The Birchbark Letters

The Israelites, faced with the challenge of entering the promise land, had come to face the river Jordan.  Its mighty current formed a seemingly impenetrable wall in front of them.  To their backs lay the parched wilderness.  On the far side of Jordan, milk…and honey.

God told Joshua to have faith and cross the river.  He instructed the Levite Priests to set up stones, one for each tribe of Israel in the middle of the miraculously parted river, to serve as markers.  When a future Israelite, curious about the nation’s origins, would ask their grandfather about the circumstances and events that brought their people henceforth to the Holy Land, the grandfather would smile and squint, recalling the miracles and tell the grandchild of the stones in the middle of the Jordan, upturned and anchored, a testament to God’s faithfulness.

The morning stars blinked through thebarren treetops as I made my way through the November woods.  It was one of those walks to the treestand where you’re breathless, not from the hiking uphill, but the anticipation, the nervousness of spooking a deer, hearing that all to familiar snort and blow, seeing the white flag of their tails bounding up and over the hill.  Game over.

Frost slicked up the leafy forest floor.  Greenbriars pulled at my bootlaces in the darkness.  I looked overhead and saw the form of my treestand, a few ragged leaves clung to its frame in the stillness.  Anchoring my foot on the first step, I climbed to the stand and shifted onto it, easing gingerly, then aggressively tested its soundness with my full weight.  Good.

I clipped into my safety harness and zipped up my coat.  I sighed and saw my breath in the first rays of morning, the vapor fleeting, fading, gone.  The sun was splitting the east by now and when I looked skyward a hawk screeched, startled from a branch.  First flight of the morning, destination…breakfast.

Behind me lay an open field hilltop.  In front of me, a greenbriar thicket that stretched all the way to the ridgeline.  To both sides of me, narrow valleys filled with pines, oaks, hickories.  Hollers, we call them.  I thought to myself, and said to my Dad when we hung this stand, that this would be a successful stand.  Those words have held true so far in that to date, we have killed 4 deer from this location.

As the woods around me started to warm up I couldn’t help but notice the squirrels.  One simply cannot not notice squirrels.  Of course, squirrels are rodents, but to me, it seems they have quite vivacious personalities.  Busybodies they are, never still.  Why, even if the weather is cold and rainy, snowing even, it seems like the woods are full of bustling squirrels, storing nuts, barking…flirting.  Seriously.  From my perch in the locust, I observed one big gray, rather full of himself, put the move on a sleek little lady squirrel.  Of course, all this romancing took place 15 feet below me so I’m not completely sure, but reasonably sure that this was indeed his first rodeo with the ladies and it turned out rather disastrous for the fellow.  It seemed to me, that she wanted no part of his advances and did not hesitate to tell him so, for the awfulest scolding proceded forth from her squirrel lips as I ever did hear.  She ran that poor chap up the nearest maple stump and left him there, cowering, quivering and rejected.  He pouted there awhile until the next minky little thing came along and he was at it again.  Evidently, he fared better the second time around for the last I saw of that pair, they were trotting towards the nearby thicket.  I think I saw him wink at me as he passed.

I really wasn’t expecting the deer to appear when he did.  I never do.  It just happens that way.  One instant, no deer.  Next second, deer present.  He was a spike with two slender, branchless antlers.  I expect he was a late dropped fawn, as most yearling spikes are, their brains more concerned with putting on weight for the impending winter rather than mess with antler growth that will do nothing for them come February.

He slipped in quietly, puffed out in the frost, tested each step, glanced side to side, antsy-like.  A doe trailed him, likely his sister, possibly a girlfriend, but I doubt it looking back on it.  Eighteen month old yearlings typically run together, especially twins.  Anyway, that’s just a guess on my part and not really important.

At this point of the season my freezer was still empty and quietly entering archery range to my right was the remedy for that.

Anyone who knows me really well knows that moments like this excite me greatly.  It seems that something in side me goes a little haywire when a deer walks in.  I missed the first deer I ever shot at because of this.  I missed a few more since then too.  I try to keep this in check by reminding myself to pick a spot, focus, breathe.  Sometimes it works.

My first shot dead centered a tree trunk not 15 yards from my stand.  THWACK!  The arrow waved back and forth like a bucksaw blade.  The deer hopped and darted but didn’t spook.  I nocked another arrow.

I would like to say at this point that my second shot rang true but the mere fact is it didn’t.  I choked.  Tree trunks 2, me 0.

Believe it or not, the deer didn’t go anywhere.  He was having trouble pinpointing exactly where the maniacal shots were zooming in from, and the crazy hunter in the tree, not 30 yards away, never registered on his radar.

Finally, 3rd shot, I hit the deer.  I took my time, but still pushed it.  I took a shot I had no business taking.  The shot was too far.  It was though too many tangles and trees.  It was iffy, and I knew better than to do iffy.

The deer crashed through some briars and bounded to the top of a small rise.  It then hopped down the other side of the rise and vanished.

Quiet.  Stillness.  Now motion, wind, gentle…leaves falling, drifting.  Sunlight.  Blue sky.

I lowered my bow to the ground and climbed down.  I immediately went to the place where the deer was standing when I shot.  Nothing.  No blood.  No hair.  Only tracks and some upturned leaves.  My dad walked up.  Thinking perhaps it had passed through the deer we tried to find my arrow and came up empty.

I prayed.  “Lord, I need to prove to myself that I missed this deer cleanly.”

An audible voice, immediately, “You guys looking for a deer?”

It boomed up from the field below us.

“Yeah!”

“We saw one run past us a little while ago!”

It was the men who hunted the lease next to us.

We met them and talked a minute.  Turned out, they saw the doe that was with the buck I had shot at.  She bolted back their way when I released my barrage of arrows.

I prayed again.  “Father, I really need to prove to myself that I missed this deer cleanly, please.”

Once again, immediately, another squirrel, there, by that dogwood, thirty yards away.  God told me to walk there.

I walked to the dogwood, and there, among the leaves, was most of my arrow.  Bloodied, broken.

“I’ve got blood!”

I let the arrow lay as we took up the blood trail.  I figured, if we lost the trail, we could always return to the arrow to start again.

The buck, had waded into a thicket on the edge of a field.  Slowly we followed the drops of blood, some as small as the end of a pencil, none bigger than half a playing card.  Four of us trailed.  When we lost the blood we would circle until one of us located more and we would strike out trailing again.

The blood trail led us to the top of the ridge, winding, always uphill.  Odd.  Every deer I’ve ever tracked has always gone downhill after being hit.  Eventually, we topped out, blinking in the bright morning, sore from the scrutiny and concentration.  The trail turned right at the ridgetop and stopped at a blowdown, right at the edge of another field.  The blood drops, tiny now, abruptly stopped at the edge of the blowdown.

“This is great,” I thought.  “The deer has jumped this blowdown, exerting all of his remaining energy-we’ll find him dead on the other side.”

Nope.

No blood whatsoever.  We circled the blowdown.  No blood.  We plunged out into the field, carefully searching down both sides.  Devoid of any sign whatsoever.  It’s like that deer came to that blowdown and jumped on it and used it as a springboard to vault himself into the next county away from this hunter who had just launched an aerial attack on him.

I’m not going to lie.  That was tough to swallow.  I knew that in all likelihood that deer was out there dead.  More than likely I hit him too high, I’m thinking the loin, right below the spine.  The fact that I can’t tell you exactly where I hit him is a testament to my own poor judgement.

We parted ways with the two gentlemen who had so kindly helped us track and worked our way back to my treestand.  The sun was hot by now and I realized just how hot I was.  I had made a mistake and I knew it.  I simply forced something that shouldn’t have been forced.  I let my empty freezer stand in the way of good judgement.  I let loose when I should have held.

So why would God have driven me to find my arrow and track that deer for as long as we did to eventually end up empty-handed?  I believe it was so I could end up empty-handed.  To teach me a lesson.  Just don’t try to force something that’s not there.  It applies in life you know?

As dad and I walked back to my stand to pick up my things I veered a little.  I retraced my steps to where my broken arrow was.  When I found it I bent over and picked it up.  Some of the deer’s blood stained my fingers a dark crimson.  As I turned to leave for the truck, I found myself pressing the arrow deep into the soil.  I stood it upright, its bright fletchings reaching for the sky, the deer’s blood running down the shaft into the dark earth.

It’s a marker in Fleetwood.  Perhaps I’ll take my daughter there one day.  Perhaps the arrow will still be there.

Suspended between heaven and earth, walking a tightrope, she worked amidst the clatter of traffic, the blaring of horns and sirens, steeled against a November sky, oblivious to everything save the task at hand, catching prey.

She was clinging to a thread so thin that I could barely see it against the backdrop of the building.  Hair-like, the strands extruded from her abdomen.  She payed out the gossamer strand and with engineered precision, she fastened, at strategic points, the trap that would supply her dinner.

I observed her calculated movements, the way she felt the strands already in place so as to perfectly space the thread she was currently spinning.  She worked counter-clockwise around her creation, working from the outside in.  I poked my head no more than a couple of inches from her as she worked and was unabashedly amazed at the efficiency with which she worked.

My goodness, here is an example for us all.  While the world spins at an unbelievable pace around her, here works an amazing creation, doing exactly what God designed her to do.  Nothing, in my mind, is more beautiful.  The fact that her masterpiece was torn down the night before did not dissuade her.  The cold autumn winds, northerly, did not convince her to take shelter.  In fact, the cold winds seemingly persuaded her to hasten, work hard, quick…time is short.

As I left for home, I found myself comparing myself to her.  Do I work that hard with such tenacity and fierceness?  Am I doing what God designed me to do?  Hmmmm…

In the distance I heard the faint beating of a drum.  Steady, persistant, out there somewhere in the darkness, someone boomed the sound over the valley.  I expect it was a ritual of some sort, meant to bring the drummer closer to nature in a place that was, in his mind, sacred.

The place was Brown Mountain.  Standing watch over the Linville Gorge, the mountain is dark, perhaps forboding, but rather beautiful.  Wiseman’s View Overlook is where I was standing when I heard the drumming.  Brown Mountain was staring back at me from across the valley and the drumming was drifting through the night air from behind me, somewhere in the woods.

I was there with several friends and my own family to see the Brown Mountain Lights.  Oh they’re real.  That’s not even a question.  Undisputed even, are these strange lights.  And we saw them.  Right after dark, the appeared, slowly at first, incandescent through the black darkness, then brightening, shimmering, moving slowly up the ridge line, hovering across the ridge, then fizzling out.  Then they would reappear, in a different spot, maybe a different shade, marching up the mountain, sculling suprisingly fast through space, going this way and that, sometimes standing completely still.

Fascinating.

The drumming continued, boom…boom…boom.

The tribes of the Cherokees and Catawbas tell the legend of a great indian battle that took place on Brown Mountain in the 12th century.  The fighting was fierce and the loss of life great.  The respective tribes sent their young maidens, after the battle, to search for survivors.  None were found.  The lights, say the Cherokees, are the torches of the maidens, looking for their slain warriors.

Another legend tells of a slave, from ages gone by, returning night after night, searching for his master who was lost on a long hunting trip.

I’ve also heard the more logical explanations.  Foxfire, a light-producing fungus that grows in the forest.  Railcar lights, truck and car headlights, atvs, people hiking with flashlights.  Oh I almost forgot…aliens.

None of these have been proven and they all have been meticulously researched.  There are no roads on Brown Mountain, no hiking trails, certainly no railroad tracks.  The lights are too consistent to be hikers, and if you saw them, you would agree that aliens are the most likely explanation.  They’re that weird looking.

So that’s why drummer was drumming.  Wiseman’s view is a special place and Brown Mountain is a special mountain.  Not because of paranormal activity or naturalistic significance, but because the mountain and lights were created, yes created, by God.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am driven by curiosity.  I would love to know what causes the Brown Mountain Lights.  It is very interesting to me that after 800 documented years of their viewing, no one has accurately explained them.  But I’m okay with that.  I’m okay with the fact that there are things out there that cannot be explained with our human abilities.

The drummer was seeking a connection with the mountain.  While I admire his acting on his beliefs, I would suggest that rather than seek a connection with the mountain which was created, seek a connection with the Creator.  God’s word tells us that God’s handiwork points us to Him and that is a tremendous comfort to me.  Because honestly, that visit to Wiseman’s View, seeing the lights, certainly had tendencies toward spookiness.  But, as my friend and I were discussing on our way back to the cars, God knows exactly what those lights are.  Think about that.  He knows-He made ‘em.

As I drove away from the parking lot I noticed a church van pulling in.  Out poured youth, racing to the overlook, hoping to see the lights.  I hope they saw them.  I hope their leaders pointed them to the Creator of the lights.

October is the month when we usually receive the first frost of the year.  Of course, frost starts quietly, like all seasons, and gradually builds from there.  In fact, for the past few nights, the frosts have gotten progressively harder and more widespread.  One can usually tell whether it’s going to frost in the morning  by considering the conditions of the atmosphere the night before.  Clear sky, no wind, cold temperature, equals frost in the morning.

Frosty mornings hold a special place in my life.  Whenever I leave for work in the morning and there’s frost, I always imagine I’m going hunting rather than to work.  Images of grown over fields, brushy two-tracks, icy dead leaves on the floor of the forest.  Naturally these thoughts dissipate briefly while I scrape my windshield-never with an ice scraper, I don’t even own one of those.  I’d much rather use a debit card, or CD cover, my fingernails, anything but an ice scraper.  I once saw an ice scraper for sale that was enshrouded by a woolen mitt that you slipped your hand into.  Evidently it was designed to keep the scraped ice from settling onto your warm skin.  That’s for wimps.

As I drive to work on these frosty mornings I am impressed by the number of houses I see which have woodsmoke ascending to the heavens-like burnt offerings with benefits, namely, warmth.

I really, really like the smell of woodsmoke on a fall morning.  Couple that with the general frosting of the milkweed and goldenrod and I’m downright transcendant.  I get kind of carried away while driving thinking about rabbit hunting, squirrels, grouse, etc.  Sure I think of deer hunting, but deer hunting is so, what’s the word, grown up?  Lackluster?  No…maybe commercialized.  There it is-commercialized.

No one deer hunts in wool and canvas anymore.  It’s all gore-tex, microfiber, and a new one I heard about the other day called “Optifade.”  Evidently, animals see in certain kinds of dimensions, gray scales, and parallel, parallax, and who knows what else.  Anyway, the idea behind Optifade, as I understand it, is to make you look less like a tree, unlike regular camoflauge, and more like the sky, or matter, or maybe it was broken matter.  I can’t remember.

So I think about small game hunting.  Living in the mountains of North Carolina, we have the occasional Ruffed Grouse, red phase.  Of the two color phases, it seems to me that the reds are a little larger than their northern gray phase cousins.  Better looking too. 

I’ve shot two grouse in my life.  I’ve hunted them specifically, in total throughout my life, about thirty seven days.  Believe me, in southern grouse hunting circles, that’s a pretty stout ratio.  Oh, I’ve flushed a few more than two, they’re just that hard to hit.

Squirrels, like any other boy introduced to hunting, except for these days it seems, were what I first pursued, gun in hand.  Dad taught my brother and me how to position a squirrel for a shot.  One of us would assume a post where we had a clear view of the tree trunk while the other, slipping quietly, would circle around the side of the trunk where the little fella was masquarding as a branch.  See, we essentially had him pinned this way.  A treetrunk, being round, has no corners to hide behind, so it was only a matter of waiting him out.

The smell of the woods, I think, most affected me as a young boy.  There was a feeling, (it still eludes me to this day,) that drew me to the logging roads and ridgetops.  All the seasons were great to me back then but oh the fall.  Golden, orange, earthy with the smell of dropping leaves, and cold creek water, and dogwood berries red and heavy, and the deer tracks in the dirt road holding ice that melts with the first ray of the sun.

Nothing is finer than the sound of hounds amidst the aforementioned backdrop.  A pack of rabbit hounds, beagles rather, is pure bliss when the air is crisp and the robins and starlings circle overhead, working their way southward.

We had a kennel of beagles growing up.  Some of my fondest memories are of Sandy, the jumpinest jump dog, and Bart, her littermate, and Tess, Tamer, Percy, Rock, Ann, Annie, and all the rest whose names escape me know. 

My brother and I were always afraid of the cows in the fields where we hunted rabbits.  I recall a sense of dread in my stomach when the time came for us to exit the cab of dad’s truck to let out the dogs.  The cows, assuming that they were about to be fed would amble close to us, breathing on us, mooing, stomping.  Quite an imposing site for a five-year-old.

But we’d quickly lose them as we gained ground up the two-track, following the hounds, stepping on the spikes of ice heaved upward through the frozen roadbanks, like stalagmites in minature in a frozen cave.  Hoar frost I think it’s called.

The beagles would work in little circles, drinking in the scent of everything that passed that way during the night.  Deer, raccoons, possums, skunks, coyotes, and then, there, that snuffle right there, aha…rabbit!  And Sandy would let loose with a high pitched whine, piercing the stillness, rising through the pine boughs and the cold laurel hells, reaching our ears and those of her hunting partners.  They, of course would respond with immediate obedience to her request, and join her in timely fashion to pursue the task at hand.

Rabbits, when pursued, usually run in circles.  Some range far and wide, trying to lose their pursuers with sheer speed and distance.  Others rely on trickery and fancy darts and jumps.  Maybe they’ll run up a little creek, trying to throw off the dogs.  Maybe they’ll run out a fallen log, trying to disperse their scent.  Years of living in fear of owls, hawks, and foxes have taught them that they must never stop moving and when under stress, to find the shortest distance back to their holes, or warrens, if you prefer.  If you’re a rabbit, there’s safety in going to ground.

So the idea, if your a hunter, is once the dogs strike, to try and position yourself where you best think the rabbit will be going, and kind of post-up for a shot.  Naturally, you don’t want to shoot until you clearly see the rabbit, and you want to make sure that he’s clear of the hounds.  Oh, and don’t shoot the minute the dogs jump him.  The dogs are there for a job, let them do it please.

A pack of five beagles at full cry is a sound like no other.  An organized cacauphony of bawls and whines, each voice known distinctly by their master, said master interpreting the baying for clues as to positioning of the pack, the whereabouts of the rabbit, and where the whole shebang is headed.  Presently, after manuvering through the swampy creek bottom, and over the cutover laydowns, and through the Christmas tree field in our case, the beagles will bring the rabbit ever closer. 

I remember such a chase where I was working my way out the hill.  Tenderfooted, I hacked my way over some rocks and grapevines as the dogs drew closer.  I carried daddy’s 20 gauge, he carried his 12 gauge Valmet.  I remember the dogs being above me, up on the hill, now cresting, the rabbit darting back and forth about twenty yards in front of me, bounding down the slope, flattening out in the bottom into a dead run.  The little Remington came up to my shoulder, swung to catch up with the rabbit.  I snapped the trigger, BOOM!

Evidently, I didn’t have quite enough purchase on the steep hillside when I fired, for my backside, as quickly as I had pulled the trigger, was transported through the morning air, in the opposite direction as my pattern of number 7s, and landed with a thud!  On a tree root, oh, about the diameter of a Louisville Slugger.

Amazingly, the rabbit lay still in the bottom of the holler, for, said number 7s, had found their mark.  The dogs were trailing up to the scene right as I reached down to grab him by his back legs.  Success was shown to the hounds and then slipped gently into the pouch of my game vest…blaze orange.

Now, there is certainly nothing wrong with deer hunting.  Nothing wrong with kids deer hunting.  But, are we not robbing our kids of something special if we bypass the small game and move from bb guns right bears?   Why are not more hunters taking to the woods each fall in pursuit of tails, both bushy and cotton?  Is it that they are too concerned with antlers, 130 inches or greater?  Are they too anxious to try out their new synthetic stocked superwonder?  Maybe their new grunt tube slash rattling box slash snort wheeze, sneeze, cough, natural esophagus-like tube with three-in-one doe and fawn bleat?  Oh yeah, it’s got an estrous bleat too!

I don’t know.  It seems to me that the little boy, heck, even the grown man, who is denied the pleasure of the small game hunt, in deferrence to bigger and supposedly better things is indeed missing out on a lot of joy and connection with the Creator.  See, a father or mother can teach important things about life while walking with their little hunter after a squirrel.  They don’t have to worry about being insanely quiet and still.  You just cannot do that in a deer stand.  Also on the upside, most fall mornings around here come in at about thirty degrees.  The great thing about small game hunting is you can walk.  You stay warmer.  Think about it.

Last October, the 4th and final week to be exact, the rut commenced.  My brother called me from his cell phone-12 o’clock in the day, “There’s a huge buck in my driveway!”

“Shoot him,” said I.

“Can’t get a shot…he’s chasing a doe, grunting, wheezing…sounds like he’s choking.”

Of course, it was still archery season here on the western slope of the eastern continental divide.  Leaves had just started dropping, nights were getting nippy.  And I was at work and Drew was at home eating lunch, trying to get a shot with his bow at this beast.  Exciting times.

I had hunted in that particular area a couple of evenings before and had missed a doe with my archery tackle.  Shot right under her, my arrow chunking into the soft, loamy soil on the bank behind her.  It happened right at last light and I was particularly lucky to find my arrow.  Thankful I did though as it let me know I had cleanly missed.  No blood, no hair, just dirt.

So two days later, in the middle of the day, here was this great buck, trying to breed the same doe, presumably, that I had missed.  You’re welcome Drew.

As it turned out, Drew never got a shot for the buck wouldn’t stay still where he was supposed to.  The buck chased my doe up the hill behind a neighbor’s house and stayed there pretty much all afternoon, grunting.

Drew called me again and relayed this information and we devised a plan.  A setup was layed out involving rattling and calling and hopes were stilled against the fact that the buck had more than likely chased my doe out of my neighborhood.

When we got home, we threw on some camo, grabbed our stuff, and walked into the woods.  Quietness enshrined the pine forest, the brittle dead sticks on the lower trunks of the pine trees snapped if you walked into them, making your head jerk up to see if you had scared anything with the noise.  I posted below a deer trail where a newly shredded hemlock trunk stood staring back at me.  Drew found a little hiding spot 20 yards to my right.  As darkness gathered I rattled and grunted, trying to coax the buck, if he was still in the vicinity, to show himself.

We heard him.

Slowly at first, cautiously, he raked leaves with hooves.  He rubbed bark with antlers.  He pranced about in place as if to let us know he wanted to come in to the sound but his age and experience with humans just wouldn’t permit him.  He was maybe 40 yards to the right of us, out the hill, up a little draw, surrounded by laurels and rhododendron.

Waiting him out was quickly proving unsuccessful, and as my fear had been, we ran out of time.  No, not time, rather daylight-we ran out of daylight.  It was too dark  to shoot, but light enough to just make out lines and shapes when he decided to trot in before us.  The kingly aura about him was palpable.  Long dark antlers projected from his head and swept backward at an angle accentuated by the tilt of his head, enabling him to sweep through the briars and vines.  Steam left his nostrils, rolling into the night air, almost frozen, appearing then disappearing, looking all the world like a dragon, maybe an angry bull.  His hulking form, backlit by the moonlight exhibited ethereal power and strength, but curiously, he was silent upon the dry leaves of the forest floor.  Ghost-like.   He stopped directly in front of me, my knees quivering, hair on my neck standing.  To say I felt small would not be stretching the truth for I felt as if I was in the presence of something more than a deer.  This buck was regal and he knew it, no doubt.  He stomped the ground, he knew I was there.  He stomped again, trying to make me flinch, react, run.  He snorted a low, menacing wheeze, stomped, twitched, and vanished.

The air had left my lungs and I inhaled sharply.  Coolness descended on the ground.  I heard the wind, saw the stars twinkling now, the pines brushed the blackness.  All was calm.  Something touched my shoulder and I flinched.  It was Drew.

We didn’t say much about what had just happened.  Neither of us had been that close to such a majestic animal.  Indeed it does sound corny but it was a moment that almost transcended the moment.  It was as if time stood still, for me at least, in part maybe, I believe, because of my great love for the woods, and deer, and hunting them.  God had given me this moment.  And looking back, I’m glad I never got a shot at that magnificient stag.  It was better that way.  I like the way that moment fits in my memory.  Of course I’ll hunt this buck again this year.  Don’t know if he’s still around.  But I’d like to think that the doe I missed last year will lure him into my neck of the woods again.  Well, they’re really his woods.  I’m just a guest.

I clearly remember the day I became a man.  Well, at least in my own mind.  The wind whipped in from the north on that January day.  The sky was raw, clouded, and very, very cold.  The grass was brown and the apple trees in our backyard were barren, hunkered against the wind.  I was 10, wearing a tri-cornered cap my grandparents had given me.  A Patriot I was, born of the American Revolution, fighting the Redcoats beside the dog-lot.

A fort of some kind was needed.  Not only to suppress enemy musket balls but to protect my hide from the thunderous wind pouring down from Virginia.  Washington and his men braced themselves against the cold at Valley Forge and I was no different.  I glanced around the backyard wandering about the materials needed for my bulwark.  This was for keeps.

Logs and iron-work were hard to come by at my current state.  I had no equipment with which to sharpen the ridgepoles or fasten the flying buttresses.  Of course these things weighed heavy on my mind seeing as how the hour was growing short and rather frigid.  It was almost time for supper.  The warm light of our house looked rather inviting and I think I had some homework.

Mustering some strength from my frozen limbs I gathered the only fortifications available to me…4 innertubes.  Innertubes-the kind that go inside truck tires.  I think I found them in the basement, left over from sliding down the snow-covered hills around our home.  Thankfully they were inflated.

As the night drew near I clunked the innertubes to a strategic piece of ground in the back yard.  I set about constructing my Alamo.  Standing in the hole of the first one I reached for the second, lifting it over my head and settling it down around my knees, it resting firmly on the first.  I repeated this process until I was ensconced inside a stack of all 4 of the giant black donuts.  There was just enough room inside for me and my long rifle.

Inside my fort all was quiet.  I had conquered the wind and the enemy.  Inside me there grew a sense of pride due, in part, to the fact that I had devised a plan and carried it out with the end being the preservation and insulation of my person.  I had provided shelter.

Shelter is an interesting concept.  Of course as humans, we need it.  And if one watches much television, one will quickly realize how important it is for everything to have curb appeal, have a low fixed rate mortgage, pop with color, and impart a sense of calm quiet.  Oh, and it also needs to smell like milk and honey, or lavender, or some such.

But what is shelter?  What is real shelter?

At our home, we are trying to build a shelter from the world.  Much like I was protected in my boyhood fort from the bitter wind, we are trying to foster an atmosphere in which our children, and us for that matter, are protected.  My wife and I are striving to create and maintain a shelter in which our family is safe to explore good things.  Where we are free to learn and share and participate in the process of growing.

What is the best thing we have done so far in our sheltering?  Why remove the television of course.  Well, not really.  We of course have a television set to watch DVDs, but the programming like CBS, and Fox News, and Food Network, and ESPN, and all that stuff…gone.  And I really like it.  Didn’t think I would at first but it has really grown on me.  The peace is tangible.  The increased productivity is noticeable and I hang out with my wife and children more which is a good thing.  Honestly, I do not miss it.

More than the absence of television, we live out.  Out of the city.  Not too far out…but out.  Wee see deer from our windows.  I’ve been known to hunt deer from our windows.  We watch nature.  We watch the clouds, the pine trees up on the hill, the birds that come to our feeder, the blackberries we pick from the bank beside our driveway, the stars from our front porch.  We hear owls, barred and screech varieties, whipoorwills, bats, tree-frogs, crickets.  We smell snow, rain, falling leaves, frost.  We touch shovel handles, tomato plants, pine needles, cicadas, salamanders.  We taste well water, wild blueberries, and fresh zucchini bread.

It seems our culture has grown increasingly insulated from our environment.  Oddly, an environment we are bent at saving.  Of course, I understand that not all can live out.  Pity.  What I’m driving at here is perhaps to stress the importance, in my mind, of being connected to creation.  God’s creation.  We’ve come so far from there.  A couple of generations ago, it was not uncommon at all for most everyone to grow at least a small garden.  Now, well, bluntly put, that’s not the case.  Perhaps, when it’s all boiled down, what’s missing is a virtue that was one of this great country’s founding principles.  A virtue that any boy scout knows.  A virtue that is in short supply these days.  Self reliance.  Preparedness.  Wherewithal, gumption, whatever.  Not being a victim.  Responsibility.  You get the idea.  Shelter.  Men, can you build it?  Can you find it?  Can you provide it?

I eventually wriggled out of my innertube citadel.  The wind, by now, was blowing a few snowflakes.  They drifted noiselessly against my face, stinging.  It was full on dark, the moon tiptoeing in and out of the apple tree branches.  The lights shown through the windows of our home.  Truth be told, I think I could have stayed the night out there.  Honest.