Tenderfoot Diaries

They say the first one always holds a special place in your heart.  I currently write for five blogs,  two of which deal with the outdoors, but the first outdoor blog I ever wrote, the Hunt Smart, Think Safety Blog, will always be special to me.   I did a lot of good writing there, if I do say so myself, but more importantly it is where I learned that I might have a place in the outdoor world, and where I discovered that I did have more to say about outdoor issues than I’d ever suspected I would.

I started writing the blog in 2006.  When I started I didn’t know what it would be.  I wasn’t even sure I knew enough to write more than one post.  The company was new, the product was new, and I was brand new to the outdoor world.  The fact that I was even attempting to write a blog about outdoor subjects filled me with equal amounts of excitement and anxiety.  What if no one wanted to read what I wrote?  What if the outdoor community thought I was a fraud?  What if the blog was no good?

In any case, I had a brand new job, and part of that job was publicizing an outdoor products company, and part of publicizing the company was writing this blog.  So I wrote and I read a lot of other blogs and I left comments and slowly, very slowly, I started to carve a niche for myself in the outdoor world.  I also slowly came to love that world.  It wasn’t a world to which I had ever expected to belong, but I gradually started to feel that I had a place there.  No one, trust me, was more surprised by that than I was.

Unfortunately, almost three years to the day after I wrote my first post on the blog, it became apparent that the company wouldn’t survive the economic downturn.  The decision was made to shut things down, and the blog went dark.  It has lingered in a kind of limbo these last few months, but I was informed today that the domains have been released.   Pretty soon the blog will go dark for good.

When you put your heart and soul into something, and when you do what you know is good work, you want to believe that it will outlast you.  I guess I’m now receiving a lesson in how impermanent the Internet can be.  As proud as I am of the work I did on the Hunt Smart, Think Safety Blog and as much as I wish it could be available for years to come, it won’t be, and nothing I do can change that.

I guess in the end all I can do is be grateful that I got to write that blog in the first place.  Everything else I’ve done in the outdoor world, the Outdoor Bloggers Summit, this blog, the friends I’ve made, all stems from that blog.  Without it, none of the rest of this might ever have happened.   As much as it pains me to see that blog go dark, and to see all the work I did disappear, I still have no regrets.    Sometimes what you write on the Internet is fleeting, but that doesn’t make the writing any less worth doing.

Besides, if I want to write something that will be around forever, I could always write Turning Tricks in a Treestand.

After all, books stay around forever.

Don’t they?