The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  After Dale found the Lord, he was forever trying his damnedest to convert everyone in sight, the way a formerly wild person will when they want to make up for lost time, and he horse-collared Bruce when he was seventeen. Dad had already been baptized in the Christian Reformed Church but Dale and Rev. Cofield dunked him anew as a Baptist.

  “Bruce came to me one night and we were supposed to have a date or something and he said, ‘I got saved last night,’” said Mom. “And I was really happy about that, but then he proceeded through that evening to try to save me.

  “And I said, ‘I don’t need to be saved. I am saved. I know Jesus.’

  “‘No. Nope,’ he said. ‘Your church is not—’ He was totally indoctrinated with the fact that my church was not the right church and Rose Park Baptist was the place. He says, ‘Well, then I can’t see you anymore.’

  “I came home and, man, I didn’t go to school the next day and Mom let me stay home ’cause she could see how upset I was,” said Nancy. “I said, ‘He told me I’m not good enough. I think I’m good enough. I don’t need to be saved again.’ And then he started dating a girl from that church and he was very, very thick with Uncle Dale and Aunt Sandy.”

  And that’s the way they left it. The two young lovers didn’t see each other much and then Bruce’s eighteenth birthday came, and the great maw of the Vietnam War opened and took him, and down at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio he was remade as government issue.

  Henry’s fraught relationship with farming marked all six of his sons. The five oldest all became guys who wore suits: Dale as a minister, Ron at the State Department, Vern and Jack with an insurance company, Bruce with his construction company, where he wore suits a majority of the time. He owned about fifty of them. Years later, when working on the deer camp, Dad would curse the sand and kick at it when rye and buckwheat didn’t come up. “You grew up on a farm. Don’t you know how to do this?” I asked him. “No, because my dad wouldn’t tell me,” he said.

  No one knew if Henry withheld information because he was mean, or insecure, or just didn’t know. Mike asked him loads of farming questions he’d never answer. When Ron was writing an analyst’s report about North Africa once for the CIA, he called Henry and asked him about an agricultural technique they had used on the farm, but Henry refused to talk about it.

  I once asked Grandma Gertrude if any of my uncles were farmers, and she sang out, in her high and nasal croon, “Oh, goo’ness, I guess not. The only reason they were innerested in a farm is if they could shoot a pheasant there.”

  Mike was the only one of my uncles whom I really knew when he himself was still a kid, and he developed a relationship to the land that went beyond the hunt. Only seven years older than me, he grew up mostly in Grandpa and Grandma’s last place, a brick ranch house on forty acres where Henry ran a few feeder calves. Mike worked a rural postal route near Hamilton, Michigan, and read history and spent more time afield than the other brothers. He mostly liked trapping, and he knew every culvert that held a muskrat and every mink that put tracks on the creekside mud for miles around Holland. He once tried to teach me in a farmer’s field how you could tell where the Potawatomi people would have put their encampment, and we walked out there and found a chert arrowhead in the freshly turned earth, right where he had predicted. He had a shoebox full of these kinds of treasures and was hyperaware of the land, and he bought and sold property. When he was a teen, he had a chopper motorcycle and played electric guitar; when I was twelve, we sat in his room while he introduced me to Frampton Comes Alive!—but Grandpa just didn’t come down on him.

  “He treated me as good as you could ever hope to be treated, but I guess he really struggled with the other kids,” Mike concedes.

  Mike went to the Black River every day after school and skipped dinner, the reading of the Bible, the whole thing. I guess by that time Henry was more kind and mellow, or maybe broken and morose, but either way more sugar than salt. Grandma would heat up something for Mike when he got home after dark. He pretty much stayed out there in the fields his whole life. He didn’t have the social ambition that the other brothers had and didn’t go to all the family events; he loved the people who were close to him and grew close to the people he served on his mail route, but he was more intellectual than the other brothers and felt more comfortable with the landforms and the mink and their language. He developed the kind of relatedness to the land that Joe and Brett and I all craved, and that our father kept at arm’s length. We were fascinated with him, and his brothers were, too.

  Mom also grew up on a farm, but her family dynamic did not have anyone bolting out the door to kill the local wildlife. She was one of six children born to Marvin and Dorothy Nienhuis—everyone called them Bub and Dot—so among the Nienhuises I had another five sets of aunts and uncles and eighteen more first cousins. They had a pickle farm in South Olive, just north of Holland about fifteen miles from the Kuipers place. Mom and her family were close and loving and fun, and she was not particularly eager to leave them or the dirt under her nails from digging potatoes. Their farmhouse was the hub of all family activity, and I knew it as a place of huge softball games in the yard and the family singing together. They never quit farming. They also belonged to the Christian Reformed Church, but where Grandpa Kuipers saw doom, Grandpa Nienhuis saw beauty and light. He had been close to his father, whose original farm was only a mile away down the dirt road, and he took comfort in the relative homogeneity of his Dutch world, comprising Holland, Zeeland, and the spread of nearby satellite towns such as Drenthe, Overisel, Graafschap, Noordeloos, Crisp, and Bentheim. But he had room in his mind for diversity.

  Inclusion and diversity were not among the church’s founding principles. Rather, the explicit desire of the colonists who came over from the Old World was separateness and purity. When Rev. Albertus Van Raalte first arrived to found the city of Holland on the untamed shores of Black Lake in 1846, he wasn’t looking to convert the Ottawa people or assimilate into America. He was one of a handful of ministers who split from the Netherlands’ state-sponsored Reformed Church after King William I attempted to modernize the church in the early 1800s. They called themselves Secessionists and chose to stick with a strict interpretation of the Protestant leader John Calvin’s teachings, such as salvation by election. Van Raalte was seeking only an unpeopled chunk of wilderness where he could create a “colony for Christians,” and his flock birthed the strict Christian Reformed Church in the United States.

  As Larry ten Harmsel wrote in his book Dutch in Michigan, “One could say that the people who led boatloads of Hollanders to Michigan were among the few American immigrants to flee a spirit of tolerance in their native land.”

  There’s no way I can escape the influence of this history. Like rot in the heart of an old tree, I saw this constant bid for separateness ruin my father’s life. My great-great-great-great-grandparents on my mom’s side, Berend Koijers and his wife, Johanna (Woordes), and their kids were among the first arrivals to Holland in 1847, and the Kuipers from Germany’s Dutch-speaking County Bentheim arrived not long after; since all the Dutch kept to themselves and intermarried, it’s not unreasonable to say I’m related to just about everyone in town.

  Grandpa Bub defied this history of separateness. He was a sunny, rugged, action-oriented farmer who was an enthusiastic participant in world events. He wasn’t liberal, by any stretch of the imagination, but he loved humanity and he had an innate trust in the earth and in life. He read National Geographic as well as the Bible, and he marveled over scientific discovery and the newest technologies, such as the Apollo program. I sat with him and Grandma Dot and several of my other uncles and aunts and baby cousins in the living room of the old farmhouse in 1969, absolutely riveted by the TV spectacle of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon. Grandpa Bub sang in the choir and played the piano, and he was a huge booster of the Lightbearers Quartet, a gospel outfit including two of my uncles (and a third on guitar) that put out a series of vinyl al
bums. He regularly traveled around the world distributing Bibles to remote populations with his cousin Chet Schemper, who was president of the World Home Bible League. Together, the two of them would jump into a private jet and blaze down to some remote airstrip in the Amazon or Central America to deliver boxes of the New Testament translated into local languages, though I’m not sure which ones.

  Bub’s dad pulled him out of Holland Christian during the Depression to go to work, but he went back and graduated from high school at age twenty-one. He had an astonishingly inclusive and generous take on the world. He had seen suffering and starvation during the Depression—his own feet were mangled because he hadn’t been able to buy new shoes during those bleak years—and he told me that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vision for a welfare state was a Christian gesture that made him the greatest president the United States had ever had.

  When he read the Bible over dinner, he would practically sing it. He would look up from the text and catch your eye and smile, like he was saying, Here, this is for you. I always marveled that my two grandfathers could come out of the same religion with such different takes on life. It wasn’t the doctrine itself; it was how you lived it.

  For my part, I grew up believing that no one gets to go to heaven unless everyone goes, a help-your-neighbor-or-else kind of thing. I knew that was not a popular idea in the Abrahamic religions, but why would God want anyone in heaven who believed they stood apart from the others? I figured God would take everything, even plants and animals. Our fates were tied together, and if there was a heaven, it was big enough for all of us, for worlds within worlds. Maybe I got some of that from Grandpa Bub.

  I would bring my BB guns to his farm, and Brett brought his .22 one time to hunt for rabbits and squirrels in the five-acre woodlot in the back, but Grandpa wasn’t really keen on that. He had an ancient oak-beamed barn built in 1897 that was full of pigs and a farmyard peopled with ducks and geese and goats and some exotics including golden pheasants and peacocks. He loved his farm companions and didn’t like the prospect of young hunters loose on the place. He warned us not to shoot anything other than rabbits and squirrels. Bub and Dot lived on that farm together for well over sixty years, and their whole world sprang from the soil beneath their feet.

  But they didn’t hunt.

  As a kid, I begged Bruce to show me the farms where he’d grown up, and he always refused. I explored the Black River with Mike, and I didn’t realize until later in life that we sometimes passed by the Kasslander Place. Dad never acknowledged it. But he did show me their first farm once, by mistake. He and I went to see Grandma Gertrude one day when she lived in the Royal Atrium retirement community just south of Zeeland, and as we drove west on Perry Street, he pointed at a farm and said offhandedly, “That was our first farm.” I threatened to jump out of the car, so he swung around and parked in the driveway. I got out and poked around, but Bruce stayed in the car. The farmhouse was old but someone lived there, and a car sat under the massive old maple trees spreading over the yard. I could see into the twenty-acre field behind the outbuildings and I wanted to go back there and see and smell the swamp ditch.

  “Let’s ask if we can walk back there,” I said, pointing.

  “Get in the car,” Bruce said. I did and he rolled away without looking back.

  He added, “I never liked that place.”

  Five

  A Boat

  Our faith in wildness was born of water. When I was four years old, Dad built me a fishing boat. He had just finished four years as a carpenter in the Air Force, stationed at Paine Field north of Seattle, and he hand-built a two-person wooden dinghy in a room barely big enough to hold it behind the kitchen in our tiny apartment in Edmonds. It was his way to show me we didn’t belong to apartments and air bases and war, that no matter how things went with him and Mom there were rivers and mountains without end. Edmonds is on Puget Sound, and about twenty miles of suburbs separated our apartment from the foothills of the Cascades, but that little boat carried us straight into the cedar forests on flows of sea wind and emerald snowmelt and the shadows of deer, and off we went—me, Mom, and Dad. A family made of the hunt.

  Mom and Dad looked to the wilderness for a love that wasn’t in them. All families come together through a certain amount of happenstance, but Bruce and Nancy might have passed each other by if it weren’t for me. When Dad was stationed at Lackland, he wrote letters to Nancy, but he wrote letters to other people, too. After he moved to Paine Field in Washington, he was having sex with lots of women. He came back to Michigan for pheasant hunting with his brothers every September, because no force on heaven or earth could have stopped that, and when he did he saw Nancy. In the summer of 1963 he came home to Zeeland for the month of June, and shortly after he went back to the base, Mom found out she was pregnant. With me.

  “When I told your dad that I was pregnant with his child, I got a letter about a week later. He stated in that letter, ‘I don’t know that I can marry you. I have someone else,’” Mom said.

  Mom shared this with her family, and everybody knew what this meant: If he wasn’t marrying her after dating for years, then he already had another woman pregnant. Bub and Dot told her to forget him; she’d be fine living with them. After a few weeks, another letter came saying Dad was rethinking the whole situation.

  “Evidently, she, I think, miscarried, or had an abortion or something,” Mom added. Dad told other people that he had actually asked to marry the other woman, but her parents wouldn’t have it. They thought he was too much of a hick. Mom didn’t ask too many questions. She was a nineteen-year-old nursing student at Grand Rapids Junior College who wanted a father for her child. In a universe of unnervingly random choices, Bruce chose us.

  Bruce and Nancy were married that October at the old South Olive Christian Reformed Church, the Nienhuis’s creaky pine-board sanctuary. They had handsome photos in the paper and were genuinely happy to be wed. Dad was delivering a new car from Detroit to a fellow airman on the base, and they packed that car directly after the service and said good-bye to everyone standing at the church and drove one hundred miles per hour all the way to Seattle.

  When Mom settled into Dad’s apartment on Thirty-Fifth Street in Everett, where the base was, she saw a pile of letters from some other woman in the closet. But she never read them, and one day they disappeared. I was born in March 1964, and we moved to a trailer in Marysville, and as soon as I could walk, at nine months old, Dad disappeared, too. We had just moved to an apartment on 113th in Everett, and Dad took off with another woman for three months or so. He left no word and no money. Mom didn’t have a job or a car, so it was just her and me sitting around the apartment, slowly strolling through downtown Everett, hoping Dad would come back. Mom was homesick to the point where she was physically ill a lot of the time, so we went home for Christmas and stayed at the Nienhuises for almost a month. Mom didn’t want to go back to Everett, but she felt some obligation that Bruce evidently did not.

  “I thought: Doesn’t he have a conscience?” said Mom. “To leave a wife and child? He just didn’t seem to feel guilt. He acted like he was allowed to do this, like it was his right, and no one could tell him any different. He never said he was sorry for any of it. Not ever.”

  Dad’s supervisor on the base was Roy Sutter, a civil engineer and a civilian, and he and his wife, Vesta, knew what was going on with Dad. They were a little bit older and became a second set of parents to Bruce and Nancy, and grandparents to me. They didn’t approve of Dad’s girlfriends, but they didn’t judge him, either. When he came back, they were glad he was back. Vesta was especially important for Mom, as she looked after me when Mom started working, and she would take us up to their small farm in Arlington on nights and weekends when Dad was off chasing some other lady. Lots of times that chase began at one of the bowling alleys where he moonlighted. Paine Field had a bowling alley on the base and Roy was a part of the bowling team, so Dad started hanging there, too. He and Roy saw eye to eye on a
lot of things and neither of them drank. Roy and Vesta were fairly strict Seventh-day Adventists and mostly vegetarians and didn’t even drink coffee unless it was the roasted grain substitute Postum. Dad might take a cigarette now and then, but he probably hadn’t had a dozen beers in his life. He told me once, much later, he didn’t like the feeling of being “out of control.”

  A bowling alley was just a bar with games in it, though, and a lot of ladies came to have a cocktail, and there was handsome, brown-skinned Bruce. Through the bowling alley, Dad became great friends with Mac Lowry, a master sergeant in the Air Force who was also a pro bowler and owned Leilani Lanes and Sunset Lanes. Through Mac’s connections, Dad got a second job working in a bowling alley in Edmonds. He even bowled in a few pro events, but bowling wasn’t why he was there.

  Mom never knew when Dad might leave for good, so in 1966 she took a job in the Inventory Office at Sears and bought a white VW Bug. A co-worker named Cheryl befriended Mom and came to live with us in Everett to help Mom cover the rent; Dad wasn’t around, so Cheryl moved into my tiny room and I moved in with Mom. The wife of one of the other officers on the base babysat me whenever Vesta wasn’t available, but they both had to be paid.

  Dad didn’t pay the rent and all he did was chase strange: Why not kick him to the curb? Mom believed one day his conscience would awaken and he’d fly right, but Dad himself didn’t even believe that. He could have sex with anyone he wanted, for however long he wanted, and Mom would open the door when he got back. So he kept at it. When he returned to the Everett apartment, he was mad that Cheryl was there and kicked her out.