Field Notes

As outdoorsmen (and women) it behooves us to keep up with the latest advancements in gear designed for inclement conditions. And there isn't a nastier, more extreme environment to be trapped in than the modern American airport. When your connecting flight disappears from the big board, the check-in counter goes dark as night, and your Ipod battery starts fading away it can get scary out there: roving packs of TSA agents, airport toilet paper, lattes made from non shade-grown coffees, that weird-looking hairy-toed dude sitting across from you who won't put his shoes back on.

Let's face it: this is a survival situation and you need shelter. Something like the airport tent. Not only a brilliant idea, but a brilliant comment on the current state of modern air travel.

However, as a self-described rugged airport outdoorsman I think it could use a few improvements.

For one, it's got to lose the bright red color, which only draws unwanted attention from envious and/or creepy fellow travelers and suspicious security personnel. Since traditional camo won't work well in the airport setting, the tent should be clad in an amalgamized random pattern of the most common types and colors of airport carpeting. Just be sure to pitch it in a corner so it's not run over by one of those little motorized carts.

Second, Gore-Tex and an integral interior fan. You want the tent breathable, but only from your side. I don't need to elaborate how airport food affects the gastro-intestinal harmony of a large group of people sleeping in close proximity, do I?

I think with those two improvements the personal airport tent could comfortably see you through the worst the FAA can dish out, but maybe I'm missing something. What would you like to see included?

I need help from some of the more learned readers of F&S. What I need are great historical hunting and/or fishing quotes or verse. Think Isaac Walton or Peter Beckford type material. You know, the timeless stuff. Quotes from the 'Nuge - while entertaining -  won't cut it.

Why, you ask? Interesting question, that.

I recently came into possession of a number of polished granite headstones. Now before you jump to any grave-robbing conclusions, I picked them up from an old building that used to be a monument company but is very soon going to be a pile of rubble. My plumber bought the property and told me I could scrounge anything I wanted. Imagine my surprise to find all these beautiful slabs of granite just lying around.

So I brought them home, much to my wife's chagrin. She flatly refused to allow me to scatter them through her flowerbeds. I thought it would be quirky and off-beat, but for some reason she considered it morbid and disturbing.

Since my reputation in the neighborhood is already a bit dodgy, I reluctantly agreed, but then hit on a great idea: I would find timeless quotes, inscribe them on the granite and place them strategically around our property! Even my wife agreed it was a pretty cool idea.

For example, this one is, which I found on Steve Bodio's excellent blog is going in front of my dog kennels: "Hee cannot be a gentleman whych loveth not a dogge" which comes from a 1555 book entitled "The Institucion of a Gentleman."

"Litera Scripta Manet" or "the written word endures" will be going on a slab placed outside my office window, while the Ben Johnson quote that hangs above the Shakespeare & Co. book store in Paris  "Thou art alive still while thy book doth live and we have wits to read and praise to give" will be going in my front yard.

So I've got dogs, literature and books covered. Now I need some immortal hunting and/or fishing quotes. The kind of timeless, trenchant wisdom worthy of being etched forever into a block of solid granite and proudly displayed to the whole world, or at least to the mailman, the UPS driver and the guy who jogs by my house every day.

Any ideas? 

One of the most overhyped and over-marketed areas in big-game hunting is camouflage. This story from the NYT science blog certainly isn't going to help much.

"...there’s a new type of digital camouflage specifically designed to fool deer’s vision. Called Optifade, it’s being unveiled today by W.L. Gore, the inventor of Gore-Tex".

"...the new digital camouflage consists of a micropattern made up of tiny squares that are supposed to match the overall texture of the landscape — the “spatial frequency” or “busyness” of the forest or scrubland as seen through the deer’s eyes. It also has a macropattern of large geometric shapes that are supposed to break up the outline of the body so that even if a deer sees a hunter moving, it doesn’t register in the deer’s brain as a human shape."

It's an interesting development, but I found the Times readers’ comments on the story much more fascinating. Apparently some are upset because this new wunderflage makes us "invisible" and that's just not fair.

From the comments section...

"Do hunters really need any more technological advantages over the deer then they already have? To call deer hunting a “sport” is absurd; considering all the hardware available to hunters, the deer never stand a chance..." -- comment from "AZ"

It just goes to show how little anti-hunters know about the animals they profess to love. The belief that human technology will always prevail over a deer's senses is the mark of someone who has obviously never spent any time in the woods.

You can spend as much money on as many gimmicks and gadgets and look as ridiculous as you want and it won't make a damn bit of difference to the animal you're hunting. The first set of "real" camouflage I ever purchased (that hadn't already been discarded by the military) made me look like one of the ents from "Lord of the Rings," but it didn't me get any closer to deer than my old surplus duds. If you rely on technological doo-dads instead of respecting an animal enough to actually learn a little bit about it, then a bunch of fuzzy dots on your clothes aren't going to give you any advantage at all.