Don’t Be An Idiot

Daniel Boone Didn’t Wear A Raccoon-skinned Cap

Hello and hope you are well. Sorry it has been such a while since sharing this newsletter with you. It certainly isn’t because the world is suddenly less full of the bullshit preventing us from surrendering our hearts to longing, forging meaningful purpose and finding our place in the world. If anything, the last year and a half has proven there’s more—so much more , in fact, than was 1.) anticipated and 2.) feared. 

My own personal stronzata meter is sounding as loud as ever as I sit here, half a world away from the source of it all, fuming like everyone else over the state of things. It has made me, as it should us all, take a closer look at my own part in how in the hell did we get here. After all, I voted. I called Congress. I’ve petitioned and raised my voice. I’ve joined the masses in protest. And yet, here we are. 

Clearly I didn’t do enough. None of us did, though, you, too, like me, probably know plenty of people—friends and family—who stand now on the “other side” and hearing them and seeing them act the way they do fills me with grief and heartache. How can we live in the same world and see things so differently? 

Part of me understands their beef. At the very least I’m no stranger to their history and can acknowledge some justification in their thinking. They’re angry, but in their anger they are holding the wrong “people” accountable, and despite my familiarity with them I can’t help but shake my head and wonder aloud What in the world? In the words of Robert Frost: “How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?”

My mission with this newsletter has always been to uncover proof that you can cut through all the bullshit we’re taught about life, and prove that it's indeed possible to embrace that longing, deploy that purpose and flourish as your most authentic, audacious badass self. Is that more difficult for some than others? You bet. Which speaks to the inequality at the center of the problem. For many, indeed, for most people in the world, forging and flourishing are simply not in the cards. Barely getting by is in the cards. Obstacles are in the cards. Less is in the cards. 

Some say: “I didn’t get a handout, why should they? I didn’t have my college debt forgiven, why should they? I don’t get free medical care, why should they?” As if giving something to someone else equates to taking it away from you. As if you’re the one then getting less. 

Please. Open your eyes. 

“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.”—All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy

Stop living in darkness. 

I know, I know, but our egos. They’re too fragile, too misunderstood. We’re afraid of being too vulnerable. When you consider that the term Ego literally means “I”—and for our purpose here, let’s dial it deeper and call it egotism, which is when we think of ourselves as more favorably than is objectively warranted—added to the fact that our psyches have been shaped, not so much by experience, but through eons of passed down human arrogance and overconfidence, it’s easy to see why we are where we are. The truth, our egos cry, is whatever I say it is.

For instance: I used to hunt deer. Every December for several years I would shoot a deer and we would eat that meat in the months following. Actually, I wouldn’t call what I did hunting. I shot them in my yard, sometimes from the front or back porch. Sometimes wearing slippers. There was no tree stand. No waiting in the damp and cold. Often, I saw the unfortunate deer from the window, went and got my rifle and bang. It was, I thought then and still do, the most ethical way of putting meat on the table. So much better than the cruel and inhumane method that leads to the shelves of any WalMart or grocery store.

Then one day everything changed, in terms of my hunting, which is the story I want to share today.

I had grown up watching Daniel Boone on television. I loved the show. Loved everything about it, the woods, the rustic lifestyle, the adventure. I fully embraced the idea of this crafty and kind, noble woodsman. I also loved his look—moccasin boots, raw hides, long musket and that famous raccoon-skinned cap—and while I may not have actually modeled myself on his look (seventh grade was bad enough)—I never owned a raccoon-skinned cap. Okay that’s wrong. I did at one time, one purchased from a store selling “authentic mountain" tcotchke in Gatlinburg, TN. And once I kept a raccoon as a pet, but only until he escaped the morning after his capture—and that’s all fine because the truth is the real Daniel Boone never wore that cap. He preferred a wide-brimmed hat that provided better shade and protection from the weather. An actor changed the hat, to suit his own idea of the frontiersman, when commissioned to sit for a painting. And it stuck, because the truth, as we see now all around us, is shaped by the things we think, not by the things we see.

Fast forward fifty years, plus a century or more from that significant headdress change, when a few days before Christmas, I shot a white-tailed doe in the woods beside our house. She was a good sized deer with large ears, long slender legs, and her coat was just starting to turn grayish-brown. When I shot her with an old single shot, breech-loading rifle—a rifle perfectly fit for a writer with nostalgic tendencies, one purchased especially for the occasion—I was standing at the edge of the small garden pictured above. Standing. Like Daniel Boone. Nothing to brace me, nothing to brace the weapon. Nothing to ensure a good shot. 

Milliseconds later, the deer bucked and kicked and as soon as her feet touched the ground again she took but a couple of sideways stutter steps before adrenaline rushed in and she whirled and bolted into the woods. I lowered the rifle and watched her disappear, my heart hammering in my chest.

A primer I’d recently read online said to make careful note of the deer’s direction as well as the place it was standing when shot, advice I intended to follow with diligence. After she’d vanished from view I walked back to the house and with my hands shaking drew a glass of water from the tap and I stood there, my knees quivering, too, and looked out the window over the garden and into the treeline beyond. I could feel the anxiousness ebbing as I focused my thoughts on my reading, which had informed me also that if the shot was well placed and the deer not already dead she would quiet soon, then find a place to bed down and according to laws of anatomy, her death would arrive with as little suffering as possible. 

After what felt like a reasonable amount of time had passed I walked back outside and into the woods to look for the doe. I carried with me the rifle and one cartridge (just in case), a rope, some toilet paper for marking a trail, and printed instructions on How To Field Dress a Deer. When I found the first dollop of blood, my heart quickened again with the proof that my shot had landed. Mixed in with the splotches of blood, however, were tiny shards of white bone, which I understood also to mean that the shot had not, in fact, been well placed, not remotely, and the deer was not likely dead nor possibly even dying. 

Propelled now by angst for the injured animal, angst and guilt, I hurried to piece together her likely retreat, searching and marking signs of blood here and there, a disturbed little place in the leaves, and then checking behind me for some pattern to the ribbons of toilet paper looped around sapling branches. 

When I did eventually finally find her an hour or so later she was half a mile away in a small open grove with another couple of does and two full-sized bucks. For a second, I considered the spare bullet in my shirt pocket—as if shooting another deer should’ve even been in the cards that day—but the two bucks had by then sensed my presence and darted off with the other two does closely behind. I watched as the deer I had shot slowly rise to her feet. It was then that I discovered to my horror, as the doe turned away and made to follow after them, that my shot was not only not well-placed but had struck her in the legs. She’d been running, striking the ground with each step, on a pair of shattered front knees.

I stood watching her, imagining her pain, my mind racing and deliberating questions of how and why and when had the plan gone so horribly wrong. But I knew why, even then, with the tragedy still fresh and evolving. I knew it was because of foolish disrespect for the life I’d been willing to sacrifice, all while standing at the edge of my yard like Daniel Fucking Boone, then pulling the trigger and shattering not only those knees but also any idea I’d had of putting meat on the table in a way I believed was more ethical than just buying it at the store. And so here we were: a broken, half-dead deer caused by an idiot holding a rifle. 

She was exhausted and in pain and I could see her clearly through the woods and followed her to where she laid down again, on her side, a half mile away, in the flower bed next to the deck of a two story house. A lovely, quiet house in a lovely, quiet neighborhood. Lay this dying deer.

I stepped out of the woods and the deer raised her head and she looked at me and I watched her, completely unsure of the protocol for this kind of thing. So I went around to the front of the house and knocked on the door and when there was no answer and no sound from inside I walked around to the other side of the house to approach the deer from behind. Toward what purpose I wasn’t sure. Perhaps only to not startle her and have to see her run on those broken knees again.

As I came around the corner of the screened-in porch the door from the house to the porch opened and a woman stepped out. She was wearing a robe with her hands bundling it up around her neck and looked at me. Her eyes shifted to the rifle and hung there.

I explained, “I live on the other side of these woods. I shot a deer there and have trailed it to your backyard here. She’s hurt and not dead but is laying in your flower bed. I’m sorry, but I need to shoot her again.”

The woman glanced at the yard. She looked at me in a no-nonsense kind of way. “Do what you have to do,” she said.

“I tried your front door,” I explained further, wanting her to understand, this was not a thing I did often. I’d shot one deer a year for the past six years without this sort of thing happening and I didn’t want her thinking I was the kind of person who would shoot a wounded deer in someone else’s yard without first seeking permission. 

The woman, still gripping the collar of her robe with one hand, pressing it against her neck, nodded. She had her own reasons to express. “I was upstairs,” she said. “I’m not feeling well today, so I stayed home from work.”

While we were talking the doe had gotten to her feet and had made it back to the wood line where she’d stumbled and fallen back down. I left the woman and walked over and stopped a few feet away from the deer. I loaded the cartridge into the barrel and raised the rifle. I wanted to not hesitate, but my heart ached for her in ways I had not until that very moment understood. She was in pain and her pain was neither my objective nor what I had bargained for when I stepped out the door that morning with a nostalgic new rifle and a sensible choice of feeding my family.

My expectations before then had seemed so accommodating, so efficient, so humane. Lift. Point. Shoot. Like a camera. 

Only it wasn’t a camera I was holding as I looked down the barrel of the rifle with the hammer cocked, the dying deer in my sights, my mind begging to deliberate questions of how, why and when had the plan gone so horribly wrong. But I knew even then, the answers, if they were even to come forth, would be of little use to me. This was reality. This was the truth. A creature, a broken, half-dead deer. And an idiot holding a rifle. 

“How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?”

I think about that day and that deer often. She was the last deer I hunted/shot—whatever we should call it—and while the end of things is hardly ever the ending we imagine, it was the one I had to accept. The truth was I was not Daniel Boone. Daniel Boone was not even the real Daniel Boone, in my mind. From the hat down. I had been wrong to think of myself with such cavalier cockiness. To look back in my memory and picture myself standing there holding a rifle, a figure of such bold and mistaken arrogance, fills me with the chagrin and embarrassment one would expect. 

Fortunately, I learned my lesson. The question in these times is, What will it take for others to do the same, to step up to that window, look out upon the activities in the square and see things clearly, unencumbered by darkness, by their own ego, and welcome the truth.

I hope so. 

Thanks for reading. Keep up the good fight!

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