And the mountain man is not afraid of grammar.

He knows pronouns must agree with their antecedents. He can spot an independent clause at 20 paces. He always carries a comma, and he knows how to use it.

The mountain man in question is Big Jake McLaughlin, literary creation of Spotsylvania County resident and grammar book author Gary Spina.

People around the area have probably noticed Spina on the roads since he moved back to Spotsylvania County this summer, after several years away.

He's hard to miss, riding as he does in a pickup whose cap advertises "The Mountain Man's Field Guide to Grammar: A Fearless Adventure in Grammar, Style, and Usage."

(That's a serial comma before that "and" in the title; Spina insists on it. Because newspaper style shuns the serial comma, the title and one example from the book are the only places you'll see a serial comma in this story.)

Spina, 62, recently retired after teaching English at Catholic schools in Washington, New Jersey and Montana.

Teaching was an unlikely career for a man who spent most of his own school years wishing he were somewhere else.

Old West devotee

As a boy in northern New Jersey, Spina hated school. But he did love literature and remembers one of the first tales he read on his own, O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief." It impressed him that O. Henry had written short stories while in jail.

"I realized, if you're a writer you can write from anywhere. They can't stop you," Spina recalled.

He and an older brother also read books and magazines about the outdoors, which fueled their passion for camping, hiking, hunting, fishing and canoeing in Stokes State Forest.

It was then that Spina started identifying with the mountain men of the West, the trappers who from about 1810 to 1860 lived independently, moved comfortably among American Indians and made money by supplying furs to company traders from back East.

Mountain men were self-sufficient and self-taught in subjects they needed for survival.

That sounded good to Spina. Once he finished high school, he considered his formal education complete.