Large Fierce Mammal

The picture at left is of a new in the package Coghlan’s Brand machete, available as I type from the outdoor sports and leisure section of your nearest Canadian Tire store for $14.99 before tax. It’s posted here merely to illustrate that the machete is an inexpensive and easily acquired item of equipment pretty much everywhere that matters. This is not a warning against machete proliferation, encouragement that you run right out and buy one, an endorsement of the Coghlan’s brand of anything, nor of Canadian Tire as your best go to place to buy machetes, tires, or anything else. What it is about, as usual here at LFM, is education in the interests of clear headed, self-reliant, reality based thinking aimed at a long and happy life. So with this in mind, good Reader, read on.

South of the US border into many parts of Mexico, Central America, and much of South America, the machete is carried by every adult male. The same applies to large parts of Africa, notwithstanding the ubiquity of the AK47 rifle. Essentially a very simple large knife, with a broad spring steel blade commonly ranging from 18 to 24 inches, the machete is simply hafted with slabs of plastic or wood riveted to either side of a full tang, is as simple as simple gets to maintain, and can be obtained or replaced at exceedingly low cost. It represents an all purpose cutting tool, most particularly in places where poverty has limited options down to subsistence levels. The kind of places where, to quote Chris Cornell in You Know my Name, you need to “Arm yourself because no one else here will save you.”

I have personally carried and used machetes on many trips into the bush where they have served me well clearing brush from campsites, harvesting an assortment of wood products for the fire, clearing lanes of fire or visibility on hunts – all the non-weapon jobs you could ask of a cutting tool. With its long broad blade, it serves well in place of a purpose built draw knife for debarking and shaping shafts and walking sticks made from properly sized saplings. It certainly can’t completely replace a good axe in roles where only an axe will do, but in the hands of a thinking man of limited means, or for whom the weight and versatility of his gear matters, the machete has no equal.

And then there are those times when situations evolve so that the presence of the machete assumes a different tone. I recall a brief conversation I had long ago, with two males who paddled their canoe up to speaking distance while I was engaged in preparing a camp fire on the shore of a remote and uninhabited island on which I intended to spend the night. From their vantage a short distance off shore, they began looking around and asking questions in a manner, and of a kind, that under the circumstances led me to certain suspicions about them. I picked up my machete from where it lay previously unseen on a rock next to me, stood up to face them, and continued with trimming tinder off a larger dead branch as I answered their latest question with one of my own – if they were camping nearby since their canoe seemed so lightly loaded. Their demeanor took a turn for the silent at that point, in favour of a departure approaching canoe racing standards. To paraphrase the late Alphonse Capone, you can get much farther with a kind word and a machete than you can with a kind word alone, and I have never felt I dd any disservice to the two men in that canoe by taking their reaction to the appearance of my machete, wielded peacefully and for an understandably legitimate camping purpose in the midst of what was, on the surface, a polite and civil conversation, as evidence that their intentions were less than honourable.

Remember, good Reader, that I speak of days long before now, before most would look upon such a thing as a machete and see only a weapon of mass destruction. An instrument of mayhem that exists for no other purpose. Back then, whether or not an implement was perceived as a weapon had as much to do with the intentions of the observer as it did the behaviour of its bearer, and possibly moreso. Think on that a moment, and you will realize that the only thing that’s changed since then is the nearly universal adoption of a state of incipient victimhood that can only be assuaged by the blunting of all sticks, and the breaking of all rocks into particles too small to deliver more than an invigorating sting when thrown.

I made reference to a machete owned first and foremost as a weapon a year ago in my article titled In Ferro Veritas – Chapter the Third, and in that case the item was part of the bedside arsenal of a woman who is both a senior living alone on a remote dirt road, and one who has decided not to be a helpless victim who comes prepackaged in a state of surrender. She is amply aware that she fits the profile for home invasion, and that when seconds count, the police are minutes away; all this predicated on the presumption that a successful attack would leave her able to make a call for help in the first place. No surprise at all that she intends to go down swinging so that at least one of her attackers will be leaving a lot of his DNA at the scene, whether in the form of blood or body parts. Better yet is the scenario that suddenly turns the seemingly helpless and outnumbered target from a sure thing into something the attackers want most to be as far away from as possible.

The “Lost Heads” reference in the title today is used with apologies to Master At Arms James A. Keating, who offers his own course of instruction in the darker side of the machete under that same title. The foregoing is offered for your edification in pursuit of a long and fruitful life dear Reader.