Quickening the blood

"The frost is on the pumpkin and the fodder is in the shock and it is high time we think of Lake Laura, the prized buck and other such noble pursuits".

How do I explain this to my wife? Where does the draw of burning cedar, wet wool, and burbling brook come from? What makes the "pop" of the drum stove, the yellow glow of gas lights and the "hiss" of 2 feet of snow sliding off the corrugated roof so comforting? Where do I start to understand this myself? The fat months of summer have past and the quickening of the blood suggests its time once again to forage, root around and provide for the coming of the lean months. All of that rubbish would explain my need to get into the woods perfectly well if I had been born to a family of hunters but this has simply not been my experience. Where does this interest in shotgunning birds, building deer blinds, and begging leave from my wife and children come from?

For me the quickening comes into full swing sometime in October when the hard frost has bent the tomato plants in my garden. Grouse season in Northern Michigan begins around the 15th of September but the end of summer hasn't yet given up it's Bermuda shorts. The days are still warm. Cutting through a thicket of poplar behind a dog is hot business. These early season days are small knocks at the door of consciousness announcing a visitor whose arrival always takes me a little by surprise. Our boats are still in the lake, I haven't yet put up all of the wood I'll need for the winter, the grass needs to be cut once or twice more. Then, the first hard frost of October hits and I wake to realize what most of my neighbors have noticed two weeks prior. I'm behind the ball, in the weeds. September's warm days have lulled me into procrastination once again. By October the pull wells up, a strange tonic in the blood. "Move", it whispers, "Too late to lay in the hammock. Time to do what all animals do. Move, root around, forage...". In short, the seasons seem to have left me behind and I am restless.

                      

The first sign of the pull comes with my bedtime reading. Robert Wegner's "Legendary Deer Camps" and Jim Harrison's "Just Before Dark" take their place on the bureau next to the bed. Both books are read over and over, year after year. They sit idle during the spring and gravy months of summer but during the fall of the year they are read almost obsessively. Jim Harrison spent much of his childhood and adult life tromping the woods within 40 miles in either direction of where I live. Much of his writing carries an intimacy of shared place. I appreciate that. I also appreciate that the man can spend a day behind a dog and turn it so intimately inward. I can never write like that. I am without the knowledge and the song. By nature, I am lazy. Harrison is truly a sportsman and a poet. Robert Wegner is an archivist and his book belongs in every deer camp. The photos and prints of camps are the best you'll find. The chronicling of the camps, their members and guests is done with a devotion to detail that is indicative of a lifetime of study and deep love. There isn't a time I pick up that book without seeing something new. I don't think I'll tire of it.

                                         

                                                                                         

The pull sets in hard during October, even though the first time I'll most likely venture into the woods after Whitetail will be during Michigan's black powder season in mid December. October brings the Fall "Work-bee" to Foggy Creek Camp, a camp I hope to be a guest of for a long while. It's to Foggy Creek that I annually beg leave of my wife and family for two weekends a year; the first, during the "Work-bee" in October and then again in December, during "Muzz Camp". Foggy Creek rests in the bottom of a 50 odd acre cedar swamp north of Hessel Michigan, in the state's Upper Peninsula. Its owned by three brothers from the Soo and it got its name from a reminiscence of Steve or Tony Fazzari's conversation with their father, Ken, after one of Ken's fishing trips. The boys asked Ken how his trip had gone, to which eldest Fazzari replied "Oh, not so well...the stream was foggy, but then so were we". The camp is known by other names, but "Foggy Creek" is the name that sticks and rightly so. An "Up North" deer camp wouldn't be worth a damn without a foggy day or two.

Camp consists of a Finnish, square cedar cabin and a utility shed with a privy. Scattered throughout the property are various deer blinds in various states of repair. The creek from which Foggy Creek Camp derives its name is a small meandering thing that flows from springs throughout the swamp, disappearing and then reappearing all over the property. It's bottom near the cabin is clear, deep and sandy and it flows all year.

Foggy Creek Camp isn't luxurious by any means, nor is it particularly attractive. It is what it should be, solid, a little soiled and sturdy. Slow improvements have been made over the past 6 years to make its hunters a little more comfortable. Tony ran raceway wiring through the cabin and hooked it up to a couple of RV batteries, much to the disappointment of his brother Joe, who argued fervently for "keeping it rustic". We can now watch "Jeremiah Johnson" and see the faces of our cards at night without squinting. We still get water from the stream next to the cabin, heat with the original 55 gallon drum stove and sleep on the metal bunks that were there when the place was bought. In our eyes the camp represents much more than its physical presence might suggest. Shoulders lift, burdens lighten, and we are once more gathered together to join in nobler pursuits. We eat, drink, debate, and hunt. What more could we possibly want "when the frost is once more on the pumpkin"?

Full circle now and back to my previous question. How do I explain the importance of my one or two weekends of hunting? I can start by stating emphatically that it is not about killing. Sometimes we take deer, many times we pass. Most of the time it is not about the animal at all. The animal is the catalyst, but not the grail. Camp is the grail. Foggy Creek offers more than a place to be comfortable after the hunt. It offers more than a prime spot to shoot deer. It provides community and communion for disciples that come together every year at a prescribed time. Foggy Creek provides a sense of ritual. We walk familiar trails blanketed in pure snow to familiar blinds. We fall to sleep with the tang of whisky and cigars in our mouths and cedar in our nostrils. We tell the same stories year after year and speculate on the possibility of deer in the morning. We pack nights ahead of the day we leave for camp, send e-mails and plan menus. We get excited about the "idea" of camp and when we arrive we feel somehow "bigger". Our spines straighten. So, forgive me gentle reader if I've stumbled into romantic rambling. We know we're better men.