Jim Matthews is an important journalist, brothers and sisters. He occupies a niche, granted, but a niche most of us in journalism tend to overlook or trivialize. Distancing ourselves from a substantial subset of our potential readership.

That niche: Hunting and fishing.

Jim Matthews is the Boswell of the Great (SoCal) Outdoors. A guy who writes with passion, a coherent and consistent point of view and, often, downright elegance.

About shooting and angling. Topics most reporters and editors know little or nothing about.

Jim Matthews has done it so well for so long that he arguably is the most influential — important — writer with whom I ever worked. At some point, his material has appeared in nearly every Southern California newspaper that is not the L.A. Times. And he has made a nice living as an editor and contributor for nearly every significant outdoors/hunting/fishing publication in the state — if not the country.

(See his web site here for his latest work.

Animal-rights folks find much of his writings morally offensive. Others find some of his stuff generically offensive — such as the Ps & Qs of bodily elimination while sitting on a lake boat, or tips on the proper use of outhouses.

He cannot be ignored, however. He cannot be wished away. And he will be heard and read by the substantial minority of Americans who still hunt and fish.

Matthews was mostly a mainstream sports journalist when I met him, in 1976. He had been at the newspaper since 1973, touted on the job opening by Gordon Coy (mentioned in an earlier blog entry) … and by 1975 “Mattress” (as Paul Hagen liked to call him) was a full-timer.

Matthews even then had a big head of curly hair, a mustache and boundless energy. He covered preps, San Bernardino Valley College and motor racing, but it was clear his passion and expertise were focused on outdoors topics. He had grown up in rural south Fontana, backed up against the Jurupa Hills, and he could shoot rabbits and other “varmints” in his backyard, and fish at any number of nearby lakes.

The sudden death of his mother, in 1980, prompted him to get out from under the aegis of a newspaper and strike out on his own covering what he really cared about. He remained in The Sun as the valued and valuable outdoors stringer whose stuff appeared every Thursday morning. And whose exhaustively complete Mammoth-to-the-Mexican-border “fish report” was perhaps the most eagerly awaited item in the newspaper. (We found that out the hard way, the few times we accidentally omitted the fish report, from the volume of angry phone calls from readers whose weekends hinged on whether Matthews had reported good fishin’ at a particular destination.)

Matthews soon hit his stride: Blunt, outspoken, unapologetic, passionate … but always authentic and often wonderfully entertaining, even to those (like me) who never have taken aim at a wild creature in their lives.

I remember in particular his recounting of the pursuit of a deer. He got into range and shot it … then closed in on his stricken prey and wrote about how he watched “its brown eyes go dead,” or something like that. It sounds a bit ghoulish, but in fact it touched on a recurring theme in his writing.

Matthews believes it is more honest and far more noble to take personal responsibility for the death of the meat you are going to eat. As he did here. He rued the passage of the forest creature he had shot. But he was willing to confront the reality of his actions, right down to watching the life drain out of the deer’s eyes …

Those who would condemn him as a blood-thirsty savage … well, they better not eat a hamburger. Because that leaves you, in Jim Matthews’ mind, as a carnivore without the intestinal fortitude to understand how that meat got to your Big Mac. That makes you a hypocrite, if not a coward.

He actually is something of a purist on these topics.

For instance, he opposes the idea of “staged” hunts at ranches where wild animals are trucked in and released for easy bagging by jaded hunters will to pay for the easy hunting of animals with nowhere to go. To him, it seems little different than working in a slaughterhouse. It isn’t sport; it’s meat-processing.

(In Matthews’ world, hunting is miles and miles of hiking in rough terrain, hours and hours of stalking, getting downwind of skittish prey, taking aim while your heart is pounding, getting off that kill shot … and then humping your trophy back to the truck. It is “sport” more akin to running a marathon than target practice in a gun club.)

It turns out that Matthews is, in fact, a rabid conservationist. Not in the modern “save every living creature” sense, but in the Teddy Roosevelt sense. Matthews believes in carefully limited hunts. Not because he is opposed to hunting, but because he wants to make sure there are deer and boars and bears and quail for his grandchildren to hunt, decades hence.

Reading his columns opens another world to us city dwellers whose idea of “camping” is a Motel 6.

I remember a particular column in which he outlined the enormous difficulty of bagging a wild turkey. Most of us have images of turkeys as birds so stupid they can drown during a rain storm because a drop hitting their heads will prompt them to look up — and choke themselves.

Matthews, however, regaled us in delightful detail with his inadequacies when it came to shooting a wild turkey. They are so wary, so elusive, he told us, as to be nearly immune to human hunters. Matthews described crawling through the brush, spotting a turkey on the next ridge over and seeing it disappear even before he could begin the massive exercise of trying to get close. He mocked himself for the arrogance of thinking he could shoot a wild turkey. And he noted that Ben Franklin thought the turkey should be our national bird, rather than the eagle — and for good reason. It’s a hell of a lot craftier than we ever imagined.

I don’t know if Matthews prefers fishing to hunting, but he seems to write about fish more often. What lure to use, what reel works best, how heavy your line should be. When or where to fish this or that lake. (By the dam, just before sunset.) He knows his stuff.

A highlight for him, every year, is The Trout Opener in the Owens Valley area. Usually right about this time of year, actually. For him, it is a rite almost religious in its significance, a harbinger of spring, when the frozen lakes thaw out and fishermen of all generations return to try to hook some feisty trout in idyllic settings.

Matthew probably has agitated more people with his steadfast support of the Second Amendment “right to bear arms.” (Check out Part 2 of his current online column, “Morons in the Legislature”, his latest blistering of would-be abridgers of Second Amendment rights.)

One of the guys on our desk a decade ago mockingly referred to Matthews as “Toter” … as in “gun-toter.” He would say, “you want me to read “Toter” now?

I never have believed Jim Matthews gets up every morning and lovingly caresses his guns. I do think he believes he has a right to own however many guns he chooses to collect, and considers that ownership to be an expression of American history. He might not even prefer talking about the Second Amendment, but for him and the readers he reaches the attacks on gun ownership now seem so random, relentless and ridiculous as to demand almost daily defense measures.

Note his final sentence in the column mentioned above: “The fact that we have legislators who introduce bills like this is proof that prejudice and discrimination are alive and well in America. All three of these bills are about discriminating against America’s newest class of “lesser” citizens — legal gun owners.”

Too many of us are unwillingly even to listen to the beliefs of hunters and fishermen such as Jim Matthews. Few of them have access to mainstream media, or are taken seriously by it.

Jim Matthews has been their voice for nearly two generations. He represents the real people who believe THEY are the true communers with nature, who are convinced they view the animal world and our relationship to it in a realistic and honest way. I can’t say I really understand these people. I can’t say I ever will join them in a duck blind or on a fishing boat … but I respect them far more than I would have if Jim Matthews hadn’t been trying to explain them and their motivations for 30 years.

I asked him who he has ticked off, during his career. He responded, via e-mail: I can’t think of too many people, agencies or groups I haven’t found a way to annoy — the DFG (on so many fronts), National Park Service, Forest Service, bass fishermen, ocean anglers, fly-fishermen, women (wait, that one might just be at parties and personal conversations), liberals, conservatives, the NRA, politicians, environmental whack jobs and, well, you get it.”

As we near the end of so many things we once assumed would go on for decades to come … Jim Matthews has invited me, one last time, to his big annual December party. The one in which he clears out his freezer and makes venison chili or bear-kabobs. Catfish steaks. And his pals among the hunting and fishing community come over to compare notes and trade lies and give a sort of tipsy tribute to the bounties and beauties of nature. It’s on Dec. 20. I’ve always been busy in the past. Matthews says this will be the last “wild-game feast”. I think I will go.

Oh, and before I forget: Never use an outhouse before dropping a rock through the hole — to make sure it’s not overflowing. I mean, where else can you get that information in a daily newspaper?