“Good To Meet You. Do You Hunt?”
Here’s what happened when a sensitive, liberal, bookish musician asked for the hand of this man’s daughter
To understand my father-in-law, Weston, you need to see his man-cave. His wood-paneled basement den in Nanaimo, British Columbia is a cozy but somewhat cramped archive of the wildlife that Weston has, in his lifetime, either shot, fished or wrestled to the ground with his bare hands. Represented are: two species of African kudu (a reclusive, jungle-dwelling deer), a warthog, two different kinds of impala, a blue wildebeest, an eland, a gemsbok, a blesbok and a magnificent Cape buffalo. Rounding out the collection are a Fallow deer and a Blacktail deer, more antlered ungulates that Weston shot locally. It’s a world of taxidermic fascination. You ain’t seen nothing until you’ve looked deep into the nostrils of a Cape buffalo.
In Weston’s wonderfully cluttered shop off the garage are even more trophies from around the world: a musk ox, an Asian water buffalo, European wild boar tusks, a six-point Rocky Mountain bull elk, two caribou from the Canadian tundra, two bull moose, a bison, a Drake pintail duck, a Drake gadwall duck. Visited consecutively, Weston’s den and shop are like two exhibits in a museum of natural history. Or, according to my mother-in-law, Wanda, it’s all the evidence anyone needs that her husband has a hoarding disorder. Wanda hasn’t set foot in Weston’s shop since 1981.
The first time I met my wife’s family and walked into his den, Weston was relaxing on his dark green leather couch with his hands clasped behind his neck. He stood up and launched himself toward me, all 6 feet, 4 inches and 250 lbs. of him. He offered me his hand and it was essentially a giant calloused mitt that enveloped mine in such a way that I felt like I was in kindergarten. Those powerful hands had spent forty years servicing the greasy innards of literally thousands of heavy-duty logging machines. His first words to me are now the stuff of family lore: “Good to meet you. Do you hunt?”
Tell the truth, I thought. It’s easier to remember. With a retinue of glassy-eyed dead African animals as my witness, I confessed that not only had I never hunted, but I had also never even held a gun.
Only one thing has ever felt just right in my hands: a guitar. Or, failing that, anything else with strings.
After graduating with a virtually useless Bachelor of Arts from Toronto’s York University in 1991, I bought a clunky, burdensome PA and spent the rest of my 20s performing solo or in duos and trios in smoky, badly lit rooms between Vancouver and Toronto. Since I wasn’t able to command much more than a $50 fee per gig, I made sure that I had a show almost every night to pay for gas and rent. Mine was a spartan existence. I owned two guitars, an aged mattress and a fake-leather suitcase full of unfolded jeans, t-shirts and the Guatemalan vests I wore at the time. I even lived in a camper van for a while, parking it outside friends’ homes so I could use their showers. I was a naive, bookish, long-haired liberal arts graduate, toting an acoustic guitar case with a Clayoquot Sound anti-logging sticker on it. I had never met someone like Weston before, and I imagined that a man like that would instinctively run me from his house with a high-powered rifle.
My first visit to Wes and Wanda’s home was an exercise in decoding the family’s power structure. I deduced correctly that Weston would occupy the head of the table; I sat down at the setting just to his right, hopefully to signal respect as well as confidence. But, as I observed it, any sense of paternal authority ended there. I had grown up in a family in which teasing was done very carefully, if ever. But my future wife’s household was another thing entirely: Leslie, her older sister, and Wanda and Weston all ripped and ribbed each other with gusto and abandon. “You moron!” was a term of endearment. When Weston launched into one of his rants on human stupidity, someone would cover his mouth with masking tape and write Shut Up on it. Only I was spared from the carnage; I suspect that all four of them implicitly understood that I would crumple under the merciless mockery that passed for affection in that rambunctious kitchen.
It’s a good thing that I’m not a naturally competitive person, because Weston totally crushed any territorial advances I’d hoped to make that weekend. Every chance he could get, Weston would commandeer Leslie’s attention. “Dad, you need an ear trim,” Leslie announced after one dinner, brandishing an electric ear-hair trimmer at the side of Weston’s head. “This is a forest in here.”
As she lovingly attended to the errant hairs on her father’s sunburned earlobes, I swear I caught Weston toss me a wink. You’re not so special after all, are you, Mitch Mitchellson. How you like them apples?
Furthermore, despite already having shared a bed with Leslie, I spent every night that weekend in the guest bedroom, while Weston snored like a Husqvarna across the hallway.
The summer we fell in love, Leslie and I made regular visits back to her family home, and Weston applied himself with vigor to the task of manning me up. He’d wake me up at 2:30 a.m., ply me with coffee, then the two of us would drive an hour and a half across Vancouver Island, towing his almost 50-year-old motorboat to the head of a Pacific Ocean fjord called the Alberni Canal. Weston had had a lifelong, tireless interest in sockeye salmon, and I was ignorant on the subject. Clearly, I had a lot of catching up do.
Fishing with the man who would be my father-in-law was a trial-by-fire of such masculine activities as setting up outriggers, assessing line depth, clubbing a salmon and peeing in a bucket while standing up and steering a motorboat. I’ve never met a person more enthusiastic for the sport; mere microscopic dips of the tip of the rod were enough to send Weston into paroxysms of excitement. There would be shouting and screaming, and he’d lurch from one side of the boat to the other, cranking up one line by himself while simultaneously coaching me on my line. If either one of us lost a fish, he took it very personally.
As it turned out, fishing was just Lesson #1. The next month, it was pheasant shooting. The night before the shoot, I was filled with anticipatory dread. How was I going to pull this off?
Before the sun came up, Weston and I were already at a breakfast diner near the shoot site, sipping coffee and tucking into ham and eggs. Weston’s hunting friends, normally clad in bush jackets, down vests and baseball caps, joined us at the table wearing knee-high socks, breeches and English style hunting jackets. Pheasant hunting, I discovered, was something of a high-class affair, mostly drawing doctors, lawyers and wealthy Nanaimo businessmen.
We sipped our coffees and discussed the weather and the ongoing sockeye salmon run and, when those subjects dried up, one of the hunters turned to me.
“So, what do you do?”
“I’m a songwriter,” I said, hoping to radiate a sense of respectability and adventure.
Silence. It was as if I’d casually mentioned that I hung around the wooded perimeter of elementary schools with my pants around my ankles.
Quickly, I veered the conversation back onto comfortable terrain, wondering if any of the men had any insights on housing prices in the Nanoose Bay area. It was a nice save.
At the shoot, Weston took a glance across the field, squinting against the morning sun, and reached into the back of his truck for a long-handled axe. The next thing I knew, I was carrying out explicit instructions to hack down a small tree with a trunk radius comparable to my thigh. Weston claimed the tree would hamper visibility at the shoot, but I knew better. It was all part of a long-term vetting process; he wasn’t going to hand off his youngest daughter to some moron who didn’t know an axe handle from a mic stand. I whaled away at the tree like my life depended on it, not even pausing for a break. By the time I was able to mutter a hoarse “Timber!” my hands were raw with blisters and I could barely breathe.
In a pheasant shoot, the birds are released from boxes and flutter away across the field above the hunters. On this morning, Weston expertly brought down seven or eight birds in roughly 15 minutes and then handed me the gun. “Let’s see what you got,” he said, grimly. “There’s a pheasant right up there in the crook of that tree. See it? That’s only about 100 feet. It’s all yours.”
I couldn’t help but visualize an earlier me, circa 1988, with long curly red hair, noodle dancing to a Grateful Dead cover band at some P.E.T.A. benefit concert in Toronto. Steve Mitchell, this is your life.
My assessment was that the most humane thing I could do at this moment would be to pull off a shot so deadly accurate that the bird would perish immediately, with not even a split second in its little dinosaur brain to register its imminent doom. After accomplishing that, I could then thank Weston for the opportunity, hand him back the gun, excuse myself and then have a good silent cry in the Porta John. I took aim, sighted, steadied…and pulled the trigger.
So, basically, the buckshot hit the pheasant in the legs. I literally sheared off his landing gear and sent him into the air in agony. I had just achieved the exact opposite of the shot I’d intended. Without a word, Weston took the gun from my hands, stepped down the embankment, found the bird flying futile circles in the air, and finished him off. To this day, I wonder if he’d briefly considered turning the rifle on me.
That was the first and last gun I ever fired.
My attempt to win over my mother-in-law was much easier. All it required was an understanding of cause and effect. Wanda likes Licorice All-Sorts, so at the beginning I tried to remember to present her with those whenever I could. But it goes both ways. Wanda is a woman of remarkable subtlety, and early on she took note of how much I enjoyed white chocolate. Now, when we visit the family home in Nanaimo for a visit there is, unfailingly, a bar of white chocolate the size of a gold bar on my pillow. She also appreciates a glass of red wine or a shot of cinnamon Fireball when she has guests. My job as her son-in-law is to make sure she never has to drink alone.
Weston made me work for the privilege of wedding his daughter. The truth is that I would have undergone much more indignity and shame to win Leslie’s hand and heart. And now, almost twenty-one years later, I can no longer conceive of any kind of existence without her. Sometimes, when I’m ordering something on the phone the other person will have to interrupt me and ask about this “we” I keep mentioning. As if I had an invisible friend.
Three-quarters of a year ago, my father-in-law had just gotten a merciful gift for his 80th birthday: an all-clear ultrasound result just three months after an operation for stomach cancer.
But Weston was still in rough shape. On good days, he puttered in his workshop, reloading shotgun shells with buckshot and repairing broken beaks on antique duck decoys. On his bad days, he slouched miserably in his kitchen chair, muttering darkly about his prognosis. He’d lost more than 70 lbs. but he was getting back his appetite, slowly.
Meanwhile, I was just another one of those sad sack musicians you read about on Facebook, grieving a year of canceled gigs and trying to wrap my head around my future as a Starbucks barista. The career I called my life’s work was not exactly lucrative even before COVID-19. And now it was essentially impossible.
Aware that I might possibly have a little too much time on my hands, my sisters-in-law offered me a landscaping job. Both women work in health care and had been putting in long hours in an environment of palpable COVID-19 anxiety and fear. Gardening was, as you might imagine, a low priority. They have a pretty, vinyl-sided home just a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean, with four planted terraces stair stepping down to the road.
One afternoon there, while stubbornly hacking away at a stubborn root in one of the middle terraces, I heard a familiar bellow from the road below.
“Hey, worker man. Take a break!” It was my father-in-law. Even after the chemotherapy, his baritone holler was as full and strong as ever. I’ve always thought that, had Weston not grown up surrounded by people who felt that singing was a questionable skill for a man to pursue, he’d have been a great country singer. His voice seems to explode from some subterranean cavern underneath his size 12 boots, just like Johnny Cash.
I took off my work gloves, wiped the sweat from my forehead, and walked down the steep driveway to Weston’s GMC Silverado. He dropped the automatic passenger seat window but, wary of airborne viruses, he stayed put in the driver’s seat. Weston got right to the point.
“I fixed up this spoon reel. It was missing a bunch of parts.” He leaned across the passenger seat and carefully handed me a 1 ft. leader of fishing line. On one end was a handmade weight and a swivel, with a pivoting joint he instructed me to attach to the end of my fishing line. Attached to the leader were five concave intermittent steel spoons, designed to catch light and conjure up the wobble of an injured or crippled bait fish. On the other end was a lure and hook tucked up into a square of cardboard with a notch at one end to hold the line in place. It was a beautiful set-up, and Weston had dragged himself out of his sickbed, gotten dressed, and driven across town to give it to me.
“This lure was Leslie’s,” Weston began, cradling the tackle as if it were a precious family heirloom. “She caught a monster of a rainbow trout at Angel Rock using this, when she was about 7 or 8.”
We talked a while about fishing, about family, about life. I enjoyed the rest from hard work, the gentle April sunshine glancing off the roof of the truck, and Weston was in no hurry to leave. There was a gentleness in his voice that I recognized from our long drives together to early morning sockeye runs in the Alberni Canal. This was a careless man who has come to realize that he cares, and that he needed to choose his words carefully. That each one mattered. It suddenly struck me that this rough-hewn man, with his meaty vice-grip hands, his suspenders and his denim work pants, might actually have come to like me. Even if I didn’t shoot worth a damn.
Like the flash of a fish in water, my thoughts went back to that first meeting, that timeless standoff. On one end of the handshake: Who was this interloper, and is he man enough for my daughter? And, on the other end: Who was this giant, and was he the type of fellow who would consider sneaking over to the guest bedroom and strangling me while I slept?
My father-in-law is a man who walked his youngest daughter down the aisle to say “I do” to a man who, at the time, didn’t know how to use a propane grill or how to tie a mattress to the roof-rack of a vehicle.
If that’s not faith, then I don’t know what is.
