooking and drinking didn’t go together, certainly not beyond a single glass of wine.
His first victory was absurd. A young couple from the French department had stopped by for a drink and to advise him on his next trip to France. The young woman seemed to know everything about food and wine. He did note how quickly the young quiet and deferential man opened a bottle of wine. It was enviable when he had seen it done in the bistros and he thought it required big talent and an amateur could never pull it off. His wife had warned him against cooking from the books of Paula Wolfert as the recipes were currently well “above his head.” He had started a recipe the afternoon before but it wouldn’t be done until midnight. His wife had made it once saying that he probably wasn’t worth all the effort. It was a stew made of duck legs and thighs, garlic, thyme, Armagnac, and red wine. His wife was tired, made an omelet with cheese, and went to bed, and he gave up on the recipe.
Now they were all hungry sitting there eating olives and drinking cheapish Côtes du Rhône, and the Frenchwoman suggested they drive to their place across town and she could whip up a little supper. He dramatically yelled stop and got his half-finished casserole in its big blue Le Creuset from the fridge. His wife said to her, “We’ll heat it up. You’ll probably have to correct it.” He improvised finishing the Cassoulet de Canard and the Frenchwoman shrieked with delight, pronouncing it beautifully on her sibilant tongue. After that he would arrogantly try anything within or beyond his talents, usually French but quite a bit from northern Italy and the books of Mario Batali. He preferred the French but only because they were more versatile. This food obsession had lasted throughout his life, waxing and waning. A month of intense activity might be followed by a month of laziness with a few very simple Chinese meals thrown in. He loved the way cooking took over his mind and resolved the usual mental miseries which it always did. He suspected that it was the root of his sanity if there was one which was doubtful.
The clearest mystery of his childhood was water which led him to fishing. It was emotionally enriching like cooking later became. You started by hearing from a teacher that water was H2O which never meant a thing. High on the list of the loves in his life were rivers, the dozens he had fished and others he’d simply seen on road trips. The good fortune of his water obsession was growing up in northern Michigan which abounded in wild waters, lakes, ponds, creeks, rivers, and the Great Lakes. They visited the Great Lakes on an occasional excursion where you couldn’t see the other side, and there was the feeling that there might not be another side. His love of water became haunted from one of the many fibs his older brother, currently a university dean, had told him. His brother insisted that even puddles could be bottomless leading down to China where you would be beheaded with long swords like the Japanese did to GIs during World War II, photos of which his mother had saved from old Life magazines. Falling all the way through earth only to get your head chopped off was frightening indeed, the stuff of nightmares, but he realized his brother was just trying to scare him. His brother had also insisted that he had dreamed he would die in a river in South America strangled by an anaconda. This enormous snake captured his imagination at the Saturday afternoon serials at the movie theater in Reed City, in which a man named Frank Buck apparently had been attacked by every sizable creature on earth.
His lifetime of fishing began when he was about five and intensified considerably after his eye accident at the age of seven. His father had figured out that the only way to lift the melancholy of his little son was to take him fishing. They fished for trout on weekends on rivers when his dad was off work and during the week fished in the late afternoons and evenings at the cabin they lived at all summer long on a remote lake. His father and uncles built the cabin when the uncles returned from a very hard time in World War II in the South Pacific. He was impressed that they had built the lovely cabin for only a thousand bucks. The sound of rain on the tin roof was soothing to his eye which hurt a lot and after that he always identified a remote cabin with good feelings. A day never passed at the cabin without him fishing. Even when it was cold and windy he was bundled up and would let the wind carry him across the lake in heavy waters. Then he would have to strenuously row into the wind all the way home for dinner. Fishing was ordinarily not very pleasant in the high winds but he would screw up his eyes and imagine he was way up in Canada surrounded by polar bears.
He felt that rivers, birds, and forests had kept him alive and would continue doing so. His wife was far better than him at identifying birds but then she had far better eyesight. None of his friends were bird-watchers. They would try to tease him about the “sissy” sport. He would only answer obliquely that birds were the grandest facts of nature and life. When he was doing sports journalism fishing in Chile, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mexico it was altogether as pleasant as he thought it might be. He wanted to fish not write about fishing. It is often our conclusions that exhaust us. It also slowed him down that he had to hire guides for trout fishing because his vision was insufficient to tie on the tiny flies. Often, having a guide in the boat compromised the fishing. Guides want to talk about marriage and financial problems. He didn’t.
He had also been impassioned with bird hunting for several years, especially for the grouse and woodcock, less so the quail and doves of the South. He never cared for deer hunting and had shot a deer only once which proved to be sufficient. It was unpleasant to gut and skin them, a moral exercise. They were wonderful to eat but he discovered that when he quit deer hunting plenty of friends shared their own kill including the antelope and elk of Montana.
He had trained half a dozen dogs which was more enjoyable than actual hunting. There was a mutual joy between them when the dog totally caught on to pointing the scent and then retrieving the bird. A momentary thrill, the total comprehension between dog and man over what precisely they were doing. His English setter Tess, a truly elegant creature, would often do a prancing dance after retrieving a bird. And when they began hunting she would often take off at a very formal gait similar to what you see in American Saddlebred horses. He loved poems that gave him goose bumps, and the same thing could happen hunting over a fine dog.
Obviously so much of the pleasure of hunting and fishing came from where you were. You were utterly enveloped in the natural world. Sometimes when he was trout fishing his mind played the cello. And sometimes when he would bird hunt for eight hours the exhaustion and also the taste of the French red wine when he got back to the cabin would be exquisite. He usually had two friends at the cabin and they would prep for dinner at midday break then slowly cook it when they got back to the cabin. They all cooked elaborately but sometimes they only grilled birds and would have them with a cheese polenta and lots of wine.