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Aesthetic Exercise
Where hunting and singing meet
Aesthetic Exercise
Where hunting and singing meet
By Craig Springer
Scraps of a 30-year-old moving memory play between my eyes like a dream not quite complete. It's translucent, this vision, pieced together in fragments. Aged memories are overlain in layers like the autumn sky I see in the theatre of the mind. It's variegated in various shades of gray above - leaden, like fresh glazier's putty, and sullen like soot. The clouds move visibly in thick lumpy layers, like they can't quite mix with one another. Below, doughy mud curls around my boots as I slog through the fallow fields that hadn't been plowed for a few years. A Winchester 12-gauge pump shotgun, an over-the-counter Kmart special, gets heavy on my shoulder. I am but a wiry boy, barely 16 years of age.
Lifeless Osage orange trees and knobby hackberries line the gravel lane to this old Ohio farm near where I lived for a time as a kid. I think of it often. The Osage oranges aren't native to this place. Softball-sized fruits smell a little like orange if you put some thought to it. Well into autumn, these pomes look like rusty-green brains littered about the field of last summer's grasses laid down level by wind and rains and killing frosts. The hackberry trees cropped up in the corners and edges on this old place. Their gnarled stucco-like bark, gray and furrowed, mirrors the sky above. Though birds love their little berries, thoughts of this tree always leave me an odd longing, and I can't really say why. The brown hulls of autumn's Queen Anne's lace too wet to crackle belie these snowy white umbrella-topped flowers that they were in summer. The briar tangles reach through rusted field fence topped with a strand of barbed wire, encroaching on the sparsely used road and scrape my brush pants tattered by previous such encounters at this place.
Wet gravel on this two-track lane scratches softly under the grind of my heels. It leads to the old barn, what's left of it anyway. Gravity has been unkind; the barn roof caved in years ago and the grain silo, the color of lead, the same as this autumn sky that it touches tilts a degree or two to the north. The two-story farm house has been carried away by the elements, and only the rock and mortar foundation and a little rubbish are evidence to there having been a family home here.
Ninety acres of brambles and hedge rows and fallow rocky fields - they cut at right angles through the recesses of recollection. Smooth distant hills patched in fields and woods like a symmetric quilt rise and fall. I fancy that these fields I hunt in memory once looked more manicured before they turned fallow. Pioneering vegetation softens the visual edges.
The place wasn't too productive for farming; I recollect being told that. The many erratic rocks that protrude in the field, scraped by the disc spoke to that. So did the occasional small cairns in the corners beneath the hackberries that marked nothing in particular, save for the muscle and sweat that went into the land those many years ago. Old farm land reverting toward what was once a mosaic of hardwood forest and pockets of prairie made a place ideal for quail in the autumn.
Come late October, it usually brought with it the first real makings of winter - cold, wet, dismally gray, sometimes in doses a week long. But it also brought with it in a complete paradox something that is irreducibly spiritually uplifting, hunting seasons.
Despite the press of years, this place and the experiences it yielded are an everlasting spiritual larder. All things spiritual rise. Most any ardent outdoorsman will tell you that a full-immersion experience in nature that comes with hunting is, irreducibly, a spiritual one. Witness the dissonance of a ringneck pheasant as it puts sky between the two of you; or the disquieting skirr that comes with a covey of quail taking to the wing at your ankle - they both turn your eyes upward toward the sun and the moon. Duck hunters scan the skies for distant black specks. Goose hunters sit in pits listening for the cacophony coming from afar; their eyes and thoughts turn upward. Blue grouse hunters, their eyes are drawn upward to the tops of spruce and fir on the flush. All of these things have an upward movement. All of them immerse you in nature. All of them sharpen your senses and they are without question, spiritual experience.
Hunters describe the full-immersion nature-experience of hunting in varying degrees as connecting with the Creation in ways that can't come from other recreations like snowshoeing, birding, dominoes, or a pick-up game of hoops. Former Washington Post Magazine writer and current University of Illinois journalism professor, Walt Harrington, said it succinctly in his memoir on hunting in Kentucky, The Everlasting Stream. Harrington noted that from musings of Socrates to missives in James Swan's finely wrought book In Defense of Hunting, hunters describe the experience of hunting as one that clarifies the mind.
Hunting fully immerses the hunter as a participant in nature, not just observing nature, but one who is in nature. Harrington equated this deeply emotional and psychological experience to athletes being "in the zone."' It's like a painter being caught up in the canvass. For a writer, it's like being immersed in the words, transcending paper - being caught in the muse. Swan called this experience the "Zen of hunting" where one is "in a state of awe and reverence which is the emotional state of transcendence."
Few hunters in contemporary society go afield strictly to put meat in the freezer. People hunt for the aesthetic ritual, and at its nucleus, that is a spiritual experience. "The duck-hunter in his blind and the operatic singer on the stage, despite the disparity of their accouterments, are doing the same thing," said the father of modern wildlife management, Aldo Leopold. He reduced the reason for hunting to this odd comparison. "Each is reviving, in play, a drama formerly inherent in daily life. Both are, in the last analysis, aesthetic exercises."
That transcendence that comes in the full-immersion of hunting is the state of being where the uncertainties of existence become cogent and clear. And that is irreducibly a spiritual matter. Being close to the land, hunters say they come to know themselves through these experiences. Many believe that it is there in nature in pursuit of prey that they come to know the mind of God. Jesus himself didn't go the synagogue to hear God speak. He went to a different church; he went into the wilderness.
Mark Wilson is a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Montana - an avid hunter and angler - and he is also an ordained preacher. He lectures on what he calls "Creation stewardship." Wilson nears the completion of his second master's degree, this one in theology. He holds a master's in wildlife biology and researched waterfowl early in his career. On the face of it, they seem disparately different fields of study. But Wilson says that's not so. The connection is they both deal with stewardship, he says - something he's already been doing for 30 years as a biologist.
"Nothing speaks of a Creator in a language that anyone can understand more than being in nature, standing in awe of something beautiful," says Wilson. "We are instructed to take care of what we are given, like in Psalm 104; there is fullness, a blessing people enjoy in interacting with the Creation."
And that speaks to core of why hunters are conservationists, why they care immensely for nature. What is more, hunting is recreation; your senses stir and awaken to re-create one's own being. The aesthetic primordial act of hunting is paradoxical: Immersed in the hunt is life-affirming. Irreducibly, conservation of wild things in wild places matter to people.
One of my favorite places to hunt quail in New Mexico is at the juncture of two arroyos where a spring wells up in a fissure. On a rock outcrop, a lone knarled hackberry hangs by roots that palm through crevices. Its knobby bark is just like that found on hackberries on a fallow Ohio field. Behind the orbits of my eyes there is an everlasting fluid image. A covey of bobwhite takes to the wing in a flurry from a corner of a fallow field along a three-strand barbed wire fence. Their brown forms in flight pass through the hackberry and Osage, and meld into a sooty gray sky. Over and over again these 30 years, still caught in the moment, time at once accelerates yet stands frozen-still. I am inside myself, and at the same time entirely a part of all that surrounds me. Those odd acres made an impress upon my soul. Chance encounters with quail live in my mind. They register in my morals. Deeper yet, these acres still serve up spiritual food that sticks to my ribs.
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