With the Boys: Field Notes on Being a Guy
By Jake MacDonald
GreyStone, 188 pages, $22.95
Here's more proof, if more were needed, that you can't judge a book by its cover, or at least the title on the cover. With the Boys: Field Notes on Being a Guy is not a Hemingwayesque wallow in death and testosterone, nor a laddish, Nick Hornby giggle, and certainly not a Sensitive New Age Guy navel inspection.
No, what we have here is a collection of deceptively casual short pieces about Manitoba author Jake MacDonald's pursuit of grace, which in his case usually involves hunting and fishing. These are, of course, manly pursuits, and so his companions are usually (but not always) men, so the title is not entirely deceptive.
Maybe the folks at Douglas & McIntyre thought it best to play down the fly rods and shotguns angle, lest critics and booksellers relegate With the Boys to the Recreation shelf alongside What Fish Don't Want You to Know. Goodness knows the discerning Canadian reader nowadays is an urban, multicultural type who doesn't fish or hunt, and regards those who do as quaint — or worse.
Here's hoping the vaguely hip title draws in that reader, because MacDonald, in his unassuming way, is both maintaining a noble literary tradition once championed by the likes of Norman Maclean and Roderick Haig-Brown, and keeping alive the relationship to the backwoods that is every Canadian's birthright.
If that sounds a little lofty, ask yourself: Can you tell a tamarack from a jack pine, a mink from an otter, a steelhead from a coho? MacDonald remarks that Canadians like to believe they have some kind of primal bond with their land. We clutch some fragment learned at summer camp — the J-stroke, a trick with the fish knife, that owl call with the cupped hands — like a pass-key to the Great White North we plan to visit some day.
Such lore was second nature to middle-class Canadians just a generation ago. MacDonald, fiftysomething, acknowledges a debt to his father's circle of friends, whose idea of quality time (though they would never use such a term) involved loading the Buick with shotguns, rye and steaks, and heading off to some mouse-ridden shack in the toolies. Such men are usually portrayed in current film and TV as red-necked louts; MacDonald reveals them as earthy but liberal (and why should that "but" be there?) guys whose goodness owed something to the time they spent with guns and dogs.
Time spent with dogs is always redemptive, of course, and MacDonald truly shines when recalling them. A futile attempt to restrain an enthusiastic but dim mutt named Buckshot escalates with the hilarious inevitability of a Wile E. Coyote scheme, while the story of Luke, a remarkable collie-St. Bernard cross, should be required reading for would-be writers who want to know the difference between sentiment and sentimentality.
Other instructive passages inform the reader that much of the Everglades is closer to prairie than jungle, that you shouldn't try to catch a shark with a fly rod, and that passengers in helicopters should be careful what levers they pull.
It must be said that some of the writing lessons to be learned from MacDonald include what not to do. As mentioned, his style is deceptively casual, which is to say so highly disciplined that he makes it look easy. But every so often he overwrites and breaks the spell: "As we dipped our paddles, skim ice bonked against the canvas hull of the canoe. There were millions of stars all around us. It was like canoeing through the sky, like being Winkin' Blinkin' and Nod, who paddled on a river of crystal light into a sea of dew. Invisible wings whistled past in the darkness."
You don't need a degree in literature to appreciate the straightforward charm of three of those sentences, or to wish the editor had persuaded MacDonald to skip the cloying (and misspelled) quote from the Eugene Field poem. Most of the pieces in With the Boys have one or two of these clinkers; a closer edit could have lifted this book from good to great.
In the introduction, MacDonald worries about the "long shadow" cast by Hemingway on the wildlife adventure genre, but he manages not to slip into Papa-speak. However, he is possessed by Raymond Chandler at one point: "The front desk was still closed and Jorge the night manager was still in dreamland, snuffling like a hog, chin down on his chest, with his fingers laced across his gut and the black handle of the unobtrusive little .25 automatic protruding from the belt of his dress slacks."
There are some anecdotes, such as a Bahamian guide's story about Margaret Thatcher not swimming, that go nowhere. There's more detail about fishing equipment than a non-angler would want, and less about "what is it with guys anyway" than a curious female might want. (To save your search time: Men do enjoy drinking and juvenile humour. Some of them are slow to grow up. None of them discusses you the way you discuss them.)
The sorrows of life — divorce, part-time parenthood, passing friends — are given their due, but no more. Whether he travels to Mexico, the Bahamas or the Arctic, MacDonald is there for the game, but he takes care to sketch the people and settings he encounters, including, to a seemly degree, himself. He comes across as the sort of person you'd like to know, not just because he could tell a great after-dinner story, but because he's on to something good.
That, ultimately, is the great charm of With the Boys. It reassures you that it is possible to see how lovely the world can be without turning one's back on it. Go fish.
Shane McCune is a B.C. writer and editor who spends more time than he'd care to with the boys.
