For Outdoor Writer, Evolution Is Key To Longevity

“The trail I used to follow on all my adventures is long since buried beneath cement,” says Patrick Durkin. He’s remembering childhood days when he would haul glinting fish out of area lakes and stalk wild game with a bow and arrow.

Those paths may now be entombed in lifeless pavement, but the lessons Durkin learned on his early journeys into the natural world are still very much alive. They are the reason Durkin, a celebrated outdoor writer in newspapers and magazines for decades, is now blogging prolifically and reaching new audiences through MeatEater, a wildly successful hunting and fishing network that spans from Netflix to YouTube and has transcended the genre of modern hunting and fishing stories in the modern age.

“Adapt or you are gone,” explains Durkin. “I think that’s the way the world works. That’s how evolution works. It’s one of the things hunting and fishing really drives home, is this hard truth.”

For Durkin, the wilderness has never been merely symbolic or mythical; it is a real place full of rocks and earth and blood. It is a place in which human beings are simply members of the natural world. It is the provenance of food, a point illustrated by a grandmother who knew what it took to raise a family during the Great Depression and passed on her rabbit-cooking skills to her grandson.

“When she was watching us, my grandmother would say, ‘Go down into the freezer and dig out those rabbits,'” he recalls.

“I just figure humans are not very different from the rest of the animal kingdom,” he says. “We hunt in order to live, and for that to happen animals have to die, but we do have a conscience, which means we strive for a quick and ethical kill.”

While he sometimes strikes a matter-of-fact tone in conversation, his writing often soars to the heights of poetry. Take, for instance, this opening sentence to a recent blog: “Doug Duren built a thinking man’s buckpole outside the milkhouse on his family’s farm last summer, as if to concede the end of dairy farming on the land and in his bloodline.”

When writing about hunting and fishing, Durkin often hits a stride in meter and pace that makes him sound like an affable Cormac McCarthy or a midwestern Jack London.

But before Durkin became an award-winning outdoor writer, freelance newspaper columnist and general outdoors reporter. Before he provided copy editing services for books, magazines and websites such as ArcheryTrade.org, Archery360 and Bowhunting360. Before he became editor of Deer and Deer Hunting magazine, or went ice fishing for MeatEater, he was a young man in the Navy. It was there that his affinity for the written word began to bloom.

“Back in my Navy days, I probably did more reading in those five years than in the rest of my life,” he remembers. In the military, Durkin learned lessons from both books and people.

“The Navy taught me a lot of things, and perhaps most importantly it taught me a lot of things I wasn’t good at,” he says with a laugh. “I would think I was okay at something, then I’d see someone else do it and think, ‘Oh.’”

One thing Durkin was undeniably good at was writing stories, particularly ones that stretched beyond the walls of any office. He decided to make it his craft, and his ensuing career has been a mixture of the art of writing and the blue-collar work ethic that Durkin brings to his endeavors.

“I still look at myself as a guy grabbing the lowest hanging fruit and making a living,” he says. “Cranking out stories.”

He’s always been acutely aware of the words of Samuel Johnson: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”

“I really try to appreciate the fact that I made a career out of this. I don’t consider myself a hack, and I do consider myself a hard worker,” he says. “When I turn something in, I really want to know it’s my best effort.”

So how has someone whose profession is so inexorably linked to the past made a life as an outdoor writer in the year 2020? How has this longtime newspaper columnist become a popular mainstay on the MeatEater blog run by many people half his age?

“I think it’s driven by survival instinct,” he says. “If you have a gun to your head and you don’t adapt, you die. I’ve never had any problem with that. I think that’s the way it works, and that’s something hunters know.”

“It’s still your thoughts [when you write],” he continues. “It has nothing to do with the physical device you use.”

“[But] since I started working for MeatEater I really realized how much the world has changed beneath my feet,” he adds.

As a Wildlife-Research Contributing Writer for MeatEater, he draws on his extensive contacts at universities and wildlife agencies nationwide to report on biological and sociological research into hunting, hunters and wildlife. Through one-on-one interviews and by scouring scientific literature, he provides the latest insights into wildlife behavior and biology.

While the way people read Durkin’s work has changed, the nature of his stories has not. He is still focused on forging connections with his readers. He says it goes back to something Teddy Roosevelt learned by telling his tales to audiences whose faces were hidden behind the flames of a flickering campfire. It has something to do with spinning a yarn for people you cannot see.

“There is one thing I’ve always tried to keep in mind over the years, and that’s the idea that if you want to reach people, you have to connect with them,” he says. “The greatest compliment I ever got, and I did get it, was when people who didn’t hunt or fish would tell me they read my column.”

For many people, the face of MeatEater is Steve Rinella, an outdoor writer whose celebrity reaches beyond the world of hunting and fishing. On his programs and podcasts, and in his books, Rinella talks about the role humans play in the natural world. He isn’t just writing about nature; he’s writing about human nature, as well.

“Rinella is just great,” Durkin says. “People dig it. They see this guy who is very smart and can sort of talk about the philosophy of it all.”

In many ways, Rinella embodies something Durkin has long believed: “My real interest in the outdoors is actually in people,” he explains.

While many people are still passionate about hunting, the number of people harvesting food from the wilderness has plummeted in recent years. About 10 to 11 percent of hunting licenses currently go to female outdoor enthusiasts, and those numbers are holding fast. But Durkin says he’s aware those populations have “not individually, but as a group, more challenges to stay involved.”

“They tend not to have that support network,” he says.

“I raised three daughters. And they are each different,” he says. “With my eldest daughter, Leah, it didn’t matter if it was three o’clock in the morning – she’d always go fishing with me.”

At Leah’s wedding, the proud father jokingly informed her groom: “Leah seldom shoots more than once, because she seldom misses.”

But fewer and fewer people are hunting. More and more, meals come through other means, and people think of the natural world as a destination to visit and take photos of, or the setting for exquisitely filmed BBC nature documentaries. So, what if everyone did stop hunting? What if, for the first time in a human story stretching back 200,000 years, people did not go out and harvest living prey to feed their families? What if nearly all that funding for conversation dried up? What if, with no predators, deer populations swelled, and diseases and starvation decimated entire species?

It’s something Durkin and others worry about, because hunters, more than any other group, subsidize and support wildlife conservation efforts.

“It would be huge,” he laments. “The ripple effect would be huge.”

“Society has changed. We don’t grow up hunting and fishing anymore,” he continues. “Other things occupy our time.” Many of those old trails are long since buried beneath cement.

But people like Durkin and Rinella, and people like the brides who only shoot once, and many others, are bucking the trend and staying connected to the outdoors with their lives and their stories, and with the connections they forge. Durkin plans to keep at it for the foreseeable future, and he has an aptly evolutionary view on how long he’ll keep at it.

“I have no retirement plan,” he says. “I’ll keep going until I can’t get it done anymore.”

Visit  www.patrickdurkinoutdoors.com to read more.

Related stories: http://mounthorebmail.com/perspectives/hunt