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Deer hunting.
6 days to go and I am so geared up I can't sleep. I can't express how much I love deer hunting with my Dad.
My family...not a peaceful past. Terrible conflict, divorce, other nightmares I would rather not mention.....
To be approaching 40, and still have by dad healthy and strong, and a hell of a sportsman to boot.....it means so much. We get in his F350 in Ann Arbor and drive 12 hours to a place outside Crystal Falls, MI. Where we hunt is only a few miles from the WI border. Its hard, cold, northern hunting. No fat corn feed deer in these parts. But we go don't go there to kill the biggest deer. We go there because we have a deer camp of men. Serious hunters. Guys that like to have fun, but are really there to kill deer. No one going to strip clubs, casinos or that kind of crap.
I guess every guy has a few touchstones in life. The points that attach you to the earth and everything in it. For me, its my wife and child, and that 12 hours drinking coffee and talking to my dad as his trucks diesel engine chews up the miles. Rolling through the gray hills of Michigan, watching the landscape change.
I don't have a son of my own. Hunting will likely die with me. The last of the men in our family that carry my fathers name. It does not make me sad to see hunting go cold in our family. But it makes me sad to see a ritual die. An ancient ritual, of men around a fire in subfreezing air, drinking wine and telling stories. Men who know how the earth smells, and know about death. Know it not as some glamorous bit of visual porn on a movie screen, no, men who know death up close. The black orb of a deers eye reflecting the cold gray northern sky as you stand over it, panting to catch your breath, your hands trembling. The smell of viscera. The sound of Coyotes fighting over entrails. For that I am sad.
What does the modern young man get in its place? The plastic click of a video game controller, as he kills his millionth digital foe? And we wonder why the boys are violent. And we wonder why they can't 'focus'. A million years of fire, and struggle, and death, replaced in a single generation with a hollow fascade, the pale blue flicker of an LED monitor like a single candle compared to the sun.
I best stop.
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