If Size Matters, Use A Dollar Bill

 

Hunters and fishermen are at least as interesting as the things for which they hunt and fish. Here's one way: Size matters to nearly the whole lot of them, and in a myriad of ways. In that grouping, I should be considered no different than any of the rest.

Were people not interested in who caught the biggest string of fish, bass tournaments never would have been.

Want to know the best bullet size for deer hunting? Ask me 'n “Joe.” I guarantee you I'll say one thing, and Joe will say another, and on and on it goes.

For years I carried in my truck a set of postal scales I picked up at a flea market. I used them to measure the body weights of game birds, particularly quail, but also pheasants and prairie chickens. I still carry in my truck a spring scale and a steel tape to measure the weight of turkey gobblers (hens, too, in season), as well as spur lengths. I haven't held a quail in my hand to weigh (let alone eat) for years, would that I could. Show me a quail to shoot, and I will do it again.

Just so that you know, I am not involved in some kind of weirdo, secret, tournament-bird hunting society where total weights matter. I just like to know things. In the circles I travel, these sort of questions are not all that uncommon.

Were you to step out in front of me in the woods tomorrow, I might ask you to hold still so I could try out my spring scale on you. Just checkin', you know. I am always looking for new ways in which to measure the important parts of my life.

One day not so long ago, hunting turkeys with Stacy Gibson of Wister out in the wild, cross timber bojacks of Blaine County, we killed, more or less simultaneously, two monster gobblers. We both hefted the gobblers for guess-weight, and likewise guessed at the beard and spur lengths before shouldering the birds and hiking back to camp, a cold pop, and official weigh-in on Conrad's spring scales.

Incredibly, I had gotten away on the hunt without my spring scale to which was also attached my steel measuring tape. Not to worry, Stacy said. We could at least verify the beard and spur lengths of our dinosaurs.

“How?” I wanted to know.

“Like this,” Stacy said, and pulled out his wallet.

“You mean, that your wallet is to a certain degree fatter than mine?”

Stacy ignored my sarcasm and opened his wallet and took out a dollar bill.

“A dollar bill,” he said, “is exactly six-inches long,” and here he stretched his one to demonstrate. “If you fold it in half,” he continued, “that folded half is exactly three-inches long, giving you a good nine-inches of verifiable numbers. The width of a dollar bill is exactly two-and-a-half inches wide, giving you a total of twelve-and-a-half total inches of accurate “ruler”, right in your wallet. Let's measure our turkeys.”

“I don't have a dollar in my wallet,” I said.

“I bet you all the money in there, you do.”

Dollar-wise, the beards on both our gobblers came out to exactly nine-inches; the spurs, exactly one-inch. Measured again in my driveway with my found steel tape, it was exactly so. I was fascinated by the method's simplicity and ingenuity. You knew I would be, given what I have already stated at the beginning of this piece about all things verifiable.

Stacy's dollar bill trick set me off on a little run of actually, and in my mind, measuring things, common, against the known dimensions of a dollar bill. I measured all sorts of stuff that, formerly, I had only guessed at, including... well, all sorts of things outside the common realm of measuring.

The dollar bill seldom let me down, unless I ran into things metric which I have written off as things “foreign,” not meant to be understood by either Americans or those mathematically challenged.

Someday, the Chinese will own all the American dollar bills, and will reconfigure their lengths metrically. I will be hunting turkeys on the other side of the river by then. Which side, I am not sure.

Copyright © 2013 Conrad M. Vollertsen