A Day at the Shooting Range
January 09, 2012, By Craig J. Heimbuch 0 comments
It was just one of those weeks. Work was hell—deadlines, meetings, falling behind on things and finding more things that needed to be done. A freak rainstorm revealed a hole in our roof and ruined the ceiling in our living room. The carpet needed work, the kitchen floor started to crack. Too much going on at home to maintain anything resembling a schedule. And, to top it off, I had to get ready to go out of town for four days. The night before I left, I didn't sleep a wink. Too much pressure. Too many frayed nerves.
The trip to Maine was dual-purpose. Part of it was for work, part for a book I'm working on. Had it not been such a bad week, I might have been giddy with anticipation when my plane landed in Portland, Maine. But, as it was, my nerves were fried. I was tired of the stress at home, tired of the hassle of traveling—who wouldn't be with a two-hour layover?—and I found myself getting short with my wife on the phone while I was waiting for my bag to come out of the carousel. It was almost midnight. No sleep. I just wanted to get to my room and go to sleep.
I never sleep all that well on the road. Uncomfortable beds, strange sounds. I was in Freeport, Maine, the place where I proposed to my wife, the place I held up so highly in countless memories from childhood and college roadtrips. And yet, I woke up to a drizzling sky and a knot in my neck. I worried that my class was going to be cancelled, so I grabbed some coffee and headed over to the home of L.L. Bean's Outdoor Discovery School, a small farmhouse set on the other side of I-295 called the Fogg House.
I had shot guns before. I shot them mostly with my uncle during visits to Iowa. I was never that good at it. Passable, but not great. But, like a skier from Kansas who spends the year looking forward to their trip to Colorado, shooting was something so closely tied to a specific location as to seem unreasonable anywhere else. I signed up for the Wingshooting Essentials II class as a means of learning a thing or two before heading out on my first hunting trip—the topic of my next book—a month or so later. It was recommended to me by Mac MacKeever, an L.L. Bean media relations representative I've gotten to know over the years working in magazines and on this site. Everything I needed to know about shooting—certainly enough to be sure I don't embarass myself in front of my veteran hunter relatives—would be covered. I may not come away a crack shot, but I would be better than I was before. Sounded good.
But it was no easy day at the range. This wasn't a vacation for me. It was work. Work for my book. Work for the site. I couldn't allow myself to simply relax and be a student. I had to be paying attention, taking mental notes, writing a narrative as I went along and hoping I would remember it days and weeks later when I took the time to set it to paper. It wasn't a typical day at the office, but as I sipped my Starbucks and navigated my rental Ford through the rain-drenched streets of Freeport, I felt like I was definitely going to work.
