This article was first published in Issue 4, 2026 of Western Hunter magazine.
It’s an unfortunate fact of life that the older we get, the fewer friends we make, so when my dad had the opportunity to befriend what had previously been just a casual, coffee shop acquaintance, a guy named Rick, he took it. And when Rick mentioned one Saturday morning over his biscuits and gravy that he could use some help getting to and from a doctors’ appointment later that week, dad offered to drive him, refusing Rick’s every offer of compensation. And thus, a friendship was born.
Rick had worked his fingers to the bone as an outfitter in the Colorado Rockies, guiding his clients to bugling bulls and branch-antlered bucks, until he packed out of those mountains for the last time and retired to the gentler slopes of southcentral Oklahoma where he met my dad. The code that Rick lived by, the Code of the West, didn’t allow for charity cases, and since dad refused to take his money, Rick resorted to giving him gifts.
There’s a reloading press in my shop that came from Rick, along with a handful of dies and assorted brass. It’s in my shop because dad already had a reloading press of his own. That press sits next to a century old, cast iron dutch oven, itself a gift from Rick. He gave it to dad after a long drive to see a doctor in the city, but because my dad has always preferred to let my mom do the cooking, it wasn’t long before the dutch oven found its way to my house. I’d never cooked much with cast iron, myself. After eating a peach cobbler one weekend that a friend made in his own dutch oven, though, I was determined to figure it out.
Turns out that YouTube can teach a man just about any lesson he needs to learn. Anything from making a peach cobbler in a dutch oven to swapping out the transmission on a square body Suburban. It only took me watching a couple of tutorials before I understood how important it is to care for cast iron. My dutch oven was going to have to be kept clean, obviously, but it was also going to have to be seasoned.
Seasoning cast iron means applying oil and heat in equal and copious amounts. Doing so not only creates a smooth cooking surface, it also staves off rust. As an added bonus, seasoning cast iron also bakes on layers of oil and fat that enhance a dish’s seasoning. Your dutch oven doesn’t know the difference between seasoning and cooking, though, so anytime you fry a slab of bacon or put a crust on a peach cobbler, you’re effectively pre-seasoning your next meal because every cook in a cast iron dutch oven adds flavor to the next, developing a taste that’s distinctive to your dish. That means that, theoretically speaking, the ribeye you finally perfected this year at deer camp could never have been possible had you not burned all the steaks before it.
I’ve got hot coals on the cast iron tonight and I’m wondering whether or not life, and especially a life spent in the woods and on the water, works the same way. Do our failures in the outdoors actually season our future successes? Would the hunters in Rick’s camp have had stories to tell whether they filled their tags or not? As they came down off the mountain and hit the road for home, the freezers in their truck beds every bit as empty as the day they’d departed, would they have been able to content themselves with the memory of how brightly the stars had burned or how the herd bull’s bugle had echoed across the canyon? And would a few years’ worth of those stockpiled memories and unpunched tags have made the eventual taking of a buck or a bull that much sweeter?
If that’s the case, and I’m coming to believe that it is, then maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to scrub our own lives clean of failure. It’s human nature, I know, to want to sanitize our existence, to regularly wipe our slates clean, but when we do, when we scrub away the failures of our lives, we can’t help but scrub away, too, some of the successes that those very failures helped to create. And in so doing, we wind up cheating ourselves out of those baked in experiences that season our lives.
Search all you want, not even YouTube can teach a man a lesson like that.
Wright Outdoors 