Mountain men they will never be...

...and I'm not so sure that's a good thing anymore.

Let me try to explain the genesis of my crazy thinking.

I think we have done a good job in starting the boys off on the right foot academically. They love to read, learn, and ask questions. I think as parents one of our main goals is to help them get "book smart". We want them to WANT to go school, make great grades, and get into a fantastic college. But what about common sense stuff? Or practical life lessons? Neither one of us can work on cars, figure out how to fix plumbing problems, or build things with wood. The only things I feel I can contribute on a practical level (besides basics like doing laundry) is to teach them about gardening, and possibly growing their own food.

But what if they need more than that to survive one day? What if something catastrophic occurs to take away our comfortable and relatively easy way of life? What if the food or water supply was contaminated or rendered somehow unsafe? Every time a story breaks about bacteria infecting people from a food source it scares the crap out of me. I think we have a tendency to hold onto blind faith that whatever is on the shelves of our grocery store is 100% safe to eat. Or what if global warming kicks in sooner rather than later, and drought becomes the norm? All of a sudden there's not enough food to feed everyone, and things start to get ugly.

Paranoid thinking, maybe, but not completely farfetched.

A couple of years ago, we were kind of sad to realize that there was no one to take Gabriel (this was before Joel) fishing. Well, we could take them, and I know how to attach a lure to the line and cast it. But if I ever caught a fish I wouldn't know the first thing about releasing it, let alone keeping it to clean, filet and serve for supper. My Uncle Robert used to take my family fishing, and although he threw most of what we caught back, he would sometimes keep one of the bigger ones and we would have some beautiful fresh fish filets for dinner that night. My mom, coming from a family of uncles on her dad's side that actually fished the Gulf commercially, claims she used to know how to clean them, but isn't too jazzed about trying it again. My dad would go fishing with his grandfather, Daddy Buck, but Dad never had the patience to actually sit and fish. He loved to hike, so that's what he would do while his grandfather fished.

Uncle Robert and his brothers all hunted too, and and could skin and butcher a deer without thinking about it. After all, their father (my maternal great grandfather) had been a butcher for his career. I have second and third cousins who killed their first buck before they were 10 years old. I used to play just outside my Uncle Robert's smokehouse, where he had different cuts of venison hanging everywhere and the smell was sometimes horrible, sometimes heavenly. But my parents never got into the hunting way of life. In fact, my Dad may have gone along on some hunting trips when he first started meeting my mother's family, but never had the stomach for killing another living creature. Which is the way I feel about it too.

Jav's dad never got into hunting or fishing either, and Jav himself was too busy playing baseball to worry about the outdoorsy stuff. So the boys have little or no knowledge to gain from their dad. Which up until now wouldn't really have bothered me. I've been a hater of guns and hunting for some time now. When we started having children, I just assumed they'd grow up in a gun-free home. That included toy guns, in my opinion. So other than a tiny plastic water gun that didn't work that someone gave him last summer, Gabriel hasn't had the word "gun" in his vocabulary. But he recently went to a classmates' cowboy-themed birthday party where the party favors were a hat, bandana and plastic water gun. He had a great time once he got home getting dressed up, especially once I told him there were some boots in his closet that someone gave us that probably almost fit him now. Then he told me while driving to school one morning this week that one of Tita and Tito's neighbors has a BB gun in his garage. How, I asked, did he know this? Because Tito took him to say "Happy New Year" and the man let him hold the BB gun, and may have even let him shoot it. The details are sketchy.

But the thing is, I am starting to wonder if they might someday NEED to know how to hunt or fish for their own food.

We would love for the boys to get involved in Boy Scouts, and my dad and I are on the verge of taking Gabriel on his first hike at the Fort Worth Nature Center. But even if they love it, it doesn't mean they'd end up even more outdoorsy. I asked Jav what he thought about getting them a BB gun when they're a little older, but only to shoot at targets in the back yard. He thinks I'm crazy in thinking that they won't try to aim at any animals. I wondered about archery electives, or taking them skeet shooting. At least they could practice at hitting a target. But the thing is, you could practice on non-living things your whole life, but it wouldn't give you ANY sense of what it would be like to actually track and kill a living creature.

There is a scene in "Into the Wild" that really grabbed me. It's towards the end of the movie, and college boy Chris McCandless has hitchhiked all the way to Alaska in his quest to turn his back on the establishment. He has read countless books on surviving in the wilderness. He kills a moose and is attempting to skin and butcher the animal before the meat starts to rot and becomes inedible. And this is where he realizes that reading things out of a book, no matter how fierce your determination to do them, is not the same as real life experience. He fails, and I felt his agony of realizing that not only did he kill that majestic animal for nothing, but that he may have blown his chance of finding real food for a long, long time.

So would the boys be able to turn into Mountain Men in a pinch, without having grown up going hunting and fishing? Probably not. I guess we need to hope that they become so successful after college that they have the money to hire someone to do it for them. And I'll have to keep pondering that BB gun issue.