 |
| Maine Magazine - November 2012 (pgs. 63-67) |
Almost a year has passed since the Vose family deer camp was invaded for the first time by WOMEN! That sordid tale was already partially told last year in a series of blog postings (For more see: Girls at Deer Camp? - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Maine Magazines Response)
What had not yet been revealed from this adventure, was the actual professionally published story written by Sophie Nelson and photographed by Erin Wallace (ALOVESUPREMEPHOTO).
Please visit Maine Magazine (themainemag.com) to see the article as published in the November 2012 edition, titled "Alive and Well in Lonely Country". As they have the photographic rights, the online version contains dozens more photographs than I am allowed to publish! So, be sure to take a look! So with that little introduction complete, here is the REST of the story . . .
ALIVE AND WELL IN LONELY COUNTRY -
Written by Sophie Nelson, w/Photographs by Erin Wallace - The leaves have fallen and turned to rot,
and the sky can only manage varying shades
of gray. Photographer Erin Wallace meets
me in Augusta and together we continue
north into the fast-falling night. Beyond
Brewer, we follow a scar of highway through
endless forest, navigate gnarly back roads,
and eventually find it: a camp with a set
of caribou antlers over the doorway, the
place my friend Steve Vose escapes to every
autumn. In the warm interior, I encounter a
blur of camouflaged limbs and Bean boots,
rag rugs, and a wood stove. I take a seat and
drink when they’re offered to me. Faces come
into focus. I smile and receive several smiles
in return.
 |
| Dad plays the banjo |
Steve’s father is also named Steve. He wears
a soft, green corduroy shirt, worn jeans, and
a neon-orange hat, and welcomes me with a
warm handshake. Steve senior is joined by
his friend John, and when I inquire about
how they know each other, John kindly
offers the backstory. John is originally from
Caribou and met Steve in the 262 Engineer
Battalion in Calais/Brewer. Steve, John, and
their other military buddies gather at Deer
Camp as often as they can, but this year just
the two of them could make it.
“I want to tell you about a year when
shooting a deer really mattered.” Steve
senior says, confirming my suspicion that
Deer Camp often has little to do with deer.
He throws a glance toward John, who shifts
his position and drops his gaze to hear
Steve senior trace the story already etched
in his memory. “Deer Camp 2005. It was
the military group so we met in Calais. We
were bummed because two were going to
be deployed to Afghanistan. I had promised
I would take John’s boys ice fishing while
he was gone. After breakfast, we went out
for a hunt and John shot a buck. It was the
first deer we ever shot at Deer Camp, and it
boosted moral so much we went to Walmart
and bought one of those talking heads. It
became the mascot. We didn’t meet again
for another two years because of the war.”
It’s Veteran’s Day, and I think about the way
Portland’s Congress Street looked in the
morning, filled with proud men in crisp suits
and little boys and girls waving miniature
flags with a fervor that didn’t quite fit the
gray day.
As with any tradition, a healthy degree of
nostalgia comes into play at Deer Camp.
It’s clear that Steve and his brother Matt
know the 2005 story well. I imagine that
similar stories filled their home when
they were kids, and that those stories, like
this one, made them wonder—however
subconsciously—what about Deer Camp
wasn’t being communicated, or couldn’t be.
“How old do you have to be to come to Deer
Camp?” I ask, and Steve senior answers
without hesitation: “Old enough to drink.”
 |
| John and my brother Matt trade stories |
The camp we’re in is Matt’s. Unlike the
neighboring camp, a sizable house topped
with a satellite dish, Matt’s is fairly small
and rustic. Steve senior recently renovated
his own camp, which is about an hour and
a half from the one we’re in, and the men
tell me that modernizing old camps, or
building them from the ground up with all
the amenities, is a growing trend. I’m glad
they met me here, in a camp with neither
running water nor cell-phone reception, but
I also wonder about the less quaint aspects
of Deer Camp that I may be missing out on. I
am, after all, here with the sole intention of
breaking the cardinal rule: “What happens
at Deer Camp stays at Deer Camp.”
As a group, they are quiet at first. Steve is
his usual jokester self, and I sense familial
playfulness in Matt, but it takes a little while
to emerge. John, in head-to-toe camouflage,
seems to prefer listening to talking, and the
same goes for Preston, Matt’s friend and a
fellow engineer at the Bucksport Mill. They
tell me that another one of their colleagues,
a “city boy” from Waterville, will be joining
us later. Preston pipes up when I ask the
men about the first time they ate an animal
they had killed. “It was a frog with a BB gun,”
he says. “I shot it and my dad said, ‘You shot
it, you eat it.’ So I cooked up some frog legs.
They really taste like chicken.” Matt adds,
“Partridge for me. It always tastes better
when you killed it.”
 |
| Erin plays us a song |
After a dinner of meat and potatoes, I
help Preston pump water for the dishes
and Matt places a pot on the woodstove
at his dad’s request—Steve senior wants
to be sure Erin and I have the option of
washing up with warm water before bed.
We reconvene around the stove, and Steve
senior brings out his banjo. Over the course
of the evening, Steve and Matt never seem
more like brothers than when they’re
singing and tapping their muddy boots in
unison. Their voices are good and strong and
gruff around the edges. “You picked a fine
time to leave me Lucille/With four hungry
children and a crop in the field…,” they sing.
I’m the only one familiar with Simon and
Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” and offer a sloppy
solo, nodding my head in time with Steve
senior’s, watching his mouth shape the
words I almost know, watching a smile come
over his face when I get a line just right. I’m
unsure of myself, but he keeps pulling the
song from me; he is the kind of teacher that
tricks a kid out of thinking she has nothing
left. When Steve senior and John leave—
they’re heading to Calais to hunt that spot
where John got a deer half a dozen years
ago—I am sad to see them go. Chris from
Waterville has brought his iPad, and we
resort to his hip-hop playlist. Preston nods
off on the couch with Mally, Matt’s affable
yellow lab, asleep on his knee.
In the morning, I head to the dock with a
steaming cup of coffee. The air tastes sweet
it’s so clean, and I imagine the water does
too but don’t dare disrupt it with a dip of
my hand. In the spirit of trying new things,
I eat corned-beef hash along with the eggs
Steve scrambles, and don an orange vest
and hat over my odd assemblage of winter
gear. Hunting starts up with Steve’s truck.
Erin, Steve, and I bump along back roads
toward a location he has in mind, scanning
the ditches for partridge collecting pebbles
for their gullets. I try to concentrate but I’m
preoccupied with the gun rattling between
my thigh and the truck’s center console.
 |
| Dad tells a story about a really BIG fish that got away! |
As the car slows to a stop on the side of an
old logging road, I sense a shift in Steve; his
mood takes on a new and appropriate depth.
He moves soundlessly down the path, rolling
his feet carefully over the stones so that
they don’t crunch under his weight while
pointing out moose prints, nibbled branches,
and scat containing tufts of coyote fur. Steve
sets up speakers that correspond with an
electronic game caller so that, from within
the blind, we need only push a button to fill
the silence with the wails of a wounded hare.
We are in for coyote, not deer. In a whisper,
Steve tells me about overpopulation and the
trouble coyotes have caused. He doesn’t eat
coyote, but he does make pelts with their
hides.
We wait. My fingers and toes prickle as they
freeze. Steve tells me about the season he
spent 200 hours in a deer stand. He saw
some deer, but none that were shooting size.
The rule is one deer per year, and Steve is
after a deer that will meet or exceed the 10
pointer his Mom shot in 2008. He speaks
bitterly about the hunters who “go out at
night and kill 15, 16 a year.” As a boy, he used
to wander around his family’s many acres
in Calais without spotting a single deer, and
he worries that his sons will never have the
opportunity to hunt.
 |
| I can never stop smiling at deer camp! |
The wail of the electronic hare crescendos.
After about an hour, we call it quits, pack
up the blind, and begin talking at normal
volumes—though after so much whispering
it seems inconsiderate somehow. Steve tells
me it’s time for target practice. I lean the
butt of the .223 R15 rifle into my shoulder,
center the log between the crosshairs, and
pull the trigger. The sound and the kickback
I expect, but the feel of the bullet ripping
though the barrel of the gun is terrifying. We
spend the morning shooting, driving down
logging roads en route to somewheres that
seems like nowheres, listening to country
music and gnawing on home-smoked duck
jerky, passing only hunters in trucks and
men driving 18-wheelers. Maine is a vast
and empty state, and that is precisely what
Steve loves most about it. I understand the
appeal on a theoretical level, but in actuality
I find these woods coarse and lonely.
 |
| View from the porch at deer camp |
Late in the afternoon, cold to the bone and
marveling at Steve’s dogged approach to the
day, I somehow spot three partridge on the
side of the road. I holler and point and, in the
blink of an eye, Steve is out of the car poised
to shoot. His excitement is palpable, rippling
off of him and warping the air around us.
At some point, we startle the partridge into
flight and a vague shape—a brown smear
on the gray sky—appears over the treetops.
He shoots and the bird plummets. Soon
afterward, he emerges from the woods
carrying the floppy carcass by the feet. With
his calloused and bloodied hands, Steve
spreads open the bird’s intricate wings.
Then, still intoxicated with adrenaline, he
pulls the carcass apart to reveal the perfect
pink breast that will be his dinner.
Later that afternoon, I see another partridge
on the side of the road and it’s my turn
to approach it with a gun in hand. I hold
the heavy shotgun to my shoulder and
“He tells me that he has the right shotgun, but the
wrong bullets, and as if on cue the ducks ascend
to form a flying V and come curling toward us,
honking irreverently.”
Steve follows closely behind, whispering
instructions in my ear. Raw excitement
overcomes him again, and rather than focus
on the task at hand, I wonder about the source
of it. I wonder where to aim to kill the bird,
and whether or not I am capable of pulling
it apart in the event that I somehow manage
to shoot it, and, in that case, if I have any
business killing it in the first place. I shoot and
miss. To my relief, the partridge disappears
into a dense, moss-covered patch of forest.
Steve checks for it. We wait for a while. It
never reappears.
 |
| The young men of deer camp |
Toward the end of the day, as pinkish dusk
settles over a swamp, Steve spots a flock of
ducks at the mouth of a river. I can hear them
but not see them, despite his best efforts to
point them out. He tells me that he has the
right shotgun, but the wrong bullets, and as
if on cue, they ascend to form a flying V and
come curling toward us, honking irreverently.
On the way back to camp, I think about the
photos that hunters collect of themselves
holding their kill by the antlers. Despite
their unsteady smiles—or perhaps because
of them—they don’t look happy, exactly.
To me, hunting seems more about thrill
than kill, about appreciating life in an
acknowledgement of death and thereby
living with a rare acuteness, even if only for
the amount of time it takes a doe to flick her
white tail. I think about Steve, who describes
the habits of animals with the knowledge and
tenderness of a parent prepping a babysitter.
He wakes when they wake and sleeps when
they sleep. He studies their miraculous
anatomy and warps his mouth to mimic their
sounds.
This part of Maine is not in fact empty.
