Cartoon classic: Home folks

This Real Life Adventures ran November 30, 2001, and has been a favorite of mine ever since.

If you've been reading the blog for awhile, you'll know that "Classic" postings are code for my being out of town and unable to post. In this case, I'm back home in the Adirondacks, where people indeed have tree stands. And beer.

Not very often at the same time, despite all the jokes.

"The Second Week of Deer Camp," which makes the Blue Collar Comedy Tour look like Shakespeare in the Park, is beloved among hunters for the same reason even people who enjoy theater got a kick out of Dan Akroyd as "Leonard Pinth-Garnell."

We all know somebody it applies to. Not us. But someone else.

Jeff Foxworthy's entire "you might be a redneck" schtick is based on jokes about the people down the road.

The slob hunter is a figure of merriment in the Swiftian sense: The jokes are mirrors in which every face is seen except our own.

But make no mistake: While the after-hours rules are certainly loosened during hunting season, the actual hunting is taken seriously. 

I was never a hunter, but many of my friends were, and it wasn't a hobby. It was something you did in the fall as part of life, going back as many generations as anyone knew, including, for a fair number of them, back before Samuel de Champlain wandered through making all that trouble.

And for quite a few, not getting their buck was equivalent to a farmer losing crops to a hailstorm: You'd get through, but it was an economic setback.

It was never spoken of in such reverend terms.There were serious retellings of hunts and serious swapping of tips at the barber shop, but the stories that were told to larger crowds up at the bar were of the spectacular failures, mostly true but often intertwined with shaggy dog stories that everyone took very seriously until the joke was sprung.

At the time this cartoon came out, I was working with a reporter from up there somewhere who had a nasty scar on his throat, the result of a near-fatal encounter with some nimrod who hadn't bothered to be sure of his target. (That's "nimrod" in the contemporary, not the classical, sense.)

I never heard the story in depth, but certainly got the impression that it was a slob hunter who didn't belong in the woods at all, much less with a gun. Now, to be fair, having never been shot through the throat in the middle of the woods myself, I'm not sure what level of apology and explanation it would take to earn my forgiveness, but, in any case, John did not speak of the fellow with an overflow of compassion.

On the other hand, when I showed him this cartoon, he guffawed and asked me to run him off a copy.

Comments

[Sherwood Harrington]

The kid in the picture linked below is me in January or February 1949. The guy is a fellow named Ralph who my parents rented an apartment from for a while. The thing with the tag is groceries. I don't remember Ralph ever telling stories about hunting, but, then, I don't remember him ever telling stories about going down to the dry goods store, either. http://www.flickr.com/photos/sherwoodh/3165446957/

[Mike Peterson]

The element of necessity is real, and it's also acknowledged, at least in western Maine. When the boys were little, we ran into the remains of a butchered deer -- well-butchered, it was just hoofs and bones -- and I explained to them that, in hard times, sometimes people hunted out of season. But a couple of decades later, I said something about that to a Maine Warden and he had no patience for it. He said that, if people were hungry, they should come to the Wardens, because they set aside seized game for food banks. Hunters donated portions of their kill to this purpose, as well. There's no reason to poach, he insisted: We'll feed you.

The Maine Wardens have their own reality show now, but I already knew they were cool.

[Sherwood Harrington]

The only auto accident I've had so far was in upstate NY when I hit a deer in 1969. It was a big one: smashed up the front end of the Rambler something fierce. When the State Trooper arrived on scene, after a cursory glance to see that none of the three people in the car were actively bleeding, the first words he said were, "You don't want the deer, do you?"

I have always presumed that he wanted it for himself. Now I realize that maybe it was for a food bank like the one you describe. I'd like to think that was the case.

[Mike Peterson]

I don't know about that ... because of the labor required in getting it dressed out before it is ruined. Time works quickly in these matters, and you'd have to get it to a sympathetic butcher pretty fast.

I did hear a very funny story about an ass't school superintendent hitting a deer and getting it tagged by the trooper, who then helped her load it into the trunk of her car, high heels not being geared for such efforts. But she said the value of the venison was more or less cancelled out by the damage to the vehicle.

She and her husband had a farm with, among other things, beef cattle, so I'm sure she was able to deal with it handily once she got home and changed.

[Mike Peterson]

(I kind of assume the vegetarians have checked out of this conversation awhile ago.)

[Sherwood Harrington]

Not just vegetarians -- "That could have been Bambi's MOM, you troglodytes!"