At Long Last

My love of literature began at infancy.

My mother would dispute anyone who dared challenge the statement. According to her, all three of us Viau boys latched on to specific objects around the house without any prompting or explanation. My brother Matt loved hammers and hitting things with them. My brother Isaac loved whatever he could find on the floor and fit into his mouth. And I loved books.

“My Nick always loved his books.” She’d say. “You shook whenever you’d see one and pretended to read them to me the moment you learned to babble.”

That love for reading grew with me. I looked forward to Book Order time and always had a pile on my desk the day they’d arrive. Mom never said “no” to books. She put a premium on them and it stuck with me.

The third grade was my first literary epiphany. I enjoyed everything I read, including youth classics like Charlotte’s Web and Jerry Spinelli’s Maniac MacGee, which is still my favorite youth novel of all time. It was during this time, I discovered outdoor authors Gary Paulson and Jean Craighead George. Their novels Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain, spoke to me in ways no other books had. I grew up in the woods and spent hours exploring, making forts, crafting weapons, and knocking over decaying birch tree stumps. The idea of kids surviving on their own in the wild was everything I’d ever wanted in a story. I was so infatuated with Hatchet, in fact, that I saved up the $50 and bought a leather-wrapped Estwing. It hardly left my side for several years.

The seed had been planted and was cultivated in middle/high school through Richard Adam’s Watership Down and Brian Jacques’ Redwall series. While not “outdoorsy” per se, the animals were the main characters, and the storytelling was top notch. I had little issue relating to the characters or the world, in which they lived.

While my appetite was always there, my tastes changed in college. Giants such as Crane, London, Twain, and Hemingway changed the way I looked at literature. Reading it was no longer enough. I needed to participate and believed I could. The next few years were spent on songs and poetry with the occasional short story sprinkled over the top. But I was lacking a consistent topic and an outlet to share my work.

I found the topic when I discovered archery in 2009. The outlet arrived in 2010, when I discovered blogging and created Life and Longbows. Still, the education was far from over. The journey had just begun. My archery immersion led to my re-acquaintance with the outdoors, which led to further writing discoveries. Authors such as MacQuarrie, Ruark, Voelker, and Colonel Tom Kelly changed the way I saw the page. Gordon MacQuarrie, in particular, had a profound effect on me. He showed me the power of relationships, humor, and dialogue and how they could make a good hunting/fishing story a great one.

This changed the game completely. I no longer felt that my outdoor experiences were inadequate in comparison to other hunters. In fact, I realized comparing was silly to begin with. The value of an experience is subjective to the hunter. Some search for solitude chasing moose in Alaska. Others long for the romance of the Dark Continent. And some find satisfaction hunting whitetails in their backyard with a buddy or two. This is where the idea for Life and Longbows manifested.

I wanted to introduce you to a younger me, walk you through my experiences (good and bad) and show you how I got to this point — with as much transparency as possible. I am no expert. I wouldn’t even call myself a “good” bowhunter. But I do love bowhunting and the people I’ve hunted with.

All that being said, I hope you will consider purchasing Life and Longbows and will recommend it to your friends when you are finished. I hope you will enjoy reading it, as much as I enjoyed writing it.

You can purchase a signed copy of Life and Longbows here. 

 

 

A Disclaimer

When I try to explain traditional archery to people and exactly what it is that archers “do”, I get the sense they don’t truly grasp it. When I try to explain it further, I get the, “man this guy is really into this and I need to find the nearest exit” look. Neither surprise me. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that both are to be expected. Shooting a longbow is simple enough to wrap your head around, but the passion associated with the activity – not so much.

I’ve developed a saying for this and I offer it as a disclaimer.

“You’ve got to live it to get it.”

I cannot overemphasize how literal the word live is, in regards to this topic. “Traditional archery isn’t something you dabble with.” I tell them. “It is both a life warming and warping pursuit.”

Since I rarely get the chance to elaborate on these statements, I will do so here. Please humor me by pretending you know very little about this whole deal. Or just pass this along to someone who doesn’t and is brave enough to find out.

Life is a journey and traditional archery is the the road less traveled. And by “road” I mean a squiggly path winding off through the trees. The beginning is unmarked and often stumbled upon. The end is the promise of self discovery, eternal happiness, enlightenment, the perfect bow, the buck of a lifetime, optimal arrow flight, and all that good, philosophical stuff the oldest among us blather about if the weather is good and their stomachs are full.

The middle is where it all gets interesting. It is where you’ll spend most of your time and is a mess of stumps, creeks, mud, burs, briars, deadfalls, poison ivy, ticks, chiggers, mosquitoes, and other obstacles to trip over. Not to mention miles of that metallic orange tape that leads straight to the town of Hopelessly Lost if you follow it.

You’ll get tripped up. You’ll get stuck in the mud. You’ll fall off a log. You’ll lose your way. You’ll end up in a pond. An “expert” will give you bad advice. You’ll lose arrows. You’ll break bows. You’ll miss targets. You’ll miss animals. You’ll have passionate disagreements with other archers over the proper “anchor point” and acronyms like “EFOC”. Then you’ll shake hands and shoot a round with them afterwards. Unless its online, of course. I would suggest a “time out” if thats the case.

And therein lies the beauty of it all – the people you share the path with. Generous, intelligent, passionate people who will walk this path with you and make it impossible not to love every minute of it. You’ll shoot with these people. You’ll share a fire with these people. You’ll break bread with these people. You’ll learn with these people. And you’ll learn to love these people.

“So you shoot bows at foam targets and you camp, right?”

– The Average Non-Arrow Slingin’ Joe or Jane

Well…yeah. We do all of that. We eat really well too, but there’s a whole lot more to it.

Just get yourself a bow. Get yourself some arrows. Get yourself to a gathering. Please do all of these things, but understand that when you find your calendar full from March to December and have a room in your house dedicated to wood and feathers, I will be responsible for none of it.

Want to know more about traditional archery or find out more about traditional gatherings? Visit www.michiganlongbow.org.