by Dean Kuipers
While Spenser and Ayron stained the porch, Brett and I worked along the ditch on the edge of Cabin Field, planting some viburnum that people call highbush cranberry. We had the bucket loader on the tractor and we were peeling back some of the dense canary grass when we hit a pile of buried granite boulders. Nice round boulders, rolled by the action of glacier and pushed into the ditch by who knows which farmer when they cleared this field. Brett got under one with the loader and I helped heave it into the bucket.
“Let’s set it in the island for Dad,” Brett yelled above the plop and throcket of the idling tractor.
The island was a thirty-foot-by-twenty-foot set of trees in the middle of Cabin Field, with two black cherry, a pin oak, and a white pine, all about twenty to thirty feet tall. It was a shady spot for Dad that we could see easily from the porch. The rock was good-sized, maybe a hundred pounds, and Brett jumped down while we set it in place. Then we both walked up to the cabin to see how it looked from a distance and without a word Brett got back on the tractor and we were back in the ditch getting another stone.
It was early in the morning, the orchard grass still heavy with dew, and we went on collecting and placing rocks till lunchtime without talking much at all. The tractor roared and a monument built itself, and finally, about two dozen or so large stones later, we capped it. We were both sweaty and filthy with black muck and our fingers were cut.
“Snakes will live in there,” I said.
“Ooh, Dad would hate that,” Brett laughed. “He couldn’t stand a snake.”
Spenser ended up painting the porch and the downstairs entry door and the Adirondack chairs and footrests, and probably some other things I didn’t know about. He cleared red maples that had crowded the cabin and dragged them into rabbit piles. He oversaw the construction of a treehouse in a huge white oak at the edge of Cabin Field, and cleared and modified the motorcycle trails. He spread fertilizer. He hiked miles along the bog and walked the old M&O railroad beds in the USA across the road to study the beavers. He ate like a trucker, as Dad would say. He worked.
Spenser had his little dog, Jenkins, with him. A couple of weeks in, I asked Spenser if he missed anyone, and he said, “Mom, I guess.”
“Would you do this next year?” I asked, expecting a no.
“Well,” he said. “We could stay the whole summer and my friends could take turns coming to see me.”
In 2013 I had traded some correspondence with Wendell Berry as I started this book. I had read several of his, starting with The Unsettling of America, and I felt he might respond to someone engaged in the kind of restorative farming he prescribed. I needed to send my measuring line out into the world to test the possibilities of this relatedness I had found. If this sand farm had given me a family, what else was in it? What was the value of this work to the human community? How were we supposed to respond to enormous crises like the chemical farming that went on around us, and climate change and species extinction?
“The problems are big, they are even big emergencies,” Berry wrote to me, “but they can’t be solved by big solutions. What our understanding of nature tells us is that the big problems can be solved only by small solutions, unrelentingly practical, that will be made by individuals in relation to small parcels of land farmed or forested or mined, in their home watersheds.”
The humility in this answer opened worlds. What our understanding of nature tells us is that even big geophysical events like global warming emerge from tiny actions in a place, or a billion places, and the remedy is also in those places. Not everyone will have an old sand farm, of course, or a forest or a mine. Once again, Brett and Joe and I knew how incredibly fortunate we were to have a piece of dirt that we could work, and we were determined to do things with it that were good for the entire community. But anybody can do this, and must do it, whether or not they have any land of their own. Every single thing you buy and use all day long comes from some piece of ground. Our lives come from the dirt in someone’s home watershed, and you should know about it. Small solutions, unrelentingly practical.
It turns out it’s not so hard to grow a ruffed grouse. Mostly you create great habitat and the birds do the rest. It’s probably the same for a rhinoceros or a polar bear, though I’ve never grown those. Every animal or plant that grows is a loud and charismatic voice in the community, but more than anything it’s an interpreter of the habitat. It’s the habitat that talks to your imagination. It’s the sentience of rabbit and stone and wind that makes your mind, and without them you would be mindless. It’s the habitat that speaks when you hear voices at night. Whatever you think God is, it expresses its many-ness as habitat. Want to get your head right? Work on the habitat.
Doing that can mean growing a garden. Or buying organic produce from a farmer who does. Or adopting a beach for cleanups with the kids. Or planting trees on your block.
Mom and Tom got the message and started planting deer plots on the land behind their house. They don’t hunt there. They just want to care for the wildlife.
Doing that work alone only slows your progress. It’s best done as a function of community. Berry writes voluminously about this in his essays about American farm life: those small solutions, unrelentingly practical, need to be shared and allowed to form the roots of a human culture. Work on the habitat with other people. Curmudgeonly nature writers like Thoreau and John Muir so often leave that part out, and the environmental heroes and adventure sports figures we all fawn over so often present their finest moments on the mountain or in the surf as so many solo breakthroughs in narcissistic self-fulfillment. We need to expand that engagement with nature to include all our human relations. All of our backbreaking labors on the deer camp wouldn’t have had the same effect on my psyche, or on the mental health of my entire family, or on the well-being of the critters or of the camp itself if any one of us had been there all on our lonesome, celebrating our own, siloed relationships with the land. To produce love, we had to do this with Dad.
Andy Fisher told me there was more to this: without our family dynamic, our work on the deer camp would lose its enormous power to change global culture. Fisher is an ecopsychologist and therapist in private practice in Ontario, the author of the book Radical Ecopsychology, and I studied with him for a few intense months. He saw a bigger picture beyond my deer camp tale. My family story was one of ecopsychological healing, in that Dad really saw Joe and Brett and me for the first time and accepted us when he accepted the trustworthiness and agency of that lowly sand. Which allowed us all to thrive. Once Dad saw that the dirt wasn’t going to let him down, he thought we were okay, too, and the better it got, the better we got.
The development of that ecological self, however, is also a path toward saving the planet. In the second sentence of his book, Fisher writes: “Ecopsychologists argue that genuine sanity is grounded in the reality of the natural world; that the ecological crisis signifies a pathological break from this reality; and that the route out of our crisis must therefore involve, among other things, a psychological reconciliation with the living earth.”
That reconciliation requires a different culture, one in which we recognize both the material and psychic agency of the planet we live on. As Shepard had implied, Man must stop destroying his habitat. Fisher finds this a fundamentally radical project that needs a “psychologically based ecological politics.” This kind of overtly political thrust is much too forward for many in the psychology community, but hopefully it will catch on. “To ultimately overcome dualism we must become different people, must overcome the mode of existence in which our dualistic thought is rooted, and for this our repressing and fragmenting society must itself fundamentally change.”
Those politics have to develop from relationships, and those relationships have to include the other-than-human world. It’s a world-sized project, but as Berry indicated, it starts small. It might not be a political revolution. It might be therapy. Fisher leads couples therapy as part of a practice that includes his wife, Jill, and whe
n they get in a bad space, they take the session outdoors.
“We did it just the other day,” he said. “We were out walking and Jill spots a feather. And suddenly we’re good! I think it’s a bald eagle, because we’ve got a bald eagle around here, and I’m wondering about these lines on the feather, they’re called ‘stress bars,’ but they’re also called ‘hunger traces.’ So this is sort of our Story of the Day. I’m thinking about this suffering eagle, it’s really moving me, and suddenly we’re in this space that is so rich and alive. We rely on that now: any time we’re in a bad place, we just say, ‘Okay, we’re heading out!’”
November came again and Cabin Field was all torn up and planted to alfalfa that had been stilled by the cold just as it started to erupt between the volunteer orchard and rye grass. The leaves were off the trees. Brett and I had moved the Desert Storm blind, pulled it out into an open patch of grass we’d created, and renamed it Eagle—partly because we saw bald eagles all the time that we hailed as visitations from Dad, and partly after the band Eagles of Death Metal, who survived an armed attack at the Bataclan in Paris only days before. Mom and Tom were hunting the deer opener with us at the cabin for the very first time. Tom had hunted regularly in the U.P. many years before, and he seemed very pleased to take it up again with us. The deer camp had called to him and he wanted to do the work. We were clearing shooting lanes over by Eagle the day before Opening Day and Joe, Brett, Ayron, Tom, and I suddenly pulled up short when we realized there were white pines everywhere.
I mean everywhere: every ten or twenty feet in every direction was a white pine ten feet tall in the understory. When we finished our work, we got Mom from the cabin and we walked around: the whites were ten feet tall in the vernal muck, blasting out of the swamp’s edge, nosing even into the mature popple of the south twenty, racing up above the beech and black cherry in the natural regrowth of what had been the Scots pine plantation, appearing in the shade of the red pines and the big beeches to the west, volunteering in the sand rimming First Field. I had noticed them coming up a couple of years back, especially around the small grove planted by Askins, but suddenly they’d all heaved upward several feet and launched themselves into serious competition for a place in the canopy all over the ninety-five acres. They were spreading into the USA and over onto Carter’s place, and Randy’s, and all the camps around us as far as we could tell.
All around Buck One they were taller than elsewhere, fifteen to twenty feet tall and poking up through gaps in the red and white oaks. I had to trim the lower limbs in order to shoot through them. For about 140 years they didn’t grow on our place, but they’d evidently heard the call.
Why did they wait so long? What brought them out? The appearance of these white pines correlates precisely with when we logged off the Scots pines and aspens twelve years earlier and created a rough disturbance for the benefit of game birds. But they had popped up even a quarter mile away from where we’d done any cutting or planting. They’d sprung from the ground at the approximate moment when we got our dad back. So was this a people dream, or a tree dream? Or did those dreams get tangled? It didn’t feel like we could take even the tiniest bit of credit, but it was happening right then, and fast.
We had spent countless hours talking about how the place must have looked and felt in big trees, when Carpenter first homesteaded the place; here came the prospect that maybe Spenser and Hazel would see it one day with their own eyes.
Dad probably would have been bummed out about this, as white pine lands aren’t prime habitat for deer. Whitetails prefer the disclimactic white oak, the disturbed field of new aspen, the open grassland.
But we’d learned to respect the dream, to pay attention to the original instructions. The armature for our restored family was there in the sand; we had every reason to trust whatever new family ecosystem might lie implicit in a tall-tree forest. It’s an adventure we had not foreseen, but it was one we were not going to resist.
And so we had ever-more reason to sit out and watch the fields at night.
The next morning, an hour before dawn, we stood outside in our thick, cold-weather gear and loaded our rifles by the light over the freshly painted downstairs door. There was the click-clack of shells racked in and we paused and smiled at one another. Mom was going out with Tom, and they were both beaming under their heavy winter clothes. Then the light was out and Brett and Ayron went north to their new Taj and the rest of us went south, Mom and Tom to Eagle, Joe to Shouldabeen, and me to Gonzo. The trees were hushed as the stars raked the frost out of the crowns and scattered it on the sand. We walked out into the darkness on our farm in Michigan, where we raise trees and grass and a love you can feel in your feet.
Acknowledgments
This story would have never been told without the devotion of my beloved wife, Lauri, who grows food and community and changes the world every day, who guides our boys with wisdom, and who read these pages for five years until a book emerged. My eternal gratitude to my mother, Nancy, and to my brothers, Brett and Joe, and to Ayron and Becky and my stepdad, Tom, for allowing me to stir up all the old hurt and for believing both the land and our family were worth restoring; to Jack and Jane and Vern and Sally and all my cousins for establishing the Hunt Club and filling it with stories; to Uncles Ron and Mike, Great-Uncle George and Great-Aunt Frieda, and to Diane Hamilton, Scott Stephens, Meg Cranston, and Anne Lehman for some history; and to the extended Kuipers and Nienhuis clans for making us who we are. Thank you to Spenser, Milo, and Gus, and to Hazel, who have filled me with hope that the next generation will care about the habitat. And to all my Mattawan schoolmates, especially Matt and Joann, Bruce, Mickey, Andrew, Kelly, Troy, Jeff, and Tim for a lifetime of love.
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my agent, Bonnie Nadell, for seeing a book where others didn’t, and to everyone at Hill Nadell, especially Austen Rachlis, and to Sloan Harris for early efforts at shaping this idea. Bear hugs to my editor, Anton Mueller, for believing in this idea, and to Barbara Darko, Morgan Jones, and everyone at Bloomsbury for making it happen. Heartfelt thanks to Andrew Gumbel, Karl Taro Greenfeld, and Andew Blechman for reading drafts and versions, and to Michael Wiegers, Doug Aitken, Dan Gerber, and Jim Harrison for pondering big questions about poetry, trout, and our place in the universe.
Deepest thanks to Wendell and Tanya Berry, and Mary Berry at the Berry Center, for hosting a Kentucky research visit for what was then a very different book, and to the incomparable W. S. Merwin for telling me in Maui, “The imagination is nature,” which changed everything. A deep and humble bow to Andy Fisher for his indispensable tutoring in ecopsychology, and also to Robert Greenway, Betsy Perluss, Deb Piranian, Linda Buzzell, and Patricia Hasbach. A tip of the hat to the MSU Forestry Department, including David Rothstein, Rich Kobe, Larry Leefers, and Don Dickman, and to Tom Nederveld, Randy Kuipers, and John Barnes Logging for habitat work, and to our neighbors Joe and Marilyn Carter and Andy Sneller. Many thanks to Loretta Harjes, Bill Askins, Iran Huizenga, and Bill Dukes for the history of our property. And to Eric Nyquist for visuals.
I think every day of my father, Bruce, who took us to rivers and camps. He is alive in his family and in every grouse and deer and in the fields themselves.
A Note on the Author
Dean Kuipers has studied and written about environmental politics and the human–nature relationship for decades. He is the author of Burning Rainbow Farm and Operation Bite Back, as well as several books on art and culture, including I Am A Bullet with the fine artist Doug Aitken. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Outside, the Atlantic, Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. He lives in Los Angeles.
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Copyright © Dean Kuip
ers, 2019
Frontispiece map © Dean Kuipers
Epigraph translation © Catterel and Catherine Sommer
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-63557-348-0; eBook: 978-1-63557-349-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kuipers, Dean, author.
Title: The deer camp : a memoir of a father, a family, and the land that healed them / Dean Kuipers.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018059379 (print) | LCCN 2019002700 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635573497 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635573480 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Kuipers, Dean. | Kuipers, Dean—Family. | Fathers and sons—Michigan—Oceana County—Biography. | Deer hunting—Michigan—Oceana County. | Country life—Michigan—Oceana County. | Farms—Conservation and restoration—Michigan—Oceana County. | Oceana County (Mich.)—Biography.
Classification: LCC F572.O3 (ebook) | LCC F572.O3 K85 2019 (print) | DDC 977.4/59—dc23