“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”
— John Muir
There is a sharp bend in the road and that’s where the camp is. Below the Miller’s cornfields as the land tumbles into the valley/ rolling down into itself/ there’s a creek, (like there always is), and that’s further on below the cabin. It’s a low spot in these timeless Appalachians.
I first went there as a teenager, but it has been years since I set foot in the place. The cabin itself belongs to a good friend who time has borrowed and not yet returned. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
There’s no blame, either way.
All these years, they’re just riptides.
Everyone slips under in the end.
____
A recent favorite of mine, the Irish writer, Blindboy Boatclub, once spoke on his podcast about solemnity. It was a game changer for me, teasing my attention towards something I’d never really considered before. Solemnity, he offered, is a way that others hold sway over us. Dressed up like a ceremony, solemn tones and words invoke a sense in us that seem to whisper in our ear.
You had better understand that this is heavier than the sky.
In the hands of the religious or the powerful: solemnity causes us to reflect deeply on the dizzying heights of gods and leaders. In the hands of the poets: solemn phrases reflect our own existence; in times of strife or challenge there is rarely comedy or tenderness from the lips of those we turn to for validation of our own raw humanity. Instead, those in the know utilize majestic air to frame their messages. Their words reek of grandiosity, their deliverances made lofty by the walls of solemnity that are simply never to be scaled
So how does a guy like me hold nostalgia in his hand/ feel it slathering warm blood all down my fingers/ cupping a deer heart out in the wintry forest/ and not let solemnity move in to hijack my words?
I am not at all sure. It can’t be easy.
_____
Time has moved on in a way that I think is a little less cruel than I originally imagined it might be like someday. Literature and songs about aging, watching people get old for real, it wasn’t lost on me that I’d get there at some point if I simply lived. Age is the prize for survival. It hardly seems fair on the surface of things, but that’s why we are here now, I guess.
I have always believed that I would rather die than be sentimental for the bygone days.
Still, lately I find myself returning more and more in my mind to this old deer camp I once knew. The reasons why are unclear to me yet. There is a chance I will never know. After all, what business do any of us have questioning our daydreams?
The erstwhile fires of my abiding youth, they’re dimming.
And the shadows are spreading across the land.
_____
Dammit.
That was solemnity, wasn’t it?
Ugh.
Whatever.
Well/ I mean/ Did it work at least?
_____
A small camp made of cinderblocks painted summer sky blue; deep flat fudge trim on the windows and doors; the colors all basic, if a little sad. The simple draw of the place to the outside world was the framed portrait of real-time glow that hinted (through a solitary small window) of something beguiling within. At a distance of maybe twenty yards the bend in the road forced cars coming down the hill to ease up to a crawl so as to navigate the hard right that led down towards old Gene Persun’s house, and the hard left when you got there.
Inside the cabin, as the dark early winter evening swallowed everything, the rare cars coming down the road were given away by their headlights. They which would often appear to me- sitting on my chosen side of the long table in the kitchen, beneath the massive cork board with it’s old photos of the men when they were much younger kneeling proudly, no smiles upon their faces, at the sides of dead black bears and dead mountain lions and dead mule deer and dead pronghorn- as a pair of UFOs flickering down out of the night sky, into the glass above the sink. They would float and flick into the black gloss from far off/ grow in stature and brilliance as they moved closer/ mingle with the certain reflections of men tearing hunks of bread off the loaf or spooning out more canned corn/ or speaking/ silently in the glass/ as if they were in a painting that had somehow come alive.
All in short time, they eventually all hovered still for a fleeting instant before silently flying off out of our view.
Off into to the west.
And then they were gone.
Sometimes at the table I would be nursing a can of soda, listening to the older men razzing each other/ sly smiles upon their bearded faces/ their breath jaundiced by beer and snuff, when a car would come moving down the hill outside, no one noticing except me.
My imagination ran wild then. The aura of some solo car wheezing past the old deer camp was too much for the creative in me even back then. I heard songs in the possibilities the other men would have been confused by. I wrote the openings of beautiful indie films sitting right there beneath the current gun shop calendar with a big mule deer buck standing tall and proud in some high western pines. Within me, I held the keys to the plot of each motorized short story soundlessly moving forever forward through my life- and likely out of it forever- in the swift flash of time it took to eat a handful of pretzels, wash it down with some Coke.
Was it an elderly farm widow who smelled like mutt and wore original cat eye glasses out there easing her dead husband’s battleship Buick toward town? If so, why was she going there?
Or was it a man from the city, a bad man with killing in mind (and not deer either), steering himself towards the first warm occupied camp he came across? If it was, then what had brought him this far out ff the way of anyone else on Earth?
Was it a teenager up from the suburban counties to hunt deer same as me? If it was: would we be friends? Could we be friends? And what was he doing driving around by himself in these parts on a frigid night like tonight? Maybe it was none of those people. Maybe it was all of them crammed into one small car. I would never find out most of the time. They mostly just kept going. Deer camps are lovely places, friend, but if you are never invited then you won’t ever have the nerve to stop.
_____
In the middle of the long December night, the wind shatters the branches of certain brittle trees and ice comes crashing down onto the steel roof. No one stirs. The gusts out in the world, they hiss and groan. Ever stood outside in that kind of cold out in those kind of woods? If your answer is yeah, then you may appreciate the stretched-out optimism people sometimes get when they are privy to nature’s punishing wrath from the vantage of a dusty mattress on the floor of a sparse particleboard room.
The cabin heat is the sort of beast that directly feeds on men’s faces. In cramped quarters such as these, where the downstairs is the kitchen with it’s long table for 14 and all that’s left is a small side room with a couch and some chairs and a phone booth bathroom tucked in besides the hot water heater, sweaty nights were almost always a given. Upstairs, two rooms, each barely high enough to stand up in, plywood crypts infused with rainforest temps/ backwoods sauna chambers where men and boys each slept on twin mattresses laid directly on the uncarpeted floor.
Flimsy strands of gossamer light dangled from naked bulbs, one on each ceiling.
The whole thing was like your hospital room right before you die.
It was electrifying and horrifying and mesmerizing and sublime.
Through the venetians, country midnight pressed her purplish bruised tits up against the frosty glass as men unleashed their big guns, shelling the hill for all it was worth.
The oxygen up there was a miasma of melted shit.
I hardly ever slept a wink.
Everywhere I looked all I saw were beautiful deer running at me in the sacred forest, leaping out of the moonlit patterns on the pressed wood tiger skin walls. Creatures daring me to slay them.
Storybook bucks coming my way/ one after another/ all night long/ their strides digging into the world, stabbing into the skull of everything at once.
Freight train steam pouring out of its throbbing nostrils.
Charles Bronson and the White Buffalo.
Coming.
Coming.
Coming
Coming
Coming now, boy.
Coming now, oh frightened son.
The pale dawn crunching of some leafy forest floor older than the bottom of the sea.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
