A trail of green and gray runs a dusky line across the middle of my left forearm, a mark indelible as a tattoo and integral to my being as my callouses and bruises from baseball. A mark I earned from hours of pain, and one I will carry for the rest of my life with pride. It is my bow scar.
I have been a longbow archer for years, since my father first let me try shooting a bow and arrow when I was about eight years old. One lucky bulls-eye that day made an addict, a junkie for fletch and feather itching for his next hit. My obsession for getting an arrow airborne overrode any concern for methodology until I learned the difference between compound and traditional bows. Once I learned a compound bow holds the string back for you, at least to some degree, I lost interest in modern archery techniques and dug deep into traditional archery forms. I can still remember my first D-Flex longbow, made by PSE, called the Legacy. Slick black with red wood in the grip, I put hundreds of arrows through it before I found a crack in the handle and had to send it back. They sent another one, and it developed the same problem. I thought my overlong draw was the issue, but a few years ago I tried to find the bow online and did not come up with a single one. It would seem the design flaw extended far beyond my problems.
My next chance to own a longbow came after my brother and I discovered PVC bow making. One heat gun purchase later found me on the ice cold floor of the garage melting a length of pipe to make a bow. The limbs and grip took shape beneath my over-eager, slightly incompetent fingers. The finished bow was not well balanced or perfectly symmetrical, and some of the dirt from the garage floor made it into the white PVC, but it held a string and cast an arrow, more than enough for me to take on a real target.
It also turned out to be almost more bow than I could handle. I made a string myself out of old string my grandfather had used for trot lines. I twisted two strands into a bowstring, waxed it with Crisco, and clipped on a brass string nock. Slipping the string into place took as much strength as a store bought bow, bespeaking a hard shooting weapon.
My first shots still stand out in my mind as pure success juxtaposed with pure surprise. After stringing the bow and feeling the suppleness in its limbs, I figured it would have a respectable punch, but realistically did not expect it to have the same kind of power my professionally made recurve did.
My first shot taught me better. The cedar shaft jumped from the fiberglass, its crimson feathers spiraling. The silence of the bow almost allowed me to hear the hiss of the shaft as it buried its field point in my target, a one foot by two foot square of multiple card board sheets glued together. Add to this the string slapped my forearm with vicious force, and I knew this do-it-yourself project was a complete success. The welt rising from where the string bit me hurt, to be sure, but my pride soared, and repeated shots yielded a form correction, and that meant more bulls-eyes and fewer slaps.
I shot that bow for weeks, learning the art of shooting the arrow of my knuckles. The wooden and aluminum shafts left black scores across my bow hand, proof that I was constantly shooting. But those marks were far less alarming than the welts that grew into blisters, and the blisters that erupted after an especially viscous bite from my bow string. I also began to wear the skin off my pointer finger on my string hand, and soon enough it also started to bleed. I shot so much my arms weakened, and any archer can tell you tired arms mean poor form. Unfortunately, being a hard head as well as an obsessive archer, I refused to end on a bad shot, or a bad slap either, so I kept shooting until sunset or suppertime drove me inside.
One afternoon the blisters began to run with blood, a phenomenon I had dealt with before, but this time something felt different. Looking down at my bow, I realized the limbs and grip were spattered with my skin and my blood. The string also had a red stain where there had been white before where my fingers were bleeding; my bow dyed with the fruit of my limbs and fingers. My archer’s heart swelled with pride, although my more practical side realized just how much I had been shooting that year, and somewhere in my head a voice whispered, “Your mom is gonna notice that blood.”
The voice was right.
To this day, I am not sure when or how she stopped to look at my bow long enough to realize what was splattered all over it, but notice she did, and at that point my parents asked me to wear my vambrance. The open weal on my arm, which had turned green at this point, probably also helped give me away. But the damage was done, or the medal awarded, depending on who’s asking. And my efforts yielded some nice results. A few weeks after my first adventure, I got a chance to try my bow on some 3D targets at a friend’s range. Using wooden shafts and my PVC bow I buried arrows so close together in a model deer you could cover the tips with a quarter. My scar, which at this point the string rarely if ever marked, was now a badge of competence, a graduation certificate into an echelon of archers who use eye and hand to project shafts with lethal, instinctive efficiency.
I kept shooting that bow, firing to the point my home made string began to fray, and I had to buy a new set of shafts. Weeks turned into months and spring gave way to summer. I still remember the heat on the last day. Sweat poured down with the sun while I plugged away at a cardboard target in the side yard, when the bow bent back like a peeled banana in my hands, the string draped over my arm like a dead snake. I stood there a moment, nonplussed at what had just happened and reeling at the friend I lost.
Future attempts to make a PVC bow ended in failure, until I got myself an English longbow, a fearsome weapon that can cast heavy shafts close to 200 yards. It too has a viper in its string, but now when its fangs caress my scar, the old callus only glow a dull angry red, a reminder of the bow I earned my scars on. My fingers have toughened to the point that they only tingle unless I shoot over three hundred arrows in one day, but they too bear the marks of my old PVC longbow, and the rattler that lay coiled in its limbs.
Freedom's Kindling 