To write is to put the seeming insignificance of human existence into a different perspective. --Alfred Kazin
Nonfiction Contents:Title Author
Bright Eyes Mildred Henderson A Winter's Fall Chasidy Sharp Poise Chadrick Miller A Journey of Fate Stephanie Tackett Working in Alaska: Beautiful and Dangerous Ronald Smith Broccoli Cheddar McKenzie Ellis |
Author: Mildred Henderson
|
Bright Eyes
His tombstone bears the name he borrowed when he fled to Illinois; it is not his real name. The year of birth (1889) carved on the granite slab over his body buried in Mt. Zion Cemetery may not be accurate either. My father was born Lee Hudson in the small rural town of Dermott, Arkansas. Word of mouth from elderly relatives, themselves long dead, is that he was at least ten years older than he claimed. His life in Arkansas remains an unsolved mystery to all nine of his surviving children. He suffered a debilitating stroke working on our old house and died just before I started second grade. I am the youngest, his baby girl, and the one he called “Bright Eyes.”
The mystery of his identity began with the circumstances surrounding his leaving Arkansas and coming to Illinois. The story overheard by my siblings and later shared with me by an elderly aunt is that he got in “some kind of trouble” with white folks in Dermott in the 30s. As the story goes, Daddy (that’s what we called him, even my mother) was a carpenter, guitar-playing musician who worked as a clerk in a general store there owned by a Jewish man. This Jewish man was clearly a man of courage (or crazy) to employ a black man in his store during this period in the South. I was told that Daddy was considered a handsome man who the ladies (white and black) found attractive. No doubt Daddy had mixed heritage because his complexion was light (referred to as “high-yellow”), and he had reddish hair. Aunt Thelma said that he only went to sixth grade, but due to his apprenticeship with the storeowner learned how to handle money, take inventory and help out in the running of the store. Where he acquired his musical and carpentry skills is unknown.
Complete racial separation was the way of life back then, and any social or public mingling between white and blacks was forbidden, especially between black males and white females. It was said that some of the white women who heard him playing his guitar became interested in more than his musical skills, creating the need for him to leave not only the town, but the state, and to change his name. Adding to the mystique was the rumor that he was a member of the powerful and secretive Freemasons, who aided in his clandestine escape from retribution. Although Dermott and the little town of Lake Village, Arkansas, where my mother lived were relatively close together, they did not actually meet until my mother’s family left Arkansas, under even more distressing circumstances, at about the same time my father did.
It is impossible to tell my father’s story without including the upbringing and background of the eighteen-year old woman he was determined to marry after coming to Southern Illinois. My mother, Jessie Lee Cooper, was born in 1911. She was the middle child of five children, whose father died of the flu and whose mother died of complications after childbirth. In our culture, when children’s parents die, the other relatives assume the responsibility of taking them in, providing a home, and raising them. They lived with her father’s brother, Walter Cooper, and his wife, Millie (for whom I’m named), until a racial incident in the early 30s convinced them to move away. A fourteen-year old male cousin wrote a note to a white girl he admired and she showed it to her father. The white men in Lake Village went to the segregated school for black children, dragged him out, took him away and beat him to death. My mother and her siblings witnessed him crying and begging for his life, and found out later that night he was killed.
This vicious act convinced Uncle Walter and Aunt Millie they needed to leave Arkansas to provide a more hospitable environment for them and their adopted family. Why they decided to settle in Southern Illinois is not clear. Considering that Lee Hudson and my mother’s family arrived about the same time from approximately the same area in Arkansas, it is not altogether surprising the two families met. What is known is that as my mother and her two younger sisters became young women, there was a push by her oldest brother (now considered the man of the family) to marry them off to eligible workingmen in the area. More than one suitor was interested in my mother at that time.
All the Cooper girls’ appearances reflected their Native American (Blackfoot Indian) heritage and features, including long, thick black hair. This is due to our maternal ancestor, Missouri Cooper, a full-blooded Blackfoot Indian, my mother’s grandmother. Daddy claimed to be thirty years old; my mother was only eighteen. Even if the birth date on his tombstone were accurate, he would have been forty years old at the time, not thirty. Nevertheless, he persuaded her brother, James, (Uncle Jim) that he would be a better husband and provider than the other contenders. Being overly obedient, she agreed to marry him. No one has ever said it was a “love match” at least not from my mother’s perspective. It is a fact that none of us, even the older ones ever remember Momma showing Daddy any affection. He, on the other hand, was perhaps too affectionate toward her. I guess that explains Momma’s twelve pregnancies, which resulted in two infant deaths, one miscarriage, eight siblings, and me. Daddy didn’t look his age until his later years, but as a much older father of five boys and four girls, he certainly acted it. He was a strict disciplinarian and had no patience with, nor made any allowances for, the natural exuberant, and sometimes rebellious, behavior of his children.
My father made no pretense of his reasons for wanting a large family; it was to have help working the 80-acre farm we lived on. Working the land was hard, using a horse-drawn plow and manual labor. There were cows to be milked, pigs and chickens to be fed, a big vegetable garden, and two areas (known as “patches”) for growing strawberries and peanuts. Almost everything needed to sustain life was grown on that farm. Without running water or electricity, barrels of spring water had to be hauled from a quarter mile away on a sled, pulled by a horse named Fred. The older boys got frequent whippings with Daddy’s belt; the girls seldom did.
My oldest sister, Minnie Marie told of getting a whipping from Daddy when I fell off the bed as a baby in her care. She married over Momma’s protest (with Daddy’s consent) when she was only fourteen, declaring that if she had to take care of somebody’s babies, they would be her own. I totally get that. The injustice of that decision is my oldest sister, Minnie Marie, was extremely intelligent, loved school and should not have been forced to choose between education and staying home to help with farm work and take care of babies. Minnie overcame many obstacles in Detroit, including an older abusive husband, raising a family of four, getting her G.E.D, high school diploma, and a job with the IRS and retiring as a supervisor.
My mother worked harder than any of her children, though, getting up early to make breakfast for everyone and seeing the older ones off to school. She worked in the garden during the spring and summer, with sewing, cooking, and housework year round. The evening meal (we called it “supper”), always required a lot of effort, being made from scratch for such a large family, but she managed to get it done somehow.
One example of how Daddy’s age and intolerance for children left an impression on all of us involved evening mealtime. After chores, he made all the children sit, without talking, on a bench until the food was ready. Naturally, someone would start to giggle, setting everyone else off. Momma would tell him, “Daddy, they’re just kids.” Usually, that did not stop the one who started it from getting a whipping with Daddy’s belt. “Bright Eyes” never, not even once, got a whipping from him. To my mother’s credit, none of us ever heard her speak negatively about him except to remark that he was too hard on us kids because he was too old. How could we disagree with that?
School for the kids involved walking two or three miles to the nearest “colored” one-room schoolhouse. By the time the last ones went off to school, they only had to walk half a mile to catch the bus to the two-room “colored” school in Olmsted. Daddy respected education unless it interfered with getting work done or crops cultivated or harvested on the farm, so the children missed more days at school than the teacher liked. The oldest two left the farm as early as possible and did not have many pleasant memories of Daddy as a result. The oldest son, Joseph (age 14), lied claiming to be older to work in Kevil, Kentucky.
From time to time, a few of Daddy’s relatives from Arkansas (“his other life”) came to visit. We always wondered why his brother, Uncle Fred, had the last name of Hudson, similar yet different from Daddy’s and ours. It didn’t seem strange that Aunt Josephine, one of his sisters, had a different name, because that was explained by her being married. Only later, as adults, did we speculate as to whether he had a wife and an entire “other” family left behind in Arkansas as well. We also found that Daddy had another brother who lived in Chicago.
By this time, Daddy was beginning to show and feel his age. He worked hard in the fields and did carpentry on the house, adding a porch and repairing a leak in the roof. One day, I remember playing in the yard and saw him climbing the ladder to the roof with a load of shingles over one shoulder. Suddenly, and inexplicably, he fell to the ground. Dr. Robinson was called (doctors made house calls back then), and the family was told he had a stroke and might not be able to walk again. One of the few memories I have is his falling from the roof and the futile attempts, day after day, to get out of bed and walk. Eventually, he was forced to accept his fate, and began to focus his attention elsewhere.
The only two children not of school age and still at home when Daddy had his stroke in 1951 were my five-year old brother, Elbert, and me. Elbert was a capricious and mischievous boy who loved to play and hated to work, which must have frustrated, if not angered, our father. He directed most of his attention on me, calling me “Bright Eyes” and telling anyone who would listen that I was smart and special. I have absolutely no memory of this, but my jealous siblings told me that he taught me to count to one hundred, the alphabet and how to read when I was five years old. That was a gift to me because back then there was no Head Start, preschool or kindergarten.
One of my fondest memories is Daddy letting me sit on his lap in the wheel chair and giving me coffee with lots of milk and sugar. The last memories I have of Daddy is waking up on the morning of August 4, 1954 and crying when I couldn’t find him anywhere in the house. The next time I saw him was as I approached the open casket at his funeral. Someone told me to kiss him goodbye, and, being his obedient “Bright Eyes” I touched the cold, waxy hand and kissed the hard cheek of the figure looking like my Daddy and was led away.
What was only recently shared with me by my brother, Freddy Lee (named after Uncle Fred and Daddy) was that Uncle Jim had come to dislike Daddy over the years, feeling that he had not been the good husband and provider he had claimed to be. Uncle Jim had only one child and a good job working on the railroad. He disapproved of the yearly pregnancies and subsequent hard life my mother endured and held Daddy responsible; I can understand why. As Daddy’s illness progressed, he realized that he wanted his real name “Lee Hudson” on his tombstone when he died. According to Freddy, he asked Uncle Jim to make sure that happened. Apparently, Daddy put his trust in the wrong person because Uncle Jim, now long dead himself, did no such thing.
One unappreciated aspect of my father’s choice of new last name is that I can quickly answer the question of whether I am related to someone else bearing that same last name with an emphatic “No.” The quick response sometimes precipitates the follow-up question, “How do you know you’re not related?” To that I answer, “Because Henderson is not my real last name.” This may come across as flippant or dismissive, but, in truth, it is an uncomfortable reality inherited from Daddy that I still find hard to accept.
So who was Lee Hudson, really, and are there unknown sisters, brothers and cousins bearing that name still in Arkansas, or maybe even here in Illinois? Whenever I hear about or see anyone of color with the last name of “Hudson,” I wonder if we could be related. Of course, who wouldn’t love to claim Jennifer Hudson, singer/actress or Ernie Hudson, actor, as their relative, but I would gladly settle for knowing any of my father’s Hudson family. Genealogy, for me, is a topic generating the surprisingly strong emotions of jealousy and anger. I cannot help but feel jealousy of those who can trace their ancestry back through generations, and anger because I cannot. Not only do I feel the anguish of not being able to trace our family ancestry because of slavery in the 1800s, but also the sorrow of history lost by my father’s need to hide his identity due to post-slavery racism in the 30s, well over one hundred years later. Might there be other “Bright Eyes” somewhere out there in whom I could find that missing part of me?
Mount Zion Cemetery – Olmsted Illinois (Pulaski County)
Tombstone Inscription: Husband & Father
Lee HENDERSON
Nov. 23, 1889
Aug. 4, 1954
The End
Editor's Note: Mildred Henderson is a 2015 Shawnee Community College graduate, with honors.
His tombstone bears the name he borrowed when he fled to Illinois; it is not his real name. The year of birth (1889) carved on the granite slab over his body buried in Mt. Zion Cemetery may not be accurate either. My father was born Lee Hudson in the small rural town of Dermott, Arkansas. Word of mouth from elderly relatives, themselves long dead, is that he was at least ten years older than he claimed. His life in Arkansas remains an unsolved mystery to all nine of his surviving children. He suffered a debilitating stroke working on our old house and died just before I started second grade. I am the youngest, his baby girl, and the one he called “Bright Eyes.”
The mystery of his identity began with the circumstances surrounding his leaving Arkansas and coming to Illinois. The story overheard by my siblings and later shared with me by an elderly aunt is that he got in “some kind of trouble” with white folks in Dermott in the 30s. As the story goes, Daddy (that’s what we called him, even my mother) was a carpenter, guitar-playing musician who worked as a clerk in a general store there owned by a Jewish man. This Jewish man was clearly a man of courage (or crazy) to employ a black man in his store during this period in the South. I was told that Daddy was considered a handsome man who the ladies (white and black) found attractive. No doubt Daddy had mixed heritage because his complexion was light (referred to as “high-yellow”), and he had reddish hair. Aunt Thelma said that he only went to sixth grade, but due to his apprenticeship with the storeowner learned how to handle money, take inventory and help out in the running of the store. Where he acquired his musical and carpentry skills is unknown.
Complete racial separation was the way of life back then, and any social or public mingling between white and blacks was forbidden, especially between black males and white females. It was said that some of the white women who heard him playing his guitar became interested in more than his musical skills, creating the need for him to leave not only the town, but the state, and to change his name. Adding to the mystique was the rumor that he was a member of the powerful and secretive Freemasons, who aided in his clandestine escape from retribution. Although Dermott and the little town of Lake Village, Arkansas, where my mother lived were relatively close together, they did not actually meet until my mother’s family left Arkansas, under even more distressing circumstances, at about the same time my father did.
It is impossible to tell my father’s story without including the upbringing and background of the eighteen-year old woman he was determined to marry after coming to Southern Illinois. My mother, Jessie Lee Cooper, was born in 1911. She was the middle child of five children, whose father died of the flu and whose mother died of complications after childbirth. In our culture, when children’s parents die, the other relatives assume the responsibility of taking them in, providing a home, and raising them. They lived with her father’s brother, Walter Cooper, and his wife, Millie (for whom I’m named), until a racial incident in the early 30s convinced them to move away. A fourteen-year old male cousin wrote a note to a white girl he admired and she showed it to her father. The white men in Lake Village went to the segregated school for black children, dragged him out, took him away and beat him to death. My mother and her siblings witnessed him crying and begging for his life, and found out later that night he was killed.
This vicious act convinced Uncle Walter and Aunt Millie they needed to leave Arkansas to provide a more hospitable environment for them and their adopted family. Why they decided to settle in Southern Illinois is not clear. Considering that Lee Hudson and my mother’s family arrived about the same time from approximately the same area in Arkansas, it is not altogether surprising the two families met. What is known is that as my mother and her two younger sisters became young women, there was a push by her oldest brother (now considered the man of the family) to marry them off to eligible workingmen in the area. More than one suitor was interested in my mother at that time.
All the Cooper girls’ appearances reflected their Native American (Blackfoot Indian) heritage and features, including long, thick black hair. This is due to our maternal ancestor, Missouri Cooper, a full-blooded Blackfoot Indian, my mother’s grandmother. Daddy claimed to be thirty years old; my mother was only eighteen. Even if the birth date on his tombstone were accurate, he would have been forty years old at the time, not thirty. Nevertheless, he persuaded her brother, James, (Uncle Jim) that he would be a better husband and provider than the other contenders. Being overly obedient, she agreed to marry him. No one has ever said it was a “love match” at least not from my mother’s perspective. It is a fact that none of us, even the older ones ever remember Momma showing Daddy any affection. He, on the other hand, was perhaps too affectionate toward her. I guess that explains Momma’s twelve pregnancies, which resulted in two infant deaths, one miscarriage, eight siblings, and me. Daddy didn’t look his age until his later years, but as a much older father of five boys and four girls, he certainly acted it. He was a strict disciplinarian and had no patience with, nor made any allowances for, the natural exuberant, and sometimes rebellious, behavior of his children.
My father made no pretense of his reasons for wanting a large family; it was to have help working the 80-acre farm we lived on. Working the land was hard, using a horse-drawn plow and manual labor. There were cows to be milked, pigs and chickens to be fed, a big vegetable garden, and two areas (known as “patches”) for growing strawberries and peanuts. Almost everything needed to sustain life was grown on that farm. Without running water or electricity, barrels of spring water had to be hauled from a quarter mile away on a sled, pulled by a horse named Fred. The older boys got frequent whippings with Daddy’s belt; the girls seldom did.
My oldest sister, Minnie Marie told of getting a whipping from Daddy when I fell off the bed as a baby in her care. She married over Momma’s protest (with Daddy’s consent) when she was only fourteen, declaring that if she had to take care of somebody’s babies, they would be her own. I totally get that. The injustice of that decision is my oldest sister, Minnie Marie, was extremely intelligent, loved school and should not have been forced to choose between education and staying home to help with farm work and take care of babies. Minnie overcame many obstacles in Detroit, including an older abusive husband, raising a family of four, getting her G.E.D, high school diploma, and a job with the IRS and retiring as a supervisor.
My mother worked harder than any of her children, though, getting up early to make breakfast for everyone and seeing the older ones off to school. She worked in the garden during the spring and summer, with sewing, cooking, and housework year round. The evening meal (we called it “supper”), always required a lot of effort, being made from scratch for such a large family, but she managed to get it done somehow.
One example of how Daddy’s age and intolerance for children left an impression on all of us involved evening mealtime. After chores, he made all the children sit, without talking, on a bench until the food was ready. Naturally, someone would start to giggle, setting everyone else off. Momma would tell him, “Daddy, they’re just kids.” Usually, that did not stop the one who started it from getting a whipping with Daddy’s belt. “Bright Eyes” never, not even once, got a whipping from him. To my mother’s credit, none of us ever heard her speak negatively about him except to remark that he was too hard on us kids because he was too old. How could we disagree with that?
School for the kids involved walking two or three miles to the nearest “colored” one-room schoolhouse. By the time the last ones went off to school, they only had to walk half a mile to catch the bus to the two-room “colored” school in Olmsted. Daddy respected education unless it interfered with getting work done or crops cultivated or harvested on the farm, so the children missed more days at school than the teacher liked. The oldest two left the farm as early as possible and did not have many pleasant memories of Daddy as a result. The oldest son, Joseph (age 14), lied claiming to be older to work in Kevil, Kentucky.
From time to time, a few of Daddy’s relatives from Arkansas (“his other life”) came to visit. We always wondered why his brother, Uncle Fred, had the last name of Hudson, similar yet different from Daddy’s and ours. It didn’t seem strange that Aunt Josephine, one of his sisters, had a different name, because that was explained by her being married. Only later, as adults, did we speculate as to whether he had a wife and an entire “other” family left behind in Arkansas as well. We also found that Daddy had another brother who lived in Chicago.
By this time, Daddy was beginning to show and feel his age. He worked hard in the fields and did carpentry on the house, adding a porch and repairing a leak in the roof. One day, I remember playing in the yard and saw him climbing the ladder to the roof with a load of shingles over one shoulder. Suddenly, and inexplicably, he fell to the ground. Dr. Robinson was called (doctors made house calls back then), and the family was told he had a stroke and might not be able to walk again. One of the few memories I have is his falling from the roof and the futile attempts, day after day, to get out of bed and walk. Eventually, he was forced to accept his fate, and began to focus his attention elsewhere.
The only two children not of school age and still at home when Daddy had his stroke in 1951 were my five-year old brother, Elbert, and me. Elbert was a capricious and mischievous boy who loved to play and hated to work, which must have frustrated, if not angered, our father. He directed most of his attention on me, calling me “Bright Eyes” and telling anyone who would listen that I was smart and special. I have absolutely no memory of this, but my jealous siblings told me that he taught me to count to one hundred, the alphabet and how to read when I was five years old. That was a gift to me because back then there was no Head Start, preschool or kindergarten.
One of my fondest memories is Daddy letting me sit on his lap in the wheel chair and giving me coffee with lots of milk and sugar. The last memories I have of Daddy is waking up on the morning of August 4, 1954 and crying when I couldn’t find him anywhere in the house. The next time I saw him was as I approached the open casket at his funeral. Someone told me to kiss him goodbye, and, being his obedient “Bright Eyes” I touched the cold, waxy hand and kissed the hard cheek of the figure looking like my Daddy and was led away.
What was only recently shared with me by my brother, Freddy Lee (named after Uncle Fred and Daddy) was that Uncle Jim had come to dislike Daddy over the years, feeling that he had not been the good husband and provider he had claimed to be. Uncle Jim had only one child and a good job working on the railroad. He disapproved of the yearly pregnancies and subsequent hard life my mother endured and held Daddy responsible; I can understand why. As Daddy’s illness progressed, he realized that he wanted his real name “Lee Hudson” on his tombstone when he died. According to Freddy, he asked Uncle Jim to make sure that happened. Apparently, Daddy put his trust in the wrong person because Uncle Jim, now long dead himself, did no such thing.
One unappreciated aspect of my father’s choice of new last name is that I can quickly answer the question of whether I am related to someone else bearing that same last name with an emphatic “No.” The quick response sometimes precipitates the follow-up question, “How do you know you’re not related?” To that I answer, “Because Henderson is not my real last name.” This may come across as flippant or dismissive, but, in truth, it is an uncomfortable reality inherited from Daddy that I still find hard to accept.
So who was Lee Hudson, really, and are there unknown sisters, brothers and cousins bearing that name still in Arkansas, or maybe even here in Illinois? Whenever I hear about or see anyone of color with the last name of “Hudson,” I wonder if we could be related. Of course, who wouldn’t love to claim Jennifer Hudson, singer/actress or Ernie Hudson, actor, as their relative, but I would gladly settle for knowing any of my father’s Hudson family. Genealogy, for me, is a topic generating the surprisingly strong emotions of jealousy and anger. I cannot help but feel jealousy of those who can trace their ancestry back through generations, and anger because I cannot. Not only do I feel the anguish of not being able to trace our family ancestry because of slavery in the 1800s, but also the sorrow of history lost by my father’s need to hide his identity due to post-slavery racism in the 30s, well over one hundred years later. Might there be other “Bright Eyes” somewhere out there in whom I could find that missing part of me?
Mount Zion Cemetery – Olmsted Illinois (Pulaski County)
Tombstone Inscription: Husband & Father
Lee HENDERSON
Nov. 23, 1889
Aug. 4, 1954
The End
Editor's Note: Mildred Henderson is a 2015 Shawnee Community College graduate, with honors.
Author: Chasidy Sharp
|
A Winter's Fall
It was a freezing icy cold winter's day, a couple of weeks before Christmas. My four-year-old son, Nathan, and I were next door at my grandparents’ house. We were there to help get out the Christmas decorations and put them up. After a while of visiting and talking over what decorations to put up and, of course, the Christmas tree, I bundled up like Nanook from the North to go outside. I knew that Nathan would want to help, so I explained to him it was best to stay inside this time because he might slip and fall on the ice and get hurt. "But, momma," he cried, "I won't get hurt. I just want to help!" Knowing I shouldn't give in to his begging and pleading, I did. I helped him put his coat on and out the door we went.
"Momma, can I be the boss?" he said, wanting to direct me in what tubs of decorations to bring in the house. We made it to the shed, and I started going through the red and green plastic tubs of decorations and picked the first one to bring in. On the way back to the house, Nathan started to run; I told him "Nathan, don't run; you might fall"! Before I knew it, he was way ahead of me. Down he went, and he jumped right back up. As I was walking towards him, he turned around and said, "Momma, what's wrong with my head?" I saw the dark red blood running down his face. In a panic, I dropped the decorations and ran to him. He had slipped on the icy concrete step and busted his eyebrow wide open. Ironically, he wasn't crying, just scared. I wanted to burst out in tears, but I kept calm for him and took his hand and said, "let's get inside and get you cleaned up, Bubba.”
Once I got him in the house G.G. (our grandmother) sat him down in the chair. As I ran to the kitchen to get a wet rag she exclaimed to me, "Chasidy, you're going to have to take him to the emergency room!" Then I really began to panic. Once I got the wet rag, and put it on his head for a second to clean off the blood, I could see that the gash was very deep, all the way to the bone. I didn't tell Nathan how bad it was. I didn't want him to be more upset. As I tried to clean off the excess blood that had run down all over the front of him, I explained to him we had to go see the doctor and that he might need stitches. All that he could say was, "Momma, there's blood all over my boots. Get it off." I called the emergency room and told them I was coming with Nathan. Once I got him buckled in the car, I told him to hold the wet rag on the wound. He wasn't fond of that. By this point, all he wanted to do was go to sleep. I knew I couldn't let him fall asleep after he hit his head, so I kept talking loudly to him all the way to the emergency room.
I was really starting to get worried when he wouldn't keep his eyes open. I called my husband and told him what happened. He met me at the doctor's office in a rush. He ran over to the car when we got there and swiftly snatched Nathan up and out of the car cradling him as he carried him inside to see the doctor. "Daddy," Nathan said talking slowly, "Look what happened to my head! Am I going to have stitches? Is it going to hurt?" Shawn (my husband) consoled Nathan telling him, "I don't know son, but if you do it will be fine. Mommy and daddy are going to be with you the whole time.”
He seemed comforted by that only for a few seconds until the nurses hurriedly laid him on the sterile the white bed and commenced to work him over. Nathan usually doesn't get very agitated, but under circumstances and at this point he was. He was squirming beneath the nurse’s hands as she whipped some sort of white cloth thing with a hole in it to lie over his body only exposing the wound. The doctor came in and started talking to Nathan and telling him that he needed to sew his eyebrow up with stitches. Nathan was shaking like leaf on a tree. The nurses swaddled him in warm white blankets. I rubbed Nathan's feet while the doctor determined which one of the shiny silver tools he needed to start the procedure, and Shawn joked about the fall trying to steer Nathan's mind off of what was going on around him. The nurses explained to Nathan that the doctor was about to give him something to numb his head so he wouldn't feel the pain only pressure Nathan said, " I don't like pressure." We all had to laugh. Every time the doctor would get done with one stitch, Nathan would ask, "how many more?”
After a very tedious forty-five minutes and fifteen stitches later, it was over. Nathan was mostly thankful to get that white cloth off of his face so he could "breathe.” The doctor and nurses told him how brave he was and one of the nurses asked him, "Nathan, would you like a popsicle?" Of course, Nathan immediately said, "Yes, can I have a blue one?" While Nathan waited on the nurse to bring his Popsicle the other nurses cleaned up the bloody gauze, the blankets, the tools and that dreadful white cloth they had to put on his head that he despised. He was all cleaned up and ready to go with his Popsicle in hand. I finished signing papers, and the doctor filled us in on some last minute advice about how to treat the wound.
We gathered our things and proceeded out the door, and we thanked everyone for all of their help. Nathan had to tell everyone he saw on the way out of the clinic that he had "fifteen stitches!" He wasn't too worried about the pain as he was really ready for a nap. He had been through a lot for a four year old that day, but he had been very brave. Back out into the cold we went towards the car, Nathan still savoring his blue Popsicle. We all piled in and headed for home. Nathan finished his Popsicle as my husband and I reflected and discussed on all that had happened in the last couple of hours. Nathan couldn't wait for his big brothers to get home from school so he could tell them about his fall. Nathan also informed us on the way home that he, "Couldn't get in any trouble since he had a bad booboo.”
When we got home, G.G. and Papa Harvey were there to see what kind of damage had been done to Nathan's head. Papa Harvey, with his dry sense of humor, added that "It was a good thing he hit his head and not somewhere else on his body or he might have been really hurt," (insinuating that Nathan had a hard head). But Nathan was out like a light, and he didn't get to hear Papa's jokes. Shawn carried sleepy Nathan inside the house where it was warm and cozy and being very careful not to hit his head he laid him down to finish his nap out. I was glad to finally be able to take a breather after all that had happened. I had been pretty shook up myself after seeing my four-year-old son's bloody skull. That is not a pretty picture.
Nathan didn't have to go to school for a few days, in order to heal a bit. He wasn't too upset about that, either, and I knew I would enjoy the extra time I would get to spend with him. While Nathan napped, Shawn and I laughed about the stories Nathan would tell about his big scar when he was a teenager. We thought it might go something like; "Yea, man I got into a fight with this guy three times my size, and I really showed him who was boss. If you think this scar looks bad you should've seen the other guy!” That night when I laid down to say my prayers, I was very thankful that Nathan's fall wasn't worse. I guess I learned a lesson that day. I shouldn't have given in to Nathan when he begged me to go outside. Next time, I'll have to show some tough love, and stick to no means no!
It was a freezing icy cold winter's day, a couple of weeks before Christmas. My four-year-old son, Nathan, and I were next door at my grandparents’ house. We were there to help get out the Christmas decorations and put them up. After a while of visiting and talking over what decorations to put up and, of course, the Christmas tree, I bundled up like Nanook from the North to go outside. I knew that Nathan would want to help, so I explained to him it was best to stay inside this time because he might slip and fall on the ice and get hurt. "But, momma," he cried, "I won't get hurt. I just want to help!" Knowing I shouldn't give in to his begging and pleading, I did. I helped him put his coat on and out the door we went.
"Momma, can I be the boss?" he said, wanting to direct me in what tubs of decorations to bring in the house. We made it to the shed, and I started going through the red and green plastic tubs of decorations and picked the first one to bring in. On the way back to the house, Nathan started to run; I told him "Nathan, don't run; you might fall"! Before I knew it, he was way ahead of me. Down he went, and he jumped right back up. As I was walking towards him, he turned around and said, "Momma, what's wrong with my head?" I saw the dark red blood running down his face. In a panic, I dropped the decorations and ran to him. He had slipped on the icy concrete step and busted his eyebrow wide open. Ironically, he wasn't crying, just scared. I wanted to burst out in tears, but I kept calm for him and took his hand and said, "let's get inside and get you cleaned up, Bubba.”
Once I got him in the house G.G. (our grandmother) sat him down in the chair. As I ran to the kitchen to get a wet rag she exclaimed to me, "Chasidy, you're going to have to take him to the emergency room!" Then I really began to panic. Once I got the wet rag, and put it on his head for a second to clean off the blood, I could see that the gash was very deep, all the way to the bone. I didn't tell Nathan how bad it was. I didn't want him to be more upset. As I tried to clean off the excess blood that had run down all over the front of him, I explained to him we had to go see the doctor and that he might need stitches. All that he could say was, "Momma, there's blood all over my boots. Get it off." I called the emergency room and told them I was coming with Nathan. Once I got him buckled in the car, I told him to hold the wet rag on the wound. He wasn't fond of that. By this point, all he wanted to do was go to sleep. I knew I couldn't let him fall asleep after he hit his head, so I kept talking loudly to him all the way to the emergency room.
I was really starting to get worried when he wouldn't keep his eyes open. I called my husband and told him what happened. He met me at the doctor's office in a rush. He ran over to the car when we got there and swiftly snatched Nathan up and out of the car cradling him as he carried him inside to see the doctor. "Daddy," Nathan said talking slowly, "Look what happened to my head! Am I going to have stitches? Is it going to hurt?" Shawn (my husband) consoled Nathan telling him, "I don't know son, but if you do it will be fine. Mommy and daddy are going to be with you the whole time.”
He seemed comforted by that only for a few seconds until the nurses hurriedly laid him on the sterile the white bed and commenced to work him over. Nathan usually doesn't get very agitated, but under circumstances and at this point he was. He was squirming beneath the nurse’s hands as she whipped some sort of white cloth thing with a hole in it to lie over his body only exposing the wound. The doctor came in and started talking to Nathan and telling him that he needed to sew his eyebrow up with stitches. Nathan was shaking like leaf on a tree. The nurses swaddled him in warm white blankets. I rubbed Nathan's feet while the doctor determined which one of the shiny silver tools he needed to start the procedure, and Shawn joked about the fall trying to steer Nathan's mind off of what was going on around him. The nurses explained to Nathan that the doctor was about to give him something to numb his head so he wouldn't feel the pain only pressure Nathan said, " I don't like pressure." We all had to laugh. Every time the doctor would get done with one stitch, Nathan would ask, "how many more?”
After a very tedious forty-five minutes and fifteen stitches later, it was over. Nathan was mostly thankful to get that white cloth off of his face so he could "breathe.” The doctor and nurses told him how brave he was and one of the nurses asked him, "Nathan, would you like a popsicle?" Of course, Nathan immediately said, "Yes, can I have a blue one?" While Nathan waited on the nurse to bring his Popsicle the other nurses cleaned up the bloody gauze, the blankets, the tools and that dreadful white cloth they had to put on his head that he despised. He was all cleaned up and ready to go with his Popsicle in hand. I finished signing papers, and the doctor filled us in on some last minute advice about how to treat the wound.
We gathered our things and proceeded out the door, and we thanked everyone for all of their help. Nathan had to tell everyone he saw on the way out of the clinic that he had "fifteen stitches!" He wasn't too worried about the pain as he was really ready for a nap. He had been through a lot for a four year old that day, but he had been very brave. Back out into the cold we went towards the car, Nathan still savoring his blue Popsicle. We all piled in and headed for home. Nathan finished his Popsicle as my husband and I reflected and discussed on all that had happened in the last couple of hours. Nathan couldn't wait for his big brothers to get home from school so he could tell them about his fall. Nathan also informed us on the way home that he, "Couldn't get in any trouble since he had a bad booboo.”
When we got home, G.G. and Papa Harvey were there to see what kind of damage had been done to Nathan's head. Papa Harvey, with his dry sense of humor, added that "It was a good thing he hit his head and not somewhere else on his body or he might have been really hurt," (insinuating that Nathan had a hard head). But Nathan was out like a light, and he didn't get to hear Papa's jokes. Shawn carried sleepy Nathan inside the house where it was warm and cozy and being very careful not to hit his head he laid him down to finish his nap out. I was glad to finally be able to take a breather after all that had happened. I had been pretty shook up myself after seeing my four-year-old son's bloody skull. That is not a pretty picture.
Nathan didn't have to go to school for a few days, in order to heal a bit. He wasn't too upset about that, either, and I knew I would enjoy the extra time I would get to spend with him. While Nathan napped, Shawn and I laughed about the stories Nathan would tell about his big scar when he was a teenager. We thought it might go something like; "Yea, man I got into a fight with this guy three times my size, and I really showed him who was boss. If you think this scar looks bad you should've seen the other guy!” That night when I laid down to say my prayers, I was very thankful that Nathan's fall wasn't worse. I guess I learned a lesson that day. I shouldn't have given in to Nathan when he begged me to go outside. Next time, I'll have to show some tough love, and stick to no means no!
Author: Chadrick Miller
|
Poise
Anxiety overwhelmed the whole team as we witnessed three opposing consecutive batters advance to first effortlessly. The moment was almost unbearable, but the competition was certainly coming to an end. We waited with our hopes high, but the situation seemed to be spiraling completely out of control. Would our entire team be left defenseless after fighting such a battle? In such a jaw-clinching fight for the championship, it seemed hardly fair to call one kid to seize the task with the deck stacked against him. How, exactly, is an eight-year-old boy supposed to relax when called to do a soldier’s duty? We had made it this far, but as the next enemy approached the plate it would be nearly impossible to sling a ball accurate enough to hit a target so small. The favorite was in the perfect situation to send the underdogs packing with a second place meaningless trophy.
The moment came where our entire team, audience, and coaches found ourselves submersed in doubt. In a competition of this importance, each and every being involved had made every decision to ensure success. The confidence we undoubtedly had for our pitcher slipped away as he assisted the opposing team with three ducks on the pond. Our coach made his move to avoid check-mate as the enemy began to surround us. He approached the mound, and despite the thought of the game swirling out of control, we still hoped that our commander had a motivation technique sure to inspire our pitcher. Our coach had something else on his mind, though, and he was not seeking to motivate anyone. He was seeking one nine-year-old boy to take on the challenge of a man’s duty. As we all sighed with relief, we watched our commander; he stirred up dust as he approached the mound. I watched his lips whisper some words as he lay his right arm across our pitcher's back, and he ensured him he had nothing to be ashamed of. As they parted, a nine-year-old boy who usually hustled to his position was inching toward me with his head hanging low. I gazed beyond him. I noticed the rugged ball as it lay dead in the hand of our commanding officer. He held his right hand out in my direction. His index finger curled back and forth. He signaled me to take authority in this helpless situation. I ran to the mound from my position at second base, and he dropped the ball in my hand. I was promoted to be the authority over our unit.
He gave me some words of encouragement, but I ceased to comprehend the words as I immediately replaced my concerns with determination. I placed my feet on the rubber, and, nonchalantly, I proceeded through my progressions. At the age of nine, I prepared to become not just a pitcher but, more importantly, I became my my squad’s savior. After preparations, the umpire gave me the signal; I had one more toss to get primed. I failed to communicate it, but I was already in the saddle chomping at the bit. The catcher returned the ball, and I took my final precautions. I rotated my arm around in a few circles and surveyed the field. Surrounding me were my troops with faces full of skepticism. The bases were juiced with an adversary standing on each refuge. My adversaries wore a mask of assuredness. Despite the depressing glimpse of the battle at my rear, I was convinced that the momentum was about to deviate.
I turned to fix my eyes upon my victim. Everyone in the baseball diamond behind me had already weighed the circumstances, and they made their hypothesis of the outcome. I now understood their fear, but my decision to destroy the villain without mercy was undoubtedly impenetrable. There stood the terrorist; he placed his miniature spikes in the dirt. His knee appeared to be touching his ankle, his waist not far from his knee, and his chest immediately following his waist. For someone who is unfamiliar with pitching, this may not seem extravagant. I took one glance at my opponent. I was asked to become more precise with my accuracy than a professional pitcher. From the outside, it appeared the situation was inevitably decided.
The most important factor in the equation could not be seen by mere sight. The motor that drives champions in baseball is what is beating on the inside. It was the heart that was beating inside my chest that revealed the only thing relevant in this chaotic situation. There I stood on the mound. I stared deep into the eyes of my victim. The black streaks beneath his eyes were hardly noticed, and I made every attempt to look directly into his soul. I knew that I was ready to become the nightmare haunting him for years to come. Every heart was racing. I viscously pounded my cleats into the dirt and cleared the debris out from in front of the rubber. I had the perfect trench dug out to obtain every ounce of momentum possible just before releasing the ball. Only I could hear the sound of the secret weapon that could finish the war. Both spectators and participants approached cardiac arrest. Only I heard and felt the heart of a champion. It appeared that there was no outside stimulus affecting me, and I found myself in the most adverse position on the field. One single organ in the whole park was at ease. It calmly supplied the rest of my being with the oxygen it required. When faced with all this adversity, I found myself looking into the eyes of the hardest situation I was ever asked to face. Despite this extravagant thought, I found myself completely focused, and all the helplessness that overwhelmed me moments before had ceased.
It was time to regain my unit's will to push forward. I placed my two feet parallel to each other as I stepped onto the rubber. I was certain I replaced any confidence my opponent had with fear as I stared into his eyes. I bit down as hard as I could, I wrinkled my nose, I curled my eyebrows, and I made it known that I was out for blood. I placed my ammunition in my glove, and looked directly into my catchers eyes. I hoped I could somehow send him some confidence. In such a moment, I was certain that the opposing advisor suggested the enemy to hope for a free base. The strategy was to make no attempt to engage in combat until I hit my target. However, this move was what got the cowards in the position to win anyway. The tactic was to take their bat to the plate, lie down, and watch us beat ourselves by walking them till they got one run. They attempted to let us hand them the championship on a silver plate. My catcher stuck one finger down and signaled for the fastball right where anyone except a coward would drive it to the fences. I gave him the nod to clarify we were on the same page, and I reached into my glove. I placed my index and middle fingers across the seams to grip a four-seamed fastball.
Empty words of encouragement rained down on me. My heartless team couldn’t help but doubt in the circumstances surrounding us. I am not sure if they would have helped or hurt as my sight became tunnel vision, and my complete concentration changed all the sounds to dead silence. I continued the process of search and destroyed, and I began my wind up. My first move until the ball left my hand became one continuous motion. I stepped back with my left foot and smashed my cleats into trench that was already prepared in front of the rubber. This ensured a good push off toward my target. I turned my hips to face the third base line. I was steped forward with my left leg. I elevated my left knee toward my chest, and began moving forward to invade my opponent’s territory. At the same time, I curled my right knee slightly and started the vital portion of the process. I activated a small portion of my leg strength. I moved into enemy territory, and the ball parted ways with my hand. My glove pointed to the target; my hand pointed toward second base. I reached back only far enough to gain about fifty percent of my strength. My hips turned to face my target, and my arm whipped straight over the top. I fired the ball to the mitt.
As suspected, I beat them at their own game, and their strategy to lie down backfired. My release was pinpoint accurate, and my catcher did not move a muscle to catch the ball. I beat them at their own game; the coward attempted to take the prize without effort. I slid into the driver seat with a mediocre fastball. I had one strike on my batter, and the decision to lie down allowed me to use deception to prepare my next strike. Confidence tried to make a comeback, and my whole team hoped that maybe this game wasn’t over after all. I took my spot on my throne.
My catcher signaled for a fastball over the outside corner. I shook my head to let him know I was coming right back with the same technique. I smelled fear coming from my prey, and I was going for the kill. I sensed that he believed no one our age could throw with such accuracy. He thought no one was able to throw two strikes back-to-back. I went through the wind up again. I used my intuition to justify my decision. The ball pierced through the air toward the mitt, and--ding--at the very last second the batter realized a free base was not an option. Hesitation prevented the ball from staying in the warzone. The ball dribbled slowly straight to the first base dugout.
My intuition was correct. I caught my opponent asleep, and at the last second he took the enticing bait. His hopes for a free base were long gone, and his hesitation caused him to lose his only fair shot to be a hero. Just like that my armies hope was restored. I looked out across the battlefield, and the look of excitement filled each of their faces. Then I turned to my opponent. I stared into his eyes. I noticed he not only took the bait, but he was on the verge of swallowing the hook. The foul ball filled him with confidence, and he believed he could win this game. It wasn’t fair that their commander convinced him we were going to hand this game to them. This lousy tactic allowed me to set the bait in the little fish’s mouth, and I prepared to reel him in.
It was comforting to see that my team believed once again, and my troops were prepared to make a play. I was pleased to take note of this, but I refused to allow anyone to claim the victory I strategically set up. Once again I took my place of authority in front of my victim, and my catcher sent me the signal for a fastball. He suggested to place it out of the batter's reach. I shook my head. I signaled we were not on the same page. He went through all the signals, and I wanted to throw the same pitch again. I sensed his worry, but I returned a face full of grit. Everyone was ready for this moment, but no one was more prepared than I.
There I stood with nothing immobilizing me. My provisions were completed. There I stood once again ready to take on the challenge. I was completely relaxed (poise). I began to go through my wind up. This time, I acquired every ounce of energy. I saved energy by keeping my composure. I dug deep within my soul, and exhausted every muscle I had available in my leg. My arm shot back at that very moment, but, unlike before, I extended my arm extensively behind my head. Every leg muscle and every component in my arm was primed and ready to deliver its maximum performance. My gun was loaded, and my target was locked on. The hammer on the gun slammed, and every piece of my body changed directions. With extreme force, I thrust my body forward with my right leg. Simultaneously, my right shoulder began to push forward. My arm acted as a rubber band, and it created the whiplash affect. Every last bit of momentum transferred from the lower parts of my body, and every trace of force shifted directly to the bullet at the precise time. My assignment was finished. The ball left my fingers, and it charged its destination. Without hesitation, my adversary opened his hips, and instantaneously he pivoted the bat. Whole-heartedly, the miniature boy flailed his bat at the ball. As the bat began to make headway, the ball advanced to the intended target. He obviously pulled the trigger entirely too late. The deafening thud of the ball hitting the mitt confirmed the target was destroyed. My victim was retired.
This moment turned out to be the instant that defined me as a baseball player. The competition proceeded to an extra inning, and with it we clustered up some hits to gain a four run advantage. I ended the contest with an additional three strikeouts. In the years to follow, our gang found ourselves in many situations similar to this one. Every individual who witnessed this moment was convinced in my ability to conquer under pressure. A baseball player is labeled by his ability to perform. Every individual on our championship team received the label excellent, and that label followed all except one. I received the label every competitor dreams about. The label earned when the competition is on the line, and the title handed out when moment is so crucial that the majority of people find it impossible to concentrate. The only one who stayed poised despite the adversity and chaos that surrounded them--I was considered clutch. My performance only improved as stipulations became strenuous, demanding, and problematic. Few athletes have the ability to remain poised when a challenge rises. The few that obtain this unique ability became champions along with their whole team, but only that one achieved that unique identity. Clutch!
Anxiety overwhelmed the whole team as we witnessed three opposing consecutive batters advance to first effortlessly. The moment was almost unbearable, but the competition was certainly coming to an end. We waited with our hopes high, but the situation seemed to be spiraling completely out of control. Would our entire team be left defenseless after fighting such a battle? In such a jaw-clinching fight for the championship, it seemed hardly fair to call one kid to seize the task with the deck stacked against him. How, exactly, is an eight-year-old boy supposed to relax when called to do a soldier’s duty? We had made it this far, but as the next enemy approached the plate it would be nearly impossible to sling a ball accurate enough to hit a target so small. The favorite was in the perfect situation to send the underdogs packing with a second place meaningless trophy.
The moment came where our entire team, audience, and coaches found ourselves submersed in doubt. In a competition of this importance, each and every being involved had made every decision to ensure success. The confidence we undoubtedly had for our pitcher slipped away as he assisted the opposing team with three ducks on the pond. Our coach made his move to avoid check-mate as the enemy began to surround us. He approached the mound, and despite the thought of the game swirling out of control, we still hoped that our commander had a motivation technique sure to inspire our pitcher. Our coach had something else on his mind, though, and he was not seeking to motivate anyone. He was seeking one nine-year-old boy to take on the challenge of a man’s duty. As we all sighed with relief, we watched our commander; he stirred up dust as he approached the mound. I watched his lips whisper some words as he lay his right arm across our pitcher's back, and he ensured him he had nothing to be ashamed of. As they parted, a nine-year-old boy who usually hustled to his position was inching toward me with his head hanging low. I gazed beyond him. I noticed the rugged ball as it lay dead in the hand of our commanding officer. He held his right hand out in my direction. His index finger curled back and forth. He signaled me to take authority in this helpless situation. I ran to the mound from my position at second base, and he dropped the ball in my hand. I was promoted to be the authority over our unit.
He gave me some words of encouragement, but I ceased to comprehend the words as I immediately replaced my concerns with determination. I placed my feet on the rubber, and, nonchalantly, I proceeded through my progressions. At the age of nine, I prepared to become not just a pitcher but, more importantly, I became my my squad’s savior. After preparations, the umpire gave me the signal; I had one more toss to get primed. I failed to communicate it, but I was already in the saddle chomping at the bit. The catcher returned the ball, and I took my final precautions. I rotated my arm around in a few circles and surveyed the field. Surrounding me were my troops with faces full of skepticism. The bases were juiced with an adversary standing on each refuge. My adversaries wore a mask of assuredness. Despite the depressing glimpse of the battle at my rear, I was convinced that the momentum was about to deviate.
I turned to fix my eyes upon my victim. Everyone in the baseball diamond behind me had already weighed the circumstances, and they made their hypothesis of the outcome. I now understood their fear, but my decision to destroy the villain without mercy was undoubtedly impenetrable. There stood the terrorist; he placed his miniature spikes in the dirt. His knee appeared to be touching his ankle, his waist not far from his knee, and his chest immediately following his waist. For someone who is unfamiliar with pitching, this may not seem extravagant. I took one glance at my opponent. I was asked to become more precise with my accuracy than a professional pitcher. From the outside, it appeared the situation was inevitably decided.
The most important factor in the equation could not be seen by mere sight. The motor that drives champions in baseball is what is beating on the inside. It was the heart that was beating inside my chest that revealed the only thing relevant in this chaotic situation. There I stood on the mound. I stared deep into the eyes of my victim. The black streaks beneath his eyes were hardly noticed, and I made every attempt to look directly into his soul. I knew that I was ready to become the nightmare haunting him for years to come. Every heart was racing. I viscously pounded my cleats into the dirt and cleared the debris out from in front of the rubber. I had the perfect trench dug out to obtain every ounce of momentum possible just before releasing the ball. Only I could hear the sound of the secret weapon that could finish the war. Both spectators and participants approached cardiac arrest. Only I heard and felt the heart of a champion. It appeared that there was no outside stimulus affecting me, and I found myself in the most adverse position on the field. One single organ in the whole park was at ease. It calmly supplied the rest of my being with the oxygen it required. When faced with all this adversity, I found myself looking into the eyes of the hardest situation I was ever asked to face. Despite this extravagant thought, I found myself completely focused, and all the helplessness that overwhelmed me moments before had ceased.
It was time to regain my unit's will to push forward. I placed my two feet parallel to each other as I stepped onto the rubber. I was certain I replaced any confidence my opponent had with fear as I stared into his eyes. I bit down as hard as I could, I wrinkled my nose, I curled my eyebrows, and I made it known that I was out for blood. I placed my ammunition in my glove, and looked directly into my catchers eyes. I hoped I could somehow send him some confidence. In such a moment, I was certain that the opposing advisor suggested the enemy to hope for a free base. The strategy was to make no attempt to engage in combat until I hit my target. However, this move was what got the cowards in the position to win anyway. The tactic was to take their bat to the plate, lie down, and watch us beat ourselves by walking them till they got one run. They attempted to let us hand them the championship on a silver plate. My catcher stuck one finger down and signaled for the fastball right where anyone except a coward would drive it to the fences. I gave him the nod to clarify we were on the same page, and I reached into my glove. I placed my index and middle fingers across the seams to grip a four-seamed fastball.
Empty words of encouragement rained down on me. My heartless team couldn’t help but doubt in the circumstances surrounding us. I am not sure if they would have helped or hurt as my sight became tunnel vision, and my complete concentration changed all the sounds to dead silence. I continued the process of search and destroyed, and I began my wind up. My first move until the ball left my hand became one continuous motion. I stepped back with my left foot and smashed my cleats into trench that was already prepared in front of the rubber. This ensured a good push off toward my target. I turned my hips to face the third base line. I was steped forward with my left leg. I elevated my left knee toward my chest, and began moving forward to invade my opponent’s territory. At the same time, I curled my right knee slightly and started the vital portion of the process. I activated a small portion of my leg strength. I moved into enemy territory, and the ball parted ways with my hand. My glove pointed to the target; my hand pointed toward second base. I reached back only far enough to gain about fifty percent of my strength. My hips turned to face my target, and my arm whipped straight over the top. I fired the ball to the mitt.
As suspected, I beat them at their own game, and their strategy to lie down backfired. My release was pinpoint accurate, and my catcher did not move a muscle to catch the ball. I beat them at their own game; the coward attempted to take the prize without effort. I slid into the driver seat with a mediocre fastball. I had one strike on my batter, and the decision to lie down allowed me to use deception to prepare my next strike. Confidence tried to make a comeback, and my whole team hoped that maybe this game wasn’t over after all. I took my spot on my throne.
My catcher signaled for a fastball over the outside corner. I shook my head to let him know I was coming right back with the same technique. I smelled fear coming from my prey, and I was going for the kill. I sensed that he believed no one our age could throw with such accuracy. He thought no one was able to throw two strikes back-to-back. I went through the wind up again. I used my intuition to justify my decision. The ball pierced through the air toward the mitt, and--ding--at the very last second the batter realized a free base was not an option. Hesitation prevented the ball from staying in the warzone. The ball dribbled slowly straight to the first base dugout.
My intuition was correct. I caught my opponent asleep, and at the last second he took the enticing bait. His hopes for a free base were long gone, and his hesitation caused him to lose his only fair shot to be a hero. Just like that my armies hope was restored. I looked out across the battlefield, and the look of excitement filled each of their faces. Then I turned to my opponent. I stared into his eyes. I noticed he not only took the bait, but he was on the verge of swallowing the hook. The foul ball filled him with confidence, and he believed he could win this game. It wasn’t fair that their commander convinced him we were going to hand this game to them. This lousy tactic allowed me to set the bait in the little fish’s mouth, and I prepared to reel him in.
It was comforting to see that my team believed once again, and my troops were prepared to make a play. I was pleased to take note of this, but I refused to allow anyone to claim the victory I strategically set up. Once again I took my place of authority in front of my victim, and my catcher sent me the signal for a fastball. He suggested to place it out of the batter's reach. I shook my head. I signaled we were not on the same page. He went through all the signals, and I wanted to throw the same pitch again. I sensed his worry, but I returned a face full of grit. Everyone was ready for this moment, but no one was more prepared than I.
There I stood with nothing immobilizing me. My provisions were completed. There I stood once again ready to take on the challenge. I was completely relaxed (poise). I began to go through my wind up. This time, I acquired every ounce of energy. I saved energy by keeping my composure. I dug deep within my soul, and exhausted every muscle I had available in my leg. My arm shot back at that very moment, but, unlike before, I extended my arm extensively behind my head. Every leg muscle and every component in my arm was primed and ready to deliver its maximum performance. My gun was loaded, and my target was locked on. The hammer on the gun slammed, and every piece of my body changed directions. With extreme force, I thrust my body forward with my right leg. Simultaneously, my right shoulder began to push forward. My arm acted as a rubber band, and it created the whiplash affect. Every last bit of momentum transferred from the lower parts of my body, and every trace of force shifted directly to the bullet at the precise time. My assignment was finished. The ball left my fingers, and it charged its destination. Without hesitation, my adversary opened his hips, and instantaneously he pivoted the bat. Whole-heartedly, the miniature boy flailed his bat at the ball. As the bat began to make headway, the ball advanced to the intended target. He obviously pulled the trigger entirely too late. The deafening thud of the ball hitting the mitt confirmed the target was destroyed. My victim was retired.
This moment turned out to be the instant that defined me as a baseball player. The competition proceeded to an extra inning, and with it we clustered up some hits to gain a four run advantage. I ended the contest with an additional three strikeouts. In the years to follow, our gang found ourselves in many situations similar to this one. Every individual who witnessed this moment was convinced in my ability to conquer under pressure. A baseball player is labeled by his ability to perform. Every individual on our championship team received the label excellent, and that label followed all except one. I received the label every competitor dreams about. The label earned when the competition is on the line, and the title handed out when moment is so crucial that the majority of people find it impossible to concentrate. The only one who stayed poised despite the adversity and chaos that surrounded them--I was considered clutch. My performance only improved as stipulations became strenuous, demanding, and problematic. Few athletes have the ability to remain poised when a challenge rises. The few that obtain this unique ability became champions along with their whole team, but only that one achieved that unique identity. Clutch!
Author: Stephanie Tackett
|
A Journey of Fate
It was June 13, 2001, and I was prepped for surgery. The procedure is called rough-n-y gastric bypass surgery. All the blood work and scans and appropriate information were gathered. The most vital instruction given to me was to make sure and bring my C PAP breathing machine. The weight had caused another life threatening condition in my life known as sleep apnea. The extra tissue and fat around my throat caused snoring and loss of oxygen for up to 120 seconds at a time. I would actually stop breathing several times each night without the assistance of this C PAP machine. Since I was going under anesthesia for an estimated six or more hours, it was imperative to have this during the surgical procedure.
I knew this surgery would surely change my life, and with those changes would come many side effects and risks. I was in very poor health. I was considered morbidly obese, tipping the scale at a horrifying number of 298 pounds. Being a petite height at only five foot one inch, I had made the drastic choice for this weight loss surgery to finally take control of my health and to prolong my life. For me, there simply was no other option. My blood pressure was dangerously out of control even with the intervention of medications. My knees, ankles, and feet were grotesquely swollen as well as painfully and forcefully being exerted beyond measure. My body was failing to hold me up and move my massive frame each day. I felt only the thudding and crushing against the ground. The weight was grinding my fragile joints step by merciless step.
It was post-op day number ten. There was only confusion, dizziness, and pain. I was experiencing my life in this moment so intensely, unbalanced and out of sync with myself, yet full of fear with each moment. Things were about to get much worse. The room was spinning, and waves of extreme nausea were washing over me. My body felt weakness like I had never felt before. I stumbled to the bathroom and began to vomit small amounts of bright red blood from the tiny new stomach pouch created for my digestion just ten days before. The contrast of crimson blobs of my life force spilling against the white porcelain of the commode stuck in my mind with complete fear.
All of a sudden, I had an intense burning within my gut and a totally uncivilized feeling of losing my bowel as well as my stomach contents. My skin was ice cold and yet damp with the dew of death. Nothing made sense at that moment. My small hand was desperately trying to grip the side of the sink for balance, but I found no true anchor. My only certainty was that I knew something was terribly wrong. I was now horrified at the realization that I was bleeding out from both ends. I struggled with the muffled sounds inside the black tunnel that was vastly sweeping me out of consciousness. I struggled to find my voice, to form words and cry for help. "Call 911,” fell from my lips weakly before I crumbled to the floor. My mind was already dazed and confused and was now to be put to rest by the fierce cracking of my skull on the edge of the tub. My consciousness was sucked from my body like an angry vortex, seeking to take me captive for an undetermined duration of time. My mind eventually, somehow, found the will to search for the light of reality. My eyes were heavy as a quilt on a vine, but I fought to push them open. My skin was ice cold, and I felt frozen. I felt drenched from head to toe. My body would not move, and numbness took over. All I could hear was the screaming of the sirens and the loud yelling of a man’s voice. The sounds were piercing through my mind's darkness like a thousand tiny holes in a black cloth held before a blazing fire. "Mrs. Tackett? Can you hear me? Stephanie! I need for you to open your eyes now!" These words wrestled and battled with the little will I had left until suddenly I opened my eyes. There were all kinds of things attached to me, poking and violating me. Now that my eyes were seeing the chaos unfolding around me, the sounds that were responsible for bringing me to consciousness were fading away. My mind was in complete panic mode, yet I could not seem to speak or move.
I heard the stern barking of the staff all in agreement after witnessing my apparent seizure. My blood pressure was barely measurable with the faint flutter of a pulse I had remaining, according to the voice of a concerned nurse. The doctors and nurses were whizzing around me in a very frenzied and determined way. Both of my arms were pulled out and stretched like Jesus Christ on the crucifix. I lay there waiting for a miracle, and for sense to be made, and for my very life to be saved! I could see the various tubes running into both of my arms. I was receiving over six units of blood through the transfusions pouring into my veins. The blood was infusing into both of my arms at once. I heard a nurse say, ” I hope the blood transfuses fast enough.” I was bleeding internally from the suture line in my new stomach pouch. It was a life threatening GI bleed.
Although my body was freezing, somehow the blood going into my veins seemed colder, like liquid ice shards. Suddenly, my mouth was being invaded with a tube, and I could not breathe. The voice in my head was screaming, "Oh, God, please help me. I can’t breathe!” I could hear the doctor yelling at me to comply with his urgent prompts to breathe and swallow, swallow, swallow. My eyes were searching the faces around me desperately trying to convey my terror and fear and somehow beg for my mind to be released from this nightmare. The blackness came, for the second time.
What felt like moments turned out to be seventy-two hours in and out of a still and healing slumber. My body was still, and my skin was grayish green in color, the haunting color of doom and death and my fate fluttering in a gambling sea of fifty-fifty statistics for survival.
I have never felt such an intense fatigue, and I had no clue in what dimension I had found myself. There was no concept of time. Occasionally, my mind would peek from the darkness that held me captive, and every once in a while I could capture a brief glimpse of a loved one or recognize a fleeting concerned touch. All that could I do was wait and pray.
God chose to save me. I would live! A true modern day miracle had taken place within my body and mind and spirit. I would forever be changed. I was now fully coherent and back in this world and seeing things with a new brilliant color and feeling things with the sensitivity of a child and hearing as if I had never heard a sound dance in my ears before. I was aware of the gift of life I had been given. The gift given was to start a fantastical journey of self-discovery and ultimately a 150 pound weight loss. I have no words for the gratitude which I have because of this life-changing experience. All I can say is: I survived and I am blessed.
It was June 13, 2001, and I was prepped for surgery. The procedure is called rough-n-y gastric bypass surgery. All the blood work and scans and appropriate information were gathered. The most vital instruction given to me was to make sure and bring my C PAP breathing machine. The weight had caused another life threatening condition in my life known as sleep apnea. The extra tissue and fat around my throat caused snoring and loss of oxygen for up to 120 seconds at a time. I would actually stop breathing several times each night without the assistance of this C PAP machine. Since I was going under anesthesia for an estimated six or more hours, it was imperative to have this during the surgical procedure.
I knew this surgery would surely change my life, and with those changes would come many side effects and risks. I was in very poor health. I was considered morbidly obese, tipping the scale at a horrifying number of 298 pounds. Being a petite height at only five foot one inch, I had made the drastic choice for this weight loss surgery to finally take control of my health and to prolong my life. For me, there simply was no other option. My blood pressure was dangerously out of control even with the intervention of medications. My knees, ankles, and feet were grotesquely swollen as well as painfully and forcefully being exerted beyond measure. My body was failing to hold me up and move my massive frame each day. I felt only the thudding and crushing against the ground. The weight was grinding my fragile joints step by merciless step.
It was post-op day number ten. There was only confusion, dizziness, and pain. I was experiencing my life in this moment so intensely, unbalanced and out of sync with myself, yet full of fear with each moment. Things were about to get much worse. The room was spinning, and waves of extreme nausea were washing over me. My body felt weakness like I had never felt before. I stumbled to the bathroom and began to vomit small amounts of bright red blood from the tiny new stomach pouch created for my digestion just ten days before. The contrast of crimson blobs of my life force spilling against the white porcelain of the commode stuck in my mind with complete fear.
All of a sudden, I had an intense burning within my gut and a totally uncivilized feeling of losing my bowel as well as my stomach contents. My skin was ice cold and yet damp with the dew of death. Nothing made sense at that moment. My small hand was desperately trying to grip the side of the sink for balance, but I found no true anchor. My only certainty was that I knew something was terribly wrong. I was now horrified at the realization that I was bleeding out from both ends. I struggled with the muffled sounds inside the black tunnel that was vastly sweeping me out of consciousness. I struggled to find my voice, to form words and cry for help. "Call 911,” fell from my lips weakly before I crumbled to the floor. My mind was already dazed and confused and was now to be put to rest by the fierce cracking of my skull on the edge of the tub. My consciousness was sucked from my body like an angry vortex, seeking to take me captive for an undetermined duration of time. My mind eventually, somehow, found the will to search for the light of reality. My eyes were heavy as a quilt on a vine, but I fought to push them open. My skin was ice cold, and I felt frozen. I felt drenched from head to toe. My body would not move, and numbness took over. All I could hear was the screaming of the sirens and the loud yelling of a man’s voice. The sounds were piercing through my mind's darkness like a thousand tiny holes in a black cloth held before a blazing fire. "Mrs. Tackett? Can you hear me? Stephanie! I need for you to open your eyes now!" These words wrestled and battled with the little will I had left until suddenly I opened my eyes. There were all kinds of things attached to me, poking and violating me. Now that my eyes were seeing the chaos unfolding around me, the sounds that were responsible for bringing me to consciousness were fading away. My mind was in complete panic mode, yet I could not seem to speak or move.
I heard the stern barking of the staff all in agreement after witnessing my apparent seizure. My blood pressure was barely measurable with the faint flutter of a pulse I had remaining, according to the voice of a concerned nurse. The doctors and nurses were whizzing around me in a very frenzied and determined way. Both of my arms were pulled out and stretched like Jesus Christ on the crucifix. I lay there waiting for a miracle, and for sense to be made, and for my very life to be saved! I could see the various tubes running into both of my arms. I was receiving over six units of blood through the transfusions pouring into my veins. The blood was infusing into both of my arms at once. I heard a nurse say, ” I hope the blood transfuses fast enough.” I was bleeding internally from the suture line in my new stomach pouch. It was a life threatening GI bleed.
Although my body was freezing, somehow the blood going into my veins seemed colder, like liquid ice shards. Suddenly, my mouth was being invaded with a tube, and I could not breathe. The voice in my head was screaming, "Oh, God, please help me. I can’t breathe!” I could hear the doctor yelling at me to comply with his urgent prompts to breathe and swallow, swallow, swallow. My eyes were searching the faces around me desperately trying to convey my terror and fear and somehow beg for my mind to be released from this nightmare. The blackness came, for the second time.
What felt like moments turned out to be seventy-two hours in and out of a still and healing slumber. My body was still, and my skin was grayish green in color, the haunting color of doom and death and my fate fluttering in a gambling sea of fifty-fifty statistics for survival.
I have never felt such an intense fatigue, and I had no clue in what dimension I had found myself. There was no concept of time. Occasionally, my mind would peek from the darkness that held me captive, and every once in a while I could capture a brief glimpse of a loved one or recognize a fleeting concerned touch. All that could I do was wait and pray.
God chose to save me. I would live! A true modern day miracle had taken place within my body and mind and spirit. I would forever be changed. I was now fully coherent and back in this world and seeing things with a new brilliant color and feeling things with the sensitivity of a child and hearing as if I had never heard a sound dance in my ears before. I was aware of the gift of life I had been given. The gift given was to start a fantastical journey of self-discovery and ultimately a 150 pound weight loss. I have no words for the gratitude which I have because of this life-changing experience. All I can say is: I survived and I am blessed.
Author: Ronald Smith
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Working in Alaska: Beautiful and Dangerous
Cutting trees down is one of the most dangerous occupations on the planet. It may be the uncertainty of the unpredictable or the unexpected and the speed at which a tree comes down. An experienced faller knows where the tree is going to land. and when large trees fall they look deceivingly slow. It is the deep down back-of-the-mind knowledge of what can happen. For those who have spent any amount of time in the industry, they have been injured or know someone who has been killed. This unsettling fear can wear away at a person. Or they become so used to it that they just ignore it, but that fear is there for a reason. It is there to help keep alert or on edge enough to avoid harm.
It may be when danger becomes commonplace that it reduces the awareness of how deadly the woods can be. Moreover, it’s not just the trees that can kill you. There is the terrain itself. Wet ground or a fallen limb can cause a slip, usually while trying to get out of the way of a falling tree. Grizzly bears can be extremely unfriendly, and heavy machinery moving around is dangerous—to name but a few.
I started cutting firewood when I was about thirteen, as my family’s farmhouse in southern Illinois, and heated primarily by wood; this meant that we had to have a large stockpile of seasoned firewood before the chill of winter came around again. Having all the trees to cut up for firewood was not a problem, either, as I had an endless supply down in the Cache River bottoms. Being a teenager, the need for cash money is a never-ending problem. Therefore, to kill two birds with one stone, I started selling firewood. By the time I was nineteen, I had more than the usual amount of experience at cutting down trees.
It was a fortunate day when my Uncle Bill called from Alaska stating that there was a job cutting timber for the Bureau of Land Management. Bill had been an engineer in a construction battalion serving in Vietnam. Bill had moved to Alaska in 1972. By 1981, he had lived there for nine years, and he had gained a reputation for being able to get hard surveying projects done. But even he admitted that this job was by far the toughest one he had ever been on. Except as he said, “This is a lot easier. No one’s shooting at me.”
My uncle Bill was the boss on this project, which had its advantages and disadvantages for me. On the plus side, I knew exactly what kind of leader he was and what kind of things really ticked him off. The down side was that he would expect twice the amount of work from me than anyone else on the crew. It also meant that no way could I quit.
We started out with nine men excluding Bill and myself. Of all the starters, only one was still there at the end of the job. The rest had quit, been injured, or fired. Even some of the replacements were replaced more than once. The rate of turnover was about one replacement a week. The company we worked for tried to get the toughest men they could find. It was not so much a question of physical strength that was needed. Of course, they had to be strong, but it took mental fortitude, a mindset to be able to deal with this job. Of course, the money is really the main attraction for this line of work. Cash is one of the few things that drive people to work in an environment where they can die at almost any moment. Yet after time, it gets into your system. I loved it!
The working conditions were brutal, indeed. I witnessed one guy who had just done his tour as an army ranger break down and cry. The terrain around Valdez, Alaska is a mix of mountains and valleys with hundreds of small to medium sized streams. It is an area classified as temperate rain forest. This means it rains just about every day, so the ground is always wet, and so are you. The sides of the mountains are covered in a mix of pine, hemlock, alder thickets, and one of the more hateful species of plant life, Devils Club, a plant that grows about six feet tall and has hook-like thorns that break off easily into your skin. The mountains themselves are as slick as can be where there is dirt. This means falling down a lot, a whole lot. Otherwise, it is granite, a very hard and abrasive rock. The valleys are mostly clear of trees because the ground is too wet to support them. The soil in the valleys is mostly muskeg, a surface that resembles old oatmeal. Walking across muskeg requires caution or you will be knee deep, and boot loss is a regular occurrence
It wasn’t the hardest job, that of being a timber cutter, that turned over the most. It was the surveyors, and next to that was the rear chainman. I guess the cutters were more used to the strain. Cutting timber is very labor intensive, plus dealing with extremely dangerous tools and equipment did not help ease the tension any. Very few things on the planet are as scary as the sharp metal teeth of a large chain saw moving very fast. In addition, the saws used are heavy with a cutting blade close to four feet long. There is an old saying among timber cutters that the bigger the tree the harder it tries to kill the cutter. What they don’t say is that the saw is the most dangerous thing the cutter has to deal with.
The job description was to cut, survey, and put up signs between the termination of the oil pipeline and the Chugach National Forest in Valdez, Alaska. This sounded like the job of a lifetime to me. Little did I know that the terrain and weather in this part of Alaska was far from ideal for cutting trees. It was mountainous; it rained almost every day, and to get to the actual work itself required a helicopter. I quickly realized that I would earn every penny I would make at this high paying job. Besides the pay, the other redeeming feature for me was it was extremely dangerous. Truth be known, I like the more dangerous things.
An average day could go something like this: Rise about five in the morning, eat a huge breakfast, go to the landing/take off area for the four-passenger helicopter (three if it was taking out a lot of equipment) and load up. We would fly out to the area that we were to work on that day, a ride that I always found stimulating, land, unload—being very careful not to rise up out of a crouch. Chopper blades and body parts do not mix well. We carried the equipment, chain saws, gas, oil, axe, water, food, radio, tripod, and surveying transit anywhere from 100 yards up to three quarters of a mile over some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet.
Arriving at the worksite, the surveyor would set up his transit and center on the line that we were to cut through the trees that day. It was important to be accurate as a mistake wasted a whole day’s work. Then, we started cutting a fifty-foot boundary line through the forest. When we had the day’s assignment met, we packed up our gear and made our way back to the nearest landing zone. At some time, during our walk back, we would radio the helicopter base and notify them where we could be picked up and that we were ready to get out of there.
Another chopper ride back to camp—the helicopter rides were one of the highlights of the job. Flying around in helicopters is fun, much better than airplanes, though louder. They move slower and provide a better view. From the air, Prince William Sound is so spectacular a person can forget that he is flying. You can see the bears fishing for salmon, the seals sunbathing on the beach or Prince William Sound, and the mountains and glaciers that surround it. After the wonderful ride, we unloaded, did a tool check, sharpened saw chains, and made ready for the next day. Now it’s time for another gigantic supper, a cold beer, a little talk or storytelling and some sleep.
One day we were assigned to go out to point 16 and cut in the direction of where point 17 was supposed to be set. Points were steel posts with a cap stamped with surveying codes driven deep into the ground along the boundary line, marking distance or where the line changed direction.
On this fine day, I was working with Jim G, a man of many talents, with a humorous outlook on life. We loaded our gear, got in the flying machine, and left the ground behind. Arriving at the landing zone, a small clearing that we had enlarged only 100 or so feet from point 16, Jim and I disembarked. Gathering our tools, we walked up the line to where the trees had not yet been cut down on the line. Jim set up the transit while I fired up the chainsaw and started knocking down trees.
The timber on this part of the line was hemlocks (a type of tree that resembles a pine) around two feet across, 80 foot tall, and spaced about ten to fifteen yards apart. This was my favorite type of timber to cut, much easier than the alder thickets that I had been cutting for the last few days. After an hour or so, Jim moved the transit up the line and then shot for distance from point 16. The distance shot revealed that only a little over a quarter mile of line remained to where point 17 was to be set, just a couple more hours of cutting—whoopee, a short day.
Starting the saw back up, I was feeling good, and after dropping a few more trees, the saw needed fuel. Walking back to the gas can, I noticed that the sky was getting darker, not a surprise as it rained just about every day, and hopefully we could finish this up before it started raining. After fueling up and cutting for another hour, a fine mist began drifting down. Looking down the line, I had to laugh. Jim had covered the transit and tripod with orange plastic, making a teepee, and was under it snug and dry. I yelled over asking if he was comfortable; he replied that he could use a few dry pine branches to sit on, as the ground was a little hard. I notified “his dryness” that was not out of the realm of possibility, but I would not cut them for him any time soon. Laughter echoed off the mountain for a little while.
After cutting down a few more trees, I noticed that up ahead it looked like we were coming to a clearing. Thinking that this was turning into a great day, I gassed the saw back up. Then I shouted down to Jim that it looked like there was a clearing ahead. It was like watching the sun come out, watching a smile come over his face. Coming out from under his improvised shelter, he started gathering up the gear needed to set the next point. I went back to work on the last few trees and quickly came to realize that it was not a clearing ahead but a cliff. Seeing Jim approach, I paused while he walked up the line so as to not put a tree on top of him. The words that came out of his mouth when he saw the cliff cannot be expressed! While I cut down the last tree on the line, which was only a few feet from the edge, making it a little hairy. Just for grins, I dropped it over the cliff and watched it hit the solid rock below splintering into a million toothpicks. After watching this show of destruction, Jim set up the transit again and shot for distance. It turned out that point 17 was just six feet off the edge of a 200-foot cliff. Of course, I had to ask Jim if he had an anti-gravity point marker with him, getting a firm negative answer to my question. Laughter overcame me for some time.
Our solution to this problem was actually quite simple. The steel rods that the caps were affixed to were threaded top and bottom and two feet long, and we had four with us, making the post 8 feet. Now for the tricky part, taking a small coil of rope out of my pack and tying it to the stump of the last tree cut. I looked at my partner getting another definite no. Tying the other end around my waist, my stress factor went up a notch or two, taking the hammer and one section of rod and telling Jim to hang onto the rope. I started over the edge chills went up my spine I almost said no to this, but over I went, climbing down about ten feet and hammered that piece of rod into the cliff-face. Then Jim handed down the other six feet of post with the marker attached. Screwing it on the one I had pounded into the cliff, we had point 17 established. The climb back up went well with an assist from my friend ol’ “Not me. I ain’t going down there.”
Gathering our tools, and calling in to camp for the chopper for pickup, we walked back to our landing zone and flew back to camp. Telling the boss what we had done got us a “Well done” as the company got paid for setting these points. A not so strange thing was that no surveying was ever done off point 17 being a physical impossibility to set a transit up over a point in midair. Best of all was the story around the fire that night; Jim sure could lay it on thick.
One evening, Bill assembled the crew to layout the next day’s agenda, some distance and angle shots from widely separate points. Our fearless leader wanted to split everybody into five separate teams of two, with himself going with the two newest guys. To make this work, each team had to either have one man who was a surveyor or at least be able to read the numbers on the transit and report them to Bill over the portable radio. The other guy on three of these teams had to be a cutter. It didn’t matter, as they were to set up in clear locations. Then our wonderful leader singled out Jim and me and stated that we must set up on point 20 that we had just set the day before, take a distance shot, then proceed to point 21 and set it without a line being cut to point 21, and only knowing the general location of it.
This meant that we had to walk through uncut forest, toting all our gear to where we would guessed was the right location. Then we’d cut enough trees to get a clear sightline of the mountain. Bill was set up on and, over the radio, received instructions on which way to move and how far; then he set up again on the exact point. Next, he found a spot open enough to make a new landing zone. I knew right then that tomorrow was going to be a long day.
The next morning, Jim and I were the first ones to leave camp, landing almost on point 20. We set up the transit, did the shot, packed up, and started out. If someone asks you to break trail over the side of steep, slippery, wet mountainside carrying a few heavy bulky tools trying to stay on course using only a compass, I can offer one piece of advice: don’t do it. After an hour or so of walking, falling down a few times, and cursing a great deal, we stopped for a little break. Jim dug into his pack and brought out a topographic map and after finding our position and figuring out how much further it would be to point 21, he started cussing some more.
Resuming our little excursion through the wilds of Alaska, we soon came upon a little stream coming down from the snowfield on top of the mountain. Stopping for a drink of ice-cold snow water helped cool us down enormously. Continuing our stroll, I soon became aware of a very unpleasant odor, bear, a smell somewhere between wet dog and pigs. Immediately, my nerves were on edge, and I reached for my pistol to take the safety off at the same time turning around to notify Jim. That was a waste of effort as he had already stopped and was taking his pistol out of his pack, a sensible precaution.
We hoped it was a black bear and not a grizzly; a black bear will generally not bother people unless it’s a mama bear and somebody is bothering her cub. A grizzly is unpredictable and almost unstoppable in the amount of time that we would have in this thick timber. Trying to look in every direction and walking as fast as we could go was our course of action. If anyone would have been watching, they would have thought we were crazy because about every ten steps or whenever one of us fell we would turn around and look behind us.
In this unusual manner, we reached the area where Jim thought point 21 should be. To help locate the exact placement of the marker, we dropped a few trees so Bill could see our position. While I started cutting down a good-sized tree, my compadre notified Bill to watch for us. When the second tree came down, the radio came to life, receiving good news and bad news, the good almost perfect for distance, the bad—500 yards too low. Foul language once more polluted the pure mountain air. Before starting out, Jim asked, “Can you still smell bear”? Grinning I asked, “Why, are you nervous?”
“No, I was just worried about your safety,” he replied. “Since when?” I asked. Jim answered, “Since you smelled that bear. I don’t have as good a sniffer as you. I might walk right into one of them if you weren’t here.” After a good laugh, we started up the mountain. Keeping a count of how many steps we made while on our way up helped us judge our height. When Jim’s count hit 500, he stopped, and then I mentioned that he had only fallen three times on his way up compared to my five boom booms. Giving that some thought, he decided another few steps might kill him, but he would do it anyway. And for once, fortune smiled upon us. Just as we were about to stop, the ground leveled out little bit; we had come to a small shelf on the side of the mountain. While taking a well-deserved break, we looked around and smiled. This soon to be landing zone had made our day much better.
There are times, when not working, the woods can be peaceful, for it can be very beautiful in Alaska. I would be on the side of a mountain overlooking Prince William Sound, watching the killer whales, or the bald eagles fishing, and sometimes I could see part of the glacier break off on the far side of the sound. With the snowcapped mountains in the background, and the wind whispering through the pines, the word beautiful is not enough.
Since these trees were not going to fall by themselves, I got to work. Knowing that we were real close to our spot, Jim set up the transit as soon as he had called in. After three trees were down, we got the call we wanted, just a few yards adjustment, yippee. Now I got down to some serious timber cutting. This was directional falling so as to keep the tops of the trees out of our new chopper pad. The smell of freshly cut pine soon permeated the air. Stopping to gas up, Jim asked me to look through the transit; he had focused in on a bald eagle just 100 feet away. The eagle was looking at us like he would put us on the menu if we were any smaller. I told Jim to keep an eye on him as he might decide that we weren’t so big after all.
Getting back to work, I soon got in the zone and the trees fell like rain. After an hour or so, the new landing was almost complete, and my partner had not been idle, either. The post and cap were set in the ground, the transit was set up right on top of it, and Bill and Jim were on the radio speaking that weird language that only surveyors can understand. Gazing around, I spotted only a couple more trees that had to come down. Stepping up to the next to last tree, I cut my notch out of it, moved to the back, and started the final cut. Sinking the saw blade in, I noticed it was going in too easily as it does if the tree is hollow. As this requires a different type of cut, I started to pull my saw out when the tree gave out a sound not unlike a stick of dynamite exploding. A split second later, the tree’s butt started chasing me. For as soon as I had heard that enormous crack, I had abandoned the saw and lit out like a jackrabbit with its tail on fire. As I was running, it caught me on the heel of the boot that was off the ground and sent me flying through the air, with a crash landing at the end of my flight and with the tree coming to rest just a few feet behind me. As I picked myself off the ground, the shakes hit, and I felt as if my whole body had suddenly been turned into Jell-O. Jim yelled over asking if I was all right. And, if I was, could I do it again so he could get a picture of me flying. I shook my head “no” because I was still too shook up to talk. I then took just two wobbly steps to the butt of that tree and sat down. He talked on the radio for a minute and then came over to where I was sitting down.
Jim dug out two smokes, lit one, handed it to me, and then lit his. “Wonder if your saw survived the bomb blast?” This question sparked my interest greatly for two reasons: one of which was that the chopper would have a rough time landing without that last tree being cut down, the other was that saw cost almost a week’s wages. We walked over to the ragged stump and the third miracle that day; it had not even been scratched. Jim looked at me and asked, “Does that other tree get to live or die?”
“It’s kind of like getting bucked off a horse, isn’t it?” I answered and then started the saw and knocked down the last one we needed. We soon wrapped it up for the day. The helicopter had no trouble picking us up. In addition, Jim had another preposterous story to tell around the fire that night. The day the tree exploded is still one of the scariest moments of my life.
Cutting trees down is one of the most dangerous occupations on the planet. It may be the uncertainty of the unpredictable or the unexpected and the speed at which a tree comes down. An experienced faller knows where the tree is going to land. and when large trees fall they look deceivingly slow. It is the deep down back-of-the-mind knowledge of what can happen. For those who have spent any amount of time in the industry, they have been injured or know someone who has been killed. This unsettling fear can wear away at a person. Or they become so used to it that they just ignore it, but that fear is there for a reason. It is there to help keep alert or on edge enough to avoid harm.
It may be when danger becomes commonplace that it reduces the awareness of how deadly the woods can be. Moreover, it’s not just the trees that can kill you. There is the terrain itself. Wet ground or a fallen limb can cause a slip, usually while trying to get out of the way of a falling tree. Grizzly bears can be extremely unfriendly, and heavy machinery moving around is dangerous—to name but a few.
I started cutting firewood when I was about thirteen, as my family’s farmhouse in southern Illinois, and heated primarily by wood; this meant that we had to have a large stockpile of seasoned firewood before the chill of winter came around again. Having all the trees to cut up for firewood was not a problem, either, as I had an endless supply down in the Cache River bottoms. Being a teenager, the need for cash money is a never-ending problem. Therefore, to kill two birds with one stone, I started selling firewood. By the time I was nineteen, I had more than the usual amount of experience at cutting down trees.
It was a fortunate day when my Uncle Bill called from Alaska stating that there was a job cutting timber for the Bureau of Land Management. Bill had been an engineer in a construction battalion serving in Vietnam. Bill had moved to Alaska in 1972. By 1981, he had lived there for nine years, and he had gained a reputation for being able to get hard surveying projects done. But even he admitted that this job was by far the toughest one he had ever been on. Except as he said, “This is a lot easier. No one’s shooting at me.”
My uncle Bill was the boss on this project, which had its advantages and disadvantages for me. On the plus side, I knew exactly what kind of leader he was and what kind of things really ticked him off. The down side was that he would expect twice the amount of work from me than anyone else on the crew. It also meant that no way could I quit.
We started out with nine men excluding Bill and myself. Of all the starters, only one was still there at the end of the job. The rest had quit, been injured, or fired. Even some of the replacements were replaced more than once. The rate of turnover was about one replacement a week. The company we worked for tried to get the toughest men they could find. It was not so much a question of physical strength that was needed. Of course, they had to be strong, but it took mental fortitude, a mindset to be able to deal with this job. Of course, the money is really the main attraction for this line of work. Cash is one of the few things that drive people to work in an environment where they can die at almost any moment. Yet after time, it gets into your system. I loved it!
The working conditions were brutal, indeed. I witnessed one guy who had just done his tour as an army ranger break down and cry. The terrain around Valdez, Alaska is a mix of mountains and valleys with hundreds of small to medium sized streams. It is an area classified as temperate rain forest. This means it rains just about every day, so the ground is always wet, and so are you. The sides of the mountains are covered in a mix of pine, hemlock, alder thickets, and one of the more hateful species of plant life, Devils Club, a plant that grows about six feet tall and has hook-like thorns that break off easily into your skin. The mountains themselves are as slick as can be where there is dirt. This means falling down a lot, a whole lot. Otherwise, it is granite, a very hard and abrasive rock. The valleys are mostly clear of trees because the ground is too wet to support them. The soil in the valleys is mostly muskeg, a surface that resembles old oatmeal. Walking across muskeg requires caution or you will be knee deep, and boot loss is a regular occurrence
It wasn’t the hardest job, that of being a timber cutter, that turned over the most. It was the surveyors, and next to that was the rear chainman. I guess the cutters were more used to the strain. Cutting timber is very labor intensive, plus dealing with extremely dangerous tools and equipment did not help ease the tension any. Very few things on the planet are as scary as the sharp metal teeth of a large chain saw moving very fast. In addition, the saws used are heavy with a cutting blade close to four feet long. There is an old saying among timber cutters that the bigger the tree the harder it tries to kill the cutter. What they don’t say is that the saw is the most dangerous thing the cutter has to deal with.
The job description was to cut, survey, and put up signs between the termination of the oil pipeline and the Chugach National Forest in Valdez, Alaska. This sounded like the job of a lifetime to me. Little did I know that the terrain and weather in this part of Alaska was far from ideal for cutting trees. It was mountainous; it rained almost every day, and to get to the actual work itself required a helicopter. I quickly realized that I would earn every penny I would make at this high paying job. Besides the pay, the other redeeming feature for me was it was extremely dangerous. Truth be known, I like the more dangerous things.
An average day could go something like this: Rise about five in the morning, eat a huge breakfast, go to the landing/take off area for the four-passenger helicopter (three if it was taking out a lot of equipment) and load up. We would fly out to the area that we were to work on that day, a ride that I always found stimulating, land, unload—being very careful not to rise up out of a crouch. Chopper blades and body parts do not mix well. We carried the equipment, chain saws, gas, oil, axe, water, food, radio, tripod, and surveying transit anywhere from 100 yards up to three quarters of a mile over some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet.
Arriving at the worksite, the surveyor would set up his transit and center on the line that we were to cut through the trees that day. It was important to be accurate as a mistake wasted a whole day’s work. Then, we started cutting a fifty-foot boundary line through the forest. When we had the day’s assignment met, we packed up our gear and made our way back to the nearest landing zone. At some time, during our walk back, we would radio the helicopter base and notify them where we could be picked up and that we were ready to get out of there.
Another chopper ride back to camp—the helicopter rides were one of the highlights of the job. Flying around in helicopters is fun, much better than airplanes, though louder. They move slower and provide a better view. From the air, Prince William Sound is so spectacular a person can forget that he is flying. You can see the bears fishing for salmon, the seals sunbathing on the beach or Prince William Sound, and the mountains and glaciers that surround it. After the wonderful ride, we unloaded, did a tool check, sharpened saw chains, and made ready for the next day. Now it’s time for another gigantic supper, a cold beer, a little talk or storytelling and some sleep.
One day we were assigned to go out to point 16 and cut in the direction of where point 17 was supposed to be set. Points were steel posts with a cap stamped with surveying codes driven deep into the ground along the boundary line, marking distance or where the line changed direction.
On this fine day, I was working with Jim G, a man of many talents, with a humorous outlook on life. We loaded our gear, got in the flying machine, and left the ground behind. Arriving at the landing zone, a small clearing that we had enlarged only 100 or so feet from point 16, Jim and I disembarked. Gathering our tools, we walked up the line to where the trees had not yet been cut down on the line. Jim set up the transit while I fired up the chainsaw and started knocking down trees.
The timber on this part of the line was hemlocks (a type of tree that resembles a pine) around two feet across, 80 foot tall, and spaced about ten to fifteen yards apart. This was my favorite type of timber to cut, much easier than the alder thickets that I had been cutting for the last few days. After an hour or so, Jim moved the transit up the line and then shot for distance from point 16. The distance shot revealed that only a little over a quarter mile of line remained to where point 17 was to be set, just a couple more hours of cutting—whoopee, a short day.
Starting the saw back up, I was feeling good, and after dropping a few more trees, the saw needed fuel. Walking back to the gas can, I noticed that the sky was getting darker, not a surprise as it rained just about every day, and hopefully we could finish this up before it started raining. After fueling up and cutting for another hour, a fine mist began drifting down. Looking down the line, I had to laugh. Jim had covered the transit and tripod with orange plastic, making a teepee, and was under it snug and dry. I yelled over asking if he was comfortable; he replied that he could use a few dry pine branches to sit on, as the ground was a little hard. I notified “his dryness” that was not out of the realm of possibility, but I would not cut them for him any time soon. Laughter echoed off the mountain for a little while.
After cutting down a few more trees, I noticed that up ahead it looked like we were coming to a clearing. Thinking that this was turning into a great day, I gassed the saw back up. Then I shouted down to Jim that it looked like there was a clearing ahead. It was like watching the sun come out, watching a smile come over his face. Coming out from under his improvised shelter, he started gathering up the gear needed to set the next point. I went back to work on the last few trees and quickly came to realize that it was not a clearing ahead but a cliff. Seeing Jim approach, I paused while he walked up the line so as to not put a tree on top of him. The words that came out of his mouth when he saw the cliff cannot be expressed! While I cut down the last tree on the line, which was only a few feet from the edge, making it a little hairy. Just for grins, I dropped it over the cliff and watched it hit the solid rock below splintering into a million toothpicks. After watching this show of destruction, Jim set up the transit again and shot for distance. It turned out that point 17 was just six feet off the edge of a 200-foot cliff. Of course, I had to ask Jim if he had an anti-gravity point marker with him, getting a firm negative answer to my question. Laughter overcame me for some time.
Our solution to this problem was actually quite simple. The steel rods that the caps were affixed to were threaded top and bottom and two feet long, and we had four with us, making the post 8 feet. Now for the tricky part, taking a small coil of rope out of my pack and tying it to the stump of the last tree cut. I looked at my partner getting another definite no. Tying the other end around my waist, my stress factor went up a notch or two, taking the hammer and one section of rod and telling Jim to hang onto the rope. I started over the edge chills went up my spine I almost said no to this, but over I went, climbing down about ten feet and hammered that piece of rod into the cliff-face. Then Jim handed down the other six feet of post with the marker attached. Screwing it on the one I had pounded into the cliff, we had point 17 established. The climb back up went well with an assist from my friend ol’ “Not me. I ain’t going down there.”
Gathering our tools, and calling in to camp for the chopper for pickup, we walked back to our landing zone and flew back to camp. Telling the boss what we had done got us a “Well done” as the company got paid for setting these points. A not so strange thing was that no surveying was ever done off point 17 being a physical impossibility to set a transit up over a point in midair. Best of all was the story around the fire that night; Jim sure could lay it on thick.
One evening, Bill assembled the crew to layout the next day’s agenda, some distance and angle shots from widely separate points. Our fearless leader wanted to split everybody into five separate teams of two, with himself going with the two newest guys. To make this work, each team had to either have one man who was a surveyor or at least be able to read the numbers on the transit and report them to Bill over the portable radio. The other guy on three of these teams had to be a cutter. It didn’t matter, as they were to set up in clear locations. Then our wonderful leader singled out Jim and me and stated that we must set up on point 20 that we had just set the day before, take a distance shot, then proceed to point 21 and set it without a line being cut to point 21, and only knowing the general location of it.
This meant that we had to walk through uncut forest, toting all our gear to where we would guessed was the right location. Then we’d cut enough trees to get a clear sightline of the mountain. Bill was set up on and, over the radio, received instructions on which way to move and how far; then he set up again on the exact point. Next, he found a spot open enough to make a new landing zone. I knew right then that tomorrow was going to be a long day.
The next morning, Jim and I were the first ones to leave camp, landing almost on point 20. We set up the transit, did the shot, packed up, and started out. If someone asks you to break trail over the side of steep, slippery, wet mountainside carrying a few heavy bulky tools trying to stay on course using only a compass, I can offer one piece of advice: don’t do it. After an hour or so of walking, falling down a few times, and cursing a great deal, we stopped for a little break. Jim dug into his pack and brought out a topographic map and after finding our position and figuring out how much further it would be to point 21, he started cussing some more.
Resuming our little excursion through the wilds of Alaska, we soon came upon a little stream coming down from the snowfield on top of the mountain. Stopping for a drink of ice-cold snow water helped cool us down enormously. Continuing our stroll, I soon became aware of a very unpleasant odor, bear, a smell somewhere between wet dog and pigs. Immediately, my nerves were on edge, and I reached for my pistol to take the safety off at the same time turning around to notify Jim. That was a waste of effort as he had already stopped and was taking his pistol out of his pack, a sensible precaution.
We hoped it was a black bear and not a grizzly; a black bear will generally not bother people unless it’s a mama bear and somebody is bothering her cub. A grizzly is unpredictable and almost unstoppable in the amount of time that we would have in this thick timber. Trying to look in every direction and walking as fast as we could go was our course of action. If anyone would have been watching, they would have thought we were crazy because about every ten steps or whenever one of us fell we would turn around and look behind us.
In this unusual manner, we reached the area where Jim thought point 21 should be. To help locate the exact placement of the marker, we dropped a few trees so Bill could see our position. While I started cutting down a good-sized tree, my compadre notified Bill to watch for us. When the second tree came down, the radio came to life, receiving good news and bad news, the good almost perfect for distance, the bad—500 yards too low. Foul language once more polluted the pure mountain air. Before starting out, Jim asked, “Can you still smell bear”? Grinning I asked, “Why, are you nervous?”
“No, I was just worried about your safety,” he replied. “Since when?” I asked. Jim answered, “Since you smelled that bear. I don’t have as good a sniffer as you. I might walk right into one of them if you weren’t here.” After a good laugh, we started up the mountain. Keeping a count of how many steps we made while on our way up helped us judge our height. When Jim’s count hit 500, he stopped, and then I mentioned that he had only fallen three times on his way up compared to my five boom booms. Giving that some thought, he decided another few steps might kill him, but he would do it anyway. And for once, fortune smiled upon us. Just as we were about to stop, the ground leveled out little bit; we had come to a small shelf on the side of the mountain. While taking a well-deserved break, we looked around and smiled. This soon to be landing zone had made our day much better.
There are times, when not working, the woods can be peaceful, for it can be very beautiful in Alaska. I would be on the side of a mountain overlooking Prince William Sound, watching the killer whales, or the bald eagles fishing, and sometimes I could see part of the glacier break off on the far side of the sound. With the snowcapped mountains in the background, and the wind whispering through the pines, the word beautiful is not enough.
Since these trees were not going to fall by themselves, I got to work. Knowing that we were real close to our spot, Jim set up the transit as soon as he had called in. After three trees were down, we got the call we wanted, just a few yards adjustment, yippee. Now I got down to some serious timber cutting. This was directional falling so as to keep the tops of the trees out of our new chopper pad. The smell of freshly cut pine soon permeated the air. Stopping to gas up, Jim asked me to look through the transit; he had focused in on a bald eagle just 100 feet away. The eagle was looking at us like he would put us on the menu if we were any smaller. I told Jim to keep an eye on him as he might decide that we weren’t so big after all.
Getting back to work, I soon got in the zone and the trees fell like rain. After an hour or so, the new landing was almost complete, and my partner had not been idle, either. The post and cap were set in the ground, the transit was set up right on top of it, and Bill and Jim were on the radio speaking that weird language that only surveyors can understand. Gazing around, I spotted only a couple more trees that had to come down. Stepping up to the next to last tree, I cut my notch out of it, moved to the back, and started the final cut. Sinking the saw blade in, I noticed it was going in too easily as it does if the tree is hollow. As this requires a different type of cut, I started to pull my saw out when the tree gave out a sound not unlike a stick of dynamite exploding. A split second later, the tree’s butt started chasing me. For as soon as I had heard that enormous crack, I had abandoned the saw and lit out like a jackrabbit with its tail on fire. As I was running, it caught me on the heel of the boot that was off the ground and sent me flying through the air, with a crash landing at the end of my flight and with the tree coming to rest just a few feet behind me. As I picked myself off the ground, the shakes hit, and I felt as if my whole body had suddenly been turned into Jell-O. Jim yelled over asking if I was all right. And, if I was, could I do it again so he could get a picture of me flying. I shook my head “no” because I was still too shook up to talk. I then took just two wobbly steps to the butt of that tree and sat down. He talked on the radio for a minute and then came over to where I was sitting down.
Jim dug out two smokes, lit one, handed it to me, and then lit his. “Wonder if your saw survived the bomb blast?” This question sparked my interest greatly for two reasons: one of which was that the chopper would have a rough time landing without that last tree being cut down, the other was that saw cost almost a week’s wages. We walked over to the ragged stump and the third miracle that day; it had not even been scratched. Jim looked at me and asked, “Does that other tree get to live or die?”
“It’s kind of like getting bucked off a horse, isn’t it?” I answered and then started the saw and knocked down the last one we needed. We soon wrapped it up for the day. The helicopter had no trouble picking us up. In addition, Jim had another preposterous story to tell around the fire that night. The day the tree exploded is still one of the scariest moments of my life.
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Author: McKenzie Ellis
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Broccoli Cheddar
I focused all energy on my breathing. One after another, I took deep, slow breaths. Still I felt I could go into cardiac arrest at any second. I fought my body’s natural reaction. I fought to stay as still as humanly possible. I fought, and I failed. My entire body, in particular my hands, were vibrating worse than the few leaves left on the snow covered trees surrounding me. I could hear every beat of my heart, thudding in my ears, each beat growing louder and faster. I stared down through my scope, and placed the crosshairs once and for all. After one final breath that caught in my throat worse than any before it, I braced myself, tensed my shoulder, and as gently as I could manage, squeezed back with my index finger on the trigger.
It was the morning of December 7th, 2013. I was on my way to my favorite place on earth, the woods. But on this particular morning, even though it was shotgun season, I was not headed to the woods to hunt. My uncle and I were going out this morning to retrieve his kill from the previous night. As we left my house around 8:30 that morning, it was about fifteen degrees outside. And if that was not bad enough, there was an inch of ice on the ground. That is still not too bad, right? Add about two feet of snow on top, and that is what the two of us were up against. Simply opening a door to outside, the cold felt like it slapped me across the face, and we were going to willingly spend hours out in it. To put in nicely, it was not the smartest idea anyone had ever had.
We did the traditional McDonald’s run and proceeded to complain for the remaining twenty minutes of our drive about how cold it was. We arrived at the farm and quickly realized two things. There was no possible way the two of us would be able to drag this deer the whole way out, and, also, there was no possible way we were able to drive through the snow to get her. What were we going to do? There was obviously only one answer. We got the sled out of the back of my uncle’s truck, and began our walk. It felt like someone was forcibly holding my feet to the ground with every step I took. It took us about forty minutes to walk just over 300 yards, a walk that should take around five minutes at most. And, of course, we had all of the accessories, everything one could imagine, from a sled to a gun to all of the proper cleaning materials, and much more including two cell phones, which we figured would come in handy when the first one of us collapsed. Getting hot to the point of sweat when it is fifteen degrees outside is a very unique feeling, and not my favorite. Ice was forming on our faces because the sweat was quite literally freezing.
Once we finally reached the deer, all we had done was walk, and yet we were both sure we would die, right there, in the middle of the field. Fortunately, we were wrong. Unfortunately, even though we both felt like passing out, we had not even scratched the surface of the amount of work we got ourselves into or how excruciatingly hard it would be. After a terribly short break, and tons of hysterical laughter and picture taking, we had the deer loaded onto a sled, with a long strap pulled through a hook on the front. We each took an end of the strap, and we were off!
We went a total of about twelve feet, and it was most definitely time for a break. We continued like this for quite a while, fifteen feet, take a break, ten feet, take a break. “See that stick stickin’ up? We’ll get there, and take a break.” At one point, the two of us stopped for about the 453rd time, and both, at the same time stated that we were seeing things in the sky. “I think I’m hallucinating, because I definitely see what looks like a circle of rainbow in the sky right there.” By this point, when we stopped for this break, I could do no more than free-fall back into the snow. I lay there sure I was about to die. “That right there? No, I see it too. What is it?” I had no idea, but was very curious. I started taking pictures, still laying surrounded by this oversized blanket of snow. We later found out that we were not hallucinating, and that the thing we saw in the sky is called a “sun dog” and they are caused by extreme cold temperatures and made visible by a reflection off the snow. Luckily, we were not going crazy.
Before taking off again, I had to start shedding some layers, which I later learned is an absolute surefire way to get sick. But anyway, our work was from far from over. The spot I had just been laying in was at none other location than the bottom of the very steepest hill on the entire farm. This was precisely the reason that this happened to be our longest break. “This isn’t even, worth it. I mean, we could just, leave her here.” My uncle said breathlessly. “Come on, it’s just a doe. She’s not even that big and the meats probably bad by now anyway.” He was trying to talk himself into leaving her there. After weighing the pros and cons, we decided we had already worked too hard not to finish the job. As tempting as the idea was, we both readied ourselves again.
Unlike the usual ten feet we had been averaging, going up this steep hill was a completely different story. If we stopped once, we stopped at least twenty times going up this fifty-yard hill. My body was covered in several layers of insulated, thick, made-to-keep-you-warm clothes, which is why I was also covered in sweat. My skin felt like I was burning alive, and my muscles did not want to move ever again. The only thing that was not on fire was my face and hands, the only skin exposed. That skin, on the other hand, was beginning to turn an interesting and mildly alarming shade of reddish-purple. We were so close, though, we could see the truck now from the top of the hill.
Our next break, an impressive eleven feet closer to the truck, was another interesting one. I ended up just sitting in the snow this time. The breaks were getting longer and longer each time, and this particular one consisted of me taking pictures of the snow-covered timber. After a gust of wind blew by and we both saw the snow dislodge from the branches and slowly drift to the ground, my Uncle Tom decided that I had to get a picture of that for my photography class. He insisted on his idea and bent down to start a snowball. “Umm, what are you doing!” I laughed.
“Get your camera ready.” I did, and he lobbed a snowball into the woods. I mistimed the picture, so we tried again. I had the camera ready and counted down from three. He threw again and I took another picture. The two of us burst out in hysterical laughter. “How do you, throw a snowball, into the woods, and not hit anything!” I yelled between laughs. The snowball went straight through the trees and made a perfect half circle shape as it landed on the ground about thirty yards into the woods. At this point, the two of us were exhausted to the level of being delirious and both genuinely thought that this was the funniest thing we had ever seen.
Eventually, after stalling this break to get the ever so important picture, we decided we were both far beyond done and needed desperately for this to be over. We made our last few trips, and after every bit of three hours of what felt like the hardest manual labor any human being had ever done, we were finally sitting, layers shredded, soaked in sweat, in the truck. I may or may not have blacked out at this point, but I do remember sitting absolutely motionless, in complete silence, for several minutes. My uncle finally realized something, water—we needed water, badly. We downed a bottle of water each in less than a minute, and went for seconds.
My uncle called his son, my cousin and another hunting buddy of ours, Tom, to let him know that we, surprisingly, were both still alive. “So you guys are headed back out to the buddy stand now, or…?” was his question after hearing about how miserable we were. Our exhausted laughter rang out through the truck. “Where we’re headed, is to pick up your grandma and then to a booth at Panera to sit and thaw with some broccoli cheddar soup. Son, you have no idea what McKenzie and I have just been through.” My uncle explained.
My cousin retorted with “Well that’s nice. You told all the guys at work ‘Oh yeah I’m going down south for some deer huntin’’ and now you’re gonna go back and they’ll all ask ‘Oh Tom, whadja get down south hunting?’ and you’ll say ‘Yeah, I got some BROCCOLI CHEDDAR SOUP from PANERA BREAD!’”
“Son, you just don’t understand, that’s all real easy for you to say sittin’ on your couch under a blanket with your feet up. I thought we were going to DIE.” After a few minutes of going back and forth and my cousin making us feel guilty and telling us how this would probably be the night that someone kills a big buck, he had talked us into it. Even though it was already time to be going back into the woods for an appropriate time for an afternoon hunt, we soon realized that I did not have any of my gear with me. After a victorious, “Awesome! Keep me updated. Love you guys, good luck!” from Tom, we were headed back to town.
We hung his doe up and gathered my gun, tags, and license and got back in the truck yet again. The entire half hour drive was nothing but the two of us saying how much we did not want to be going back. Just when our heartbeats began to return to normal, there we were back at the farm, anything but ready to get out of the truck and walk through that snow again. After talking my uncle into letting me sit by myself, which I had never really done, we reluctantly got out of the truck, gathered all of our stuff, and took off walking, again. If I had to guess, we probably complained more on that day than anyone, ever. We debated which spots to go to, and quickly settled on the two closest places. I went to the closest stand, and my uncle stopped and sat on the ground about fifty yards before that. Climbing into and sitting in a twelve foot tall, ice covered, metal deer stand is definitely not the safest, or smartest thing anyone has ever done. But fortunately, that was just what I did.
Finally. After what I had done that day, I deserved to sit in a deer stand for a couple of hours. By the time I was stationary, gun ready, and could finally relax, it was 3:30, way too late to be just getting out; it got dark at 5! Although I was thoroughly exhausted and it was twelve degrees outside and I was sitting on metal covered in an inch of ice, I would still not have rather been anywhere else. Of course, it is easy to say that now, but at the time, I really would have much rather been sitting in a warm booth at Panera eating some Broccoli Cheddar soup. But, I was there, and I was going to make the best of it. The next hour or so of my life was filled with perhaps the only thing to do in a deer stand when there are no deer to be seen, appreciate.
One does not even need to see deer when out hunting, a hunter just feels lucky to be there. I took in the beautiful sight of hundreds of yards of open field covered in an almost undisturbed thick layer of glistening bright white snow. The only snow out of place caused by the tracks of the animals I could only hope and pray I would come in contact with that night. The woods wrapped around my stand from the back looked like a painting with every branch covered perfectly in the weather. No sounds of people yelling or arguing or technology clicking, just the perfect silence of the woods. This interrupted only occasionally by the chirp of a bird or squirrel, or the snapping of a twig finally breaking under the weight of the ice and bouncing off every other branch on the way down before landing gently in the snow.
If one has ever been to a big city such as Chicago or New York City, they know the almost unbearable smell of the garbage and smog and pollution that is inescapable in the air. Sitting out in the woods in southern Illinois is about as far from that as one can get. Although most of us are used to it and do not notice it on a daily basis, there is a certain sweetness to the air where we live. I took a deep breath and knew that that was the definition of fresh air. I could even pick up a trace of the crops that just a few short months before filled the fields I looked upon. It was perfect, the most amazing, incredible feeling, or so I thought at the time. Something as simple and inactive as sitting in the middle of the woods can make anyone feel better about themselves, about the world. It gives me the feeling that the world has not gone totally mad. Everything in this setting feels sane, for now at least. If there was one bad thing at that point in time, it was that sitting on the irremovable ice in non-waterproof clothing was not the most comfortable thing in the world. But I was over it because everything else was just so breathtaking. Just as I was thinking that nothing could possibly make this afternoon any better, I was proven wrong. From my right, in the next field over, appeared about half a dozen deer. Game on.
Trying to stay as calm as possible, I brought my gun up to my shoulder, just to get a look. They were much too far to shoot at just yet, but they were headed my way. I brought the scope to my eye to get a better look, all does. Not what I was hoping for most, but better than nothing. To put it calmly, I was instantly filled with pure adrenaline. My hands started shaking, and I could feel my heartbeat increasing quickly. A small creek separated the field directly in front of me with the field the deer were lazily eating their way across. But they were coming across, no doubt. Keeping an eye on the deer constantly, I slowly reached for my phone to contact my uncle, who I was not sure could see them yet. A few text messages were traded. He could see them, and was watching just as intently as I was. I put my phone away, and tried to calm my breathing, as all I could do was wait. It was like they knew I was waiting in anticipation, and they stood, walking slowly around just the other side of the creek, for what seemed like hours. It was around 4:45 in the afternoon, and if I was going to get a shot before dark, they needed to get on the same page I was. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and tried everything to get myself to calm down, but it just was not happening. I continued to watch helplessly through my scope as they played around, doing everything except crossing the creek. Another deep breath needed, I looked up from my scope. My head snapped so quickly to my right I was surprised my neck did not break.
There he was, standing tall and proud, the King Of The Woods. All I saw was bone. Granted I could only see one side of his rack, but that one side looked better than anything I had ever seen before. He had just stepped out of the woods forty yards to my right, heading to check out the does in the next field. He was not in a hurry though, taking a couple steps, then putting his head down to eat. There was no more trying to stay calm. That was completely out of the question. It was just not possible. Trying not to process fully what was going on, I, trying with every fiber of my being to stay quiet and make as little movement as possible, rotated my gun and myself. I rested my elbow on the arm rail, and found him in my scope. I clicked off the safety and flinched, praying to God that he would not hear it. Success. I gently laid my shivering right index finger on the trigger. I pushed the gun back into my shoulder, held as steady as I could manage, stopped him in his tracks, and took my chance.
The sound exploded in my ear, and I looked up in just enough time to see him jump up and kick his back legs at least six feet in the air. He took a couple leaps and stopped about fifteen yards from where he was. For a split second, I was absolutely frozen. Once my body caught up with my brain, I reached into my pocket and reloaded as fast as I could, which was not very fast at all in the condition I was in. The deer repeated his actions and took a couple more bounds and paused again. At the time, I felt great about the shot and thought he was going to fall right there. But the shot must not have as good as I previously believed, because off he went. Like nothing had happened, he walked off and got on the other side of the next tree line before I could manage to shoot again. I was stunned, paralyzed even. I had no clue what to do. I brought my scope up to my eye again to see if I could spot him. Too many trees in the way—that had been my one and only chance. I did not know what to think.
I sat still for a few seconds. I felt a mixture of complete absence of emotion and every emotion all at once. My blank stare was interrupted by the buzzing coming from my pocket. Not until then when I went to set down my gun did I realize how bad it was. It was not just my hands shaking; it was my entire body. I was shaking, due to a mix of coldness, but mostly adrenaline, roaring through my veins. My hands, arms, knees, my entire core was shaking uncontrollably. It was a little scary actually. I tried, and failed, to snap out of it, but I knew I had to get to my phone. On about the third try I could finally touch the “answer” button. “He-hello?”
“Can you still see him?” was the first thing that my uncle could blurt out.
“N-no, he, he’s be-behind the the trees...” I can’t believe he could understand me at all.
“I can see him, I’m watching through my scope right now. Was it a good shot?”
“Wait! What? Y-you see him? What’s h-he d-doing? Where is he?”
“Ok, take a breath. He’s just walking up towards the pond. I can’t tell for sure, but he looks hurt. He’s walking reeeally slow, Kenz.” At this point I just remember squealing something that not even I could decode. “Are you still loaded? Is the gun loaded?”
“Wha-what? Um, yeah. Yeah it’s lo-loaded.”
“Ok. Listen to me carefully. Unload the gun. Unload. The. Gun. Then climb down, CAREFULLY, and just, stand there. Just stand there, and don’t do anything. I’m getting up now and I’ll walk to you, ok?”
“Yeah, o-ok.”
“Ok, be careful McKenzie.” Click. I slid my phone back into my pocket, and tried to gather all my stuff and shove it in any pocket I could find. I focused for about ten seconds to unload my gun, and my brain went back to going in every direction at once. In perhaps the most dangerous minute of my life, I tried my hardest to concentrate while I made my way down the ice-covered steps, still with my body shaking as if I were having a seizure. It is very scary for one’s body to shake that badly and have absolutely no control over it. I did as I was told and when I finally made it down safely, I took a few steps out from the woods and stood there, and waited. It was too dark to try and see anything, so I just stood there, shaking. A few seconds later, I was almost knocked to the ground from being tackled into the biggest hug. “KENZ! How big was he! Six! Eight!” my uncle asked almost as excited as I was. I just smiled, because I thoroughly believed he was way bigger than that, but did not want to say so and have him end up being smaller than I made it out to be. “I don’t really know, he was…he was big.” Another tackling hug followed. “What about the shot? Where’d you hit him?” and my smile faded. “I mean, I felt good about it at first, but, I just don’t know.”
“Ok, Kenzie, listen to me. You’re going to walk me over to where he was when you shot, and we’ll see what we can find.” He loaded his gun, and I practically sprinted to where the deer stood when I first saw him. He followed and we turned on our flashlights. “No, no look! Right here right here, doesn’t this look like tracks from where he kicked?” I was surely yelling by this point. “But wait where’s…” my voice got quiet, trailing off at the end. I cleared my throat. “Where’s…I don’t see any blood…” it was barely a whisper.
“If you saw him kick that hard, he’s hit. You hit him Kenz!” my uncle tried to reassure me as we both kept looking for any more sign. I went from crazily ecstatic, to unable to speak.
For the next few minutes, we looked separately, trying to cover ground quickly. “Hey, right here maybe, what’s this?” I said in his direction half-heartedly. He hurried over and this led to the third bear hug of the night so far. He was much more enthusiastic than I was. “That’s it! Right there! You did it! Kenz, I can’t believe this, he’s gotta be down! Congratulations!” another hug ensued. I was not trying to be negative, but also did not see this as something to get my hopes up about. My throat felt scratchy and I felt my eyes start to water. “It’s like one drop. I don’t even see any more. Maybe it wasn’t as good of a hit as I thought.”
“McKenzie! You found blood! The deer’s dead!” Even he knew that I knew that just because we found blood did not mean that deer was dead. He was trying really hard to make me feel better, and I was thankful, but it just was not working. “Keep looking” he encouraged, as he did the same. I went back to searching. As dumb as I felt, I felt I could start crying at any minute. I was trying to calm down when a few short seconds later, “Right here, come here!” I snapped out of it and ran over to where he was looking. I did not see any blood, “What?” I said quietly. “Right there, look!”
I bent down. “Is that, hair?”
“It suuure is!” For some reason, I still was not convinced. He could tell and said “Well you said you saw him stop up there right?” motioning to the corner where I last laid eyes on him before he took off walking. “Yeah, right at the corner.” I said.
He responded with “Ok, here’s what we’re gonna do. We’ll walk up there, and see if we can see anything at the corner. But whether we do or not, we’re gonna have to go back and let him sit since the blood isn’t very heavy. But believe me, that deer is dead, McKenzie.”
I just nodded my head and we walked slowly up to the corner of woods, our eyes straining in the darkness to scan the new field in front of us. We could see his trail. His trail was footprints, lazy, dragging footprints, with a single drop of blood here and there. I was so incredibly disappointed, thinking of all the things I could have done better and that I should have taken my time more to get a better shot. I tried to put the worst thought to the back of my mind, but it would not leave. He could be injured if the shot was not good enough. I shivered and then sighed at the thought of that. My uncle spun around and just looked at me. “Look, I know you’re gonna think I’m crazy, but we gotta get outta here. I know, I know. I really am sorry. I know how much you wanna keep goin’, but we just can’t. We can’t ok? Don’t hate me I just know that if we keep walking we’re gonna walk up on him and jump him up and that’s the last thing we wanna do, ok? We have to let him sit overnight. We’ll come out very first thing in the morning, all right? I’m so sorry.” He expected me to throw a tantrum.
“Ok” was all I could get out.
I turned around and started walking to the truck. He caught up to me and gave me a pep talk all the way back, explaining to me all the reasons that the deer had to be dead. I am not sure I said a single word. I was glad he was convinced, but I also knew that he was just trying to make me feel better. He was probably trying to keep me from breaking down into tears, or, throwing up. I was not sure which would come first. I held my composure as well as I could and we got back to the truck and thawed in the heat for a few minutes.
Once we were on our way home, he of course wanted to call every contact in his phone. “Maybe we should just wait. I don’t wanna tell everybody and then not find him tomorrow.” I was still almost choked up.
“Are you kidding! We’re telling everybody!” I didn’t feel like arguing. “We’ll call your dad first!” he said and dialed the phone and set it on the middle console on speaker phone. “Hello?” We just looked at each other.
“Hey Rick, I know you’re at work, but, Kenzie’s got somethin’ she wants to tell you!” he blurted out. I shot him “the look”.
“Ohh, kay?” there was silence.
“I uh, well don’t freak out, but I shot a big buck…” I started, my tone not at all matching my words.
And of course, that was followed by “WHAT? ARE YOU SERIOUS? MCKENZIE. How big! Where! What stand! How big! How far! Did you find blood! How big!” My eyes started to water again. My uncle could tell and took over for me. He told him the whole story, no detail left out. It was a much more optimistic story than I would have told. Another round of praise and excitement and congratulations came through the phone. But my dad was at work, so he congratulated me again and ended with saying he would see us in a couple of hours. My uncle picked up the phone and dialed the next on the list, my brother, Shaun. Shaun lived in Michigan at the time, but is likely the biggest hunter of all of us, so we knew we had to tell him. He picked up. “McKenzie’s got somethin’ to tell you!” my uncle yelled.
“Kenz… what happened?” he said in a suspicious tone knowing that we had been hunting that afternoon. I sat quietly.
“MCKENZIE, WHAT HAPPENED” he demanded excitedly.
“Don’t get too excited, because we didn’t even find him ye-“
“HIM! Did you just say ‘HIM’! You just said ‘him’. McKenzie I’m not even playin’ right now, how big is he!”
“Um, I mean, I don’t really know to be honest. I didn’t see him for very long.”
“Ok well…” he whined through the phone, “you did see him, and you obviously shot him, so about how big was he? Just guess. Was it a good shot? How far? How big is he!”
Finally allowing myself to get a little excited and crack a smile, “Bro, I don’t know, he’s, he’s big.” My uncle was overjoyed that he finally knew I wasn’t going to have a breakdown right there in his truck, so he gladly took over the rest of the story again.
“So like, do I need to come down there?” we all laughed. “All right it’s what, like, almost 7? Ok, well, try not to freak out too bad, the deer’s dead.” I kind of wished everyone would stop saying that. But we all laughed it off and hung up after more congratulations. I turned to my uncle, “He can’t drive down here in the middle of the night!” I said.
Trying to let me down easy, he said, “Kenz, I, I think he was kidding about that.”
I considered it, but explained that “No, I don’t think so. I know Shaun a little better than you, I don’t think he was joking.” Realizing how not smart it would be for him to do this, my uncle dials Shaun again.
He answered “What!”
“Hey um, you’re not really coming down are you? ‘Cuz that would be dumb…”
“Kenz, I just packed a bag and I’m puttin’ my shoes on. I’ll be there at like 2. I’ll text you to unlock the door. I’ll bring McDonald’s!”
My uncle tried his hardest to talk him out of it and finally my brother asked, “Kenzie, was it, a good shot?”
I paused, “I don’t, I mean, there was barely any blood…but, Shaun when I shot he just jumped and kicked sooo har-”
“All right I’m leaving now. It may take a little more than 8 hours, ‘cuz there’s an awful blizzard up here right now. I’ll send updates, see you in a ‘lil bit.” He hung up.
My uncle wanted to call him again and tell him not to come, but we both knew it would not work, so we left it alone. We were back to town now and decided on going across town to my other uncle’s house where the doe was hung up. We got there and went through the whole story again, with more congratulations. My Uncle Tom said that there was one other person we needed to call, he dialed my cousin and handed me the phone, and my two uncles resumed talking. Tom picked up the phone, “Hey! What’s up?”
“Hey, it’s Kenzie”
“Kenz! How was the hunt? Either of you get anything?” he said hopeful.
“Ok, listen. Don’t freak out, but-”
“KENZIE, DID YOU SHOOT A BIG BUCK!”
I paused and laughed a little. “Well actually, yeah.”
“Oh my God! Kenzie! Congratulations! How big? What stand? How far? How big? What time? Blood? How big!”
I laughed and took a deep breath and told the whole story again, finally a little more upbeat about it.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe that, that’s too cool. You gotta send pics tomorrow, ok? Congrats again!”
“Oh and thanks by the way!” I laughed.
“Thanks? For what?”
“Um, hello! You forced us into goin’ out! In our minds we were halfway to Panera already!”
“Oh no, this was all you!”
“No way! What are you doin’ anyway?” I asked.
“Oh, I just stepped out to answer to the phone, I’m out at dinner.”
“Tom! You left Jess by herself! Get off the phone and go back in!”
“No it’s no big deal, it’s just like this dinner and dancing type thing for all the guys in my Coast Guard unit and their wives. Jess knows everyone; she’s not by herself. I just knew you guys were goin’ back out this afternoon, so I just left for a minute and stepped outside.”
“I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t have kept you this long! Why didn’t you tell me? Oh my God, Ok, get back to your dinner and I’ll talk to you tomorrow! Thanks again.”
“Like I said, I didn’t do anything; it was all you! Love you, cuz. Talk to you later!” and the line went dead.
We were both beat and decided to go home for the night. We got some dinner, and sat around talking about the littlest, seemingly unimportant aspects of the afternoon’s hunt. We told my mom the whole story and everyone told me congratulations one more time and they all went off to bed. Also, my grandma was staying the night; therefore, my home for the night was our couch. I laid there, in the dark, wide-eyed, for what seemed like forever. I could not stop, I was over analyzing ever single little thing that I had done in that stand. My heart was racing so badly, there was absolutely no way I was falling asleep. My phone buzzes, “Hey, we’ll be there in like 2 mins. Unlock the door, please!” it read, and I did so. When my brother and sister-in-law arrived, everyone heard, and got out of bed at 2:30 in the morning, to sit around my living room and listen to me tell this story, yet again. My brother had several more in depth, technical questions. He was analyzing what happened almost as much as I was. At around 4 a.m., everyone finally laid down again. I tried again also, and got about an hour of sleep from 5 until 6, and then my brother was going through the house waking everyone up saying that it was time to go “NOW!”
We all made it up and out, and it was just as cold as the previous morning. We went for our McDonald’s run, but I was so incredibly sick to my stomach there was no way I could eat. We got to the farm, finally. I got out and got my gear together, and I was ready. Everyone else was still sitting in the truck. “Ok guys I know it’s early and you’re eating and everything, so I’m sorry, but, we have to go! Like we need to go, like, right now.” They all laughed at my anxiousness and got out to get ready. The time had come. I realized quickly that not everyone planned on running to the deer like I did. Once again, they all laughed, and I slowed to a walk, annoyed.
We got to the corner that we had stopped at the night before. In the daylight, his trail was as clear as anything, not a blood trail, like I needed, but a trail of footsteps that would have to suffice. My dad, uncle, brother and I all hunched over to start looking for blood. Finding a blood trail, a bad one especially, is usually a very difficult task. But with two feet of bright white snow on the ground, there was really no need to bend down to get a better view; anyone could see blood in the snow even several feet away. Someone would find a drop here, and a drop there, but there was definitely not an adequate trail. After a few very anxious minutes, my brother decided that since the foot trail was so clear we should just follow it. “We’ll get to him eventually.” So we were off.
This time we were so close I could not take it anymore. I could not just follow the trail; I was power-walking and no one was trying to stop me, because they all were too. It was a much different pace than walking through the same terrain just a day earlier. Although, it was certainly still not ideal, and breaks were still needed. We got to “The Duck Pond.” Blood had picked up a little and seemed to split in every direction right at the tree line. The pond we had come to is surrounded by some incredibly thick timber, meaning it is not in the slightest easy to walk through, and the thousands of sticker bushes did not help either. We all had the mindset that we were going to be tracking this deer a very long way, due to the small amount of blood. But since it seemed to go in two different directions, my brother decided that he and my uncle would venture through the pond area, and my dad and I could follow the outside up and around and just meet them on the other side and we would continue, easy enough. We started walking again.
After just a few steps we stopped because of the yelling and screaming coming from just inside the woods. My brother and uncle were high fiving and screaming and in that moment, I am pretty sure that my heart actually stopped. “Come here! Come here! Look!” We ran over to them and I was frantically looking around and could not get the words out when I did not see anything. “…WHAT!” I sounded mad.
“Right here! Don’t you see it?” it was not my deer. It was perhaps the next best thing though. It was a spot right inside the trees where he had laid down for the first time after getting shot. “He’s dead! He’s dead! He’s gotta be close!” everyone was yelling and high-fiving and hugging and congratulating.
“Ok,” I thought, “this is good, very good, BUT, it’s still not the deer.”
“All right, he’s dead, he still might be kinda far off though. You guys stay here and me and Uncle Tom will go up and by the pond and look. It’s really thick and nasty in here so just hang tight” apparently, Shaun had this all figured out. So they started up the hill to the pond, and we waited. I am actually pretty proud that I did not pass out. I stood there silent as we watched them walk farther, listening to “there’s blood, here’s some, oh it’s gettin’ heavy now, maybe he’s closer than we think.” I was dying inside. I was shaking again and the adrenaline had me feeling like I could lift a car off of someone or something like that. My heart stopped again.
The screaming and yelling and high-fiving resumed even more than before. It was impossible to make out a word either of them were saying and my patience was nonexistent. I figured it was another spot like the first one. They finally gained a bit of composure and my brother yells “HE’S HERE KENZ! IT’S HIM! YOU GOT HIM! HE’S DEAD!”
I’ve never covered ground so fast in my life. Slick slope, huge hill, sticker bushes, none of it mattered anymore. I was there in a matter of seconds. Nothing could ever explain the feeling I had. Everyone was screaming, and I got a hug from everyone and then another hug from everyone and then another. I could not even speak. The three of them, who had all helped me so much in my first few years hunting, were just as happy as I had ever seen them with deer of their own. Another round of hugs commenced, followed by about 400 pictures. No I am not exaggerating, 400 is just about exact. Before we got to the cleaning process, I had one thing to do. My uncle had already sent pictures to my cousin, so I got my phone out and dialed.
“KEEEENZ,” he answered, “CONGRATULATIONS!” We talked for a few minutes, and I told him all about the morning leading up until then. He was just as excited as the rest of us, but so upset that he was not there with us. “You might not be here, but you’re the only reason this deer’s on the ground!” he tried to interrupt but I continued, “I am telling you! We would not have come back out here yesterday if you hadn’t talked us into it!”
“Well I didn’t do anything. But you know what you gotta name him though, right!”
I paused, confused. “Uh, what?”
“’Broccoli Cheddar’!” I burst out in laughter and told the guys what he had said, everyone thought it was hilarious, and it stuck.
“Broccoli Cheddar” was a 10 pointer, and the biggest deer mounted in my family to date. He will be done at the taxidermist in a few long weeks, and get a well-deserved spot on the wall in my house, complete with a plaque displaying his name. Hunting is most certainly not a sport for everyone. People love it or hate it, and that’s ok. The slogan for a certain camouflage brand, “Mossy Oak” simply states, “It’s not a passion; it’s an obsession.” This could not be more accurate. Although 99% of hunting is being miserable, bored, and extremely uncomfortable, we as hunters continue to inflict this upon ourselves year after year because of one thing, that one percent. That 1% that is pure, mind-blowing, unimaginable, soul satisfying joy. That one percent is what I crave, every minute, of every day, of every week, of every month that I am not experiencing it. As a hunter, that one percent is what I live for.
I focused all energy on my breathing. One after another, I took deep, slow breaths. Still I felt I could go into cardiac arrest at any second. I fought my body’s natural reaction. I fought to stay as still as humanly possible. I fought, and I failed. My entire body, in particular my hands, were vibrating worse than the few leaves left on the snow covered trees surrounding me. I could hear every beat of my heart, thudding in my ears, each beat growing louder and faster. I stared down through my scope, and placed the crosshairs once and for all. After one final breath that caught in my throat worse than any before it, I braced myself, tensed my shoulder, and as gently as I could manage, squeezed back with my index finger on the trigger.
It was the morning of December 7th, 2013. I was on my way to my favorite place on earth, the woods. But on this particular morning, even though it was shotgun season, I was not headed to the woods to hunt. My uncle and I were going out this morning to retrieve his kill from the previous night. As we left my house around 8:30 that morning, it was about fifteen degrees outside. And if that was not bad enough, there was an inch of ice on the ground. That is still not too bad, right? Add about two feet of snow on top, and that is what the two of us were up against. Simply opening a door to outside, the cold felt like it slapped me across the face, and we were going to willingly spend hours out in it. To put in nicely, it was not the smartest idea anyone had ever had.
We did the traditional McDonald’s run and proceeded to complain for the remaining twenty minutes of our drive about how cold it was. We arrived at the farm and quickly realized two things. There was no possible way the two of us would be able to drag this deer the whole way out, and, also, there was no possible way we were able to drive through the snow to get her. What were we going to do? There was obviously only one answer. We got the sled out of the back of my uncle’s truck, and began our walk. It felt like someone was forcibly holding my feet to the ground with every step I took. It took us about forty minutes to walk just over 300 yards, a walk that should take around five minutes at most. And, of course, we had all of the accessories, everything one could imagine, from a sled to a gun to all of the proper cleaning materials, and much more including two cell phones, which we figured would come in handy when the first one of us collapsed. Getting hot to the point of sweat when it is fifteen degrees outside is a very unique feeling, and not my favorite. Ice was forming on our faces because the sweat was quite literally freezing.
Once we finally reached the deer, all we had done was walk, and yet we were both sure we would die, right there, in the middle of the field. Fortunately, we were wrong. Unfortunately, even though we both felt like passing out, we had not even scratched the surface of the amount of work we got ourselves into or how excruciatingly hard it would be. After a terribly short break, and tons of hysterical laughter and picture taking, we had the deer loaded onto a sled, with a long strap pulled through a hook on the front. We each took an end of the strap, and we were off!
We went a total of about twelve feet, and it was most definitely time for a break. We continued like this for quite a while, fifteen feet, take a break, ten feet, take a break. “See that stick stickin’ up? We’ll get there, and take a break.” At one point, the two of us stopped for about the 453rd time, and both, at the same time stated that we were seeing things in the sky. “I think I’m hallucinating, because I definitely see what looks like a circle of rainbow in the sky right there.” By this point, when we stopped for this break, I could do no more than free-fall back into the snow. I lay there sure I was about to die. “That right there? No, I see it too. What is it?” I had no idea, but was very curious. I started taking pictures, still laying surrounded by this oversized blanket of snow. We later found out that we were not hallucinating, and that the thing we saw in the sky is called a “sun dog” and they are caused by extreme cold temperatures and made visible by a reflection off the snow. Luckily, we were not going crazy.
Before taking off again, I had to start shedding some layers, which I later learned is an absolute surefire way to get sick. But anyway, our work was from far from over. The spot I had just been laying in was at none other location than the bottom of the very steepest hill on the entire farm. This was precisely the reason that this happened to be our longest break. “This isn’t even, worth it. I mean, we could just, leave her here.” My uncle said breathlessly. “Come on, it’s just a doe. She’s not even that big and the meats probably bad by now anyway.” He was trying to talk himself into leaving her there. After weighing the pros and cons, we decided we had already worked too hard not to finish the job. As tempting as the idea was, we both readied ourselves again.
Unlike the usual ten feet we had been averaging, going up this steep hill was a completely different story. If we stopped once, we stopped at least twenty times going up this fifty-yard hill. My body was covered in several layers of insulated, thick, made-to-keep-you-warm clothes, which is why I was also covered in sweat. My skin felt like I was burning alive, and my muscles did not want to move ever again. The only thing that was not on fire was my face and hands, the only skin exposed. That skin, on the other hand, was beginning to turn an interesting and mildly alarming shade of reddish-purple. We were so close, though, we could see the truck now from the top of the hill.
Our next break, an impressive eleven feet closer to the truck, was another interesting one. I ended up just sitting in the snow this time. The breaks were getting longer and longer each time, and this particular one consisted of me taking pictures of the snow-covered timber. After a gust of wind blew by and we both saw the snow dislodge from the branches and slowly drift to the ground, my Uncle Tom decided that I had to get a picture of that for my photography class. He insisted on his idea and bent down to start a snowball. “Umm, what are you doing!” I laughed.
“Get your camera ready.” I did, and he lobbed a snowball into the woods. I mistimed the picture, so we tried again. I had the camera ready and counted down from three. He threw again and I took another picture. The two of us burst out in hysterical laughter. “How do you, throw a snowball, into the woods, and not hit anything!” I yelled between laughs. The snowball went straight through the trees and made a perfect half circle shape as it landed on the ground about thirty yards into the woods. At this point, the two of us were exhausted to the level of being delirious and both genuinely thought that this was the funniest thing we had ever seen.
Eventually, after stalling this break to get the ever so important picture, we decided we were both far beyond done and needed desperately for this to be over. We made our last few trips, and after every bit of three hours of what felt like the hardest manual labor any human being had ever done, we were finally sitting, layers shredded, soaked in sweat, in the truck. I may or may not have blacked out at this point, but I do remember sitting absolutely motionless, in complete silence, for several minutes. My uncle finally realized something, water—we needed water, badly. We downed a bottle of water each in less than a minute, and went for seconds.
My uncle called his son, my cousin and another hunting buddy of ours, Tom, to let him know that we, surprisingly, were both still alive. “So you guys are headed back out to the buddy stand now, or…?” was his question after hearing about how miserable we were. Our exhausted laughter rang out through the truck. “Where we’re headed, is to pick up your grandma and then to a booth at Panera to sit and thaw with some broccoli cheddar soup. Son, you have no idea what McKenzie and I have just been through.” My uncle explained.
My cousin retorted with “Well that’s nice. You told all the guys at work ‘Oh yeah I’m going down south for some deer huntin’’ and now you’re gonna go back and they’ll all ask ‘Oh Tom, whadja get down south hunting?’ and you’ll say ‘Yeah, I got some BROCCOLI CHEDDAR SOUP from PANERA BREAD!’”
“Son, you just don’t understand, that’s all real easy for you to say sittin’ on your couch under a blanket with your feet up. I thought we were going to DIE.” After a few minutes of going back and forth and my cousin making us feel guilty and telling us how this would probably be the night that someone kills a big buck, he had talked us into it. Even though it was already time to be going back into the woods for an appropriate time for an afternoon hunt, we soon realized that I did not have any of my gear with me. After a victorious, “Awesome! Keep me updated. Love you guys, good luck!” from Tom, we were headed back to town.
We hung his doe up and gathered my gun, tags, and license and got back in the truck yet again. The entire half hour drive was nothing but the two of us saying how much we did not want to be going back. Just when our heartbeats began to return to normal, there we were back at the farm, anything but ready to get out of the truck and walk through that snow again. After talking my uncle into letting me sit by myself, which I had never really done, we reluctantly got out of the truck, gathered all of our stuff, and took off walking, again. If I had to guess, we probably complained more on that day than anyone, ever. We debated which spots to go to, and quickly settled on the two closest places. I went to the closest stand, and my uncle stopped and sat on the ground about fifty yards before that. Climbing into and sitting in a twelve foot tall, ice covered, metal deer stand is definitely not the safest, or smartest thing anyone has ever done. But fortunately, that was just what I did.
Finally. After what I had done that day, I deserved to sit in a deer stand for a couple of hours. By the time I was stationary, gun ready, and could finally relax, it was 3:30, way too late to be just getting out; it got dark at 5! Although I was thoroughly exhausted and it was twelve degrees outside and I was sitting on metal covered in an inch of ice, I would still not have rather been anywhere else. Of course, it is easy to say that now, but at the time, I really would have much rather been sitting in a warm booth at Panera eating some Broccoli Cheddar soup. But, I was there, and I was going to make the best of it. The next hour or so of my life was filled with perhaps the only thing to do in a deer stand when there are no deer to be seen, appreciate.
One does not even need to see deer when out hunting, a hunter just feels lucky to be there. I took in the beautiful sight of hundreds of yards of open field covered in an almost undisturbed thick layer of glistening bright white snow. The only snow out of place caused by the tracks of the animals I could only hope and pray I would come in contact with that night. The woods wrapped around my stand from the back looked like a painting with every branch covered perfectly in the weather. No sounds of people yelling or arguing or technology clicking, just the perfect silence of the woods. This interrupted only occasionally by the chirp of a bird or squirrel, or the snapping of a twig finally breaking under the weight of the ice and bouncing off every other branch on the way down before landing gently in the snow.
If one has ever been to a big city such as Chicago or New York City, they know the almost unbearable smell of the garbage and smog and pollution that is inescapable in the air. Sitting out in the woods in southern Illinois is about as far from that as one can get. Although most of us are used to it and do not notice it on a daily basis, there is a certain sweetness to the air where we live. I took a deep breath and knew that that was the definition of fresh air. I could even pick up a trace of the crops that just a few short months before filled the fields I looked upon. It was perfect, the most amazing, incredible feeling, or so I thought at the time. Something as simple and inactive as sitting in the middle of the woods can make anyone feel better about themselves, about the world. It gives me the feeling that the world has not gone totally mad. Everything in this setting feels sane, for now at least. If there was one bad thing at that point in time, it was that sitting on the irremovable ice in non-waterproof clothing was not the most comfortable thing in the world. But I was over it because everything else was just so breathtaking. Just as I was thinking that nothing could possibly make this afternoon any better, I was proven wrong. From my right, in the next field over, appeared about half a dozen deer. Game on.
Trying to stay as calm as possible, I brought my gun up to my shoulder, just to get a look. They were much too far to shoot at just yet, but they were headed my way. I brought the scope to my eye to get a better look, all does. Not what I was hoping for most, but better than nothing. To put it calmly, I was instantly filled with pure adrenaline. My hands started shaking, and I could feel my heartbeat increasing quickly. A small creek separated the field directly in front of me with the field the deer were lazily eating their way across. But they were coming across, no doubt. Keeping an eye on the deer constantly, I slowly reached for my phone to contact my uncle, who I was not sure could see them yet. A few text messages were traded. He could see them, and was watching just as intently as I was. I put my phone away, and tried to calm my breathing, as all I could do was wait. It was like they knew I was waiting in anticipation, and they stood, walking slowly around just the other side of the creek, for what seemed like hours. It was around 4:45 in the afternoon, and if I was going to get a shot before dark, they needed to get on the same page I was. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and tried everything to get myself to calm down, but it just was not happening. I continued to watch helplessly through my scope as they played around, doing everything except crossing the creek. Another deep breath needed, I looked up from my scope. My head snapped so quickly to my right I was surprised my neck did not break.
There he was, standing tall and proud, the King Of The Woods. All I saw was bone. Granted I could only see one side of his rack, but that one side looked better than anything I had ever seen before. He had just stepped out of the woods forty yards to my right, heading to check out the does in the next field. He was not in a hurry though, taking a couple steps, then putting his head down to eat. There was no more trying to stay calm. That was completely out of the question. It was just not possible. Trying not to process fully what was going on, I, trying with every fiber of my being to stay quiet and make as little movement as possible, rotated my gun and myself. I rested my elbow on the arm rail, and found him in my scope. I clicked off the safety and flinched, praying to God that he would not hear it. Success. I gently laid my shivering right index finger on the trigger. I pushed the gun back into my shoulder, held as steady as I could manage, stopped him in his tracks, and took my chance.
The sound exploded in my ear, and I looked up in just enough time to see him jump up and kick his back legs at least six feet in the air. He took a couple leaps and stopped about fifteen yards from where he was. For a split second, I was absolutely frozen. Once my body caught up with my brain, I reached into my pocket and reloaded as fast as I could, which was not very fast at all in the condition I was in. The deer repeated his actions and took a couple more bounds and paused again. At the time, I felt great about the shot and thought he was going to fall right there. But the shot must not have as good as I previously believed, because off he went. Like nothing had happened, he walked off and got on the other side of the next tree line before I could manage to shoot again. I was stunned, paralyzed even. I had no clue what to do. I brought my scope up to my eye again to see if I could spot him. Too many trees in the way—that had been my one and only chance. I did not know what to think.
I sat still for a few seconds. I felt a mixture of complete absence of emotion and every emotion all at once. My blank stare was interrupted by the buzzing coming from my pocket. Not until then when I went to set down my gun did I realize how bad it was. It was not just my hands shaking; it was my entire body. I was shaking, due to a mix of coldness, but mostly adrenaline, roaring through my veins. My hands, arms, knees, my entire core was shaking uncontrollably. It was a little scary actually. I tried, and failed, to snap out of it, but I knew I had to get to my phone. On about the third try I could finally touch the “answer” button. “He-hello?”
“Can you still see him?” was the first thing that my uncle could blurt out.
“N-no, he, he’s be-behind the the trees...” I can’t believe he could understand me at all.
“I can see him, I’m watching through my scope right now. Was it a good shot?”
“Wait! What? Y-you see him? What’s h-he d-doing? Where is he?”
“Ok, take a breath. He’s just walking up towards the pond. I can’t tell for sure, but he looks hurt. He’s walking reeeally slow, Kenz.” At this point I just remember squealing something that not even I could decode. “Are you still loaded? Is the gun loaded?”
“Wha-what? Um, yeah. Yeah it’s lo-loaded.”
“Ok. Listen to me carefully. Unload the gun. Unload. The. Gun. Then climb down, CAREFULLY, and just, stand there. Just stand there, and don’t do anything. I’m getting up now and I’ll walk to you, ok?”
“Yeah, o-ok.”
“Ok, be careful McKenzie.” Click. I slid my phone back into my pocket, and tried to gather all my stuff and shove it in any pocket I could find. I focused for about ten seconds to unload my gun, and my brain went back to going in every direction at once. In perhaps the most dangerous minute of my life, I tried my hardest to concentrate while I made my way down the ice-covered steps, still with my body shaking as if I were having a seizure. It is very scary for one’s body to shake that badly and have absolutely no control over it. I did as I was told and when I finally made it down safely, I took a few steps out from the woods and stood there, and waited. It was too dark to try and see anything, so I just stood there, shaking. A few seconds later, I was almost knocked to the ground from being tackled into the biggest hug. “KENZ! How big was he! Six! Eight!” my uncle asked almost as excited as I was. I just smiled, because I thoroughly believed he was way bigger than that, but did not want to say so and have him end up being smaller than I made it out to be. “I don’t really know, he was…he was big.” Another tackling hug followed. “What about the shot? Where’d you hit him?” and my smile faded. “I mean, I felt good about it at first, but, I just don’t know.”
“Ok, Kenzie, listen to me. You’re going to walk me over to where he was when you shot, and we’ll see what we can find.” He loaded his gun, and I practically sprinted to where the deer stood when I first saw him. He followed and we turned on our flashlights. “No, no look! Right here right here, doesn’t this look like tracks from where he kicked?” I was surely yelling by this point. “But wait where’s…” my voice got quiet, trailing off at the end. I cleared my throat. “Where’s…I don’t see any blood…” it was barely a whisper.
“If you saw him kick that hard, he’s hit. You hit him Kenz!” my uncle tried to reassure me as we both kept looking for any more sign. I went from crazily ecstatic, to unable to speak.
For the next few minutes, we looked separately, trying to cover ground quickly. “Hey, right here maybe, what’s this?” I said in his direction half-heartedly. He hurried over and this led to the third bear hug of the night so far. He was much more enthusiastic than I was. “That’s it! Right there! You did it! Kenz, I can’t believe this, he’s gotta be down! Congratulations!” another hug ensued. I was not trying to be negative, but also did not see this as something to get my hopes up about. My throat felt scratchy and I felt my eyes start to water. “It’s like one drop. I don’t even see any more. Maybe it wasn’t as good of a hit as I thought.”
“McKenzie! You found blood! The deer’s dead!” Even he knew that I knew that just because we found blood did not mean that deer was dead. He was trying really hard to make me feel better, and I was thankful, but it just was not working. “Keep looking” he encouraged, as he did the same. I went back to searching. As dumb as I felt, I felt I could start crying at any minute. I was trying to calm down when a few short seconds later, “Right here, come here!” I snapped out of it and ran over to where he was looking. I did not see any blood, “What?” I said quietly. “Right there, look!”
I bent down. “Is that, hair?”
“It suuure is!” For some reason, I still was not convinced. He could tell and said “Well you said you saw him stop up there right?” motioning to the corner where I last laid eyes on him before he took off walking. “Yeah, right at the corner.” I said.
He responded with “Ok, here’s what we’re gonna do. We’ll walk up there, and see if we can see anything at the corner. But whether we do or not, we’re gonna have to go back and let him sit since the blood isn’t very heavy. But believe me, that deer is dead, McKenzie.”
I just nodded my head and we walked slowly up to the corner of woods, our eyes straining in the darkness to scan the new field in front of us. We could see his trail. His trail was footprints, lazy, dragging footprints, with a single drop of blood here and there. I was so incredibly disappointed, thinking of all the things I could have done better and that I should have taken my time more to get a better shot. I tried to put the worst thought to the back of my mind, but it would not leave. He could be injured if the shot was not good enough. I shivered and then sighed at the thought of that. My uncle spun around and just looked at me. “Look, I know you’re gonna think I’m crazy, but we gotta get outta here. I know, I know. I really am sorry. I know how much you wanna keep goin’, but we just can’t. We can’t ok? Don’t hate me I just know that if we keep walking we’re gonna walk up on him and jump him up and that’s the last thing we wanna do, ok? We have to let him sit overnight. We’ll come out very first thing in the morning, all right? I’m so sorry.” He expected me to throw a tantrum.
“Ok” was all I could get out.
I turned around and started walking to the truck. He caught up to me and gave me a pep talk all the way back, explaining to me all the reasons that the deer had to be dead. I am not sure I said a single word. I was glad he was convinced, but I also knew that he was just trying to make me feel better. He was probably trying to keep me from breaking down into tears, or, throwing up. I was not sure which would come first. I held my composure as well as I could and we got back to the truck and thawed in the heat for a few minutes.
Once we were on our way home, he of course wanted to call every contact in his phone. “Maybe we should just wait. I don’t wanna tell everybody and then not find him tomorrow.” I was still almost choked up.
“Are you kidding! We’re telling everybody!” I didn’t feel like arguing. “We’ll call your dad first!” he said and dialed the phone and set it on the middle console on speaker phone. “Hello?” We just looked at each other.
“Hey Rick, I know you’re at work, but, Kenzie’s got somethin’ she wants to tell you!” he blurted out. I shot him “the look”.
“Ohh, kay?” there was silence.
“I uh, well don’t freak out, but I shot a big buck…” I started, my tone not at all matching my words.
And of course, that was followed by “WHAT? ARE YOU SERIOUS? MCKENZIE. How big! Where! What stand! How big! How far! Did you find blood! How big!” My eyes started to water again. My uncle could tell and took over for me. He told him the whole story, no detail left out. It was a much more optimistic story than I would have told. Another round of praise and excitement and congratulations came through the phone. But my dad was at work, so he congratulated me again and ended with saying he would see us in a couple of hours. My uncle picked up the phone and dialed the next on the list, my brother, Shaun. Shaun lived in Michigan at the time, but is likely the biggest hunter of all of us, so we knew we had to tell him. He picked up. “McKenzie’s got somethin’ to tell you!” my uncle yelled.
“Kenz… what happened?” he said in a suspicious tone knowing that we had been hunting that afternoon. I sat quietly.
“MCKENZIE, WHAT HAPPENED” he demanded excitedly.
“Don’t get too excited, because we didn’t even find him ye-“
“HIM! Did you just say ‘HIM’! You just said ‘him’. McKenzie I’m not even playin’ right now, how big is he!”
“Um, I mean, I don’t really know to be honest. I didn’t see him for very long.”
“Ok well…” he whined through the phone, “you did see him, and you obviously shot him, so about how big was he? Just guess. Was it a good shot? How far? How big is he!”
Finally allowing myself to get a little excited and crack a smile, “Bro, I don’t know, he’s, he’s big.” My uncle was overjoyed that he finally knew I wasn’t going to have a breakdown right there in his truck, so he gladly took over the rest of the story again.
“So like, do I need to come down there?” we all laughed. “All right it’s what, like, almost 7? Ok, well, try not to freak out too bad, the deer’s dead.” I kind of wished everyone would stop saying that. But we all laughed it off and hung up after more congratulations. I turned to my uncle, “He can’t drive down here in the middle of the night!” I said.
Trying to let me down easy, he said, “Kenz, I, I think he was kidding about that.”
I considered it, but explained that “No, I don’t think so. I know Shaun a little better than you, I don’t think he was joking.” Realizing how not smart it would be for him to do this, my uncle dials Shaun again.
He answered “What!”
“Hey um, you’re not really coming down are you? ‘Cuz that would be dumb…”
“Kenz, I just packed a bag and I’m puttin’ my shoes on. I’ll be there at like 2. I’ll text you to unlock the door. I’ll bring McDonald’s!”
My uncle tried his hardest to talk him out of it and finally my brother asked, “Kenzie, was it, a good shot?”
I paused, “I don’t, I mean, there was barely any blood…but, Shaun when I shot he just jumped and kicked sooo har-”
“All right I’m leaving now. It may take a little more than 8 hours, ‘cuz there’s an awful blizzard up here right now. I’ll send updates, see you in a ‘lil bit.” He hung up.
My uncle wanted to call him again and tell him not to come, but we both knew it would not work, so we left it alone. We were back to town now and decided on going across town to my other uncle’s house where the doe was hung up. We got there and went through the whole story again, with more congratulations. My Uncle Tom said that there was one other person we needed to call, he dialed my cousin and handed me the phone, and my two uncles resumed talking. Tom picked up the phone, “Hey! What’s up?”
“Hey, it’s Kenzie”
“Kenz! How was the hunt? Either of you get anything?” he said hopeful.
“Ok, listen. Don’t freak out, but-”
“KENZIE, DID YOU SHOOT A BIG BUCK!”
I paused and laughed a little. “Well actually, yeah.”
“Oh my God! Kenzie! Congratulations! How big? What stand? How far? How big? What time? Blood? How big!”
I laughed and took a deep breath and told the whole story again, finally a little more upbeat about it.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe that, that’s too cool. You gotta send pics tomorrow, ok? Congrats again!”
“Oh and thanks by the way!” I laughed.
“Thanks? For what?”
“Um, hello! You forced us into goin’ out! In our minds we were halfway to Panera already!”
“Oh no, this was all you!”
“No way! What are you doin’ anyway?” I asked.
“Oh, I just stepped out to answer to the phone, I’m out at dinner.”
“Tom! You left Jess by herself! Get off the phone and go back in!”
“No it’s no big deal, it’s just like this dinner and dancing type thing for all the guys in my Coast Guard unit and their wives. Jess knows everyone; she’s not by herself. I just knew you guys were goin’ back out this afternoon, so I just left for a minute and stepped outside.”
“I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t have kept you this long! Why didn’t you tell me? Oh my God, Ok, get back to your dinner and I’ll talk to you tomorrow! Thanks again.”
“Like I said, I didn’t do anything; it was all you! Love you, cuz. Talk to you later!” and the line went dead.
We were both beat and decided to go home for the night. We got some dinner, and sat around talking about the littlest, seemingly unimportant aspects of the afternoon’s hunt. We told my mom the whole story and everyone told me congratulations one more time and they all went off to bed. Also, my grandma was staying the night; therefore, my home for the night was our couch. I laid there, in the dark, wide-eyed, for what seemed like forever. I could not stop, I was over analyzing ever single little thing that I had done in that stand. My heart was racing so badly, there was absolutely no way I was falling asleep. My phone buzzes, “Hey, we’ll be there in like 2 mins. Unlock the door, please!” it read, and I did so. When my brother and sister-in-law arrived, everyone heard, and got out of bed at 2:30 in the morning, to sit around my living room and listen to me tell this story, yet again. My brother had several more in depth, technical questions. He was analyzing what happened almost as much as I was. At around 4 a.m., everyone finally laid down again. I tried again also, and got about an hour of sleep from 5 until 6, and then my brother was going through the house waking everyone up saying that it was time to go “NOW!”
We all made it up and out, and it was just as cold as the previous morning. We went for our McDonald’s run, but I was so incredibly sick to my stomach there was no way I could eat. We got to the farm, finally. I got out and got my gear together, and I was ready. Everyone else was still sitting in the truck. “Ok guys I know it’s early and you’re eating and everything, so I’m sorry, but, we have to go! Like we need to go, like, right now.” They all laughed at my anxiousness and got out to get ready. The time had come. I realized quickly that not everyone planned on running to the deer like I did. Once again, they all laughed, and I slowed to a walk, annoyed.
We got to the corner that we had stopped at the night before. In the daylight, his trail was as clear as anything, not a blood trail, like I needed, but a trail of footsteps that would have to suffice. My dad, uncle, brother and I all hunched over to start looking for blood. Finding a blood trail, a bad one especially, is usually a very difficult task. But with two feet of bright white snow on the ground, there was really no need to bend down to get a better view; anyone could see blood in the snow even several feet away. Someone would find a drop here, and a drop there, but there was definitely not an adequate trail. After a few very anxious minutes, my brother decided that since the foot trail was so clear we should just follow it. “We’ll get to him eventually.” So we were off.
This time we were so close I could not take it anymore. I could not just follow the trail; I was power-walking and no one was trying to stop me, because they all were too. It was a much different pace than walking through the same terrain just a day earlier. Although, it was certainly still not ideal, and breaks were still needed. We got to “The Duck Pond.” Blood had picked up a little and seemed to split in every direction right at the tree line. The pond we had come to is surrounded by some incredibly thick timber, meaning it is not in the slightest easy to walk through, and the thousands of sticker bushes did not help either. We all had the mindset that we were going to be tracking this deer a very long way, due to the small amount of blood. But since it seemed to go in two different directions, my brother decided that he and my uncle would venture through the pond area, and my dad and I could follow the outside up and around and just meet them on the other side and we would continue, easy enough. We started walking again.
After just a few steps we stopped because of the yelling and screaming coming from just inside the woods. My brother and uncle were high fiving and screaming and in that moment, I am pretty sure that my heart actually stopped. “Come here! Come here! Look!” We ran over to them and I was frantically looking around and could not get the words out when I did not see anything. “…WHAT!” I sounded mad.
“Right here! Don’t you see it?” it was not my deer. It was perhaps the next best thing though. It was a spot right inside the trees where he had laid down for the first time after getting shot. “He’s dead! He’s dead! He’s gotta be close!” everyone was yelling and high-fiving and hugging and congratulating.
“Ok,” I thought, “this is good, very good, BUT, it’s still not the deer.”
“All right, he’s dead, he still might be kinda far off though. You guys stay here and me and Uncle Tom will go up and by the pond and look. It’s really thick and nasty in here so just hang tight” apparently, Shaun had this all figured out. So they started up the hill to the pond, and we waited. I am actually pretty proud that I did not pass out. I stood there silent as we watched them walk farther, listening to “there’s blood, here’s some, oh it’s gettin’ heavy now, maybe he’s closer than we think.” I was dying inside. I was shaking again and the adrenaline had me feeling like I could lift a car off of someone or something like that. My heart stopped again.
The screaming and yelling and high-fiving resumed even more than before. It was impossible to make out a word either of them were saying and my patience was nonexistent. I figured it was another spot like the first one. They finally gained a bit of composure and my brother yells “HE’S HERE KENZ! IT’S HIM! YOU GOT HIM! HE’S DEAD!”
I’ve never covered ground so fast in my life. Slick slope, huge hill, sticker bushes, none of it mattered anymore. I was there in a matter of seconds. Nothing could ever explain the feeling I had. Everyone was screaming, and I got a hug from everyone and then another hug from everyone and then another. I could not even speak. The three of them, who had all helped me so much in my first few years hunting, were just as happy as I had ever seen them with deer of their own. Another round of hugs commenced, followed by about 400 pictures. No I am not exaggerating, 400 is just about exact. Before we got to the cleaning process, I had one thing to do. My uncle had already sent pictures to my cousin, so I got my phone out and dialed.
“KEEEENZ,” he answered, “CONGRATULATIONS!” We talked for a few minutes, and I told him all about the morning leading up until then. He was just as excited as the rest of us, but so upset that he was not there with us. “You might not be here, but you’re the only reason this deer’s on the ground!” he tried to interrupt but I continued, “I am telling you! We would not have come back out here yesterday if you hadn’t talked us into it!”
“Well I didn’t do anything. But you know what you gotta name him though, right!”
I paused, confused. “Uh, what?”
“’Broccoli Cheddar’!” I burst out in laughter and told the guys what he had said, everyone thought it was hilarious, and it stuck.
“Broccoli Cheddar” was a 10 pointer, and the biggest deer mounted in my family to date. He will be done at the taxidermist in a few long weeks, and get a well-deserved spot on the wall in my house, complete with a plaque displaying his name. Hunting is most certainly not a sport for everyone. People love it or hate it, and that’s ok. The slogan for a certain camouflage brand, “Mossy Oak” simply states, “It’s not a passion; it’s an obsession.” This could not be more accurate. Although 99% of hunting is being miserable, bored, and extremely uncomfortable, we as hunters continue to inflict this upon ourselves year after year because of one thing, that one percent. That 1% that is pure, mind-blowing, unimaginable, soul satisfying joy. That one percent is what I crave, every minute, of every day, of every week, of every month that I am not experiencing it. As a hunter, that one percent is what I live for.