The Hunting Camp (Revisted)

I posted this a couple of years ago. I just caught it on a search for something else.  I think it's worth a reposting. I posted the pictures a little larger and gave the copy a good once-over editing.

Every late Fall the Old Man and his cohorts went Up North to go deer hunting. You must understand, in Minnesota, "Up North" is a place, a destination... even a state of mind... not a direction.  They went Up North, a place of rough rocks and rapid rivers - deep snow, frozen lakes and White Pine forests - a good place to spend time in a warm tent alone with friends.

Left to right: Marlin "Bud" Berg (The Old Man), Chuck Nelson, Donald "Big Don" Wayne, Chris Lindrupp and Homer Jensen sitting around the evening table, which Homer had just built from a pile of boards he brought along from the Clarks Grove Lumber Company, which he managed. Those guys could really wear caps well. I also notice that Big Don was still wearing a white shirt and tie, apparently left over from a meeting he left in a hurry to get a fast jump on the road north. Dad looks like Dad always did during the winter - hunting or not - a man of leather and wool. He even smelled like leather and wool. 

The same group getting ready for bed. Damn, Dad looks young! Just a kid. I must have just been a newborn baby then. They are all young men in their prime, not yet knowing how time would tear them down, break their bones and bury them.

Our boys ready to bed down for the night. They are sleeping in bedrolls, as this is before sleeping bags were common, at least for this conservative crew. The gentleman on the rear cot (or is it on the ground?) is Al Swenson. No one ever called him Reverend Swenson. He was Swens. He was a rough-edged, take no prisoners preacher. He was big and burley, and he could kick your ass. The Old Man said Swens was always trying to save their souls by have morning devotionals. Everyone ignored him and escaped his salvation by crawling under the tent wall when he was distracted. Dad said the last thing he heard in the morning as he was walking into the deep woods was Swens, now alone back in camp, bellowing, "Come back here! You HEATHENS!". They were and they didn't.

Chuck after he got his buck, ever the neat and dapper killer. No blood spilt on his pants nor under his fingernails. There is no evidence that he had met Bambi in the woods and killed him. Then cut him open and tore his guts out, before looping a sisal rope around his neck to drag him out of the woods and hang him from a tree for all the honest world to see. How easily he wears his look of innocence.

I realize that a Winnebago is more convenient and blaze orange is safer, but we've lost a certain sense of class, style, even elegance, when the soft wools, buckled leather straps and cotton canvas tents were lost over time to nylon, polypropylene and velcro. Sometimes progress can be a bitch - a hard and ungiving mistress..

These are the people that taught me honor and honesty, how to be a man, a man in the best sense of the word.

Swens was the preacher who lived across the street, a man I knew as a friend and neighbor, more as a role model than a Sunday minister. The religion didn't stick, but hopefully his strength did.

Donald was my first employer as a kid - 50 cents an hour and I was rich. Nobody else my age had a paying job. We would be talking about moral dilemmas and he would come up with things like, "Well, just don't forget to rotate your tires" - things that at the time didn't seem to be related to the conversation at all, but of course they did. Thoughts that just took me a few years to process.

Chuck owned the gas station where I worked my way through high school. One time I was agonizing over a gift for a young lady (keep in mind he was paying me all of $1.25 an hour). From Chuck I got, "In the long run, for women, I've found it's tough to beat furs and jewels". That little nugget has stood me in good stead, although over time furs seemed to have become a faux pas. Also on women: "I made big two mistakes in my life. The first was marrying a woman like Margaret. The other was having a daughter just like her."

Homer was the father of one of my best friends and lived four doors down the street. Later in life, the Old Man and Homer really only talked when they were in the middle of life crises and needed counsel. When the Old Man died, Homer came to the funeral home and had a long conversation, out loud, with my father laying in an open casket. Their last counsel.
From good hearted Chris, I still have a Remington 513T target rifle and the skillset to use it well, though not the eyes. As Chris said, "A long range paper punch". I must say, now that they are all gone, Chris was the best shot of the crew and worst hunter. He never killed a deer. Now that I am older I wonder, was he a poor hunter by choice?

And of course the Old Man ... from my father, particularly from my young father, I got ........ everything, everything I am. These were all good men, and they are all gone now, and I'm still here to tell their story. And still resisting comments about going to the Happy Hunting Ground.