Books which make me laugh — again

Books which make me laugh — again

What do you do when the thermometer reads 25 below and the TV weatherman bellows in your ear that the “feel like” temperature outside is more like 50 below?

My first thought would be to grab a good book, one like “They Shoot Canoes, Don’t They?” a compilation of 100 percent true stories — if you believe that — by Patrick McManus.

Not only was that my first thought when my thermometer read 24 below when I looked at it early one morning last week, but I followed through and began reading, probably for about the 421st time, one of my favorite volumes of short stories.

In case you are not acquainted with the late Patrick McManus, I will tell you he was a college professor while at the same time he wrote monthly humor columns for many years, both for Outdoor Life and Field and Stream magazines.

His characters were a comical version of himself, of course, along with such colorful characters as Retch Sweeney, Rancid Crabtree, Crazy Eddie Muldoon, Strange (the family dog), The Troll (his sister), Game Warden Sneed, his wife, Bun, and his neighbor, Al Finley.

The titles of his stories were, let’s say, as crazy as the characters in them. One of my all-time favorites has been “The Crouch Hop and Other Useful Outdoor Steps,” a method of ambulatory methods brought on by sudden bouts of pain, the result of “mishaps” that often befall hunters, fishermen, and other users of the great outdoors.

“Skunk Dog,” “The Sensuous Angler,” “The Deer on a Bicycle,” “Search and — Uh — Rescue,” “Whatchagot Stew,” and “Phantom of the Woods” are other McManus stories I pretty much know by memory word for word.

Over the years, I have accumulated the ownership of some half-dozen McManus books, including “A Fine and Pleasant Misery,” “The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw,” and “Never Sniff a Gift Fish.”

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, I loaned out a few of them, which somehow never got returned. Not to say I never tried to get them back, but the scofflaws who borrowed them kept forgetting to bring them back. I finally forgot who borrowed them.

That said, I am not totally bereft of McManus books and stories. In the past couple of days before I began putting this column together, I horse-laughed my way through both “They Shoot Canoes, Don’t They?” and “Real Ponies Don’t Go Oink.”

Though I can’t always remember which volumes I have lost, I can at least, in my mind, practically read them completely anyway.

Usually, I have to give up reading McManus' stories for a period of days simply because my stomach muscles begin to severely cramp up and otherwise hurt in an intensive manner from continuous belly laughs.

That said, I found the perfect outlet with which to continue my outdoor reading pleasure.

As some of you who know me well or have read my scrawling for the past 30 years know, my co-favorite outdoor humor writer, Robert Traver, is always at my beck and call, just awaiting the moment when once again my shaking hands will pull “Trout Magic” or “Trout Madness” off my bookshelf.

Traver, as some of you may know, was once a Michigan Supreme Court judge, a lifelong resident of Upper Michigan, and a purist fly fisherman on U.P. trout streams from the Keweenaw Peninsula to Paradise, Mich.

I first read his volume of “Trout Madness” in 1960 when it was published. A small sports shop in Sayner had copies of it, and I did not hesitate to plop a dollar or maybe two on the counter to claim the book as my own.

Its pages are well-worn from literally scores of times having been turned as I read the wonderful stories it contained.

One of my most treasured moments in life occurred when John Voelker — he used the pen name of Robert Traver — came to Manitowish Waters for his daughter’s wedding, at which time the pastor got him aside so he could autograph my copy of the book. It is still the only autograph of any kind I’ve ever sought, and I count it as one of my most treasured possessions.

“Trout Magic” is a compilation of stories about fly fishing at Frenchman’s Pond and the author’s other favorite trout waters of the U.P.

The third book of U.P. trout fishing lore I have read, re-read, and re-read some more is a comedy-filled tome, “Danny and the Boys: Being Some Legends of Hungry Hollow,” about the fictional Danny and his crew of woebegotten, usually drunken and disorderly, flat-broke, and always happy denizens of a log shack on the Caney Fork River. It too comes from the pen of Robert Traver.

Well, anyway, until the thermometer reads about 30 degrees higher than it is right now, I think I shall continue to peruse these favorite books of mine once again.