ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, September 30, 1996 TAG: 9610010002
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LISA APPLEGATE/STAFF WRITER
MEMO: ***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on October 1,, 1996.
Wendy Koons' name was misspelled in a picture caption on the Monday
Outdoors Page.
THERE he stood, his deep black eyes staring at the trees behind me, pleading "Mama?" as a bright blue arrow jiggled from above his front leg.
I pierced him right in the heart.
If he actually had a heart, that is, and wasn't a Styrofoam deer secured in the dirt for archery practice.
Still, I'm sure I felt the same surge of pride and the same desire to spit tobacco any hunter must feel. After what seemed like hours (OK, more like minutes) of patiently waiting for just the right moment, I nailed him with my powerful - albeit only 24-pound - bow.
Me, one of those tree-hugging, meat-clogs-your-arteries-and-besides-it-had-a-face-once-too-you-know kinds of people standing there just drooling over my Styrofoam kill.
As the brochures had promised, I apparently was "Becoming an Outdoors Woman."
Almost 100 women gathered for this inaugural program in Virginia. We spent three days at Holiday Lake, a small 4-H camp near Appomattox, complete with rustic cabins, campfire songs and a profuse amount of hearty, stick-to-your-ribs food.
The program started six years ago in Wisconsin. Since then, 41 states have offered hunting, fishing and outdoor instruction to women.
Virginia is the first state to hire an Outdoors Woman coordinator; other programs survive on volunteer time. The Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, which sponsored the event, hired Libby Norris to organize the program, and also supplied many of the instructors for the weekend.
When we arrived at lunchtime under a beautiful blue fall sky, I didn't know what to expect, or whom to expect.
Some women donned camouflage and hefty knives hung from their belts; others had those perfectly manicured fingernails you see in Palmolive ads. A few still were in college; many glowed with the smug satisfaction of retirement.
Their reasons for spending $150 to sleep in stiff bunk beds and wake at 7 a.m. were just as varied. They either wanted to bond with their hunting husbands, or show them up. They hoped to connect with their grandsons or teach their daughters.
They just inherited land and wanted to feel comfortable walking through it, or they'd been walking through the same land for years and wanted something to show for it.
Some knew how to call a deer depending on what week of breeding season it was; others couldn't find their way out of a parking lot, much less a forest.
I fell into the latter category.
I'm not even much of a fisher-woman. Every time I went out with some of my male friends, I quickly would become bored and want to chat. Needless to say, I didn't stay in their canoe particularly long.
Fly-fishing, I learned during my introductory course, was my kind of day on the water. Soon after our group learned to tie the three types of line to the reel (I'm still working on the nailess-nail knot), we were casting on the dock, looking like Brad Pitt with better hair.
Once I got the feel, my body and that fly were part of one fluid motion. I didn't even care about catching anything. That kind of misses the point, I realize, but the hypnotizing "whizz plunk" rhythm kept me casting well into lunchtime.
Our instructor, Pat Clifford, told us in a rather ethereal way that fly-fishing was "like a dance" - perfect for women.
We heard that a lot during the weekend. Bow-hunting trainer Glen Askins is convinced women make better hunters because they can find details men miss, like blood trails and subtle movements. And besides, his wife, Stephanie, can urinate in the deer scrapes and attract the bucks to her female hormones.
Askins, a self-proclaimed sensitive-new-age-hunter-guy, confessed to years of stubborn arguments while he taught his wife how to hunt. He even left her dangling from a tree stand once so she could learn how to get down.
After 12 years of entering the forest an hour before dawn and climbing 30 feet into a tree, Stephanie Askins admitted to still being afraid of the dark, and of heights. But she can hunt on her own now, and loves it. She's shot five bucks with her bow in the past few years, sneaking to within 30 feet of all of them.
There was some support and encouragement from other women, but for the most part, we were on our own to challenge ourselves.
On the first day, for example, I faced Giants Ladder, which led to a ropes course 30 feet in the air, complete with shaky cables that could churn any stomach.
As I stepped out onto the first cable - no bigger, it seemed, than that fly line - I thought I saw rain clouds obscuring the dots of color below me. I'm sure I saw an airline stewardess wave as the 757 flew by my head.
I was attached to a safety line, and wore a harness tighter, I'm guessing, than any chastity belt could have been. That's no consolation when you're shuffling across two cables on your hands and legs, on a section of the course affectionately called the Kitten Crawl.
The mothers in the group compared the sadistic pain inflicted on our bodies from that crawl to child birth. Worse than childbirth, actually.
But then it got easier. The "Balance Walk" across a log was more like a cakewalk compared with the others. Finally, I made it to the "Zip-line," which stretched 100 yards over a gully and to a low ladder at the other end.
I felt like an army commando as I stepped off the abyss and whooped and roared and kicked my way back down to earth. And, OK, I might have kissed the ground when I finished.
From the zip line to the shooting range, I heard the word "empowered" again and again. By Sunday, I think I even saw a few women spitting.
Another weekend is planned for next spring.
Look out Bambi, the women are coming.
For more information on "Becoming an Outdoors Woman" workshops, contact Libby Norris at 804-367-8867
LENGTH: Long : 113 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: NHAT MEYER/Staff. 1. After finishing the rope course,by CNBLinda Webb (left) of Boston gives some tips to Wendy Kooks of Burke,
who is about to start. 2. Gretchen Boeren, a Northside High
School teacher from Roanoke, slides through the rope course while
Carol Heiser of Louisa waits to try the Kitten Crawl. color.