“Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.“
I am not sure where I first heard this quote by Alexis Carrel, but as I ripped the fourth or fifth tick of the trip off me with my trusty Leatherman this quote went through my head… and not just for reasons obvious and immediate.
Spring is a time of rebirth and of remanufacture for every ecosystem and every living thing that I’m aware of. At least, that’s how it appeared to me I sat on a grassy slope and watched a newborn elk calf nurse off of mom at least twice during the week’s events. The deer are trusting in May and I had more close encounters than I could count once my trip out of service and in the mountains had run its course. The moose stood still, shin-deep in the slowmoving beaverponds in the bottoms of the steep canyons. Turkeys prowled along forest roads in the early hours of the morning. The water rushed down from the receding snowline, scoffing at the most tenacious efforts of bait or fly.
Perhaps most striking, though, was the vivid display of the Rocky Mountains in absolute, peak wildflower bloom. I’ve heard of superblooms of cacti and forbs in the desert — not really sure if the terminology is applicable in the green North, but I can’t think of another word for it, even after much contemplation. Almost entirely arrowleaf balsamroot and lupine, with a smattering of Indian paintbrush scattered about with an apparent randomness.
Each morning, for seven days, I woke to the smell of flowers drifting through my flyless tent on a gentle breeze. I woke to the sounds of robins chirping, and the peculiar six AM sun after a mere seven or eight hours of true darkness. I did not wake up to notifications, texts, emails, or the ability to mindlessly scroll through the morning’s news as I have a pernicious and recurrent habit of doing.
The world kept turning as it has always done — awareness from this lone soul be damned.
My annual week out in the Bitterroots serves as a small and unmissable window of time where I attempt to remake myself to any degree possible — like everything else around me. To lower my bar of comfort as much as I responsibly can. To unplug myself from the bit stream and give my brain room to writhe around on its own and see what insights find their way forward on the drive home. To not live out malevolent charade of instant accessibility to everyone on earth with my phone number and email address thanks to the magic rectangle we all choose to carry around. To put the best foot forward for the winters to come, far away though they may seem at the time.
It should go without saying that I hope to come out a better man — hunter, outdoorsman, whatever — after this process than a worse one. Every year I feel like I make some progress, no matter how small, and then by the time the next three hundred sixty five days have passed I feel like I’m right back to where I was the year before. Year to year, the mountains mostly look the same too.
Some resets are forced and some are voluntary, but the end result is the same. Twenty-five has been a year of forced resets… both in terms of the firearms market, and for me personally. Fear not the winnowing process itself… fear what’s waiting on the other end should the universe deem you the chaff.
None of this has anything to do with how the hunt went, likely since this trip ended without a punched tag. I am now 0-4 on spring spot-and-stalk bear hunts, which should probably merit more introspection than whatever the hell I was rambling about above. The man in the arena… or something.
It seems always impossible for me to extricate this sort of broader reflection on life and the trajectory of one’s own from from what should otherwise be a one-note hunting trip. I don’t know why this is the case, although I’ve heard speculation from smarter folks that thinking while ambulatory can lend itself to deeper connections and better insights. Perhaps the inherently distraction-free nature of the thing is really the vehicle for all of this. I don’t know.
Now, I sit here in my beloved GFI rocking camp chair in the middle of nowhere — in the broad vicinity of Pioche, Nevada — as an afternoon thunderstorm rolls through the hills to the north while I write this. Of course, an intact tag after a hard week away from family isn’t the result that anyone strives for, but the Great Basin wind seems to speak to me another, harsher truth; at the end of the day, I experienced no suffering at all compared to what I was expecting; compared to what I should have experienced.
Status quo ante. Sure, my bar of comfort gets progressively lower with each trip, but complacency seems to slip in anyway. There was no great montane remaking this spring… not even an evolutionary, incremental one.
The year is 2025 and there now exist dozens and dozens of companies marketing solely to hunters. Of course, a full freezer and a nice set of antlers (or hide, more relevantly) is usually the carrot that is dangled in front of potential consumers, enticing them to purchase whatever their wares may be. This is certainly an important part of the experience; however, I notice a certain lacking of introspection from there. In this crowded age where hunting — especially out of state trips — is often more of a luxury and status symbol for the genteel outdoorsman, half of the equation is left out.
I guess that makes sense. How can you market this sentiment? How can you profit from it? I fault nobody for this absence.
For some reason, the understanding of the physical and emotional aspects of the sport and of the things around it has always better been espoused by fishermen. Go reread The Longest Silence again if you don’t believe me. I don’t know if it’s some outwardly macho image that big game hunters aspire to, but this universal and uniquely human mandate for refinement should never be cast by the wayside, and instead should be perhaps at the forefront of one’s thoughts while busting through the alders and underbrush.
It’s easy to miss the forest for the trees in today’s age, and I believe that doing so in this capacity is, at its worst, a serious detriment to the soul of a man. Best case, well… there’s no refinement. No self-stropping. No furtherance of one’s potential.
I tend to ascribe some sort of deity status to all of my great inspirations in this domain: Elmer Keith, John Gierach, Rinella (the list goes on and on), and occasionally that train of thought leads me to the belief that these exceptional specimens are the only people qualified to share their thoughts on paper or screen. That is, I oftentimes wonder who I am to pontificate with such vanity on this deeper vein that runs through these lifestyles and the pursuits that we all love so much. Indeed, I am nobody special.
Perhaps, then, while not occupying any space indistinguishable from an archetypal composite of the Everyman, the sentiment that I express is more universal and not as relegated solely to me as I initially had felt.
The easiest action a man can take is to leave himself in the run that he has found himself in. Mired in the complacency which kills. Perhaps I didn’t give it everything? What else could I have left out in the mountains? I suppose I have a year for the AAR.
The preventative course of Doxycycline cost me $27.50. Cheaper than a shrink, I guess.
