Outdoor writer Jim Mize remembers simpler times, when his whole family used to target shoot on an improvized gun range on their land.
One of the perks of being an outdoor writer is that we gather annually at the Southeastern Outdoor Press Association conference for education, camaraderie and hijinks. Most recently, we met in Eufaula, Alabama at the Lakepoint Resort State Park.
On a bluebird afternoon, we shuttled over to a gun range for a few hours of gun safety and shooting instruction, with a sprinkling of practice thrown in for good measure.
As I hefted various Smith & Wesson pistols, I found myself gravitating toward a light little .22 M&P Super Compact. After lining up and squeezing off a few shots at a target, my mind drifted back to a simpler time on Sunday afternoons long ago.
Back then, .22 rifles and pistols were cheap entertainment. Moms, dads, sons and daughters would gather in front of a dirt bank, set up targets and take turns knocking cans off logs or poking holes in milk cartons full of water.
Besides ammunition, we all brought or found along the way something to shoot at. Maybe a dried-up terrapin shell would get pulled out of the leaves or a knotted stick might be broken off a dead tree. Sometimes, we planned ahead and froze a plastic jug of water overnight to chip away at like sculptors.
My mom had a nifty trick she would perform with wooden matches: she could light them with a .22 rifle. After lining up a row of matches stuck in the ground or propped in the crack of a dead log, she would shoot the tip and cause it to flare up. It was an impressive trick amongst plinkers.
Kids with BB guns would string a can up under a branch and shoot rapidly to keep it moving. After tiring of shooting the can, we’d try to clip the string. As soon as one competition got boring, we’d look for another.
If anyone actually brought targets, they were homemade, usually on the backside of school work already turned in and graded. The compasses used to draw circles in art class would make nice concentric rings we’d trace with Magic Markers. Then, sticking these to boards using thumb tacks, we’d pace off as far as we thought we could shoot straight and go for another round.
Those informal gun ranges required little more than a dirt bank for a backstop, an adult for supervision and a few kids unencumbered by worries and concerns. We didn’t need gun ranges, spotting scopes or shooting benches. After all, we were just plinking.
Standing on that gun range in Alabama, the pop of a .22 going off and that memorable whiff of gun powder wafting in the air took me back to a simpler time. I could imagine cousins carrying BB guns with straps, Dad with a .22 revolver and Mom with an automatic .22 rifle, walking behind the house to a dirt-bank shooting range like some rag-tag army.
John Prine summed up the mood most clearly in his song, “Paradise.”
“When the air smelled like snakes and we’d shoot with our pistols, but empty pop bottles was all we would kill.”
John understood plinking.
