Dear Diary:
So, I got my buck.
Well, I’m not sure if it was a buck or a doe. I barely saw it.
I didn’t even need a gun.
I didn’t need to sit in a blind all day.
All I needed was my trusty Ford Focus, a stretch of M-55 and a little bit of dusk.
As you can guess by now, I haven’t yet bagged a deer this season, but one definitely got me. It came out of no where while I was driving to an all-lady deer camp last Sunday, just one of my stops as I traversed the county with nothing but a notebook and a camera in search of deer camp adventures.
Crash! Screech! Thump!
There I was in a ditch.
But I was a writer on a mission, so I pressed on.
Hunting deer is a tradition going back thousands of years in the Manistee area, from the Native Americans to the current camps that abound from the woods south of Wellston up to Copemish; from the big lake east to the hills of Marilla.
It was my aim to visit as many of them as I could to capture the true deer camp experience.
What ensued was a strange week where the personal trials and tribulations of this humble scribe threatened to overwhelm my attempt to cover the subject.
Deer camp is all about the thrill of the hunt, and there are always many obstacles: weather conditions, lack of deer, baiting laws.
My own mission was fraught with as many problems and difficulties.
But the journey itself is always part of the story.
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
The quest started on such a happy note.
You see, I have good news, diary. The preface to my strange and bizarre week of deer camps is that I’m recently betrothed.
That’s right, Meredith and I are engaged to be married.
The weekend of Halloween, we went downstate for a party where we announced our pending nuptials to our families. It also gave me a chance to pick up the slug barrel for my shotgun, which my brother, Chris, had at his house. It was an opportunity that was thoroughly bungled.
We’re a family of bird hunters -- mostly grouse and woodcock -- and I’ve never bothered to bring the barrel to Manistee. But if I wanted to slay a deer, I’d need it.
The party was at Meredith’s parents’ house, an hour north of my brother’s in the Detroit area.
“Hey, dirtbag,” I said in the voicemail message I left him on his cell phone. “Grab that slug barrel and bring it up to the party, would ya?”
Maybe I should have been more pleasant in the message and cosmic justice would have been more in my favor. Or, I should have just called his landline.
“You bring that slug barrel?” I asked Chris after he arrived with his family.
“What are you talking about?”
“I left you a message,” I said.
“I haven’t had my phone since Friday,” he said.
There was no time to trek an hour south before heading back up to Manistee, so, instead, there I was, the Friday before the Opener, heading back downstate for the barrel.
I drove eight extra hours to get it.
I didn’t see a deer near the road the entire time.
IN THE HEADLIGHTS
The sad part is that I haven’t needed the barrel yet, mostly because of my car situation.
I’m having a hard time trying to envision myself strapping a buck on my loaner car (a sleek, red Toyota Camry). I don’t know how I’d explain any blood stains to the good people of Enterprise rental car service, or my insurance company. They’ve probably had enough of me already.
I got back into the Manistee area on Saturday, when the fellows at Chisler’s Lodge were having a little soiree to kick off the season and celebrate Ed Knaffle’s 90th birthday. I visited Chisler’s last year for a story, and they were kind enough to invite me out again this year. Since I’d been there before, you’d think I’d have no problem finding it.
No way.
I took a wrong turn in the woods and ended up at the Linkes’ deer camp, which will be featured in Tuesday’s newspaper.
I don’t need to go into any more detail about the rest of Saturday night. A deer camp kick-off party is a time for, ahem, discretion.
Sunday night, I was scheduled to go eat some N.Y. strip steaks with an all-female deer camp headed by father, grandfather and camp cook Gene Smoter.
The history of their deer camp will be featured in Wednesday’s newspaper.
En route to their cabin Sunday night, I was headed east on M-55 just as the sky was blackening. I was barely out of town when a flash of brown filled my high beams. It was running south and I just clipped its rump, but, still, the impact with the deer was tremendous. Its hindquarters bounced off my hood. Shocked, I did what I know you’re not supposed to do. I slammed on the brakes and ended up on the side of the road.
I grabbed the flashlight from my trunk and went into the woods, looking for the deer, but it had disappeared.
It had attacked me like a renegade guerrilla force, coming out of the woods, inflicting quick but lasting damage, and vanishing.
The front end of my Focus was crumpled.
Ruined.
But, alas, still driveable.
I contemplated canceling my dinner with Gene Smoter and his gals, but I didn’t. I soldiered on -- and I’m glad I did. The steak was delicious and their stories were great.
I would visit two more deer camps in my fractured Focus: the Dontz camp and the Berentsen camp.
To learn more about the Dontz camp, check out Friday’s paper. The Berentsen camp will be featured in Saturday’s News Advocate.
POWERLESS
I woke up in the middle of the week with a deer camp hangover and decided something should finally be done with the car. Getting it fixed would turn out to be a quest in itself.
My insurance company offered this improbable solution to my vehicle woes: take it to a collision shop in Ludington and pick up a loaner car in Cadillac.
So, instead of being in the woods, utilizing all the knowledge I’d picked up about deer hunting at the camps I’d been hanging around, I was stuck driving all around the region dealing with the car stuff.
Reviewing the damage with the insurance guy, I noticed a few strands of brown deer hair sticking out of a crack in my headlight.
An insult. A taunt.
But not as disheartening as the next obstacle I encountered.
I woke up the next morning and the power was out at my house. It was one of those dark, gloomy days when the sun didn’t offer any light. After showering and shaving with a flashlight, I called my landlord, who informed me his 79-year-old brother would soon arrive to check out the electricity.
Like many Manistee men (and women) this time of year, the brother was dressed for the hunt when he arrived at my house.
He wore those old school wool pants with the suspenders and a flannel shirt. He told me he hadn’t gotten his buck yet.
I had fiddled with the breaker box in the basement to no avail for a good hour. He came down, flipped a few switches, and within a matter of five minutes had the power back on.
“That went easy,” he said. “We had some good luck. Now, if only I was having better luck with the deer.”
Indeed, I thought.
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