The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  “Oh Lord!” said Dad, already wiping his nose.

  “—and you’d crank that thing up and the air would come blasting out of the purge valve on the snorkel, so all around you the water was like boiling and this froth would blow your mask off and everything. From up on the dock it looked like a submarine was going to the bottom. But we’d be down there like Poseidon, armed with our trident.”

  “HAW HAW HAW!”

  “Oh, but that air!” Mom said, making a face.

  “It was full of oil. It tasted like car exhaust. We couldn’t stay down very long because it made you dizzy. We did see fish, though. Some big ol’ fish would come by, but none of them ever came close enough that we could poke it.”

  “HAW HAW! How could you get enough arm speed to throw the spear?”

  “Well, you couldn’t. It was always like slow motion. Your best bet was to try a kind of straight-ahead jab.”

  “Gosh, you’d think Marge would say something about that air,” said Mom.

  “Oh, HAW HAW! You probably could have died of carbon monoxide poisoning!” roared Dad. “Ach du lieber! Ha ha ha!”

  Mrs. Purk was one of the lunch ladies at school. She never said anything about not using the compressor. What the hell, this is what kids did. And I don’t think we knew anything about any carbon monoxide or whatever.

  “Oh Lord, you boys are crazy,” Dad said, beaming, and then he went downstairs to get into an episode of The Love Boat all by himself, feeling he had the greatest family in the world.

  Dad asked me once at the dinner table what my favorite story in the Bible was, and I gleefully told him I loved the Witch of Endor. He never asked me again.

  “The New Testament makes such a big deal out of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead and then the resurrection, but the Witch of Endor makes it clear that pagan people did that kind of stuff all the time,” I went on. My brothers were listening keenly.

  I combed through the Bible obsessively looking for evidence of God in the many rather than the one—the powers of nature, the talking donkeys, the small gods, which are all over the Bible like so many chalk outlines of bodies on the street.

  The story is in I Samuel 28, when Israel under King Saul was about to be destroyed by the Philistines. Saul needed battle advice but Jahweh wouldn’t speak to him, so he disguised himself and went to a witch in the town of Endor. He asked her to “bring up” the beloved prophet Samuel, who had recently died. I loved this story so much because, no matter which modern translation you read, her abilities are completely unremarkable: she brought up Samuel out of the ground without any difficulty, and he stood in the room and barked at Saul, “Why have you disturbed me?” Evidently it’s torture to be among the living once you’ve tasted again the original dust.

  King Saul goes out of his way to assure the witch that God is not displeased with her, and even though the Lord is generally wrathful she wouldn’t be punished. Rather, Saul needed her and the old pre–One god ways. And she seems nice. When she figures out this visitor is really the king in disguise, she insists on killing a fatted calf and making bread and feeding his whole entourage, because it’s clear he has starved himself with worry. And he eats.

  “It’s so normal,” I said. “He sits down and eats with her.”

  “Ha ha! Oh boy! I don’t know,” said Dad.

  “Well, I like to read stories like that,” I said.

  “Okay. Well,” he said, and he got up to read the paper. End of talk.

  Of course, this is partly why we never talked about anything but animals. But I was not cynical about the church; I embraced it, I squeezed it with both hands. I simply wanted to fall in love, like any kid. I wanted to fall in love with the dirt that held the living and the dead. I wanted the world and the people in it to be beautiful and not something to be judged or doomed to fire. Our pastor, Jack Stulp, figured out I was a mad reader and fed me books by the Calvinist philosopher Dr. Francis Schaeffer, the prophet of the church militant and a principal architect of the modern evangelical movement, who zeroed in on the singular push to reverse Roe v. Wade as the focal point of their crusade. When I was sixteen, I told my father I loved the people in our church but that I “loathed the political institution” because people acted differently in their political lives than they did at home.

  I prayed in Pastor Stulp’s study and traveled with him and his wonderful wife, Jan, to attend Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts seminar in Grand Rapids. The Stulps had the sunny joy I associated with Grandpa Nienhuis, and they were among the first church people I knew who actually read books and weren’t threatened by ideas I might read out of the ecologist Paul Shepard or, for that matter, the Old Testament. I craved hanging out with them because it was okay to ask questions. In Gothard’s big seminar, a multiday event that attracted many thousands to a big hall, the evangelist made a show out of telling women how powerful they were as an influence over their men, and in return they had to submit to the husband’s authority. Men around us had tears streaming out of their eyes. I thought this was a terrible idea. I was trying to get with the program, though, and I asked the Stulps about this on the way home, leaning in between them from the back seat: Do women have to be subservient to men? All I could think about was my dad. Jan Stulp assured me Gothard didn’t have all the answers. I was so relieved that there was room to disagree with Bible bigwigs.

  I was starting to read a lot of ecology texts at this time, beginning with Shepard’s work, and the interests overlapped. I had this passage from Psalm 19 taped to my wall in the big new house, right next to my worn-out copies of Quadrophenia and Outlandos D’Amour and the sweet 1960s Gretsch drum kit I’d borrowed from the neighbor; the poem was about the true nature of reality, the speechless speech, as the psalmist described it three thousand years ago in Mesopotamia:

  The heavens declare the glory of God;

  the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

  Day after day they pour forth speech;

  night after night they reveal knowledge.

  They have no speech, they use no words;

  no sound is heard from them.

  Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,

  their words to the ends of the world.

  In the Hebrew Bible, the original phrase for “voice” in that passage was “measuring line.” Yet their measuring line goes out into all the earth. The other-than-human world takes its own measure, judges the conditions, and responds according to its own purposes, using its own sensory information. The world winks at us through the language, as the psalmists in the time of King David harnessed the old pagan animism to pull for the new One god. I guess it’s good to have the old gods on your side. But the skies themselves were obviously still keeping their options open: Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.

  I understood that, without the voices of the wind and stones, even the super-promoted Semitic storm god Jahweh could get no traction in the mind. For the imagination is built of this speechless speech. The small gods carried the original instructions, the user’s manual for the nonideological way we actually live on earth.

  One night I found a little sticky note from Dad stuck to that Psalm where it hung on my wall, and it said, “Very nice.”

  In the fall of 1981, Dad and I were driving to the house in the Jesse when a buck ran across the road in front of us, plunging into a field of drying corn. Bruce thought the deer would stop in a small plantation of red pines at the top of the hill, and we roared the quarter mile home, grabbed deer rifles (which was illegal, it’s shotgun-only in that part of Michigan), and roared back, with me loading both guns as we drove (also illegal). We left the truck on the side of the road and ran through somebody’s corn and up the hill, and sure enough, the buck trotted ahead of us into somebody’s pines.

  We separated a bit and stalked into the rows of trees and face-first into a blazing fall sunset coming over the top of the hill. The sun’s rays were perfectly horizontal and sear
ed the eyes, leaving long black shadows that swept toward us and projected down onto the cornfield. I saw the deer step into a dark stripe and disappear. I put my gun up to look at a nose, then a rear leg, then nothing. The deer stepped quietly from tree to tree. It was toying with us, and I started to smile so hard I wept. I was seventeen and cried over just about everything.

  “Where the hell is it?!” Dad hissed.

  I pointed at the tree where I had seen it, tears splashing down my front, and we flanked the tree, but there was no deer there. The plantation was only a couple hundred yards long, and when we reached the far end we turned around and saw the deer’s ass departing right where we had come in. He took one step down the hill and was gone.

  At Christmas that year, I felt like I had a good story to tell to the Kuipers crew, but Dad stopped me. “They don’t want to hear that story,” he said to everyone.

  Later when we were driving home I asked him why I couldn’t tell that one.

  “Those guys don’t care about how beautiful the sky was or any of that,” he said. “The deer got away. That’s what matters.”

  Nine

  Back to the Cabin

  When Bruce, Vern, and Jack finally got their deer camp from Ike in 1989, it didn’t change Dad’s life the way he’d hoped. I wouldn’t hunt there. Joe had gone the first two years and then quit, and Brett managed three, and in 1991 Brett even shot a decent deer there. That gave him rights to name the blind he’d been in, which sat on the miasmic edge of the bog and was prone to fogs and spookiness. It was only fair, since Brett had also built all the blinds as a job for Dad. He named it “Gonzo” after the writer Hunter S. Thompson. Then he stopped going, too. It was just no fun.

  So Bruce got very lonely in the cabin he had built, even though it was full of other family members. He was lonely to the point of paranoia and weird behavior. I started to get reports.

  “Dad called me from the cabin and said he wanted me to come up there because he was finding these drag marks all over the place,” Brett said. Brett and Joe had lived in San Francisco for a couple of years while I was there, but both of them ended up back in Kalamazoo.

  “I said to Dad, ‘What do you mean, “drag marks?”’” Brett said. “‘Like someone driving out there and dragging out trees for firewood or something?’

  “He said, ‘No, like someone was dragging a body. Exactly the weight and shape of a body. It’s that goddamned poacher. He’s been shooting all the deer off our place for years, that’s why we never get any big ones.’”

  The poacher was a real person, or a real family of persons, but I’ll withhold their name because the only thing they’d ever done for certain was ride their ATV across the Kuipers camp. One or more of them did go to prison for growing a lot of dope over in the USA, but I don’t think they ever poached off our place.

  Brett continued, “So I said, ‘Are you following the drag marks?’ And Dad said that’s why he needed me to come up there. He said the drag marks meandered all over the property, looping back on themselves. They went out into Mr. Carter’s corn and then back onto our property. They went all over hell. Dad said you could see the heel marks, so it’s a person on foot, but the poacher would have worn himself out dragging a deer that far. He couldn’t figure it out.

  “So I said I’d go up there, and I did. Dad and I walked the property and he was right: it sure as hell looked like someone had been dragging a body around. I followed the marks, and I couldn’t figure it out, either. It might not have been a deer—you know how paranoid Dad was about that—but somebody was dragging something. Knocking down the bushes, running over stuff, dragging something heavy through the sand.

  “So then Dad’s pissed, and he’s going to call the sheriff. But first we go over to Joe Carter’s to ask him if he’s seen anything. And Joe says, ‘Oh, sure, that’s not a poacher, Bruce. That’s a horse!’

  “Joe Carter says, ‘There’s a lady named Jeanie Mannor to the east, right there on the corner, she puts her horse out in the lawn so it can eat the grass. And instead of staking it, she ties it to a tractor tire so it can pull the tire and go to a new spot. The idea is that it wasn’t supposed to go far, but it’s been down here in these hayfields across the street and even over across the next road, which means it’s more than a mile from home. That horse goes all over this section dragging that tire. Poor horse.’

  “Well, then Dad felt kind of foolish because he’d been raving about the damn poacher! And what are you going to do to stop a horse? They don’t have a fence around the deer camp. He never did go see that lady about it, though. Too intimidated.”

  Dad ended up on the place alone. In 1997 Jack and Vern both quit the Kuipers Hunt Club because they needed their own camps. Grandbabies were popping up everywhere and the previous Thanksgiving there’d been twenty-some people jammed into that tiny cabin, and of course with the rules being what they were about minimizing the disturbance outside it was crazy-making in there. Plus they shot everything that moved so there were hardly any deer, much less porcupines or coyotes or cranes.

  Dad had to either buy them out or sell the place, and he was leaning toward the latter. He effectively had 215 acres, if you included the USA adjacent, but he was dismayed that the deer weren’t like they were over on Ike’s across the road. And we were boycotting, so how was he going to police all those acres? He’d be overrun with poachers, for sure.

  Dad and Joe were driving somewhere in Michigan that summer and they called me from the car.

  “Kemosabe!” he shouted. “Hey, Joe and I were just up north looking at places that might be on a river, and I wondered what your vote would be: Joe wants some land on a fishing river, and Brett wants swampy woods for grouse. I’m more interested in bowhunting now. So you might be kind of a tiebreaker. What do you think is most important?”

  “I don’t even know what’s going on,” I said. “Are you getting a new hunting camp?”

  “Well, that place by Ike’s is no good.”

  “What? The cabin? You’ve been trying to get me to go there for years! I thought you guys all loved it so much.”

  “Well, maybe we can get a better place where there’s more game. You know we never see anything big there.”

  “That’s because you had like a thousand people hunting it. Anyway, I wouldn’t know.”

  “You gotta come this fall,” Joe interrupted. “We’re going to kick around the place and see if we can put up some birds.”

  “Brett wants to do that,” Dad said, dejectedly. “I mean, we really should leave it be and bowhunt it now that it’s quiet there.”

  “We’re going to bowhunt, too. We can find some birds and still see deer,” Joe said, reassuring him.

  “If there’s birds there, why aren’t you keeping it?” I asked.

  “It’s just all that stinking sand,” said Dad. “Nothing grows there. The deer don’t have anything to eat. Jack tried to put in rye but it won’t even come up.”

  In the spring of 1990, with the cabin under construction, Jack had bounced through First Field in his Astrovan pulling an old stretch of chain-link fence around, weighted with granite boulders to rip up the crust of moss and prickers. The windshield wipers slapped back and forth at a brown cloud of ant lion chitins and lichen fibers and sumac berry dust and stink bug stink that rose up like the column of smoke from a forest fire and blew into the interior of the van. He scattered fifty dollars’ worth of rye seed over the five acres and figured something would come up. The magnetism was there. “You felt like you had to do something,” Jack told me. He did this spring and fall maybe three years in a row and got nothing more than a green fuzz to come up. So he quit.

  Vern did better with his spruce trees. He liked to plant conifers and had put white pines all around his home out by Dad’s—I had mowed his yard for years and saw those pines grow into giants. That first year at the cabin, he bought hundreds of spruce trees, mostly Norways, but anytime you buy spruces there are some blues mixed in. The uncles and cousins had themselve
s a planting party at the cabin and whacked those into the sand all up and down along the road, for privacy, and in sun-scorched drifts here and there around the property. Most of them survived and by the time the uncles and their families decamped for more rivery cabins elsewhere, the spruces were head high and had already formed a dense wall four or five trees deep along the road. All three of the Hunt Club’s original members were thrilled with those trees, not just because they kept prying eyes out but because the trees flourished and the flourishing was satisfying no matter what you believed about your responsibilities here on earth.

  “Have you looked at good places?” I prompted.

  “We saw one place on a river we liked, but the guy said the family was selling it out from under him and he’d only leave as a corpse,” said Joe. “We decided not to get involved with that shit.”

  “You both sound excited, though. And Brett’s looking at places, too?”

  “Yeah, he’s looked at a few. We’re focusing mostly on river places, but they’re so much more expensive,” said Joe. “Maybe we can get a forty bordering on some federal. It would be great if you come out in the fall—”

  “I’ll be there,” I interrupted.

  “But you gotta talk to Brett,” Dad broke in. “We’re going to run all the deer off by thrashing around out there and it just makes me sick, we’ve worked so hard to keep everyone out of there. We could go in the federal land—”

  “I’ll be there,” I repeated. “Can you look at my Wingmaster to make sure it’s not a pile of rust? It’s still in the box somewhere in your house. I’ve only shot it a couple times.”

  Dad went on explaining how bird hunting was going to wreck the place, but no one was listening. We’d never before agreed to all go to the cabin together and it was unlikely we’d find another time that would work for everyone. Bruce would probably end up selling this place, or hunting it on his own. But at least we’d get a couple of days hunting together.