This is The Offerman Files, where actor, humorist, , and Nick Offerman shares tales of wild creatures,Ìęgassy adventures, and hitting his brother in the face with a fish.

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve said that, I would have enough money to buy even more sweet, sweet gear! I’ve always found it powerfully gratifying that beautiful, well-designed outdoor products enable me to fulfill my body’s daily requirement for dopamine.

In this case, I had only to head down to the local bike shop, where I was coddled, groomed, and sent home with a upon which I quickly and easily mounted my bike. It came with an app so I could adjust the resistance on the rear wheel, using my phone, as I rode mile after mile in my garage, staring out the open door. It was great: a training regimen I could squeeze in on almost any day, just like I used to do with running. No need to drive to the gym—I just clipped into my pedals and I was rolling, usually while listening to an audiobook or a podcast. And when I’m on location for a shoot or touring, I can saddle up a stationary bike in the hotel fitness center. A perfect system.

Well, almost. Pretty soon I began to really miss being out among the elements, which had been another of my favorite things about running, even in the rain (because I love my rain gear so much). The bike trainer was convenient, but my spirit was caged. So I took my Specialized off the trainer, put it in the car, and hauled it to the L.A. River bike path—specifically, to a stretch along Atwater Village and Los Feliz, which is a wonderful place to ride and see birds. In Burbank, at the top end of the route, I took a left into Griffith Park and pounded uphill to the observatory. Great views and a great workout. I felt liberated. I was back in the world instead of spinning wheels like a hamster.

Of course, driving my bike to a safe and friendly location adds time I often can’t spare. So I once again turned to gear: “Surely there’s a solution to this problem that a fellow can purchase with his hard-earned lucre.” I bought a Giant Trance E+ e-assist mountain bike, which was a revelation. I had resisted this technology for years, because the old-school jock in me saw it as cheating. I’m pleased to report that I fully cut a caper when I realized how wrong I was. You can turn the pedal-gooser up or down—there are five levels—to provide everything from “very little help” to “a really cushy ride, you baby.”

I could now launch from my house and ride through my mountainous neighborhood on an hourlong loop, still getting a very brisk workout. Or, on occasion, I could take a few hours and ride west along altitudinous Mulholland Drive, keeping even with the red-tailed hawks, and then ride into the Santa Monica Mountains—climbing the fire roads toward Malibu, soaking in views of the Pacific, and marveling all the while that a brilliant little electric motor had gotten me outside again in such a rewarding way. For the first time, my eyes were opened to all the rich cycling options in my area. When I happened upon a potential new route, I’d grin and think: Hell yeah, gear. Let’s do this.

But as much as I enjoy shiny new toys, sometimes it’s the old favorites that get me going. In the back of my truck, I always carry my hiking boots and a little blue Osprey backpack with a two-liter water bladder. I bought the pack years ago, when I was living in Santa Cruz to film the exquisite sci-fi series Devs, created by writer and director Alex Garland. I rented a mountain bike and spent my days off flying around trails in the redwood forests that surround the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The pack was always with me, and it has since become a reminder of my need for escape. The simple act of keeping it ready, with a full bladder and energy bars, has led to excellent impromptu hikes around the mountainous neighborhoods of Pasadena, Glendale, and Altadena. As I’ve learned, Los Angeles County is full of rugged canyon trails that start on the edge of an unassuming neighborhood and within minutes have you feeling like you’re far from civilization. I can be filming on location, or working at the Offerman Woodshop, when I spy the Osprey and hear its call: “Haul me up the mountains and you can enjoy some sinful calories after.” My favorite is a thermos of coffee and some locally baked Č”ŽÇłÜȔÚ°ù±đČő, a kind of cheese puff. Damn. Just typing that makes me drool for a hike.

Gear can inspire us on a much bigger scale, too. In early 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, my wife, Megan Mullally, and I were like everybody else—we kept away from other people to avoid the plague. It was crushing and depressing, but Megan knew exactly what to do: part with a right healthy portion of our lucre in exchange for a piece of Gear with a capital G. We bought a 30-foot Airstream trailer. Now as then, we love to take road trips, hauling it hither and yon. We head out for at least a few weeks every year if we can.

This 9,000-pound love wagon has so many accessories, you’d think it would never come up short in any aspect of camping, but you would be wrong. The Airstream’s ability to properly grill and smoke joints of meat is embarrassingly feeble. Yes, it has a couple of gas burners and the cutest tiny oven. But if like me you enjoy barbecuing low and slow, or even just having the elbow room to make good and proper love to your slabs of ribs and tomahawk rib eyes, then a camper kitchen is severely lacking.

By now you know what we do when faced with such a problem. I pick up my large acoustic guitar, pluck a cowboy tune, and sing: “We buy gear with our filthy lucre!”

I got us a Big Green Egg ceramic smoker last year, using it right away to dispatch a pork butt under the magical canopy of Oregon’s Sitka spruce, cedar, and big-leaf maple groves. Megan made enchiladas and fresh guacamole. Allow me to simply say: problem solved.

Nick Offerman doesn’t just write about gear, he makes the stuff—including an exquisite cedar canoe that he crafted and then paddled down the L.A. River.

The post How Much Does Nick Offerman Love His Outdoor Gear? Let Him Count the Ways. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

This is The Offerman Files, where actor, humorist, , and Nick Offerman shares tales of wild creatures,Ìęgassy adventures, and hitting his brother in the face with a fish.

CRUNNNNCH!

SKKKZZRRRR!

JJJUUUGGGGLLLLZZZZZ!

In my balls, I could feel the violent vibrations as layers of Epifanes spar varnish, quite dear in both price and labor, were mercilessly toothed from the hull of my canoe by river rocks. To be fair, I could also feel the scraping tremors in my feet, legs, and buttocks as we banged along the river bottom in yet another stretch of shallow water. But it was my familial plums that spoke with the most immediacy, because there was something existential going on that afternoon in L.A.

In the 25 years I’ve called the city my home, I’ve done a great many things that I would categorize as fun. I have, of course, worked as an actor. But I’ve also been paid to build various decks and cabins as a carpenter, plus one exquisite post-and-beam yoga studio. I worked as a production assistant on a few music videos, trained by a tall, handsome, surfing porn actor who taught me to get up and stay up (but only in the surf). I constructed an octagon-style wrestling cage for an episode of Friends. I’ve hiked hundreds of miles’ worth of trails in Los Angeles County, some while hallucinating, but mostly sober and high on the views from Griffith Park, the San Gabriels, and the Santa Monica Mountains. Yes, this has become a paragraph of bragging. The point is, the one thing I never dreamed I would do is launch my beloved handmade cedar-strip canoe, Huckleberry, into the concrete-clad L.A. River, just a few miles north of the location of the drag-race scene in Grease.

If you can recall that iconic moment, in which Cha Cha DiGregorio orgasmically whips her silk scarf off to begin the race between Danny Zuko in Greased Lightnin’ and the jerk whose jalopy was so lame it didn’t even have a cool name, then you might be thinking: Where the hell does a canoe fit into that expanse of concrete?

I put in at the outfit’s headquarters an hour ago with my bowman, Morgan, and since then Steve and Grove have nimbly paddled along with us in kayaks, flitting about alternately fore and aft, scared shitless at the idea of me dragging Huckleberry across the many shallow stretches in the several miles of river we hoped to complete.

Their concern was amplified by the fact that Morgan and I were now soaking wet. After launching, we had remained upright through a couple of wobble sessions in the river, in that way you do when first setting off in a canoe. As a team, you discover the limits of how far you both can lean while paddling, sightseeing, ass scratching, or snagging a beer (if the sun has traveled far enough into its morning’s arc, of course, depending upon the traditions of comportment in your particular barque). We were busy spotting herons (great blue and green) and egrets (great and snowy) while zipping past lush foliage, luxuriating in a smooth 50 yards of gushing creek before bumping back into the intermittent rocks and shallow water, when, some five minutes after first dipping our paddles—whup! shit!—we suddenly found ourselves T-boned against a boulder by a waist-deep current.

Huckleberry neatly flipped us out, and we immediately set to righting it and dumping out the many gallons of river that had filled its rounded hull. Steve paddled over to lend a hand, as it was both arduous and somewhat dangerous work, in the way any task can be when requiring the exertion of strength on slippery rocks in the face of rushing water. When we succeeded in once again taking our seats, it became apparent that in our swift blunder and its subsequent correction, Morgan and I had established a few things for our gentle guides: (1) we were suitably tough and skilled to be trusted on the day’s outing; (2) I was enough of a dipshit to willingly bang around my pristinely refinished canoe; and (3) we were dumb enough that this might just turn out to be fun.

But now, as I sat in Huckleberry with my love marbles buzzing after maybe the 50th crunching encounter with river rocks, my three compatriots asked me once again, as they did throughout the day’s adventure, “Are you sure you want to keep going? That canoe’s taking a beating.”

I learned to build canoes from the seminal 2007 instruction book , written by Ted Moores of Bear Mountain Boats up in Peterborough, Ontario. Ted and his partner, Joan, were pioneers in the development of cedar-strip canoe and kayak construction, utilizing fiberglass and epoxy finishing, though they would be quick to point out that their designs are but the current progeny of a long lineage of hulls, dating back centuries to the ingenuity of the Indigenous peoples of eastern and northern Canada. In 2008, I arrived in Manhattan with a bag of hand tools, at a time when my legendary bride, Megan Mullally, was cast by Mel Brooks in his musical version of Young Frankenstein.

The vacation from and furniture clients meant that I could fulfill my dream and build my first wooden canoe. Being all too aware of the old chestnut about the basement-built boat failing to fit out of the house, I secured a shop in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn, on the third floor of a Civil War–era stone warehouse perched on a pier and complete with a huge freight elevator. Crisis foreseen and averted.

The most important lesson in Ted’s patient lesson book comes at the beginning. He says that when you consider the whole canoe, it can seem impossible to build without years of training, but if you take it one step at a time—trace a shape, cut it out with a jigsaw, glue a couple pieces together, and so on—then before you know it the boat will emerge as though you just spun a chrysalis.

If it hadn’t been for Megan’s timely turn burning up the Broadway stage, I would likely have continued on in California, building ever more substantial homages to the table stylings of George Nakashima, Sam Maloof, and Gustav Stickley. But since the East Coast diversion had pulled me out of that potential rut, I experienced a powerful epiphany: shaping curved pieces freehand—with spokeshave, card scraper, chisel, and rasp—was to become like a god.

You see, most woodshop operations are set up to work on rectilinear forms, creating and cutting and joining square and plumb surfaces and corners to make many variations on the box, usually featuring 45- and 90-degree angles. But a canoe has exactly zero straight lines on it, so one sculpts its gunwales (“gunnels”) and thwarts and shapely bottom until one’s eye and caress pronounce its lines to be “fair,” thus creating an affection for the final product that transcends the love one might feel toward, say, a three-legged stool. Throw in a couple of custom, hand-carved paddles and I had fully reawakened that part of my youthful fancy determined to find a way to Narnia. Imagine the faerie magic in my every dainty step as I hoisted the completed Huckleberry upside down onto my shoulders for its inaugural portage to the freight elevator. Victory was upon me—shit.

As I said, the elevator was huge, but my canoe was 18 feet long. She would not come close to fitting, even on a diagonal. The small stairways were obviously not an option either, so my pal Jimmy DiResta and I rigged a block and tackle from an old freight hook on the roof and gamely hoisted it out the window and down to the pier.

Ted and Joan had traveled down from Bear Mountain Boats to see the launch, and Ted (generously) said that my work was exquisite, which made me cry, but only a medium amount. We were all on eggshells watching Huckleberry descend from a third-story window, but Ted said that he’d seen these canoes survive worse falls than that. The engineering of the form, plus the makeup of the shell, make them tough enough to survive even the dumbest of actors.

Over many creeks and rivers over many years, I have learned the hard way that Huckleberry can gamely scrape across a lot of rocks and gravel while suffering only minimal cosmetic damage. Still, do I wish that I had run the L.A. River before applying three brand-new coats of varnish to it only weeks earlier? Yes, I do wish that. I wish that so very much. But you can only strategize and try to account for every potentiality up to a point. When finally you are faced with the choice between the comfy living room and the unpredictable outdoor jaunt, there is but one clear answer: Do the goddamn thing. Drop to your knees in the mud. Get your hands dirty, wipe ’em on your shirt. Paddle your canoe down a fun expanse of weird urban river that might scratch it up. Why did I spend so much time and care building this watercraft if I don’t intend to get some thrills out of it?

Onward we went. The route through the Elysian Valley has a delightful mix of fast-moving chutes, medium twists and turns, a four-foot waterfall, a couple of brief portages (for canoeists), and two pond sections where the flow slows into a laconic, deep-water float, perfect for taking stock, bird peeping, and, well, ass scratching and beer snagging.

One true surprise was how clean the water was. Steve and Grove founded LARKS in 2013, partly as a way to support conservation efforts for the river. (Grove left the organization seven years ago but remains a close ally.) Today LARKS has a healthy relationship with a bunch of nonprofits and government agencies like , , the , and the .

But the focus on water quality dates back more than 20 years, when Steve, who is a sculptor by day, crafted a waterwheel that he placed in the river, plumbing it to an experiential artwork that collected and filtered the (then filthy) river water to make it, he says, “clean enough to drink.” This led him into a close working relationship with the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation, which maintains so-called water-quality beacons that serve as stop and go lights for L.A. River recreation. Of the 108 tests done in the Elysian Valley during the 2023 paddling season, 92 percent met EPA requirements for safe swimming. The nine exceptions (measurements usually taken after a storm flushed in dirt and waste) met a slightly lower standard that is still perfectly fine for canoeing and kayaking.

All I can say is that Morgan and I were impressed (and relieved) that the river smelled 
 perfectly fine. The water was also visibly clean, which added to the surreal quality of paddling through an industrial corridor between the 5 Freeway and a main train artery for both freight and passengers. In the section they call the Secret Pond, the water was over ten feet deep, and things got downright otherworldly as we calmly floated, chatting in a quiet reverie about the American coots swimming near the shore and then walking up the concrete bank with their strange, big-toed feet. A minor bloop caught my ear—a pair of double-crested cormorants surfacing right next to us, then diving back down into the depths of this unlikely fishing hole.

As our venture drifted to completion, we were left wanting more, which is utterly preferable to that feeling every paddler has known: Ugh, this is too long! When are we getting there?! I’m always a little melancholy when the hull runs lightly aground for the last time and we have to climb out of the cedar escape pod and step back into the reality of life on terra firma.

We flipped Huckleberry over to reveal a cluster of battle scars: a web of bright white abrasions against the golden honey brown of the varnished cedar. My compatriots lightly gasped and made noises like those prompted by minor stomach pain, but I shook my head and said: No, boys, don’t be sad. Those gouges are just telling us that we spent the day correctly. I’ve mended them before, and I’ll do it again.

Nick Offerman’s column for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine has him regularly repairing gear, washing cow butts, and getting outsmarted by raccoons. He’s fine with that. He also just won his first Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for an episode of The Last of Us.

The post Nick Offerman Paddles a Badass Canoe He Built Down the L.A. River appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

This is The Offerman Files, where actor, humorist, , and Nick Offerman shares tales of wild creatures,Ìęgassy adventures, and hitting his brother in the face with a fish.

I grab my phone to check the channels for any fires that need putting out, only to discover that I have just the barest gossamer of cell service. I feel the same disorienting ennui I’ve experienced in ballparks when tens of thousands of fellow fans are trying to post blurry home run videos simultaneously, and all you want to do is text your dad in the concession line that you’ll have that third bratwurst after all.

In this case, I have actual business to attend to. I’m touring the UK and Dublin with guitar and backpack as a wandering humorist, performing seven shows in eight days. It’s 3 P.M. on a July afternoon, and at 8 P.M. I’m slated to tickle 1,800 souls at the O2 Apollo Manchester. I get a text out to my tour manager, who lets me know that a large tanker truck has crashed, dumping 5,000 gallons of milk—milk!—across the highway, along with a sizable quantity of diesel fuel.

When I heard this I thought, Why the hell are we sitting here? I’m willing to drive on a highway that is merely wet! Then I recalled from my teenage days on a blacktopping crew that we used diesel as a solvent for cleaning up asphalt and tar, because it dissolves pavement. Meaning that the crew now on the M6 will need to scrub up that diesel tout de suite, before it sinks its corrosive teeth into the roadway. At least I have plenty of time to get to the show.

About that Mercedes: it wasn’t my choice. For the third time in recent years, I have rented a car to convey myself around northern England and Scotland as I engage in multifaceted touring. These jaunts have me playing comedy gigs at gorgeous jewel-box theaters like the Drury Lane in London’s West End, as well as stickier old vaudeville houses in Brighton and Liverpool.

When I’m over here, I also film advertisements for Lagavulin single-malt Scotch and—best of all—visit farms, especially the one owned by my good friend the shepherd and author James Rebanks, who along with his wife, Helen, manages a traditional sheep operation in the Lake District, where I often spend the night.

To get around, I have always reserved a small SUV that gets decent mileage and has enough clearance to navigate rocky lanes. Except that, during each trip, a generous rental company employee has apparently recognized my name and thought, A sensible crossover? Oh no, my bacon-and-eggs-loving friend, I’m going to set you up with something considerably more flash. Then they proceed to “upgrade” me to a tiny, sexy kumquat of a James Bond car.

Three times I have arrived to face this revelation and said, “Oh, thank you. I’m grateful, but can I just get the Volkswagen Tiguan?” Three times I have been met with a sheepish, red-faced, open-mouthed stare telling me that actually, no, they have no replacement vehicles. Hence the Mercedes.

It’s 4 P.M. on the M6, and things are still not moving. To quell the first stirrings of anxiety, I take a deep breath and think back to a few days ago, at the Royal Highland Show in Edinburgh—basically the equivalent of a New England state fair, but with tastier fish and chips. The Rebankses maintain a herd of Belted Galloway cows, of which I own a few because raising the world’s finest grass-fed beef rates high among my remunerative hobbies: delicious fun that also earns me some income.

The three of us attended the Royal Highland for one reason—I mean, sure, amusement and also beer were factors—and that was to “help” our friend Helen Ryman show her exemplary Mochrum Estate Belties, which rightly earned four prize rosettes. I got to assist the washing of her gorgeous heifer, Cora, rubbing large handfuls of shampoo into her lush coat—a thick, layered pelt that kept her warm through the Scottish winter— then using a power washer to rinse before blow-drying her spanking-clean hair.

I adore the hands-on participation, especially since this breed of ruminant is such a brilliant piece in the larger conversation about regenerative agriculture—specifically, rotational grazing. Instead of force-feeding grain and antibiotics to beef cows, as is the practice in the horror-show setting of factory farms, these cattle graze on uncultivated high terrain that isn’t suitable for growing anything else (such as cereals), and they can turn thistles into the most delicious steaks I’ve ever tasted.

I settle back into my reverie. The previous morning at the Rebanks home, James woke me up at 6 A.M. Some sheep had escaped through a hole in a fence, so before we even had a cup of tea, we threw on jackets against the rain, collected his dogs Tosh, Meg, and Floss, and got on the quad bike in a trice, towing a little trailer down the road loaded with a few eight-foot-long two-by-fours and some substantial wooden posts.

We drove into a hilly pasture along a boundary fence, to the spot where the dozen or so sheep had slipped beneath the wire. James clambered over with the dogs, who were off like lightning in ranging half-circles, herding the errant ewes and lambs back through the breach. Then it was our turn to close the weak spot by pounding in a couple of posts and strategically nailing the two-by-fours across the gap. Each greenish, pressure-treated post was six feet tall and five inches in diameter, with one end sharpened like a pencil. With little discussion, we worked in tandem: I speared the post into the soil, then held it steady as James stood on the wet seat of his quad bike and pounded the top with a massive, ancient sledge. I’d never been happier.

My elation in physical labor always amuses James, who makes fun of me for staying with his family so that I can split firewood and stack stone walls and just be out in the weather instead of pursuing a more conventional vacation. But for me, being of even minor service to his efforts, especially when the task calls upon the tool skills and stamina that each of us learned from our fathers, feels like the best possible thing to be doing.

That allure has never been more powerful than it is now, as I sit on a hot stretch of blacktop, waiting to be released from this supposedly wonderful “time saving” three-lane roadway. As the hours roll on, I really start to fear that I won’t make it to Manchester in time to introduce the comedian who’s opening for me. Then I have an idea: I’ll record a voice memo on my phone and send it to the tour manager to play in case I’m not there. “Good evening, Mancunians, and welcome to the Apollo,” I say. “Our first entertainer is the charismatic Lou Sanders, and by the way I am recording this at 6:38 from my car, because a milk truck has gone arse-over-tit on the M6.
”

And then, just like that, the traffic begins to move. I kick the sprightly Mercedes into gear and race to the venue, pulling into the alley behind the theater at 8:07. As I enter by the back door, I can hear my recorded introduction just ending, and I am primed to turn my clown dial up to 11 for these fine people.

On one hand, the goose of nearly missing the show is part of the allure of the Road, with a capital R. On the other, I am forever yearning for a simpler existence, bereft of circus thrills. But just like you, I have little choice but to navigate our world of multilane motorways and mobile phones. Stuck in a traffic nightmare, I may dream of lathering cows and mending fences, but when the road opens up again, the show must go on.

The post Nick Offerman Would Rather Be Washing Cow Butts appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

This is The Offerman Files, where actor, humorist, , and Nick Offerman shares tales of wild creatures, gassy adventures, and hitting his brother in the face with a fish.

This required use of a log suspended from a pair of ropes hanging next to the bell. After winning a wordless session of You first; no, you first, I insist with Mike, I grabbed a third rope dangling from the center of the log and prepared to execute a full-body, two-handed swing to make the bell go bong. The elderly Shinto priest, correctly assessing the amount of adolescence still coursing through my 19-year-old body, gave me a grim smile and said, “One time,” lest I turn this reverential ceremony into a cacophony that would shatter every Sapporo bottle within a mile. But believe me when I tell you that your corn-fed correspondent rang that goddamn bell with enough gusto to vibrate your innards.

This wasn’t the first ritual bell ringing of my life, given that I’d been an altar boy at St. Mary’s in Minooka, Illinois. If only we’d had the wherewithal to hold church in the woods, like these Japanese folks did! Our Catholic masses were so sleep inducing that the only highlight was the multi-tinkle clanging of a behandled cluster of four altar bells, which sounded like Santa’s sleigh advancing for a few seconds in stop-and-go traffic. We desperate young lads scrambled to become altar boys just so we’d have the chance to bestow that one remotely interesting moment on the congregation.

Slamming a log into a giant, patinated bell on a mountainside was a whole different order of experience and part of a life-altering opportunity for me, though not the kind you might expect. I wasn’t on a retreat to learn about Shinto and Buddhism. Mike and I were traveling as performers in a Kabuki-theater show that had been created by our sensei Shozo Sato at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The year was 1991, and about 20 of us prancing Illini theater students were putting on an adaptation of The Iliad called Achilles: A Kabuki Play. Our tour included a handful of venues, from the bright lights of Tokyo to the tiny mountain village of Damine, where we were housed with local families for the few days we were there to participate in the town’s 300-year-old Kabuki festival. Mike and I got bunked at the priest’s house, most likely because he asked for a couple donkey-like actors who could carry 30 pounds of rice cake up a mountain.

Once the massive bell tone had faded from the countryside, we were directed by Kumagai-san to the head of a well-worn trail leading into the forest. He gestured right this way, as if to say, “You ring the bell, then you take the walk.” Like any other American kids from the 1980s would have, we saw in him the mysteriously charming sensibility of Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid. Without waiting for further instructions, we pressed our right fists to our open left palms, nodded respectfully, and said, “HČčŸ±.” Then we set off into the trees.

The light transitioned instantly from bright day to shadow, and the sounds of the world were cut off by the lush insulation of Japanese oak, beech, birch, and maple, along with healthy stands of conifers. Mike wandered ahead to afford us both some solitude. The air was so clean and sweet, and the birds and flora were just foreign enough, that I felt like I had ducked through a magic wardrobe into an enchanted landscape. Every so often, I would notice a small white cloth ribbon tied in a conspicuous spot—on the twiggy branch of a gnarled old tree, around a sapling in a small copse of pines, on a moss-kissed rock, or near a particularly pastoral viewpoint along a stream the trail ran beside. Our sensei would later explain that the ribbons signified special features of nature identified as part of a god.

Winding my way uphill, I came to a rocky outcrop with a stream gushing and burbling down it. I don’t know why we humans love to see water succumb to gravity, but damn if we don’t go apeshit about it. I stood there and stared, rapt, for several minutes—at the innumerable points of light and ever morphing, dancing cataracts and pooling rivulets—as the tumbling waters sang the sweetest of songs. My eyes darted here and there as I attempted to catch every tiny delight on offer, but of course I had no chance of succeeding. Instead I let out a deep breath and allowed the sights, sounds, and scents of this holy place to wash over me. Ahhhh.

The benevolent massage to my senses lulled me into solace, the moment steeped in reverence for the realization that I could never fully comprehend all the information in just this one small part of nature. Letting go of the need to know everything felt right to me in a pretty deep way, like a first tiny step toward the adult knowledge we all aspire to. I was stone-cold epiphanized. I would later come to learn that this feeling of dumping the concerns from my head is exactly what Japanese tea gardens are designed to accomplish: to prepare the initiate to receive the wisdom of the ceremony with an open, unfettered mind.

Which meant I was perfectly set up for what was to come when we got to Damine.

According to legend, this high-altitude village ran into trouble hundreds of years ago when a woodsman accidentally chopped down one of the shogun’s trees. Word spread that the shogun, a powerful and deadly feudal warlord, was coming to investigate, and the villagers began to pray that they might be spared his wrath. A solemn promise was made that they would perform Kabuki every year to honor and thank Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, if she would only intervene.

Lo, the village was struck by an impossibly rare June blizzard, canceling the shogun’s flights (I assume?). The village was saved from punishment, and the people kept their promise, holding an annual festival celebrating Kabuki ever since. Our Illinois company was the first group of outsiders to perform in it.

This was an incredible joy and honor, not to mention a mind-blowing treat for a bunch of midwestern college students, most of whom had never left the U.S. (The flight to Japan was my first time on a commercial plane.) Our sensei had taught us a Japanese custom to follow when drinking sake, in which the guest fills the host’s cup, then the host refills the guest’s, then the guest the host’s, and so on. This way everyone enjoys an equal portion of good cheer. But he had forgotten to tell us that you flip your cup when you’ve had enough, so we were all pretty well cheered up for the main night of the festival.

Kumagai-san, who spent most of his time farming green tea with his family, led a number of priests dressed in masks and kimonos in performing a ritual harvest dance known as dengaku (“pleasure at the rice field”) around a large bonfire. I was enraptured by this communal observance of fertility, my fervor bolstered by the booming drums, the gyrating priests, and various celebrants circulating through the crowd of revelers and refilling our sake cups. The mood was raucous and primal, with the priests every so often sweep-kicking at the edges of the bonfire so that the crowd opposite would be showered in sparks, ensuring good health in the year ahead (so they said).

My friends and I came away from our time in Damine with a profound gratitude for the many gifts that had been bestowed upon us. We were mostly spared hangovers, thanks to the cleanliness of the sake we drank. (Life hack!) For me, celebrating with this community of farmers and giving thanks for the yearly bounty that nature provided was the beginning of a lifelong understanding that the mysteries of creation are much more apparent and accessible when standing outdoors in creation itself. Now that was a religious experience.

The post Nick Offerman’s Enchanting Journey into the Mountains of Japan appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

This is The Offerman Files, where actor, humorist, , and Nick Offerman shares tales of wild creatures, gassy adventures, and hitting his brother in the face with a fish.

Unfortunately, my delight was short-lived. The wind picked up, and I looked back toward our dock to see a dark thunderhead rolling in. Oh shit.

My anxiety was eased by the sight and sound of our rented pontoon boat, buzzing expediently in my direction like a big, boxy june bug, with my dad at the helm. With his trademark prudence, Dad had (a) known to watch for the storm, and (b) set out in front of it to collect his flower child. At first I stubbornly refused to be saved, but he wouldn’t give in, despite all the powers of persuasion that came with my bachelor of fine arts degree. So I hauled my kayak onto the pontoon and he throttled us back across the lake.

An absolutely opaque wall of rain was approaching and—here it is!—we were now being pissed on. Dad steered the june bug into the teeth of the wind as I perched on the prow, holding the running light like that in the gatefold to Led Zeppelin IV. I could see maybe 20 feet in front of me, squinting as hard as I could to look out for the shoreline or another boat as thunder cracked all around.

This was not the first time Dad and I had braved a lake-weather tantrum. The Offermans have been making an annual pilgrimage to Long Lost Lake in northwest Minnesota since I was five, and this treasured ritual remains the one part of the year that I don’t let Hollywood touch. The entire family drives about 12 hours from Illinois, while I fly from California to Fargo, North Dakota, and then drive east and north for 90 minutes until I reach the lake—a beautiful, evergreen-ringed body of water that covers nearly 500 acres. When we arrive, there’s always a moment after we’ve unloaded the groceries when we gaze out and feel the breeze and think to say something about the breathtaking scenery. But instead we slap our necks to kill the first of many large mosquitoes and say, “Son of a bitch! Where’s the spray?”

There are usually around 20 of us, spanning three or four generations, and we stay in a few ramshackle cabins that meet our basic needs: sleeping, cooking, and card playing. The real attraction is the lake, because we Offermans are plum nutty when it comes to messing about in boats. Fishing, tubing, paddling, sailing, or just floating—our family knows what we love to do, and we’ve found the perfect place to do it.

Our original guide on the lake is long gone now, alas, but I’ll never forget him: a bent, eldritch man named Bill, who I only ever saw in his 16-foot fishing skiff. This was during the mid-1970s, way before fancy, gadget-filled bass boats started showing up. Bill sat on a rear bench, where he ran everything using an assortment of Rube Goldberg rope and pulley systems. From this position he could drop or retrieve any or all of his three anchors, as well as adjust the speed on a large outboard motor and a smaller electric trolling motor, both of which were mounted behind him and could be retracted in shallow water.

Bill knew every divot in the lake bed where a walleye might lurk, and on outings together we tempted them with his favorite lure: a combination of bright beads, a small spinning spoon, and an Eagle Claw hook threading the fat half of a night crawler. Bill would finish off the rigging of each diminutive masterpiece with a thick splort of tobacco juice from the wad of longleaf in his cheek.

Dad’s first boat was like Bill’s, and as we kids got older, we added more thrilling options to the armada. But please hang on just a second for some important lessons on water safety and protocols. When you’re boating with the Offermans, you can do one of two things. You can fish, or you can fuck around. If you want to fuck around, you’ll be well advised to locate a safe distance from the people who are fishing. Our severe and somber intensity can be traced back to the early years, when we would fill a couple of coolers with our catch and take them home to our deep-freeze, providing dozens of frugal meals over the coming year.

While we still manage to take home some fish—and hold a big fish fry at the cabin on Tuesday nights—these days we usually catch and release. So one fun thing to do, if Dad isn’t looking, is to “release” your fish by lobbing it at your brother’s head. Ideally, it will softly slap across his cheek on its journey back to the lake.

Also, depending on the company assembled on your vessel, there are ways to enjoy a tinkle without heading back to shore. If everyone is OK with it, heads can be turned while the tinkler—say, that brother again—stands at the prow and waters the water. This is exactly when you want to “accidentally” drop a pair of pliers, catching them before they hit the bottom of the boat—which scares fish off—but rocking the boat as you violently “save the day” by catching the pliers. This gives your brother an intolerable fright and, you hope, causes him to wet his pants.

When I was only a wee first mate, my Grandpa Mike bought a little nine-foot aluminum dory from his brother, its blue paint peeling enough to reveal the white base coat. Over the years, we attached different electric trolling motors to the transom, but I preferred to row that thing all over the place. Mom and Dad would cut me loose, the only rules being: wear a life jacket and stay in sight of the cabin. That gave me about a square mile of lake to explore, and I’d throw my back into rowing at top child speed. Having an entire boat under my command was absolutely bewitching. The sounds of the water lapping against the hull and the breeze in the leaves when floating along the shore filled my ears as I scanned my surroundings for bald eagles, blue and gray herons, ospreys, and, most important, the mystical loons.

Those adventures came with some hard lessons about the speed of Mother Nature’s wrath. One day when I was ten, out in a rowboat without a care in the world, a darkness on the horizon quickly became a roiling mass of charcoal cumulonimbus rumbling over the lake. The wind whipped the chop up to a punishing three feet or so, much more force than I could hope to overcome. But still I tried, turning the boat into the swells and rowing against the growing whitecaps—even as they forced me ever farther from our dock and cabin.

Suddenly and cinematically, our muscular teenage neighbors Sven and Curt appeared out of nowhere, zipping neatly up next to me in a simple fishing boat with a beefy outboard motor. Sven nimbly vaulted into my boat, turned the bow toward the shore, and rowed like an Olympian, speeding us to safety in a matter of minutes. I was extremely grateful, as was my family, who had seen me in danger and were about to have kittens.

During our years on the lake, we’ve done our best to avoid trouble, but sometimes it sneaks up on you. On that day when Dad rescued me in my kayak, motoring the pontoon through the blinding downpour, I was glad that we were in this together. We’d always been a strong team, working in concert to achieve what was required, like one directing the other when backing a trailer into a shed.

This time was more fraught, but I wasn’t worried, because Dad was driving, and he doesn’t miss. Eventually, I was able to make out the horizontal band of forest along the shore, and we reckoned we were just a couple of hundred yards starboard from the dock. Cutting hard to port, we maintained a safe cushion along the shore until relief flooded our senses: we could see our dock. Once we’d securely lashed the pontoon in place, I suggested we remind ourselves why single-malt Scotch was such an invaluable elixir, because that boat ride was scary.

“I wasn’t worried,” Dad said. “You were navigating, and you don’t miss!”

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This is The Offerman Files, where actor, humorist, , and Nick Offerman shares tales of wild creatures, gassy adventures, and hitting his brother in the face with a fish.

I recently recorded the of , the latest work of nonfiction by Wendell Berry, the 88-year-old farmer from Henry County, Kentucky, and acclaimed essayist, poet, and novelist. If you don’t know Berry, some of the central themes in his decades of writing—he has published fifty-odd books—are an awareness of the sanctity of manual labor, and a reverence for the land and the small farmers who are its best stewards. Reading him has long offered me a therapeutic shortcut past a lot of wasteful, distracting consumerism, and to the wisdom of agrarianism, as well as the importance of fidelity to one’s household and community.

Then came The Need to Be Whole, which, in purely technical terms, rocked my fucking socks off. Berry examines our nation’s foundational race problem, which led Americans to increasingly view farming as beneath them—the labor of enslaved people. That persistent ethos, that we should strive to avoid the “dirty” work, has destroyed rural culture, fueled industrial farms, and divided the country.

At this point, you might be thinking: Where’s my Offerman column? Didn’t he write about farting last time? Yes, but you don’t get farting without food, and you don’t get food without farming, and so it naturally follows that I tell you about Berry, whose writing has undoubtedly been the greatest influence on my own small life. When I was given a book of his short stories in my twenties, I was dumbstruck by the weight he placed on the simple values of work ethic, kindness, and humility. His characters felt one step removed from my own staunch family of farmers and public servants. I was so powerfully gripped, I wrote him a letter asking him to let me adapt one (or more) of his stories for the stage or screen. To my delight, he typed out a congenial reply: “I like you, and I like your letter, but I consider the whole of my writing to be an ongoing project, and, as such, I’m not interested in seeing anybody else’s take on it.” I kept trying, and he always replied the same way, expressing friendship first, then issuing an avuncular denial.

Meanwhile, I consumed damn near every word he wrote. One direct, positive effect was a shift in my approach to Hollywood. I gave up the gambling lifestyle of auditioning for commercials in the slim hope of scoring a windfall paycheck, and instead embraced the steadiness of carpentry so I could pay my rent while waiting to audition for actual acting roles. For a while, I laid off the adaptation idea, though I continued to write Berry, offering the service of my back and arms, my spade, and my hammer in exchange for some face time with the wizard on the farm where he’d lived and worked since giving up his professorship at the University of Kentucky in 1977. I was like an obsessed fan, really. But if he didn’t want me pursuing him, then he shouldn’t have worn those fetching overalls and carried around that cute hoe.

Twenty years went by without much forward movement beyond our occasional letters, when, in 2015, out of the blue, I was put in touch with the filmmaker Laura Dunn, who was directing a documentary about Berry. She was game to let me help out as a producer, which finally got me in touch with the Berry family—by telephone. This was monumental.

I daresay I persuaded Mary Berry, executive director of the Berry Center and gatekeeper to her parents, Wendell and Tanya, to conditionally approve of me and nominate me for a coveted talk-to-Daddy-on-a-Sunday-afternoon slot, so I could interview him for my 2016 book, Gumption. I had made it.

Or so I thought, because the man himself was apparently still ambivalent about an actor who was interested in promoting Wendell Berry books (good), yet who also worked in television (bad). But as has happened so many times in my life, carpentry came to the rescue. The Berrys’ son, Den, happened to be familiar with issue number 222 of Fine Woodworking magazine, which featured me and my slab-leveling router jig on the cover. He piped up to Dad that I was fair to middling with a chisel, which was all Dad needed to hear. And so I finally spent a Sunday with Wendell and Tanya on their porch, admiring a few lambs and engaging in some (mostly) wholesome chin-wagging, culminating in Wendell walking me down to the barn, and that is not a euphemism.

Since then I have participated in a couple of projects with the Berrys, including my fulsome support of , a Henry County–based business that distributes grass-fed beef from local farmers to regional suppliers. They even trusted me enough to record audiobook versions of two Berry essay collections: 2017’s and, arguably his greatest hit, 1977’s , which basically means that I did in fact realize my longtime dream of sharing his writing with a wider audience.

But as I sat to record the 500-plus pages of The Need to Be Whole—20 hours of narration in all—I soon became aware that I was not up to this new task. The book is lousy with patient thought, common sense, and fair reasoning, all the things that have made me such a devoted student of Berry’s work. And I’m just not good enough. The sentences are scholarly, and with many, it took me a couple of tries (or more) before I felt that I’d clearly conveyed their meaning. But even then I never felt like I delivered any of them perfectly. Son of a bitch. I’m a heavily experienced actor, versed in all sorts of comedy and drama, not to mention assorted audiobooks and other narration and voice-over challenges, but performing this particular material had me feeling defeated.

Still I carried on, because I knew that Berry would say writing makes him feel the same. A book necessarily contains flaws. As he has taught me, all we can do is step up to the plate and take our best swings, remaining open to the world and the puzzles it brings our way.

That’s certainly how he lives, as I witnessed firsthand in March 2016, when I was asked to give a speech introducing Berry on the occasion of his receiving the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle in New York. I spoke a little too long, they gave him the thing, he offered some sagacious words of gratitude, and then we were a bit thronged for handshakes and photos, since there was nobody to whisk us away backstage. He lasted about five minutes before he leaned over and said, “You wanna get out of here and get some grub?” Somebody heroic got us a table down around Bleecker Street at a place called Hundred Acres.

It was maybe 10 P.M. as we strode toward the West Village. It was also Saint Patrick’s Day, so I was worried about my octogenarian companion, what with the uneven sidewalks and helter-skelter atmosphere that nightlife around Washington Square Park can give off. But of course it was thrilling to walk amid the cool evening with Berry, chatting and taking in the multicolored revelry. At the intersection of MacDougal and Third, we saw a tall, lanky person wearing only denim cutoffs, a rainbow wig, inline skates, and several strands of Christmas lights draped about their framework as they spun slow, rangy pirouettes from a distance, then rolled right past us. It was a pretty puckish performance, and as the faerie-like vision whirled by, Berry said, dreamily, “That was beautiful.”

The repast was similarly such a dream: pork chops and bourbon with Berry! He asked the young waitress, as she cleared our plates, what flavors of ice cream they had. She shone as she proudly recited that they had lavender plum and cucumber basil. He smiled at her generously and said, “Can I please have some vanilla?”

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This is The Offerman Files, where actor, humorist, , and Nick Offerman shares tales of wild creatures, gassy adventures, and hitting his brother in the face with a fish.

When I first learned that , the Peacock series I was working on, would be filming scenes in a cenote in the Dominican Republic, I said, “Hell yes!”—and then immediately cracked the ol’ dictionary app to look up what a cenote was. “Cenote (suh-noh-tee): A deep natural well or sinkhole, especially in Central America, formed by the collapse of surface limestone that exposes groundwater underneath.” Like I said, hell to the yes. After consuming many titillating photos online, I flew to the Caribbean robustly juiced with anticipation to experience this magical geological anomaly.

As we all know, the promised good times ahead often don’t turn out to be all that good. Or, more accurately, the highlights are rarely what we expect they’ll be. Before I knew it, I was schlepping down hundreds of dangerously slick, uneven stone steps into a cave system that was for sure spectacular. It had an otherworldly quality, kind of like we were spelunking into the digestive tract of an enormous rock giant. But I didn’t have much opportunity to enjoy the scenery, because I was focused on performing my role. Also, I was wearing extremely heavy makeup so that I appeared old, plus a wig. By the time I’d completed my descent and was “on set,” I was sopped with sweat. And I had an easy job compared with the crew, who had carried down the equipment and supplies.

The work was grueling for all of us, and came with a certain amount of forced tedium that can inspire horseplay. When we find ourselves stuck in such circumstances, left literally to our own devices, that’s precisely what happens. Tucked beneath a sheltering pine in a downpour? Sequestered in a lodge without a deck of cards? If you don’t count a skilled beatboxer among your number, then you, too, might turn to the original streaming service of making fart noises with your mouth, hands, armpits, elbows, or—if you have the talent—your actual flatulator.

It’s funny how an adventurous life teaches us this lesson time and again. We travel thousands of miles to experience the glory of nature, only for our dreams to be dashed by random factors: the weather, our fellow tourists, our upset stomachs, an insect. Whatever the thing we’re excited about—the summit, the powder run, the cenote—there’s a strong chance it will be a tad underwhelming, if not a complete bomb. Usually it doesn’t matter. If you’re lucky enough to have quality companions, you often find that the best moments arrive when you least expect them.

When I was a kid in Illinois, our family had a ramshackle fishing cabin known simply as “the cabin.” My favorite memories have nothing to do with fish or bears or the woods. Instead, I remember staying up for hours with my siblings and cousins doing funny voices, paralyzed with laughter at the stupidest bits. Lying awake in the dark when you’re supposed to be asleep, especially if other humorless people (parents) are trying to sleep nearby, can be an intoxicating circumstance for foolish humor. It’s like trying not to laugh at a fart in church, when the atmosphere of reverence and the fear of mortal punishment makes the temptation that much more urgent. Suddenly, church is no longer a bore.

The same rules apply on an overnight film shoot at a subterranean lake in the Dominican Republic. Something majestic about human nature allows us not only to survive tedium and stave off boredom, but to delight in the stupid diversions we come up with when we get saddled with a bout of waiting.

In our raft, there was just one problem: Cristin might have a golden ear, but how were the rest of us to judge whether the pitch I’d attempt to produce was the right one? This was easy, as it turned out: , a tuning app on my phone. One of its functions is to play out a selected tone as if you’d just plucked a string on your guitar. I tapped the G, and—tingggg 
 tingggg 
 łÙŸ±ČÔȔȔȔȔ—a high clarion sound rang out in the cave. This was quickly followed by exhausted giggles and titters from Cristin and the two other actors on our raft, William Jackson Harper and Luis Gerardo MĂ©ndez. I tapped it again—łÙŸ±ČÔȔȔȔȔ—and as the tone hung in the air, they waited for me to match it with a tunesome whine from my nether-trumpet.

And so I did, though not until my third try. It was unmistakably on pitch, with a slight tremolo.

“Holy shit, that was it!” exclaimed Will, and we all agreed, laughing and shaking our heads in disbelief, relieved that the contest had drawn to a triumphant close. I had some inexplicable need to legitimize this feat, and I rather hounded Cristin to Venmo me the $50. She did, and I felt darkly victorious, proud, and filthy at the same time, as though, like Cool Hand Luke, I had eaten 50 eggs in an hour.

PS: The next day, I awoke with a tinge of that benign shame that can follow a night of revelry in which you know you took things too far. You removed one garment too many, perhaps, or were a little too demonstrative with the pelvis on the dance floor. My light chagrin was assuaged when I opted to donate my winnings to the GI Research Foundation, and to this day my pride at my feat remains. It’s evident in my answer every time someone hears of my victorious, late-night, subterranean flourish and asks, “How did you do that?”

“I’m classically trained.”

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This is The Offerman Files, where actor, humorist, , and Nick Offerman shares tales of wild creatures, gassy adventures, and hitting his brother in the face with a fish.

Let me rewind a bit. I grew up in a rural part of Illinois, where I generally loved the animals I encountered around my home and on my grandparents’ farm, including a yearly crop of meat hogs. And while I was not a hunter myself, I valued the role of hunting and fishing in the subsistence economy of my family and community. As an adult, I dug into the writings of Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold, which further shaped my environmental ethos. But all that affection for other creatures went out the window when I suddenly found myself squaring off in a turf war with a raccoon.

The setting was a vacation house my wife and I had in a redwood forest of Sonoma County, California, where a large bed of hydrangea in the front yard was being aggressively excavated at night. It appeared as if a befuddled band of wee pirates had been digging blind for a long-lost treasure chest. I conferred with a botanist friend, and we agreed that it must be a raccoon hunting for delicious grubs.

I decided I’d catch and release, far away, this nocturnal mischief-maker, so I went to town and bought a large cage trap, intending to capture the little bugger and relocate it to the wilderness. I was actually looking forward to the project. It seemed like a fun challenge, something Huck Finn might enjoy. I did a bit of online research, but I also thought: Come on, I’m a country kid. How hard could it be to outsmart a so-called trash panda?

Extremely hard, it turns out. As I would later learn, studies show that —likely smarter than your cats, which are pretty darn smart. The various obstacles we’ve developed to keep them out of our human spaces, like , seem to have only enhanced the animal’s problem-solving skills. Perhaps this is how we ended up with that super raccoon in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 2018.

I set up my trap near the hydrangea-strewn battleground, baited it with peanut butter on bread, and turned in for the night. When I came out to check the trap the next morning, the bait was gone, but the trap stood unsprung. Son of a bitch. Rocky Raccoon had drawn first blood. I immediately became fixated with a visceral desire to destroy—um, I mean, gently transplant—this charming rascal.

It took me three more nights of escalating techniques before I was able to catch something. My most ambitious innovation was camouflaging the entire cage structure, especially the wire-grid floor. I covered it in mulch and forest detritus, which I then compressed and covered again with another layer to match the ground surrounding the cage site. I performed all manoeuvres (we’re into some MI6-level stuff now, hence the British spelling) wearing gloves, so as to leave no scent on the apparatus.

I also upped my baiting game by leaving a trail of a few pungent crumbs leading into the trap: old bacon, a chicken leg, and the payoff prize—half a piece of pepperoni pizza. Inside the tantalizing slice was a wire securing it to the mechanism that released the latch and sprang the door shut.

I awoke on the fourth morning before the sun was up, feeling like a kid at Christmas. Within minutes I was out in the yard, skipping to my trap because I could see from the house that the door had been sprung shut. My elation was quickly quashed, however, as I drew near and realized that I had not trapped a raccoon but a creepy old possum. Not only that, but the damn thing was dead. Maybe the chicken was bad? The critter wasn’t breathing, and it didn’t stir when I gave the cage a brusque kick.

There was little choice but to get rid of it in the woods. But as I picked up the trap, the animal suddenly hissed and cowered back away from me. I very nearly soiled my britches as I shouted and dropped the cage, because of course the goddamn thing was merely playing possum. Some country boy I turned out to be. I had seen many possums in my day, including a spooky one in Silver Lake that my friend Pat insisted had my face, but I’d never had occasion to see one pull its namesake stunt. After checking my shorts for terror stripes, I spoke a few select, congratulatory words to the possum and set it free where we stood, watching it haul ass out of sight.

I resumed my mission, which by now had become a blinding obsession. I set my jaw, cleaned out the trap, and re-created my successful combination of baits and set design, adding some strategically located trash spilling from a “tipped over” can. Frustration ensued for another four nights. With each failed effort, I adjusted and polished my techniques and tried experimenting with different locations in the yard. It got to the point where, with each new layer of branches, moss, and tree duff, I had nearly fabricated a large burrow. Then, the final touch: I swapped out the pizza for a smoked pork-chop bone, which still had a few nibbles of meat left on it.

Ha ha! Another skipping morning traipse out to the tripped trap, and this time I could see, even from a good distance, that it was no stupid possum. Suck on that, Mr. Raccoon, you fool! Who’s the dummy n—oh, shit. I had a fox.

The beast was gorgeous: mottled, with patches of silver and red. I was spellbound. Then it growled at me. The noise sounded like an idling chainsaw burning an overly rich fuel mix. This magnificent mammal was letting me know that it would like to vamoose, and I was only too happy to oblige. I released it on the spot and watched as it vanished into the trees.

After another week of dogged fidelity to my project, I finally trapped my prey. And it was even a raccoon this time! I caught a large boar (male), then a sow (female), then a smaller boar. I drove them some 15 to 20 miles away, to a remote spot, where I let them run free. I felt ten feet tall with triumph.

Later I was informed that relocating raccoons is illegal in some states, due to concerns that include the spread of disease and disturbance of ecosystems. In California, the Department of Fish and Wildlife mandates that the animals be “humanely euthanized or released in the immediate area.”

What? Murder the things? No way. Where’s the fun in that?

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This is The Offerman Files, where actor, humorist, , and Nick Offerman shares tales of wild creatures, gassy adventures, and hitting his brother in the face with a fish.

I powerfully admire Thoreau, but I wasn’t angered. Instead, I wondered if this guy was aware of the naturalist’s storied toughness—his inner circle of friends knew him to hike for many miles, often with wet feet, and to have little use for those who couldn’t keep up—and if he believed that Thoreau would have cared much about impressing his peers with manly accomplishments. But I also wondered if I, too, might be ridiculed by the “people of the outdoors” for my own version of adventure. Am I doing this wrong? Maybe. I don’t have a story involving walking home to my mom, but I do have a tale of emasculation.

In the late 2000s, I was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, commuting around 11 miles by bicycle every day to Red Hook, Brooklyn, where I was building my first cedar-strip canoe in a rented workshop. (If I’m not employed at my first love, acting, then I’m likely engaged in my other first love, woodworking.) I was pedaling a Specialized Tarmac, usually in full cycling regalia, and relishing the opportunity to be out in the weather while getting in two killer workouts a day. There, in the most densely populated city in the country, I would fly all the way down the Hudson River bike path before cutting across the tip of downtown to catch the wide-open bike lane over the Manhattan Bridge. Some days I would stop at the pinnacle of the bridge and watch storm clouds moving in over the harbor, an edifying experience unavailable to the myriad souls in cars and subway trains. (You have to leave a little room for poetry, I guess, like a real candy-ass.) Once in Brooklyn, I’d cut south along the water to reach the shop.

Much of the route was so amazingly free of automobiles that I would often fall into a meditative reverie, zipping along in silence, focusing on my form, my breathing, my pumping legs—always trying to shave seconds off my roughly 45-minute time as a matter of pride and principle, and to widen the gap over the next best method of getting there: two trains and a bus, which took an hour. This was just basic New York City bragging-rights stuff, knowing inside and out the most efficient and economical route to get from one part of the five boroughs to another.

I especially loved the mile along Furman Street, which runs under the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway and was frequently deserted. Here I could truly lose myself in the pleasures of speed. Imagine my shock, then, when on a crisp 45-degree December morning, a Chrysler 300 full of young men and women materialized next to me, and the passenger-side male in the back seat loudly and cleanly spanked me. Whap!

I’m telling you, he absolutely nailed my medium-large and spandexed ass, perched tantalizingly atop my seat. The jarring blow goosed me forward on my bike, while his crew hooted, as if a winning goal had been scored.

Then the car sped away, nearly drowning out the triumphant cheers and laughter.

I veered off the street and barely managed not to crash. Rage and humiliation washed over me. Only through luck had I managed to avoid a broken limb or worse. I was badly scared and welling up with tears.

Cut to some months later, and I had moved back home to Los Angeles, which, somewhat counterintuitively, is a substantially worse city to traverse by bicycle than New York. The streets of L.A. are wider, the population much more spread out, and the weather more conducive to cycling, to the point of being laughable. But there are very few good bike lanes, and getting to many places involves what we outdoor journalists call “uphill sections.”

Nevertheless, when I was cast in a Comedy Central show that was shooting in Burbank, about a 30-minute ride north of the woodshop I had opened in Atwater Village, I was hell-bent on commuting by bike as much as possible. My route required using a long stretch of San Fernando Road, a somewhat muscular thoroughfare with two lanes of traffic in each direction and a solid row of parked cars along each side. My best option was to stick as close as possible to the parked cars, maintaining laser vigilance in case a door was flung open.

Some drivers were extremely angry about having to share the road with a cyclist, so I was deferential with my gestures, erring on the friendly side with a Hello! wave or a palms-up gesture meant to convey: Hey, why don’t we try to make space for each other? I am actually a pretty friendly guy.

Still, horns would blare, and some geniuses would swerve at me slightly. Even so, none of this prepared me for the evening when a man cut me off with his Corolla and got out in a pugilistic fury, ready to throw down over the temerity I had displayed by riding in “his” space. (The nerve!) Frightened, I loudly but carefully asked him if he really wanted to fight. He screamed in reply, “Get off the fucking road!” before jumping back behind the wheel and zooming away. Fortunately, the Comedy Central show didn’t get renewed, so we were denied the opportunity for a rematch and possible second spanking.

The particular stripes of dumb in these two anecdotes strike me as having originated in the same fragile place as the urge to call a great naturalist and writer a candy-ass: A place of insecurity, fear, disappointment, and pain. A place of weakness. I sense that demeaning podcast hosts and cyclist-hating drivers come from a culture of bullying and aggression, one that so often misunderstands our need for outdoor adventure. For me, getting on a bike or into a canoe, or even just taking a hike, is not something I do to impress anybody with my toughness or masculinity. Quite the opposite: it’s what I do to escape those kinds of domestic and cultural stressors, to try and approach the world with empathy despite my human propensity to cause others pain.

If it’s intrepid wilderness adventuring you seek, I humbly encourage you to read some Thoreau, especially , which includes some deep trekking and even deeper thinking. If Henry is to be labeled a candy-ass, then I can only aspire to be called the same.

Nick Offerman is an actor, a woodworker, and the author of five books, including, most recently, .

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