Fall sports

Hunting, baseball, and the White House

By Jerry Fraser

Deer season is upon us. For many Mainers this is the best time of year, and even if you don’t hunt, it’s hard to ignore the subtle shift in the pace of life that takes place when so many people you’re used to seeing every day take to the woods.

Behind us are the aureate days of late September and October; ahead are Thanksgiving and Christmas. Summer is history, fall is unfolding, winter is uncertainly brooding in wait.

Hunting season’s gift is time, and it comes with cold days and forests that bend to the wind.

I’ve tried hunting, and I’m not much good at it. I like being out in the woods and all that, but I don’t have a whole lot of incentive to kill deer. I’m not crazy about venison, and I can’t stand the hamburger.

Some people say deer are so lean you could starve to death eating venison. But I’ve also heard a lot of old Mainers say that there were winters growing up where they’d have eaten nothing if it wasn’t for deer.

I guess if I were hungry enough I’d eat it, but it sounds like it might be too late by then to do me any good.

Whatever they tell you about deer hunting, it beats clamming. Digging clams is work. I know, I’ve dug a peck of them. It’s tedious and back-breaking labor, exertion on the knees in the cold, wet, gritty sand.

A hunter may sit in his tree stand and smoke cigarettes from dawn till dusk if so inclined, and at night there is a warm, dry camp, playing cards and liquor waiting. The clammer at nights waits for the tide to go out, then he’s back on his knees. Years ago, when the commercial diggers worked the Wells flats, you could watch the lamps on miners’ helmets as they flickered on windswept winter evenings.

No thanks.

When it comes to the eating, I don’t like clams any better than I do venison. Nor do I like lobsters. I do like Schultz hotdogs, though, so don’t deport me to Boston just yet.

Hunting season and football go together, and both evoke images of layered gray skies and leaves on the ground, of northwesterly breezes and afternoons out of doors. The way they are dragging out the baseball season, though, our grandchildren are apt to someday reflect that hunting and baseball go together.

It seems to me the weather was still warm when my classmates and I sneaked transistor radios to school to listen to the World Series in the early 1960s — back when baseball players were still the boys of summer. In those days there were 162 games, some of them double-headers, and two teams that won the pennant and might play seven more.

Now there are no scheduled double headers, and we have wild-card games followed by league championship games followed at long last by the World Series. The notion of a pennant is all but forgotten, fans show up at ballparks in snowmobile suits, and we are one more “critical” series away from an Election Day double-header.

Now there’s one sport that will outlast even the hockey season, and that’s politics. I remember reading once that Americans wouldn’t pay attention to presidential politics until after the World Series.

If that’s the case this year — and I suspect it is, if my own interest is any barometer — the American people will spend little more than a week choosing the next leader of the Free World.

That’s probably all we need, but it doesn’t say much for the $100 million or more the major candidates have spent during the past couple of years in pursuit of the nation’s highest office.

To say nothing of time. Has Al Gore really been seeking the presidency since his days at St. Albans? Has he spent 40 years at the altar of a vote many Americans award on impulse?

I went to prep school with a very nice guy named Ralph. Ralph told everyone on campus that one day he would be president of the United States. Insofar as I know, no one has heard of Ralph since.

(I ran for the Maine House of Representatives in 1986, and no one has heard of me since, either.)

The reason for this, I suspect, is that Ralph was far too sharp to devote decades of the only life he would ever have to bum kissing, fund-raising, and other things he’d rather not do, such as feigning interest in foreign policy and staying out of X-rated video stores.

Setting one’s sights on the presidency at too early an age can have devastating consequences, as Hillary Clinton can attest.

On the other hand, that’s what I like about George W. Bush. After decades of losing money, drinking beer, and watching baseball games, no one can say he’s spent the last 35 years fantasizing about having his name on the White House mailbox.

Jerry Fraser can be reached at cavu@cybertours.com.