Ted Trueblood was a true westerner who pined for the open country and big skies of his native Idaho. So it stands to reason that the six years he served as Field & Stream’s fishing editor in the magazine’s New York City offices were to him, a form of indentured servitude. In 1947, he abruptly quit and said he was “going home to hunt and fish.”

The editor at the time, Hugh Grey, didn’t want to lose such an all-around talent and asked what he could do to keep him on staff. Trueblood said he would mail in a column once a month, but that he would never again set foot in New York, a promise he kept for the next 35 years until his death in 1982.

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I have an agreement with Ed Zern, the Field & Stream philosopher, by which I, too, am permitted to philosophize once during each ninth year—when the sum of the last two digits is nine. I got to write the profound department once in 1918, 1927, ’36, ’45, ’54, and ’63. In return for this concession, I correct the grammar and spelling in Zern’s manuscripts. Now it is 1972 and my turn again. I proceed herewith.

When my wife and I lived in Pleasantville, New York, the neighbor across the street retired one September. The other neighbors said he was worth a million dollars. I don’t know about that. He would only say that he had worked hard and made some good investments and now he intended to enjoy life. In November, two months after he quit work, we had a heavy snow. He started to shovel it off his walk, had a heart attack, and died.

I immediately quit my job in the city, to which I had been commuting five days each week, and returned to the West, determined to hunt, fish, and write about it. Why work hard and save money and then die before I had the chance to enjoy the things for which I had been saving it? The very idea was insane.

Of course, nonwriters might assume that writing is work. Not so. We writers know better. On days when we’re too tired to hunt or fish, play golf or go girl watching, we lie back in an easy chair with a scratch pad in our laps, doze, and stare at the ceiling, Occasionally we scribble down a few words for which editors pay us incredible sums, and when our wives and children disturb our daydreaming we run them the hell out and tell them we’re working.

Those were the days! For twenty-five years, I did just that and I told my friends and eager editors that I refused to work—pardon me, write—for money I didn’t need. Then I forgot the lesson I had learned in Pleasantville. I had one boy in college and one in high school and the same problems every man has. I got to working harder and harder and neglecting regular exercise. My diet wasn’t all it should have been. I smoked and drank too much. But worst of all, I worried.

I was asking for it, and I got it—a heart attack, and a good one. And let me tell every man who is heading toward one by the same route, it will scare you as you have never been scared before.