Editorial-Opinion October 2016

Read Ecclesiastes 11, and you will find an important verse: “Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days.” 

Now imagine what this has to do with the best dove shoot I have been to in a decade. My point here is that my experience is not noteworthy; rather, it is common. But most of us don’t give ourselves credit for the ripple effect of good we do; good we fail to notice in ourselves. Today, I want to notice. 

It takes a lot to make a good dove field, beginning with the land, and then the field prep. The Darden Dove Shoot is a good one because of many.

First and foremost there is Claibourne Darden and his wife Anita, who welcome a group to their farm each opening day of dove season. There is Wade Palmer, of Palmer Equipment Co. in Washington, Ga., who supplies bottled Palmer water for the hunters along with chairs and a vehicle to help transport hunters. There is Matt Harper, of Fat Matt’s Rib Shack, who brings his mouth-watering goodness from Atlanta. There’s retired Marine Corps Lt. General Buck Bedard, who comes from Las Vegas and donates a shotgun for a fund-raising raffle. The list of individuals who give their time and effort goes on—please see the article on page 30.

We mention these minions and benefactors because you need to know something about the making of the bread, and those who have so freely and graciously cast it upon the waters. 

Mixed in amongst the loaves of bread this effort has cast out, there are three pieces who I want to highlight here. 

First, you need to know about a group of adults and kids called LOST, the Lake Oconee Shooting Team. A decade ago, a kid working the gun range and shooting with the LOST team won a place on the USA Shooting Team and subsequently competed in three Olympics, winning gold medals in two Olympics. 

Officially, he is Vincent Hancock, but when I was shooting with him, he was just Vinny, and I was Mr. Burch. He was a great kid from Eatonton, who has now shot and traveled the world, who eventually became a world champion because adults formed and nurtured that team and that kid. Vinny won first place in the world again two weeks ago, on Sept. 17, in Italy.

A decade ago at the Darden Dove Shoot, I was also Mr. Burch to a precocious little blonde bird retriever named Samantha Simonton, from Gainesville. 

Sam graduated the next year from retriever to being a shooter on the field, and she took her first dove. From that start, to say that Sam has moved on in her shooting is quite an understatement. This past July 27 at the Olympic Shooting headquarters in Colorado Springs, Sam won first place in the J2 Category (15-17 years of age) in Olympic Skeet. 

And that brings me to Grace Seay. A picture of her and her dad Phillip is included here. Grace is showing off her first dove taken at our shoot, one of four, while her father got his limit. Will she become an Olympic star, a standard bearer for the USA? 

Time will tell, but she is off to a great start. Phillip is from Sharpsburg, and he said he drives so far to this field because he knows it is a safe environment for families 

“I don’t have to worry about getting shot, course language on the field or drinking,” he said. “That’s why I drive so far.”

I remember my first dove, and I am not an Olympic shooter. But the effort put forward by so many mentors and supporters—on dove fields, on playing fields, in scouts, in bass clubs, in archery clubs, in so many programs that typically go largely unrecognized; those programs and those men and women create and strengthen and enrich the fabric of those individual lives, as well as the life of our country. 

So I want to use this space to personally thank those who have contributed so much to our dove shoot, and to show them that our bread is, indeed, returning. But in a much larger sense, I also want to tip my hat to each of you who is a coach, a mentor, a provider, a contributor, a giver to an effort. You are producing a positive result, so much larger than any one of us can see. In its greatest and largest definition, this support is truly an act of faith that produces amazing and unforeseeable fruit. 

To each of you, to those I know well and those I will never know, I say thank you. And I say, keep baking that bread.