Jake MacDonald is the author of Houseboat Chronicles: Notes from a Life in the Shield Country, as well as five works of fiction. He is also an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in Sporting Classics, Saturday Night, Canadian Geographic, Maclean's, and the Winnipeg Free Press. He lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
The stories in this book cover a period of approximately forty years. Some of the early events took place before I became a writer, so these are recollections, and I couldn't testify in court as to their factuality. It's a trick of memory that we tend to revise the details of our past. And it's a trick of the eye that when we're trying to spot something, like a faint star, we can see it more clearly when we look o€ to one side. So these are sidelong dispatches, field notes taken during my travels with fathers and sons, relatives and buddies. If the stories reveal anything about men's lives, I'm pleased. But they're intended to be stories, not lessons. If they seem to have a moral, I'm afraid it's purely accidental.
Women appear in some of the stories too. Even when they're not on the scene, their absence is a kind of presence. Women keep an eye on men and exert a moderating influence on their behavior. That's one of the reasons that men like to occasionally get away from them. The singer Garth Brooks once remarked that he was teaching his little daughters a simple concept: "Men are pigs." All men know this about themselves, and they think it's funny. But at the same time, they have their own gender-specific code of ethics. Some kinds of piggy behavior are allowed, and some aren't. There are hundreds of rules affecting male behavior. That's too many to list here, and in any case every guy knows them. But women might find the male codebook strange and interesting. Women, for example, commonly assume that men like to talk about their spouses or sweethearts with their buddies. This is what psychologists call "projection." Women do it, so they think men do it too. A woman will happily dump the entire kitbag of her romantic woes on the table for the amusement of some other woman she's met four minutes ago. But no matter how late the evening or how debauched the conversation, you'll seldom hear a man say more than a few neutral words in passing about his mate. In the male codebook, talking about your love life is considered to be craven and unmanly. So women can at least relax about that.
Some of these stories have a wide cast of characters. Like most men, I seem to belong to various male groups that come together for seasonal banquets, fishing derbies, snooker tournaments, and what have you. The anthropologist Lionel Tiger says the phenomenon of club membership is an aspect of the "male hunting bond." He says that men have an instinctive need to assemble, invent uniforms, devise rites of passage, and go after arbitrary goals of some kind, often with surrogate weapons like golf clubs or pool cues or hockey sticks. As the first story in the collection explains, my father belonged to a hunting group, and he drafted me at an early age. He and his friends taught me a lot of things. They offered these lessons in an indirect sort of way that made me feel I was learning rather than being taught: a subtle distinction, but one that makes a big difference to a boy. They didn't just teach me about hunting, either. We could have been sailing a ship or building a barn, and the lessons would have been the same.
