Tuesday, December 12, 2006

I'm not from There anymore.

Being from North Dakota and about to embark on a long trip to the "Old Country" as my Grandma Lee used to call Norway, I read this column in the Chicago Tribune from an occasional correspondent of mine and a man who is of the same vintage as I who carries a well-written wisdom worthy of reading.

Read this:
Charles M. Madigan
Even in the familiar thicket, we're not from here anymore



Published December 12, 2006

A few weeks ago, we were in the town of Summit, Pa., which sits, appropriately, at the top of a mountain on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, when I heard a comment that planted itself so firmly in my head I have not been able to forget it.

My wife and I were looking for directions to the burial place of a poet-theologian ancestor in her family. A woman at the library was helping us.

"We're not from here anymore," my wife said. "We need to get to Mercersburg."

That statement, "We're not from here anymore," struck me as profound.

Of course we are no longer "from" Pennsylvania. We are literally "from" Evanston now.

The less obvious part, and the one that applies to me, to my wife, to all of us as a matter of fact, is that the place we were from is no longer literally there anymore, not the way it was in our youth.

To say "We're not from here anymore" is a statement that recognizes the nature of change in one's own life, and in the life of the place where it all began.

Briefly put, there is no "here" in my life anymore.

My parents are gone. The railroad that built my hometown, Altoona, is gone. Most of my friends are gone. The old neighborhood is strange, not as meticulously kept as when the Pennsylvania Railroad employed 54,000 people at very ripe wages. My grade school is gone. The convent is gone.

My first newspaper is gone.

I still have my brother and my sisters. But everything else that was familiar exists in my head, not on the ground.

I found that a pretty sad thought until I concluded that what doesn't change much in the formula is the individual and some rituals.

That was why there was a powerful resonance for me in being in Pennsylvania in the woods on the opening day of deer season.

Hunting is a ritual, like church. Even though the weapons have changed and the gear is fancier, it's still about the season, the quest, the win or lose prospect of coming home with your deer.

A week into combined buck and doe season, hunters had worked the deer far up into the mountains. At altitude (2,000 feet is high in the Keystone State) it was not unusual to run into little herds of deer high-tailing it for the Maryland border. It was rainy and in the 60s, unusually warm for the post-Thanksgiving hunting season.

I had witnessed this season many times in my youth. The symbol used to be the front-fender deer carcass, which you would see all the time as hunters hauled their trophies down the highway. Now the hills are alive with sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks of every description, so the deer are stowed before the trip home begins.

Hunting season eve seemed pretty much unchanged, at least at the little store where we stopped to pick up some food. A long queue of hunters waited to pay, armed to the eyes with turkey and deer jerky, lots of canned food, meat for dinner. Some of them wore orange coveralls.

That, in retrospect, was somehow comforting.

I talked with a man in the checkout line. He said the deer were not as plentiful as in previous years. Lovely as they are, deer behave like 200-pound rodents. They are dangerously wild, especially if accidentally confined. A big herd causes trouble, and a good hunting season will solve much of the problem.

Because we planned to be in the woods with our cameras and our eyes as the season played out, we stopped at Wal-Mart and purchased, for $3 each, orange Wheaties "Breakfast of Champions" hats to warn hunters that we were not a part of the harvest.

Happily, this worked.

A few cabins away from us, I talked with a young man who was icing down a big buck and a doe that were tied to the porch rafters, legs spread to open their cavities.

He told me the story of his hunt for the buck, and how his dad, who had just joined him on the porch, shot the doe a few minutes later in the same location. He was proud and I was honored to hear the little saga.

To some, I know, hunting sounds brutal. But I also know families who depend on deer season for their winter's meat. We're not all townspeople. We're not all well paid.

I felt that sense of loss, deep in the woods, that I was not from there anymore.

But it was comforting to know that this part of life, the deer-hunting ritual and the stories it creates, has not changed.

We didn't get our deer this year, but we got deer meat. 5 of them, thanks to the Frankhauser Gang who never met a deer they didn't shoot.

So, venison is still on the plate if you come to visit the Redlins in 2007. But, I didn't shoot it, I'm not from There anymore.

Oh, and if we do invite you to a nice plate of Deer Liver, There are no hormones in Deer Meat; Other than Lead.

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