“When they called me for this shoot, I thought there must be some kind of mistake,” Ed Freeman, the fine art photographer who created the cover image, later told me. “I hadn’t paid attention to Playboy for many years, since I was a kid. And I thought: ‘Wait, they’re hiring me to shoot the cover? Do they know I’m gay?’”
This is a newer, woke-er, more inclusive Playboy — if you believe what company executives tell you, and if you are inclined to give an aging brand yet another chance at reinvention.
When I visit my mother in California, we’ll sometimes go to the grocery store together. She’ll ask the cashier for five SuperLotto Quick Picks, and she’ll take them with her long fingernails. She estimates she’s spent $3,000 on lottery tickets in her lifetime. “You can’t win if you don’t play,” she says. But it seems, I tell her, that you can’t win if you do play. The lottery did not ever and will not ever provide her with a ranch, or solar panels, or vacations. It will not afford her a better life. This beacon of false hope can be seen at the top of every California lottery ticket, a sun shining above the chosen numbers. It is golden, radiant, looming. And it is blinding.
This is how we are: gluttonous, ravenous, lazy and short-sighted. To act any differently, the intellect must use complex arguments from philosophy and science to suppress millennia of adaptation. It’s tough. Famine sticks in our cellular memory; the fat and protein in meat provide some of the best actual insurances against it, so biology cries Eat it! Culture adds that meat must not only be easy to find, but easy to acquire. Thus the land of plenty is also the land of the lazy. And the lazy have the additional luxury of denying the uneasy truth behind their easy meals.
The seven stories in “Hunter’s Moon” act as an unflinching reality check on the state of middle-age manhood at the close of the second decade of the 21st century. The Cialis tubs and wealth management ads that pepper every golf tournament telecast portray the American man’s empty nest phase as a silver-tipped victory lap. On the ground, though, the truth is ugly. The suicide rate among American men aged 45 to 64 rose 45 percent between 1999 and 2017. The states with the toughest solitary-cowboy reputations — Montana, Alaska and Wyoming — charted highest on the self-erasure scale.
That is Caputo country. The writer who established himself more than 40 years ago with “A Rumor of War,” the classic memoir of his years as a Marine in Vietnam, now writes from the vantage point of an elder. Phil C., the author’s fictionalized self in the story “Lines of Departure,” notes that he and a fellow Vietnam veteran feel “obliged to dispense our hard-won wisdom to younger members of the soldier’s tribe. That I didn’t have much wisdom to dispense seemed beside the point.”
On his first trip to Kamchatka, in the Russian Far East, the American conservationist Guido Rahr rafted down the Bolshaya River, the first of many adventures in what would become a lifelong obsession with exploring and protecting the region’s innumerable untamed rivers and their incomparable salmon habitat. Born and raised in Oregon, Rahr spent his boyhood summers chasing salmon migrating up the Deschutes River to the sandy beds where they were born. By adulthood he had become one of the world’s most accomplished fly fishermen, but his beloved salmon — beset by logging, dams and fish hatcheries — were in trouble.
As he is about to embark on his dayslong fishing trip down the desolate, heavily forested Bolshaya, Rahr gets his first good look at the rafts his Russian guide, Misha, has procured — cheaply made, with dinky plastic paddles, bad oarlocks and no life jackets. “We should be more concerned about bears,” Misha says. Was there bear spray in that case, or a gun? There was not. “Maybe there won’t be so many bears,” Misha shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ve never floated this river.” Not the sort of thing you want to hear from a river guide, but Rahr learns to appreciate the Russian way of embracing fate, if not their way of catching salmon.