The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  Joe didn’t quite find the peace that Brett and I did. He agreed that there wasn’t unfinished business, but he took the death hard. So maybe there was. He stopped sleeping. The injustice that attended him had always been embodied by someone close—Dad, Hazel’s mom, Diane, ex-girlfriends, various colleagues at work, bosses—but after the funeral, the source of his irritation or disquiet seemed to lodge within himself. He’d staved it off for decades and then it took up residence, seemingly for good. He sat in a chair at his house and watched TV all night while his new bride lay in bed. I could call him at midnight from L.A. and he’d pick up, three A.M. in Michigan, and mumble, “Whazzup.”

  Joe spent more time with Dad than any of us from the mid-’90s up to 2004, and I hadn’t noticed that that had changed after things started to get good. But Joe said it did. He said that after Dad got married in 2004, Joe saw him less and less. Except when we were all at the cabin. When we were all in the middle of our big family throw-downs at the deer camp, Joe mostly lay on the couch or chimed in from the porch because there was peace in that place and he didn’t feel like he had to assert himself. He let Brett and I do the talking. But he really hadn’t had a satisfying talk with Bruce in years. Or maybe ever.

  “[Dad] was torn, because he was happy doing his thing with [Diane],” Joe said. “It became less and less over those years, that I saw them or talked to them at all.”

  I said, “For me and for Brett, life at the cabin was just like this massive relief, like Dad letting go of his control issues. You could have a beer, and you could sit outside, and you could plant things. You could do stuff outdoors besides hunt, you know?”

  “Yeah, well, for sure. That was all so much better. He was so happy. The changes there made him happy, and not just there but everywhere,” said Joe.

  But he felt judged when he was with Dad and Diane, like they regarded him as a fix-it project. Dad wanted to see Hazel on the weekends that Joe had her, but Joe would avoid going over there if he could because this meant submitting to the project, and he didn’t want fixing. He wanted the kind of relating he got at the cabin.

  “And all of that kind of boils down to my shit, and how just pointless and useless and more fucked-up than anybody else I felt. Especially in their eyes, so I never wanted to go feel that.”

  We all noticed that Dad had changed his ideas about the past and what it meant. These changes were on full display at his house. He had put a new wing on the house for Diane so that, as a cancer survivor, she didn’t have to go up and down the spiral staircase, and part of the new hallway was a brag wall where they had put up their Air Force photos side by side. I reminded Dad he had told me on a long drive to Rose City that I was absolutely forbidden from ever joining the military, but he brushed that off. “Ha ha! I don’t think I ever said that.”

  One other historical revision is that they started critiquing how Mom had raised us. You know, during the years that Bruce was off having sex with other women. Joe got an earful of that a couple of times and didn’t care for it, because the implication was that Joe’s troubles were partly Mom’s fault, and Joe didn’t believe that.

  Joe was kind of lurching around on a hair trigger and since he was staying up all night and getting more and more frustrated at home, his one refuge was the cabin. Brett and Ayron proposed they all go up for Fourth of July the year Dad died, and when Joe mentioned that to Mom, she hinted she’d like to be there and he said, “Yeah, you guys should come!” But Joe hadn’t understood that Brett and Ayron had invited their friends and intended it to be a party weekend, the kind of thing they never could have done when Bruce was alive because he had never dropped the “no friends” rule, and when they told Joe about this, he just collapsed. “I’m sorry I messed up the fucking schedule!” he screamed at Ayron over the phone, and when Brett called to see what was going on, Joe just said, “I quit. The cabin’s yours.” And that was it. Joe gathered all his stuff from the cabin and left. It all happened in the space of a few hours.

  I didn’t think this split would last, but I got more concerned as the days passed. I didn’t want to be at the cabin without Joe, so I tried to reassure everyone the feeling would knit itself back together. A few months later, Brett and I ended up cutting Joe a check for his interest in the cabin, and he bought himself a different one, a good-sized house near Frederic on a private piece of the Manistee River. That deeply tannic water under his dock was so cold and so full of the soft language of big brown trout it was hypnotizing. His neighbor was a lovely English fly fisherman who made beautiful cane fly rods, and Joe became fast friends with him and his wife. The Manistee was where Joe had always wanted to be, where Dad had first acknowledged that he was a real person.

  The new place helped and the crisis passed. By the following summer, Joe was helping with the planting at the Hunt Club again. He had ceded his room to Spenser, but he took one in the basement. A bunch of his stuff reappeared. That relatedness was sticky. Then we had two cabins, one for hunting and one for fishing.

  And Joe had two porches to sit on all night.

  Not everybody has a ninety-five-acre camp where they can make habitat changes and try to change the world or their own heads, and maybe we broke our backs doing physical labor there precisely because we felt privileged to have it. We were Bruce’s sons. He absolutely craved hard physical labor, and after he died it seemed we only worked harder. Nobody told us to do it; we just have a thousand experiments we want try, to see if they make more or healthier wildlife.

  Dad had finally put in a wood stove, so in the steamy summers there were wet cords of wood to cut, haul, split, and stack, mostly windthrow oak and yellow birch and some hard maple. We put a new metal roof on the cabin, and when we did we replaced the old sun-scorched deck that overlooked Cabin Field with a huge sitting porch the full width of the building, with a peaked roof that opened up the space and broadcasts your vision outward into the green. It became the center of all our activity there. No matter how many people or dogs or cats are there, or what the day’s task, we would all end up in chairs with tea and coffee gazing out on the fields from that porch.

  Then we put in a pole barn and built equipment racks in it. The deck and siding needed regular restaining. The pipes froze and split twice in the basement. There were three water crossings on our two-tracks that needed regular rebuilding, and each time you pulled those old culverts out you knew you were in for a day of muck up to your knees and potentially getting the tractor stuck. The tractor and its equipment required maintenance. We built platform beds for the bedrooms. We felled and milled the lumber for tables and a new entry deck with an Alaskan sawmill, which allows you to cut straight timber with a chainsaw. We cut back some falling-down wild apples and pears that may be over a hundred years old.

  In 2016 I married a wonderful woman named Lauri, a musician who built edible gardens for a living, and my two new stepsons, Milo and Gus, were anxious to see this mysterious deer hunting camp. On our first trip there, we spent two days cleaning roots out of the septic tank, which Lauri said was the most glamorous vacation she’d probably ever had and then laughed and laughed. Thank God she laughed.

  But mostly what we did at the cabin was plant. We fenced in a heel-in garden against the marauding deer, and as Brett and I drove the dirt roads to get hardware or liquor we skidded to a halt at thickets of four-foot-tall gray dogwoods or wild honeysuckle or white spruce or highbush cranberry or Juneberry or highbush blueberry or hazelnut standing in the soggy ditch. Brett spotted this stuff like some kind of botanical detective. He should have a TV show. We kept shovels and plastic bags in the car just for the occasion. If they’re on the public right-of-way they’re going to get mowed by the county anyway, so we leapt out, dug up twenty or so, keeping the rootballs intact, roared off to the store to get whiskey and, you know, replacement chimney pipe parts or deck screws or whatever, and then carefully set the shrubs and trees in the garden for a couple of years to get as big as possible before we transplanted them into thickets we�
��d created out on the property. The bigger they were, the harder to handle, but the better chance they had of surviving cervid nibbling.

  We once found a dense thicket of small hawthorns, a thorny, scraggly wild tree that makes beautiful bright red berries that grouse love and people can eat, too. (I don’t: the seeds contain cyanide, which seems a bad risk for such a bitter berry.) They were already fourish feet tall when we dug them out of the ditch, so we loaded them onto a plastic sled six or eight at a time, dragged them out into the woods and meticulously made new thickets with our shirts torn and hands bleeding. Unlike the six hundred bushes planted in 2001, the new transplants mostly survived. Now we know you just have to transplant them when they’re as big as you can handle. We have learned a little.

  After a decade of planting First Field and tilling it under, twice yearly over and over, we finally hit on the right solution and planted those five sunburnt acres to native tall-grass prairie. Brett and Ayron hand-harvested switchgrass seed from a wild field and we supplemented it with Indian grass and big bluestem and cultipacked that into the gray-orange soil. The first year we got the tallest crabgrass you’ve ever seen in your life, up to my belly button, but that was hammered down by the snow and the next spring came a righteous prairie. This gorgeous expanse of chest-high prairie grass immediately became a bedding spot for summer fawns and a giant feeder for birds. Similarly, Cabin Field developed thick orchard grass, then Italian rye, then a mix of those two and alfalfa and clover. It would have made Dad cry just to see it.

  The sand became more and more like loam every day, and the more we learned, the more we needed to put our hands in it. We’ve never had a single day at the cabin where we don’t have a to-do list as long as your arm; it would be intolerable if we did. That sand was like a sacred river: we stood in it and we were renewed every day, and its needs were a big part of what we needed from one another.

  A November came and I was sitting in Buck One, feeling a rimy frozen darkness move against my face. I’d been out for maybe an hour, but there was still a half hour before first light. Frost shimmered off the tufted, foot-tall orchard grass that had taken Cabin Field, the air pooling over the vernal ditch at about twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Tiny feet crunched in the frosted leaves outside my metal box. Squirrels, maybe. Mice. I focused like I always did on the feel of the sand under my boots. Images seemed to pour up out of that sand into my head—images of the sand itself seen from about four feet down, rusty yellow and wet and shot through with sticky fungal filaments; or the inside of Wendell’s hollow tree; or the trails through Mr. Carter’s middle fields from the viewpoint of a coyote on the trot; or empty, matted beds in the grass on the spruce island in the bog. Places I’d never seen but which seemed to force their way into my head.

  The year Dad died, the poet W. S. Merwin told me in an interview that “the imagination is nature.” There is no separation and there never has been any separation, he continued, letting that sink in. It sank in. Of course that was right. Perhaps the imagination was the basic organ of being and was in every rock, raindrop, and Ovambo tribesman. I became fascinated with the poetics of the imagination, the mechanics of it, how all the thinking outside my body became the thoughts in my own head. The imaginative displays described by James Hillman, moving through the senses, moving through an unconscious, flowed back and forth through me like water. Amid a boil of images were real facts, like the fact that the geese were on a golf course down south or the fact that the prophet Samuel was available for a chat.

  A thick, irrepressible flow of subjective material poured through my body, wild, loose, and demanding attention, coronal eruptions of a great subjectival field, perhaps. Our imaginations can not only read that flow but must contribute to it constantly, dumping our psychic stuff into it. You are out there. You are knowable. The stuff in your head matters not just to yourself but to everything. Merleau-Ponty called this our “interinvolvement”—the thickness of communication by which everything reifies its being by displaying its own psyche and validating that of its neighbor.

  And sometimes nature turns the imagination inside out and hangs meat on it. I was in the blind, feeling the bottoms of my feet, when the hairs on the back of my neck suddenly stood on end. I had my eyes closed, fielding images from within, when I felt eyes on me. Speaking of the subject-object reversal. I was wearing thick, cold-weather camo and I felt heat surge upward as my face flushed with adrenaline, choking off my breath. My heart lurched sideways and began pounding. I didn’t hear anything and when I opened my eyes I couldn’t see anything, either. When I tried to quiet my breathing, I heard only my heart squeaking in my ears. I couldn’t smell anything. But I knew.

  Something was watching the back of my hooded head.

  Sitting in the woods in Michigan had always been a fairly tame experience, but the place was changing. This same year, Nancy had been nearly face-to-face with a puma on the Manistee River. The DNR didn’t acknowledge that there were puma in the Lower Peninsula, or wolves, either, but Joe had also found wolf prints clear as day in the sand on a gas pipeline right-of-way along that river. Mr. Carter had been seeing a black bear around his house, and we had what we thought were fishers, a mean-ass weasel that is kind of like a small wolverine. We were growing a lot of prey, so who knew what was out there?

  I held my breath and whatever it was that was watching me took a step and crunched. It felt me stop breathing and it knew. It felt its own arrival in consciousness. It was very silent. Then it took a few huffy breaths and

  CHUUUUUUUUU!

  I flinched and smelled the sour corn breath then. It was a big deer and it had to be real close. Considering that it was the rut, I thought it might be the big boss we’d seen running around, a very healthy eight-point probably three and a half years old and goofy with hormones, leaping around and racing back and forth in Cabin Field. I slowly hunched my shoulders, hoping he wasn’t aiming to stick an antler through my neck. We had been watching him and now he was watching me. Even if he couldn’t see my face inside this hood he could see at least the outline of my head and smell that I was a human, with my stink of soap and fear and fried eggs. But the rut made him more brave than smart. I was in his woods with the does he was jealously guarding and I had become part of his problem. He took two steps toward me, crunching in the stiff oak leaves, snapping twigs, then stomped the ground a few times and hauled huge amounts of air through his flaring wet nose.

  He stomped, wanting me to move, to declare myself. I took tiny sips of air.

  When I refused to budge, he stuck his antlers into a couple of beech and aspen saplings and thrashed them, then stood, wheezing. I felt his fierce breathing. I heard him lick his snout inches away.

  CHUUUUUUUUUUU!

  He blew his musty disgust and rage all over the back of my neck. He was so close I could feel it hit: he snotted me. For weeks we had examined his scrapes where he kicked the leaves back and pissed on the thin black humus and reached up to mash the glands on his brow tines against an overhanging tree branch; we felt high up where he used the outer tines of his antlers to tear the bark off both sides of a ten-inch-diameter pine at what would be about face height on me. I had imagined him and he had probably looked warily at the cabin and imagined me. Maybe we had imagined each other into a kind of contact.

  Crazy then with curiosity, he moved along the south side of the blind as softly as wind. I have had lots of fawns do this, stick their heads right into the blind in order to see me, but never a mature deer. I think he was trying to see my face, and when I saw the curve of polished bone enter my peripheral vision, maybe two feet from my head, I cut my eyes to the right to see him better and for a brief moment that was us, eye to eye—like seeing into the center of a black hole, where all the light is held—and then the old fear and he exploded into the underbrush.

  His hoofs sounded like pile drivers as he tore off, thrashing the saplings and hitting a small tree headfirst with a horrible thud, shaking it all the way up in the lower canopy. His white fl
ag flashed as he ran with his head down into the hemlocks and then wild splashing through about twenty yards of blackwater swamp and up onto the slight ridge to the southeast. I never even had my gun in my hands. He raced around up there on the high ground for about ten minutes, snorting and stomping at me from the darkness.

  As he ran off, he left behind a little piece of the real quarry: the claims we make on one another.

  Spenser announced one day when he was fifteen that he wanted to go work at the cabin for an entire month after school let out. He’s a Venice kid and an on- and offline gamer, and this declaration meant leaving behind his computer and school friends and his mother, Meg, for relentless clouds of deerflies and farm work and the painful absence of Grandpa Bruce. It was the first time I had any indication there would be another generation at the deer camp. There were only Spenser and Hazel, after all. But I guess he’d been hearing the speechless speech.

  When I asked him why he wanted to go, he said, “I want to see Dexter catch grasshoppers. And see the beaver dam. And paint the porch.”

  Brett and Ayron had a fat gray tabby named Dexter that hunted grasshoppers. Dexter stalked the ’hoppers in the foxtail grass, coiling beneath them and leaping high to snatch them midlaunch. He mostly missed, but when he didn’t, he chewed them with his head turned sideways like they tasted bad.

  Spenser understood that we watched the fields for stories and visitations. He had encountered baby Wendell. Over the years we had found horses dragging tires, cows that had pushed down their fences, herons and cranes and vultures and bald eagles and badgers standing defiant in the fields. My friend John had watched a pair of river otters galumphing through the hemlocks. We’d freaked out over the bizarre quavering shrieks of long-eared owls in the night. My stepson Milo had poked me on his first day in the blind and whispered, “There’s a dog-wolf thing.” And it was: a coy-dog or coy-wolf or some such combo, longhaired and following a group of does until it saw us, then it stood behind a tree and peered at us with one eye like a wolf will, melting into the forest as though it had never existed. I couldn’t identify it, and that kind of mystery is why we watch.