DEER HUNTING

A long time ago, when I was attending writer’s retreats at Glen Lake, Michigan, I discovered Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lake Shore. It’s a stretch of lakeshore that reaches back into the eskers and moraines, left there from the last ice age. They are steep sided hills and ridges, covered with maples, oaks and ash and their flanks stretch  down onto the shoreline. I go there when I can and walk the slopes, talk to the animals and make believe I belong there. Once, for my small writers group, I wrote a piece about walking this one particular high meadow. I called it “Deer Hunting.” I was hunting deer, early in the morning before the fog burned off. I was wet from dew on the tall grass and had seen deer beds and fresh droppings. I explained how I finally found the deer and began shooting. Shot after shot I took aim and squeezed. In the end I revealed that my weapon was a camera with a big lens and that I had several trophies to take home with me from that hunt. 

Now, over a decade later, I’m still deer hunting every time I go to the “High Meadow.” Day before yesterday I was there in the late afternoon. I drove three hours to get there before sunset, that magical hour of low angle light. But clouds blew in and my magic hour turned into an ordinary cloudy afternoon. I still walked the meadow. I have a better camera now with an even better lens and I was searching for deer. Not even the animals can move through the grass without leaving a trail. You can tell which direction and how fast they were going and I got into a spot where there had been a lot of traffic. Then I saw the large, beaten down circle with a deer’s shoulder and leg. The hide had been gnawed away and stripped of flesh. Chunks of deer hide were strewn about but all of the red meat was gone. Across the way an eight-point buck’s head was set aside, undisturbed. Behind it in the grass was the ribcage and spine. Blood spills looked recent and the bits of flesh still left on white bones had not yet dried. I was fresh on the scene. I reasoned it was probably a mother coyote and her young; they would be six months and between them, they could take down a buck.        
A few minutes later, cresting a low ridge that rimmed a bowl shaped depression I had to look hard but there were five dark spots in the tall grass some two hundred yards down range. They were moving toward the trees. I thought immediately about my writing and about coyotes who were probably sleeping off their big meal. We get nostalgic with the Bambi concept and think of them as nature’s darlings but coyotes need to eat as well. Certainly, cars and highways are a new danger but the struggle to survive is timeless and grim as it might seem, the buck was just recycling the food web a little sooner than he might have wished, if he wished at all. Park Rangers protect wildlife from hunters with guns but the true hunters sleep in the same tall grass as the deer. The high risk business of survival is everyday stuff for the deer and the coyote. I live a charmed life, no worries about hungry predators outside my door. Our predators cheat us out of our money but we get to wake up in the morning.

MAN WITH A CAMERA

Grand Haven, Michigan; the beach is in winter mode now with rows of snow fence set up to keep sand on the beach instead of migrating to the street below the bluff. The light house may have some new paint but wear and tear on the pier itself can’t be covered so easy. Freeze and thaw eat away, little pieces, one at a time but the cracks and cavities are too big to miss. After so many years it’s easy to take the place for granted. The last time I was here there was a great festival going on. The beach was crawling with people of all ages. Sunset found the pier with tourists, shoulder to shoulder, waiting, watching the sun sink somewhere beyond the horizon, into Wisconsin. I'm by myself now, walking up and down the beach, out to the light house and back, then repeat the process again and again. Walking the beach should be worth college credit; you learn something important, every time. As much as it stays the same over years it changes minute to minute. Subtle changes in light, different angles, creatures in and out of the picture; I’m not sharp enough to catch them all but the lens doesn’t miss anything. 

There is an edge on the wind, just enough to push small rollers up onto the sand. Where the pier was full of people last time, this morning only three guys and a dozen fishing poles. The perch are there but nobody’s having any luck today. They are quick to remind anyone who will listen that a bad day fishing is better than a good day at work. Down the beach, gulls have congregated at water’s edge. Before I can check them out a jogger and her dog come up on them too fast and they explode into a flurry. Some settled back in the shallows while others circled for a few minutes and came back to the wet sand. As I got closer, hoping for another flurry and a chance to shoot them on the wing, they noticed me alright but chose to walk away rather than fly. In the sand, with a heavy camera around my neck they can walk as fast as I can so I headed back up to the rows of snow fence. There was a healthy dune behind the first row with wind ripples on top. The wind has packed the sand and that makes for easy walking. So I walked there, looking for lines and angles, color and contrast. Photographs don’t just happen, you have to look for them. Even then you have to figure out where you need to be when you trip the shutter. 

I have other things to do today but maybe I’ll still be in town when the sun gets low. If I can get a low angle sun in the same frame with the light house and be lucky enough to catch a few gulls flying through, I wouldn’t want to be somewhere else, doing something mundane. Fall colors are past their peak and I need to go up north tomorrow if I want fall photos. Some of you have been with me to the high meadow on M22, just up the road from Glen Arbor. That’s where I’ll be tomorrow when the sun comes up. If you haven’t been there, you need to go. 

FARMER

When winter starts to wain and the promise of spring gives you hope, you bring home with you, green growing things and great expectations. I do it every year. But this year I was far away, returned late in May. With perennials in front of the house I didn’t have to put much stuff in the ground but all of my containers were stored. Everyone I knew had their plants established while I rummaged through left overs at the lawn & garden store. There were some good buys, plants that weren’t perfect, passed over and now just hoping to drop their roots somewhere before being recycled in the compost heap. It was the fist week of June before my plants were all in. Two weeks later everything looked fine, except for the tomatoes. 

Flowers have always been good to me, give them a drink now and then and pull a few weeds. But my luck with tomatoes has been nothing but bad. If it’s not caterpillars or white flies it’s blossom-end-rot or mold. But they had great deals on healthy plants that should have been in the ground a month earlier. So I bought six, made them at home in 20 gallon pots. By the time they acclimated and got their roots in gear it was July. Everybody else had little green tomatoes and mine were still growing a root network. I figured they would come late but with a little luck, I would get some tomatoes.

In September, as green tomatoes began to turn, yellow first then into orange, I discovered that neighborhood squirrels had been watching them too. There was a yellow-pink tomato that would be just right in two or three days. When I checked again, it had been gnawed on, through the skin into the meaty flesh, just enough for flies to gain access and torpedo the salad I had planned. So I started harvesting firm, yellow-pink fruits keeping just ahead of the squirrels. They ripen on my countertop instead of vine ripened, like the samples down at Farmer’s Market. But I had tomatoes. 

So now it’s October, short days and cool nights, what’s left on the vines will not ripen in the sun. Plants aren’t stupid. They know, at least the annuals, when nights turn cool and sunlight goes away, they look in the mirror and say to themselves, “OMG, I’m so old. I don’t have much time left.” It’s programmed into the DNA, when the odds go against you and your time is short, reproduce. Bloom again, make new fruits; it’s all about the seeds. “If I”m going to perish, at least I can seed a new generation.” So that’s what they do and they spend all of their remaining energy on new blooms and whatever tomatoes are left, are left hanging like orphans. Then I come along and see the new blooms, tell the late tomatoes, in tomato talk, “You guys have been disinherited, you get nothing from now on. Why don’t you come with me? I’ll spread you out in the kitchen and you can ripen there, listen to the radio, watch me eat cereal in the morning.” They are smart enough, know that however their destiny plays out, they won’t be back in the spring. I collected all of my October tomatoes today, leaving the parent plants to fret over blossoms that will never set fruit. Between slicers and summer salad, my little harvest will last a week or so. The green ones may not make it to ripe; may have to do the fried green thing, dredged in garlic and pepper flour. If I had bib overhauls and a straw hat I could look the part.