The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  After he finished his four years in the Air Force, Dad worked construction and started in on a degree in building trades at Everett Junior College. Constantly running away from his misdeeds, we moved to an apartment on B Avenue in Edmonds and the insult continued. The owner of one of the bowling alleys where Dad worked had a gorgeous teenage daughter, a woman four or five years younger than he and Mom, and he shacked up with her for between three and five months. At least this time Mom knew where he was: the bowling alley owners sanctioned this affair and gave Bruce and their daughter a place to live. They were supposed to be friends, but they were only friends to Dad. The money stopped again and Mom was desperately lonely, and this time she bailed. She boxed up most of our stuff and shipped it Greyhound to Holland; she had to borrow eighty dollars from Grandpa Bub to get it there. She booked a plane ticket for the two of us and quit the apartment on B Avenue and gave her two weeks’ notice at Sears, then moved in with Roy and Vesta until she could fly home. Bruce got wind of this and showed up before we could leave. He was always secretive about where he was sleeping and who he was with, but like a true creep he kept close tabs on Mom’s movements.

  Once again, he convinced Mom to stay and they got the apartment in Edmonds back and Sears was happy to have Mom return to work. Grandpa Nienhuis put their stuff right back on the Greyhound. The next year went okay, and Dad ran around a little less. The economy in Seattle was starting to flag in advance of the base reverting to civilian control in 1968 and Dad was having trouble finding work, but Mom’s job was solid. He needed her to survive. It wasn’t too long and Mom was pregnant with Brett, and in August 1968 they decided to move back to Michigan together.

  I was a kid and what I knew was water. Dad was obsessed with fishing, so my first encounter with the sentient wild was the native cutthroat trout. Roy Sutter was a fly fisherman like Dad, and he showed Dad his secret trout spot just up the road from their farm in Arlington, a gorgeous small piece of Cascade Mountain water called Ebey Lake—now called Little Lake. We started going there when I was just an infant, but by the time I was three Dad had me set up with a little closed-face spin-casting rig and we fished together.

  I have dim memories of this lake, of emerald water ringed with tall, straight cedars moving in the wind, of the shallow banks picketed with dead snags and muck. I don’t believe there were any structures or houses on the lake. My fish stories from this time were legendary with my grandparents and uncles and aunts back in Michigan, and I have photographs of me telling them, age three, in the Seattle train station. Out on the lake, Dad sent his fly line whistling back and forth, dropping dry flies among the hatchling insects resting on the surface, among the cottonwood seeds and the milkweed down that seemed to float without actually touching the water. I watched my bobber. I knew that fly-fishing was too difficult for me, but dunking worms almost always works better than flies anyway. I’d catch panfish, but Dad only really cared about the cutthroats: elegant, rare, with a slash of red behind the gills that gave them their lurid name.

  I knew other animals. The Sutters had a cat and usually kept one feeder calf, and I went to an amazing preschool in Lynnwood called Maple Bar Ranch, which had sheep and goats and other animals and cost Nancy sixty-five dollars a month, which was a fortune. But I understood more about the fish because I was trying to catch them, and to catch them I had to think like them. I understood that they were thoughtful about their choice of bait and how much splashing and disturbance they would tolerate. I had to learn their watery culture. Fish mated and communicated and had a way of being when we weren’t around, and they mostly liked doing that in the good places like Ebey Lake that were clean and wild. I internalized that from Day One: these fish needed the isolation of mountains. I had dreams about seeing what the fish saw from under the water—I am unsure of their provenance and it’s possible I had these dreams later and they simply attached themselves to Ebey Lake, but I still have them today: looking up at Dad’s flies landing on the water, legs in waders seen from underwater, the stumps of old snags, water that was unnaturally clear but always green. And the underside of our boat.

  The dinghy may have been Roy’s idea. It may have been a bid on his part to reconnect Dad to me and Mom. Dad had already left the service when he built the boat, so I don’t know how he steamed and bent the wooden pieces to the appropriate curve, but Roy would come over to the apartment in Edmonds and help him put each rib and strake in place. I was very aware that this was our boat, not just Dad’s. We painted it an ugly forest green, for when it needed to lie hidden in the brush along the shore, and took it up the mountain.

  Even the boat had to fit the habitat. We were constantly assessing the Cascades environment, learning how we were related to the color of the water and the plants and birdsong. When we weren’t fishing we were hiking up the fire roads or up to Ebey Mountain, and I liked hiking but only if I couldn’t fish with Dad. Vesta foraged a fair amount of the food for their vegetarian diet, and I remember her telling me about ground cherries, a fruit that she grew or found somewhere. The Sutters had extensive gardens. She picked berries for money now and then, and when I was with her I sometimes took my afternoon nap in a big blackberry patch.

  Roy and Vesta invited Mom and Dad to their Seventh-day Adventist Church, and Mom did go a few times, but Dad was skeptical. He and Mom attended Everett Christian Reformed Church for a while, and then Dad started probing around, trying Baptist, Lutheran, even Episcopalian. Then he quit going altogether for about a decade.

  Real memories from the age of four are rare, but one distinct memory of our time in Seattle is being on Ebey Lake and looking at my bobber in green water and the dull shine of that water and the reflection on the water of tall conifers moving in the wind.

  We left Seattle when I was four and a half, and Dad threw his Air Force dress uniform into a Salvation Army box. He had achieved the rank of Airman Second Class—now simply called Airman—and he was done with that and he almost never mentioned his military service again, except to tell me it was no good. Lots of other dads flew away to the Philippines and to Vietnam, but he didn’t. Mom regretted leaving her good job at Sears but Dad was eager to make a fresh start. He had an honorable discharge, the GI Bill, and a two-year degree from Everett Junior College, and he was ready to go back to Michigan.

  For the move, we bought a Volkswagen bus that Dad fitted with a big, comfy bed stacked with a thick foam-rubber mattress and heavy cloth sleeping bags whose flannel linings depicted hunters and pheasants. We towed Mom’s VW Bug behind the bus at first, but after the bus wheezed and chugged all the way over the Cascades with the dinghy on top, Mom had to drive the bug and I went back and forth from vehicle to vehicle. We were rushing and didn’t stop to fish. We rolled across the Clark Fork and close by the Big Hole, the Jefferson, the Beaverhead, stopping to look down into the Madison, the Gallatin, the Yellowstone, the Bighorn, waters that Dad called the “good rivers,” hung with morning steam. We drove through the Upper Peninsula because the U.P. is the dream and slept in the van in the late summer, and anytime we stopped Dad would show me the rivers on the maps and say, “We’re going back for those.”

  Dad was a good carpenter and he got work immediately with Dan Vos Construction out of Ada, Michigan, mostly building churches. But moving to Michigan didn’t change his sexual appetites any, and because he was always chasing another job and another woman, we were on the move, rental to rental.

  “The flip-flops went on from there,” said Mom. “Lots of flip-flops.”

  The next fall, the fall of 1969, was the first time I ever saw my father and his brothers the way they saw themselves, easy comrades laughing together, men who had grown up farming and hunting together and shared a code. I’d never seen Dad so relaxed and secure, even around Roy. It was Dad and Vern, probably Jack, certainly Mike, and probably others I don’t recall, standing in Henry and Gertrude’s back lawn pulling guns out of fabric cases and handfuls of twelve-gauge shells out of paper boxes and stuffing them into their pocket
s. As they talked and loaded, they looked through a barbed-wire fence at a cornfield south of the house. A cock pheasant had flown across the dirt road from the river and into that cornfield and nothing else mattered. Down in a steep gulley between the yard and the corn, heifers ate around the bull thistle. Others drank at the cow tank on the west edge of the yard. Heinie stood among the men, muttering, “Boys, boys.” The wet had cleared out of the blue sky because summer was ending. There was the metallic tap of cartridge brass seated in the chamber and a double-barrel snapped closed. Pump actions ratcheting.

  Mom had baby Brett, and Vern and Sally had just had their first child, Sarah, so Grandma chatted away with them in her high nasal voice that was like a bluegrass song as they moved in and out of the house. My father had a beautiful Ithaca Model 37 Featherlite shotgun that I’d never seen before, because I’d never seen him holding a gun. If he was issued a gun in the Air Force, neither Mom nor I had ever seen it. The Ithaca was an elegant slash of dark wood and blued steel, long and thin like he was, with a very fast and loud pump action. The pheasant we’d seen had set its wings and tugged all the purpose in the world after it. Enough of each man remained in the yard to turn and grin at me, and I grinned back, and Mom and Sally grinned, and Heinie and Gert grinned, but theirs faded quickest because once again their boys were hustling away from them into those fields. Some of the men were still stuffing shells into the feeder slots on the side of the guns as they went through the barbed wire, quickly down a cow trail through the gulley, up past the old bag-swing tree, over another fence, and into the corn and gone.

  Grandpa and I sat in the fall sun on a tiny concrete apron off the back of the brick house among the empty boxes of shells and listened for the dull thud of shots. Which thrilled me so when they came, I had to run to the maple tree in the yard and piss on it.

  Mom and Dad bought me a yellow Huffy Cheater Slick, a stingray-style bike with a fat rear tire and a little bit of a sissy bar. We had moved to an apartment complex on a big sweeping turn on Butternut Drive in a Holland neighborhood called Pine Creek, and my buddies and I had few restrictions on where we could ride. Just across the street was a barbershop with a gumball machine. One afternoon I was straddling my bike next to a couple of other guys in the gravel in front of that shop, on the big curve, when we decided to get some gum. I didn’t have any money and I laid my bike down without a thought and ran straight across the road toward the apartment. Almost instantly, I was hit by a station wagon moving at speed.

  When I replay the moment of impact, I always see the grill of the wagon hitting me directly on the right hip. It makes sense, but memory is fallible. Mom, for instance, didn’t see the accident but remembers me getting off the school bus and getting hit, but I distinctly recall that barbershop gumball machine. The impact, however, was certain: the car hit me square-on and I flew about twenty-five or thirty feet into the yard of the apartment complex. The guy who hit me was our postman, and he must have had a little speed up because as he braked, his momentum carried him into the yard, too, and the long wagon swung around, making almost a full loop in the grass, and slammed to a stop near a fence. I must have reconstructed the car spinning in my memory because I was too busy tomahawking across the lawn to have seen it. I found myself sitting upright on the ground, gripping at the grass as though to stop me from sailing away into the sky, awake and shaking violently.

  The postman appeared beside me saying, “Are you okay? Don’t move, don’t move.” Someone got Mom out of the apartment, where Brett was getting up from a nap, and she thrust Brett into that person’s arms and ran out the door. They laid me down in the grass and checked me over, and I had scrapes in all the places where I had hit the ground—forehead, knees, elbows, palms, hips—as I ragdolled across the turf.

  The poor postman! He offered to take me to the hospital, but Mom got me in the car and took me herself. Dad left a construction job and came to meet us. In the ER, they made sure I didn’t have a punctured lung or need a splenectomy or anything like that, but I was fine. The next day the postman rapped on the door while he did his rounds and asked about me, and he was still pretty shaken up. I was at kindergarten, but Mom assured him I was okay. He had gone through a pretty bad night, thinking he might have killed a little kid. It was completely my fault. I was shaking too hard in the grass to apologize, or else I would have. No words would come out of my face while I looked at him with my eyeballs rattling around in my head.

  I had already thought a lot about dying by that point in my life. Church people talked about dying all the time, ’cause that’s when things were going to get good for them. I had thought about all the fish we caught and the pheasants Dad shot and the muskrats and mink my uncles trapped along the Black River and the moose Uncle Dale shot up in Canada. The animals didn’t give up their lives easily and volunteer to go to heaven. They fought. They bit you if they could and gored you with an antler and clawed and wiggled and hightailed it. I wasn’t ready to fly away to wherever God was in outer space, either. I had clung to the grass in the lawn with both hands while I sat there, shaking. My fingers were sore from it. I was like everything else that only had this life and then went into that ground. I wanted to live.

  Dad got into the building trades program at Western Michigan University, and we moved into a depressing cinder-block house in Richland, east of Kalamazoo. He worked construction when he wasn’t at school and was gone all the time. Brett was just one year old, but Mom was pregnant again, and she was having a lot of trouble with the pregnancy. I didn’t know much about it, I was only six years old, but she was gone to the doctor a lot and she’d take Brett with her. Her obstetrician was an hour away in Holland, so she’d drive up there for appointments.

  In August, my brother Joe was born more than two months premature. He was about the size of a large guinea pig, weighing only two pounds, thirteen ounces, and he was kept in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit—in the “nick-you,” Mom called it—in Holland Hospital for six weeks. Mom had me and Brett to care for and Dad worked all the time, so Joe was alone with the hospital staff most of that time. His pediatrician called Mom with updates every day, and even if she did go up there, she wasn’t allowed to touch him. Joe just lay there in his box, day after day, and developed infant depression because no one could hold him. I had a brother I had only seen in a plastic box with tubes and wires; the writer Rebecca Solnit once described preemies like him as a “half-written sentence.” Dad didn’t go to the hospital because he couldn’t take it. When I asked him how Joe was, his eyes would well up and he’d say he didn’t want to talk about it.

  The doctors had warned Dad that Joe probably wouldn’t make it, and if he did he might have some physical problems. He did have a double hernia, which was easy enough to fix. Mom didn’t care what they said. She was never weepy because she never believed for an instant that he would die. She knew he would make it.

  Joe did make it, and with a vengeance. You never met a kid who wanted more from life and who was determined to grow big and fast enough to get it. Later, when he was powerful and challenging every gallon of vodka to kill him, I thought about him lying in that little plastic box and I thought it unfair that a ravaging hunger would chase him from start to finish.

  That fall, we moved into WMU’s married housing complex across the street from the sprawling campus, a series of maybe a couple hundred white stucco apartments stacked three to a building and laid out in staggered, faux-Mediterranean terraces. The place was overrun with kids so I thought it was fine, but Mom and Dad were a complete shambles.

  This was when I first became aware that my Dad wasn’t acting right. I had hundreds of other couples around me for comparison, and it was easy to see he was up to something. On the weekends when people went to Woods Lake or to Little League or whatever, he wasn’t around. He went to Western all day during the semesters and worked construction all summer and on weekends, struggling to keep food on the table, but on Saturday and Sunday nights he wouldn’t come home. He’d come dr
agging in early Monday morning just in time to get some clean clothes and bitch about how there was nothing to eat before he had to get to work or to class, and then he and Mom would fight.

  They would fight because Mom knew he was with one girlfriend or another, and she was working like mad, too, babysitting as many as six kids from the complex during the day to help make ends meet, so she lived more or less in a state of rage. She was angry and desperate, but she was quiet. She confronted Dad, but she didn’t yell or scream or throw things. She just blasted him with a terse righteousness. If she would have slapped or screamed, Dad probably just would have laughed. He hated any display of emotion. The two of them went into the bedroom to keep the fighting away from us. Joe was just a tiny baby, but Brett saw their faces twisted with anger and he was scared out of his mind, so I didn’t leave him sitting there alone. I would hang out until Mom reemerged and then I was out the door.

  I would disappear into a little savannah of sassafras and sumac and honey locust that beckoned from the hillside up above the apartment complex. I’d kick around in there looking for woodchuck holes and identifying the birds, and sometimes watching deer. The married housing property went partway up Howard Street Hill and stopped at a chain-link fence, but the scrubby, wooded savannah continued on the other side of the fence and that was the property of the Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital, or what everyone called the State Hospital. The heavy brick buildings were visible at the top of the hill and its spooky medieval water tower loomed over us.

  The property beyond the fence stretched for about 150 yards up the hill before it reached the hospital’s grass yards. It had probably been open fields not too many years before, as it was only lightly dotted with spindly trees. I would cling to the fence with both hands and watch the residents strolling along trails through the goldenrod and milkweed and foxtail, smoking cigarettes. I watched one man stop and smell the locust blooms, which hung from the trees like bunches of cream-white grapes in the spring and smelled like honey. I thought heaven must smell like that, and I wondered if he thought heaven had a smell. Dad told me to stay away from these people because they were lunatics. Some of the walkers talked to themselves, but none of them ever came down to the fence to talk to me.