Right now, somewhere in New York City, some corner of Texas, the mountains of North Carolina, or in a house in Portland, Oregon, the story of contemporary America is being written about, filmed, or painted. The art of today will be the historical documents of tomorrow, telling future generations what the here and now was like.

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Last week would’ve been the 184th birthday of Levi Strauss, who in 1853, along with his partner Jacob Davis, founded Levi Strauss & Co. Like Coca-Cola and Ford automobiles, there is something so undeniably American about a pair of Levi’s jeans, and that has a good deal to do with the fact that the company has spent the better part of the last 60 years branding itself as the quintessential American brand in a masterful way: from the company’s use of old American rock and soul music in their commercials, to Walt Whitman’s poetry in the “Go Forth” campaign that was “.” From the rugged West and the industrial Rust Belt, to James Dean and Marlon Brando, denim marries America’s rugged spirit with its rebellious one, and the company that Strauss and Davis founded started it all.

Chicago is undoubtedly a beer town, and has been since the city’s incorporation in 1833. From the Old Style signs at every bar to the Schlitz globe on top of the Shubas Tavern, its iconography is ubiquitous. You go to Chicago and you drink beer the same way you drink bourbon in Louisville, wine in France, or vodka in Moscow. Sure, you can deviate a little and sample from the impressive whiskey collection at the Logan Square inn/restaurantĚý, and you should by all means drink a martini if you’re going to eat a steak in the city known for its meat, but please realize that first and foremost, Chicago is a beer drinking city.

But the city’s beer culture has changed, especially in the last decade since the second Mayor Daley (current-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s predecessor) decreased the number of taverns in the city and, in a 20-year period, successfully saw the amount of liquor lisenses drop from about 3,300 in 1990 to 1,200 as of 2009. As noted by Whet Moser for Chicago magazine, led to “more drinking at home, more drinking at restaurants, less drinking altogether, two abstemious mayors, and the changing demographics from tavern drinkers to pub drinkers, and the city’s down to about 10 percent of its old number of taverns.”

Even though there are fewer places to drink it, beer in Chicago is not on the decline. A new crop of craft breweries popping up in the city has made Chicago one of the places that every beer lover must visit, alongside cities like Portland and San Francisco. While breweries likeĚýĚýandĚýĚýhave been wooing fans across the country with their ales and stouts, one man, Michael Kiser, has been elevating beer to an art form in a totally different way.

“The day I visited Best Place, a pub inside the Pabst brewery in Milwaukee,” Kiser says, “was the day I realized ‘people need to see this.’” Soon after, he created , a site that combines Kiser’s photographs and musings about the beer he drinks, the places he drinks the beers at, and the people he drinks them with. If you appreciate good beer or good photography, Kiser wants you on clicking over to his site.

ON MY FIRST VISIT to Good Beer Hunting, I thought I had stumbled upon some really clever, beautifully shot, totally improvised catalog shoot for some high-end menswear company, or some other clever marketing stunt aimed at getting people to buy something—I just wasn’t sure what. But when I started digging around, I realized it was actually just one guy taking these beautiful photos, and not the work of some branding guru trying to entice men of the 25-40 demographic with a taste for vintage workwear and brews. Kiser sees every photo he posts on his site as one connected story where the players and pieces might not all match, but it’s all part of something bigger: “The aesthetics of any movement, whether it’s jazz, pop art, or craft beer, are what define its legacy and I felt like I had accidentally found myself in on the ground floor of that story.”

ItĚýisn’t hard to grasp what exactly those aesthetics are. The food Kiser shoots alongside the beer always looks delicious. When he takes pictures inside a brewery, he makes sure the beer-making machines are given the same treatment as the brew masters. And, most importantly, the people drinking the beer always look like they’re really enjoying life. Kiser says his photography is “less about getting the perfect lens and lighting, and more about anticipation, human empathy, and intuiting the moment.”

Last year, Kiser found himself at an odd point with Good Beer Hunting.Ěý“I had been asking myself a difficult question for almost a year,” he says. “If Good Beer Hunting were to do something in the physical world, what would that be?”

The answer: summer camp for adult males.

KISER AND HIS FRIEND Max Wastler ofĚýBuckshot Sonny’sĚýSporting Goods invited about 25 of their guy friends to a spot in southern Wisconsin called “Camp Wandawega.”

They swung from swings, hung by a roaring fire, sat on docks, and, of course, drank a lot of beer. Local breweries made Kiser and co. special brews for their retreat, and local chef Pete Repak cooked up a feast of smoked quail, pork cheek, short ribs, green beans, horseradish potatoes, campfire beans, cornbread, and chocolate pecan pie. “It was unstoppable,” Kiser says. He has received requests from fans to do a similar event for the public, but he’d rather keep this concept dedicated to his close group of friends and the spontaneity of it all, and explore other concepts for his fans.Ěý

When you start looking at Kiser’s site (and once you start, it’s difficult to stop), it becomes apparent that while the photographer lives in one of the leading craft beer scenes in America, he wants his work to be part of a larger city-making story about Chicago. “We did it with the railroad, slaughter and meat packing, and we did it with air travel,” Kiser says.Ěý“Now we’re doing it with the transportation and consumption of craft beer.”

Jason Diamond lives in New York. He has a wife, a dog, two cats, and a Twitter account that can be found atĚý.

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Billy Childish’sĚýstyle and collected works have long meant a great deal to me. Childish gives the world art in every medium—music, painting, and writing—all in great quantities. Childish named one of his bands Thee Headcoats, titled one of his albums InĚýTweed We Trust, and has often been photographed in tweed sport coats. My personal style influenced a great deal by musicians, this, of course, made me want to buy a tweed jacket, and then another, and then another. Because, as I’ve learned, tweed is not only a wonderful fabric for the colder seasons, it’s just so fun to wear.

Tweed probably isn’t thought of as the most rock-and-roll option for a wardrobe; just trying to imagine Robert Plant swaggering around the stage in a tweed jacketĚýsoundsĚýuncomfortable. While Fender, the most well-known amplifier manufacturer, had an amp that was generically referred to as the Fender tweed, it was actually varnished cotton twill, not tweed.

Although maybe not the best choice for aspiring rock stars, people tend to fall in love with tweed early. “Tweed works because it makes you look professional but not stuffy,” says Daniel Ralston, co-host and producer ofĚý. Nine years after purchasing his brown Brooks Brothers sport coat, Ralston still loves to wear it with slim cut almost-khaki color jeans and dark brown Chelsea boots, saying, “It looks great with almost any color button-up.” Ralston bought his tweed coat a few years before the fabric’s recent resurgence.

Yes, tweed is having a moment. Harris Tweed, a type of tweed hand-woven on the Western Isles of Scotland, is now showing up on everything from IPad cases to a line ofĚý. You can buy , or maybe you’re obsessed with dressing like a Downton Abbey character, but as : “Once associated with only out-of-touch country-dwellers and aristocratic fox-hunters, tweed has made an about-turn and become the domain of the A-lister. All the cool kids are wearing it now.”

While some fashion blogs might be falling all over themselves for woolly shoes and wallets, as tends to be the case with any semi-popular thing, there is a symmetrical backlash. Derek Guy, blogger for menswear sites likeĚý and his own siteĚý, tweeted: “.” Guy, who extols the virtues of well-made classic menswear better than most, doesn’t have anything against Harris Tweed; he’d just rather the fabric be used for what it is known best. While I can’t say I totally disagree (A goddamn tweed snapback? Please go away), there is another way to look at it.

TWEED IS HAVING A moment, sure, but in a lot of ways it’s always been having one—especially in Great Britain. Harris Tweed, specifically, is so sought-after because, since before the days of the Industrial Revolution, it has been woven by hand. To be authentic Harris Tweed, the fabric must be woven on handlooms by the crafters in their cottages on the Western Isles of Scotland. The Harris Tweed Authority monitors the fabric and checks the quality.ĚýWhen and if they deem it to be satisfactory, the fabric gets “stamped” with the Harris Tweed Orb, it’s ticket out of the mill—all according to the .

In current culture where authenticity is in vogue, Harris Tweed is, quite legally, as real as it gets. Terese Wilson ofĚý, a company whose tweed comes from the Stornoway Mill,Ěýthe oldest producer of Harris Tweed in Scotland’s Outer HebridesĚýsince 1906, tells me that this latest round of tweed infatuation has “indeed helped our cause,” while she is still “optimistic” that the business will continue to thrive no matter what may come.

Wilson has good reason to look on the bright side. While Harris Tweed itself might be part of our larger cultural fascination with authenticity, the fabric never really goes out of style. From Modernists to Mods, to businessmen and bankers, tweed has always been around. James Joyce had some small success in the early 1900s as a tweed salesman, importing the fabric from his native Ireland to Germany. To what degree theĚýUlyssesĚýauthor had success , but Joyce is just another link in a long line of European writers and intellectuals who helped create the impression that tweed is something that smart people wear. Images of fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes and Jim Dixon of the Kingsley Amis novelĚýLucky JimĚýand photos of authors like Mary McCarthy and Vladimir Nabokov come to mind as proof that tweed has long been the official fabric of literature.

And while men and women of letters have made up a good portion of the tweed business for in the years following the Second World War, , and a few years later the Mod subculture of the 1960s (think The Who’s Quadrophenia) helped to make the Houndstooth pattern, commonly created with tweed, popular again. It isn’t always the fabric that changes; what evolves is the way people wear it. Yet in the case of tweed, you really can’t go wrong with keeping it classic. Rockers like Billy Childish and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker have shown that over the years with their penchant for the fabric, and so have the dandies who mount vintage bicycles for the annual .

Guy’s traditional-tweed views aren’t without merit, though. Tweed, especially the Harris sort, is “hot” right now, and while that’s something to be celebrated, it is a bit disconcerting to see it used on a pair of sneakers.ĚýThe very mention of the fabric conjures up visions of weekend walks through the woods in November, or a winter evening sitting around a fireplace drinking scotch. But forcing tweed into contemporary style seems like a bit much. Tweed feels like it should have its own time and place (the colder months of the year), but really, tweed—Harris or other—should have its moment in the wider-culture’s sun since it’s such a marvelous and durable fabric that has such a great cultural history. My only hope is that we can give it the respect it deserves.

Jason Diamond lives in New York. He has a wife, a dog, two cats, and a Twitter account that can be found atĚý.

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“It’s like a family tradition,” Adam Clarkson of Minneapolis, Minnesota, tells me. “My dad went on his trip when he was 18. He got drunk, wandered around, and met my mom. She was camping with her family, he bumped into her, and they just hit it off.” When I ask him if the family tradition he was referring to was to go camping, get drunk off cheap beer, and meet a life mate, Clarkson laughs. “No, but my dad, my two older brothers, and me all drove the same kind of car on our trips: Volvo station wagons.”

Clarkson’s dad, then a freshman at New York University, was visiting his parents in Wisconsin for the summer. Finding his old car bequeathed to his younger brother, and in need of something to drive down to Illinois to go camping with his buddies in those pre-Zipcar days, Clarkson’s father had no choice but to take his father’s ugly new Volvo. While ugly it may have been, it still took a lot of begging to get the old man to let go of the keys. “I think it was orange. My dad always omits the color. It was something embarrassing and very 1970s.”

“[Dad] still says the car is why he met my mom. He thinks Volvo station wagons are lucky. So every time senior year came around for my brothers or me he would just start asking, over and over”—here, Clarkson starts to imitate his father’s Wisconsin accent—“‘When are you gonna take the Volvo to the lake?’ Like, he purposely kept buying Volvo station wagons with the expressed intent to have each of his sons use them on camping trips.” Clarkson pauses for a moment, then laughs. “It’s really hilarious, when you think about it. But those were really amazing cars.”

STATION WAGONS HAVE BEEN around in some form or another for nearly a century. Prior to becoming a mode of transport for families in the middle of the 20th century, they were initially used for commercial reasons. It wasn’t until 1923 that Durant Motors (a competitor of Ford’s) offered the first fully factory-built station wagon. The wagon’s ability to transport extra passengers as well as extra cargo took off, and by 1941, the classic Chrysler Town and Country model was the most expensive automobile offered by the company. In no time, “Woodies” (named for the extensive wood paneling used for the wagons) were everywhere; parked in front of suburban homes, and traveling up and down the freeway.

But by the 1970s, the wagon was the four-wheeled symbol of so much of what was ailing America. The gas crisis of 1973 gave people a reason to think twice about a car that cost double—and sometimes triple—the price of other sedans. Wagons also, simply put, weren’t cool. They were symbols of a pre-Woodstock America; conservative gas guzzlers that looked boxy, and were often painted in ugly hues of green and (like Clarkson’s grandparents’ Volvo) orange. At some point this century, nearly every major car manufacturer stopped making new station wagons. Minivans and SUVs became the norm.

Today, station wagons represent—as a kind of relic—a different time and just a generally different America. Their decline is described by CNN’s Alex Taylor III as “a classic case of automotive Darwinism.” If you grew up when Carter or Reagan were president, your parents probably drove a wagon. If you’re a Clinton kid, you were more likely to get around in a minivan. The George Bush Sr. administration was that awkward transition stage when you might have had either one. I was definitely a station wagon kid, and growing up, you had one of two: the geeky, wood-grain-panel ones that you’d expect to see Clark Griswold behind the wheel of or a Volvo.

In 2011, Volvo, realizing sales of new wagons had totally dried up, discontinued production of its last wagon model, the V50. The outcry was fierce among enthusiasts, : “What the hell is wrong with people? It is currently impossible to buy a Volvo station wagon, an old stand-by for anyone who needs a car than can do anything, go anywhere, and survive anyone.” One message board I looked at had an entire post with several hundred replies bemoaning the death of old reliable; until one commenter simply asked, “If they were such great cars, why aren’t they being made anymore?” The next reply, the final one in the thread, was short and to the point: “They just aren’t practical cars anymore.”

During their time, though, they were. The reasons were simple: station wagons were big enough for extra passengers and their extra luggage, but most of all they were safe—the ideal sort of car that any parent would want kids strapped into. And that’s probably something that also would speed the wagon’s decline: they were cars for parents. No kids turned 16 and decided they wanted their first automobile to be a Buick Roadmaster wagon. And while good gas mileage and easy repairs surely matter to today’s consumers—and you won’t get either one with a wagon—that hardly stops people from being nostalgic about them.

“I DIDN’T MIND INHERITING the Volvo,” Clarkson says. He recalls pulling up to his high school parking lot and seeing about a dozen station wagons that were borrowed or passed down from the parents of other students. “Volvo station wagons were actually pretty cool looking cars for the most part. My friends never made fun of me for driving it. I think it’s because it’s European.”

“Everybody had a Volvo station wagon.” Mairead Case, a Seattle-born-and bred writer and editor living in Chicago, tells me via email. ĚýMore than anything, Case’s father who “grew up in Nebraska, driving long flat open roads in blizzards,” wanted a feeling of safety from the car that took his family to Canada in search of skiing. “Even after one decade and two active kids,” Case says of her dad’s meticulous care, “the car smelled like new. He certainly never picked up fast food in it, and if he bought a cookie at the coffee shop or anything he’d put it immediately in a Ziploc bag, then eat it on a plate once we got home.”

“My mom used to refer to it as ‘Black Beauty’ after the horse,” Mark Waclawiak of Austin, Texas, tells me about his mother’s black S70. “She loved that car so much.” His mother loved it so much that Volvos became the family’s car of choice. His sister, Karolina, recalls driving in the wagons for family camping trips in Maine, and driving from their home in Connecticut to Texas every summer. She says the trips were “hell,” probably due in part to “those half leather seats that stick to your body in the heat” that Mark mentions. There was just something about Volvo station wagons from the late 1970s to the early 1990s; they were cars that were very of their time.

It’s problematic to affix the label of “generation-defining” to something like a car, but from Case’s Seattle to the coasts of New England, there was a 20-year period where not seeing a Volvo wagon with bikes strapped to the top, or a family driving to who knew where, was a rarity. I still see older model Volvo station wagons driving around my own neighborhood in Brooklyn—bringing home groceries, taking children to and from school, or just aimlessly joyriding throughout Kings County. Some enterprising journalist could write some think/trend piece about the Station Wagons of Brooklyn, say it’s some sort of urban ironic statement or some attempt at holding on to a swiftly disappearing artifact of true Americana. But when I see some guy loading two kayaks up in the top of the roof of his own mid-1980s model Volvo station wagon, or I see long slats of wood sticking out the back of another wagon on the way to restore a brownstone somewhere, I realize something else: Volvo station wagons were just some damn fine automobiles.

Jason Diamond lives in New York. He has a wife, a dog, two cats, and a Twitter account that can be found atĚý.

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If there is a hall of fame for well-dressed men, Rock Hudson is certainly in it. Thanks to his Eisenhower-era New England poster-boy look full of plaid shirts, his leather work boots (that would fetch a small fortune on eBay today), and his arsenal of Thoreau quotes, the 1955 film is proof enough for a unanimous vote by the committee. You might even mistake the film—Hudson as the quiet woodsman Ron Kirby, trying to win the heart of Jane Wyman’s Cary Scott—as one long-but-brilliant L.L. Bean commercial.

Another of Hudson’s films, the 1964 Howard Hawks-directed comedy , gave Abercrombie & Fitch some real, considerable publicity as Hudson played a fishing-expert working for the company. Whether that publicity was paid for isn’t known and is beside the point; the A&F of Man’s Favorite Sport? resembles today’s A&F about as much as a loaf of bread resembles an ice cream cake. In Man’s Favorite Sport?, A&F is—just like it was for nearly a century after its founding in 1892—a sportsperson’s paradise.

For as stylish as he was—he could make a potato sack look good—Rock Hudson was trying to push a boulder up a mountain in trying to make fishing look fashionable. Which is fine, because that’s never been what fishing’s about. Sure, there are Greek fisherman caps and the Gorton’s Fisherman rocking that yellow rain slicker like a badass, but the whole point of fishing is often to escape the daily grind, to throw on a ratty old T-shirt and sit on a boat or at the edge of a lake for hours, just tossing your line out in hopes of catching something. Yet, while you don’t fish to impress anybody with your style, there is something undeniably classic and stylish in a scenic sense about a black-and-white picture of your grandfather fly-fishing on a clear lake with mountains spread across the horizon or the downright Rockwellian image of a father teaching one of his kids how to cast a line just like his own father did so many years before.

There’s something generally stylish—not in what you wear, but in what you’re doing, in the idea of it all—about fishing, then. So it makes some sense that the thing you use to fish—the lure—is the most stylish thing about it. From the unique design to the evident craftsmanship, there’s something undeniably eye-catching about a vintage lure. The only problem: they’re always under water. Douglas Smith, though, is trying to change that.

WHEN YOU THINK OF American dreamers and innovators, Edisons, Fords, and other people who invented things that changed the course of the world usually come to mind first. Fred Abrogast didn’t figure out how to harness electricity to power light bulbs, and he didn’t come up with the idea to mass-produce automobiles, but Abrogast changed the world of fishing when, in 1928 in Akron, Ohio, Abrogast quit his job working for Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company to found . The lures he originally made for himself were suddenly in demand locally, and then not long after, throughout the entire Great Lakes region. The only reason I know this is because an Abrogast lure now rests a few inches away from my desk—except it’s been retired from its job of catching fish, and has been turned into a keychain.

Calling them “the final chapter of a sportsman’s relic,” Douglas Smith, an Indiana native now living in Brooklyn, has been turning vintage lures into keychains and selling them at various locations, like crab shacks and the popular Brooklyn menswear shop Smith + Butler. Going under the name —“My Dad and Grandpa were nicknamed Smitty and I secretly always wanted to pick it up myself,” he told me—Smith started making the keychains when he noticed his girlfriend’s set of keys could use a little more decoration. Unable to find anything he liked, Smith stumbled upon something familiar—“it was a kind of sleek, shiny silver teardrop shaped thing,” he said. The keychain he found reminded them of an old trolling lure he used to use. “So I climbed in the back of my truck to fetch my tackle box and, sure enough, and I had about a dozen lures in there. They turned out to be pretty spot-on for keychain size.”

Fishing isn’t something new to Smith, whose day job is working as a freelance radio producer and journalist. His family used to travel around Smith’s beloved Midwest to places with names like Hatchet Lake, Jitterbug Lake, şÚÁĎłÔšĎÍř Lake, and Disappointment Lake. To Smith, there’s something here that goes beyond just using fishing lures for keychains because they look cool. The idea behind ł§łžžąłŮłŮ˛â’s, he said, is more about keeping the past alive by creating something “you can carry around that has had a whole other life before you.” When I asked him if there were any specific lures that he likes to use, he rattled off a laundry list, including companies like The Creek Chub Bait Co., The South Bend Bait Co., Paw Paw, Heddon, and, of course, Aborgast lures. Just reading the names of these companies conjures up lazy days spent fishing along the shores of some Midwestern body of water that Smith and countless others grew up around, just hoping to get a bite.

The lures tell stories; from Fred Abrogast’s American dream to the people who spent a little bit of quiet time casting the lure in your pocket into a lake or river, never thinking twice about who, where, and how it was made. Ultimately, Smith gives the lures a new reason for being, but also gives a new generation an opportunity to get to understand a simpler time and place; you pick up a Smitty Lure, and you wonder about the people who may have used them, and the waters they may have been cast into.

At the same time, they invite you to reminisce whenever you’d like. Those instant memories are ultimately why Smith, a Midwestern expat who deals with the daily chaos of New York, makes the lures; he knows there aren’t millions to be made selling keychains. Instead, ł§łžžąłŮłŮ˛â’s lures serve as both a quick fix for nostalgia and something that is visually appealing. They look cool, but they also make a person think about being elsewhere: the oceans and rivers of their youth. Something like the beaches on the North Shore of Chicago where my own grandfather taught me how to fish, which, coincidentally are located a few miles up the road from where Rock Hudson himself grew up, long before he was raising the bar almost impossibly high for stylish fishermen everywhere.

Jason Diamond lives in New York. He has a wife, a dog, two cats, and a Twitter account that can be found atĚý.

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Humans have been hunting for as long as we could walk on two feet—and with hunting comes stories of the hunt. They’re carved into cave walls from thousands of years ago, they’re the inspiration for works of Classical art, and they pop up all over the Bible. Families pass down stories of long-dead relatives, and in many cases, hunting has inspired people to write great books. Moby-Dick isn’t just a story about a bunch of guys going fishing; (among other things) it’s about a crazed captain hunting a white whale. The Russian writer Ivan Turgenev’s first great work, a collection of stories often referred to as A Sportsman’s Sketches, is filled with tales of the people he met and the things he heard while wandering around his family’s estate, rifle in hand. While the stories aren’t about shooting at wild Russian game, if it weren’t for his hunting trips, he may not have found his inspiration to write and we might not even know who Turgenev was. President Theodore Roosevelt wrote about his real-life hunting experiences, William Faulkner incorporated hunting into much of his fiction, and Richard Connell’s 1924 short story of man hunting man, “The Most Dangerous Game,” inspired works from Stephen King’s The Running Man to the phenomenon of The Hunger Games trilogy of books and film franchise.

Courtney Letts.

Courtney Letts.

Courtney Letts was certainly not the first person to write about going into the wilderness with a weapon in hand, but she was certainly the first person to do it with the sort of style Courtney Letts had. And while the hunting story has faded away and the hunting-of-animals steadily declines, Letts’ influence is still obvious. Just look down a city street, pick any one, and you’re bound to see it.

In 1943 “one of the world’s 10 best-dressed women,” which is not all that notable when you consider some things about Courtney Letts. Born to a family of wealth and privilege in Chicago, she was a member of the famed debutante quartet, the Big Four. One of her friends, Ginevra King, was the . She dined with presidents and other heads of state, and you can find her personal journals and correspondence with people like Adlai Stevenson and Duke and Duchess of Windsor at the Library of Congress.

It might seem that Letts was merely just another stylish, well-to-do woman of the first half of the century, except that wasn’t entirely the case. By 1943, she’d already written two books about hunting through and exploring the wilderness of Canada and Alaska. In her second book, şÚÁĎłÔšĎÍřs in a Man’s World, Letts tells a story of her second husband, the dairy industry scion John Borden, who certainly didn’t see his wife as the adventurous type. He suggested she might “prefer trips to London, Paris, and the Riviera,” but that he wanted her to go on one hunting trip just to see how she’d deal with “cold … getting up at dawn.” Borden must have been surprised by how much his wife actually enjoyed the lifestyle, and he ended up sparking a love of the outdoors in his wife that would last well beyond their looming divorce.

HER FIRST BOOK, THE Cruise of the Northern Light, published in 1928, contained journal entries that documented her trip. But it was her second book, published five years later in 1933 that documented her first foray into hunting, stepping off the train into Moose Jaw in search of sharp-tailed Grouse and Canvasback ducks. In no time she finds herself going along for a mallard shoot on the Illinois River, hiking down a road that she describes as “for several miles was lined by poplars, reminiscent of a lovely poplared highway in France, leading north out of Bar le Duc.” Except: “Only here there would be no brioche to be enjoyed at a small round table under a spreading umbrella in any of the small towns, no vin ordinaire.”

What’s most noticeable about Letts’ books is the good degree of glamour she injected into her writings about hunting brown bears and fishing for salmon—sort of like what you’d see in a glossy travel magazine today. She loved the adventures and wrote of the beauty in the land. One example: she writes something you’d more expect to see some disciple of Thoreau—and not some socialite from the big city—jot down in a tattered journal: “Perhaps I am leaving a wrong impression. The impression that life, for us, has been one continual merry-go-round of sport—one continual search for this recreation and that adventure. Quite the contrary. These excursions into the refreshing peace of the woods and waters have been our greatest luxury.”

Letts’ books also become all the more interesting when you consider their historical context. Women were a few years away from winning the right to vote, but still had decades to go before gaining true social autonomy. Hunting wasn’t exactly high up on the list of things considered “proper” for women of Letts’ status to do. While women have been hunting just as long as men have, the very idea of hunting is gendered: Man vs. Nature/Beast/etc. Letts realized this; it’s evident by just looking at the title şÚÁĎłÔšĎÍřs in a Man’s World. But while women of high society have hunted game for centuries, Letts wasn’t gingerly riding horseback behind a trail of hounds chasing after foxes; she was a debutante trudging through the ice and mud to shoot and clean game right alongside men—all the while, documenting her adventures. It was hardly the sort of behavior demanded from a wealthy woman born in the last days of the Gilded Age, but Letts didn’t seem to care. And that made her something of a trailblazer. She could be the most beautiful woman at whatever social engagement she went to by night, but by day, she hunted. And somewhere in-between, she found time to write her books.Ěý

At points the dualism of her life is revealed in her writing. She writes about the glamour of nature when she talks about trout streams, which she starts off calling “the cleanest, cheeriest, most exhilarating thing in nature.” Then: “the bubbling exuberance of sparkling wine.” And finally: “Oh, the peace of it! Wine that slips smoothly down inside you. Wine that makes you forget anything, everything except the day, the hour, the moment, and a fiendish—again puerile—desire to catch a fish.”

EVERYTHING ABOUT BEING OUTDOORS—even the idea of the hunt—was all just some big, truth-revealing party thrown by an Astor or a Vanderbilt. Throughout both books, Letts recalls all sorts of super-specific details, ranging from the regional dialects and accents of the people she talked to throughout her journeys to a meticulous list of all the items aboard the Northern Light. (If you’re wondering: one case of Welsh rarebit, two cases of ox tongue, 100 pounds of salted pork, and I’ll stop there.) And that attention didn’t escape her wardrobe, which included things like an “indispensable” green alligator oilskin coat and hat, one pair of high-laced moccasin boots, and one heavy tweed coat. Basically, a checklist of the wardrobes and made careers of documenting on the streets of Manhattan and Milan today.

While the practice of hunting for survival moves past its heyday—as Steven Rinella writes in his book , we’ve “probably entered a period that will one day be regarded as the autumn of hunting”—you can still see its aesthetic influences everywhere. Take a look at advertisements for big name designers like Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger—beautiful people standing around in the forest in knee-high leather hunting boots, wearing waxed canvas vests or tweed sport coats. People want to dress as if they’re minutes away from mounting a horse and chasing down some foxes on the English countryside when they’re probably about to get into their Prius to go to the local organic market to pick up some free range chicken thighs for dinner.

Yet, we are natural hunters, and we still love hunting stories—hello, Hunger Games—because of that. Whether it is for pheasant or a bargain, we’ve always been out for some sort of blood. People don’t necessarily mind the blood, either, so long as they aren’t the ones spilling it, and that probably explains the declining popularity of hunting. At the same time, the aesthetic is in a growth period. People are fine with dressing the part, but field dressing a deer is another story entirely. For Courtney Letts, style and the hunt went hand in hand.

Jason Diamond lives in New York. He has a wife, a dog, two cats, and a Twitter account that can be found atĚý.

The post Plaid and Canvas: The Queen of the Hunt appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔšĎÍř Online.

I’m not exactly sure when you officially become a New Yorker. It might be like religion, where you need to be formally converted, or something like working your way up the ranks from corporate mailroom to corner office. I’ve heard you have to have a 212, 718, or 347 area code for at least 10 years; that you have to live in Manhattan to be a true New Yorker; that you have to spend every day for three straight years eating bagels and drinking coffee from Anthora coffee cups; you have to read every issue of The New York Review of Books when it comes out; have at least one sighting of Tom Wolfe wandering the streets in his white suit; had a small non-speaking cameo in a Nora Ephron film (now an episode ofĚýGirlsĚýis a sufficient replacement); and/or an apartment in an episode ofĚýLaw and Order: Special Victims Unit.Ěý I’m not totally convinced any of that renders you a true citizen of the Big Apple, but if it were up to me, I’d say that living through one catastrophic event in the five boroughs surely verifies your New York resume.

I’ve lived through the Blackout of 2003, the late December ’05 MTA strike (it shut down the city’s trains and buses during our busy season) and I watched Hurricane Irene graciously spare my neighborhood from my window last year, even after spending the day chasing hot leads on where to get batteries and enough dry food to fatten up my cats so we could ride them through the post-apocalyptic landscape outside of the small apartment we shared at the time in lower Manhattan if need be.

But Sandy wasn’t so forgiving; not to me, and not to the millions of other people who are used to a fairly punishing lifestyle to begin with, like unexplained fare hikes and the New York Knicks’ flip dismissal of our beloved Jeremy Lin. Sandy caused significant loss of life, an unfathomable amount of damage, and brought catastrophic flooding to our underground transit and electrical infrastructure. Everything below 34th Street is still dark, still powerless.

HOWEVER YOU BECAME A New Yorker, get a handful of us together and we probably fulfill all the key stereotypes: we pay a ton of money for small apartments, we throw our trash out in front of those apartments, we kvetch (a word known here whether you’re Jewish or not) about everything, and we eat while we walk through crowded streets because we’re always in a hurry. But so much of this—the stereotypical-but-true stuff—gets stripped away during and following a disaster. You see our ability to come together, our ability to make light of crazy situations, and in the bars and apartments that have electricity after Sandy, our ability to drink.

“Tending bar the day after Sandy struck was unlike any other weekday shift I’ve ever worked,” Rosie Schaap of South in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood told me. Schaap is a keen observer of people in bars; her bookĚýDrinking With MenĚý(forthcoming in early 2013) chronicles her own experiences drinking in pubs and taverns, not only in her hometown of New York City, but also places like Vermont, Montreal, and Dublin.

We had watched as the storm raged through Monday evening, tearing large branches off trees, sending traffic cones flying, and ripping a large street sign positioned above traffic off its post, turning it into a major hazard for the cars that were still on the road or the person who felt it necessary to be outside during a storm. By Tuesday afternoon, after the storm subsided, my wife and I finally emerged from our apartment, and needed a drink or two. We decided to meet up with some friends at South, where Schaap was tending bar. One of our friends had been staying nearby with other friends because her Williamsburg loft was in an evacuation zone, while several others simply lived in the general vicinity and had all planned on making South their drinking destination. Since all of them had mentioned it on social media, we decided to go where almost everybody knew our name, deciding to walk the 1.8 miles for some much needed exercise, and to survey the damage. We counted at least 10 large, uprooted trees along the way; some had landed on top of cars, others were wrapped in colorful tape to warn pedestrians that the massive trunk could shift at any second. One woman stood laughing at her SUV, which had a tree branch through the windshield, telling her acquaintance, “It’s no big deal.” Half a block up, two men with hatchets hacked away at tree branches; they told me there were bigger things for the authorities to deal with in other parts of the city, so they took it upon themselves to clear the debris here.

Once we arrived, the bar was packed. Schaap, working by herself, told me, “I was way deep in the weeds, but customers were patient.” she gives credit to her barback and off-duty coworkers who pitched in when things got really rough. While I waited for Schaap to make her way down to my end of the bar, one of the many bearded men in attendance told his friend, “I don’t usually like [New Jersey Governor Chris] Christie, but I’d be glad to have a governor like that for something like Sandy.” Other conversations focused on our neighbors and, specifically, the mayor of Newark, Corey Booker, whose Superman-like dashing from crisis to crisis during the storm was documented on his Twitter account. One patron told me that he had been to the local Park Slope Armory to help evacuees whose homes were in the most vulnerable spots in the area, but was turned away because there were so many volunteers, “So I just came here to unwind,” he said. “I was in Long Island just the other day helping my parents put boards on their windows. Then when the storm started picking up here, I couldn’t get any sleep.”

MY WIFE AND I kept drinking until dinnertime, realizing the rest of our provision snacks just wouldn’t do. We made our way to the Gowanus neighborhood, where just hours earlier, Buzzfeed noted , thanks to the possibility of the disgusting toxic waters of the Gownaus Canal flooding. Aaron Lefkove, a friend who co-owns the popular “classic New England-style beach side seafood shack,” Littleneck, situated in the heart of the neighborhood, beckoned. Situated on the border line of Zones A and B, Lefkove told me that even though the restaurant doesn’t normally open on Tuesdays, he’d try his luck and see what happened. “We really didn’t start out with a whole lot of food because we couldn’t get any deliveries that morning, so really it was just the burgers, the mussels—and we only started out with a bushel and a half of those to begin with, chowder, and eight or nine lobster rolls.”

We arrived at 7 p.m., and there was Lefkove and one of his employees, running around an entire floor that is usually manned by at least triple the staff. While a table at Littleneck is usually tough to come by, Lefkove was a little taken aback by the crowd, and told me that, “I let everyone know we were running on a very skeleton crew as they were seated—I was bartending and waiting on tables, and we had our manager Pascal running food and one guy in the kitchen pumping everything out—so if everyone could just be cool we would get everything out as quickly as possible.”

While a few of us came hoping for oysters or the popular full-belly Ipswich clam rolls, we were just as happy to eat the burgers and chug bottles of Miller High Life alongside fellow New Yorkers whoĚýwere either born and raised in the city we all love or had been baptized a few hours earlier by the devastating winds that tried and failed to rattle the spirit of a place that shows its true greatness in times of crisis—be it while lending a hand clearing debris or raising a pint glass. For a day I saw the part of New York and the people who live here that I truly love; a sense of camaraderie before figuring out what we collectively do next, and then having a drink together afterwards.

We’ll do it all again—and next time, hopefully, it won’t be because we’ve got nowhere else to go.

Jason Diamond lives in New York. He has a wife, a dog, two cats and a Twitter account that can be found atĚý.

The post Drinking Through a Disaster appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔšĎÍř Online.

God’s Country. It’s not a name you’d associate with the Michigan of the American auto industry and current Detroit “rebirth” that has been touted by newspapers over the last few years. But it’s there, sitting right above the Mackinac Bridge, with its waterfalls, rivers, and varied landscape. Shaped by the large number of “Yoopers” who claim Nordic ancestry, it’s home to white-tailed deer, black bears, and some of the best bird-watching in the world. It’s a beautiful Midwestern pocket all its own. But in the winter, God’s Country turns into a frozen hell.

Surrounded by three Great Lakes, the winters freeze quicker and bite sharper than maybe anywhere else in the continental United States that I’ve experienced. I’ve been stuck in the Upper Peninsula twice before for the kind of snowfall most Americans would call a “blizzard,” but a friend who grew up in the area described it as “normal winter weather.” Both times I kept warm sleeping next to wood-burning fires while huddled underneath Hudson Bay blankets, not ever wanting to let it go—just like people in the region, near-frozen and not, have been doing since the mid-1700s.

French fur trappers huddled in their Hudson Bays, trying to keep warm after long days spent hunting for beaver pelts. They were . Today, the blankets retain an iconic status in Canada usually reserved for greatĚýhockey goalies, but also sit on the sofas and in the sheds of American homes around the Great Lakes. The Hudson Bay became an artifact like a sturdy oldĚýaxe or a field watch that once adorned the wrist of a long-gone relative. A family member might have a linen closet full of them, denoted in size by their points—the lines on the side that look almost like claw marks—stitched into the thick wool just below the iconic green, red, yellow, and blue stripes against a white background.

Today, Hudson Bay point blankets serve several different functions. You can still buy them brand new from the company, but people are snatching them up from their families and from antique stores for extra warmth when the thermometer dips below freezing, as well as for fashion accessories and decoration for their living rooms. While others still cherish them for the memories.

ONE FRIEND OF MINE who grew up in Michigan but now lives in a small house overlooking the Housatonic River (an area with no shortage of severe weather) in the woods near the shared borders of Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut spends the colder months tucked underneath a passed-down four-point blanket that his grandfather bought in the mid-1940s, right after the Second World War while on a fly-fishing trip through Canada. While the blanket his grandfather called his “Canada blanket” has kept various family members warm throughout the years, he believes the blanket is extra special. “I sort of think the family was conceived under it.”ĚýĚý

A priceless family heirloom or an extra layer on the bed or in a tent; whatever the case, an uptick in trading among younger, upwardly-mobile consumers indicates that Hudson Bay blankets have moved from the realm of utility to aesthetic. Somewhere along the way it made the jump from family artifact to vintage-looking must-have. Take a Sunday stroll around the Brooklyn Flea, held weekly on the East River Waterfront, and you’re sure to see several of the blankets being sold along with other pieces of North Americana originating from the Pacific Northwest to the Sun Belt, the Rust Belt, and the forests of New England.ĚýThe brightly colored stripes stand out against the rusted tools and framedĚýtintype photographs of long-dead John and Jane Does being sold by the market vendors. Vintage Hudson Bay blankets have begun to go for upwards of a thousand dollars if old enough and in near-mint condition.ĚýEven a quick search through online photoboards and microblogs like Tumblr and Pinterest yields hundreds of results featuring everything from dog sweaters to canoes that showcase the iconographic primary-colored Hudson Bay stripes.

One of those boards, , is run by L.L. Bean senior PR rep, Laurie Brooks. Brooks has been working for the Maine company for 15 years. Brooks points out that her employer and Hudson Bay have had a business relationship since L.L. Bean began selling the blankets 75 years ago, but is quick to point out that her own love of Hudson Bays started with an Internet search. “I always hoped to buy a new one, but once I discovered vintage Hudson Bays on Ebay, I started scooping up deals.” Brooks mentions that she likes the way the blankets’ age has helped fade the blankets’ bright white background to cream and tan and also reiterates the history each blanket has, but she adds that her own collecting habit has turned up a white whale. “I search for the elusive two and three and three-and-a-half point blankets. They have been harder to find.”

One collector I talked to at a tag sale in Connecticut, a banker who spends the weekdays on Wall Street and the weekends roaming the forests of New England, spoke at length about his collection that he says numbers around 30, including one that he says has been in his family since “at least” the middle of the 20th century. A Canadian by birth, he tells me that the blanket was one of the items up for grabs when he went with his siblings to clean out his late grandfather’s house. “Everybody wanted that blanket.” He rattles off a list of other priceless pieces of Canadian ephemera, from a stick autographed by the legendary Montreal Canadiens right-winger Maurice “The Rocket” Richard to a small cache of hunting rifles and fishing poles. “But I was no nonsense when the car pulled up,” he says. “I popped right out and ran to one of the two places he usually kept the blanket; my brother ran to the other. I got lucky, because I guessed it would be in the shed.” The blanket now sits behind the desk in his home office, “like a beautiful piece of Modernist art,” he says.

But the irony of this collector’s description of the blanket as “Modernist” art is that the iconic design hasn’t changed much since fur traders first exchanged Hudson Bays in lieu of currency. Harold Tichenor, one of the (if not the only) says the phenomenon of collecting blankets is “rather new.” The people who are paying hundreds of dollars for the vintage finds are fanatical about their love of Hudson Bays. They’re framing the blankets, setting up Pinterest boards for them, and getting ready to pass them down to their own children some day. A reversion and recreation of the blanket’s history-as-artifact. As a piece of material culture that represents a particularly North American sense of adventure, the blanket has re-entered the cultural consciousness in good company—think Airstream trailers and Maglites, both items included in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art—but whether or not it ever moves from Michigan to the MoMA is certainly dependent on somebody, anybody, deigning to part with their beloved, well-worn Hudson Bay.

Jason Diamond lives in New York. He has a wife, a dog, two cats and a Twitter account that can be found at .

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