THE GREAT OUTDOORS

For century upon century, man's relationship with nature has been a wellspring of the sublime. Countless paintings, poems, symphonies and other works of art have been summoned forth as man has gazed upon the brooding, seductive, majestic Other.

But even nature can slip on a banana peel and fall on its ass, and it usually does so on the Outdoors pages of daily newspapers.

These pages normally run in the back of the Sunday sports section and exist solely to reaffirm man's place at the top of the food chain. They are crowded with photos of hunters and fishermen proudly displaying their trophies, such as luckless fish and deer they have caught or killed. Oh sure, there are stories about hiking and other non-bloodsport activities, but in general the Outdoors pages are kingdoms of the dead, ruled by sportsmen.

With nature already reduced from an Emersonian wilderness to a theater for manly pastimes, layout editors and copy editors now step in to provide the comedy. You see, Outdoors pages are often seen as nuisance work by people who only think about guns and hunting when a reporter is 45 minutes late with a story that hasn't been run through spell-check. Thus the pages can be hastily thrown together by people completely unfamiliar with the subject. The results sometimes go awry.

For instance, at a paper where I used to work we ran a story eulogizing a champion fisherman who had been killed in a plane crash during the past week. We found a great photograph of him holding a aloft a massive bass that he had caught, and he was beaming with triumph. We made that story the centerpiece of the page, meaning that it was given special display type known in the biz as a hammer. A hammer is usually a two or three words that a general tone of the story, whether it be witty, somber or whatever. Unfortunately, the hammer placed under this photograph said "A tragic loss." And indeed it was, but it was not a widely known loss; not many people (generally speaking) had heard of this fisherman. So the only immediately recognizably dead thing thin the photo was the fish. And it appeared that the paper was devastated by its passing.

At times in the past, I have longed to take a more deliberate approach in sabotaging the Outdoors page -- not because I have any sympathy for the animals or antipathy toward the sportsmen -- but rather just because it's there. We've had several hunters send in photos of themselves posing with their deer-head trophies arrayed about them as visual evidence of their prowess. But to me, that looks like a Vegas singer posing with his backup vocalists. I once soooo wanted to say in the caption that one such photo depicted a hunter who had rigged the deer heads with hinged jaws and tape players so they could provide the chorus when he wanted to sing "I Ain't Got Nobody." I also wanted to say that one hunter was using his trophy sort of as a ventriloquist's dummy ("Say, Bob, do you remember all the fun we had when you shot me?") and entertaining small children at grade schools. Or perhaps the deer head could be made to recount its killing: "I thought I was the king of the forest, and I had escaped many lesser hunters with ease. But as I roamed the woods that fateful day, I was seized by an unspeakable dread. I knew then that Jerry Smith -- the Jerr-beast as we call him -- was nearby. If I fell under his rifle, there was no hope. Then suddenly I knew I was in his sights, and I tried to flee. But his aim was too pure ... ." Or Something like that.

I mean, really, deer hunters have done so much recently to rig the game in their favor -- they might as well just take the final step and start chaining deer to trees -- that a deer trophy ain't what it used to be. So it might as well serve another purpose.

But what I really regret is not getting this photo in of a hunting dog gone bad.


(And if the image isn't showing, then bear with me for a few days until I get back into town to fix it.)

Anyway, next time you here the song of the wild, but it sounds and feels like something being played by a kazoo orchestra, fear not. It just means an Outdoors page is being designed somewhere.

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Here's a shout-out to Hannah M. Thanks for the comments, and remember that copy editors have a genetically encoded sense of grievance that is quite acute. Don't give into it.