Nothing Irrelevant About That

First sticking snow

On Saturday, after we’d finished chores, after I accompanied the boys on the daily running of their trapline, after we’d jarred another batch of kimchi, after we’d dispatched the last of the season’s lambs, and after I’d unsuccessfully attempted to resuscitate the truck, which had died a sputtering death in town the previous evening, I lit out for the north, in order to retrieve a half hog we’d taken to the butcher. The pig was destined for a friend’s table, and as such, we’d deemed it wise to hire a professional to cut and wrap the beast. Not everyone so willingly tolerates the eyesore roasts and chops we turn out atop our kitchen table.

Anyway, there I was at 5 o’clock-ish, motoring back from the butcher loaded with boxes of piggy parts, just starting to sink irretrievably into the sweet fatigue of a day spent in productive motion, when I came upon the cluster of cars at the road’s edge. There was a big black Lexus SUV amongst them, bits of plastic protruding from beneath the driver’s side wheel well. And at the opposite side of the road, to what did my wondering eyes appear? Why, a young fella dragging the corpse of a deer into the ditch. Even from a distance I could see that the deer (a doe, as it turned out), was in fine flesh and not too badly damaged. I mean, other than being dead, of course.

“You got any plans for that,” I inquired, after I’d halted the Subie and stepped onto the shoulder. Clearly he didn’t; he was dragging the poor beast into the ditch to rot, after all. But it seemed only polite to ask. With the assistance of the Lexus driver, who was clad in designer jeans and obviously uncomfortable at the thought of handling a dead deer (“I’ve never done anything like this,” he said. “She’s so… floppy”), I got the girl loaded into the back of the car, snuggled against the boxes of frozen hog bits.

Long story short, my new friend and I arrived home at 6, whereby I strung her up and by the lights of the tractor, liberated hide and organs. On Sunday, Penny proceeded to flesh the hide in preparation for tanning, whilst I laid the chilled carcass atop the counter and commenced to cutting and wrapping.

That’s the story. Here’s the moral, as I see it, although perhaps it’s not so much a moral as a reflection on my own curious assemblage of skills and capacities and how there was something about the procurement of that deer and the simple fact that I was able to make something of it that confirmed the strange, serpentine path of my life.

It’s a discomfiting thing, sometimes, inhabiting a world in which it often seems as if the small body of knowledge and experience contained within the vessel of my body and mind is irrelevant. Or nearly so, anyway. I know this isn’t really true; I realize the things I know and know how to do aren’t really irrelevant. But it’s also true that many of these things – most of them, probably – aren’t terribly marketable. They’re rarely acknowledged. They bring little recognition or acclaim, and as such, it can occasionally seem as if they don’t much matter.

What’s more, even what I do know – how to build a house or barn, or slaughter a hog, or make kimchi, or fell a tree, or whatever – I know less well that those who specialize in these tasks. I suppose writing is as close as I come to a specialty, unless one considers my very generalism a specialty (hmm… now there’s an interesting thought). In some regards, it’s sort of ironic: As I’ve come to know more and more about how to survive and thrive on this piece of land and in this community, I’ve become even more of a generalist. And the time passed accruing that knowledge and experience is time that hasn’t been passed developing the skills that would garner the recognition necessary to lend them marketability and perhaps imbue them with a sense of their being relevant.

Thank you, deer

Yet here I am, with a nice, fat doe in the freezer simply because when I happened upon that unfortunate scene, I didn’t have to think about it for even an instant. I saw that deer being dragged into ditch and I conjured an image of exactly how the rest of my evening was going to unfold, the animal hanging from the tractor bucket, a pot of hot water and two sharp knives at my side, my sons crowding in and clamoring to help, my feet going cold in the thin skim of snow that hadn’t quite melted. I knew that Penny would be happy for the hide and the boys for the strong lengths of sinew along the doe’s back. I knew the meat would feed my family and friends.

As surely as my hands still carried the faint smells of kimchi, diesel, and fresh-killed lamb – my day in odors – I knew that the experience contained within the vessel of my body and mind would keep that doe from bloating and rotting in the ditch. And there was nothing irrelevant about that.