What I Learned at Deer Camp
My family isn’t big on telling stories. Oh, sure, some of my aunts and uncles occasionally summon a tale from the deep wells of their memories. But for the most part, they aren’t prodigious storytellers. Where I really developed a sense of story was at deer camp. My dad began taking me along to camp when I was thirteen. There, for four or five days every December, a dozen or more hunters—men and their sons—gathered at the remote two-room cabin in Sproul State Forest, near Clearfield, PA. What I quickly learned was that deer camp was about a lot more than the hunting. It was also about the camaraderie, comprised of a lifetime of shared experiences, which often became memorialized in stories. Talk about storytellers. In the evenings after dinner and dishes, our dads would sit around the table—lit by kerosene lamps, maybe a Coleman lantern—where they smoked pipes and cigars, drank tall cans of Schaeffer’s, and told stories of deer camps past, letting them fly scattershot around the room. Tingle and Trisch, Krafty and Pfeiffer and Furman, Smitty (my uncle) and Dale (my dad). Each of them took their turns, though some more than others, of course. Embellishment seemed not just acceptable but expected.
Tingle, for example, might tell about the time he was out hunting, perched behind a tree, as he secretly watched Furman cross the creek. Furman placed his boots carefully on one stepping stone after another. “He fancied keeping his feet dry, you see,” Tingle drawled, his eyes glistening with mirth. “He was gingerly about it.” Tingle would tell about how Furman came up the hill and stood not more than fifty feet away from him, encroaching on his hunting space. So Tingle began making bear noises—grunts and growls, chuffs. As the noises grew more raucous, Furman became more and more frantic. Finally, he could take it no longer. “He galloped down that hill and went right through that crick,” Tingle said. “Never hit a single stone. Soaked his feet clean through.” My cousin Brian, our friend Dave and I would sit in the corner by the heater and drink in these stories like they somehow held the key to manhood. We watched the older kids—Bob and Van and Vernon—young men themselves by now, standing around the table and nodding knowingly at tales they’d already heard many times before. We craved their knowledge, not yet understanding that we were getting it the same way they had. We were being changed by our dad’s stories. Jokes are just funny stories. Though they’re usually completely made up, the best ones include a bit of truth to them, a kernel of wisdom. The joke told most often at deer camp was the one about the guy who always complained about the food. It was told as though it had really happened, often substituting the names of actual camp members. It went something like this: Krafty used to always bellyache about Smitty’s cooking. Whenever something was put down in front of him, Krafty would say, “I’m not eating this. It tastes like shit!” But, of course, he always ate it all up anyway. Finally, one day, Smitty got fed up with Krafty’s complaints. Addressing the whole table, he said, “Next guy that grumbles about the food cooks every meal from now on.” The following morning, when Smitty put some scrambled eggs in front of him, Krafty took one bite and without thinking said, “These eggs taste like shit!” Then, suddenly realizing, he grinned and said: “But they’re good!” And so the stories and jokes would go on, one reminding someone of another, until each hunter had heard his fill and drifted off to the bunkroom to get some well-earned sleep. These days, now that our dads have all passed away, we still tell the same stories and jokes. We know them so well that we rarely need to tell the whole story anymore. Someone might say, “Remember the time Tingle scared Furman across the crick?” And we’ll all chuckle and shake our heads knowingly. Or someone might simply say, “But they’re good!” And we’ll laugh at the memory of the joke’s repeated telling. Even the most recent addition to camp, Larry, who had the opportunity to know only a few of our dads, has become wise to these stories. When we were kids, we always thought our dads were the old guys. The truth is that we’re the old guys now, and none of us has sons who come to deer camp anymore. So, I suppose these stories will likely end with us. But, for now, we’ll carry the torches of our dads’ lives through the stories they told. And maybe we’ll even add a few stories of our own to the mix. There’s still a bit more time for that. Scott’s story “Motor Men” appears in Dammit, I Learned a Lot from That Son-of-a-Gun. Click here to learn more about Scott. |
