Stuck Up

By far, the greatest outdoor invention of our time is the jeep. Well, maybe not the greatest outdoor invention of our time. That would probably be the space blanket. Those things have saved no telling how many hunters and fishers and campers from freezing to death. And from being inconveniently uncomfortable.

Maybe, the greatest outdoor invention of our time is the Ziplock bag. You can use those for keeping countless small items dry, such as your hunting license, or your ammo, or your matches, or your cell phone, or your Charmin 2-ply, which is what I use them for most often. Ziplock bags are great. No one likes wet toilet paper.

Or maybe, the greatest invention of our time is the LED flashlight, or the Bumper Dumper, or the lithium battery, or Velcro, which is trademarked, so it’s supposed to have that little R in a circle, which I would insert if I could, but I’m not what you’d call computer literate, so I can’t figure it out.

But the jeep is definitely in the top ten greatest outdoor inventions of our time. Maybe the top five. After World War II, when surplus military jeeps started hitting the civilian market, new vistas opened up on the American landscape that were previously only available to people who were willing to hike many miles from the nearest road. Jeeps could go much farther off the beaten path than anything that had come before, beating new paths, allowing outdoors persons to literally go where no one had gone before—which is why you should always take Charmin 2-ply with you.

Whereas, previously, the ambitious hunter trying to go farther afield would drive off the traveled road and get stuck almost immediately, the advent of the jeep allowed that person to go many miles from the beaten path before he got stuck. Four-wheel-drive is a lot like nuclear armament – it’s nice to have, but you really shouldn’t use it until you have no other choice.

The only problem with the jeep is that it has barely enough cargo space to haul a regulation-sized box of Chiclets. The jeep opened up new and previously unheard-of areas of outdoorsmanism, but it required several trips. The average hunter, wishing to spend a week at a remote hunting camp, could easily get there in his jeep, but then he would have to drop off his tent and go back for his rifle, and then go back for his ice chest, and then go back for his knife, etc. By the time he got his camp set up, the average week was pretty much shot.

There are, of course, options that allow the jeep owner to carry more stuff, and I don’t just mean trading the jeep for a pickup, although that works if you want to take the wimpy way out. You can’t stretch a jeep, but if you’re creative you can come up with ways to attach things to it. Although duct tape works pretty well, there are other options.

Personally, I’ve owned a jeep since 2001, and that’s not counting the Cherokee or the postal jeep I had before getting a Wrangler. Those both said ‘Jeep’ on the side, but I never thought of them as real jeeps. The Cherokee was really a 4WD station wagon, and the mail jeep was pretty much worn out by the time I got it. It had a 4-cylinder engine and an automatic transmission, and the days of the annual Sears catalog seemed to have taken their toll on it. I could never spit out the window without getting stuck.

When I finally got a real jeep, a 1997 Wrangler, I had Rock Dicke build me some bumpers for it that had three receivers each, so I could build all kinds of racks and attach them every which way, to carry stuff. Hauling a deer on a rear rack gets it all dirty, so I usually carry dead deer home on the front rack, which keeps them nice and clean.

Bobby Wuest must have had the same idea. Bobby was spotted recently hauling a deer on I-10 near Seguin with his Jeep, but he wasn’t using a rack, like I do. He was using a winch, and some kind of pole sticking up about six feet above his front bumper, with the deer hanging from that. And it seemed to work pretty well, although Bobby probably caused no telling how many wrecks along the 160 miles of I-10 he traveled with the deer. But then, innovation always comes with a price. And as I always say, it’s best to let someone else pay that price.

So now I’m thinking I need a winch on my Jeep. My wife thinks a winch is unnecessary. But then, my wife has never had to haul a 200-pound deer 160 miles on I-10.

Not without Charmin 2-ply, anyway . . .

Kendal Hemphill is an outdoor humor columnist and public speaker who always tries to get stuck as close to the road as possible. Write to him at [email protected]