The Deer Camp Read online

  To Nancy, Joe, Brett and Ayron, and especially to Bruce, who dug in

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save American Wilderness

  Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in Smoke

  Contents

  Prologue

  One: The Deer Camp

  Two: Hello, Winter Maker

  Three: The Big Chair

  Four: The Darkness

  Five: A Boat

  Six: Muskrat Island

  Seven: God in the Many

  Eight: Animal Talk

  Nine: Back to the Cabin

  Ten: First Plantings

  Eleven: The Other Kuipers

  Twelve: Does Sand Dream of Trees?

  Thirteen: Sends a Deer

  Fourteen: Trails End Motel

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  I can only seek you if I take the sand into my mouth

  So I can taste resurrection

  —Nelly Sachs

  Prologue

  A relative who once stayed with us at the cabin complained: “Did you hear all those people talking in the woods last night?” Our cabin sits among vast federal swamps in a depopulated corner of Michigan, with farms on either side, and other than a few barking dogs we don’t hear much of the neighbors. Pretty much never. When that was pointed out to her, her eyes got wider and wider as she decided, if those weren’t live people murmuring in the trees, then they must be dead ones. “Spirits,” she said.

  The talking out there is real enough. It wakes me up, too. A whitetail deer has been snorting outside the open window of my tiny cabin bedroom for half an hour—CHUUU—like a horse blowing or a person winded by hauling in a load of wood. It’s the middle of a warm June night throbbing with cricket song and katydid shrill and bullfrog whomp; there are creatures moving.

  But those aren’t the spirits she was talking about. I woke, like I have a hundred times here, to the impression of whispering at the window screen. In the gaps between snort and whomp they’re there, too low to grasp, exactly, but voices. The forest itself, I guess. I squeeze my eyes shut and focus, and when I do they seem to come from a particular direction, hard to nail down. They are softly urgent, wanting things. Like the presence of people standing stone-still in the woods.

  There’s no sleeping through that. I get out of bed and put on water for tea by the weak glow of a nightlight, then slip by the dogs without letting them out the sliding door and sneak onto the porch to find out what all the murmuring is about.

  My youngest brother, Joe, is already out on the porch taking notes. I’m not surprised to find him out there, but it is four A.M. He’s been out there pretty much all night. The universe breathes a night wind and Joe is counting the breaths, scratching on a notepad while he sits with a hoodie tied around his face and a lit cigarette to keep away the mosquitoes. He gives me a big toothy smile but doesn’t say anything, turning immediately back to the field of orchard grass that stretches away into the night. He doesn’t want to miss anything.

  “What’s that deer huffing at?” I say, low.

  “You, now,” he says.

  Joe only sleeps one night out of every four or so, a circadian scar: a constant reminder of troubles that started long before we got this deer camp a quarter century ago. He’s a big man, six foot one and running about 220, barrel-chested and banged up. One knee doesn’t work and his back was broke once, and when he’s not obsessively changing toilets in the apartments he owns, he’s likely to be fly-fishing or sitting out here on the porch. He chews ice out of a big dirty Slurpee cup held together with duct tape. He has turned the fridge into an ice farm and superintends five trays of ice there in various states of ripeness and is constantly getting expensive dental work done.

  He picks up a pair of field glasses, peers into the darkness, puts them back down.

  I look at his notepad, where he’s scribbled about barred owls in the south twenty. Coyote pack running through Mr. Carter’s, the farmer to the west. Kept a tally of deer on the corn feeder. Raccoon fight in the red pines. Sandhill cranes. A loon.

  We write down what we hear talking in the fields at night like other people write down dreams. Because they mean something.

  A huge stonefly makes for the hot cherry of Joe’s cigarette and bats him in the face and he snatches it; on his forearm he has a six-inch tattoo of a mayfly known to all fly fishermen as a Hendrickson, the Ephemerella subvaria. He studies the stonefly closely, then releases it into the darkness.

  Our middle brother, Brett, emerges onto the porch with a cup of coffee and his longtime partner, Ayron, the sister we never had. She shuffles past in slippers and a jacket and says to me, low, “You going out?”

  I go out. The night wind blows off Lake Michigan twenty miles to the west, smelling of algal water and sand and pines. Our camp is a worn-out farm halfway up Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, near the knee-deep meander of the North Fork of the White River, a spit of blow-sand left between the swamps when the Laurentide ice sheet retreated from this spot a little more than fourteen thousand years ago, the receding blade of the last ice age. All around us are swamp and other hunting properties, mostly former farms like ours that were beaned to death a century earlier and left in yellow, medium-coarse sand. Some are plantations of USDA red pine, some are third-growth mixed hardwood forest. Most are empty this time of year.

  This night-sitting is a tactic that turned into a practice. When I was twelve years old, my father, Bruce, and I started hunting at a camp owned by a steel contractor named Bernard Card—heavy emphasis on the first syllable, BURN-erd—and Mr. Card built deer blinds out of sheet metal and wood that were five-foot-by-five-foot boxes with a roof and an eighteen-inch gap in the walls all the way around, just right for sitting in a chair and watching deer.

  Dad was a legendary still-hunter, and we’d always settle in at least an hour before dawn and sit in total silence, a couple of times in cold so fierce I got frostbite on my jaw and earlobes waiting for sunrise. After the sun was up, we could use the propane heater without throwing light that would spook the wildlife. But that wasn’t the relief I needed. I stopped wanting the sun to come up.

  Sunup meant the hunt was on, and we’d sit wordlessly for ten or eleven hours until the air in front of my face went dark again. I got to sit with my dad, but what I really needed was to talk to him. There weren’t many other opportunities. I wanted to talk to him about Mom, about my role in a house where he didn’t live anymore, who I should be as the oldest son. We’d sit all day, my ass aching, and after it was too dark to shoot we’d scuff down the frozen two-track toward dinner and talk in low voices about the deer and turkeys and owls we’d seen, how many, the patterns in their movements. But that’s all we’d talk about. Dad was so exhausted from the intensity of his watching, practically conjuring whitetails by sheer force of will, that he’d skip all the after-dinner whiskey and dirty jokes that were standard at Bernard’s and go straight to bed.

  One night we lay in our beds listening to the party, and I asked Dad why he didn’t have a beer and talk to the other men and women hunters. He said, “That’s not why we’re here.”

  Dad got good at killing deer. I don’t know what else he was good at. He was good at building buildings. Brett had a little better idea of who Dad was, probably, because Brett worked for him for six or seven years, and little brother Joe had almost none. Even a decade after our own Kuipers family deer camp became one of the few places they actually saw each other, Joe had hardly ever had a real conversation with Dad in his life.

  In the early morning dark, before the birds start in, it’s easier to forget the names and shapes of things, to let go of working like an amateur naturalist. With no sun, one can get beyond
words, to other kinds of talking. I sit in a blind and watch like Saint-Exupéry watched the fearsome Sahara, where the illusion of sameness mile upon mile so stilled the physical world that the sublime language of the spirit could be heard against it like whispers in the undulating dunes, revealing what he called the “invisible solicitations.” Everything out there calls in its own voice. Sitting in my box, just like the boxes we had on Card’s place, I am poked and prodded with offers, entreaties, lascivious invites.

  I make notes in the dark, pages spotted with blood from where I squish mosquitoes off the veins on the backs of my hands. From the black outlines of trees and star movement I’m trying to describe a wholeness and its language, but am getting mostly parts. A chickadee lands on my shoulder—the least shy of birds—but it says nothing. Just sits, without any weight at all. It, too, is listening silently until sunrise.

  Darkness starts in a place and expands in all directions at once, like space. It moves simultaneously toward you and away from you. Darkness is a living tissue, and ideas and signs move through it, and from those things our minds are born. Figures emerge from the darkness without warning—some memories I wasn’t trying to remember, some shame because of words I said—and if I accept those figures with humility, they don’t take up too much of the night. I want these things from inside my own head to hustle past so we can encourage the figures from outside to come closer. They come like nothing I’ve ever felt before, and yet familiar. I don’t know them, yet we are related.

  I didn’t think I knew the new trees on our camp, for instance, but it turned out I did. They knew me. They brought me a new father. Only a dozen years ago, they shot out of the bare sand like making a new father was a job they’d been waiting a hundred years to do. When Dad looked upon them, tiny saplings leaping up out of ground he believed was barren, he gave up his long career as shadow and destroyer. He started to love all three of us boys like never before. This really happened. Love was a figure that came out of this ground, out of the darkness.

  So I watch these fields, these trees, this sand. Joe and Brett and Ayron and I all watch. We are watching and listening for the figure of a family. What else out there is holding a piece of it, waiting for us to notice?

  One

  The Deer Camp

  In the summer of 1989, Bruce called to tell me he had a new deer hunting camp in Michigan.

  “Hey, Kemosabe!” my dad chirped. He could barely contain himself.

  I was in my apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and I hadn’t talked to him in maybe half a year. I had left Kalamazoo in 1987; my mother, Nancy, had divorced Bruce in 1988; and in the intervening year he and I had fallen mostly silent. In fact, I had been telling anyone who asked that my dad was dead. I lied about him being dead, and yet there he was on the phone: the hopeful singsong of his voice and the smell of decaying leaf litter and river water that it hauled into my memory made me want to tear my teeth out in shame. I suddenly realized I was weak; I had let rage make me a liar. Out the open window, New York City rumbled and foamed.

  “Is Joe okay?” I said to my dead dad. I wanted him to regret calling me. I was twenty-five years old at the time, Brett was twenty, and Joe was eighteen for a few more weeks—and I was worried about Joe. My brother was a drunk and just out of high school, and our last call together had filled me with dread that a ringing phone would summon me home for a funeral. I thought he might crash the car, or drink too much and die of alcohol poisoning. Almost all the calls from Michigan, however, were from Mom, who remained cheerful in the face of cataclysm but was worried about Joe’s drinking and drug habits. Because she was worried, I worried. I just figured someone would phone me if anything happened to Joe, and I wanted to subtly but firmly remind my dad that this was one possible reason for his call.

  “Ha ha!” Dad laughed. “I’m calling to tell you about our new camp. I knew you’d want to hear about it.”

  “Why is that funny?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say it was funny,” Dad said.

  He laughed inappropriately when he was confronted by news he didn’t like or didn’t know what to do with. For instance, that his own behavior contributed to Joe’s suicidal alcoholism. Or that any minute I’d hang up on him. When I was seventeen and Science Student of the Year at my high school, I told him that the University of Michigan was recruiting me for an experimental six-year medical school, and he laughed in my face. On that occasion, when I asked him why he was laughing, he said, “Oh, that kind of thing’s not for us.”

  I only realized after I bombed the interviews for the medical thing that we were a family of total hayseeds and that’s what he was really afraid of.

  Now the words deer camp hung there in the eight hundred miles between us and made my blood boil. He was dangling it like bait. Dad had raised us as hunters and fishermen, and sitting in a tree stand or wading in a tea-colored river were two places we still had respect for him, and I did miss my life in the woods. But these words signaled that he was going to try to rise from the dead and lurch back into my life.

  I had left Kalamazoo to get away from being a hayseed and from being tripped up by my father’s fear and defensiveness. I had moved to New York City immediately after Kalamazoo College to be a journalist because it was a way I could investigate the structure and character of power and the arts; I was in love with anarchism and punk rock and literature and deep ecology, and I had to find these ideas where they were embodied by real people. A resistance. I owned nothing but questions. On the very first night I had arrived in New York City, I lucked straight into a party for the composer John Cage and a conversation with the artist Laurie Anderson, whose work I adored. Together we looked at my car parked out front full of books and a drum kit, and I told her I knew only one person in the city, who didn’t even know yet I’d arrived. “Well, now you know two,” Anderson said, and assured me I’d be fine. It was a different world than the green open fields and vineyards and trout waters of Michigan, and I was freaked by how I was going to survive, but I needed to get inside the built environment of urban America. I wanted to write about politics and music, and in New York they were both blood sports. Nights, I ran into Iggy Pop at the Pyramid Club and Sonic Youth, Live Skull, and Vernon Reid at the Knitting Factory. I had moved from one experience of wildness to another.

  I had left Kalamazoo because Bruce’s version of how to be a man had nearly killed my mother. I was pretty sure somebody in New York could show me another way.

  I had never considered whether that other way would involve having a deer hunting camp. I had lived in the city for two years at the time of his call, and I didn’t know anyone I could even talk to about that. Upstate New York is thick with deer hunters and there are even fancy hunting shops in the city, but a deer camp still sounded like a redneck fantasia, like a broken toilet in the yard with flowers growing out of the bowl. I didn’t expect anyone to understand that hunting was part of an ecological consciousness.

  Because I am a hunter, I have always been a liberal and an environmental radical. My brothers, too, and loads of other people we know. Growing up in Michigan made the politics deadly obvious: if you wanted any wildlife at all, you wrestled it away from heavy industry. The Rouge River, like the mouth of the Cuyahoga on Lake Erie, and the Buffalo, and the Chicago, was so choked with industrial pollution when I was little it used to catch fire. In the early 1970s, you didn’t dare eat a trout if you found one because Michigan rivers were clotted with PBBs, PCBs, mercury, dioxin, and other poisons; deer and turkeys were scarce; the state mascot, the wolverine, had been extirpated for more than a century; seeing an actual wild mink, the great indicator of livable habitat, was like seeing a holy apparition. Three federal laws radically altered the conditions on the ground in ways that can hardly be appreciated today: the 1970 Clean Air Act, the 1972 Clean Water Act, and the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Without them, there would be no hunting or fishing in Michigan. But nearly a century before these kicked in, Michigan hunters and anglers were alr
eady at the statehouse demanding action. In 1887 Detroit sportsmen fomented the hiring of the nation’s first state game warden, regulating themselves in order to rein in market hunters who were killing every living thing to feed Michigan’s logging camps.

  What I saw in the 1970s was hunters and anglers shoulder to shoulder with government and activists in a cleanup that was hugely successful. That environmental action made my whole life possible. By the time I graduated from high school in the early 1980s, the state deer herd was in the millions, the ponds were full of ducks, and every little culvert under the highway shimmered with trout again.

  Bruce hated politics when we were young and so presented both hunting and guns as largely apolitical, and neither were they gendered: my aunts and female cousins shot a lot more deer than we did. There was no prescribed set of beliefs or tribal allegiances one had to adopt in order to hunt or fish. My brothers and I owned no guidebooks, and we had never joined the National Rifle Association or conservation clubs. We subscribed to none of the popular magazines like Field & Stream. We regarded every stereotype of hunters and fishermen as false because they weren’t like us. Hunting wasn’t like other cultures I adopted, such as skateboarding or rock music, that blew into town on the pages of a magazine. Every scrap of hunting technique and knowledge we had was strictly local, gleaned from farmers and hunters we knew.

  As a kid, I sat on the steps of Boogie Records in Kalamazoo eagerly awaiting the delivery of the first Clash import single, “White Riot,” and Joe Strummer may have urged me to rise up against corporate polluters, but he never told me not to eat venison stew. As far as I could tell, neither did the Who nor Patti Smith nor any of the prog or jazz outfits I loved like Camel or the Mahavishnu Orchestra, either. Exceptions arose as I learned more (the Smiths’ second album is titled Meat Is Murder), but if you were going to eat meat, then hunting and fishing became your politics, because that’s how you ate. My dad and his five brothers grew up as farmers, and they treated hunting no differently than farming: hunting was a function of a piece of land, and fishing was a function of a stretch of water, and the more intimately you knew that dirt and that water, the more likely you were to eat.