Excursions in Minimalism
Something has happened to me. For some reason I want to know again that feeling at the crest, when everything was at risk, the exhilaration of snatching something from nothing. It’s almost as if I try to recreate what it was to be very young once more.
Of late, I’ve slipped from the house into the wilds with very underpowered armament. On this day, I carry an I-frame Smith & Wesson .22 caliber revolver from the 20’s, a practice weapon, a poor choice for feeding or defending myself, one I’d never drop under my outer clothing and carry into a town or a city.
Were a new shooter to try a box of cartridges through this little revolver, he’d quickly see his chances of feeding himself with what he could hit with it as somewhere near zero. More than once I’ve heard it explained that the handgun is a symbol of where masculinity went wrong, useless weight unless you plan to assassinate someone. I rarely bother to tell these critics that they’ve never seen what someone who has spent a lifetime devoted to learning the handgun can do.
The little revolver weighs almost nothing and disappears in the pack more easily than a hatchet or a large knife. Under ideal light, it’s capable of hitting a squirrel’s head at thirty yards, but finding ideal light comes more to a quest than a regularly reproducible set of circumstance.
