Editor's Note - I wrote this piece for the November, '04 edition of Dakota Country magazine.
The Outdoors - Passion or Plague By Tony Dean
I think it’s safe to say fishing and hunting are my passions, and in response to a question often posed…which I like best…my answer is always, the one I’m doing. And so it is each autumn I face the test, realizing the passions could be described both as a blessing…or a plague.
There was a time nearly 40 years ago when I sold radio advertising in Cedar Rapids, IA, that some might have called my passions a plague. Among them was my boss, a good man who didn’t hunt or fish, but recognized my love for them. And he tolerated them as long as my sales matched his lofty goals. I think what I liked about Jim was that he reached a point in our boss/employee relationship, where he knew I was going to take a certain amount of time out of the work week to chase pheasants, hunt ducks or catch crappies, bluegills or bass. In return, when I worked, I did so diligently because one of the things he taught me was that sales is the easiest job in the world if you work hard, but one of the toughest if you try to take it easy. So, on the days devoted to selling radio time, I worked my butt off. As I reflect on those days, the hard work positioned me for a transfer into a management job at a radio station our company had just purchased, KCCR in Pierre, SD. That turned out to be a blessing.
To maintain a passion for fishing and hunting wasn’t easy if you lived in eastern Iowa back in the 1960’s, because by Dakota standards, the quality of the outdoor life wasn’t very good. Oh, there were bass, crappies and bluegills in Lake McBride, a 20-minute drive south, a few ducks and a lot more hunters on nearby Coralville Reservoir. The pheasant hunting was, at best, fair; quail hunting decent, but there were numerous cottontails and squirrels. The latter two species, which are largely ignored in the Dakotas, seem to be popular in states where there isn’t much to hunt. Even so, I don’t regret those years because they gave me a better appreciation for what I’d left when I moved from Bismarck to Iowa.
It was only after arriving in Pierre in 1968 that I realized how much I missed the prairie. Come October that first fall as a new South Dakota resident, I learned I hadn’t resided there long enough to qualify for a hunting license, and I couldn’t afford the non-resident price. So, I splurged for a much cheaper non-resident fishing license and spent October catching big walleyes below Oahe Dam, largemouth in the stock ponds and huge crappies around flooded timber in Spring Creek, a small arm of Oahe.
There weren’t nearly as many pheasants as today because the soil bank program had ended and CRP had not yet begun, but the numbers still far surpassed what I’d seen in Iowa. The fishing was a lot better though, and I was astonished at the numbers of ducks and geese. Deer seemed to be everywhere, and the 116,000 acres of the Fort Pierre National Grasslands, a prairie grouse heaven and open to public hunting, seemed a luxury compared to Iowa, where nearly all land belonged to someone. And of course, this was before South Dakota enacted a trespass law, and you seemingly could hunt where you wanted to hunt. I had arrived in God’s country.
I spent the next two years running a radio station but when the time came to head back to Iowa for another management job, I wisely declined. The owner I worked for wasn’t used to hearing employees disagree, and told me in no uncertain terms that I would be moving back to Iowa. Though I’d worked for him for several years, I don’t think he really knew me because he was surprised when I quit on the spot. And a couple hours later, over lunch, I was valiantly convincing my wife that things would work out. They always do, and I learned sometimes quitting a job or being fired (and I’ve been in both situations) can be the best thing that can happen. For me, it was the first step toward finally realizing I wasn’t cut out to be an employee, and that I should be in business for myself. That would come, sooner perhaps than I expected, but first, a brief foray into politics.
After dropping the news on my wife, I went back to my office and had barely walked in the door when the telephone rang. A female voice said, “Please hold for a call from Gov. Farrar.” The Governor? Calling me? Twenty minutes later I sat in his office as he explained that presiding over a state of 700,000 people was like performing in a three-ring circus.
“And,” he added, “I’m the clown.”
A few minutes later, I accepted a job. Lord knows I needed one on that day, and so I became the Governor’s Press Secretary, the first ever in South Dakota. The Governor was so concerned that the media would learn he hired a press secretary that he hid me in the State Planning Agency for several months. And I must have done a helluva job because Frank L. Farrar was the first South Dakota Republican Governor ever to not be re-elected.
But, I learned a lot…about politics…bureaucracy…and government. And I also met the Director of the Game, Fish & Parks Department, a class act by the name of Bob Hodgins. One day I suggested his department start a radio show, something he thought was a good idea.
“Put something together,” he said.
I did, and at his request, presented it to the GFP commission. They loved the sample programs and asked me to do them. I explained that I worked for the Governor and he’d have to approve so Commissioner Abe Berg, a Democrat from Huron who was close to Gov. Farrar, said he’d talk to my boss. He did, I got the OK, and my outdoor career, albeit on a small scale, began a week later.
But, I digress.
All of this happened more than three decades ago, and I haven’t lost my zest for fishing and hunting. What’s changed is that limits aren’t as important to me these days, and I’ve come to appreciate what we have in the Dakotas.
But I still ponder the same serious questions come autumn.
To fish…or to hunt.
Like the day last fall Mort Bank and I were fishing Sakakawea for big pike. Unlike many Dakotans, Mort and I love northern pike, both on the table and the end of a fishing rod. And Lord knows there aren’t many places in the world that give you a better shot at a 25 pound pike than does Sakakawea. I was pitching a spinnerbait when I heard whistling wings as a flock of mallards passed overhead. Mort’s lucky. He doesn’t hunt so he takes that kind of thing in stride. For me though, it’s enough of a distraction that I lose my focus on the pike, at least momentarily.
For more than a decade, I’ve traveled to Devils Lake for waterfowling. I’ve enjoyed some of the best I’ve ever experienced in that area, and I’m convinced there isn’t much real estate anywhere on the continent that matches this area for duck production in wet years. Suffice to say the last 15 of have been wet. In October it seems like everyone in that area is hunting, but every once in a while, you’ll see a few boats out on the big lake and you wonder how they’re doing. And about that time, a flock of ‘bills buzzes the decoys with just enough noise to shake you out of your fishing daydreams.
A few years ago, I was staying at Woodland Resort and had just come in from a scouting trip when John Devries pulled up. John is an inveterate waterfowler, and like his partner, Mike Schell, even laughs like snow geese. But this time, John stopped by to show me a stringer of fish. White bass, fifteen of them, and the smallest might have tipped scales at 2 pounds. They might be the featherweights of the fishing world, but a bunch like that can make you forget mallards and gadwalls, if only for a day or so.
Just a couple years back, I shared a boat with Steve Bauman, the genial gent who owns Vexilar, and a recent inductee into Minnesota’s Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame. Steve and I were busily engaged in catching and releasing hordes of smallmouths but all he could think about were all the ducks that were flying about the area. Steve’s from Minnesota, of course, where such sights aren’t the norm. I think, given the choice, Steve would rather have been in his duckboat on that day.
A few years ago, Lee Brend, and I were on our backs in a stubble field near his birthplace of Mohall. It was sort of a bluebird type day, but something we were doing seemed to be working and enough snows were coming in to the decoys to keep our interest. Even so, about mid-morning we’d frequently check our watches because the wind dropped, the birds stopped flying, and without communicating, we both wondered what the trout were doing on Northgate Dam, some 75 miles northwest. A couple hours later, we found out as both of us tangled with several big rainbows that would measure in excess of 20-inches.
It brought to mind a grand slam type day I once had back in the early 1970s. I started out by shooting a limit of mallards on the river a few miles east of Pierre. Then I traveled to the Fort Pierre National Grasslands south of town, and hadn’t walked a hundred yards when I shot a sharptail. I picked the bird up, stuffed it in my game bag, took a couple of steps and a pair of prairie chickens flushed. I scored my first double and had a limit of grouse. I stopped at two dams on the way home, caught a bunch of trout in one and some feisty largemouths in the other. On the way home, I spotted a rooster in the ditch, got out, flushed him, and added him to my burgeoning bag. I glanced at my watch and realized it wasn’t quite 4 PM yet, but I did quit while I was ahead. But this was the feat of a young man, a category to which I no longer belong, and today, I have to make choices.
But not everyone I know has to make choices. Take Dr. Bob Nelson of Sioux Falls who called me early on the second morning of this year’s prairie grouse season, and I’ll do my best to write it exactly the way he said it. Except, I cannot replicate a loud whine in print.
“This is Nelson we’re going home and the resort won’t refund our last day and there was no maid service and it was too hot and all that BS you write about hunting being about watching the dogs and the shooting doesn’t mean much is just that BS,” he whined.
Honest, Dr. Bob delivered that sentence without punctuation, not even a comma or two, though he thoughtfully added a period at the end. And Dr. Bob can whine with the best. When you hunt with him, your ears are under constant assault as he hollers, “Spud, Kranzy, or whichever dog he sees doing something he doesn’t want. Meanwhile, the dogs deal with it by ignoring him, and go about the business of finding birds.
What his most recent whine session was about is that he underwent rotator cuff surgery just before the hunting season and couldn’t carry his gun. Hell, I remember when Kent Hrbek was still playing baseball and needed the same surgery, but before going under the knife, he extracted a promise from the surgeon that he’d be able to shoot that fall or he wasn’t going to do it, baseball be damned. So Bob, himself a retired surgeon, worked the dogs instead while others did the shooting. The temperature was in the 90’s so they headed home early but the place where they stayed wouldn’t refund the charges for the night they didn’t stay.
Now I look at it this way. Dr. Bob is now an octogenarian which is considerably older than Hrbek was when he had his surgery, and he has earned the right to whine.
I’ve been luckier than most in that I’ve been able to make a living doing exactly what I like doing. I’ve always loved auto racing, and for more than a decade, when I wasn’t staging weekly auto races, I was traveling the NASCAR circuit. This was back before NASCAR was cool and the drivers, guys like Ralph Earnhardt, Richard Petty and others, were siring young’uns that are making the headlines these days. Other than the new superspeedways such as those in California, Kansas City and Las Vegas, there isn’t one I haven’t been to.
But in the end, fishing and hunting would win out, and even here, I was fortunate, because as a result of doing shows for the SDGFP, and then later, for the US Fish & Wildlife Service, I’d rub shoulders regularly with some of the brightest minds in wildlife management. And I guess that’s where my concern for conservation originated.
I used to give credit to Ted Williams, the astute conservation writer from Massachusetts for the line, “Any fisherman or hunter who isn’t an environmentalist is a damned fool.” Then I found out this year that the guy who was the first to use is was Rich Landers, a good friend who is the outdoor writer for the Spokane Spokesman Review.
And when you use the word, “environmentalist,” these days, it’s like setting yourself up for abuse. That’s too bad because if there’s anything that’s been disappointing, it’s the lack of sportsman involvement in things that really determine the quality of the hunting and fishing we enjoy, and I’m old enough to lay the blame where I think it belongs.
It belongs on our shoulders, you and I.
We’re the ones who keep buying the fishing and hunting magazines that ignore conservation and fill their pages with gadgetry and how to and where to. They no longer carry “Me and Joe” type stories, the kind that initially wetted our interests in outdoor adventures. I think it’s because most of the editors of these rags live so far from the real outdoor world that they’ve never really learned to hunt and fish without the services of a guide.
We’re having a big fallout in the outdoor communications profession right now, and it all seems to be over conservation versus guns, which is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. And for that, the blame goes squarely on the shoulders of groups such as the NRA who do their best to scare us by telling us the liberals are after our guns and the only way out is to send them money, lots of money. I’d have a lot more respect for them if they recognized the role of conservation, as they once did. But these days, they’re no different than single species conservation groups who tell us that good conservation is something you can buy. And yes, I am offended when the President of the NRA tells us that state agencies such as the Game and Fish Department and the Game, Fish & Parks Department are anti-hunting. We all know better, and while there may well be some Conservation Officers who could learn much from the way a Highway Patrolman conducts himself, they’re not Gestapo guys either. But man, mention conservation around these dudes from the NRA and you’d think you exposed yourself as a member of Defenders of Wildlife. How sad. Even sadder, in the last issue of the NRA publication, American Hunter, the NRA President told hunters their real friends include the Farm Bureau and the National Cattleman’s Beef Association.
I don’t care much for the NRA argument that goes, “without guns, there’d be no hunting,” because the real catch is that without game, there’ll be no more hunting either, and neither a gun nor a rod and reel is worth much if there’s nothing to hunt or catch. Without fish or game, you either break clay birds, punch holes in paper or cast to an empty cup. These are all fun pastimes, of course, but it’s a lot like watching hockey on television. It’s a wonderful game, but it ain’t like being there.
I’ve always thought of myself as a conservative, until I realized that what I really am is a fiscal conservative. On all other matters, I’m a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, which means I believe government can solve some problems, conservation among them. Where would we be today without the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP)? How many ducks would we see without our Waterfowl Production Areas? What about North Dakota’s PLOTS program and South Dakota’s Walk-In Acres? What about CREP? What about game law enforcement and fish stocking? These are all government programs, friends, though each of us pays for them through the purchase of our fishing and hunting licenses. Nonetheless, there are politicians, especially in South Dakot, who think the legislature ought to disperse your license monies, and ironically, many of them reside behind the NRA banner. Jim Lintz, Larry Rhoden and a few others come to mind.
But the NRA and a few other groups try to convince hunters and anglers that this fall’s election is about guns. It isn’t because it should be just as much about conservation, and regardless of which candidates you support, you should demand two things; support for the second amendment and strong conservation policies. And just as the NRA says Kerry’s weak on guns, the record shows Bush is weak on conservation. What counts is which one has enough common sense to support both. And I’m not talking about the trait among many politicians to become instant friends of hunters and fishermen in the weeks leading up to the election.
So, an autumn day is a lot like life, in that it’s a series of choices, and given my druthers, I’d love to see a Teddy Roosevelt again, the last great American conservation President. That way, I’d know that on any autumn day, there’ll be something to catch or shoot.
