The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  But that was a relatedness that had only bloomed when Dad finally accepted us the way we were. I don’t know another piece of dirt where this would have happened. Joe, Brett, and I had been on separate paths. But the fact is that it could have been anyplace we put our hands in the dirt together. Dad had presented that piece of dirt to us in a gesture that was bigger than his ideology or his fear. He was locked away in a closed community that utterly rejected us, that demanded dualism to work, that was built on a dirt that didn’t talk, a dirt you could be in but not of, and he reached out to us anyway. Love drove him to open himself in humility.

  The relatedness we had found was not a static field but a product, remade over and over every instant. With his death, some piece of it had stopped being made. It had come to a grinding halt. Some amount of belonging had been stripped out of the world. And now what? The ultimate test of a mature relatedness, I figured, was whether it could survive death.

  The next day, a Monday, five of us left Kalamazoo to drive to St. Helen and get Dad’s effects. It was me, Brett, Ayron, Joe, and Becky. Becky had only joined our family a little more than two months earlier and I was so glad she was there. I made little effort to conceal what had pretty quickly become a mad crusade on my part to collect up the pieces of Dad’s life and use them to restore the community to full functioning. I thought if I could get all the parts we could pat them into place in the common ground and voilà, a new way of being. No one else mentioned this. It was my role, to gather up everything Dad was and re-present it to everyone as a new community. I was the oldest. Not only that, I was a reporter, so I started reporting.

  I was prepping to face Harold Searles’s question of “what is one’s position about this great portion of one’s total environment.” In my grief I couldn’t see my behavior as grief. I called the guide who had been hunting with Dad and asked him to meet us at a restaurant so he could tell us what he knew. I called the guy at the cheap-ass motel where Dad had been staying, which was, incredibly, named the Trails End Motel, and asked if he would talk to us. I called the police. I called the morgue. Everybody humored me.

  Dad had gone on a bobcat hunt, which he’d never done before. Joe, Brett, and I did not shoot predators. I had talked to Dad a lot about the role of predators in helping maintain deer and bird numbers, and Brett probably had, too. If a predator moved into a territory, that meant there was sufficient game to support it, and if you shot it, then another one would just take its place. But if you let it live, the prey species would generally increase to balance the numbers again, and then you got to live with a beautiful wolf or puma or bear. Dad had once shot a black bear and regretted it, and the mangy old fur was hanging on the wall downstairs at the cabin. But he was conflicted, because on the farm they had always shot predators. He had us gut our deer on Cabin Field so it would attract a coyote for him to shoot and then he never did shoot one. There was no reason to shoot a coyote or a bobcat except as a trophy, and that was weak. But on an ice-cold day in January, he went after bobcat with a young guy named Hoot Massey. Massey was only in his early twenties and was too upset about the whole thing to talk to anyone, so his dad and partner, Bill Massey, showed up at the Hen House Restaurant in his place.

  “He’s pretty tore up over it,” Massey said of his son. “I’ll try to help you with anything I know.”

  It was about five degrees Fahrenheit on the Sunday morning they set out in the guide’s pickup and headed out of town into a flat and cold boreal forest of thin jack pines and birch and aspen stuck in the frozen sand. St. Helen is an unincorporated area between Houghton Lake and Rose City, where we used to hunt with Bernie Card, and it’s in that strange heat sink in the center-north of the state that just holds cold. There was no wind. The guide let the dogs out and they bounded off through about eight inches of snow, flushing crows and jays as they went. Massey had found a cat in the area recently, so he wasn’t much surprised when they got on a trail right away. Dad had his stainless steel Savage .22-250 and they walked off through the shallow snow following the howling and yapping of the hounds.

  The walking was relatively easy and the clouds overhead were a susurrating dark gray, threatening more snow, and Dad and the guide were chatting away. They got a couple of hundred yards off the dirt fire road when the hounds started to bay: they had a cat in a hole.

  “My boy told Bruce to ‘Come on up here,’” said Bill, “and they’d been talking the whole time they were walking, maybe they’d been out there a half hour or an hour. He started messing around by that hole and your dad was standing behind him and suddenly he just stopped talking. My son heard a little sound like a grunt and he looked back and your dad was facedown in the snow. He had fallen right on his gun and it didn’t go off or anything. He just lay there. He never said any kind of cry like ‘Help me,’ or anything. He never said a word.

  “My boy went over there and tried to revive him but he was just gone. He got on the radio to me right away and said there was a problem and I got the paramedics out there and they got there pretty fast, too, but he was gone long before they ever got there.”

  We were all crying again by that point. Massey seemed embarrassed.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “It really is a hell of a deal.”

  We all agreed we needed to see the actual spot for ourselves, so we piled out east of town and made a few false starts down the unmarked fire roads that looped into the jack pines but finally found the right road. We stopped at a spot where the snow had been stomped down and a sled track led out into the bush. They’d used a sled to drag him out through the snow, one track in and one track back. We didn’t really have winter gear on but we felt compelled and we followed the tracks in our running shoes and no gloves and no hats. We high-stepped through biting cold, maybe ten degrees Fahrenheit, the blued sheets of cloud barely moving and a stillness in the birches, flapping our arms and rubbing our hands to stay warm.

  A couple of crows followed us through some red pines and then set themselves up in a copse of paper birches ahead of us and watched us as we came to a spot almost directly beneath them where the sled tracks ended. A gentle trickle of water leaked from a horseshoe beaver dam woven into the trees and topped with a dusting of snow. The clouds were a low lid from horizon to horizon. There were a lot of boot prints there and a hole with dog tracks all around it where the cat had gone to ground. I imagined the cat must have been in there the whole time they worked on Dad, and then in the deep quiet afterward, after the dogs, after everything, it slunk away, like a guest who’d mistakenly attended the wrong funeral. The crows were about a foot above our heads and said nothing. The place was gripped by a great stillness.

  “Of course, it’s like Bruce to die in the most beautiful place in the world,” said Ayron.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Joe said.

  Brett and Joe and I huddled together and I said, “This is the place where our daddy died.” We put our heads together and stood there for a while, silently. When I looked up, the crows had bent down like I was going to throw them a piece of cheese.

  “I just can’t believe I’m not going to talk to him now. I keep thinking he’s going to come walking out of those trees,” said Joe.

  “But I am so happy we did the hard work that we did and that there was no unfinished business with Dad,” I said. “There wasn’t anything left unsaid, right? We were good.”

  “We had come to a good place,” said Brett. “But it’s so odd that he’s just gone without a word. It makes it hard to believe.”

  Dad had grown so gabby in the last few years, it was not like him. He’d want to explain. He’d want to apologize. He’d want to make a plan. Dying had been a long way off. Up until that moment. Maybe even right through it. Sometimes a heart attack hits so hard it knocks the subject instantly unconscious, which is what seems to have happened here. On his death certificate, where it says “Approximate Interval Between Onset and Death,” the medical examiner wrote: “Seconds.” Maybe he never even had to th
ink that terrible thought, but only saw it in the rearview, on his way to wherever he was headed. Whatever was the case, part of him had remained and was still implied in this place. He wasn’t looking down from heaven or any of that horseshit; he was simply still there as a member of the biotic community. Something remained. I was completely, utterly relieved to find out those infinite connections can’t be undone overnight. The relatedness remained. The whole place hummed with him and he’d only been here once, just like us as we danced around in our cold wet shoes. If that was true here, it had to be true at the cabin, too.

  “We love you, Dad,” Brett said to the trees.

  Dad always traveled like he was on safari with a tribe of bearers so we knew he’d have a lot of gear. He never took planes because how can you fly with stacks of guns and hundreds of rounds of ammo and twenty or thirty changes of clothes and books and boxes of food and bags of calls and range finders and whatnot and ten different pairs of boots? I wish I were exaggerating. We went to the weather-beaten blue pole building that was the Richfield Township Police Station and I signed for his .22-250 and two shotguns, which had been impounded, and the bag that had been in the guide’s truck, which was full of ammo and lunch and cash. The officers said they were real sorry and shook our hands.

  At the Trails End, Bruce’s cavernous Denali SUV was the only vehicle in the lot, parked in the snow right in front of his room. It was a snowmobiler joint, and the guy at the counter didn’t have much to say other than that he sure was sorry. We paid Dad’s bill and the guy let us into the room. Dad was a frugal traveler, to be sure, but when he traveled alone he’d always find the absolute cheapest room he could stand and the forty-dollar-room at the Trails End was no exception. The bed was ancient and musty and the paneling half a century old, the sink iron-stained and the bathroom mirror darked with missing silver.

  His box of breakfast fixings was still on the table, his cereal bowl unwashed, and his Bible still open. It was open to Matthew 13, the Parable of the Sower. You can’t make this up.

  That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake. 2Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat in it, while all the people stood on the shore. 3Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. 4As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. 6But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. 7Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. 8Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. 9Whoever has ears, let them hear.

  What had he considered us, in the end? Were we good soil? The few words he had scattered on us from his Bible study hadn’t led us to the church, but they weren’t ignored, either. We listened. We let the words in. In his last few years, he and I could talk about spiritual questions in a very matter-of-fact way, such as the mechanics of how the sand farm itself might be part of our psychic life, or how it was necessary that the son of God be an earthling, born of a woman. He had grown beyond the nervous laughter that marked his early life. He was no longer threatened or angry about challenges to his own views, and that was true maturity on his part, because his church still told him in no uncertain terms that it was his fault if we were not saved. That meant something to him and he struggled with it.

  I know he struggled because he and I talked about it. He had not given up on us. Our experience at the Kuipers Hunt Club had filled him with hope. If our collective faith in the desiccated, sandy soil of that farm had been rewarded by an abundance of trees and, eventually, rich grass, then that begged a question about what was truly “good soil.” We had led Dad to a love that flourished far outside the parameters set by his church, and it was real. It raised no end of possibilities.

  I drove the Denali home, a gargantuan truck that Dad had bought because it could hold an enormous amount of stuff, and I drove home alone because Brett and Ayron and Joe and Becky needed to smoke. They needed to smoke like I needed to record all Dad’s idiosyncrasies. On the way home I decided to catalog everything that was in the truck as part of my mad inspiration to collect every piece of data that we might need to put our deer camp community back together.

  Diane understood what was happening, I guess, or else just looked the other way, but I sat on the floor of the garage and then in the basement for two days, cataloging. I went through every item he’d taken on his last hunt, including the trash bag of stuff they had cut off his body, and entirely filled a yellow pad with a list, and I write small, that I titled “What My Dad Was Carrying, Jan 3, 2010.” Cabela’s could publish those pages as Gear Freak of the Year. The list totaled some 579 items from guns to clothing separated into bags tagged with duct tape and Sharpied “scent-free” and “cold weather camo” to cameras to enough knives to outfit a platoon of Army Rangers to food to cleaning supplies to maps and media. There was no junk or trash in the car because he couldn’t abide that. This count did not include multiples of any one thing such as briefs (counted as 3 styles Ex Officio, 2 each) or bottles of water (Ice Mountain, 23) or shells (Hornady .22-250 Remington 55 gr. Vmax, box of 20, among dozens of others), which, even if you counted the packs of Tic Tacs or GUM Soft-Picks as being one item, would put the total number of items in the many thousands. All jammed into his truck. I recorded make and model and size and color or camo pattern, and sometimes condition, such as vomit-covered (heart attack). I counted the change in the cupholder ($4) and in his bags ($1.36) and paper money ($765) and chronicled his somewhat surprising collection of books on tape, which included Jimmy Carter’s Sources of Strength and Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls and Billy Graham’s Just as I Am, and little sticky notes from Dad to Diane and back again saying “I love you” with a smiley face and “I love you, too.”

  I didn’t feel as good as I had hoped when I was done. I said good-bye to Diane. I am sure I hadn’t been much comfort to her. I went out to the car and sobbed.

  When I had to return a shirt to Cabela’s later that month and informed the customer service agent that Bruce was deceased, there was a pause on the other end of the line and she said, “Bruce Kuipers? Oh my, he was a very good customer.”

  But after I’d written it all down, it was clear that none of that stuff was Dad’s life. It was just the wagonloads of shit he pulled along with him. It was relatedness that gave him life. He lived that parable from Matthew; it was about him. It described what kind of soil he had been—once extraordinarily hard soil where nothing grew, and then softer and richer and so much more complex and fertile. The more complexity and kinship he accepted, the more fatherly he had become, and more of a man. He had started participating in the communicative order, became permeable to message, available for intersubjectivity, available for love. He was good soil. In the end, what mattered more than anything else was that he had cultivated a new and wide-open imagination and let the world in.

  Whoever has ears, let them hear.

  At the funeral service, Vern told me that Dad had showed him pictures of the deer I had shot that fall and he said, “You guys are growing some big deer up there now. Sally and I walked in there last fall and looked at the place, it’s absolutely amazing. It’s so grown-in.”

  “Those trees you planted got it started,” I said.

  “Those trees are probably one of the best things I’ve done in my life,” he replied.

  Dad had shockingly few work friends, considering he built a big swath of southwest Michigan’s industrial infrastructure, but his buddy Stan Whitaker was there and I told Stan the story about what happened to Dad out in the woods, how he went without a word. Stan listened and he said, “How did he get so lucky? Huh?”

  Joe spoke, and I read the obit I’d written for the Kalamazoo Gazette, and Jack wrote something nice about losing his big brother, but he found it too hard to r
ead so his son, Chris, read it for him. Diane was not one to talk much about her emotional life, but at the viewing she stood with the three of us and put her hand on Bruce’s chest and said, “Good-bye my prince. He was my prince.”

  A couple of days later, I was sitting at Brett and Ayron’s kitchen table at night, sharing some whiskey. I didn’t even care about the smoking anymore. I half wanted to smoke, myself.

  “I feel okay now,” I said. “I want to grieve and count all the shit in Dad’s house and write everything down but when I really think of this I’m okay with it. If he were to walk in right now, I wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, thank God, because there was something I really meant to say to you and never did.’ There wasn’t any unfinished business.”

  “You said that the other day and Brett and I have talked about it,” Ayron said. “You guys are so damn lucky your dad made himself available to talk it all out.”

  “I talked to Dad on the phone at least every other day and I knew every detail of his life. I couldn’t possibly have absorbed any more,” I said.

  “I know, Ayron and I talked about that, too,” said Brett. “There wasn’t anything I wish I would have said to him, because I’d said it all. I just wanted more of it.”

  “Well, you created this whole new dad. That was all you, man,” I said. “You demanded that dad and you got it. And we are all a hell of a lot healthier because of it.”

  “It was like ramming my head against a brick wall for fuckin’ years. All those shitty years. And then when it got good, it got really good. But I feel like we just got there. I wanted another twenty-five years of it, at least.”

  He drank his whiskey. “But for five years I had the dad I always wanted.”