We showed up on time. Oh dark-30. Parked our car on a pull-off area on a mountain road in Kebler Pass, located in the Crested Butte area. The twins stepped out of their vehicle next to us – dressed in camo, do-rags and running shoes. The reflective tape on their shoes gleamed in the pre-dawn and I thought, “I’m in trouble here.” My hunting boots already felt heavy.
How about firing over 25,000 12-gauge shotgun shells as the testing grounds for two new shotguns? I have heard about gun companies that fire huge piles of shells as the introductory testing of new shotgun models, but I’m pretty sure such testing takes place in a figurative laboratory, i.e. the company’s testing facilities. But I was part of a five-shooter party that fired all those thousands of shells in a genuine hunting situation.
Skeet is not a game to me.
I don’t keep score. I ignore many of the rules and conventions. And I like to blaze through a round fast. Really fast. All I’m doing is trying to stay sharp for wingshooting. I don’t particularly want to be an expert at shooting inanimate clay disks.
Are you that guy? I was. I think there’s a little bit of him in most of us, and a lot in some. Who is he? He’s the guy who misses a few targets and gets so frustrated that he misses even more. A lot of shooters are just a few misses away from becoming that guy.
I’m a Texan so, of course, I’m tuned in to what’s going on in our great state. But wherever you reside, you’d have to be living in total isolation not to have heard about the catastrophic drought, heat and wildfires that have plagued Texas all summer long. Truth is, for us it started a year ago in September 2010, when Mother Nature turned off the rain faucet in our beautiful Texas Hill Country after lavishing us with abundant and timely showers throughout the prior summer. Since then, our average annual rainfall of 30 inches has shrunk to a meager 20% of that amount, a total of 6 inches in a whole year. Spring-fed creeks are bone dry and rivers are a trickle. Parched landscape holds its breath for fear of wind-driven wildfires, and residents sweat out record-breaking high temperatures. Many of us remember our parents and grandparents reciting stories about the drought of the 1950’s, but the summer of 2011 will likely prove to rival those days.
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