Sun, with blue sky today. the long grass holds last nights rain from the top of the blades to the soggy ground, but the morning sun makes pearls of the rain drops. Ravens are calling high up in the tree and eagles soar overhead from the trees near the road up over our house then to the shallows of the cove out front. Small boats are fishing out past the islands and from their reports the Pink salmon are gathering near shore but are still bright and worth keeping. There are also sharks in the sound robbing some of the trollers of their catch. This is not that unusual for this time of year, but always a topic of conversation at the bar.
The world is deep green and blue grey out to sea. The clouds show a whispy white and the weather fronts have yet to hit with much of a wallop. Summer. Early deer season and most hunters go high in the mountains, where the deer are fat and the bucks have not started to go into rut. Does are likely to have small fawns still with them. The salmon have not started running in the rivers so you could run into a hungry bear almost anywhere and hunters are likely to carry larger caliber rifles just in case.
The sun still stays up for long afternoons and there is time to hunt. But I’m not going anymore, I lost the vision in my right eye, and I’ve been thinking about getting myself a lever action gun that could be used for deer and protection, perhaps a .45-70 and I could teach myself to shoot lefty. Its a heavy round with enough stopping power, but it’s a slow round and not good for distance, which doesn’t matter because I never took long shots anyway. Nels taught me to hunt and I never shot more that thirty or forty yards away, usually much closer, by calling them in, and I never shot at a moving deer and always aimed at the head, with a large round so death would be sudden and painless. I didn’t bring lots of deer home, never more than one at an outing. But I always was happy with what I got and enjoyed the processing.
I know many people don’t agree with hunting but I always felt that if you eat meat you should understand the taking of meat. The killing, and the processing. I took part once in killing and processing a cow on a ussubsistence farm, but it was a group effort and I didn’t do the actual killing. I just helped with the packaging. Very shortly after the animal is dead, it transforms from creature… to meat. But there are some steps that should be maintained some gratitude should be shown to the animal: Nels said thank you in Koyukon and put grass in the deer’s mouth as he butchered it. I just said thank you each time and promised the corpse that I would use all I could and not take any of it to the land fill. I alway tried to take any waste, bones and hide I didn’t give away… I would take back into the woods where I took the deer. Or I would sink it away into the deep ocean. I tried to be mindful, just so I wouldn’t end up wasting the life I had taken.
But I never enjoyed the killing, and I never fully believed that the deer was fully a “gift” to me in the same way that Nels believed. I felt I had been lucky to be able to shoot a deer, and that perhaps there were ways that I could move in ways that encouraged my good fortune in that regard but in no way did I feel that the deer had given itself to me. I was always left with the feeling that I had violently ripped the deer from this life. Why am I not a vegetarian then? Well for one thing I feel the same way about Carrots and Brussel sprouts. When I eat a fresh carrot I am likewise ripping it out of it’s life. Also I’m robbing the carrot from the wild deer by fencing them off, while also endorsing whatever industrial farming and transportation infrastructure which brought it to me. There is no blameless way to consume calories. If we are indeed interconnected then we in fact eat ourselves. Honestly I think this is true. There never was a golden age of perfection where humans and animals lived in perfect harmony, if there is an original sin… this is probably where it begins.
But still, I’m not going to buy and new rifle. I just don’t like the killing anymore: killing the deer or the carrot, or the cow, but I do what I can by trying to be mindful of how it comes to me. I try to shorten the supply chain, thinking of the labor of how it got to me, I try and avoid waste, but there is no perfect solution in this western model I live in. I admired Nels and his attempts to live a true subsistance life. He did more that most: he ate a lot of gathered food, but clearly he was not truly a subsistence person, he traveled so much by jet, and a great deal of his food came long distances, no matter how much venison and salmon and berries he had, there were eggs, and oil and avocados, and bread and tortilla’s , and peanut butter and Lord… the ice cream by the gallon that he almost worshipped, that came to him via jet fuel or barge.
I’m not saying he was a hypocrite, because he did more to raise awareness of conservation issues than almost anyone, and he walked the walk as best he could. He was well aware that his skiff was powered by gasoline, he made reparations by donating his permanent fund to the conservation movement every single year he could. He was an honest and ethical man, and I loved him.
But the point I was trying to make… was this. I’M not going to buy a new rifle because I don’t enjoy the killing anymore. I am quite happy to be a hypocrite now. I will let others do my killing in my stead as hundreds of millions do around the world.
I spoke with Nels this morning on the Rain Phone. He died last November. He sounded good today. The conversation started off awkward again, much like the one with my mom. I was so conscious of the dead silence, I felt stupid. Then I realized I always felt kind of stupid when calling Richard Nelson. I almost always called him to ask him something that I knew he would know. I was about to hang up and try again but I just said, “Hello, Nelsie?”
“John Straley! I’ll be damned! How are ya! How are ya? How are ya?!!”
Now to be clear… I don’t really hear his voice, I’m not psychotic. I imagine his voice. But I have no time to make up what he says, I know I’m imagining his side of the conversation but it comes to me so quickly, in my imagination, that I have no clue that I’m making up what he is saying. Some of what he communicates to me doesn’t come in formed sentences but in the chunk of an idea, as if it was a message directly downloaded into my brain. I just know what he is telling me, just like I know what is happening in a book I am writing while I’m writing it. It down loads as chunks into my head and it’s then I just have to write it down. This is how these people talk to me, but I’m not aware of my brain making it up.
Anyway…. as my Mom said from where ever she was, it’s hard to understand.
I started off with telling Nels all the news I thought he would be interested in: the weather, the birds that I had seen and what they were up to. (he always thought my bird reports were funny because often I didn’t know the proper names, I would sometime say, just: “those little bitty grey fuckers that have a nice song.”) I told him about the waves at Sandy Beach. (flat…no good surf in a while) we talked about the berry crop and the bears on the trail system. I told him about the news with his friends.
He was a little more forth coming than my Mom about his situation. When I asked him how he was doing he said, he was doing okay, it was pretty amazing and all but he really missed being here with “us”. He said he really, really missed “wildness". Which, upon thinking about this made sense to me. Nels said that he was thinking about looking into reincarnation. I asked, “Can you do that?” and he said, “I think I can. It’s just that not many people where I am want to do that, But heck, wouldn’t it be In-fucking-credible, if I could be a Peregrine Falcon?” I said, “Yeah, but what’s the process for that? Isn’t that going backwards? “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?” and he started rattling off facts about falcons as if he was doing a radio show on the birds. “THESE BIRDS ARE AWESOME!!!” “Yeah… “ I said, It would suit you too, for a while at least.”
Well we talked about it for a while. He said that he was going to look into the possibility because he said that he “really missed us’ and by “us” he meant all of the sentient and biologically interconnected world.
I told him that I missed him too, but that I was staying strong. I told him to find out what he could about the whole reincarnation thing and I wanted to talk with him more about the pros and cons before he many any rash decisions.
He said he understood my concerns and that we would talk again soon. He seemed very certain about that so I’m not to worried he will be unavailable next time I call.
Just one small apple
hidden in the waxy leaves
hanging onto life.
