The decision was made without my input. I would be riding with Dave, the owner of the camp, my stepdad’s best friend. Dave would put me in a spot on the mountain where deer moved around a high point. It was rough country where most people don’t go. That makes it a place deer find useful.
We were still two hours until light as I sat at the kitchen table. It was a highway of rides smashed into each other: a shiny aluminum tray of scrambled eggs was scraping up against an old piss-colored Tupperware full of bacon. Toast was buttered and towered in heaps on a couple goodwill plates by the dropped mess of silverware and the pepper shaker and the massive jar of generic grape jelly.
There were granola bars on the table. Lunchmeat and cheese for sandwiches to pack and take.
Our presence, 7 or 8 of us, all men, all white, from young teens to men in their 50s, it was something small- like a distant fire- seen from far away/ perhaps from the ridge up above the Miller’s farm/ perhaps from the eyes of a crow in a dark tree/ and maybe from somewhere else, I don’t know. The wild notion that we could have been seen by the operators of a UFO from some other galaxy never occurred to me back then, but these days it doesn’t seem so far-fetched. On December mornings in the late 1980’s Pennsylvania was stomping grounds for spike bucks and teenage stoners and travelers from remote reaches of other universes.
How do I know this?
I don’t know.
How do you not know it?
In Dave’s blue van, he turned on the heater and the stars were so bright in the morning sky. We said almost nothing despite our familiarity. Sometimes people who know one another from certain pageants like deer camps tend to only be able fully function in true character when they are upon the stage, in a scene, with everyone at once. Isolated from the crowd, individuality is morphed and shaken. Shapeshifting happens when our inner selves are knocked out of the comfort zones we cling to so much.
The ridges on both sides of the valley were high dark spruces and weathered hardwoods and I saw them from our place on the road and they struck me with awe that morning. I was nervous; I still don’t know why. My minisculeness kept sliding out of me and then back in, like a lit up ghost playing games with my skin. I was in body and then out of body as I took breaths in gasps that made me feel as if I could be sick or shit myself from all the breakfast I had eaten.
Dave was a steady man, his hands were strong and worked, and he had a gentle rugged nature about him. He looked me deep in the eye whenever he busted my stepdad’s balls about something, and he grinned this magnificent smile that charmed me into believing that he had told the joke just for me/ just so me and him could laugh together. Our intimate bond rarely moved beyond that sort of thing, though, which was fine with me. I felt respected in Dave’s company. I felt like I belonged inside that small group of Pennsylvania men.
Halfway to the spot we would hunt, Dave turned the radio on. It was the local country station and the early morning DJ talked for a few moments in a comfortable tone for the hour before he played a song.
What he played I had heard before. For a kid of 17, I had a decent knowledge of country music already. And yet, I was still discovering. Still being selected by other forces, other beings or powers or whatever, to receive country singers and country songs in ways that maybe no one else who had ever lived had ever received them before. There is no telling with these kinds of things, you see. We walk around humble and cobbled by our own insecurities, but in the end it’s all bullshit.