Hunting, and Finding
After simmering on summer from wheat harvest through Labor Day, restive hunters are ready to welcome a change of season. They take to the fields on the first of September in search of the turtledove, the first gamebird of fall that may be harvested legally.
Dove hunting never appealed. Dove isn’t bad to eat -- both bites are pretty good -- but opening day is almost invariably too hot. The weather seldom matches the tradition: Bird hunting is rightly a cold-weather business. Marshaling a group of hunters in long sleeves and pants through a CRP field in 95-degree heat just feels weird to me, like trying to get in the Christmas spirit on a South Florida beach.
To me, the Kansas fall does not arrive in earnest until the second weekend of November, long after the thermometer has dropped out of the triple digits, the kids are back in school and the red maple leaves have fluttered away. True fall appears when the soybeans begin to surrender their lusty, late-summer green to the inevitability of autumn. It generally takes a hard freeze.
Thereafter my mind can drift to the pheasant hunts of my boyhood.
A half-dozen or so hunters, my father’s friends, would traverse the fields in Lincoln County. We’d admire the flawless azure sky and savor the fresh prairie air. The pheasants would roar upward in a frighteningly wonderful crescendo of feathers and flapping wings. The staccato report of buckshot would echo across the prairie. The roosters (well, mostly) would fall earthward, and the dogs – Ginger, B.J., Girdy, Bubba, Belle, Sparky and others since gone to glory – would bring them to our feet.
They were grand times. Occasions to look forward to, and back on.
There was something magical happening on those frosty November mornings long ago. Hunting trips had an ethereal mien: They were fleeting and yet still somehow lasting moments rendered from a curious alchemy of gunpowder, camaraderie and cold beer. One knew the trips would end but also last forever.
And so they have.
So here’s the secret: It’s not about the hunting. Not really. And it never was. I didn’t realize this until later, when I got to thinking about my friend Steve Roark. Roark, who hails from Southwest Missouri, has been visiting Lincoln for more than 30 years. We share a bond: We both end the first day of bird season watching the sun set over Milfred’s pond.
Milfred was my grandfather. He owned a country store for decades. In his retirement, Milfred raised crops and fed a few cows. He stayed as busy as he wanted, never more so, and he made it home each night for supper promptly at six or so. There was none of Thoreau’s quiet desperation to the old Lutheran. He went to the fields because he wanted to live deliberately. And he did.
Milfred could tell time by airliner contrails in the sky. He knew, to the minute, when the prairie chickens would fly in to roost. I think he named them. He understood the cadence of Mother Nature’s rhythms. He also knew, from his catechism, that some things were Most Certainly True. Whether that stemmed from deep faith or actual knowledge I neither know nor care. In either case, there was much to learn from him.
Among them was Milfred’s practice to drive to the farm each evening and watch the sun retire. After Milfred died, Steve insisted we continue the tradition. So we did.
We didn’t talk. We didn’t joke. We – sat. Thought of olde times, of absent friends. The western horizon would do its thing -- I’ve never been disappointed by a Kansas sunset -- and then we’d head home with something that felt, rightly, like a sense of reverence.
I started going back out there at sunset after I moved home. At first, it felt lonely. Then -- it didn’t. Ten minutes might turn into two hours. I could talk to Milfred out there, or my dad -- or my Father. I never said a word aloud. There was no need.
To the uninitiated, rural life evinces a romantic sense of tranquility that is, in point of fact, complete hogwash. Nothing is easier or simpler in the country. Life doesn’t move more slowly merely because there is less traffic and fewer folks around. Steve’s life, like mine, like yours, like Milfred’s, isn’t easier just because evenings at the home place are quiet. Relationships, families, work -- are all messy and occasionally wrenching. Even Out Here, it’s good to have a touchstone. And perhaps especially Out Here.
Roark wanted to watch the sunset because it offered a singular chance to witness something that was dependable, predictable and certain. Life, Milfred and Steve both knew, was seldom those things. But the sun going down -- was all of them, amen.
In the end, that’s why we returtned to our own little roost by the silo west of the pond for those many decades. It wasn’t about hunting.
It was about finding.