You're Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck

by Bill Heavey

Overview

In two decades at Field & Stream, the nation’s biggest outdoor magazine, Bill Heavey has become America’s everyman outdoorsman. Why? Because he believes that enthusiasm trumps skill. When he forgets his hat on a freezing winter hunt, he improvises, cutting open the juice-stained plush golden retriever puppy his daughter left in the car and using it as headgear. Trying to impress a lady, he flips his canoe and loses everything in the boat. Heavey takes you along with him as he nearly freezes to death in the 30-below cold of Alaska, and he also survives a divorce, plans deer hunts around his duties as a single dad, and defies a back doctor who tells him his tree-stand days may be coming to an end. Throughout, he is alive to both the ridiculousness and poignancy of life.

Collecting more than sixty of Heavey’s best stories from Field & Stream, the Washington Post, and the Washingtonian, this far-ranging and enlightening volume traces a life lived outdoors through the good, the bad, and the downright hilarious.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802124326
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	12/18/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	264,754
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part I Taking the Bait, 1988-1999

Partners 5

Fallback Flats 10

Shopping Is Fun, but Not for Men 13

Monster in a Box 18

The Girls of Summer 21

A Chip off the Old Root 25

Can I Tell You Something? 29

A Bowhunting Obsession 32

The Waiting 36

It's a Bass World After All 39

A Morning in the Blind 44

Alone with a Pretty Woman in a Small Room with a Big Mirror 50

Birth, Death, and Doves 55

Truce and Consequences 59

Part II It's Always November Somewhere, 2000-2004

Worthy 71

American Scene: Rod and Reel Repair 74

Tree-Stand Day 77

Finally… Uncle Danny 79

Suddenly, She Was Gone 82

Killing Time 109

Bubble Boy 111

A Sportsman's Life: Drum Roll 114

Spring Canoe Tricks 116

The Kid in the Photo 118

None Dare Call It Happiness 121

Snoop 123

Paradise Lost 125

Only So Many 127

As Good as It Gets 129

Camp Rules 131

All Alone in Tarpon Paradise 133

Good Cops Bald Cop 140

Part III Not Entirely Untrue Stories, 2005-2009

The 2005 Elmer Awards 145

On Track 149

Lost in the Woods 152

Stalking the Highlands 155

Daycare Fishing 166

Always on Call 169

The Wild Card 177

Good Grief 180

A Sinking Feeling 183

I've Been Caught 186

Unsinkable 189

Have Gun, Will Travel? 192

What I Believe 195

You Can't Touch This 198

Current Crazy 201

Clay-Bird Brain 204

How to Be the Man 207

Part IV I Wouldn't Try That if I Were Me, 2010-2014

The Last Mountain Man 213

Handy Man 230

Salute to Turkeys 233

None for All 236

Lizard Lust 239

School's Out 242

My Late Season 245

Making the Cut 248

Casting a Spell 251

Caulk This Way 254

Rash Words 257

Unholy Mackerel 260

Son of a Gun 263

The Old Warrior 266

Acknowledgments 269

Editorial Reviews

“Bill Heavey is one of the best magazine writers in America. No, he doesn’t work for the New Yorker. He writes for Field & Stream, the popular journal for hunters and fishermen. Outdoor writing has a dim reputation as a soapbox for braggarts who crow about hooking a monster marlin or bagging a 24-point deer. But Mr. Heavey will have none of that. . . . Not since Jack London’s stories has the stark danger of freezing lived so largely on the page. . . . . As the tongue-in-cheek title of Mr. Heavey’s collection suggests, this isn’t always or even usually a serious book. Think Erma Bombeck in camo gear, and you’ll get the sensibility of many of these pieces.”—Wall Street Journal

“A reader doesn’t have to hunt or fish to appreciate Heavey’s gift for storytelling. . . . The best essays, here, in fact, are heartbreakingly tender. . . . This is a hard book to classify, and that’s its biggest strength.”—Christian Science Monitor, “10 excellent books you might have missed in 2014”

“Remarkably engaging and often hilarious. . . . Even those who have never baited a hook, assembled a tree stand, or sat in a duck blind will quickly find themselves drawn into Heavey’s world with colorful—and occasionally dangerous—accounts of outdoor life.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“To the list of great Field & Stream essayists . . . add the name Bill Heavey. His writing is funny, poignant, acerbic, and best of all, always alert to the absurdities of life.”—Patrick C. McManus

“Bill Heavey is the man who put the ‘lure’ in failure. He’s my kind of fisherman, deer hunter, and wing shot. Which is to say the, um, very amateur kind. But who wants to hear about some braggart’s cast and blast triumphs when you can hear about Bill catching a 14-inch largemouth bass on a pink Shakespeare Ladies’ Spincast Combo? Even I have never done that. At least not sober.”—P. J. O’Rourke

“I’ve read Bill Heavey’s page since the earliest days of my career. He’s one of my all-time favorite writers. He’s funny, fearless and always up for anything. If he could fish as well as he writes, I’d be in trouble. Fortunately, he can’t.”—Kevin VanDam, winningest professional bass angler of all time

“[Heavey’s] self-deprecating tales make us laugh. . . . [He] writes about the good times as well as the demons of his outdoor life. Some chapters are for soul-searching, not just fun and games.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Humorous and thought-provoking essays on what it means to be an outdoorsman. . . . Readers will sense that it’s possible to fail at your mission and still have a grand time if you don’t take yourself too seriously.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Bill Heavey isn’t just one of my favorite writers, though he is. He’s also one of my heroes, proof that you can make an adult living by being witty, insightful and spending an awful lot of time outdoors. That’s the dream, and it’s chronicled in this book. Buy three copies.”—Tucker Carlson

“If you think of Bill Heavey as ‘just’ a humorist, you'll be selling him short, but it's his intelligent, unforced humor that hits you first and stays with you the longest.”—John Gierach, author of At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman and All Fishermen Are Liars

“Bill Heavey is James Thurber in camouflage overalls, an unrelenting geyser of slapstick comedy and serrated wit. If he doesn’t make you laugh, consult a coroner.”—Jonathan Miles, author of Dear American Airlines

“Heavey examines an eclectic variety of topics, from hunting to fishing to relationships and even life’s more profound mysteries. His perspective is that of a devoted, if not always expert, outdoorsman. If in doubt, he makes fun of himself. . . . Fellow outdoorspeople are the target audience, but the overall quality of the writing may draw even stay-at-homes.”—Booklist

“Bill Heavey has become famous as America’s everyman outdoorsman, unafraid to draw attention to his many and varied failures—from sporting French lavender deodorant to scaring a UPS man half to death while bowhunting in his front yard.”—DL-Online

From the Publisher