Many life skills can be learned outside the classroom

In early December, three questions would typically come up in conversation among myself and the six other boys in my fifth grade class at the Inlet Common School.

Did you get all your wood in for next year? Did you get your Ice fishing shanty rebuilt? And, did your dad get his Deer?

There were no girls to contend with in our small class which gave us the opportunity to engage in as much guy talk as we wanted.

Splitting and stacking firewood was a chore we were quite familiar with.

And I’m pretty sure we all did it at one time or another for extra cash.

Sometimes we we would discuss our preferred approaches to wood splitting.

For example, I liked to split all the wood with a go-devil while others thought a machine splitter was the best way to go.

Ice fishing was a whole other story. Some of the boys did not fish in the winter, but I did.

And even though my father had a fishing shanty, I never used it during the winter.

Instead, I preferred to use it as my personal club house in the summer.

Sometimes I would lock my little brother inside until he started to howl.

But the subject of deer hunting was where we all found a common ground. We talked about types of ammunition and guns used to hunt.

And everyone had their own tale of missed opportunities and where the best place was to hunt during that past season.

I can remember having a long discussion with John Levi about the caliber of ammunitions as we leafed through a gun catalogue he had brought to school with him.

John was of the belief that 30-06 (pronounced 30 ought 6) Springfield ammunition and weapons were the most predominantly used deer rifles because so many of them were available from the past two wars.

I also thought that the .30-30 Winchester was used by most who didn’t have a military hand me down.

They liked to pretend they were John Wayne out there in the woods.

But in the end we both agreed that it didn’t matter what kind of rifle was used in the hunt as it always seemed the best deer were taken by the best hunters year in and year out.

Our stories of the hunt and who had an eight or ten pointer hanging in their garage or shed filled many of our school mornings.

We were separated into groups and should have been concentrating on our math or science assignments, but we weren’t.

Instead, we were like a group of chirping birds at the feeder, dancing around and pushing others away instead of just plucking a seed and eating it.

In terms of life skills, hunting, splitting firewood, and ice fishing were just as important as learning math and science while growing up Adirondack.

Mitch Lee is an Adirondack illustrator & storyteller, living in his boyhood town of Inlet. ltmitch3rdny@aol.com