Phi­los­o­phy of the sport­ing life: A med­i­ta­tion on why.

There was a sum­mer I spent as a wild child in the moun­tains of Iowa.

There are no moun­tains in Iowa, you say? Tell that to my younger self.

That sum­mer my father made the crude out­line of a teepee with left­over 2×4’s sit­u­ated just per­fectly to scan the neigh­bor­ing hill­sides for imag­i­nary buf­falo. After read­ing too much “Lit­tle House on the Prairie,” I spent the bet­ter part of a week thatch­ing the sides with long grasses I uprooted from the pas­ture. When the horse tried to eat my very flam­ma­ble set­tle­ment, I chased him like a war­ring tribe – whoop­ing and waving.

I was nomadic that sum­mer, part of the land instead of a vis­i­tor to it – a hunter gath­erer – strong, tanned, wild.

Happy.

Then I grew up. I for­got that feeling.

It was not until my mid 20s, when I came to the west – to my own moun­tains, to my own rivers, to my own herds of elk and deer – that I remem­bered that summer.

And I was wild again.

As sports­men in an increas­ingly non-sporting world, we are pres­sured to come up with rea­sons why. We seek to jus­tify our actions to a the world – we hunt for food, for her­itage. We fish for cam­raderie, for solitude.

But at it’s core, are we not also look­ing for the con­nec­tion we felt as chil­dren? To be part of some­thing so broad and vast, some­thing we may not nec­es­sar­ily under­stand yet find so innately famil­iar? At the heart of it, isn’t our goal to lessen the gap between real­ity and instinct, to exist sim­ply and sim­ply exist?

There is a poem writ­ten by Lisa Mueller – “Monet refuses the operation”:

“Doc­tor, you say there are no haloes
around the street­lights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.”

Such is the sport­ing life.

For some, the line between civ­i­liza­tion and the out­door world needs only be blurred by a bit of camo. It need only be plumbed by a bit of feather and a hefty sink tip.

For us, that con­nec­tion makes us part of the sys­tem again– the place we have never and yet always known we belong. The hori­zon blurs and we find our peace, our wild, our happy.