The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

We got out there for Thanksgiving, and the oaks were already bare and the sky cold and brilliant gray. As we stood around the Gonzo blind, a boggy wet breeze fluttered the few gold leaves that were left on the aspens and the yellow-bronze leaves of the beech trees. Leaves were banked up against the trees in ankle-deep drifts. We wore canvas jackets and gloves and stocking caps, and our words puffed out in little nebulas.

  Most of the aspens were small but we came across a towering mature aspen about fifty feet tall that beavers had chewed halfway through. The beavers had felled a whole row of them so the tops fell into the bog. They chewed them into sections bitten to pencil points on both ends and dragged them down their slides. It was only my second time on Dad’s deer camp, and I’d never seen this corner before. The twelve-gauge was heavy and unfamiliar in my hands.

  I watched the remaining gold leaves shuddering on the aspens and I thought of Van Gogh’s The Mulberry Tree, which writhes before your eyes. It is at the Norton Simon in Los Angeles, and I made a habit of seeing it about once a year. While we talked, the leaves burst off the trees with the least touch of fall wind, and the forest constantly unmade and remade itself before us. Writhing and stripping down.

  “The prime habitat is already gone in here,” Brett was saying. “Aunt Sally took a picture of me here when I shot that deer in ’91 and this was all understory as thick as dog hair and just a few old mature trees. They logged it about five or eight years before you bought it and now it’s been fifteen years and everything’s shaded out. Pretty soon you could get back in here and take them down again for pulp and they would sucker like crazy and then we’d have some really good grouse and woodcock habitat again.” He’d been talking like this on the whole walk out.

  “If they screwed it up, nothing would ever grow back,” said Dad.

  Brett looked at me and said, “And this is why we’ve never been involved up here.”

  He turned back to Dad. “Damn, Dad, I just—look around! The guy who owned this logged it, and look at how it filled right in. The aspens are clonal, they—”

  The trees boiled over.

  Drubbity drubbity drubbit. A ruffed grouse thundered out of the leaf litter. Everybody jumped out of their boots. It doesn’t matter how prepared you are; you can be staring at a bird at the end of a dog’s pointing nose, and when it flushes you’re still going to jump. In this case, we didn’t have a dog and everyone’s hair stood on end. What looked like a flying fistful of bracken fern twisted madly through the trees, and Brett and I shot simultaneously and down it went. I never got my cheek on the stock and shot over it by at least five feet. It had been fifteen years since I’d touched this shotgun and I didn’t even remember how to load it: back on the porch I had twisted the cleaning nut off the end of the loading tube and sat at the picnic table trying to figure out how the shells went in and Brett stuck his finger in the loading slot and said, “In here, dummy. Jaayzus. Want me to shoot ’em for you, too?”

  He had. Brett found his bird in the dry leaves and walked toward us holding it tenderly and smiling a smile I’ll never forget. He had been waiting a full decade for that grouse. The beech tree above us roared.

  “This changes things,” I said, touching the bird’s warm plumage.

  “I knew they were in here,” said Brett.

  A half hour later Joe shot another one as it erupted out of one of Vern’s neck-high spruce trees on the west side, over by First Field. We had two fresh grouse to go with canned baked beans and burgers Dad had brought, and Joe let him cook even though Joe actually was a cook and had worked at a hip diner on Kalamazoo’s downtown mall. We’d already had a big family meal with the Kuipers clan, but this was our real Thanksgiving. It was one of the best of my life, just the four of us sitting at the table. We left the curtains open and watched the darkness fall on the aspens and the bright red of the swamp maples beyond Cabin Field. The sweet meat tasted faintly of sandy muck and gray dogwood berries and it was perfect.

  “Are we going out tomorrow to look at other places to buy?” I said. “Because I’d rather just go across the road to the federal land and do this some more.”

  “Me, too. We’re just wasting our time looking at other places,” Brett barked. The words burst out of him like he couldn’t hold them back. “We got everything we need right here.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Dad, calming him. “Vern and Jack found good places.”

  “Not as good as this, for what we do. None of the places we’ve seen so far are anywhere near as good as this, with all this federal land here, and with this great cabin on it. We’re far from a river, but if you really look you see that this place has crazy good habitat.”

  Joe agreed, saying, “The cabin makes a huge difference. Most of the places we’ve seen are either some Chicago millionaire palaces or just shit-shacks.”

  “We’re not seeing lots of birds or big deer here because this place needs work,” continued Brett. “We got pine plantations that are about useless and miles of sand. But we can change that. Dad, I know you don’t want to hear that.”

  “It doesn’t matter if I want to hear it or not,” said Dad. “Nothing will grow in that sand.”

  “I’m serious,” said Brett, the cords standing out on his neck. “I’m not going to commit to this place and then find out I’m not allowed to cut down a funky old Scots pine or plant a crabapple. I have to be able to come up here on my own and run the dog. It’s not a deer museum.”

  “I don’t like being scolded, Brett,” said Dad, his face clouding.

  “But something has to change. Today is one of the best days we’ve had in way over a decade, and there’s no reason it can’t be like this all the time. I don’t know why you wouldn’t want that.”

  “Oh, it’s been like that the whole time we’ve had this place. We’ve had so much fun, but you just didn’t see it because you weren’t here,” said Dad.

  “But we weren’t here exactly because it wasn’t fun for us,” Brett said, leaning in. “I don’t want to speak for Joe and Dean, but I was dying to come here. It was just that my ideas weren’t welcome.”

  Joe and I weren’t saying much. Brett pursued his true interests to a point of high expertise, and I had realized that day while walking the property that he had very specific changes he’d like to make to the habitat, and to our dad.

  “I’d like to do some work here,” I added. “Now that there’s room for other opinions.”

  “You guys were always welcome to come here and do anything you want,” Dad said, trying to head off a fresh mutiny. “You were just too busy.”

  “I’m not going to get dicked around,” Brett said. “This place could be great. If we want a cabin we all love, let’s keep this one and fix the place up.”

  “But why not look at some other places? We could find something perfect,” Dad said.

  “Because this place is an opportunity for us,” said Brett. “We don’t need perfect habitat; we can make it.”

  Then we didn’t talk about it anymore.

  Cold gray clouds foamed over the treetops. We moved out to the picnic table on the old porch so Brett and Joe could smoke; the porch had no roof then and was open to the falling cold. The dew came with the sweet watery taste of aspen and raised the odor of pine duff. Brett went out to his truck and got a pint of whiskey and Dad didn’t protest. The presence of whiskey and cigarettes made it the most decadent day the cabin had ever seen. No one had agreed to stay on this property, but it seemed pretty clear we were staying. Joe and Bruce pointed out into the trees to indicate where their new bowhunting tree stands should go.

  The next morning, before dawn, I went out to sit in a blind to watch the forest. I hadn’t done this in a long time. The blinds were out there holding their piece of the darkness and their tug on me was tremendous. I hardly knew where I was going on the camp but I navigated by headlamp and I had field glasses and a notebook, but no gun. It was November and the leaves were wet and spongy as I walked. I had three coats on and Dad’s old Sorels and crappy
leather work gloves. I was so new to the place that I was nervous and my stomach shivered.

  I walked through the south twenty to a blind called Shouldabeen. Dad had sat in this blind quite a bit. One day he went in for lunch, which he almost never did, and Jack sat in the blind for an hour and shot a nice deer. Shouldabeen there. It stood on a little knoll in the middle of the aspen stand where Brett had shot the grouse. The aspen and red maple there had shaded out most everything else and it was easy to see through the trees.

  Dad was a little pissed off that I wouldn’t take a gun, but he was happy to have someone sit in the blinds, demonstrating to the poachers out there that we were defending our place.

  I was hunting other things. When you sat in Shouldabeen and looked south, toward the bog, you looked right at that porcupine tree that stood about twenty yards away. We had stopped and examined it right after Brett found his grouse in the leaves, and Dad said you could hear the porcupines mewling in there when it was very quiet. The tree was a yellow birch snag, hollow and broken off about twenty feet up, with porcupine shit flowing out of it like it was vomiting out of multiple holes. I had seen it on my one previous visit years earlier. When you had a flashlight, Joe said, you could shine it up inside and see porcupines looking at you. They had obviously lived there for decades. We had followed their narrow trails leading from that tree to the dark hemlocks forty yards away, which is the porcupine’s favorite winter food.

  Joe named all the porcupines Wendell. He was reading Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America, a book about the abuse of land through chemical and mechanical farming and how soil degradation has led to the disintegration of American culture. The book had everything to do with the restoration potential we saw in this camp, and it seemed a fitting tribute. The porcupines were nearly impossible to tell apart anyway, except by size, and we weren’t sure how many there were in that tree, so one name was fine. When you saw one, you saw Wendell.

  I set up in the blind and let the darkness settle, but I never did hear Wendell. Not this time.

  The old feeling I knew from Card’s place came back fast, though. I was smiling. I was comfortable in the dark, wide open, feeling a woods that was heavy with creatures. I didn’t have to guess they were there; I had walked out to them because they were always there. The swampy woods implied the deer, the porcupine, the coyote, the crane. If they decided to show, like the turkeys bombing out of the pines, I would be so pleased but not necessarily surprised. It felt wrong to look past the blue-black shapes of trees as though they were just a container for something to eat; the aspen and highbush blueberries and witch hazel were enough. Watching them was to watch that whole implied community. Geese that hadn’t yet gone south were honking on the pond over on the camp next door, which belonged to a nice guy named Landheer. An owl was crying from the spruce island in the middle of the beaver bog. Every puff of wind shattered the pale lights of the aspens and sent a shower of night-grayed maple leaves to earth. I wasn’t straining to bring things into range. Rather, I was slightly overwhelmed by everything in the forest coming toward me like it was reaching out, wanting to be acknowledged. I felt the leaves would bank up against the blind and flow in and bury me in an outburst of affection.

  About five minutes before sunup, chickadees and crows started their wailing, then the sharp scream of cardinals, and the forest was different. It receded somewhat. It took a step back and assumed a more standoffish daytime posture. I let the sun come up into the treetops to the east and then walked back to the cabin.

  “See anything?” said Dad, in his robe.

  “Everything,” I said.

  We took to calling the place “the cabin,” as though it were ours. It had bloomed within us and we talked about it whenever we talked, which was suddenly all the time. Even Mom was jabbering on about our cabin and she had never seen the place. She had reason to dislike the camp, since Dad probably bought it with money that should have gone to her, but she let go of that. She wanted us to be closer to one another and closer to Dad. She responded to our enthusiasm, as the cabin had occupied our minds. It was hard to say whether this occupation was going to be good or bad. Dad would call up to make little announcements every few days:

  “We have to get a new coat of stain on the cabin, especially that south wall over the porch.”

  “Brett says we should look at a wood-burning stove because those baseboard heaters are expensive to run.”

  “Brett wants to put up a barn but I don’t want to.”

  “There are a few trees that need to be trimmed to open up the view into Cabin Field. I can’t see a damn thing.”

  “Joe says we should put in some apple trees, we need some apples.”

  “Hey, Aunt Sally and Aunt Jane left us pretty much everything but we need a new can opener.”

  Any time he had an idea to change one blade of grass at the cabin he reached for the phone. I could trace the calls like a map leading into the dirt. They started with things like can openers and camo makeup remover and turkey license deadlines, but with every call his focus drifted earthward, and he talked more about the needs of the land itself. He detoured right into talking about those two big fields of sand and how to get deer food plots on them, what the turkeys eat, how he wanted to plant wildflowers. The land was swarming up into his mind.

  Bruce was a builder and all day long he fitted metal and concrete to the earth. It’s certainly possible that he talked all day long about the land and what it needed, but he just hadn’t done it with us. We hadn’t had a specific place to talk about since we’d finished his house twenty years before. But he so obviously felt good talking grass and apples.

  Why did grass and apples feel good? I figured that it reinforced images arising from an “ecological unconscious.” Theodore Roszak had first proposed this idea in his book The Voice of the Earth, and one article about his findings described the ecological unconscious as “the voice of the earth expressing its own pain through our seemingly unrelated woes.” If the earth is expressing pain, I reasoned it must also be expressing its needs, its joy, its everything. Carl Jung had theorized in the early twentieth century that humans pulled archetypal images and all manner of psychic material from a deep layer of evolutionary experience shared by all people that he called the “collective unconscious.” Roszak had extended that vast repository of knowledge to the other-than-human world. This meant that images could spring up into your mind from all types of beings that have experience living on earth, from whales to trees to mountains.

  Roszak’s books were about ecopsychology, a burgeoning field of inquiry that addressed the mental health of human beings as a function of the mental health of the planet. Building off Searles’s and Shepherd’s and others’ idea that a sick environment was driving humans insane, and vice-versa, ecopsychology proposed that the way to make human beings feel better was to make Lake Erie feel better. The standards for what constituted health—grass and apples, satisfaction and laughter—might arise in our minds via the ecological unconscious. If we felt a deep yearning for grass when we saw a barren field of sand, perhaps some part of that very human desire arose from grass or sand itself, or beyond. The universe, dreaming.

  Perhaps the call I heard from the land flowed from the ecological unconscious. Joe, Brett, Dad, and I were all awake to it now. But our new awareness of that exhausted sand didn’t mean things got instantly better for us. The more we engaged, the more we acknowledged our sickness. All our talking turned out to be the nervous chatter before a big fight.

  Years later, the psychologist Robert Greenway sent me some e-mail correspondence about this. Greenway was a pioneer in the ecopsychology movement and had been studying it since the 1960s, when he used to refer to it as ‘psycho-ecology’—an ecology of psyche. During his years at Sonoma State University, he took study subjects out into the wilderness to record the effects on the human psyche. He had left academia as an emeritus to run Corona Farms in Port Townsend, Washington, growing vegetables as part of a local food m
ovement in that bioregion. Which meant that he was still very much involved in studying ecopsychological entanglement. When I pressed him for some shorthand about how working a piece of land could change a family, he e-mailed:

  Every Ecopsychology would probably have a different theory as to “what’s healing” in terms of “working with land” …

  Here’s mine: I’m with Paul Shepard, believing that humans cut off from “natural processes” are crazy (Cf., Nature and Madness). I also believe that “minds” (or “psyches”—or the sum-total of one’s “mental condition”) are improved with a certain degree of “natural stress”—that is, “survival-oriented” stress, or the requirements to plant and harvest a crop, to overcome “weeds,” to deal with the HUGE needs of the plants we grow for food—especially if you care for the plants, and see them in their full, organic context. Keeps one awake at night! So, the challenge awakens the mind—both the “present mind,” and the eons of past times still carried in the depths of our psyche. And the farming itself draws one into the systems and dynamics of “the natural world.” Farming is not “nature” per se, and it’s not “culture” per se—it’s an amalgam of both—and so, there you have it—the bridge, the non-dual task! And when you enter this as a family, you’re all in the soup! Division of labor issues arise—ALL the family issues present will arise; the work can be brutal, interspersed with incredible moments of joy. It’s like the cliché, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” A family experiencing this—from the stress to the work to the joy—not to mention the products and the tastes—is like a common place, a common boat, and you’re all on it, paddling like mad …

  I liked the sound of “paddling like mad.” I hoped we could get there. So far, we had just pulled the oars down out of the barn.

  When Joe had come back to Kalamazoo from San Francisco, Dad helped him buy a house. It was a creaky old three-bedroom 1931 Craftsman at the top of West Main Hill, where a lot of the WMU and Kalamazoo College faculty lived. Joe was as astonished as anyone, because Bruce thought of himself as a bootstraps kind of guy and didn’t give away down-payment money. He didn’t believe people should borrow money. He had borrowed two thousand dollars from Grandpa Henry to buy our house by Crooked Lake, and even though he quickly repaid him he felt guilty about it for the rest of his life. He felt similarly conflicted about using someone else’s tools, which is why he didn’t just borrow a tractor from John Polderman for a couple of days to clear the land for his house but instead bought one we really didn’t need.