The Sound of Shots Fired
I keep a journal, not as consistently as I should, but enough so that I’ve trained myself to recognize and acknowledge events or experiences that might cause a particular week to stand out thematically.
These thoughts are birds that seem of a feather, like the migrating flocks of geese we’ve all noticed in recent days, although I confess the ties that bind them are often loose. So it was with a walk along my favorite Montauk beach, an event that now coexists with the photo by Chris Foster sent to me by Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett. Both the walk and the photo involved gunshots.
On the beach I fell in step with a friend, a denizen of the greater Ditch Plain community, a retired New York City cop who is always packin’ . . . a corny joke or two. The photo of Bennett that accompanies this column shows him in his glory as a Thanksgiving provider, wild turkey in one hand, shotgun in the other, “a cross between Thor, or Daniel Boone, and Elmer Fudd,” I wrote in my journal.
The Elmer Fudd comparison is not really fair. Fudd is fiction, a cartoon, notorious as a hapless hunter, while Bennett is self-animated and an exceptionally good hunter.
The short hunting season for wild turkeys opened last Sunday. Bennett worked his way into Northwest Woods just before dawn that day. He was probably the first on the East End to bag a Thanksgiving dinner, a fat one the pilgrims would have killed for.
“Shots, shots fired,” my walking partner said stopping short of his punch line and looking up, listening, on point like an urban bird dog set to retrieve. I’d heard the shots too, but I knew where they’d come from. He didn’t, and for a split second, I watched his instincts come out of retirement and flash across his face.
When I told him the source was a boat just offshore with a crew of hunters blasting away at sea ducks, he laughed and rekindled his joke that involved heaven, a Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and a Muslim mullah. I will not repeat it here, except to say that virgins were involved.
The turkey photo and my friend’s “shots fired” got me thinking about our species’ penchant for killing unnecessarily, the huge gap between the report of guns fired to provide food, and those fired to color in the drab outline of a provider whose real necessity in our society became a cartoon more than a century ago. I doubt the hunters blasting away at the common scoters that day were going to bring the game home for dinner. Most people don’t care for sea ducks.
Sure, I understand the urge to get out into the wilds, and use proud traditions as an excuse to do so, but I don’t get the need to punctuate the experience with unnecessary and wasteful killing. These days, hunting and fishing as sport looks like no more than another marketing opportunity, the chance to sell camouflaged underwear, to replay the provider cartoon using tournaments to fill the void where real need once existed.
There are hopeful signs. More and more of the younger generation of East End fishermen are choosing to hang up their rods in favor of wetsuits and spears in order to be more selective in their killing, and perhaps more importantly, to be in more intimate contact with, and more appreciative of, the sea.
Greater appreciation of the natural world is what’s needed. People bearing binoculars and cameras are the real providers today with the exception, perhaps, of the wolf in expensive sheep’s clothing who once each year bags a Thanksgiving turkey for old time’s sake — to give thanks.
As for my friend retired from the N.Y.P.D. but as alert as ever to the sound of shots fired, that’s just sad.