Remember the old gun right’s chant: “They will take my gun away from me when they can pry it from my cold dead fingers?”  I sort of feel that way about my pocket knife.  With the new tough air travel security measures, of course, the TSA won’t let me take this vital tool—this necessity—with me. And not having my Swiss Army knife with me aboard airplanes leaves me feeling half dressed.  I’ve had a pocket knife for as long as I can remember—starting with those awful Boy Scout knives with gouges so dull you could hardly carve your name in your study hall desk.  Many a beech tree, however, did yield its smooth bark to my blade.  [There's actually an art museum in Italy that showcases beech tree carving!] I could even skin a possum with it (all the while wondering why no one was interested in buying possum hides!).

When I got my first Victorinox Swiss Army knife, however, I felt like a car aficionado who’d just gotten a Ford Cobra.  Man, was it sweet.  I got it around the time Marge and I were engaged—meaning almost 44 years ago.  That knife, of course, is long gone.  But I’ve had plenty more (and plenty more varieties) since then.  Enumerating all the places where I have them tucked, I believe I have about seven of them.

And each one is absolutely critical for its purpose: sawing down hiking sticks, carving hiking sticks, pruning house plants, clipping loose threads and hanging hangnails, skinning road kill (got a nice newly dead mink once when doing the RBC highway clean-up!), clipping McDonalds’ straws to the right size for our boys when they were little, making little catamaran sailboats at restaurant tables for our grandchildren, carving willow whistles, cutting yucca pods to find moth larvae, shaving bark from sassafras roots—just about anything that any regular Joe or Jane would want to have one for.

My "Ambassador" model

Now, I’ve been fortunate enough to remember in time to put my knives in my checked bags at the airport; so none have yet been confiscated.  But I don’t think the security people recognize how vulnerable and insecure many of us feel without our pocket knives.  And what about emergencies?  What if someone needs an emergency tracheotomy and no one on the plane has a pocket knife?  Perhaps even an emergency appendectomy or frontal lobotomy.  Have they really thought about that?

It seems to me that many of the security officials are old enough to remember MacGyver who saved himself, helpless children, maidens in distress, and the world many times because he had a Hunter or Tinker Swiss Army knife.  How shortsighted we can sometimes be.  Let me be the first to predict that something dreadful is going to happen because responsible knife carriers like me are not allowed to keep them in our pockets on board airplanes!

On a lighter vein, however, you might enjoy clicking on the “Wonder Kids” page on the top options bar and read what my friend Rusty Prichard says about kids needing knives.  Or just click here.

See you outdoors!

Dean