This December piece was so profound for me on many levels, and I am compelled now to respond. When I first hunted deer, elk and antelope in the mid 1970's, my partner and mentor was from a line of subsistence hunting loggers, and the sole criterion was meat - any season, any gender, any time. Concern for the animal was limited to a close, clean shot where compassion was more or less sidelined in favor of filling the freezers and keeping an eye out for the warden. As the years passed and I was exposed to sportspeople and started bow hunting, there was a welcome shift not only towards compassion, but towards a sense of the links between all living things and what a fine, fine line, if any, separates the 'inner' from the 'outer.' During a body work session in India in the 90's, decades and continents away from the Rocky Mountains, I had a traumatic experience. As she deeply worked my chest it triggered insufferable emotional pain and tears. It was around images I had retained of the elk chests I had ripped open during field "dressing." When it was over I realized a repressed horror that I never knew existed as the result of all the violence I had ignored. I realized then that if I were to hunt again - and this was not a given - I would have to absorb, deeply, indigenous ways of approaching the hunt. Be well.
It was not. I know it's a hard subject for a lot of people, so I try not to talk about it too explicitly, but no, this is part of how I feed my family, trying to be as local and as directly responsible as I can be for what we consume. 💗
I enjoy your writing about moving through your part of Montana. In my book club we have read a number of books that focused on the founding and ongoing mission of the National Forest Service. There is some irony in your beautiful photograph of the old logging road. Even logging roads are indicative of market distortion I am afraid. While the NFS certainly has multiple missions, from the beginning it has focused heavily on taking stands of trees that MIGHT NOT BE ECONOMICALLY HARVESTED and building the roads for private interests which makes it a "good deal". Clearly without forest management, there would be even more fires so I understand the issue. It is most interesting that even in those cases, government works hand in hand with industry to allow them to privatize their gain (and socialize the loss), ie. taxpayers maintain the logging road. It is these sorts of policies that are never on the chopping block when we harangue over "waste, fraud, and abuse).
Learning that the Forest Service was the country's biggest road-building industry, and subsidizing it for the timber industry, was what turned me deeply into environmentalism as a teenager. The privatized gain, socialized loss is just maddening.
I like Pondercast. The host, Laurie Brown, as a the interdisciplinary artist's residency with me in Banff and started the project because she was interested in connecting with night and darkness again. It started as a short, well-produced podcast about night. (Laurie used to be a CBC radio host; she's got a great voice. Pleasant to listen to.)
While it is maddening to many as it veers far from perfection, forest management is "better" in the US and Canada than other places. Perhaps because of the vast resource and the governance model. The approach in Southeast Asia, post-Soviet lumbering out of Siberia and of course the Brazilian approach stand in stark relief I am afraid.
When I have some difficulty getting to sleep, one of the later programs on the radio is CBC As It Happens. Having grown up in a border ciity, a bit of Canadian accent is pleasing to me.
I love how you write about hunting, your children's amusement, the different ways of understanding our relationship with the land, what/how we eat. I also love that commune keeps popping up for you--those accidents of misreading are when meaning opens up, as you write about finding in such a deeply layered way. And Enheduanna! I want more people to know about that history, excited for the link!
"Those accidents of misreading are when meaning opens up." So true! When you can stop and think about what you can glean from it. Not fully "the universe is trying to tell me something," but not *not* that, if you know what I mean.
I thought you might like the Enheduanna story! Seems right up your alley. If you delve into her, I look forward to reading your thoughts.
I don't buy the "honoring the animal" bullshit when it comes to grip and grin photos. If you're a Christian, do you selfie yourself taking communion? Well, don't answer that, considering how many people selfie themselves meditating, praying, whatever, because if you're that type of person you probably do when you can get away with it. None of that is ceremony, it's a decent level of "hey, look at me and what I did/do!" narcissism, which certainly has its place ... this just isn't it.
It's the same people who claim that using a Native theme for a sports team mascot is "honoring" Indigenous people. I find it enormously off-putting.
I totally agree. The praying and meditation comparison is a good one. Perfect, actually. And when I see those photos, I feel like the entire process couldn't have been pursued with respect, either.
I loved the Kinship anthology, Nia. Speaking of art, I saw a great quote today by Tom Cox, a writer in the UK and author of _21st-Century Yokel_: "the way the world is set up today, if you're making art, music, writing books, even if you're doing it well and making people happy, it's so easy to feel you're not doing enough because it's so hard to earn a living from it. But remember: that's not your fault. It's the era's."
That's an incredibly heartening quote that I will be sharing with several friends immediately! Thank you, Greg.
So glad you like the Kinship anthology! I'm having trouble getting into my current sci fi book (Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series), so maybe it's time for one of those rare intervals of reading nonfiction at bedtime. The Kinship essays are perfect for that.
I haven't read that one! I enjoyed Aurora and New York 2140. I think my problem with his books, though, is that they're very well written and thought out but I find them hard to engage with. Too crafted, almost, with characters I find difficult to connect to. I'd skip the Mars books but they've been recommended several times by different people!
Well that describes it for me! I want to like it more than I do. And feel a little badly about that! But there are, as we all know, so many books and so little time ...
Oh! I like that bit about the meaning of life (needs, relationships) and shifting that to creating a system to accommodate "living" that doesn't degrade the system has me off on a total tangent re: human resources.
Thank you for taking us along with you on your hunt and in the cold and back to living in common!
Thank you for coming with me! Writing about hunting is a little tricky, but it's the being in the woods part I really love and what a beautiful day it was.
I liked the way he phrased it. It made me think immediately of Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics model, which is about meeting human needs within ecological limits (both local and planetary), which cities like Amsterdam in the Netherlands have already started implementing. I am very interested in the tangent of Human Resources because I can totally see that! Makes me think also: nurses, teachers, parents, forest rangers, ...
Thank you for taking us out into the woods with you. You make me want to be a hunter, which is really saying something, given my decades of vegetarianism! Also, you reminded me to get tickets for the Hunter exhibit about Enheduanna, and you helped me to find a Christmas present for my niece (the Kinship anthology). So thank you for all of those gifts.
Those are very kind words, especially about the hunting! It's a tricky subject. I was on my way back to being a vegetarian when I started, but probably never would have if my parents hadn't fed us by hunting through my childhood. But truthfully I gather a lot more wild huckleberries and chokecherries than I do anything else :)
I hope you write about the Enheduanna exhibit. I think I came across that in the MIT Technology Review newsletter and it sounds so interesting. I would love to learn more about her.
I hope your niece likes Kinship! They're coming out with another series in about a year titled Elements, which I'm looking forward to.
Antonia,
This December piece was so profound for me on many levels, and I am compelled now to respond. When I first hunted deer, elk and antelope in the mid 1970's, my partner and mentor was from a line of subsistence hunting loggers, and the sole criterion was meat - any season, any gender, any time. Concern for the animal was limited to a close, clean shot where compassion was more or less sidelined in favor of filling the freezers and keeping an eye out for the warden. As the years passed and I was exposed to sportspeople and started bow hunting, there was a welcome shift not only towards compassion, but towards a sense of the links between all living things and what a fine, fine line, if any, separates the 'inner' from the 'outer.' During a body work session in India in the 90's, decades and continents away from the Rocky Mountains, I had a traumatic experience. As she deeply worked my chest it triggered insufferable emotional pain and tears. It was around images I had retained of the elk chests I had ripped open during field "dressing." When it was over I realized a repressed horror that I never knew existed as the result of all the violence I had ignored. I realized then that if I were to hunt again - and this was not a given - I would have to absorb, deeply, indigenous ways of approaching the hunt. Be well.
What an incredible story. Thank you for sharing this.
So tell if you will/can: was it an intentional miss?
It was not. I know it's a hard subject for a lot of people, so I try not to talk about it too explicitly, but no, this is part of how I feed my family, trying to be as local and as directly responsible as I can be for what we consume. 💗
I loved reading this. So much to ponder.
💓💓💓
I enjoy your writing about moving through your part of Montana. In my book club we have read a number of books that focused on the founding and ongoing mission of the National Forest Service. There is some irony in your beautiful photograph of the old logging road. Even logging roads are indicative of market distortion I am afraid. While the NFS certainly has multiple missions, from the beginning it has focused heavily on taking stands of trees that MIGHT NOT BE ECONOMICALLY HARVESTED and building the roads for private interests which makes it a "good deal". Clearly without forest management, there would be even more fires so I understand the issue. It is most interesting that even in those cases, government works hand in hand with industry to allow them to privatize their gain (and socialize the loss), ie. taxpayers maintain the logging road. It is these sorts of policies that are never on the chopping block when we harangue over "waste, fraud, and abuse).
Eager to give the Pondercast podcast a try.
Learning that the Forest Service was the country's biggest road-building industry, and subsidizing it for the timber industry, was what turned me deeply into environmentalism as a teenager. The privatized gain, socialized loss is just maddening.
I like Pondercast. The host, Laurie Brown, as a the interdisciplinary artist's residency with me in Banff and started the project because she was interested in connecting with night and darkness again. It started as a short, well-produced podcast about night. (Laurie used to be a CBC radio host; she's got a great voice. Pleasant to listen to.)
While it is maddening to many as it veers far from perfection, forest management is "better" in the US and Canada than other places. Perhaps because of the vast resource and the governance model. The approach in Southeast Asia, post-Soviet lumbering out of Siberia and of course the Brazilian approach stand in stark relief I am afraid.
When I have some difficulty getting to sleep, one of the later programs on the radio is CBC As It Happens. Having grown up in a border ciity, a bit of Canadian accent is pleasing to me.
I love how you write about hunting, your children's amusement, the different ways of understanding our relationship with the land, what/how we eat. I also love that commune keeps popping up for you--those accidents of misreading are when meaning opens up, as you write about finding in such a deeply layered way. And Enheduanna! I want more people to know about that history, excited for the link!
"Those accidents of misreading are when meaning opens up." So true! When you can stop and think about what you can glean from it. Not fully "the universe is trying to tell me something," but not *not* that, if you know what I mean.
I thought you might like the Enheduanna story! Seems right up your alley. If you delve into her, I look forward to reading your thoughts.
I don't buy the "honoring the animal" bullshit when it comes to grip and grin photos. If you're a Christian, do you selfie yourself taking communion? Well, don't answer that, considering how many people selfie themselves meditating, praying, whatever, because if you're that type of person you probably do when you can get away with it. None of that is ceremony, it's a decent level of "hey, look at me and what I did/do!" narcissism, which certainly has its place ... this just isn't it.
It's the same people who claim that using a Native theme for a sports team mascot is "honoring" Indigenous people. I find it enormously off-putting.
I totally agree. The praying and meditation comparison is a good one. Perfect, actually. And when I see those photos, I feel like the entire process couldn't have been pursued with respect, either.
I loved the Kinship anthology, Nia. Speaking of art, I saw a great quote today by Tom Cox, a writer in the UK and author of _21st-Century Yokel_: "the way the world is set up today, if you're making art, music, writing books, even if you're doing it well and making people happy, it's so easy to feel you're not doing enough because it's so hard to earn a living from it. But remember: that's not your fault. It's the era's."
That's an incredibly heartening quote that I will be sharing with several friends immediately! Thank you, Greg.
So glad you like the Kinship anthology! I'm having trouble getting into my current sci fi book (Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series), so maybe it's time for one of those rare intervals of reading nonfiction at bedtime. The Kinship essays are perfect for that.
You're very welcome, Nia! I had that same difficulty with the Mars Trilogy, though I loved Years of Rice and Salt.
I haven't read that one! I enjoyed Aurora and New York 2140. I think my problem with his books, though, is that they're very well written and thought out but I find them hard to engage with. Too crafted, almost, with characters I find difficult to connect to. I'd skip the Mars books but they've been recommended several times by different people!
I think you've nailed it for me as well. I want to like his work more than I do.
Well that describes it for me! I want to like it more than I do. And feel a little badly about that! But there are, as we all know, so many books and so little time ...
Oh! I like that bit about the meaning of life (needs, relationships) and shifting that to creating a system to accommodate "living" that doesn't degrade the system has me off on a total tangent re: human resources.
Thank you for taking us along with you on your hunt and in the cold and back to living in common!
Thank you for coming with me! Writing about hunting is a little tricky, but it's the being in the woods part I really love and what a beautiful day it was.
I liked the way he phrased it. It made me think immediately of Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics model, which is about meeting human needs within ecological limits (both local and planetary), which cities like Amsterdam in the Netherlands have already started implementing. I am very interested in the tangent of Human Resources because I can totally see that! Makes me think also: nurses, teachers, parents, forest rangers, ...
New to me poem that seems applicable to your hunt:
My Autumn Leaves
by Bruce Weigl
I watch the woods for deer as if I’m armed.
I watch the woods for deer who never come.
I know the hes and shes in autumn
rendezvous in orchards stained with fallen
apples’ scent. I drive my car this way to work
so I may let the crows in corn believe
it’s me their caws are meant to warn,
and snakes who turn in warm and secret caves
they know me too. They know the boy
who lives inside me still won’t go away.
The deer are ghosts who slip between the light
through trees, so you may only hear the snap
of branches in the thicket beyond hope.
I watch the woods for deer, as if I’m armed.
"The deer are ghosts who slip between the light
through trees, so you may only hear the snap
of branches in the thicket beyond hope."
LOVE this. Thank you!
I'm pondering and I'll let you know when I get my thoughts into digestible order.
Thank you for taking us out into the woods with you. You make me want to be a hunter, which is really saying something, given my decades of vegetarianism! Also, you reminded me to get tickets for the Hunter exhibit about Enheduanna, and you helped me to find a Christmas present for my niece (the Kinship anthology). So thank you for all of those gifts.
Those are very kind words, especially about the hunting! It's a tricky subject. I was on my way back to being a vegetarian when I started, but probably never would have if my parents hadn't fed us by hunting through my childhood. But truthfully I gather a lot more wild huckleberries and chokecherries than I do anything else :)
I hope you write about the Enheduanna exhibit. I think I came across that in the MIT Technology Review newsletter and it sounds so interesting. I would love to learn more about her.
I hope your niece likes Kinship! They're coming out with another series in about a year titled Elements, which I'm looking forward to.