The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw

The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw

Hilarious and heartwarming stories of outdoor mishaps and misadventures from the beloved five-time New York Times bestselling humorist, Patrick F. McManus, "a writer who makes people laugh out loud, hard." ( The New York Times ) Patrick F. McManus’s gut-busting observations on camping, fishing, and hunting reach ridiculous proportions in the twenty-six stories collected in The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw. Here McManus confronts his fear of the newest boating technology and his best friends' grandmother's fear of bears. When you're out in the woods with McManus and his friends and family, human behavior is even wilder than the wilderness. Including such classic stories as "Whitewater Fever" and "Never Cry 'Arp!'" The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw is a delightful treasury of McManus's favorite (mostly outdoor) adventures with friends. His stories explore the human capacity to laugh in the face of misfortune, such as "The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw" (Goombaw is Eddie Muldoon's grandmother) and "The Fried Flies, Please, and Easy on the Garlic," a story of dinner-party adversity: [CODE] "Martha starts. 'I do hope you won't take offense, Mr. McGinnis, but I view hunters as the lowest form of life, not excluding bacteria and algae.' 'No offense taken,' I reply, glad for an excuse to ignore my vichyssoise, which I view as the lowest form of food, not excluding lichens and boiled beets." [CODE] American humorist Patrick McManus could make being snagged by a fishhook funny, and in fact, he does. In his story "Getting It in the Ear," he writes, "One of the more interesting things that can happen to an angler is to get a barbed hook sunk into his hide. Such is the horror and fascination of the experience that many an angler has contemplated giving up his regular work and hitting the lecture circuit to entertain audiences around the nation with a dramatic rendering of his ordeal." After all, he argues, it's the misery endured that defines the sportsman, not the fish caught or the game shot. McManus's understated, matter-of-fact vignettes--infused with amusing glimpses of life's lesser-known eternal truths-- will make you laugh. Praise for Patrick F. McManus “Everybody should read Patrick McManus.” ― The New York Times Books Review “Patrick McManus is a treasure.” ― The Atlantic “Hilarious.” ― Los Angeles Times “A style that brings to mind Mark Twain, Art Buchwald, and Garrison Keillor.” ― People “Funniest guy in a flannel shirt” ― Kirkus Reviews “Gentle, ironic, self-deprecatory wit from the popular western humorist. There’s some of Bill Nye here and more still of Mark Twain.” ―Booklist “Laugh-out-loud funny.” ―School Library Journal “Today’s most gifted outdoor humorist.” ―Detroit Free Press “The funniest writer around today―indoors or outdoors.” ―The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Patrick F. McManus (1933-2018) is the author of novels, plays, and more than a dozen collections of his humor columns from Outdoor Life and other magazines. He has sold roughly six million copies of such bestselling books as They Shoot Canoes, Don't They? ; The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw ; and A Fine and Pleasant Misery . The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw By Patrick F. McManus Holt Paperbacks Copyright © 1990 Patrick F. McManus All right reserved. ISBN: 9780805013405 Night The Bear Ate Goombaw, The Sequences I have long been a student of sequences, probably because of my upbringing on a farm and, perhaps the larger influence, my association with my stepfather, Hank. My mother remarried several years after my father died, and Hank came to live with us on our Idaho farm. He was a city person, at one time the manager of a minor-league baseball team who had spent most of his working life in the grocery business. You would expect that someone in the grocery business would know about farming and sequences, but both forever remained a mystery to Hank.What Hank seemed never able to grasp was that on a farm you simply don't go out and do a piece of work. No, the first thing you do is determine the lengthy sequence of activities necessary even to begin the job. Then you realize that the sequence of preparatory activities is so long you will never get to the intended task. So you go fishing instead. This had been my family's approachto farming for generations, and it worked fine, but Hank could just never get the hang of it.One day Hank said to me, "Pat, let's take off the day and go fishing up Ruby Crick.""Sounds good to me," I said. "Let's go.""Okay. But first we have to fix that hole in the pasture fence. Won't take but twenty minutes."My shoulders sagged. "Hank," I said. "Either we go fishing or we fix the fence. Which is it?""Both," he said. "First we fix the fence, then we go fishing. Now go get the wire stretcher and we'll get started."I saw that it was hopeless. No matter how often I had tried to explain sequences to Hank, he could never grasp their significance. "The wire stretcher's