Lex Anteinternet: Farm to table.

Lex Anteinternet: Farm to table.

Farm to table.

Lex Anteinternet: Friday October 7, 1921. 4H Clubs and Baseball Clubs.

Lex Anteinternet: Friday October 7, 1921. 4H Clubs and Baseball Clubs.: 

Friday October 7, 1921. 4H Clubs and Baseball Clubs.

A Third year high school girl in the chemical laboratory, - Greenbank Consolidated School, Oct. 7, 1921. Location: Pocahontas County, West Virginia

A photographer spent a second day documenting the lives of teenagers and the condition of schools in West Virginia.  In doing so, he took this photo of a "third year" (either a junior or a senior) girl in the chemical laboratory.

The photos speak volumes. She's of our age, but not  Very plainly dressed and very adult looking.

On this day in 1921, The New York Giants beat the Yankees 13 to 5 in Game 3 of the 1921 World Series.

China responded to a demand from Japan for certain rights in Shantung province with a complete rejection.  The demands were based on the Treaty of Versailles transferring German possessions to Japan following World War One, which included port cities in the province.  The Chinese were not willing to go along with the treaty on these points, and ultimately their position prevailed.

Austria and Hungary submitted a territorial dispute between them to the League of Nations, with Italy to act as the mediator.

The same photographer that toured schools in West Virginia took the photos of members of a 4H Club.

Betsey Price, - First year High School at her club sewing. 4 H Club work - Marlinton, W. Va.  She would have been in 9th or 10th Grade, but again looked quite mature in this photo.

Forest Kellison, 4 H Club Member raising a sheep. Examining the quality of the fleece under direction of Harold Willey, Farm Bureau Agent. Location: Pocahontas County, West Virginia

Forest Kellison, 4 H Club member, treating his sheep for internal parasites.

Susie Kellison, raising chickens. Examining the wing and looking for smut. The club in this county had 250 members at the time. Location: Pocahontas County, West Virginia.

Harry Harper, with his registered calf. Location: Pocahontas County--Hillsboro, West Virginia.

Earl Kidd, with his registered calf. Hillsboro, Pocahontas Co. W. Va. Location: Pocahontas County--Hillsboro, West Virginia

The photographer also documented conditions at schools, some of which were quite advanced, and some not so much. This was a one-room schoolhouse, and the photographer disapproved of the location of the privies.

And he photographed farms as well.

Gen. W. D. Connor, who was a significant figure in the Department of the Army at the time, sat for a portrait.

Brig. Gen. W.D. Connor.

A group of South Dakotans visited the President.

Lex Anteinternet: The Killetarian Cookbook. Cooking Wild Game.

Lex Anteinternet: The Killetarian Cookbook. Cooking Wild Game.: 

The Killetarian Cookbook. Cooking Wild Game.

I'm sure that nobody would mistake me for a five-star chef, but I’m not helpless in the kitchen either.

One of the things that anyone who reads this blog (which, of course, are darned few people) will already know is that I'm pretty feral, for lack of a better way to put it.  An Agrarian and a Distributist at heart, I'd prefer a more agrarian world in every way, including getting as much as your table fare from the fields and streams where you live.  I'm a lifelong hunter, but not a head hunter.  That's the way hunting where I live when I was a kid.  You hunted to put food on the table.  I'm not saying that you can't and shouldn't put a trophy on the wall, or go for a big example of what you are after, but hunting is primarily for that.

Not only that, but it's the most honest and ethical way to put mean on the table.  I'll truck no arguments from vegetarians and vegans, and others who would maintain a deeply anti nature view of the world.  Hunters and Fish Hunters (fishermen) are the population that's most connected to nature, and part of the body of people who try to keep the plant livable for us all.  Meat hunters and fishermen most of all.

Wild game, moreover, is the meat source that's closest to what we're evolved to eat.

If I could have my way, the vegetables we'd eat here would come from our own garden, and the meat from the fields.  That is in fact partially true now, although I haven't put in a garden for several years as my well is down and, like a lot of things in my old age, I haven't gotten around to having it fixed.

Well, having spouted off.  I'll be putting in some recipes here, an endeavor that was inspired by something recent that I'll keep off-line.

I'll note here in addition that there are some links below.  I think these links are useful, which doesn't mean I've tried everything listed there.  I'm not, as noted, a trained chef.  The links are to sites by people who have a lot more food knowledge than I do.

My bonafides

Okay, so what, if anything, qualifies me to say anything about the topic of cooking wild game?

Well, quite a bit, really.

For one thing, I grew up eating wild fish and fowl, as well as wild leporids (i.e, rabbits).

My father was an avid outdoorsman.  Unlike me, he inclined more towards fishing than hunting, but when fall came he switched from fishing to bird hunting.  He started fishing in the spring as soon as you could, and then fished all summer, and into the fall  He continued fishing basically until the snow flew, even after he started bird hunting.  He didn't ice fish much, however, so he took the cold winter months off from fishing.

He started hunting birds when sage chicken season opened in the fall and soon started hunting ducks and geese after that, with an occasional mix of other birds as well.  When I was old enough to hunt and fish, which in the case of hunting was five years of age, I started that.  When I was just about that age, I started hunting rabbits as well.

My father had hunted big game when he was single, but some time after he married, he stopped for a while due to the pressures of work and having a small family. Also, in those days, hunting big game was more of an expedition than it is now, in spite of what people might think.  When I was about 10 or 12 or so, however, he started again, probably as he had more time and I wanted to. At that time, you couldn't hunt big game until you were 14, so I had a couple of years of observational experience before I started hunting big game too.

When my father started hunting big game again, it was antelope.  I don't recall him getting a big game license during my lifetime for anything else.  But I did.  I started hunting deer the same year I started hunting antelope, and added elk hunting as soon as I had the automotive freedom to do that.  By the time I was a late teen, I was fishing in the spring, but switched to hunting as soon as the season was on, and hunted until the last of the seasons.  I wasn't an ice fisherman at that point either.

Now, we were a family of three. And what this should tell you is that we were eating a lot of wild game.  When I was born Catholics still had meatless Fridays every week of the year, and therefore we normally had trout for Friday dinner.  We continued on with this even after it was no longer required, as we had lots of fish.  My father froze fish so we continued to have them long after it grew too cold to continue fishing.  And as this should also indicate, we ate a lot of waterfowl during the season as well as some other game birds.  Once my father started big game hunting, and then I did, we had antelope and deer as well. As both my father and I took antelope, and I usually got additional tags, we had quite a bit of antelope.

So I grew up in a household were wild game was a staple.

That doesn't mean, of course, well-prepared wild game.  My mother was an awful cook and that applied universally to everything.  But my father was a really good cook and when she could no longer cook, my father took over.  By observation, I started to learn how to cook wild game then.

To add to this, from 1983, when I graduated from community college, until 1995, when I got married, I lived pretty much exclusively on wild game.  That's a period of 12 years, of course, which is a significant period.  I didn't normally buy meat at the grocery store when I was a college student unless I flat out ran out of wild game, which would occur.  And when I was first practicing law and living at home, I was bringing home a lot of wild game.  When my father died, and it was my mother and me for a time, I did the cooking normally, and wild game it was.

Cook a lot of wild game, and you'll learn how to cook it.

An additional bonafide

My grandfather owned a packing house and my father had worked in it.  He knew how to butcher meat.  Watching him do it, I learned how to do it, although I was never anywhere as good at it as he was.

I don't like taking my game meat to a meat processor and for years I absolutely wouldn't.  I butchered things myself.  The pressures of work and life, and the fact that my wife didn't like me spending an entire day butchering, meant that I eventually relented, and I do now, and have for a number of years.  I'd still rather not, but I have made that compromise.

I've butchered or helped butcher everything from rabbits up to cattle.

A note on wild meat and how not to ruin it.

Eat wild mean and sooner or later you'll hear somebody say they don't like it, as "it's gamey".

Taste is an individual thing.  I heard one Marine Corps veteran of Afghanistan go long on praise on Afghan goat, for instance, which not everyone would, I'm sure.  Some of that observation, "it's gamey", really means that the person who is speaking has only eaten grain fed American beef or pork.  Grass fed beef, which is the kind we normally have here, tastes considerably different from the beef you buy at the grocery store or get at a steakhouse.  Indeed, this is so much the case that if you get used to grass fed beef and then have the latter, it's a shock and not necessarily a pleasant one.

In fact Plains Indians complained, soon after they were bound to reservations, that allotment beef they were give was "sweet" and they didn't like it.  Used to leaner bison, it tasted odd.  And I can vouch for something similar.  After over a decade of normally only eating wild game, getting used to store bought beef again was a bit difficult.  I like beef, but to go from lean antelope and deer to fed beef was strange and I found I had a preference for the wild game.

People, I note, make similar complaints about lamb, once an American staple, and all sorts of people claim to dislike mutton, even though they mostly have never eaten either.  I love lamb and I like mutton as well.

Which gets me next to this.  Some people think they don't like wild game as the meat has been ruined by how it was treated.

You can ruin any meant, and the easiest way to do that is to not remove the heat from it.

The other day I was at the meat processor to drop off an antelope.  I was stunned when I got there as the antelope I was dropping off was the only one that had been skinned.  I can think of no surer way to make antelope gamey than to not skin it in the field.  I can't imagine why people do not do this.

Learning to skin an animal is not hard, and its vital to do it.

When I shoot a big game animal, the very first thing I do is to bleed it by cutting its throat.  This involves, I'd note, an element of safety as a person should never ever draw a knife towards himself.  If you don't know how to do this, have somebody show you, least you slice yourself open accidentally.  People die in the field cutting themselves with hunting knives.  If its sharp enough to cut game, it's sharp enough to kill you.  Anyhow, you shouldn't be running a knife towards yourself.  I'm not going to explain how to do this as, if you don't know, you should have somebody show you so you don't slice yourself open.  Bleeding doesn't take long, however, and it removes a lot of heat, right away.

After that, you need dto field dress it.  I'm not going to explain how to do that either, but don't ever draw a knife towards  yourself or put yourself in a position where you can get cut.  Then you need to skin the animal.

The only reason not to skin an animal immediately is that you need to drag it to where you are loading it.  Okay, that's a reason.  But skin it as soon as you can.

On this, years ago I shot a moose in weather that was right at about 0F.  We field dressed it and skinned it and loaded it in my 1/2 ton pickup truck.  In spite of that, I still lost a little of it to spoilage.

I'm convinced that at least half of the claims that meat is gamey is due to the meat being absued.  The rest has to do with odd occurances, unfamilairity, and bad cooking.

What I'm noting, by the way, applies to smaller game as well.  When you shoot rabbits or birds, you really need to field dress them in the field.  Rabbits should have their fur removed in the field, both to cool them down, and because they always have fleas.  Birds are a little tougher call simply because sometimes you need the plumage to show game wardens what you have.  Indeed, that can be true for big game animals in terms of their heads and other evidence of sex.  Fish, of course, are easy as you simply remove their guts before you leave the stream.

Big Game

Okay, with all of that, we'll start on big game.

I'm going to really deal with two types of big game here, one being antelope and the other being Cervidae.  Cervidae are deer, and that includes all types of conventional deer in the United States, as well as elk, caribou and moose.  

This isn't to suggest, I'd note, that every Cervidae tastse the same.  Far from it. But they tend to be more similiar than different for the most part.  I.e., elk doesn't taste like mule deer, and neither taste like moose, but none of them are close to tasing the same as antelope.

What I'm not dealing with, therefore, are things like buffalo or bear.  I'm not, as I have no experience with cooking either.  I'm only dealing here with things I know.

Which brings up this.  Save for moose, which is a very dark rich meat, every recipe I'll give here works for everything, but you need to keep in mind they are different by degrees.  These meets have different characteristics, and a recipe that works really well with one meat, will be so so with another.

Useful Sites:

Hunter Angler Gardner Cook:  This site, I'd note, is the most useful, in my opinion. The Author also is sometimes featured in Wyoming Wildlife. He additionally has a podcast, although I haven't listed to much of it.

Wild Harvest Table.  This site is sponsored by New York's Cornell University extension and has very good practical recipes.  It was originally associated with a (then) young university professor who blogged a lot about hunting in New England, but whose cooperative blog on that topic seems to have gone into the ether, like so many blogs have over the years, but who was clearly, along with his wife who was the main driver of this blog, a fellow killetarian.

Food For Hunters.  This blog, like the first one mentioned, has some really good recipes, and it also brings some different prospective to recipes.

A 12 Gauge Girl.  Another blog with interesting recipes, from a killetarian prospective, although its very infrequently updated.

Chef In The Wild.  Interesting blog, but not updated since December 2020 at the time I'm putting this up.

Cowgirl's Country Life.  Not a  hunting specific site, but with some hunting recipes.  Also, infrequently updated.

The Prairie Homestead.  This site has a very active blog and a podcast that has a cult following.  I'll be frank that I don't know that this link really belongs here, and I'll also admit that I have some problems with the modern "homestead" movement, while also finding it interesting and sympathizing with it.

Cast Iron

Okay, the item above is cheating, but it's another page here on our site.

Lex Anteinternet: How Much Land Can A Horse Plough In A Day?

Lex Anteinternet: How Much Land Can A Horse Plough In A Day?

Lex Anteinternet: July 1, 1921 Field & Stream. A missed magazine co...

Lex Anteinternet: July 1, 1921 Field & Stream. A missed magazine co...: 

July 1, 1921 Field & Stream. A missed magazine cover and what it tells us about language and cluture.

This was one of the numerous saved threads I hadn't gotten back to, and then July 1 came and went, and I forgot about it.  Instead, as that day deal with the Chinese Communist Party, there was a big old hammer and sickle that appeared as the art for that day.

Wish I'd remembered this one.

This does bring up a bit of an interesting topic, or at least two such topics, one linguistic and the other cheesecake oriented.

Depictions of women fishing, and let us be more precise and say depictions of pretty young women fishing, are at least as old as print magazines in popular culture.  They're considerably more common than depictions of women hunting, even though fishing is simply fish hunting.  We sometimes forget that English has various words for various types of hunting, as fishing is the only one we commonly use to separate it out from hunting in general.  But there are others.

Fowling, for example, refers to hunting birds and was once a fairly common term. Offhand, I can't think of another sort of hunting other than fishing which is named for the prey, but there are some types that are named for the method.  For example, falconry, that type of hunting done with falcons, is named for the method.  Trapping, which is a controversial type of hunting that has been controversial my entire life, also is.

Of interest in this general topic, hunting of various types was so important in the Medieval era, when people started to first acquire family names, that various things associated with it or the practice itself gave us a series of last names that are still with us. This shows the degree to which it was significant, and even elemental.  Just as we have the last name "Farmer", for example, we have the last name "Hunter".  Noting that English is a Germanic language, and that this evolution occurred at the same time all over Northern Europe, and Europe in general, the same occupations are reflected in the common German last names of Bauer and Jaeger or Jäger.  It ought to be noted here that the last name Hunger more accurately reflects its Medieval origins, however, than "Farmer", as farmer actually meant "renter" at the time, reflecting that farmers tended to be tenants, if not actually serfs.

Jäger, interestingly, shows up as an English last name as well, in the form of Yaeger occasionally.  A name that sounds related, Jagger, isn't.  That name is a Yorkshire name meaning a horse packer.

Fisher, of course, also shows up as a last name, as does the German equivalent Fischer.

Falconer also shows up as a last name, that being for a person who kept and hunted with falcons.  Falconry was expensive back in the day and its pretty likely that anyone who was a falconer was in the permanent employment of a noble, so it's different from simply being a hunter or fisher.  The same occupation gave us the name Hawker as well.

Another name last name that may have a hunting origin is Bowman.  We tend to think of bows as military weapons, in a Medieval context, but in reality they were by far the most common hunting weapon at the time and, moreover, keeping standing armies was extremely rare.  While armies did employ bowmen in times of war, those guys were in other occupations the rest of the time, and they were likely using their bows for hunting.

Indeed, the significance of that may be demonstrated the only other weapon of the period which I can think of which reflects itself in a last name is Pike.  It would seem obvious that the name must derive from the weapon of that name, but it apparently isn't clear that this is the case.  It might be a corruption of "peak" or it might actually refer to the fish.  On that, Trout occurs as a last name, and it apparently stems from fishing for trout.  I.e., a person named Trout, back in the Middle Ages, was a trout fisherman, showing the importance of the species.  On the other hand, maybe Pike refers to the weapon, including its importance in Medieval warfare.  No other weapons directly resulted in last names, however, if that's the case, although the knife did give us the German last name of Messer.

Well so much for names.  Let's talk about clothing, or the depiction of it.

As noted above, depicting female fishermen was pretty common in the early 20th Century.  The depiction above is a little unusual in that the subject is deep sea fishing, but then deep sea fishing depictions in general were a little unusual.  Usually fishing subjects were fishing streams, or maybe rivers.

Depictions of women fishing early in the 20th Century weren't very different from those depicting men.  If you go all the way about to around 1900, they are different as women didn't usually wear trousers and therefore they're sometimes depicted wearing the bulky clothing of the day, fishing, which would have been extremely difficult, in actual practice.  By World War One, however, they were usually depicted just like men, with both tending to have the outdoor clothing, rather than the work clothing, of the day.  No doubt there were men, and women, who went out to the streams fully equipped with the period outdoor clothing, which tended to feature breeches and very high boots, but my guess is that most fishermen simply went out with the sort of clothing that they wore when mowing the lawn or working in the shop.

I note this as in the world of Reddit, Twitter, and Istagram, if you have any interest in fishing, you're going to be assaulted at some point with a photograph of a woman fishing wearing a bikini.

I don't know if any women really fish wearing bikini's. They don't fish wearing bikini's in the L.L. Bean or Orvis catalogs, that's for sure, and I've never seen a female bikini clad angler myself.  Of course, I don't have a boat, and maybe they're all on boats, rather than on your typical Wyoming stream or river where you'd be eaten alive by insects if you tried that.

Which brings me to this, wearing hardly anything outdoors is stupid in general, very stupid when you are more or less on the water where there's no shade, and who wants to smell all over like a fish?

All of which leads me to believe that such photos are in a certain category of adolescent male driving soft pornography, much like the weird Japanese cartoon depictions of World War Two ships as young women.  Maybe some young women on boats wear bikinis, but I bet they do it only once.

I was fishing the other day in a deep Wyoming canyon, the last fishing trip I'll make of the season, probably, as hunting season is now on, and even though I'm license impaired as I didn't draw anything, I'll be doing that on general tags.  On my way out, I encountered a young woman hiking in.

You could see she was a serious fisherman. She was carrying her pole in its tube and had on a large brimmed fishing cap of the type that's somewhat unique to fishermen, and wearing dark sunglasses.  Even from across the stream, and down in the canyon from where I was, you could also tell that she had on one of those bug and sun resistant pull on shirts that some fishermen now wear.  

She looked like a real fisherman of her vintage. I.e, one of the young fishermen in their 20s.

She was looking for a way down the canyon.  I pointed to a place up stream.  She nodded her head in affirmation. 

Lex Anteinternet: On Labor Day, 2021

Lex Anteinternet: On Labor Day, 2021: 

On Labor Day, 2021

Today is Labor Day, 2021.

Steel worker in Denver Colorado working on parts for the hull of a ship, 1942.  I recently had a jury in Denver in which not one single person had a blue collar job.

I'll be working.

That shouldn't be too surprising, as I'm a "professional", which means that I have hours and whatnot that are outside of the hourly concerns that many employees have.  But my first observation is that. 

Labor Day in the no holiday era.

It's a holiday, but a lot of people will be working.

That shouldn't be the case.

For that reason, I'm going to forego going to any stores that are open.  Indeed, my wife tries to do that on Sundays as well, and while I'm not as good as her about that, I agree with her.

An overseas view and the American economy

The second thing I'm going to do here is to link in the British Adam Smith's Institutes blog entry on Labor Day.  It's interesting how this British institute sees the American holiday

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LABOR DAY

The Adam Smith Institute is vigorously pro free market, so perhaps its view isn't too surprising.  It's notable as it takes a really cheery view of the American economy at a time at which Americans have been doubting it pretty rigorously, with the bizarre emergence of socialist thought gaining some currency, supposedly, in the country.

I don't think that the "socialist" who self declare as that really grasp what socialism is, and are actually social democrats, but that's another topic. The bigger topic is that lots of Americans don't feel that the economy works very well for them anymore.

One thing Adam Smith couldn't have foreseen is an economy that was controlled by corporations to the extent ours was.  Smith was a free marketer, but that was mostly a free market economy that was more like that which distributist imagine, rather than capitalists.  Smith probably didn't magine a world in which a lot of people from middle class backgrounds would find themselves working at Wall Mart, rather than owning stores of their own.

The disappearance of the blue collar holiday

It wasn't all that long ago that this day still had a very blue collar tinge to it.  Even when I was first practicing law the labor unions had a picnic on this day in City Park, and this region of the country has never been keen on unions.

Maybe they still do elsewhere, but labor in the US has taken a pounding by the capitalist exportation of manufacturing overseas, and the good blue collar jobs with it.

Probably only President Obama was really honest about this, in terms of a national leader.  He flatly noted that the jobs had gone and weren't coming back, taking the capitalist position that this was okay as new jobs came in their wake. That's the capitalist theory.  We sent jobs overseas we no longer wanted and got back great new high tech ones we did.

Except that's a view that's only really easy to hold if you are at the top of the economic ladder.  Most people aren't nearly as rah rah about that sort of evolution of work, as most people don't really want to work in a cubicle.  Office Space was a popular movie for a reason.

Indeed, an entire category of nostalgia is based simply on the idea of economically having your own.  Your own little store.  Your own farm.  Yours.  Nobody is going to get rich doing that, but you'd have your own.

Money is supposed to be the solution to that, and I've been hearing a lot about that recently.  You are supposed to enjoy this evolution, and move up into it, as there will be more money.

But then what?

Well, that's the thing.  You are supposed to make more money as you'll have more money.  And you'll like that as you'll have more money.

American money is just weird paper backed by nothing whatsoever, of course.  But in the spirit of the times, that's supposed to "bring you joy".

Gen X and Gen Y

But apparently it doesn't.

Indeed, as we've already noted here, Gen X and Gen Y, and even the Gap Generation, have many members who don't see it that way. They'd like to have a life, live where they want, have their friends, families, dogs and cats, and just, well, be.

And lots of them aren't going back to work post COVID at all.

Sooner or later they'll have to. And that will be pretty soon.  But the voting with their feet they're goind right now says a lot about how the economy, and the labor it entails, is viewed right now.

Lex Anteinternet: A blue grouse opener retrospective.

Lex Anteinternet: A blue grouse opener retrospective.:   

A blue grouse opener retrospective.

 

I'm missing the weekend opener for blue grouse.

I've probably missed it before, but when I did, I was almost certainly a college student.  I haven't missed it, I think, since that time.  So this will be the first time in 31 years.

I'm ashamed of that fact.

In the earliest photographs you can find of me, as a small boy, I'm wearing a cowboy hat.  Not that this is unusual for somebody my age.  We admired cowboys.  I don't know if little boys still do, but in my generation they did.  

But it was more than a passing thing with me, like being an astronaut (which I never had any desire to be) was with some others of my vintage.  When I was first old enough to drive, and had something reliable enough to make it out of town and back, the two not being the same thing, you'd find me out in the sticks as much as possible.  Fishing in the summer, or just wandering around, and hunting in the fall and winter.  By my college years, I was about as feral as could be.

Jeremiah Johnson would have, in those years, met me and have asked "geez man, don't you ever go indoors?"

And that was the center of me.  Not career aspirations or anything of the like.  It may be a major defect in my character, but I was never concerned with high dollar careers or anything of the like.  What I wanted to be was outdoors.  Preferably hunting, if not that fishing, but if not that, anything else, outdoors.

Now, it would be dishonest to say that my interests were completely singular.  Even as a very young person, I was extremely interested in history, something I inherited from my two parents. As I've noted here before, growing up in my household was like living in a graduate level history seminar, with the study of European history from the early Middle Ages through the Renaissance the specialty of my mother, and American history and post Enlightenment Europe the specialty of my father.  The historical education was both welcome and vast.  Other things that my parents knew very well, such as French on the part of my mother and mathematics on the part of my father, I took much less to, although oddly French, which didn't particularly take at the time, has snuck back in as I've aged.  I guess I learned more than I thought I did.

And that may be the reason that in my early teens I saw myself in a military service career.  Oddly, it wasn't so much the service, as the thought, really, of participating in history, and the knowledge, although it was fairly inaccurate, that servicemen worked outdoors.

By my late teens that desire was seriously waning, probably because by that time I had a better idea what military service actually entailed.  And part of what it entailed was a communal life, which I, as a real introvert, wouldn't like.

And by that time the desire to be outdoors had gone from a strong to extreme.  It's never left me.

Which is why I'm so bothered today.

Forty years ago when I was taking those first steps out into "career" I'd openly stated that I never wanted a job where I had to wear a tie (which were much more in daily use back then than now) and I'd never let anything, not job, not family, not anything, interfere with my going outdoors.

Well, 17-year-old self, you'd be pretty disappointed in me now.

I can say that safely as 58-year-old self definitely is.

Which probably seems silly.

I've worked really hard, and by external measurements I guess, really successfully, for the past 31 years. And for the nine years, or maybe eight years, prior to that I worked hard to get there, kind of.

That path was frankly a pretty meandering one.  My initial goal was to be a game warden, which I've written about before.  Then I switched to geology, not because I deeply loved it, but because I was okay at it, and it promised an outdoor life, albeit one that wasn't focused on the wild the way wildlife biology is.  In retrospect, I should have done what I first started out to do.  

Geology didn't work out due to a collapse in the oilfield and coal economy (sound familiar) and by that time law school had already been suggested to me, although I did reconsider game warden.  Where I was at, career wise, at the time would have required me to go on for a Masters degree in geology and I knew that I really didn't want to do it.  So I went to law school instead.

Now, that may not seem like the logical choice, but it actually was, at least somewhat.  Law school had first been suggested to me by Casper College Professor Jon Brady, who taught history at Casper College but who held a JD.  I don't know if he ever had practiced in the civilian world, but he had at least briefly practiced in the U.S. Navy as a JAG officer.  

I didn't know but one lawyer, one of my father's friends, and I didn't know him all that well.  I did know, however, a lot of doctors and dentists, and they were all outdoorsmen.  In some odd way, I equated that with how things must be for lawyers.

And maybe for some it is.

I became a "trial lawyer".  That something that actually didn't occur to me until very recently.  The reason for that is that I've done almost exclusively, in litigation, the defense side of civil litigation, and somehow the plaintiffs' bar has appropriated the term "trial lawyer".  I've done some plaintiff's work as well, but not anywhere near as much as defense work. That makes me, in English terms, a "barrister".  However, I do a lot of other things, so not exclusively so.  I could claim to be somewhat of a "solicitor" or "notary" in the language of other court systems, but barrister it would mostly be.

I note that as I don't know what the life of "transactional" lawyers is like, or that of criminal defense lawyers, or prosecutors, etc., is like.  I only know what the life of trail lawyers is like.

And it's pretty hard and requires a lot of sacrifices.

Maybe a lot more than other legal lines of work.  Trail lawyers give up their own time for a preset trial schedule, work long hours, and take the cause, whatever it is, above anything else.  We like to compare ourselves with such fictional characters as Palidan, but in reality we're more like World War Two Japanese infantry.  We're going there, going to suffer, going to fight in a clever fashion, and if need be, we're going to die in our trenches or in a massed Banzai charge.

It's an all absorbing career.

Indeed, for that reason, in part, I declined to go with one of my partners out for a beer in which he had invited a lawyer in a definitely different line of work that I'm wholly unfamiliar with but which I suspect isn't all absorbing.  The invite was in order to see if the fellow might wish to join us merry band of barristers, maybe.  But what am I going to say to that fellow?  My partner was clear what he was going to say.  He might make more money with us, rather than doing what he's doing.  And he was likely hoping that I'd regale the fellow with war stories, as that fellow isn't a trial lawyer either.  And every trial lawyer has a lot of war stories, myself included.  The problem is, of course, that war stories come from war, and watching Saving Private Ryan might be real entertainment, but actually landing in Normandy in June 1944 likely wasn't.

And indeed he might make more money as a trial lawyer than doing what he's doing, and he might live every freakin' second of it.  I have no idea, as I don't know him.

And he might, in a trial season, such as I am now in, work seven days a week, ten hours a day, with all that entails and implies.

Or, in other words, he might miss the opener of blue grouse season.

I know what 17-year-old Yeoman would think of that, and what he'd think of somebody who would do that.

I can't say he's wrong.