Damn. I walked outside today, thinking it might be a good day to burn some brush and old wood in my yard, to clean it up. Then all that would be left would be the pile of old mattresses, and although I bet they would burn well, I doubt the neighbors nor the atmosphere would like it much.
Anyway, it sounded as if I was in central Baghdad. There were gunshots from every direction, and although far away, they are still loud enough to prickle the hair a bit. Yes, hunting season is around the corner, once again. Which means that everyone is out firing guns and practicing, whilst scaring every deer in earshot, so that they run out in the roads to get hit. Fun, fun stuff.
For those of you not from the U.P. who would (sadly) be reading this - there are a few things you need to understand about this magical, yet weird, peninsula. Surrounded almost entirely by water, the Upper Peninsula - or Upper Michigan, as some "upper crusts" (TV6) like to refer to it - is rather cut off from the rest of the world. On this side of the jutting left hand (the shape used to describe the peninsula, with the upright right hand being the lower) we are connected to Wisconsin, which brings us cheese, beer, and Packers. But even so, the closest large city, Green Bay, is a good 100 miles away from most of us. In a nutshell, the U.P. is cut off from the world, both by its geography and by its rather homogenous, homey population (which is only 3 percent of the entire state of Michigan's people.)
Basically, this big left hand is one big, huge forest, and the various towns and villages are just little carvings out of that forest, which is always threatening to reclaim its lost acreage. The roads that connect our towns are mostly two-lane, with "passing lanes" every few miles, a phenomenon seemingly unique to up here (I have never seen them anywhere else.) The roads meander through the woods, which tower up on both sides of you, and if you're not used to it - well, it takes getting used to. The largest of our carved-out cities, Marquette, has a mere 20,000 people. That's about the size of a small suburb outside a large city. The rest of us live in smaller towns, villages, and townships. Everyone knows everyone, and that is no overexaggeration.
The weather is awful here. And it is wonderful. But mostly, it is awful. We had our first snow this year in late September, and we will probably have our last snow in late April or even May. While here in the mid-west part of the peninsula we get a relatively small amount of snow (a mere 60 inches on average per year), it is not uncommon for many northern spots to get over 300 inches, which is not far above their average. While Baltimore cries and shuts down over a 3-inch mini-blizzard, we are buried so deep that it is sometimes impossible to see around corners without going halfway into the intersection. And yet we don't shut down - everything keeps going and moving. In fact, it seems like a blizzard is when everyone comes out of hiding. Not long after I came up here, we had a winter where the whole month of February passed without the temperature rising above 0 degrees farenheit. Pipes were frozen and bursting everywhere. Most of us had no water - we had to cart it in. There wasn't even sewer service - peeing was done outside the back door. But it eventually thawed, like it always does. Then summer comes bounding along in July, and we have two months of the most beautiful weather on the planet. Then it all ends, one tragic day in September, every year. A deep freeze, and everything dies. Then the hunters come out.
There is hunting all over the midwest, and everyone who reads this probably knows someone, or of someone, who hunts. But in the UP, if you don't hunt, you are considered a minority. I just started a new job, and nearly every single person I have trained with has asked me if I hunt. When I say I don't, it is as if I just shoved a sock in the conversational tunnel - threw off the balance. I should also make a point here that most of the people I have trained with are women.....well, keep reading. I don't hunt, so I must be gay (blush.) Seriously. One of the ladies I worked with was chatting with me one day, her perfectly coiffed eighties hair flipping back and forth, her makeup just right, and her manicured fingers flying on the keyboard, while she told me how excited she was about going bear hunting this year. I wondered if she would be cutting her nails back for better trigger-handling.
Every gas station up here has piles of bushel-bags loaded with apples, or corn, or weird-looking carrots, which are for sale to hunters so that they can "bait" their blinds. (A deer-blind is where a hunter hides from all the skeery woods-stuff, with their arsenal of weapons to use in case a big buck comes walking by. A deer-stand is a kind of tree-house, where hunters go so they can sit and wait for deer, then fall asleep, then fall out and break their necks. It happens all the time.) This is probably the only place in the country where, when you go to Walmart, you can buy carrots by the hundredweight. Seriously, Walmart sells corn, carrots, and apples for the hunters too. I've always wondered what those apples and carrots would taste like. Are they human-safe? Maybe they just need a good scrubbin' and some of the rind removed.
"Deer camp" is a seemingly fun place to go, where you drink and shoot deers and then gut them and go home. At least, that's my take on it. I've never been to one. But everyone has their "deer camp" somewhere, which is often just shortened to the quaint word "camp." It's a cabin, I think. I've never been to one.
Oh, I forgot to mention the various deer urines, available at every store, gas station, and gift shop. You just slather it on, all over your face, arms, and brilliant orange body padding, and apparently those big bucks will come right up to you, because they just love the smell of a raunchy, piss-covered doe. Or they don't come, and you just smell like deer urine, which I assume smells like regular urine, except woodsy.
So if you're not from the UP (which I'm not) and you don't know anything about hunting (which I don't), you just sort of look on with amusement, or horror, or a mixture of both. I am now used to pulling up at a gas station next to a Jeep Cherokee with a deer or two strapped to its top, blood running down the sides. I'm used to going in restaurants and gas stations with heads of various animals mounted on each wall, right over your table or the broasted chicken, and not even thinking of how unsanitary it might be. I wonder what they would do if I brought one of my cats with me to such a restaurant, and held him in my lap as I ate? It's the same thing, isn't it? Except my cat is full of life and likes to lick my scalp when I'm trying to sleep in the morning. Crazy kitty.
Anyway, my only theory as to why hunting is so popular up here is this - there isn't anything else to do. This time of the year is dark, dreary, cold, and brown (before it turns white, which is soon.) The only culture that exists is the public library, which closes at 5 and is relatively unknown by most, and the bars, which, as i've said before, smell like popcorn and urinal mints. So if your daddy, and his daddy, and your momma and her sister all hunt, then you should too. It's a family affair... but for whites only. You don't see black hunters often. There was a Japanese hunter once, but he ended up shooting six people. The native americans got smart and just go to the grocery store for their meat.
For what it's worth, I look forward to hunting season for one reason - less deer on the road afterward. At least, in theory. I dodge so many deer on my way home from work at night, that by the time I get home my eyes are glazed, my fingers cramped to the steering wheel, and my mind is shredded like a mini-wheat. The other night I counted 20 - 2 of which were just standing in the road. Over the years, I have hit 5 of them, and luckily only injured myself once. So it would seem that after 100,000 or so deer are shot in a season, the numbers would go down, and you would see less accidents. But that's just a drop in the bucket, because there are literally millions of deer up here, outnumbering the humans, who feed them constantly to keep their numbers up, so that they can keep feeding them exotic carrots and shooting them and hitting them with their cars.
But, I won't get political about deer hunting, because actually I don't have a position on it. I just think it's weird, and is that so wrong?
I added some new pictures to my photo section - one is a picture of a lake near my house, which they are emptying (it's an artificial lake with a dam.) It is a frighteningly odd, alien landscape, covered with the stumps of trees that were cut 100 years ago, yet never rotted. Their twisty, gnarled roots reach in all directions over a vast tract of land that must feel really naked. Anyhow, I guess they are going to clean up the stumps and the rest of the lake (which has a train track going right through it) so that it is more user-friendly. But for now, it just has this eerie look, like the corpse of a long-dead ancient forest-city that has washed up from the depths. Boo!
This week I work all midnights, and so tonight I decided to stay up late so that I will sleep in tomorrow, and thus be more in tune for a night of fun at the ED. I'm sure my mother will call and wake me up bright and early though. Or my cat will lick my scalp until I beg for mercy and jump from bed. Or the gunshots............
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