Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

by Nick Offerman

Agrarianism promotes an egalitarian agriculture based on morally sound land use.

I would never be that innocent MTV-lover again. As if for the first time, I could see clearly the folly in the shiny materialism I had so adored, and the folly in us humans as well, me, first and foremost.

Ever since that epiphany, with my limited cognitive capacity, I have instead been able to periodically glimpse the ways in which we industriously sell to one another our own demise. One of the most pernicious ways in which we do that is by pretending and convincing one another that the planet’s resources are unlimited, and that we don’t need to worry about the concerns of agrarians, because they are old-fashioned and certainly not cool.

Even a dum-dum like me recalls Jesus’s saying in Matthew 25: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” But, no, the clear message here in Kalispell was “Fear God (or Else).”

Dear reader, I have strong opinions as well that I’m happy to share, especially if you travel onto my turf, but I don’t feel the need to erect a sign in my yard proclaiming “BEEF TALLOW IS THE FUCKING BOSS.”

I set out to write a book about us humans, particularly us Americans, and our relationship (or lack thereof) with the natural world, a.k.a. our ecosystem. I knew that our country’s complicated and loaded history vis-à-vis the various denominations of the Christian faith would play an important part in that conversation; I just hadn’t expected it to slap me fulsomely across the kisser the moment I set foot in Montana.

I wanted to get out into some remote nature, away from the various channels of distraction that ever-increasingly rule my daily labors, and get to studenting. Letting the concerns of modern life slip away from my immediate attention—filling up my senses with Mother Nature’s lush bounty—was foremost on my mind. Also, because I am a human being and subject to base passions, I wanted to go for a long walk in the woods so that I wouldn’t punch anybody in the nose,

I think that a downside of the kind of shopping Jeff and I enjoyed is that perhaps it can fool a person into creating an actual deficit in life—“I can’t go have fun doing [x activity] because I don’t have the proper gear.”

“Do we feel such an overwhelming peace when we enter the woods because the chaos of nature is a balm to the rectilinear order of mankind?”

“Or is civilization the chaos, and nature’s inscrutable design the respite because of its older-than-the-hills systems and patterns?”

when you make art with confidence, then clumsiness doesn’t play as clumsiness, but panache.

A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles. —Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

we modern Americans would be hard-pressed to come up with a single scenario in which we treated the Indigenous peoples with anything remotely resembling fairness.

This half-day statistic gets at the heart of what I think is wrong with the way we look at nature, because we treat it like an attraction at a theme park.

Everyone should get to like what they like, and that’s perfectly fine, but for my part, I’d suggest that much greater pleasure can be derived if you get out of the Jeep and discover your own experience of the trail, or the forest, or the mountain.

We unstring the everyday worries that hold our necks and shoulders taut, and cast our eyes upon the lush conifer forest, sandwiched by the blue-green expanses of water and sky. The air is fresh and sweet, and we sip great drafts of it through our teeth (minding the bugs), and our bodies seemingly transform from the practical, robotic machines that drive our cars and wash our dishes and type our emails, into furry mammals that feast and fart and belong upon this water and in these woods.

While generally a wonderful inspiration on the surface, the establishment of parks would cement the eradication of Indigenous people from their historical land and call for the removal of livestock (he actually referred to sheep as “hoofed locusts”).

As Wendell Berry says, “Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”

There is something deeply pacifying about traveling my body, with or without compatriots, to remote areas for the purpose of stripping away all the distractions that worry my everyday to-do list; to bask instead in the meditative solace of Nature and her elements; to coddle myself in the knowledge that I have used my common sense, and the sense of those who have gone there before me, to not only survive but relish the feeling of safety that comes from wearing the right gear and packing the right supplies for a place that demands hands-on know-how when something goes south.

One of my favorite things to do, no matter where I am, is to locomote my hirsute bod to a location like this, sit down, maybe enjoy a cup of black coffee or tea from my thermos, and listen.

You rarely see messaging encouraging one to sit still, breathe, and please don’t think about buying anything at all.

This is one of the most important aspects of what I think of as “wilderness.” It’s a place where I can marinate in the silence cre...

Whether it’s on a big trip like this or just sitting on a stump out behind my woodshop, I find that when I render myself unavailable to the channels, I am calmed beyond any silence that I can reach while in touch with the world.

Domesticity is a funny thing. I’m certainly a fan. It’s a consolation, generally, to be sought, but then once attained, it can immediately flip the script and become stifling.

We strategically time our “getaways” to coincide with the sands of patience running out in the hourglasses of our civility, so we’re able to reset those calming qualities before we “punch” our “fists” through our “closet doors.”

You’re walking. And you don’t always realize it But you’re always falling With each step, you fall forward slightly And then catch yourself from falling Over and over, you’re falling And then catching yourself from falling And this is how you can be walking and falling At the same time

What if it was my Dungeons & Dragons ex-friend Cedric, who says that I’m invisible in real life because he’s still holding a grudge after my thief stole his invisibility cloak, his bag of holding, and a vorpal dagger that his cleric had stolen in the first place, so you can still fuck off, Cedric; I know you’re reading this.

Nerd self-call!

We had done well in our lives, against all odds, and this trip was evidence of that. The “odds” I refer to would be our propensity as middle-aged, straight white guys to somehow hobble or ultimately destroy ourselves under the influence of the enormous privilege we lived with.

George: “Being nice is different than being . . .” Jeff: “Good. Or maybe being nice is the same as being good, but not everyone has been taught to be good in the abstract. They can be good directly, and that’s very, very important, but that’s the trick of it—liberals are constantly trying to get people to be good in the abstract. Be good to people you don’t know, even if you don’t know what their lives are like. To be good to people you don’t care about.”

I do believe that the behavior Jeff was suggesting was simply one of the cornerstones of Christian thought. Voicing it thus, to my way of thinking, only goes to show how far the ideology of our country’s so-called conservatives has strayed from the values upon which their beliefs were supposedly founded.

“The only way you can follow both Trump and Jesus is if you’ve never read either of their books.”

You can call it mojo, or kismet, or serendipity, or whatever you like, just don’t call me late for dinner.

It reminded me of visiting the house of a new friend that happened to exhibit the chaos resulting from parenthood and the bustle of work and school, compelling the friend to “apologize for the mess.” To this I always reply with an admonition: “Are you crazy? This scene clearly has written all over it that you are living! This speaks of health and vigor. If this place was impeccably spotless and resembled the cover of a design magazine, then I’d be worried about you.”

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring,

It has ever been the attitude of us Homo sapiens that when we employ our appetites and our technology to take what we like from the earth, if that greed should cause us any sort of problem, why, we’ll just use our indefatigable smarts to science us up a solution to that new problem.

Leopold now understood that the only way to live responsibly, with the values of good citizenship in regard to our planet, our watershed, our neighbors, and ourselves, was to understand our place in that infinite pattern.

If you can stay out of Mother Nature’s way as much as possible, year after year it stands to reason that your harvest of her bounty will have a much better chance at consistently high quality. This method contrasts pretty starkly with the American ideal, not of agri-culture, but of agri-business.

Like all human problems, the situation is more complicated than just “big farm bad/little farm good,” but in the grand scheme of American food production, my attention is consistently drawn to one massive factor: the vast majority of our grain farmers are not actually growing edible food. Instead of working within the parameters of nature (a.k.a. “health”) to produce delicious, nutritious food items, all of the corn and soybeans are destined to become mere ingredients, processed into “food products” in a factory setting.

We have allowed our food system to be entirely usurped by corporate interests who do not produce our food with our health in mind.

I mean, what is the point of food in the first place? In America, the obfuscation cloaking how our food is produced has reached the point where we have to work hard just to discern which food is actually clean, healthy, nutritious, and free of additives, and then pay considerably more to buy it.

“The economy” in the news has a lot to do with how the nation’s corporations are faring, and little to do with how many salmon are managing to make it back up an Oregon river to their spawning grounds in the face of new dams we have installed.

The little money economy that our politicians and bankers openly worship is not the economy about which we should be seeking diagnoses. The Great Economy, in the end, is all that matters.

“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

Aldo Leopold

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”

Wendell Berry

“Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.”

Jonas Salk

For example, right now there are different sets of rules for labels that read Organic, Certified Organic, or Certified 100% Organic. What this makes immediately clear to me is that the governmental body tasked with overseeing the quality and nutritional health of the food we’re being sold is full of shit.

Certified Humane and Animal Welfare Approved are the labels to look for—they are endorsed by the ASPCA and the Center for Food Safety, among other animal welfare groups, and they connote the conditions most resembling a healthy and happy, rotationally grazed flock, and are therefore the hardest phrases to find in the store.

I have never seen a store-bought yolk that could hold a candle to the rich, yellow-orange vibrancy of homegrown eggs.

Absolutely the best!

Aldo Leopold wrote, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

We need to hold the USDA accountable for the safety of the products we can buy but also for the methods by which they are allowed to be manufactured.