#OneWord2019

Become who you were born to be.

Two years ago, on a whim, I chose a word that would be my guide through 2017 - the word being "evolve".  You can read about my reasoning for that choice right here; in sum, I saw life drifting away  while I stood idly by, unhappily spectating.  A year later....a mostly un-evolved year, I might add....I more thoughtfully chose a new word for 2018, a word that could build upon the barely perceptible evolution I had begun the previous year.  A word that could more actionably bring change to my life. A word that would, by its definition, force me to live it rather than hide behind the sometimes passive nature of evolution.  My #oneword at the opening of 2018 was "explore"; with the year officially and permanently closed I now reflect and find.....success.

The evolution I sought but never found in 2017 arrived a year later, brought forth by the forces of 2018's explorations.  Without going completely bananas I spent the past year pushing myself into to new adventures which, in far too many prior years, I would have been content to avoid or ignore.  I fished new waters and traveled new roads, adding a sixth lake to my list of secret spots and weaving my way across several states to visit my sister's family for the first time in more than a decade.  I wrote like I've never written before (or since), embarking on a #100DayProject that added 100 posts to this blog.  I was forced to explore life without grandparents, but through that experience became the voice my family needed in a way I had been reluctant to explore in the past.  I cooked new foods, coached new teams, found new friends.  I got a freakin' mobile cellular phone device!  I picked berries in patches I'd always dreamed of visiting and filled the buckets I'd never before filled.  I hunted in new ways...and found the same lousy results.  Both literally and metaphorically I veered off of the paths I found familiar, comfortable, and slightly unfulfilling and instead put down steps in new directions that have given me a year unlike any I can remember, a year of adventures topped off by the single greatest event I've ever experienced - two nights with my daughters witnessing the Final Four and National Championship of the NCAA volleyball season.  So as 2018 settles into memory, I can do no more than give a contented sigh and a weary, but thankful, smile at all the year brought with it.  And now, the conundrum.....

What's next?  Where do I go from this point?  I've explored and evolved, I've had a mostly terrific year...what title do I now give the next chapter?  Like last year, I've pondered words while looking forward while thinking back.  Unlike last year I've got a taller task ahead of me: this coming year must somehow build upon a momentous prior year.  The baby steps I started with became tepid strides which found the confidence to become leaps...which seem to have led me to the precipice of something bigger.  Something bolder.  Something that's been waiting for me.

In J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga, the character Aragorn is the rightful, but reluctant, heir to the Throne of Gondor, the man who could be the King of Men.  As evil spreads throughout Middle Earth, Aragorn is called upon to lead men into battle.  The fighting is easy for him, the leading not so much.  The movie adaptations of the story took liberties with the timeline of events in the books, including Aragorn's acquirement of Anduril, the sword which is symbolic of his rightful place as King.  In the movie, Aragorn is visited by Elrond, King of the Elves at Rivendell, who had the sword re-forged and presents it, rather forcefully, to Aragorn with the admonition to "Put aside the Ranger, become who you were born to be."  Become who you were born to be.....

There are no thrones in my lineage.  I am the heir to nothing beyond some acres of land and a few thousand trees.  I will lead no men (or women!) into battle.  But that scene, always one of my favorites, played over and over in my mind during the final days of 2018.  And as the scene repeated, one of Elrond's words stood out above all others:

B    E    C    O    M    E

2019 will be the year I "become".  I will make no predictions on what I will become, I will lay no plans.  I have some flickering hopes of what might become of me, but rather than pigeonhole myself by laying bare those thoughts I will instead wrap my vision around the idea and let the forces of last year's explorative growth carry me forward into who-knows-what.  I evolved away from the stagnant man I was, I explored a bit of what life can be - now I set forth to become....more.

Happy New Year.  Let's all make it become a good one.

First weekend firsts

Another Opening Day, and opening weekend, of rifle hunting season has come and gone.  Two beautiful days in the north woods filled with sunshine, mild temps, and very few deer.  As always, and I do mean always, my tag went unfilled on Opening Day; for those unfamiliar with my hunting exploits, I've hunted for more than thirty years and have NEVER shot an Opening Day deer.  So that "first" didn't come to fruition this year, but the weekend did have a couple of pretty special firsts.  Sit a spell, and let me tell ya' about 'em.....

****I had an extended opening weekend by taking Friday off to give bow hunting one final whirl before the bullet barrage began.  Friday, too, was absolutely gorgeous, but I didn't actually hunt until about 4:00.  As I approached the pines I planned to sit amongst on the edge of our radish food plot I noticed movement on the opposite end of the field - a deer, a big deer, was moving parallel to me towards the same pine grove.  I ducked into the trees and got my binoculars on it to discover it was High Rack, an 11 point buck that became a resident of our property last fall and has terrorized my parents' yard and gardens all summer long.  Deer #1 on my mom's "must shoot" list.  And he was headed my way.  Rather than stay on the large radish field I quickly moved into the small oat plot I have planted on the back side of the pines and into a ground blind I have set up amongst a half-dozen spruce trees.  As I entered the blind he entered the plot, 50 yards away and out of my shooting range. Long story short.....'cause there's no happy ending for me.......he eventually moved to within 20 yards of me but never within the shooting window of my blind.  Then he wandered out of the plot the same way he entered.  And that was that.  Twenty very exciting minutes, as this was the first time I had seen a buck while hunting with my bow.  Oh sure, getting a shot at him would have been terrific, but seeing him up close was thrilling and besides, I'd have two more days of the weekend to hunt him with a rifle.  However.....

At dark I headed to the house.  As I parked the four-wheeler and closed the garage door I noticed my dad walking into the yard carrying his crossbow.  "Well," he said, " I did it.  I put an arrow in High Rack."  After picking my jaw up off the ground I shared the tale of my tangle with High Rack (I was hunting roughly a quarter mile from where my dad was hunting), disbelieving that the buck I didn't shoot had just been shot.  However......

The deer wasn't dead.  Confirmed dead anyway.  Dad was positive he had hit the buck with his shot, but couldn't find a blood trail and hadn't heard the telltale crash of a dying deer.  So we had some tracking to do.  We ate a quick supper, put fresh batteries in flashlights, and headed out.  The night was black as coal, and temps were dipping fast towards twenty degrees.  Frost was already forming on taller grasses as we started searching the area where the buck had been standing.  Dad knew where the deer had disappeared but we didn't know which direction it went after leaving his sight, and with nothing but brown grasses in all directions finding a fresh track was nearly impossible.  However......

After about 15 minutes of bent over walking and squinting at grass in the beam of a light I saw it.  A quarter inch drop of blood on an eighth inch wide blade of grass.  How I stumbled upon that one grass in a sea of grasses I'll never know, but at that moment it was game on.  Ahead was a larger spot of red, then another.  Soon we found splatters, then the arrow.  We knew we were close.  But then we weren't.  The drops became smaller, the frequency less.  He walked through tall grasses, through brush, around trees, even crossed the fence into the field, but he never ran, never lay down, and never stood still.  At 9:00 we came to a small drop of blood that became the last drop.  Lights dimming, fingers and toes numbing, we stopped.  The hopes that arrived with the first drop of blood slipped away with the last, and as we trudged home our only hopes were for the deer to survive and not become a waste.

The next morning Daughter Two and I went hunting, Dad went back so the spot we marked as the end of our trail the night before.  He discovered the buck had doubled back at that spot, the blood trail we looked for ahead was actually behind.  He crossed the fence again, back into the spruces and tall grasses that bordered the field.  And then he lay down, once, and then twice, and then a third and final time.  Roughly 100 feet from where we had stopped, High Rack took his final breath.

It's not the biggest buck of my dad's hunting career.  Nor was it his longest or toughest tracking job.  But for the first time since the mid-90s he dropped a buck that will fit nicely on the wall alongside the other bucks he has shot that carried antlers worth mounting.  In the span of those 20-some years he's passed on some nice bucks, missed at least a couple, and more often than not set his sights on a tasty piece of meat rather than worry about antlers on a wall.  But this year he ended the big-buckless streak, and even though he didn't really show it I think he was pretty pleased to finally see a sizable rack of antlers hanging in the garage with his tag on them.  Well done, Old Man!

****My middle daughter is a hunter.  She loves the outdoors and has always been up for tagging along on a bird hunt or mushroom hunt or scouting adventure.  This is her third season as a licensed deer hunter.  Season one was full of bucks and opportunities but in the end she never was able to pull the trigger.  Season two was full of sickness and tough weather, so again she was unable to shoot her first deer.  With our hunting territory thrown into disarray this year by a logging operation, some resident timber wolves and coyotes, and a smaller than usual deer herd following last year's tough winter, year three of her career hasn't been shaping up as a banner hunting year.  However.....

There she was, by my side as we crunched across frozen ground on the opener yesterday on the way to a new stand I thought she might like (she didn't).  And there she was, quietly moving to my location when I called her to let her know I was watching a couple of deer across the field.  And there she was, sitting amongst the pines along the radish field all afternoon, hoping to see any of the deer that appeared on camera there every single evening at 5:30 (she didn't).  So her Opening Day was again a bust, her personal streak of deer-less openers pushed to three.

This morning we headed to the Bald Knob, a favorite spot of ours that holds some fun memories of close calls and dead deer.  After two hours, and absolutely no new memories, we moved off the Knob and towards the turnips.  Daughter made the call - she felt I should get back on the stand I was on yesterday while she sat along the edge of the turnip patch.  It was a good plan; between the two of us we could see almost an entire 40 acre parcel...not that we could shoot that far but at least we could see what we couldn't shoot....or something like that.  So I pointed out some spots she might want to set up and then headed to my stand.  Hadn't been there 15 minutes when KA-POW was followed by a phone call.  "That was me shooting," she said.  "A deer."  I was down the ladder and by her side in minutes.  Like a good hunter should, she knew where the deer was standing when she shot and where it was the last time she had seen it.  After a few nervous minutes of not finding blood...and a few flashbacks to the tracking job of two nights ago.....I looked ahead of me in the woods and saw the white belly hair of a dead deer.

I wasn't sure if Daughter Two had the gumption to ever pull the trigger on a deer.  I knew she liked to hunt but hunting and killing are two very different pieces of the puzzle.  When the time came she did everything exactly right.  She was too shaky when she initially aimed so she pulled the gun back and made herself calm down.  She shot well enough to make a clean kill with only one shot.  She knew where to look for the deer after shooting.  And she allowed herself to feel proud while also feeling a little sorrow and thankfulness towards the deer for giving its life to her.  Dead deer or not, she is one great young hunter.

And that's that.  Adventures galore amongst the sparsity of deer.  The old man and the young kid both made memories for themselves and were kind enough to share them with me.  Here's hoping I can return the favor next weekend.