I don’t remember where I first heard about Jim Shockey, or when. It could have been any number of places.
Based in Maple Bay, he’s an omnipresent guy, with an interest in myriad projects and businesses in the U.S. and Canada.
He probably hit my radar through one of his TV programs, all on hunting or hunting-related pursuits. Shockey is a legitimate A-lister in that world, a big-game outfitter with an extra-large personality and endorsements and licensing deals too many to mention. That’s where a good deal of his money comes from.
I’m going to guess it doesn’t come from his Hand of Man Museum, which I was unaware of until recently. The 17,000-square-foot space opened in Maple Bay near Duncan two years ago, with the softest of soft launches, and is run on a by-donation basis by Shockey, 64, and his wife, Louise, a former dancer to whom Shockey has been married since 1984.
It does a steady business, given its absence of promotion, aside from a highway billboard on the outskirts of Duncan, attracting upward of 1,000 monthly visitors, some of whom travel great distances across North America to visit.
Many come simply to meet Shockey, who is to modern hunting what Chuck Norris was to action movies and The Most Interesting Man in the World was to beer commercials: confidence and cool crystallized.
A competitive swimmer in university and later a water-polo athlete at the national level, he’s also the closest thing to a celebrity in the field-to-table world, with more than 424,000 followers on Instagram. But you would hardly know it at first glance.
When the Times Colonist met up with Shockey for an interview at his museum of natural history, cultural arts, and conservation, it was somewhat impromptu. I had reached out to arrange an interview only days prior, through an associate of his who handles such business. Shockey is incredibly busy, but there was a rare opening, I was told, should I have time to make the drive.
Who would turn down a guided tour of a museum with artifacts from the personal collection of a man Outdoor Life magazine has called “the most accomplished big-game hunter of the modern era”? We could have visited The Hand of Man at any point, as it is open 365 days a year. But an interview with Shockey was integral. To write about the museum is to write about the man who conceived it.
I had been asked by the aforementioned associate how I came to hear about the museum. Through a post on a friend’s Facebook page, I sheepishly admitted. “You MUST go,” read the post. My friend wrote that it rivalled the Royal B.C. Museum “in its own amazing way.”
That type of hyperbole is manna for the media. So off went photographer Darren Stone and I, two keyboard warriors rushing headfirst into what felt like the museum version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. An expert tracker like Shockey could have spotted us city slickers a mile away.
He admitted, mere steps inside the museum’s front doors, to being surprised by our interest. I relayed the story about the Facebook post. I blathered something about reporters being nothing if not inquisitive folk, only to find out later he is an established journalist and author, with a novel in the publishing pipeline and a big-name editor attached.
It took some time before Shockey fully relaxed in our company. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t want the free press. But when we entered a room full of floor-to-ceiling taxidermy — staggering in its range of wildlife, which included several stuffed polar bears — I understood his wariness.
“The last thing I want is for people to think this is a hunting museum,” he said. “That’s not what this is about. These are memories of an event, or something important in somebody’s life.”
He asked that we refrain from taking pictures in that particular space, expressing concern that the images would be lost in translation. He struck me as someone who had weathered his share of animal-rights protests, and didn’t have the energy for more. “I don’t judge anybody,” he said, with a Zen-like demeanor that never ebbed during our conversation.
“Tolerance is one thing I have learned in my travels around the world.”
‘I CALL MYSELF A NATURALIST’
This serene exterior wasn’t what I expected from an icon of the hunting world, whose many TV shows for the Outdoor Network and other channels worldwide have led to millions of viewers and lucrative sponsorships with companies ranging from YETI to Bowtech Archery.
For an alpha dog who has worked with the U.S. military in Afghanistan, and earned the rank of honorary lieutenant-colonel from the Canadian Armed Forces, I expected red-blooded manhood, testosterone personified. John Rambo. What I encountered was something much more complex.
Not that he isn’t imposing. Shockey has reportedly taken — killed — more than 350 big-game species across the globe (a quick Google search will pull up scores of images that non-hunters would consider shocking, and hunters would call impressive).
He owns several world records acknowledged by Safari Club International, which protects “the freedom to hunt and to promote wildlife conservation worldwide,” according to its website, and he is considered an elite marksman with a bow.
To some, he’s a trophy hunter. It’s a term he considers derogatory. “I don’t even call myself a hunter. I call myself a naturalist.”
Hunting licences are economic generators for everything from gear manufacturers to governments, so wild game needs to exist in order for that to continue. That means conservation is key, Shockey said.
It’s a perspective I found hard to understand.
A variety of species will go extinct if they cannot be hunted, he explained.
So, hunting them saves them from being hunted? I asked.
Regulations keep poachers — a group so universally hated it’s the one thing hunters and non-hunters can agree on — at bay, he said.
I’ll take his word for it. Although we are similar in size, it’s not hard to see which one of us could survive a week in the woods with no shelter or food. “We eat wild game,” Shockey said. “We grow our own vegetables, make our own wine, make our own jams.”
Even when it’s for an episode of one of his TV entities, Shockey says he never hunts for sport.
He says he was raised on wild game under the guidance of his father, an outdoorsman who worked in construction and appeared on his TV programs before passing away in 2013. Every item in his museum was donated, shot, caught, bought or traded for, he said.
Some are the property of others, but the majority are linked to Shockey. The collection was initially destined for the Highway Antique Barn in Chemainus, which Shockey purchased years ago specifically to house Hand of Man. “I like antique stores. I think that does a service to the community.”
He eventually purchased the former Maple Bay Elementary, where his two children went to school, to house the museum.
“I had a vision,” Shockey said. “I could have told you when I was 10 years of age what I wanted in my museum some day. I didn’t know where it would be. When I grew up, we were in a trailer park. We had no money.”
‘AS STRONG AS THE NEED TO BREATHE’
Hand of Man is full of framed photos of Shockey’s excursions to places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Ethiopia, where he taught impoverished residents the value of hunting. He almost always has a corresponding artifact, some of which have drawn consternation from critics.
“People say these are cultural objects and we shouldn’t have them,” he said. “But none of these things are national art treasures.”
If a representative from a particular country called him and asked for an artifact to be returned, Shockey said he would do so, no questions asked. But that is unlikely. “You could go to these countries right now and buy these things.”
It’s an impressive collection, albeit a scattered one. The variety of items on display speaks to Shockey’s varied interests and experiences. He has anatomically correct casts of dinosaur skeletons presented alongside real Megalodon teeth.
There’s an entire section of first-edition books, preserved under glass and temperature-regulated, including an 18th-century tome from British lawyer and naturalist William Broderip and antiquarian books about explorers John Ross and Alexander Mackenzie.
There’s also a room full of guitars and other instruments, of which several are quite valuable.
Shockey and his son, Branlin, who lives in Vancouver and filmed and produced much of Shockey’s TV programming, both write and perform music, together when possible. That doesn’t happen as often as Shockey would like, however, even though the senior Shockey had a surprise hit on the iTunes blues charts a few years ago.
His wife, Louise, is currently undergoing treatment for aggressive, late-stage lung cancer. Nana Weezy, as she is known to her grandchildren, was warm-spirited during our tour, and is the axis around which Shockey’s world rotates. Theirs is the kind of romance you usually only see in the movies, two impossibly attractive, generous people who were clearly destined to be together. The two met in 1980 when he was an antiques dealer and furniture restorer and she was a dancer and actor.
In a way, The Hand of Man feels like a tribute to Louise, and the couple’s life together. “I was on the road for 306 days a year, for 20 years,” Shockey said. Now his days of worldwide travel are on the wane, allowing for more time with his family.
When his career winds down, he’ll have created quite a legacy. As someone who “was probably unemployable,” he needed to find a career that was from the heart. Antique collecting was his calling, which later grew to include ethnographic art, which makes up the majority of items at Hand of Man. “Where there’s a will there’s a way, and the will that I had at the beginning was as strong as the need to breathe,” he said.
A small selection of authentic pieces, along with fossils and minerals dating back centuries, are for sale, “which keeps the doors open” at the gallery, Shockey said.
I was curious about the legality of some of the items up for sale, including a 15,000-year-old woolly mammoth tusk from Yukon, priced at $6,900. Despite the ethical arguments, of which he has heard plenty, there isn’t a blanket law prohibiting such transactions, he said.
“There are commercial paleontology museums, for sure,” he said. “You can buy these things, if you know where to look.”
The province has rules governing the buying and selling of artifacts native to British Columbia, with which Shockey said he complies without hesitation — the delicate balance of hunting and conservation needs rules and regulations in order to succeed.
He said he catalogues the items in his possession, for historical purposes, and shares information with museums worldwide, knowing one day his collection will be in the hands of someone else.
“I don’t believe you own anything. You are a steward of it for however long you are alive. What are you going to do, have a big garage sale?”
He made several references to the future of the museum, none of which involved him. He said he’s currently in the process of creating a foundation through which he would donate the entire Hand of Man entity — the land, the building and its contents — to an organization capable of running it indefinitely.
He doesn’t want to profit from its sale. “We live frugally. There’s no private jets and big giant yachts. I’m not saying we’re living on the edge of poverty, but we know the meaning of a dollar.”
His son and daughter are both active in the family business, and becoming stars in their own right. His daughter, Eva, in particular, has skyrocketed to fame, and is now an author and popular personality in lifestyle media, helped along the way by her co-hosting duties on the Outdoor Channel’s Jim Shockey’s Hunting Adventures.
She lives with her husband and children in North Carolina, where Shockey also has a property.
The kids are well-positioned to take over the family business, but Shockey said he wants their futures to be of their own choosing. “We’ve told our kids: ‘You want to see your inheritance? Come on down to the museum, you and everybody else. Go make your own way.’ ”
Shockey knows a thing or two about making hay while the sun shines. When he had no money, and his children were young, he fed his family by living off the land. Survival is something every culture can relate to, he said. Through that, perhaps, those with firm beliefs can appreciate those with differing ones.
“I’m hoping the net result [of this] will be an understanding or tolerance. It will open our minds up a little bit. Maybe there is another way to look at something. There is no right and there is no wrong.”
Hand of Man Museum is located at 6759 Considine Ave. in Duncan.
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