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I consider myself rather an idiot savant in the gauging of short lengths and medium distances. Either that or I’m just way off and I think I’m a savant but I’m really just an idiot. Because my buddy Bob and I can get into some emotional exchanges when we play that game.
Actually, I’m the emotional one (if arrogance, stubbornness, and intransitiveness are emotions); Bob just laughs the whole time during the exercise. I guess laughing is an emotion.
When we’re in the boat it’ll go like this:
“Nice cast, Bob,” I say. “How far do you think that was?”
“40 yards?” Bob guesses. He’s easy-going. His life is not staked on either the length of his cast or eyeballing the distance of it.
“40 yards?!” I shout. “Are you kidding me?” Then I’m going through some colorful language (unpublishable in black and white print) about his lack of eyesight and brain and experience in feet and yards and paces.
“That’s maximum 50 feet!” I say. Authoritatively, like an author. Like a writer. With exclamation points.
It’s so interesting with Bob because we are so far removed in our calculations. 120 feet versus 50 feet. I’m closer to zero feet than I am to his number. He’s closer to half a football field than he is to mine.
Now a reasonable person might conclude – or, if they’re less argumentative than me, suggest – that the truth is somewhere in the middle. I can’t accept that. The distances we guess are so divergent that one of us really has to be crazy.
Let’s say we’re out on the ice. Slow day. Hovering around our holes. I point to the far tree line. “How far from here to that shore?” I’ll say.
“Half a mile,” he smiles. He smiles all the ever-lovin’ time.
“Bob, are you crazy? That’s only a quarter mile!”
Or the near treeline.
“1000 feet.”
I bow my head and shake it in disgust. It’s only 200 yards. To me.
So, one time I finally tested him in my yard. I’ve got my targets and backdrops set up under a big old spruce.
“Bob, from here at the target at the base of this tree, off to the outhouse, how far would you say that is?”
He smiles and says, “100 feet.”
And I’m just about ready to tear into his unmentionable sense of distance, when I realize…
“Yeah, that’s almost what I get. I paced it at 30 yards for shooting my bow.” 30 paces is just this side of the outhouse. You stand at the outhouse door and when you draw the bow your right elbow almost touches the glass pane.
Now a pace can generally be considered one yard. A pace is a long stride, longer for shorter people, sort of comfortable for tall people. I’m not sure how accurate it is in relation to the standard English yard. But it’s an approximation to a yard.
The first time I learned about paces I was about seven years old, and we were in a green grassy clearing in the oaks and the brambles. My old man hung a target – a paper target with black circles and red bull’s-eye – on the twigs of a honeysuckle bush, then turned and counted off 20 paces, and I hop-skipped behind his paces. Then at his 20 paces we sat our butts down in the long grass, facing the target, me between his legs, his knees steadying me on either side, his arms around me forward like to help to hold the gun and me bent into the scope and it was so hard to find anything on the other side of the scope, then the white, black and red target appeared, and the crosshairs, and with him whispering to me, me squeezing, squeezing, squeezing and then jerking the trigger. I’ve always jerked the trigger. I’ve always flinched.
Maybe if your parents were boomers and you were a GenXer you were a latchkey kid, so you came home off the bus and the garage door or fence gate was unlocked and the house key was hidden in the garage or backyard. We had the run of the place for a couple hours and that might mean hanging out outside, or watching reruns of brain candy like “The Brady Bunch” or “Gilligan’s Island” or, for some of us nerdier types, doing a little homework or reading. Then a family dinner, and my parents were busy after dinner.
But on Monday nights in the first half of the school year we had Monday Night Football. I’d be ready for it from 7 o’clock and at 8 o’clock my father would come in and lay on the floor in the living room and we’d watch. The Dolphins or Steelers or Earl Campbell or Jim Plunkett or Ken “The Snake” Stabler. And that was quality time back then.
I don’t think my father really cared about watching football. And he and I both went to bed at the end of the first half.
But regarding the quality time, there were some things to learn. Three feet is a yard. From the garage-side wall across the living room and down the short hall to the outside wall of my cute little bedroom, our house was 30 feet. 10 yards is that much. 100 yards is much further. Also, an inch was discussed because it was about the nose of a football. I remember that “a long yard” and “a short yard” my father had to explain to me. Those were Frank Gifford’s words. “Dandy” Don Meredith never got into the nitty-gritty of the football.
Bob’s guesses were always too long; mine were possibly too short. Wrap your brain around this: His was a short 40 yards. Mine was a long 50 feet.
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