The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  The sand itself wanted to be known. It made requests or demands on my imagination.

  I thought this display must be working on us when we worked on the land. The more we put our hands in it, sweat over it, bled into it, the more it entered our imaginations and took hold. No matter where I was in the world, working on journalism pieces, on a glacier, at the taco truck on Rose Avenue in Venice, I thought about what was happening at this deer camp. Some old part of our minds was responding to the display here. This imaginative display made us feel good, and everywhere I went I felt like the lines were open to this place.

  When I came back to the cabin around ten A.M., Dad was sitting with Spenser at the kitchen table, reading Fox in Socks. Spenser was so absorbed by the book he hardly noticed me walk in; his eyes were locked on the pages and he insisted Grandpa keep reading. Dad loved the Dr. Seuss books and they had inspired our tendency to rhyme and pun. If I walked into the cabin and said, “I saw a lot in the dark,” someone would respond, “It was not a lark!” and “Hark, hark, the howling park,” and so on. That’s how we talked when we wanted to be surprised by the imagination. A rhyme invited words in from somewhere other.

  Grandpa Bruce was making the connection: “This is where foxes live,” he said, pointing out the open window to beyond Cabin Field. “They live here, in the woods. In socks.” Spenser’s mouth hung open.

  Joe bagged a decent six-point buck that morning, which seemed to be good preparation for a guy with a baby on the way.

  Hazel Jane was born in the spring with Joe’s dimples and saved his life. We were worried about how he would react, if it would drive him this way or that, but he discovered, much to his delight, that he loved this little girl with all his oversized heart. He acknowledged to me and to Brett and especially Ayron that his beautiful dream of suicide was now impossible. Too much love. Mom was over the moon to have another grandchild to spoil, and Dad doted on Hazel like he doted on Spenser. Dad did not come to Spenser’s baptism that spring, however, because Meg and I had him baptized at Saint Monica’s and Dad was pretty sure that Catholics went to hell.

  Cutting trees for habitat generally happens in the spring, to give the forest humus a chance to release suppressed trees and get them growing before the snow flies, but the 2002 season came and went and we didn’t do any logging. I was burning through a lot of greenhouse-gas-causing jet fuel flying back and forth from L.A., but I got out there for farm work and spun around First Field on the John Deere with a T-shirt tied around my face, gagging on the fine gray dust and badger shit and blinking the deerflies out of my eyes. I think I was dragging the disc. I did figure eights around the field and a fine glacial powder crunched in my teeth.

  Dad finally started listening to Brett about the need for more inputs: our fields had phosphorous off the scale and okay potassium but only traces of organic matter and nitrogen, so when they planted the next rotation of buckwheat, he went for the full recommended amount of fertilizer. And then Brett and the old man drove to the co-op in Fremont and bought a massive load of agricultural lime that came in a spreader wagon, but instead of pulling it with the tractor he dragged it twenty-two miles down the road with his new Eddie Bauer Explorer. It was so heavy that the truck smelled hot and the red warning light for the transmission was lit up all the way. I bought that truck from him a few years later and I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise that within a month I spent eight thousand dollars putting a new transmission in it.

  The more Dad put into the place, the more he let it under his skin, the more it irritated him. Brett took the brunt of it, because he was our forester and he was preternaturally skilled with machines. He had always been the guy who fixed the outboard motor or the downrigger on the boat, who re-blued an old gun, who put a new guide on the salmon rod, who got Dad’s Harley running so he could take it out for its annual trip into town and back. Because he was so good at these things and Dad was so relatively bad at them, and Dad wouldn’t let him cut the trees, the two of them were always a few words away from a blowup.

  Dad announced he was going to take the spreader off the tractor and put on the brush hog so he could clear a new spot for a food plot in the aspens to the southwest. As he went out the door Brett yelled, “You remember how to do it?” “Yes, yes,” Dad said, slightly offended. Then: the tractor plop-plopping to life, ten to fifteen minutes of maneuvering, revving the engine, grunting, pounding on steel plate with a hammer, “God DAMN it! Fuck!” and he reappeared at the mudroom door with hands black with grease.

  “Brett, can you take a look at this? I think it’s broken.”

  “It’s probably not broken. Are you pulling the collar back on the driveshaft? You gotta wiggle it off there.”

  “It’s not coming off. It’s bent or something.”

  Brett put his jeans and Red Wings on and tromped out there and checked the three-point connections to see if the spreader was twisted in the hitch. “These are hard to get on and off,” he said, taking the driveshaft in his hands.

  “No, no, it doesn’t matter what you do. It’s broken.”

  “Are you going to let me fuckin’ show you, or what? Look—”

  “I know what to do but it doesn’t work.”

  “Why is it always like this? Why can’t you remember how it goes on? This is your tractor, and you were supposed to be a farmer. I can’t always fucking do this stuff for you!” And then he popped the shaft off the power takeoff and pulled a couple of pins from the hitch and the spreader sat free on the pine needles.

  “There,” he said, wiping his hands. “You know how to put the mower on, right? And how to engage the PTO and all that? You know it won’t work if you’re not sitting on the seat.” That was all stuff that Dad knew, of course.

  “God, you can be a real prick sometimes, Brett.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, you’re an ass. You assume everything’s broken, or a person you saw drink one beer must be a drunk, or the sand won’t grow anything. Look at it! It fucking grew!”

  There was a decent crop of buckwheat that year, a loose green grass about high enough to tickle a deer’s knees. It never really headed out all the way, but it grew. The extra fertilizer and lime made a difference. Similarly, a deer plot mix of purple-top turnips, canola, Russian kale, chicory, and other brassicas and cold-season grasses had gone off like a half-dead bottle rocket in Cabin Field; it came up but never really popped. When you kicked through there you’d find little turnips the size of your big toe.

  “Don’t snap at me like that,” said Dad, looking at him hard.

  “I wish you believed in what we were doing here just a tiny little bit. Just enough to care. That would change everything,” Brett said.

  I was on my own in Montana that summer, writing a piece on wildflower touring for Travel & Leisure. I stayed at the Ruby Springs Lodge and at the Old Hotel in Twin Bridges and fished the Beaverhead and the Ruby with a superlight, four-piece pack rod Brett had made me, which is still my favorite fly rod. The bottom was sand and the water in the Ruby was barely up to my knees and I caught trout. I sent a postcard to Dad telling him I was in the good water, just across the Tobacco Roots from the Madison and the Yellowstone, where all of us had fished on our RV vacation long ago.

  A biologist named Catherine Cain drove me in her four-wheel-drive truck up into the Pioneer Mountains above the Big Hole River to a remote high meadow called Vipond Park. We topped the last of the dirt switchbacks and slowly rolled onto a wet plateau packed with blue camas and Lemhi beardtongue flowers, and I was stunned into silence. The blooms stretched away for miles, pulling all the indigo and pale violet out of the sky and spreading it on the earth. She stopped the truck and I just hung on the door, unable to talk. Native American tribes had fought wars over these edible camas bulbs, which were an important food source in winter, she noted. I nodded, scribbled in my notepad. But all I could think of was Dad, Brett, Joe, and Mom. They needed to see this. I needed to go get them and come right back here. Because this, this is what Mom and Dad had
been good at. Because of them, I would stand in a river for no reason at all and let fish bump my ankles and fall in love with a mountaintop sea of flowers.

  “If we really want the place to take off, we have to get the timber guys in here to get those trees off,” said Brett. He and Ayron, Dad and Joe were circulating past the table in the cabin, which is where all the arguments started. Dad was showing them photos of the fishing trip he and Diane took to Alaska.

  “Brett, I’m just not ready for that. We’ve done a lot, let’s just focus on getting some grass and some turnips and chicory and stuff to come up,” said Dad, making his tea. He drank Lipton and he would wrap the string around the tea bag where it sat in the head of the spoon and wring it out into his cup so he wouldn’t leave drips anywhere.

  “Look, all that is great, I’m so happy we got some buckwheat and turnips, but it’s not the big move we need to make,” argued Brett. “The big move is to take out those Scots pines and cut back the aspen. It’s in our habitat document.”

  “If you take out those trees, nothing will grow back. That sand is poisoned.”

  “What do you mean, ‘poisoned?’”

  “Salted. Someone salted it. Burned up.”

  “Are we really having this same discussion again? The trees will grow. Aspens will sucker. The Scots pines will probably grow back. But a lot of other trees will see the opportunity and move in. Nederveld wrote it right here in the plan.”

  “Well the grass doesn’t grow like it would normally. So maybe he’s wrong.”

  “God damn, Dad,” said Brett. “Why is it always one step forward and two back? The buckwheat came up.” He got up and poured himself a highball glass of whiskey, then rolled a cigarette.

  “You have to make little moves. Don’t disturb too much,” said Dad.

  “Fuck! I’m so fucking frustrated!” Brett barked. “There’s nothing wrong with the sand! It’s totally fucking normal fucking sand. The red pines over our heads right now grew in that same sand and they are forty feet tall. Trees are going to grow.”

  “You just don’t know that. You don’t know it. You wreck this place and then we got the tractor and everything for nothing. Then we just have to sell it. And nobody will buy it because the trees are all wrecked.”

  Ayron saw the cords standing out on Brett’s neck, and she stood up to get him out the door.

  “Yes we do know!” shouted Brett. “We put in all this time and effort and you put in all this money because that’s the best science available! That’s the expert opinion! We emulate the disturbance and the forest grows back! Shit!”

  “You just don’t know.”

  “I fucking hate being here so much and I hate doing this with you!”

  “Brett, I don’t appreciate that kind of talk.”

  “Any other person in the world would see that logging as plain old common sense. Anybody but you. I just don’t get it.”

  Ayron got Brett by the shoulders and turned him out the slider. She shut it behind them. They sat at the picnic table as he smoked. After a few minutes of talking, they both came back in and Brett patted Dad on the back.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said to Dad, already planning to call Nederveld privately and get bids on the logging. But he didn’t say that.

  “Okay, good,” said Dad.

  “Your brother just puts his horns down,” Dad said to me on the phone, upset.

  “In this instance, he’s right,” I said.

  “He’s not right. I’ve been here for almost fifteen years. I know this place. Nothing will grow.”

  “So what? He’s still right,” I said. “He’s right because it doesn’t hurt you to go with the plan. Who cares if the shitty Scots pines don’t grow back? Not even birds like them. Maybe there will only be a pile of sand there afterward; I say enjoy the beach. Is it worth losing Brett’s involvement up there? I want him to be there. I come out there to see everybody in one place. So just rip the damn Band-Aid off.”

  “I wish he could just—”

  “Just what? Be like you?” I cried.

  “No, I don’t—”

  “He is like you. Congratulations. That makes it relatively easy to know how to get beyond this impasse: be not you. Cave. Let him run all over you. Let him put in a motocross track or a bullfrog ranch or put in a gladiola farm or be a chainsaw sculptor, hell, I don’t know, who gives a shit? Just let him win. Be his biggest fan. That’s what my Jesus would do.”

  “Heh. Yeah. Heh,” Dad laughed and for once it wasn’t nervous laughter. It was real. It was the sound of his ego deflating and coming out of his mouth in little chunks of breath.

  “Joe wants to plant apples,” he added.

  “Good, so let’s do that, too. See how easy? Put in a whole giant orchard. What don’t deer like about apples?”

  “They like ’em fine. I’m thinking about it, I’m thinking about it.”

  “What’s there to think about? We are your sons. We want to do this stuff with you.”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  Dad bowhunted the place all fall and he showed me the tracks of a good-sized buck coming off Mr. Carter’s cornfield and right up the trail toward Desert Storm. The corn was down and the tracks were hard to miss: the big brute’s weight split the two toes of the hoof far apart and the stretch between the tip of the toe and the dew claws behind was about as long as my hand. I spent a few mornings in that blind again before the season began, sitting in the dark for an hour or so before dawn. On both mornings, the buck arrived like clockwork just a few minutes before seven A.M. He trotted up the trail, keeping his heavy head down, moving fast, already in the rut. Whatever was happening with our camp, the wildlife was changing. I wasn’t much of a mind to shoot this deer, but I did think about bringing home the venison for Meg and Spenser. Dad, on the other hand, was absolutely obsessed with this deer and that I should get it. He offered to stay in again with Spenser so I could be out there for Opening Day.

  I went out early that morning and sat in darkness, letting the woods flood my thoughts. I had really grown to resent the name Desert Storm and was trying to think of a better one, something more personal. Joe reminded me that Ritual de lo Habitual came out the year Brett built this blind, 1990, when Joe was in the psych hospital, and I guessed we could have called it the Habitual or Three Days. But we needed some kind of new event, something to match the poetry or inherent violence of Desert Storm.

  Poetics are a function of place. The beings and shapes in the darkness presented to my imagination and became embodied as felt meanings that I tried to turn into words. Those things out there, leaves, wind, projected their own mentation into me. As Merleau-Ponty had said: “It thinks itself within me.” This echoed the speechless speech of Psalm 19. Yet their measuring line goes out into all the earth.

  I wanted to say that big buck was thinking itself within me. The whole woods was forcing its way into my consciousness, the bent spikes of dry burdock, the volcanic eastern sky, the slowly fluttering beech leaves, the dark trees poured upside down out of the leaf litter and growing gray in the coming dawn. The deer was made of all that, was a walking version of it, and would emerge from it. At six fifty A.M. I looked at my watch and started peering intently down that shooting lane.

  At that exact moment, a man in an orange camo jumpsuit stepped into the opening where the lane ended in Carter’s field. He studied the sets of prints stomped into the ground there, then shucked off his heavy pack and proceeded to put up a tree stand in the tree directly over the trail, sawing and hacking off limbs and making an unholy racket as he did it.

  I watched this for a moment and then reluctantly grasped I’d have to go over there, since he was on our property. There’d be no deer coming now, anyway. So I shouldered my rifle and walked down the shooting lane and tried to make a lot of noise, cracking limbs and scuffing the leaves so he’d notice me. He looked my way and kept on climbing as I approached, scowling at me, since I was ruining his hunt, and finally he barked, “What the h
ell’s going on?”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to get out of the tree,” I said.

  “What the fuck?” He was about fifteen years older than me, with a severe white brushcut and, as Captain Beefheart sang, particular about the point it made.

  “That’s my tree,” I said. Indicating my blind up on the rise, I added, “And you’re right in the middle of my shooting lane. It’s not safe.”

  “Well, fuck this,” he said, climbing down, and stood holding his bow as he whipped out a radio and growled into it. “Hey, this young man here says I can’t hunt on this land.”

  “I’ll be right there,” said the voice on the radio.

  We had a little argument while his pal made his way over. I was the automatic winner because my surname was on the deed, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t pissed off about it. He was armed to the teeth and so was I, and we both knew another guy was walking toward us also arrayed with various weapons. It was like meeting enemy soldiers in a Christmas armistice or something, except there was no hot tea or soccer so it wasn’t as nice.

  Turns out the guy who showed up lived right at the top of the hill, by the cemetery, and he didn’t want any flap. He was downright neighborly, which I appreciated. So we directed his friend back to the swamp, where Mr. Carter’s field bordered the USA, and the neighbor went back up by the road, well out of sight. And I went back to the blind and enjoyed the company of chickadees and crows for the next four hours.

  When I told Dad about it at lunch, he was hot. I guess I should have recognized that his refusal to cut the trees was evidence of his absolute fealty to the place, but I was pleased that he would rush to my defense. I had almost decided not to tell him because when something went wrong in the past he automatically figured we were at fault. It was the first time I could ever remember him taking my side.