Of Woods and Waters: A Kentucky Outdoors Reader

Introduction

I N T R O D U C T I O N WHEN STEPHEN WRiNN and I first discussed the University Press of Kentucky's interest in publishing a collection of some of the best writing by Kentuckians about their outdoor experiences, he suggested that I put together a "dream" table of contents to prepare for our next round of conversations. I didn't need a lot of time to think about Stephen's proposal and committed to the quest right there in his office. In the weeks ahead, I wandered through every bookstore I could find and often found myself happily lost in the stacks of libraries—both old sentinels with their well-thumbed card catalogs and modern structures with highly efficient computerized indexes. I leafed through ancient first editions with blackened leather covers that smudged my fingers and contemporary volumes with protective wrappings of acetate. I spent hours asking librarians and booksellers to suggest authors whose work might belong in such a collection. I also spent wonderful unstructured hours wandering in and out of the "Regional Literature" and "Kentucky Authors" sections in bookstores and libraries, fastforwarding through years of newspapers cataloged on reels of microfilm, and searching through stacks of musty magazines. It was the feel and the smell of those magazines that started me thinking about how I had been unknowingly preparing for this quest for quite some time. i WAS BORN in the historical river town of Maysville, Kentucky, but I grew up in Latonia, some fifty miles downstream in northxxiii ern Kenton County, a land famous for expeditions mounted by such legendary hunters and explorers as Daniel Boone, Simon Kenton (the county's namesake), and Christopher Gist. This area had also attracted the attention of renowned wildlife artist John James Audubon (he served for a time as taxidermist at the Western Museum in nearby Cincinnati), and it was also the boyhood home of Daniel Carter Beard, the founder of the Boy Scouts of America. My friends and I were not unaware of this outdoor legacy as we fished for catfish, carp, and bass in the Licking River and Banklick Creek and built camps and set rabbit snares in nearby hollows. We were consumed by the outdoors— of course, this was before girls—and when we were not fishing or camping, we sat around on cinder blocks behind the corner grocery store and carved on sticks with our Barlow pocketknives (every boy owned one back then) and fantasized about the hunting and fishing expeditions we would take when we were older. These fantasies were fueled by my father's monthly issues of Outdoor Life, Sports Afield, Field & Stream, and Kentucky Fish and Wildlife's Happy Hunting Ground, which I read, from cover to wonderful cover, as he passed them along to me. Every issue carried notes inscribed by my father in the margins of his favorite stories, printed there in his distinctive hand in the red ink he favored , which makes me think that he may have been an editor at heart. Most every story also carried a rating, with "AAA" being the best; he often defended this rating by adding comments in the margins that explained why a certain story or passage had earned his highest ranking. Clearly, he was passionate about good writing and anxious to XXIV INTRODUCTION show me what stories could teach us about the outdoors. We read mostly magazines, with just a few books about the outdoors finding their way onto the shelves in my mother's secretary. Most of those were "how-to" books from the Outdoor Life Book Club, and they were primarily about hunting, since my father did not fish. It was not until 1971, when I read Ernest Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River" in an English class at Northern Kentucky State College taught by my early mentor, the late Margery Thomas Rouse, that I noticed that serious writing—the kind I was beginning to be attracted to in books and literary journals—often celebrated nature and hunting and fishing. (Years later, we were again discussing Hemingway, and when I told Mrs. Rouse about one of my recent trout fishing trips, she smiled and asked, "Do you remember what Hemingway taught us about trout?" Before I could answer, she said, "He told us to always wet our hands before handling them so as not to harm their protective mucus," referring, of course, to the fisherman...