Table Talk

Went to a holiday reception put on by the dean of my college this afternoon. I knew no one there and was sitting at a table by myself when a couple of guys walked past discussing a gun purchase.

"I've got to get a gun before I go back down," said the older one. "I don't need something big, just something rapid fire. Is anyone sitting here?"

"No," I said, itching to hear more of the conversation.

"Get a Ruger 10/22," said the younger man, going on to describe it further.

"Luger?"

"No, Ruger. 10/22."

"Is it rapid fire?"

"It's semi-automatic. It'll shoot as fast as you can pull the trigger. You can even get a 50 round clip if you want."

It turned out the older man wanted it to shoot snakes around his vacation place in Florida, where copperheads, diamondback rattlers, and water moccasins covered most of the ground, I gathered. He didn't know much about guns, he admitted, not having held one since he went partridge hunting in northern Michigan as a kid.

"Partridge hunting," said his companion, "the sport of kings."

He turned to me and gave a quick smile. It was obvious I was listening in.

"My sport too," I said.

His eyebrows arched. "Really?"

I nodded. The older guy, who it seems was a music professor, started in on the difficulty of shooting partridge. I couldn't but agree. We ended up talking about hunting and fishing for a while. Turns out the younger one, a professor of communications, owned 120 acres up near Glennie where he spent most of the summer and as much of deer season as his teaching schedule allowed. I mentioned that I fish the Au Sable fairly often. He rarely fished anymore, he said, aside from catching eater brookies from the creeks up there. Yet when he was younger, he told me, he had speared steelhead in some of the Au Sable's tributaries. "I don't do it anymore," he said quickly. "It's not sport fishing. It's more 'satisfying a primal instinct' fishing."

I think I felt my eyes boggling but I managed a wry laugh. I snagged salmon when I was a kid (though it actually was legal at the time). Spearing seems a more brazen kind of violation, though it may be a more honest one: at least it doesn't present an illusion of legal angling.

It's a shame some of the people who proudly denounce "effete intellectuals" weren't around for this.