The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  Dad’s rigid insistence on self-reliance even extended to medical issues. About three years after Joe got his house, he was over at Dad’s and got stung by a bee or a yellow jacket. He didn’t know he was deadly allergic, but he was, and went into anaphylactic shock. His lymph nodes turned bright white and his throat swelled closed to the point where he was choking, but Dad tried to put him in the shower. “Just take a shower; you’ll be fine.” Finally Joe had to push past our father and whisper to his girlfriend Chrissy that he needed to go to the hospital, and on the way he got so scared that she had to drive. He got an IV drip of adrenaline, which may have saved him, but Dad thought that was ridiculous. Doctors and EpiPens were for fancy people. Just a way to make you pay money or grow dependent. There wasn’t anything a shower couldn’t cure and there wasn’t anything an able-bodied person couldn’t pay for on their own.

  But Joe got a house, and then Brett came back from San Francisco in 1996 and he moved into Joe’s house, too. Joe always had renters there, living in the tiny upstairs rooms, and one of them was an ex-girlfriend named Shannon. Shannon had a friend named Ayron, and one night Ayron came over and she and Brett got a good look at each other, and she started coming over all the time.

  Ayron was Irish as Irish could be, with prominent cheekbones and bright blue eyes and freckles and shoulder-length brown hair that she was constantly streaking and tweaking, a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties who cried when she laughed because she laughed hard. She was a nonstop talker and good listener and had been a high school sports star, and when she was talking she’d stand up every so often and do a few stretches and pop her hips. She had been an academic star, too, a Medallion Scholar at Western Michigan University, an award given to only a few people every year that paid forty thousand dollars in cash, which was so much cash that she dropped out after her freshman year to better focus on spending it.

  Ayron’s folks had split up when she was two, and she survived a chaotic and mostly unparented horror show that honestly made Bruce’s cheating and control issues look quaint. She was tougher than any of us would ever be, and how that translated into burning through forty thousand dollars is her story to tell. The salient point here is that she had grown up mostly without a father and, when she was eighteen, reclaimed a relationship to her troubled dad through sheer force of will. She saw echoes of this in both Brett’s and Joe’s warped relationships with Dad, and started talking to them about ways to fix it. Things started to get really analytical around Joe’s dining room table.

  Brett was resistant at first to strategizing with Ayron because he was too blunt for nuance. He just wanted to tell Dad he was a total dick and say, “Change now.” Whenever he didn’t like something, he said it. For instance, Brett didn’t care much for Joe’s housemate Shannon, and one day just blurted out, “Shannon, I fucking hate you.” So it would be hard for him to stick with any kind of long-term plan to slowly bring Dad to a new consciousness. Brett’s directness, however, went both ways. He knew hate and he knew love, and he fell head over heels in love with Ayron and he said so, and she moved into Joe’s house, too.

  Joe had been in therapy for a couple of years with a private clinician in Kalamazoo, and also volunteering for a crisis services agency called Gryphon Place, manning a suicide hotline at all hours of the night. He had a nice touch with the folks who called, though he had never used any hotline himself. He had known about it for years but never called it because he didn’t think he should be taking up the precious time of a volunteer who might be able to help someone who actually didn’t want to die.

  Callers to Gryphon Place didn’t have to know that, though. When folks called in the pit of the night, he earnestly steered them toward services. He could talk right through to sunrise if that’s what it took. One of his regulars was more lonely than suicidal and ended their nightly chats with: “Okay, talk to you tomorrow.” Believing in tomorrow is a kind of hope.

  In 1997 Joe started taking classes in psychology at Kalamazoo Valley Community College, and Dad agreed to pay for them. He’d paid for Brett’s tuition, too, so that seemed fair. Just like Brett, Joe had to pay for his living expenses. With Joe back in school, Ayron felt the kick, too, and re-enrolled at WMU, also in psychology. The material became superrelevant and drove them both back into school.

  Brett was working in a bronze foundry downtown, pouring fine art sculpture, and he was frustrated because he was working his ass off but Joe and Ayron were living the student life. Dad paid the mortgage and both of them had student loans, which meant they had walking-around money. Joe didn’t drink much anymore, but on at least one occasion in the previous few years he had smashed his car while drunk and Dad got him a new truck. Dad had given Brett a used GMC Jimmy when he was a student, too, and let him sell it to pay down student loans, but Dad was scared that Joe would go back to guzzling if he didn’t prop him up. He would corral Brett and Ayron several times a week to talk about how to best help Joe, and when Ayron asked him about whether Joe should shoulder more of the responsibility, he was very open about his rationale.

  “I’m too scared to put any expectations on Joe,” Dad told her, “because I’m afraid I’ll get a phone call that they found him dead under a bridge somewhere.”

  So Joe and Ayron would go rollerblading all day and eat ice cream, and when Brett would come home at night they’d be at the table shushing him because they had to do their homework until Joe had to go in for his shift on the hotline. Brett learned to see the positive: the schoolwork gave him opportunities to work on motorcycles or build fly rods or do other things he enjoyed. To have his own life. To Joe’s credit, he didn’t abuse the advantage Dad had given him: after a semester, Joe was enrolled simultaneously in both KVCC and WMU and maintained a 4.0 GPA.

  Both Joe and Ayron started working for a company that ran group homes, and for a while they even worked in the same one in downtown Kalamazoo. Because of its long history as a center for mental health treatment, the city is absolutely chock-full of these kinds of facilities, especially after the Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital began “deinstitutionalizing” its patients in the 1980s and sending them out into the world. Ayron made friends with homeless and troubled people wherever she went, befriending folks she called “clinical strays,” and had even had her mom and others hire them for part-time jobs, so it was no surprise that both she and Joe fell in love with their clients. They roared hysterically at their antics, but also went out of their way to help them in any way they could. Ayron would take clients out for errands or appointments when she was off the clock or bring them home for Thanksgiving dinner. But working with people who had mental issues brought up a lot of feelings for both of them, and they would tote these home to Joe’s dining room table, where he and Brett and A-Lee, as they called her—her middle name was Lee—would smoke and drink coffee and crack it all open.

  Their talks would wend inevitably toward Dad and what they were going to do about him. Or rather, mostly what Brett was going to do about him. Joe was as much involved in our saga as our middle brother, of course, and had suffered more than any of us, but he had no intention of making demands on Dad. Dad was helping him a lot and he didn’t want any confrontation. He was pulling for Brett, though.

  “That cabin is an opportunity, if you ask me,” said Ayron. “You’re being handed an opportunity. Because the changes you want won’t happen here in town.”

  “You’re right about that,” said Joe.

  “You guys see Bruce all the time now. And your relationship is awful. It consists of you guys asking him to help you buy a house, or to help you out with a job at Delta Design when you need one, or to let you borrow the boat, or whatever, but you have no real adult relationship. You’re still kids. You guys haven’t become adults in his eyes.”

  One of the conditions that allowed Ayron to create a new relationship with her own father, when she was eighteen years old and he was getting married again—he had been married multiple times—was that Ayron had been an emancipated, self
-sustaining adult for years already. He’d never given her a penny and she wanted nothing from him but a father. And, miraculously, he agreed.

  “Being an adult might not change anything,” said Brett. “Dad has outrageous control issues.”

  They talked a lot about whether Dad had obsessive-compulsive disorder, a need for control that drove him to protect his ideas or habits even if it meant hurting people.

  “That control is a deep personality trait, and I’ll just slam into it every time I approach him.”

  “Don’t try to change it, then,” Ayron said. “If you want a different relationship with your father, then the only control you have is how you respond. So you need to start responding differently. If you want to talk to him as an adult and have an adult relationship, then be an adult. Be the change. Stop letting him pay for anything, and stop whining and bitching about what he does. Just start going bird hunting or whatever it is that you do, and let him catch up. Don’t work for Delta, even when he wants you to. If you propose changes at the cabin and he says no, then show him on the map where you’re going to be camped on the public land and tell him he can come there if he wants. Put it on him. Make it obvious that the life you’re proposing is a life you’re going to go live anyway, with or without him. What else can you do? You’ll feel better.”

  Dad wasn’t really ready to forge adult relationships with his kids. His own brothers were his adult peers, and when they left the Kuipers Hunt Club, he saw an opportunity for his kids to be his kids again, like Jack’s and Vern’s kids had. So he started roaring back and forth to the cabin on every occasion, going up there every few weeks all through 1997, ’98, and ’99 in order to make the place good for us, like a dad, bringing up an old windbreaker he didn’t want in the house anymore, or a board game he’d found, or an old set of pillowcases, exhausted by the idea of all this change, sitting at the dining table staring out the window at Cabin Field all by himself. He put a lot of effort into fluffing up the inside of the cabin without acknowledging the obvious prohibitions that kept us from engaging with the outside.

  Brett didn’t start frequenting the place, but Joe did. He would go with Dad whenever he could. Dad and Joe didn’t talk much about his work or schooling because they could talk bowhunting. Joe’s new enthusiasm for bowhunting reinforced the old man’s feeling that the property was for hunting deer and for that purpose only, and that relieved some of his anxiety. Joe started exploring the place in detail, studying the tree stands that had been put up by the uncles, reassessing them as he scouted the deer trails beneath them with his nose to the ground. He presented Dad with great new locations for stands, and together they’d walk those trails until our father was satisfied. With the other uncles gone, Joe could stay up all night at the cabin and drink coffee and stare out the windows if he wanted.

  Dad was enthused and bought Joe a compound bow that I couldn’t even pull without a comic spectacle of heaving and grunting, but that Joe pulled like he was brushing his hair back. One of the first times he used it, Joe fell out of a tree stand on the very edge of the bog. It was not a very good stand because it was low and the deer would look up and see you sitting there in the opening and run off. He and Brett had walked out there together, and Brett moved off into the federal land to hunt ducks on the edge of the bog—since he didn’t care for bowhunting—and just as Brett disappeared into the predawn darkness, Joe fell. The drop of ten or twelve feet was enough to break Joe’s ankle, even landing in shore muck. He’d pitched the bow so he wasn’t impaled on his own arrow—you laugh—but he didn’t want to interrupt Brett’s hunt. Every time Joe got in trouble, it was always Brett who came to rescue him, and he needed to give our brother a chance to hunt in peace. So he climbed back up in the tree and sat there all morning with the ankle making him nauseous. Dad and Brett had to cut his rubber boot off that night because his ankle was huge. Four days later he finally ended up with a cast on his foot.

  Not long after our first hunting trip to the cabin for Thanksgiving 1997, I was introduced to an artist named Meg, and our relationship got serious pretty quickly. She was brilliant and showed her work all over the world, and I was crazy in love. Trained as an anthropologist, she brought depth of insight to any subject we’d discuss, from local politics to culture to environmental stories I was working on, and her wit and charm lifted me out of a funk from my latest failed relationship, which had left me confused and a little freaked. Plus it was fun to be witness to her artistic process. We both felt we had found a partner we could respect and trust.

  Meg was in her late thirties and wanted to have a baby without a moment to lose. The first time she brought it up I said yes without any hesitation, which was as much a surprise to me as anyone. I had absolute confidence in her. So we had started trying to get pregnant. She wasn’t too thrilled when I said I had to go to our deer camp for a week or so in November 1998, but I hustled right back and got on with the baby-making and the absence was forgiven. I wasn’t totally sure how the subject of hunting was going to go over, but she had grown up on Long Island and gone to college at Kenyon in rural Ohio, so she was at least familiar with hunting as a country phenomenon.

  The trip to the cabin with my brothers and the idea of having a child had convinced me that I had to find a more direct connection to wildness. My work in the 1990s had me in action camps with forest activists fighting logging in roadless central Idaho, on a Sea Shepherd boat chasing shark poachers around islands off the Pacific Coast of Panama, hiking into the Nevada Nuclear Test Site with Greenpeace to sit on the bomb site and stop the tests, and in old-growth forests from Mendocino to British Columbia. I was always in some mountain redoubt, but often I had no deep and personal story in that place. I needed a cabin with my brothers.

  A friend had recently given me a nice Aquatech longboard, and I started focusing on the wilderness in our backyard in Venice, the Pacific Ocean. I had been working for Ray Gun magazine and I was committed to living in L.A., and I was excited about life with Meg and a new family, so I surfed a lot that fall and winter. We rented a house at Rose Avenue and Sixth Street, where we could hear the big winter waves pounding Venice Beach at night, and in December we were engaged.

  Meg and I threw together a trip to Michigan so she could meet my family, and Dad put on an engagement party in the back room of a Kalamazoo sports bar called Gallagher’s Eatery & Pub. Mom and Tom came and Jack and Jane, as well as Brett and Ayron and Joe and some of my good friends from high school. Dad was in great form, making toasts and turning on the charm. He’d become fairly good at this kind of thing, and had once thrown me a tremendous high school graduation party. Mom mostly let Dad run this party. She enjoyed her life with Tom immensely and had even taken to having a glass of chardonnay or two in the evenings, and she gave a toast. In this setting, Dad presented himself as a patriarch, with his boys all around in a kind of rugged fraternity. I realized then, seeing my family outside the usual context of hunting or fishing or skiing, that we didn’t know much about one another—for instance, neither Dad nor Mom knew very much at all about what any of us had studied in college—but that didn’t matter, did it? In the important moments, we would pull together. We could get married just like Jack’s and Vern’s kids, who were all married years before. Dad put on a good show and I was grateful.

  Meg was happy to be welcomed into the family, such as it was, but she got the full Kuipers experience right away. Dad started talking about our grouse hunting trip the year before, and deer and turkeys, and fishing, and most everyone at the party took his lead. No one other than Ayron asked Meg anything at all about where she came from or what she did.

  The next morning, we were at Dad’s place, and he fell into the subject as a kind of afterthought. “What kind of art do you make?” he asked, as though it had never occurred to him. Conceptual art, she explained, for example, a performance piece about Marvin Gaye that included hundreds of drawings. It was a very well-known work.

  “And people buy that?” he asked. It wasn’t
a critique. He was interested, and he had no idea how the art world worked. Meg tried to fill in the gaps for him, and after they talked a while, it became clear her work was shown all over the world and collected by institutions he had heard of, like the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Really?” he said, suddenly sitting straight up, with his mouth open in surprise. It was part of Dad’s approach to the world to assume people were not worth knowing until they revealed their expertise in something, and then he was astonished and rushed forward and took extreme interest. He talked for years about a guy he once met on a plane who invented what he called a “windless lighter,” which Dad considered some kind of miracle cure for man’s need for fire.

  He leaped up and rooted around in his office and produced the duck stamp art he’d bought at a Ducks Unlimited meeting and wondered what she thought of it. Then he busted out pictures of the deer camp and the deer he and Joe were seeing. He’d exhausted what he could take in about Meg’s life, and he wanted to get back to the animal stories that made him comfortable. Meg would only make two more trips to Michigan after that.

  Dad brought up our wedding about once a week on the phone afterward, eager to know what the plans were and if he could host the ceremony in Kalamazoo, and about three months later I told him Meg was pregnant, and then his demeanor changed.