Amazon Woman

by Brett Miller, outdoor writer for St. Joseph News Press 

     About a month ago I went to interview Ellen Benitz at Coleman Elementary School.  She is the librarian, and I was expecting to sit down with some kind of testosterone ridden, gun-toting Amazon woman. 
     It wasn't that she sounded like a testosterone-ridden, gun-toting Amazon woman on the phone; she sounded like a normal woman.  It was just because I was an idiot and I didn’t know what to think.  I had no idea what kind of person the woman on the other end of the phone would be. 
     I was story about the National Wild Turkey Federation's Women in the Outdoors program and Mrs. Benitz was the director of the local chapter's program.  The Women in the Outdoors program educates women in a variety of outdoor related topics from bird watching to how to operate guns. 
     What helped mold my stereotype was the question, "Exactly what kind of woman finds interest in learning how to shoot a gun?" (I think that's where testosterone-ridden and gun-toting came from).
     What I did find when I interviewed Mrs. Benitz is pretty much exactly what she is - a librarian.
     No uni-brow.
     No bulge on her back from a hidden .45-caliber hog leg.
     Not even a mean glare or anything.
     She basically looked like an ordinary, average wife and mother because that's what she is.
     This intrigued me.
     I did the story, which was a preview of the Platte Purchase Chapter's workshop this week-end at Camp Geiger, but I wanted to take it further.  I wanted to check it out.
     I am a guy.  That means I couldn't go, so I needed a way to get into the workshop, but indirectly.  But how? I needed to find a woman who would go tot he workshop and write about it for me.  But who? 
     AH-HA!!!
     My mom.
     Why not?  The woman is one of the biggest prisses I know.  If I sent her through the workshop and she had fun, it would prove that the workshop is for average, everyday women.
     OK, I take that back.  She's not one of the biggest prisses I know. To her credit, she has lived in a house with all men for the last 27 years.  And the last 18 years she's been outnumbered in the household 4-to1.  You see, my mom  explains it as trying to have a little girl three times in a row, then giving up.  She never got to do any of the "little girl" things.  She ended up doing the "little boy" things like youth baseball, and hunting for night crawlers.
     When we went camping, she was the one who stayed by the camper and worked on her suntan all day.  She rarely went fishing with us, and when she did she sat on a blanket and read a book.
     My dad and uncle were members of the Pony Express Bass Club when I was younger and they had a father-son tournament and a husband-wife tournament every year.  I always assumed the husband-wife thing was more nerve-racking, because my dad and uncle always looked way more strung out and irritable after the husband-wife tournament.
     That must have been bad because the father-son tournament meant standing in a small, confined area all day and trying to fish with three little idiots, all under 10-years-old, running and jumping all over the boad.
     So my mom isn't the most outdoor-sport type person in the world, and that was perfect, provided she agreed to go.
     When I asked her, she glared at me with that same look she gave me when I told her I was getting a tattoo.  You know, the "I brought you into this world without a tattoo, and I can sure as heck take you out without one" look. 
     But anyway, I put on all my charm and assured her she didn't have to touch a gun if she didn't want to.   So she felt like, because I'm her son and she loves me, she had to do it.  Plus, the more I talked to her, the more interested she got in it.  She was looking forward to going.
     So this weekend, my mom is out at Camp Geiger taking the Women in the Outdoors workshop.  She chose classes like bird watching and outdoor cooking instead of guns,  but that's all right.  At  least I got her out there.
     So check things out next week.  My mom will be a guest writer, and you can hear all about her experiences at the workshop.
     Oh yeah, by the way, I still don't have a tattoo.