The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  Dad liked being a grandpa, but he was just biding his time. We talked about what would happen the next summer, and he made sure we understood that beach life wasn’t going to be a regular thing: “If we want a cabin where we can actually hunt, it’s not going to be like this,” he said.

  Eleven

  The Other Kuipers

  Dad and I walked the edge of First Field a couple of days before the deer season, kicking at the dust, carrying a ladder between us. The sun brought the temperature up to about fifty and the old man was in his glory, smiling as if he could see heaven. Spenser was in the cabin with Diane, and Brett and Joe were clearing brush from their shooting lanes. We were setting out to do that, too. Both this field and Cabin Field had been planted to buckwheat, which came up fairly thick but was mostly like ground cover rather than the twelve- to fifteen-inch-high plants we had expected, and in this season a patchy green fuzz of winter rye about two inches tall poked out of it.

  “This field is still struggling,” I said.

  “Oh, nothing will come up here,” said Dad, his smile dimming only a little. As long as he had separated himself from the place, it didn’t bother him. “The buckwheat we planted in the spring only got that big, too, and then we disked it under. I showed you pictures.”

  “Gradually we’ll get some organic matter in that sand.”

  “Well,” Dad said. “It’s just a different place here. There’s a reason Ike and all them never farmed it. Carter throws corn in the ground and it flies up eight feet tall—you can see it from here—but over here nothing will grow. That’s just the kind of place it is.”

  In July, after planting all the seedlings, Dad spent thirty thousand dollars on a brand new John Deere tractor with a bucket loader, a disc harrow, a big mower people generally refer to as a brush hog, a broadcast seeder, and a snow blade. Of course, we could have borrowed or rented that stuff from Mr. Carter, too, as he had all kinds of equipment, but that’s the way Dad was. Brett had gone round and round these fields wearing a respirator, disking up the reindeer moss and prickers and raising a choking dust storm that swirled around him as thick as the Eighth Plague and then peeled off in the prevailing westerlies. With the buckwheat they had put down fertilizer, which is a salt and makes the pH more acidic, so that required amending with lime, too.

  “You don’t want to put down too much fertilizer, though, or you burn the fields,” Dad said as we walked through.

  “What does that mean?”

  “That fertilizer just fries the plants.”

  “I guess you’d have to really overdo it to make that happen.”

  “Oh, no, even if you use the suggested amounts it happens. Your grandpa Henry used to say that all the time. You burn the fields. So I told Brett we should only use half of what it said on the seed bags. That’s probably what originally happened to this place: it got burned. Now it won’t come back.”

  We left the west end of First Field and entered a tractor trail that led to a blind called Desert Storm. I didn’t care for the name as it commemorated the first Gulf War, but it did make local sense since it sat on a sand ridge. All around it were small red and Scots pines and open pits of blow-sand that looked like sand traps. Or desert.

  Dad and I had restored a shooting lane from this blind that followed a heavily trafficked deer trail about one hundred yards through the oaks into Mr. Carter’s field to the west. But it was overhung by branches at the far end of the lane, in the old roadbed that ran along the property line. Dad didn’t want to use the bucket loader to get up in those trees, or use the chainsaw, either, as they made too much noise for the day before Opening Day. So I went up the ladder with a handsaw.

  “I want to walk around and see all those nannyberry and blueberry and stuff you planted in the spring,” I said. “That’s going to make a big difference.”

  “Oh, those all died.”

  “All of ’em? All six hundred?”

  “Yeah. I think a couple of the Autumn olive survived, but they’re like a foot tall. This is just a different kind of place. Nothing grows.”

  “Damn,” I said. “There must be something we can do about that.”

  Dad didn’t worry too much about it. Or if he did, he wasn’t letting it ruin his hunt. He was smiling. We were all there. His towheaded two-year-old grandson was there, proudly stomping around in his own blaze-orange hunting cap. Even Diane was there, which was the first time he’d ever invited a woman to camp. He’d had long-term girlfriends before, but none of them ever made that cut. I figured then he’d marry her. All those years when Sally and Jane and their kids and grandkids were there, he’d been alone. In a way, Dad finally had what he’d always wanted from this camp: a place where his partner and kids would hang out with him, just like his brothers’ families had. He had closed the gap between himself and his family, and that allowed him to widen the gap between himself and this place. It didn’t matter if the place was shitty; he was going to maintain just enough interest to keep us all coming back. That kept him from seeing how serious we were about the restoration project.

  I scrambled up and down a half dozen trees, and as each limb dropped through the canopy he greeted them with a “Yes! Now I can see something!” and dragged them off the deer trail. He loved limbing trees and so did I; the harder to reach the better. Working in the trees was the best thing in the world.

  “You going to take down those Scots pines by the cabin?” I said from my perch, full of logging love.

  “What? No way.”

  “I thought that was part of the plan.”

  “No way in the world. You can see for yourself that nothing grows. It would turn into a sand dune.”

  “I can’t even talk about it,” said Brett. “This is how it’s been all summer.”

  We walked out to a blind Dad called the Taj Mahal, which Brett had built high up in a gargantuan beech tree that overlooked First Field. The tree sprawled like a baobab, its bark a smooth gray elephant skin, emerging fat from a vast mat of gray-brown beechnut husks. Brett had built it as a gun blind, a little too high for good bowhunting, and he would sit up there perched in the canopy and whisper to the birds. This was before Ayron started coming out to sit with him in the blinds. Brett was putting some cushions up, and, just like Dad, he had been happy to focus on the next day’s hunt until I mentioned the habitat plan.

  “Nothing grows here because he’ll only agree to use half the fertilizer and lime that we need and the rain just washes it right through the sand. He won’t cut the trees. He bought all this great equipment but it sits in Kathy’s garage except for a couple of days a year. We planted seedlings in the spring that were way too small and they withered, so now he thinks bushes won’t work. We do a little clearing around the blinds and that’s about all the change he can handle.”

  Kathy was the neighbor who owned the five acres up by the road, and she let us store the tractor in her utility building for a while.

  “And why’s Joe so jumpy?”

  “Diane has Joe in a rage.”

  Diane had always been very warm to me and Spenser and had taken a particular interest in Meg as a fellow academic and intellectual—they both had university positions—but she took one look at Joe and decided that he was her personal problem. She couldn’t hide her disapproval. Diane was a psychiatric nurse, and she understood that Joe was depressed, but she thought Joe took advantage of Dad, letting him pay for a house and university fees. She didn’t see any reason why Joe shouldn’t be doing that himself, and more. He was an able-bodied man. One reason she got along so well with Dad is that they both had just about zero tolerance for neediness. But when it came to Joe, Dad was a dad, and she was appalled. Diane confirmed all this in talks with me later, saying, “All you guys have your own bullshit, and all of you manipulate Bruce in your own way, and I’m just not going to entertain bullshit.”

  I could take that kind of talk. As a reporter, I talked to people who didn’t like me all the time. I actually think Diane and I liked each other j
ust fine. She was nice to me and nice to Spenser. Joe, of course, fell apart in the face of criticism of any kind and thought that she’d turn Dad against him. I don’t know if that ever happened, but Dad was deadly allergic to any kind of conflict, so he mostly said nothing.

  None of us, including Dad, minded if Joe needed extra care. Ayron, in particular, had talked Joe through hundreds of bad nights, over thousands of hours of deep distress, and every time he called, she still took the call. Joe would show up at Brett and Ayron’s house in the middle of the night, and all three of them would talk it out. It was the relationship Brett and Joe had had all their lives, and Ayron was a much better listener and reflector than Brett had ever been. She thrived on it. Joe didn’t really drink anymore by this point in his life, but the underlying issues were all still there. We were all used to that. But he thought Diane was looking at him like he was trying to steal her purse. She did think he was too emotionally dependent on the world; he let himself be constantly disappointed. Diane was indignant about him the way some people are pissed off about welfare.

  And that wasn’t about to get any better. Joe found out in the summer that he had a baby on the way, a little girl due in February. The mother was a woman he had known for several years, but he didn’t want a relationship with her. It’s a story as old as dirt, but Diane just could not believe any man could make that kind of mistake. Whenever Joe talked about his life, she regarded him with openmouthed astonishment. Maybe the rest of us had just stopped being astonished. I was pretty excited about the prospect of a cousin for Spenser, but I’m an optimistic person. When Joe and Ayron laughed about their group home jobs and griped about whether they should stay on, with the high staff burnout and all, Diane opined freely that Joe was going to have to “grow up” and get ready to take care of his child.

  “Well, what else do you want me to do?” Joe said calmly, headed out the door for a cigarette. “I already work twenty-four hours a day.” He hadn’t quit the job or anything, he was just bitching about it.

  “Dad just smiles and pretends nothing is happening,” said Brett. “Ayron and I are trying to stay out of that whole discussion. We’ll probably run into Walkerville later, just to get out of the cabin for an hour or so. When I’m here I’m just going to focus on being out in the blind. That’s the only place that makes any sense.”

  By the light above the basement door we loaded our rifles, and then the light was out and we walked onto the camp. There was an old feeling that always returns. A feeling of answering a call. We smiled at one another in the darkness, then Brett went north with me at the two-track and Joe went south to Shouldabeen. We kicked through the dust of First Field, and Brett stopped to climb into the Taj, and I walked on alone under gunmetal clouds that warmed the air. The walking out is a prayer, an invocation: Let it all come.

  I could see my breath, but the five A.M. darkness was not cold. All the way out to the blind I felt a presence, like turkeys were about to drop down out of the pines, but nothing showed. Or rather, everything showed. The forest thrust itself at me, demanding that I acknowledge what was there rather than what was missing. I felt foolish for creeping along, looking for what was hidden, when so much was reaching out, limbs and leaves slapping at my coat, cold sand under my feet, blue-white clouds pouring sideways through the night. I got in my box and settled into my plastic chair, listening to the faintest rustle of wind in the beech leaves, always the first to leaf and the last to drop. The edges of the visible forest crept toward me, closing in the space around me, and the parts of the forest I couldn’t see receded from me, beyond the big lake, beyond the curve of the earth, in a never-ending night. The darkness was moving.

  Spenser was still asleep in the bunk next to me when I got up, and Dad had volunteered to stay in with him. “We’ll hunt from the cabin” was how he put it. That had never happened before; Dad had always been the first one up and out the door. But Dad had already hunted a month’s worth of days that fall: he’d made an early trip to hunt mule deer out of the Box Y Ranch, a spectacular and remote camp on Wyoming’s wild Greys River, and then taken Joe on a bowhunting trip for elk in Colorado (“We never even saw one elk,” Joe said) to celebrate his master’s degree. Joe, Brett, and he had fished hard for steelhead in the fall, too. I was happy they did those things, but I didn’t really want to do them. I wanted to be on this sand farm, where my brothers sat and the thinking was loudest. This was the place that was enmeshed with my family.

  What I felt was sand, tree, and cloud thinking.

  I was overwhelmed by how much thinking was going on out there in the dark. The barred owls called out of the south twenty, a pair that had been there for years, with their gentle Who? Who? Who cooks for you? But underneath the owl call was a sensation. Silent life made itself felt from the deeper dark under the hemlocks, where the black muck at the roots of the trees seemed to suck up all the light. Underneath it all was a sense of active knowing: the uncountable life forms that made up the sandy woods were making demands on me, asking for my undivided attention. There was nothing to see except the outline of some trees in the purple predawn, but I wasn’t just sensing, I was also being sensed. There was a reversal of the subject-object relationship. It became clear that the idea of subject and object work only if they are reversible. In the great dialectic between subject and object, each making the other in a flow of constant making and unmaking, everything that is must do both. The things out there were regarding me from their own point of view. They had their own subjectivity.

  We built these boxes in the woods that we called “blinds” or “hides,” with the nominal goal of not being seen by the wildlife, and we painted our faces and spent ridiculous amounts on camo coats and veils and odor-free shampoo and scent-stopper underwear with charcoal filters that you activate by tumbling in the electric drier. But it was all really an inside joke and a scam, because everything in the forest clearly knew I was there, even if I didn’t stink, which I did. How many leafy bushes do you know that smell like an electric drier? Every river otter and skunk cabbage and springtail in the dirt for miles around knew I was sitting there. Sitting in a blind is not hiding; it’s just an agreement with everything around to present yourself in a nonthreatening form. It’s a deal.

  Every thing out there in the darkness had a stake in not only knowing the other but being known by the other. I thought of the old Greek idea, from the time of Aristotle, that any object seen by the eye must ray out some idea of itself, making itself visible. Things wanted to be known.

  Even with my eyes closed, the woods around me was presenting. And not just to my eye and not just to me. The creatures that made up the woods and the swamps were presenting to one another. It wasn’t about me; this was fundamental to how they survived.

  The depth psychologist James Hillman wrote extensively about this presentation. In his essay “Anima Mundi: The Return of Soul to the World,” he reasoned that a thing can be known, or have some being, only because it contained some anima mundi, or “world soul.” This soul was a kind of animating agent or principle, created by the constant friction of relationships. Hillman proposed the existence of this soul or psyche, a Neoplatonic idea come to him by way of Plotinus and Ficino and then Jung, as an intentionality on the part of all things that exist. They want to be known. They ray out to the senses and to the imagination their desire to be known. What I love about Hillman’s theory is that it assays to identify the building blocks of the imagination. If everything out there has its own subjectivity, its own piece of the language or raw stuff of the psyche, then that raw stuff lets it signal to the imagination of the other, via the senses and whatever other faculties we may have. All those subjectivities are flowing into one another, lighting up the imagination like electricity. Where they become known. Where they attain being.

  Everything is part of this flow. If everything has psyche, and wants to be known, Hillman is proposing that everything has imagination. Not like a human imagination, probably, but some version. This is the radi
cal project implied by the “return of soul to the world.” He was attributing to the material world the agency and influence that had been stripped away by Abrahamic religion and human-centered culture. That agency is as old as the hills: long before organized religion we already had umpteen millions of years of history with trees and sky, and those things have a long history with us, too, and with each other.

  Of the inner life of objects, Hillman wrote: “Its intentionality is substantive, given with its psychic reality, claiming but not requiring our witness. Each particular event, including individual humans with our invisible thoughts, feelings, and intentions, reveals a soul in its imaginative display. Our human subjectivity, too, appears in our display. Subjectivity here is freed from literalization in reflexive experience and its fictive subject, the ego. Instead, each object is a subject, and its self-reflection is its self-display, its radiance.”

  A soul in its imaginative display. Was this what I was sensing in the dark? Something was pouring into my imagination, and it seemed impossible that I was merely creating it. I felt things that I hadn’t consciously sensed. Something was transmitted: a felt meaning. How was this communicated? Via the unconscious? Via senses of which I was unaware?

  And what was the working distinction between human and other-than-human, or even living and nonliving things, when all have their own subjectivity, their own interiority?

  In this woods, in this dark, I realized the sand under my feet was presenting just like the rasping turkeys who started crying from their tree in the purple quarter hour before sunrise. They both demanded my attention, and their own being. I saw the figure of the sand itself: orange, multitudinous, a kind of tissue made of an uncountable number of individual grains of silicate. A one made of many. That image sank into me and would grow stronger as the years passed.