Not Your Average Joe: A Selected Autobiography And Joe's Wisdom On Shooting

CHAPTER ONE

Train for What You Will Do

Outsmarting the Bears

In 1981, on day three of my canoe trip down the Kantishna River, I paddled into a creek looking for a place to pull out for the night. I remembered a pilot friend telling me about a cabin he spotted in the area but were it not for my investigating the path of a mink as it skirted the edge of that creek, I may never have found the cabin. My partner and I spent the night in that cabin, and I judged that we were the first persons to use it in many years. At the end of my eight-day trip, I returned to my home in Fairbanks, Alaska, and began a search for the owner of the cabin. I became the caretaker of it, and a few years later, I was privileged to buy the cabin from its legal owner.

The location of my Kantishna cabin is not easily accessible, and there are many black bears and grizzly bears in the area. When I first found the cabin, there were numerous one-gallon, and five-gallon metal cans hung on chains in front of the two-foot by five-foot solid wood front door. The cabin’s two windows were protected with heavy chicken wire strung in front of the glass. I decided to maintain that arrangement, and for a while, never had any bear get into the cabin, although I spotted evidence around the exterior that bears visited the cabin frequently.

My favorite thing to do in the summertime has been to fly to that cabin with a friend or my family along, climb in the canoe I store behind the cabin, paddle out on the adjacent lake, and harass the fish. In 1991, my buddy and I spent the day doing just that. And after enjoying freshly caught fish for dinner, my buddy retired to the top bunk, while I climbed into the bottom bunk for a good night’s sleep. It was the middle of June, in the middle of the night, and in broad daylight of an Alaska summer. A noise outside the cabin woke me up. Now, this frequently happens out there, and I always get up to see what it is that woke me up. I am interested. It could be a moose, or a marten, or a porcupine, or even a beaver. It could be just about anything.

This night I got up from my bunk, put my glasses on, picked up my loaded .357 magnum revolver that I always keep close by, and walked to the windowless cabin door. As soon as I partially opened the door, I saw a bear standing on the porch right in front of me. When my eyes saw the bear, I did not have to think about what to do. I extended my revolver muzzle to about two inches from his forehead and in single action fired one shot. He dropped, instantly dead, on the porch. It happened so quickly that my buddy would not believe there was a bear out there. He wondered why I had opened the door, shot the porch, and slammed the door shut.

It was a very good eating bear. It was a big male black bear. I had the pelt made into a rug. It was the only black bear I had ever killed in my life that had a pelt nice enough to have tanned. There were no rub marks on it. It had beautiful long fur, even in the middle of June. And that big broad head—a handsome bear. I hung the rug on my bedroom wall. Two years later my home burned to the ground, and I lost almost everything, including my black bear rug. I keep hoping that maybe one day, one of the bear’s relatives will come back and knock on my cabin door.

There were two other times that the noise of black bears prowling around my Kantishna cabin awakened me. Both times I spotted the bears from my windows, but I did not shoot those bears. One summer day when I was fishing, I saw a grizzly bear swim the creek just below my main cabin. Bear sign was everywhere in that area, but I assured myself that the many cans hung in front of the cabin door would keep the bears out.

Joe Nava standing in front of his John Hansen Lake Cabin, holding the .357 magnum revolver he used to kill the black bear on his porch. In the background are the cans rigged to keep bears out of the cabin. (1991)

Then came that fateful day, June 20, 1997, when I made my first trip of the summer to my cabin. I found that a bear had entered through the door and trashed it. He had removed all the cans in front of the door, either by tearing out the spikes that held the chains or by tearing the handles off the cans. Then he had pushed the door hard enough to tear out the heavy-duty metal eye on the door side of the hook and eye connection.

Almost everything in the cabin had been bitten. The mess on the floor included maple syrup, motor oil, dish soap, olive oil, water, and all the dry goods that were not in bear-proof metal cans. The bear was not able to puncture the metal army ammunition cans that lock airtight. I spent seven hours barely cleaning up the cabin. I rebuilt the hook and eye latch on the door stronger than it had initially been, then replaced the chains and cans in front of the door. I flew back to Fairbanks with my Super Cub full of garbage from the incident.

I returned to my cabin on June 24, with new supplies, only to find that the bear had entered the same way again. He had removed all the cans and had torn out the other end of the hook and eye closure. He had bitten and torn everything that he missed the first time. He destroyed two sleeping bags, three Thermarest pads, two life preservers, clothes and many other things. He even went outside and bit several holes in my sixteen-foot plastic canoe. I have to ascribe that to meanness; green plastic cannot taste good to a bear. I again cleaned the cabin and flew my Super Cub full of trash back to Fairbanks.

But this time, before I left, I reinforced the door and booby-trapped the cabin. I had never heard of doing what I did, but I thought it up and thought it might work. I tied an opened metal frame chain link mesh suitcase-style beaver live trap across the top half of the door opening. I nailed two-by-fours across the bottom half. I then replaced all the cans on chains across the door opening. The last thing I did was the booby-trap. I had brought with me three cans of bear spray, one filled with ninety grams, and the other two with 190 grams, of oleoresin capsicum, with two million Scoville Heat Units. Each can was capable of discharging about ten bursts with an effective range of approximately fifteen feet. I hung those cans, unused, on a rope stretched across the door opening so that those cans of bear spray would be the first things encountered by a visiting bear.

Then I did a nasty deed. First, I rubbed each spray can profusely with smoked salmon, and then I took the skin of the smoked salmon, and I fastened it to the spray cans. I hoped the bear would be attracted to the salmon smell and try to eat the salmon skin around those cans. I hoped that the bear would bite the spray cans hard enough to puncture one. I knew if he did, the contents of the cans were under enough pressure to erupt immediately in a blast through the tooth hole and into the bear’s mouth. I knew if this happened, it would deter the bear. I have had oleoresin capsicum on my skin, so I knew how devastatingly uncomfortable it is. I flew back to Fairbanks.

Seven days later I returned to my cabin to find that the bear had not disturbed the door or the chained metal cans. But, to my distinct pleasure, I found that the middle one of the three bear spray cans had been punctured by a tooth, and the can was empty. It worked! I rejoiced and wished that I had a video camera pointed at the door with a motion detector controlling the start switch. I would have loved to see what that bear did when the bear spray exploded into his mouth.

No bears have entered my cabin since, and to this day I keep cans of bear spray tied in front of the door. I hope I solved my problem permanently. If I have, I did so without harming or killing a bear. Not that I have an aversion to killing bears when they are legally hunted. They are good eating, and I have eaten my share. But, I would not want to see one wasted.

Since 1968, I have taught my bear safety class to thousands of people, not only Alaskans but people who travel here with the intent of either working or recreating in the Alaska wilderness. Ever since I had success defending my cabin by hanging cans of bear spray as a deterrent, I have shared my method with my students. I hope my experience saves someone’s cabin from a marauding bear.

Whatever You Do in Practice Will Happen Automatically in an Emergency

I wanted to talk about the bear I shot on my cabin front porch because how I shot it illustrates an important lesson I want to convey. I talk about this lesson to my concealed carry class students to make a point about the type of training they should do with their handgun, and to my bear safety class students to make the same point about training with their choice means for bear protection. Bear with me while I explain.

Let me emphasize a principle to you. This principle was brought home to the police community when I was a volunteer with the Fairbanks Auxiliary Police and training police to shoot. A story was circulating at the time about an incident in California where an officer engaged in a shootout was killed, and afterward, it was discovered he had six spent casings in his right front pocket.

Back then, when officers trained, instead of ejecting their spent casings on the ground, or the floor in an indoor training range, they ejected them into their hand and placed them in a pocket. That is the way we practiced in Fairbanks. In an indoor range, we did not want to drop the spent casings on the floor. We just had to pick them up. At an outdoor range, they got stepped on, they got bent, and then we had to pick them up. We were going to put them in a box at the back of the range to be reloaded, so it was much easier to catch them and put them in a pocket. When we finished our range exercises, we would empty our pocket into the box and go home. We did that all the time. Pocketing our brass is how we trained. It became our habit.

After the California shooting story circulated, training methods changed. Since then, law enforcement and security guards are trained that whenever the revolver is empty, the spent casings are always ejected on the ground or the floor, while they reach for their speed loader. They are right back to shooting much quicker. Those who use semi-automatics now drop their empty magazines to the ground while they reach for a new magazine. The principle is, whatever you do in practice will happen automatically in an emergency. Think about that. If you practice the way you want your body to react in an emergency, when you are in that emergency situation, your body will handle the gun the same way you trained it. That is muscle memory.

Shooting accurately is important. Police and security guards are required to shoot their revolvers in double action. They are not allowed to cock their revolvers and shoot in single action. When a revolver is cocked, it only takes a light touch on the trigger to discharge the bullet. With the tense situations that police and security guards find themselves in, there could be accidental discharges if the revolver is cocked. But because they must shoot double action in those tense situations, they are not achieving the utmost accuracy with their aim. Many studies by the FBI, the New York City Police Department, and others have established the national statistic that four out of every five bullets that come out of an on-duty police officer’s gun do not strike the intended target. That statistic holds for any distance, and some shooting occurs at a very close range. Double action shooting is for situations that are close and quick. Double action is not for accuracy.

In a situation with a bear when your absolute only recourse is to use a gun, or in an unavoidable personal protection situation, your reaction speed may be crucial. When you shoot too fast in double action, you are moving the gun. Try dry firing your gun in double action, and you will see how hard it is to hold the gun still while you pull that ten or fifteen pounds of pressure through on a one-inch-long draw. It is difficult to be accurate. Granted, if you want to practice double action shooting, and you dry fire in double action fifty times every day, and you do that month after month after month, you will become accurate with double action shooting. You can. But very few people ever spend the time to get good at double action shooting. If you want to get an accurate shot, you cock the gun.

I prefer to cock the gun, shooting in single action. I cock the gun when it comes down off the recoil, and then I am ready to shoot again; the gun is cocked by the time it gets to the target. That is how I practice. I trained my hand always to cock the gun, whether it is a revolver or a semi-automatic because my shooting is more accurate that way. If I am shooting two-handed, my left thumb will cock the gun. If I am shooting one handed, my right thumb will cock it.

And that brings me full circle back to the black bear I shot at my cabin. My hand did exactly what I had trained it to do in practice; I did not have to tell it what to do. The practice had created in me the muscle memory to perform a task without conscious effort. My eyes saw the bear, and my hand cocked the gun, and I shot the bear in single action—I never told my hand what to do. Never a thought about that went through my mind. It just happened. My message to you is whatever you do in practice will happen automatically in an emergency.

CHAPTER TWO

My Early Years

I Lived

I was a difficult pregnancy. My mother was not in good health, perhaps because as a child she had rheumatic fever. As it was later related to me, when I was in my seventh month, the doctor informed my father that my mother would not be able to carry me to term and to save her life I should be aborted. My father said, Take the baby.

My parents borrowed a car and drove twelve miles to the nearest hospital, in Hinton, West Virginia. The small facility was located upstairs over the town drugstore. There, on November 8, 1930, I was taken by cesarean section. They did not expect me to live, but I was moving, so they named me Joseph Arclino Nava, Jr., placed me in an incubator and kept me there for thirty days.

My Parents and the Early Years at Mother’s Family Farm

My father, Joseph Arclino Nava, was a first-generation Italian immigrant from Massachusetts. His parents traveled steerage from Italy, processing through Ellis Island Immigration Center in 1905, with two small children in tow and my father as an unborn child. My father was born soon after his parents arrived in America, and the births of his seven siblings followed. My paternal grandparents and their family, Catholics, settled in a close-knit Italian section of Westborough, Massachusetts, at that time referred to as Guineaville by the local population.

My mother, Lottie Belle Nava, nee Woolwine, was raised by devout Baptist parents on their self-sufficient fifty-acre West Virginia mountain farm, about three dirt road miles from Alderson, a community of approximately 1,450 people at the time.

My parents met at a hospital in New York where my father worked as a cook, and my mother was either a nursing student or employed as a nurse. They likely married sometime in 1927. They moved to my mother’s family farm near Alderson, where my sister, Virginia Belle, was born in 1928, but as the Great Depression set in and lingered on, my father had to travel to find work. He was often away from the farm months at a time, once working as a cook in Bermuda. There was no work in West Virginia for him unless he wanted to be a coal miner, and he did not want that. He left my mother at the farm with my sister and me, and although he came back when he could, my mother was our sole parent for most of the three years we lived there.

That is not to say we were alone, or she did not have help raising us. It was a family farm, and several generations of my mother’s large extended family lived there. My maternal grandmother had one child every two years until she had twelve children. By the time the last child was born, the oldest may have moved to town, but nine or ten of mother’s siblings still lived on the farm. They all lived in the same big house, helped each other, and pitched in to help my mother raise my sister and me. When I was older, I often visited the farm during school summer breaks, and I have wonderful memories to share about those times.

Move to Westborough, Massachusetts

I was three years old as the Great Depression deepened. My father decided to move our family to Westborough, Massachusetts, a town of about 6,400 people, where his extended family resided. He felt he could get permanent work at the Bay State Abrasives Company in Westborough, which at the time was the second largest abrasives manufacturer in the world. The company employed the local community and paid them well. My father persevered over time and eventually was hired. He could now stay home with his family.

My earliest memories in Westborough are of happy experiences among my large extended Catholic Italian family of friendly cousins and doting aunts. My immediate family settled in the Guineaville section of town, densely populated with Italians. The small houses, mostly rented, were closely packed together. Everyone had gardens, and the flavor and accents of Italy mixed with the culture of 1930s America in this tight-knit community. We lived in a rented home on Cottage Street until my father could afford to purchase a home a few blocks away on South Street. He paid $1,100 for it. At the time my family did not own a vehicle.

I have memories of large family gatherings, especially at my grandmother’s home, with my father’s siblings and their families. There were so many people at gatherings that the kids had to sit at a separate table in the kitchen. At Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas celebrations, Easter, and family birthdays, I clearly remember feeling the warmth and love demonstrated by the extended family surrounding me. I carried that sense of belonging and love of family with me throughout my life, and a deep commitment to my own family and families in the larger communities in which I lived would become my cornerstone.

My mother stayed at home with my sister and me, devoting all of her time to our needs and attending to our home. There was no kindergarten in Westborough at that time, but my mother, an intelligent woman who I was told received A grades in her school classes, took great pains to preschool