Total Outdoorsman Challenge host T. Edward Nickens has earned himself an invite to the event crew’s annual shrimp-boil-and-inarticulate-grunt festival in September. Normally, a moniker like “T. Edward” would make a fella have to earn his way to the feast by performing completely asinine acts of recklessness, but Ol’ T. Eddie pulled it off with just a pen: His story, “The United States of Skills,” in the May 2009 issue of Field & Stream sent me straight back to Route 17, waiting by the mailbox for my monthly escape.

After a summer of watching me, his pre-teen neighbor, fling arrows in groups that resembled a pattern of bird shot, he pulled himself away from building lure molds to give some much-needed advice to this fledgling archer.