by Dean Kuipers
“Well, I guess you gotta move back to Michigan now,” he said, serious as the Reaper.
“What? No, Dad, we live here in L.A. Meg is part of the art world here, and she works at great colleges. We both have a good community here. I’m not so sure they’re hiring at the Kalamazoo Gazette.”
“I’ll come out and we can have a quick wedding and then I’ll help you find a house here.”
“That’s not going to happen, Dad.”
“I’ll fly your mother out, too. We’re friends now.”
I told him I was happy about the baby and that we’d make it work. It wasn’t a long conversation. Dad called back the next day.
“Well, how is he going to know about the cabin and all the fun we have there?” Dad asked.
“How is who going to know?”
“The baby.”
“Well, we don’t have fun there. I’ve only been there twice in my life. That last time was fun, when we hunted birds.”
“Oh, we always have fun there. You’ve had so much fun there.”
“Those were Jack’s and Vern’s kids.”
“And Brett and Joe. They know.”
“Look, if Meg says it’s okay, we’ll bring him out to the cabin. Or her—it might be a girl, you know.”
“You spend every last penny to fly all over the world to spend time with those goddamned radical people, with that Sergeant Shit or whatever he was called.” Bruce’s voice was calm but loud. I had told him once about Sergeant Sphincter, a guy I had interviewed who shut down the logging of an old-growth rainforest on Vancouver Island by sitting in a strategically placed tree platform. When the Mounties tried to bring him down, he got naked and smeared himself in his own feces, and they left him alone for days. When they did finally try to arrest him, he swung off into the forest like naked poop Tarzan and got away! I would much rather interview that guy than go to anyone’s deer camp.
“But that’s my job. I like to write about those people.”
“You’re not going to do that anymore.”
“Oh, I hope so.”
“No, you have to get a real job. You’re going to have a child now.”
“Journalism is a great job. Why would I stop doing that?”
“All your stories are about how nature is more important than people. I never told you this before, but that is obviously insane, son. That’s evil. That’s the Devil.”
“Look, why’d you buy that deer camp?” I asked. “You bought it to protect a place for deer and porcupines to live wild. I’m so happy we’re doing that; it’s exactly what we need to be doing. But we can’t just have our little piece and abandon everywhere else. You always say all the good rivers and good hunting are out West, in Wyoming and Utah and Canada. They’re only good because someone kept it from getting turned into a Walmart, which you know as well as anyone because you help build all that stuff. You and I aren’t doing that, but Sergeant Sphincter is. I write about them so people know the fight is on.”
“You are insane.”
“I never said that was more important than my family. I’m about to have a child.”
“Totally insane.”
This probably would have been the end of my relationship with Dad, if it weren’t for the intercession of a new love in his life. Oddly, around the time we all started going to the cabin again, Brett, Dad, and I all met new partners who changed our lives.
In 1998 Dad started going to a new church in Kalamazoo, Calvary Bible, and he noticed a woman there who seemed powerful and intriguing. Her name was Diane and she was a tall Dutch beauty with a blonde bob and fierce blue eyes. He sat next to her in the pew and asked her to coffee, but she turned him down. That hadn’t happened much in Dad’s life. Even more interested, he persisted and finally they went out on a date. The loneliness he’d embraced for a decade suddenly felt wrong. He’d dated so many other women, some of them for years, but never seemed to take them or himself very seriously. He treated them like he’d treated Mom, like they were half a person. But affection illuminates the dualities we grip in our minds and suddenly makes them seem foolish or even damaging.
Diane was an intellectual and grounded in a blunt political and material reality, and he was absolutely stunned by her. She had a PhD in psychosocial nursing and a minor in history from the University of Virginia, and a postdoctoral degree in intellectual history from the University of Pennsylvania. She had published quite a bit in the field of psychiatric nursing, and she was one of the founders of the Bronson School of Nursing at WMU. She had retired as a major from the Air Force, and had been in the service around the time Bruce had been, but unlike him she served in Vietnam, working in a hospital in Cam Ranh Bay and in the equivalent of M.A.S.H. units in the field. She was recovering from cancer and had a deep understanding of what it meant to be wounded by wars of all kinds.
Bruce took in the full scope of the major and fell hopelessly, gorgeously in love. It took a woman who outshone him in every way to convince him that a love of equals was the thing he needed.
I was so grateful for Diane’s influence. I had begun to dread Dad’s visits to L.A. He loved to stay in Santa Monica and walk the bike path, and when he saw a woman in a thong bikini rollerblading toward us he’d scramble for his camera and click away like he was Avedon as she rolled past inches away, often giving him the finger or barking “Asshole!”
“Ha ha!” he’d laugh, watching her roll off down the beach.
“Dad, you can’t just take pictures of people. They’re not hired performers or something.”
“Oh, they want you to do it,” he said. “That’s why they’re dressed like that.”
He had stacks of four-by-six candids of rollerbladers, waitresses, bartenders, women in sundresses on the Third Street Promenade or sitting at the next table in Venice restaurants. He was shameless. But after he met Diane it all changed. After meeting her, the hot locals didn’t stand a chance. He deferred to the major like he’d never seen another woman before.
That spring, the spring of 1999, Joe and Ayron both received a bachelor’s in psychology from Western Michigan University, graduating with honors. It only took Joe two years to complete his degree. They both immediately enrolled in master’s programs. Joe was still working at the group homes, and about halfway through his master’s program he became a manager at Gryphon Place.
Dad continued to scour the Lower Peninsula for new camps, sometimes taking Joe or Brett with him, even though they had already put up new bow stands that became iconic at the cabin, such as Double Tree, which was on the border of the USA to the west, and a new blind we just referred to as Dad’s about twenty-five feet up a red maple above a mucky swamp crossing to the southeast. Until he saw an increase in the number of deer, Dad simply wasn’t convinced he wanted to keep that cabin.
I wasn’t doing any work on the place and Brett wasn’t doing much, but in Dad’s mind, all of his boys were back. That land was talking and he was listening. The way he spoke of the place on the phone, all three of us were there busily working at the cabin, making vast improvements, rebuilding the place from top to bottom. But in reality, it was just him and Joe snipping a few twigs. They worked around their bow stands, clearing shooting lanes of every possible branch and leaf that might get in the way of a loosed arrow, and they talked about putting in deer plots sometime in the future. Mostly Dad was there by himself.
Every time Dad told Brett he was going to look at a new property, Brett saw his own involvement at the cabin become less and less likely. He took Ayron’s advice and started training his talented English setter, named Gertrude after our grandma, showing up at Mom and Tom’s rural home with live pheasants and releasing them into the twenty-acre hayfield that surrounded their house and letting Gertie find them and put them to flight. He took the dog up to Oceana County to run the public lands near the cabin, and invited Dad along. Sometimes Dad even went, but they wouldn’t stop at the cabin. If they did go to the cabin, Gertie wasn’t allowed out of the car. Brett had very good reason
s to want to train the dog on the cabin property itself: there was plenty of room to run out on the USA, but he was scared to train the dog on those public lands because antipredator zealots had set hundreds of coyote traps out there that would kill or maim a dog. Dad had his own bird dog, a brilliant wirehaired pointing griffon named Rose that was badly neglected and needed the work, but Dad left Rose at home in her outdoor pen for years because he wanted to go to the cabin and she wasn’t allowed. Brett was hoping to show by example that this antidog position was hurting everybody, but Dad just wasn’t budging.
Plus all the other prohibitions: No friends, the constant hectoring about cigarettes. No bonfires or peering at the stars through a telescope. Certainly no planting bushes or other gestures for the wildlife. No boogering up the place.
Brett and I were pretty much stuck, since both of us wanted to pursue the restoration project. I took what I could get. When I got out to the property, I would sit in the blinds, summer or winter, since that didn’t involve disturbing the woods. Dad made it clear that he, personally, would never go out there without a weapon, what with all those horses dragging tires and such out there. He considered my version of watching to be esoteric and pointless.
Brett, however, wanted to hunt birds, and the more he talked to Dad, the more Dad took Brett’s ideas as an affront to his authority. I tried to talk to Dad about it. We were in the car in Kalamazoo. I didn’t mention the church, but that’s where he went with it. “You guys don’t go to my church,” he said, the AC blasting out of his truck as if to push back the underworld. “The Bible says that’s my fault, and I’m willing to accept that.”
“What does that have to do with the cabin?” I said. “The Bible doesn’t say there’s anything wrong with planting berry bushes or running a dog.”
“No, see—that’s not it. You and Brett don’t respect what Vern and Jack and I built there. You think your way is better. You want to tear the trees down and talk about your ecoterrorists and play your heavy punk music and read your books and smoke and drink. You’re just doing that to show that you don’t approve of the way I worship.”
“What? That’s totally paranoid, Dad. We’re just enthusiastic about the stuff we like. If you think we’re bad people, then you just shouldn’t have us come up there.”
“You sit in the blind without a gun to show me you’re better.”
“Sometimes I don’t want to shoot anything.”
“You guys are pissed at me and you want to show me I’m wrong about the land up there. I know that.”
The asphalt under us melted in the sun. Everything eventually goes back to earth.
“Well, I really enjoy sitting in the blinds, but I don’t have to do that at the cabin,” I said. “I can just sit in the dark in my backyard in California, it would have some of the same effects.”
Dad stared ahead.
“No it wouldn’t,” he said. He had been to my backyard.
“Sure. The dark is talky just about everywhere.”
“No, because your brothers and I wouldn’t be there.”
“Hmm. Yeah, that’s a shame, because that’s where I want to be, too,” I said. “That’s the whole point. But what can I do? Honestly. If it’s such a horrible conflict for you, let’s just call it off. We thought this was about enjoying the woods, but obviously it’s more than that.”
We drove by the Saniwax Building, an old manufacturing building in downtown Kalamazoo that housed a bunch of artists’ lofts, including the Alchemist bronze foundry where Brett worked. Maybe that’s where we were going, I don’t recall. Dad thought the art lofts there were romantic, and he often said he really thought the place was “neat.” He was an enthusiastic and tireless shopper, and even though he’d never visited any of the other artists in the building he was pretty sure he would one day and he would buy some stuff.
“Oh, you should see some of the pieces they make at Brett’s place,” he said. “They are real art.” We weren’t talking about the cabin anymore.
It was hard for Dad to talk about the Brett who wanted to change his Hunt Club. The Brett Dad really liked, the one he talked about all the time, was the Brett who worked doing penurious physical labor in the foundry. That, Dad thought, was a real man, pitted against fire and metal, melting bronze in the heat of an un-air-conditioned Midwestern summer. The boiling hot work reduced Brett to a walking bag of ligaments and tendons struggling to keep even 140 pounds hung on his six-foot frame, but that was a good Brett! It was a job that didn’t require any talking, it wasn’t just a bunch of puffed air like psychology or writing; it was brute force, pouring and welding and hammering and grinding.
He was not-so-secretly thrilled that he could buy one of these bronze sculptures and thus shop for the Brett he wanted.
Brett got the message. Late in the summer of 1999, he sat in the driveway at Dad’s house in his rusty old Jeep Wagoneer sobbing his eyes out. Ayron was trying to console him, but he realized he was at an end. They’d just had another argument with Dad about the cabin. Brett was thirty years old and worked like a beaten dog, and he wasn’t going to be tricked into putting any more energy into the cabin. It had been mostly his idea to give the deer camp a try, to make some bird habitat there, but he was quitting. He’d been a fool to get his hopes up.
He wasn’t crying because he didn’t get what he wanted. He was crying because Dad didn’t see how easy it was to be free. Maybe they’d never hunt together again.
Ayron told Brett he’d only be disappointed if he kept this up. He needed to be his own adult, and if Dad couldn’t get with it, then fuck it.
Brett and Ayron had their own life. They had bought a nice wooden 1937 house in Kalamazoo’s beautiful Westnedge Hill neighborhood and they could focus on that instead. Ayron was working on her master’s in social work and Brett had the foundry, and Dad’s false impression that all three of us boys were up at the camp obsessing over shooting lanes and counting the number of times the deer chewed its cud just made it clear he wasn’t paying any attention to Brett’s life.
If Brett wanted to make himself perfectly clear, Ayron advised, he should write a letter. Put it all down in black and white. And then walk away.
So he did. With Ayron’s help, Brett wrote a four-page letter to Dad, telling him he couldn’t be outdoors with him anymore. It was just too complicated and painful. He wasn’t allowed to express his own interests in forestry and dogs and birds. Worse, he and Joe were seen as the same person.
They had been treated like twins when they were kids, but now they were grown men. Because Joe was bowhunting at the cabin, Dad simply assumed Brett was, too. He didn’t even seem to notice that Brett wasn’t there during bowhunting season. Brett had bowhunted once at Card’s when he was thirteen and hated it, because of course Dad hadn’t spent one minute showing him how to do it, and his first day ended in bloody disaster and Bernard was angry at Brett for not being a more skilled hunter. Brett wasn’t interested in sharing half a life with Joe like they were Castor and Pollux, spending half their time in the mortal world and half in the immortal. He was tired of begging for personhood.
The letter has been lost to time, but it started and ended with the words: “I love you.” It wasn’t an angry screed. It was a demand for change. Like Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, it was the blueprint for a reformation. Brett needed his own relationship to Dad, and the path forward he preferred was our habitat restoration project. If Dad was going to stick to his rules and not let him actually inhabit the property in a way that was Brett-like, then there was no place for him. It would be easier to simply show up with a green bean casserole to pass for Christmas dinner and grow aspen trees somewhere else.
Bruce had written a lot of serious letters when he was in the Air Force, when phones were expensive, but only Roy Sutter and Dale really kept up the correspondence over the years. Dale would send him a photograph of himself from Canada holding a dead wolverine, with a caption: “I met a guy from Michigan with a wolverine on the sleeve of his jac
ket.” Their letters were mostly jokes and family news and weather, but Brett’s letter was like a Class 5 tornado; it swept up everything and flung it onto the land, leaving a shocking debris field. And so it seemed that the cabin experiment had failed.
Dad read the letter and called Brett. “Ha ha! I got your letter!” he cried.
“Don’t,” said Brett.
“Oh, son, you’ve blown this all out of proportion,” Dad sang on. “I don’t care about any rules, you can do whatever you want—”
“I’ll just hang up and this will be over. I mean it.”
There was a long silence.
Dad exhaled. “Okay,” he said.
“Okay what?”
“Let’s fix the place up for birds. Whatever you think is right. Let’s see what happens.”
Meg gave birth to our son, Spenser, during small game season 1999, and I figured this would be the jolt required to get Dad out of his head. Spenser was his first grandchild and I thought that should matter. I didn’t want to give up on my father. Lots of people would have given up decades earlier, but we stupidly stumbled on hoping to be accepted as adults. Every day I questioned why I should care. But I had to acknowledge that I did. The blood pumps round and round and longs endlessly to return to its source. Dad and Brett and Joe had just gone out to South Dakota to hunt pheasants on the family farm of some church friends named Veenstra, and had taken both Rose and Gertie. Dad was an enthusiastic guy and he’d evidently caught Brett’s bird fever, but we didn’t know yet if he’d allow that kind of hunting at the cabin. I yearned every day for the cold leaf-litter smell of Michigan and the wet lake wind that blew through its trees. I had a home with Meg and Spenser, but I wanted them to know why this other place called to me. The only way to do that was to get my own place in Michigan, and I knew it would be a long time before that could happen. We had to do everything the hard way.
Mom couldn’t wait to get her hands on Spenser and appeared at our door in Venice the second we were home from the hospital, and Dad came out a few days later. They both cried tears of joy when Dad held Spenser close to his chest like a puppy. Dad put his face down on the top of the baby’s head and said, “This is perfection. He’s perfect.”