The Deer Camp Page 2

  Hunting required that we recognize deer and pheasants as thinking and feeling and making choices, that they had lives worth understanding. It was about recognizing the sentience of the other, from individual to entire habitat. You can’t fish if you don’t recognize that fish exhibit mind-like behavior. You can’t hunt where I grew up if you don’t understand that the life cycle of aspen trees determines how many grouse or woodcock you’re going to see. Thinking about animals in their habitat means thinking of the whole community, including blow-sand and swamp water and vegetation and weather—and the people who touch all those things—an ecology of being.

  We grew up absolutely obsessed with assessing habitat—how many berries were on the gray dogwoods, how much water was in the swamp, watching the Hendrickson hatch on the river, minding when the corn was picked. In his masterpiece, Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez rightly depicts the hunt as a “wordless dialogue” not with prey or weapons or one’s ego but with the land itself. “To hunt means to have the land around you like clothing,” he wrote. Like a good farmer, the hunter was responsible for protecting the whole web of relationships that make up a place. To us, that meant you don’t shoot predators like coyotes or wolves, and you don’t shoot trophies you’re not going to eat. The habitat set itself up in your imagination, and the inhabitants, from whitetails to ring-neckeds to snow to dogwoods to mothers and fathers, moved through it.

  A habitat of our own was what we had always wanted. A place where we could do the real work: grow wild deer and birds with all their companion creatures, celebrate the lives of the whole forest, hunt in the fall, and eat venison stew. Our old host Bernard Card and his family didn’t just throw open the gates on Opening Day and start shooting; they were there all year, planting corn and putting it up in a corn crib, gathering hay and stacking it in a small metal barn, doing whatever forestry work was required to align with state efforts to improve the deer and grouse and turkey numbers, studying game trails, working on the log cabin, digging a pond, and teaching the grandkids how to handle a gun and how to watch the woods. Hunting only happened a couple of days a year, but the management of all those relationships was the real work of the imagination. We wanted a worky place like that.

  In New York City, I discovered I hadn’t really left all that behind. I craved contact with the living terrain itself, and I found a version of it in Tompkins Square Park, three city blocks of big trees that formed the heart of the East Village. The nights there were weirdly spectacular. During the operatically hot and chaotic summers of 1988 and ’89, I spent a lot of time there. It was the only park on the island that was open twenty-four hours, and I liked to sit there at night. It was a break from the heat, and I watched the massive trees and the bright New York sky for whatever might emerge. The figures that came forth felt as though they came from both my own head and somewhere outside it, like the world was manifesting my thoughts. Like turning the mind inside out.

  The park was populated by spreading American elms, including the Hare Krishna tree where Swami Prabhupada first started teaching the chants of Krishna Consciousness in the United States in the 1960s. The rest were big red oaks and plane trees. The sky was so thick with heat and trapped city light that the trees threw shade at night. The leaves overhead twisted with breathy sounds against a purple-black city sky, describing in a kind of semaphore how the trees felt about the barely cooling night breeze. Just before sunup the dew would sometimes spatter out of the leaves onto the cardboard and tarps of Dinkinsville, the sprawling homeless encampment named after the mayor, and I went home with my notes full of blooming locust and starling and tropical nightcloud as reportage on a parallel world.

  I had been looking for the sentient other to emerge from the darkness, and one of the things that turned up, at least on the day of his phone call, was Bruce.

  Dad didn’t know that I had killed him. He was only forty-five years old and newly divorced from my mother; the second half of his life had suddenly unfurled before him as vast prairies of undefined space, a landscape going light and dark with each passing cloud. Mom had dumped him, and she took Joe with her when she left. Brett and I had already been out of the house for years. Dad could not tolerate neediness, even the ordinary neediness of children, and I’d learned long ago not to need him for anything. I wasn’t sure what other connection we had.

  When I first got to New York, I was at a job interview at the Ear Inn on Spring Street, negotiating my first writing gig at the music magazine that shared a name with the bar, Ear Magazine. The editor of the magazine asked me about my family, and I answered with a sort of put-on sorrow, “Oh, my dad passed away.” That’s how I did it then. I was satisfied with the look of pity that passed over her face. It was a lie I needed in order to give myself space to live, as both loving and hating my father had so dominated my life to this point. The editor could discover the truth with one phone call, and in the next sentence I reversed myself, adding, “I don’t know why I said that.”

  My new boss was a much better person than I was and told me I was a good and loving son and that I couldn’t stand to kill my father even if we were pretty much estranged. Anyway, I got the job.

  I hadn’t thought of Joe, Brett, and me as good and loving sons. I had thought of us as savages leaning together over a haunch of stag in our own separate wilderness—all three of us shoulder to shoulder, muzzle-deep in blood, bristling and jostling each other and raising up to bare fang at interlopers, famished, gulping at the days, each destined to go our separate way after murdering the alpha.

  “Hey, you gotta come home this fall,” Dad continued. “You have to come see this place. I got it with Uncle Vern and Uncle Jack, it’s incredible. It’s ninety-five acres. A big chunk like what we always wanted. Do you think you can get out here?”

  I heard my own voice say, “The three of you bought a camp?” Growing up, we had never had the money to buy any kind of hunting property. I paid my own way through college. This same year in New York I made a whopping nine thousand dollars. I was starving some of the time. I was insulted by the idea that he now had private hunting, and that he thought that’s all it would take to have me winging home. I tried to reestablish my resistance to this idea by adding, “Mom never mentioned it.”

  “Why would your mother know anything about it?” he said quietly.

  I talked to Mom all the time. I was in the habit of calling her about every other day, although there had been months-long gaps while she and Dad were busy divorcing. I had been home to Kalamazoo once since then, but Dad had never mentioned the divorce to me, which I thought merited some discussion after twenty-four years. He talked about how Mom was crazy, or how she was dating guys with motorcycles, none of which was true. His reticence to say the word divorce made him dangerous. He only wanted to talk about the benefits of scent-free underwear when stalking big bucks or the steelhead flies he’d just bought that were three Pantone shades different from the other dozen he already owned, which is part of the reason we stopped talking. He was alone and shopping in his giant house in the woods southwest of Kalamazoo, out in the agricultural lands where farmers grew Concord grapes and asparagus. When it’s just you and the mountains of shit you buy off Cabela’s, you’re in some spiritual trouble. Still, I gave him an opening.

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s glorious,” Dad said immediately. “We put a trailer on Ike Huizenga’s place, not too far from where we used to go at Silver Lake. You know Ike.”

  Ike was a friend of the family from Zeeland, Michigan, where Dad and his five brothers had grown up, a big-time farmer with multiple operations across the west side of the state. The farm Dad described to me hung on the southern edge of the vast green expanse of the Manistee National Forest just north of Muskegon. Huizenga had a thousand acres there bordering the Tanner Swamp, where he ran fifteen thousand hogs. Across the street, he had picked up a little seventy-five-acre sand farm that was too small for hogs and too swampy and choked with blow-sand to grow anything other t
han asparagus and pine trees. Ike was a childhood buddy of Dad’s older brother Vern, and he said Vern, Dad, and their younger brother Jack could set up on that seventy-five and there was an adjacent twenty-acre piece they could hunt, too, owned by a guy named Pflug in Fremont. They hadn’t bought it yet, though they planned to. That gave them access to a bunch of federal land in the interior of the block, including a bog a half mile long.

  I knew where it was. It was south of the Pere Marquette River, where the PM—as we called it—tangled with the watershed of the White. The Pere Marquette was one of the sacred rivers. It was blue-ribbon trout water, so whole stretches lived in our imaginations. It drained a sprawling watershed of sloshy spruce and hemlock swamps and kettle lakes with low uplands of forested sand in between, glacial medium-coarse yellow-orange sand laid out in moraines and eskers snaking through the national forest. Any tall hill would have a sour cherry orchard on it, and other well-drained acreage was charged with corn or asparagus or a U.S. Forest Service pine plantation. The boggy, nonplantation stretches were soft red maple and massive yellow birch and hemlock and aspen, which Dad called “popple”; the upland stretches were heavy with oak and beech and sugar maple. Here and there were remnants of the towering white pines that had once dominated the whole area. Like the whole northwest corner of the Lower Peninsula, the last ice age had drifted the place four hundred to six hundred feet deep in duney sand.

  It was a place even Ike thought was junk, a mosquito swamp, and I knew right away it was paradise. Whitetail deer love some amount of disturbance and ruin, especially if they have farms nearby where they could eat. As Dad talked, I set myself against it. I decided right then I would never go there. That made it easier to talk about.

  “How did all this happen?” I asked, cringing because he might say something embarrassing, like I got this place for you and Brett and Joe because I love you, which would have showed I was even more of an asshole, but luckily he didn’t take it in that direction.

  “Your uncle Vern has hunted up there at Ike’s place for years and he takes Aunt Sally and the girls, too,” Dad said. “He shoots deer out of there like it’s Africa.”

  Vern hunted everywhere like it’s Africa, including Africa. He wouldn’t waste his time on a place that had no deer, and if Dad said Vern liked it, then that was all the assurance any of us would need that it was teeming with food for the table.

  “Are Brett or Joe going?” I asked Dad.

  “Oh, I bet they’ll go.”

  “Well, have you talked to them?”

  “No, I haven’t been able to get hold of them in the last few days.”

  “When’s the last time you talked to them?”

  “Oh, I talk to those guys all the time.”

  “Really? I’ve talked to Joe about once in the last six months, probably. And I can’t remember the last time I talked to Brett on the phone,” I said.

  “Well, Brett works for me so I see him all the time. He’s trying to focus on school. He’s so hardheaded, you know. Sets his mind on one thing and then he only does that one thing,” Dad said.

  Brett was going to Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, which was Dad’s alma mater.

  “I don’t even know where he lives,” I said. “Or his number.”

  “I can give you that. He shares an apartment with some guys up on West Main, up by Western’s campus.”

  “And what about Joe?”

  “Well, he lives with your mom.”

  “Barely.”

  “Ha ha! Well, sure. I think I would know,” said Dad.

  “He hasn’t really lived there in forever. He has his own apartment, or at least he did.”

  “What? No.”

  “Yes, he has a lease on a place,” I explained. “And before that he lived with friends a lot of the time, or with Cassie’s family, at the trailer. He was hardly home his whole senior year of high school.” Cassie had been his girlfriend, and that is not her real name. I’ve changed it for reasons that will become obvious.

  “He stayed there once in a while.”

  “He stayed everywhere once in a while.”

  “Ha ha! Listen, your brother has a drinking problem.”

  “No shit!”

  “But he and I have a good relationship.”

  “Okay, Dad, I’m gonna get off the phone now.”

  “When are we going to see you?”

  “I’m not coming out there.”

  Dad moped on the phone in silence, and then said, “More deer for me.”

  “They’re all for you. You guys have fun.”

  After I hung up, I stared out the window for a while and decided I needed to get outside. I took off on a run up Avenue A and past the green painted fence around Tompkins Square Park, and then over to East River Park. I had been on a couple of good sprint relay teams in high school, and I loved to run, and even though running the steaming streets of New York City was like sucking on an exhaust pipe, moving fast on foot around the city appealed to my sense of geography.

  Ours was a childhood of paper maps—Rand McNally road atlases, state maps, county maps, National Forest maps, piles and piles of misfolded USGS quadrangle topos, river system maps, hand-drawn maps—marked up with pen and highlighter and flagged with sticky notes indicating put-ins, gates, glacial eskers that formed high ridges and trails through the wet. Places we wanted to go were usually near the green spots on the map, the public lands, “the good places,” Dad called them. Joe, Brett, and I would pore over Michigan maps as boys and hound Dad to take us out to fish the great rivers of the Lower Peninsula—the PM, the Au Sable, the Manistee, the Baldwin—to float the lakes, to follow our English setter bird dog through the heavy morning dew on a hayfield looking for a cackling rooster pheasant. These were the places we really loved, and, more important, these were the places where Dad really loved us. One of the few acceptable expressions of love among all the men in the Kuipers clan was to say you loved the muscular, purling tug of the Manistee River or that you loved the peat-stinking spruce island in the deep swamp where the whitetails bedded down during the day. These were the good places where love stayed put, radiating. Calling.

  I realized as I ran that Dad had telephoned me so we could obsess, like we used to, over a green spot on the map.

  But Mom had divorced him, and good riddance. It had become obvious to me by the time I was twelve or thirteen that Dad cheated constantly on Mom, that he’d torture her by leaving her home with three young boys while he went away for weekends with other women. We were constantly moving from one apartment and house to another, maybe chased by this lady or that, or someone’s father or husband, but there was always a new place. Where he’d be a new man.

  Mom divorced him at last, and a year later there was the deer camp. I didn’t want to entertain another of Bruce’s fake reinventions. We’d been tricked too many times.

  There had been a pattern to it all. To patch things up with Mom, he’d come home without an apology but offering dirt, big dirt, fresh dirt, sometimes with a house atop it and other times not, and we’d either have to move or we’d have a new river or good spot on the map to camp. Now With New Dad! The biggest scam came in 1978, after fifteen years of truly stupendous infidelity, when he built Mom a massive custom home. It was the biggest pile of dirt he’d offered up until that time, seventeen acres of remote shagbark hickory forest southwest of Kalamazoo, high up on a ridge overlooking a spring-fed lake. He not only built a giant architectural home in order to remake the family, but he capped it all off by recommitting himself to the church, which seemed like the most false gesture of them all, since he never acknowledged his affairs. But we were good kids. We pitched in. Even as we predicted the imminent collapse of this plan.

  In the end, we abandoned Dad to that house. Mom spent several of the years she lived there just sleeping on the couch night and day and hardly ever getting up. She stayed in touch with some of the moms from our earlier lives, but hardly any of them ever came out to see her. Our beautiful mom,
who kind of looked like Olivia Newton-John, had slipped to less than one hundred pounds and was wasting away in what Dad called the Great Room of his modern chateau, with its immaculate white carpet and its skylights far above. She lay there dappled by the green of the hickory forest outside and the gray-white of the snow. Dad never came home. Brett and I had left the house for good, and Joe was a ghost because he was secretly drinking every day. Those other moms went on hosting Cub Scouts and going to ball games the way she used to, but she wasn’t part of it. She slept in a deadly silence, a reenactment of a Grimms’ fairy tale.

  Kalamazoo College was only about a half hour from the house, and one time I drove out there unannounced, and she rose from the couch in her housecoat and patted at her disheveled hair in a flutter of surprise, a pale and fading member of the species, and said, “Oh, hello, Jeffrey Dean. Do you want something to eat?”

  That was the first time I realized she could die of simple neglect. My sweet mom, the nicest woman you’d ever want to meet. Depression had driven her eyes back into her head. “You can’t stay out here anymore, Mom,” I said.

  “Joe has to finish high school,” she said, fussing in the kitchen. It was the first time I’d heard that she had any kind of plan. She held out that statement like it was Dumbo’s feather.

  “What’s the point of that?” I asked.

  “Joe has enough trouble,” she said. And that was that. But she didn’t even make it to the end of high school. She got a job in 1987 and then they walked out in 1988, in the spring of Joe’s junior year.

  I didn’t have time to go out to Michigan and heap fresh dirt on Dad’s grave: I was in my second year as a journalist and in the middle of a lawsuit related to a big riot in Tompkins Square Park. The riot broke out in 1988 when the city and the community board moved to oust the homeless encampment and the drug dealers and the night-sitters like me; when the cops rolled in to close the park, the whole neighborhood fought back. The cops beat the hell out of me as I was reporting and beat a girlfriend who was with me, too, and we were suing. I still had a hematoma in my chest from a police nightstick, a clot under the skin that had shrunk in size from a silver dollar to a dime but was lingering, recalcitrant. I could feel it when I ran, and when I ran I always ran past the park. I was constantly checking on the park. Our blood was mixed into that dirt.