MEDITATIONS ON THE BOX IN THE WOODS

Thinking about going back to finish the deer blind Monday and help Justin mount the door. He made a frame at home of 2x4s, measured to a perfect fit, and put a piece of 5/8 inch plywood on the frame. He will have the hinges in place, everything ready to go. It will take however many screws to fix the hinges to the wall, placed with that wonderful invention the cordless drill. Zip. Done. No more wrenching a screw with a screwdriver. I saw the finished door yesterday when I went to the house to see the race. He explained the process. He made it a point to buy warped wood that costs less. He knows how to take the warp out of the wood. The 2x4s have a warp and the plywood has a warp. He said it was a bitch. He opposed the warps, put them together warping away from each other. He runs the screws in from the end where they match and gradually screws the opposing warps together along the length of the frame. Held by wood screws, the warps will gradually even out. He said it will be wet after a rain, and when it dries, the wood will dry to the new shape. It has rained all day today, light sprinkles on and off, after a true thunderstorm yesterday of torrential rain, lightning flashing and booming thunder. The weather forecast looks like rain all week. May have to wait til next week to finish the exterior painting. I'd rather finish it on the same wave of energy I painted the whole with. Which, however, amounts to druthers, and druthers don't always get priority. It's one of them it-is-what-it-is kinda things. 

I told Justin the opportunity to paint a cube in the woods, a wrap-around mural of trees, is one of the great moments of my life. Whoever heard of painting trees on a cube in the woods? At one point I made what to my aesthetic eye was a major mistake. I thought: how many art critics are going to be by here in the course of a year? Only two. Me and Lucas. At the same time, it happened outside my conscious mind. My conscious mind knows better, but I did it anyway in a moment of saying no to conscious mind for aesthetic considerations. You might say, it just happened. Because it just happened, I trusted it. I wanted to change it, but it was too pure, too spontaneous a moment to erase. I'm having a hard time starting to tell it, ashamed in a way that I did something so radically against my aesthetic sense, and see at the same time it is actually quite wonderful. Standing on the ladder painting trees on the side with the openings for shooting, I painted a tree coming out of the top of the vertical rectangle, and continued the tree down below, running a tree right up the middle of the scene. I knew better than to do that. Totally knew better. Yet my hand ran the brush in a straight line above and below. I said to self while doing it, this is really stupid. I asked self, How many art critics will see it? Me! I messed it up. I could have painted over it, but chose not to. It simply came too spontaneously and against my conscious will to ignore it. I chose to let it be. Turns out, it's a little bit spooky, woo-woo, or what have you. Every time I stepped out away from the cube to look at it from afar, I only saw that straight line running up the middle. I sighed acceptance like the art director did it and I have to accept it. I kept it to myself, telling self I'm the only one who will notice and I accept it as what happened at the moment, actually held it as a kind of special moment, a living moment, almost sacred because it came so from outside my conscious mind. All the rest of it was mind with a line of beyond-mind interjected. I came to where I liked it for its not-mind quality.

Later, at home putting the camera chip into the computer, I saw it when this image came up full screen. The cross. I about wept. I wondered what the cross was about. Justin will be shooting from the cross. It came to me the cross is a prayer that goes with each projectile for the soul of the being whose life it ends. For myself, I have issues with killing. I really don't like to do it. But that is for myself alone. I'm not a missionary, so I have no desire or impulse to advise someone else about something I hold for myself. It seems a little creepy to me to hunt from a pillbox like in WW2. It seems a bit impure. So what. The Daniel Boone ways of hunting are over. This is a time when hunters have full-time jobs, families, houses, vehicles to maintain, less and less space for hunting every year as new people come in and don't want people hunting. I'm glad to help Justin make his deer blind; I appreciate his skill and conscientious attitude toward killing. He likes to go straight to the heart in one shot, so the buck's knees give out and it drops straight down. It feels nothing. Suddenly falls asleep. No fear, no adrenaline coursing through its veins. I appreciate that in who Justin is. Hunting is about deception. The wild animals are hyper-alert, requiring a clever mind to outwit them. A box in the woods, a bait pile of apples and corn, a trail-camera strapped to a tree to time when the buck you're looking for passes through, hunting as it's done today. I'm glad Justin has a hunting territory he can call his own. The land the box is on belongs to my friends, Lucas and Judy. Justin does maintenance work on the house and does some weed-eating around. They have six acres. Justin has six adjoining acres of woods, giving him twelve acres to hunt. He has been one of the great friends of my life. I'm grateful to have a part in arranging for him a good hunting place.    
   

Vada is three. She will probably get her first buck next year.with a rifle. Daddy will take her with him at least a few times this year. In his design of the box, he made it big enough that he could stretch out in a sleeping bag and Crystal and Vada can sleep on the floor too. Crystal is a hunter. I applaud the good training in taking his baby along. He can teach her the importance of being quiet, of being still, of waiting. I can't think of better training for a three and four year old than being still for long stretches of time with purpose. Vada will be one of the kids who gets her picture in the paper with a buck she killed pre-school. The kid has incredible intelligence. She'll make a good hunter. She'll be a babe hunter in her teens. The guys at school who are hunters will be her friends. She'll be safe among them by way of respect. They'll know she can handle a firearm, and one thing they'll know for sure: her daddy will stomp a mud hole in their ass and walk it dry. She will be able to fight any of them and kick many of their asses. And she'll still be a babe. Probably only older girls will be able to take her down in a fight. By the way, country kids still fight. They all survive it. Parents don't sue other parents over their kids fighting. Here, when a boy turns up at home with his face banged up, his daddy might say, Did you kick his ass? Instead of grounding him for a month. He might ground the kid if he failed to kick the other kid's ass. Country people know how that behavior works among kids. The thing daddy's understand that mommies don't seem to get is that two boys mad each other get into a fight and try to hurt each other, after which they're best friends. I was never a fighter and see no glory in it whatsoever. I bring this up by way of saying I'm in full acceptance of Justin liking to do what he likes to do. I like to do what I like to do. Why shouldn't he? I don't like to kill things. He does. So what? He's feeding a family. I'm not. I'm satisfied with a can of tuna from the grocery store, which comes from a far more questionable source than arrows from a box in the woods.

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PUTTING UP THE DEER STAND

 

justin

 I'd been rubbing tung oil on some old wood for a project, phone rang, Justin was headed this way with walls for the deer stand, he'd pick me up, would like me to hold plywood walls in place while he put in the first screws and nails. I put up my rags and tools, picked up the camera and went out the door. We arrived at the deer stand, he pulled around and turned the back end of the truck toward the stand for ease unloading the plywood and the ladder. Tailgate makes a good work bench. His toolbox amounted to the carrying case for his cordless drill. He had a hammer and a carpenter's outfit attached to the belt with pockets for nails and screws, measuring tape, whatever might be needed for the specific job. He came up yesterday while I was in town and put the roof on it and the plywood for the lower half of three walls. He put the roof together at home first using leftover roofing shingles from the new roof he put on his house a few months ago. With his friend Jesse, they took the old roof off the house one day, put the new shingles on next day. Today, he attached the three-quarter inch plywood walls on the upper parts of three sides. He measured the fourth side around the door, and will make a door. He said the box will be air tight. He will cut two openings for windows and the portal for a rifle. I'm assuming the windows will open and close for using a bow. I assume this from seeing the rectangle for the rifle is too small and too low for shooting an arrow. This box is fitting together like a kit. He makes the parts at home, brings them to the site, puts them in place and they fit together easily like puzzle pieces.  

 



 

This plywood box is built so well, so minimally, so firmly, so frugally, I had to say out loud to Justin, "I'm impressed." It is taking him no more time or materials than it would take to build it poorly. He is working at it step-by-step, visioning each step, making the parts and fitting them to the 3D puzzle in the woods. He said this is the place he has had his deer stand for the last six years. It amounted to a camouflage tent tall enough to stand up in. He wants to get it painted right away so the scent will be gone by September when he'll start using it. Possibly next week, when it's not raining, I'll be out there with brushes and paint disappearing it, painting the woods around it onto it. Sometimes I think it's not fair to the deer or anything else he shoots from this woodland pillbox. Yet, hunting is about deception. Cats creep almost without motion. The human has tools to put things together he conceives in his mind to outsmart the most wary. Justin has an aerosol can of no-scent, something that covers the human scent. This is not my world, hunting, making it all the more fascinating to me to watch Justin put together his mental construct, hear him tell its purpose, see him in my mind's eye perched inside like a snapping turtle with head pulled back waiting to strike. Justin has a hunter's mind; I enjoy listening to his adventures. When Justin talks, it's mostly light-hearted experiential, no conjecture, no predictions, no politics, no bullshit. He thinks deeply and he cares deeply. He cares passionately about the ones dear to him. Like a dog, he would jump right in and die if it can't e helped defending one of his dear ones. He will be able to keep Vada and Cheyanne with him so they won't be too uncomfortable. They could have sleeping bags. He could have battery-powered heat if he wants. He probably won't need much more light than a flashlight or some small thing powered by batteries.

  

Hunting is something I find interesting when somebody else is doing it. Years and years ago, I forced myself to watch Justin's dad string a buck up by its back feet, cut its belly open, let the guts fall out and everybody laugh. But me. I see what was a sentient being a short time before with a life in a herd, extended family, was already missed by all of them. Roscoe didn't make it. He made it as far as a deer goes, a "monster" buck, the target everybody is looking for. I see a tiny bit of the hunting going on in this county, which is considerable, yet they say the deer are overpopulating, fewer hunters every year. And gigantic places like Gander Mountain down near Statesville, and Bass near Concord, huge places like mega Walmarts with millions of fishing lures, fishing poles, boats, cammo outfits, hundred dollar flashlights, things beyond my imagination. I've been in both of them with Justin when he was looking for a particular target to set up in the yard to shoot arrows at. I gaped around like a child at Disneyworld the first time. It reminded me of the time I stopped at South of the Border in South Carolina to see what it was. Lots and lots of the cheapest beach junk that can be found around the world. Bass and Gander Mountain were lots hunting and fishing equipment, astonishing inventory. Sonar for fishing, motion cameras for night hunting, even a spotlight that lights up your subject by motion and you've got a clear shot. Deception to the max. This is even beyond deception. You're walking through the woods you've always walked through at night. A light in a tree, a red dot on the forehead. High-tech deception. They are fascinating toy stores for boys grown up enough to have money to buy things with. The vastness of Bass Pro Shop made me feel compelled to buy something. I bought a short-sleeved button-up-the-front shirt I wear whenever I go to town for its pockets.    

 

Everything having to do with hunting and fishing is antithetical to who I am, anyway in this lifetime. It's an ethics thing I hold no one to but myself, and not totally myself. I don't believe something like an ethical standard is ever absolute, and I don't believe they're meant to be. And why feel compelled to make something absolute? To pass a test question? I'm inclined to go with the sweat lodge tradition of Lakota Indians. A certain construction is advised, I think it is willow sticks and buffalo hides. There is provision, if you don't have access to willow and buffalo something else will do; it gets down to, if need be, anything will do. I like to allow for the human element of self. Yeah, I do screw-ball stuff, always will. It seems like if I embrace my humanity I don't feel so guilty for being human. Resisting my humanity brings all the church guilt, school principal guilt, don't walk the line good enough guilt, to the surface and occupies my head making me doubt everything I do. That doesn't pay. You need to make more money. What a torpor to fall into, woes about debt. I like to hold a high standard for myself, don't berate myself if I don't make it sometimes, don't berate others for having no part in my own standard for myself. A woman I was talking with yesterday started going on about abortions, how can somebody kill a little baby, and all I could think was please don't ask me what I think about it. All I can say is other people's business is other people's business. I have no desire or will for myself to hunt, for my own reasons. I don't like killing. That's the basis of it. At the same time, it is not my role to expect my friend to be like me. He has his reasons, like I have my reasons. I enjoy hearing my friends talk about their hunting adventures. They don't feel like I'm an idealist or anything political. I just don't like to kill anything and I don't hold anybody to it, not even myself when it comes to a varmint mouse.

all photos by tj worthington

 

A DAY FOR PROJECTS

justin's deer stand

The phone rang while I was sanding some blocks of wood, six of them, three inches by three inches by half an inch. Found them at a building site in the mounds of leftover wood. They had been cut exactly the same length from perhaps six boards cutting the ends off them. I didn't have any reason to pick them up except I thought they were beautiful. They are yellow pine with wide grain and the ends had interesting grain patterns. I kept them for I can't guess how many years thinking of wanting to do something with them one day. As I sit here and write, it somehow evolved that I doodle by stacking smooth roundish rocks on a three inch square pedestal, another piece cut off the end of a 4x4. I couldn't have cut a better square by intent. Carpenters are good at what they do. Covered it with a coat of tung oil and it's beautiful. At first I stacked the rocks to see how many I could balance. Four came easy and five became a challenge. Then six. I felt like going after seven would require intent to develop the skill. I only want to do it for play, for doodling. I accept six as high as I can go. Now I arrange them by colors and shapes. I look for an arrangement not made before. It has become play. A pile of a dozen or so rocks are available to pick through for each new arrangement. It exercises my aesthetic sense in a pleasing way. A few weeks ago I found the six blocks of wood while looking for something else and brought them out to be a pedestal the same height as the other, though in six levels. I looked at them every day, arranged them in vertical stacks with one flat on the top to stack rocks on. Writing, I gaze at the rocks on my left like I gaze at the donkey meadow out the window to the right. The six blocks are now part of the collection. I'd look at them and think I wanted to sand them down to flawless and smooth as glass and put tung oil on them. It's done now. The tung oil is drying. As each coat dries several days I'll add another until they're right. I want the grain in them to stand out as the artwork on them like glaze drawings on pottery. I want them exactly as found with their inner beauty accented.

 

ronnie left, justin right

 

I'm looking at the rocks and blocks of wood now with an eye to make drawings of different rock arrangements and the wood block arrangements with the rocks. I reminded self during the three hours of using an electric palm sander with three grades of sandpaper, this is play, not work. I relaxed into it and lost sense of time passing for awhile. I've read that our left side is governed by right brain. This is a good toy to occupy right brain while left brain looks for sentences. For right hand doodling I have a matchbox toy copy of a nascar Monte Carlo with Caterpillar on it, CAT on the hood. Found it in a Roses store, cat's name is Caterpillar. I bought it. It's been on a shelf until I took it down one day to look at it up close. They are near perfect miniatures of the real deal. To my eye, the race cars are the most beautiful cars going. I'd like for Detroit or Tokyo to make new cars with the maker of all the parts in a car, big and bold and colorful names and logos. Along the side of the toy car: 96 Caterpillar. The paint on my car is so bad it would not hurt to take spray cans to it and paint CATFISH along both sides. Paint it like New York subways. It feels like a seed got planted. Hmmm. I could do that, and it's legal. Maybe I'd better check with a lawyer first. I'm a little too paranoid about highway patrol to want to draw that much attention to myself. May as well put a target on each door. They'd say, there goes that grumpy old bastard cynic that writes about us having quotas. I think I'll just leave it like it is. The way they look at it, anyway, is like they want to arrest me for driving something unfit to be on a NC state road. What only mechanics know, it has one of the best Detroit engines made. They didn't make them long. It's a v6 Buick that doesn't wear out. It's 21 years old and does not burn oil. Anything I want it to do, it is ready to go. It's my old man car, the kind I look just right getting out of with a cane. First time I passed somebody in it, the G-force of passing gear threw me back in the seat, jerked the steering wheel out of my hands. I had to recover right now like a soccer player knocked down full gallop. I got ahold of that wheel fast. Next time passing gear was needed I held on. A cardinal is whistling outside the open door.

 

justin on ladder

 

Come down out of your head, it's saying. Thunder is rolling in the gloaming, overcast, rain will arrive about the time it's dark. Maybe. Maybe not. I'm wondering if the sun going down brings the temperature down in the clouds and makes it rain. It so often rains soon after dark, I tend to associate them. That's about as close to how it is as a John Wayne movie. Coming down out of my head, sitting on an upside down 5gallon bucket with an extension cord snaking out the door. Comfortable place. Birds in the trees above jeering at me to go back in the house so they can get back to feeding. I'd been sanding around an hour when the phone rang. It was Justin. He and his brother-in-law Ronnie were on their way to Air Bellows, accent on the first syllable (air) like the movie Goodfellas. They'd be putting up Justin's hunting stand. Asked me to come on up and see them. Good time to take a break from my right hand buzzing continually. Might have been good for circulation, too, but enough's enough. It wasn't all that bad, but still good to get in motion and be a little bit social. Hadn't seen Justin in a few weeks and Ronnie in several. They are good hunters. Conscientious hunters. They like the deer to drop straight down and not feel a thing. No adrenaline in the blood. They compete in archery tournaments on weekend mornings early. They're not looking to be champions. Winning gas money for the drive from county to county is plenty good. They use the tournaments to practice and they have targets in their back yards. They're both so good they can call robinhooding an arrow before they pull the string. They quit doing it, the arrows they shoot are too expensive to tear up. The arrows go so fast I can't see them. The string launches the arrow and I hear it pop when it hits the target soon after. I love to watch them practice the day before a tournament. They're honing their skill. Ronnie's brother, Gail, is with Justin's sister Sheena. Gail is side by side with Justin and Ronnie in their skill. Sheena is good in a tournament too. So is Ronnie's wife, Amanda. Justin's wife can't leave the kids or she would too. She's so busy with her work she doesn't need one more thing.      

 

gettin er done

 

Justin had constructed the foundation and floor at home. They were digging holes for each of the four legs when I arrived. It was a big square table with a plywood top. They placed the legs into the holes, measuring the depth and using a four-foot long level to finish fine levelling. He had constructed the frames for all four sides at home using screws, took it apart and loaded everything into the back of his big white pickup with beautifully rumbling pipes. He stood the first wall up, screwed it to the floor, put the second wall up, screwed it to first wall and floor. All the way around everything fit, holes lined up just right. Two cordless drills; one with a Philips screw bit and the other a drill bit. Justin did everything; it was in his head, he had the vision and knew step-by-step how to do it. He needed Ronnie to hold a wall upright while he drilled in the powerful screws about four inches long and coated blue, possibly rust resistant. Justin wants to be able to take it apart when he wants to move it and put it up in the next place in a day or two. He wants it to last a long time. Next step, he will cut plywood walls and make a plywood door. He has painted the inside of the framework black already. He will paint the inside of the plywood flat black and the outside a medium-light gray. He wants me to paint forest scenes on the walls all the way around it. A new summer project. Make a cube mural in the woods, no windows, the only opening a vertical rectangle to see down the channel to the bait pile. It came out of the blue when he said he wanted the walls painted like the woods around it. I said, Hail Yeah. Rebel Yell. Their style of hunting seems to us of another generation something like cheating. These are people who keep full-time jobs, kids in school and pre-school, wives with jobs. They don't have time to go stalking and creeping about. They can do that and they love it. Their lives now are structured by schedules. They go hunting before work and/or after work. They have big box freezers in the basement where they pack the butchered parts. Home eats well year round from daddy's hunting. Justin put $150 in this stand.

 

looking down the channel to the bait pile on right

 

 

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