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. Slow down, please, and read that last sentence again. Have you ever read a sentence even half that boring?

My tasks involved the making of mistakes, then discovering how to resolve those errors without being an asshole, a search that I now understand will never end.

When I was a kid and my family would pile into our Suburban and drive from Illinois to Minnesota or the Badlands or even Yellowstone, we just let the relatives and neighbors know we’d be back in two weeks or so, and to please water the tomatoes and keep an eye out for a postcard.

“And so I go to the woods. As I go in under the trees, dependably, almost at once, and by nothing I do, things fall into place. I enter an order that does not exist outside, in the human spaces. I feel my life take its place among the lives—the trees, the annual plants, the animals and birds, the living of all these and the dead—that go and have gone to make the life of the earth. “I am less important than I thought, the human race is less important than I thought. I rejoice in that. My mind loses its urgings, senses its nature, and is free.” Wendell Berry, A Native Hill (1969).

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

“When you spot a bear, you know how you tell a black from a grizzly? The first thing you should do is climb a tree to get a good look at it, and from the bear’s behavior you can determine the species. If it’s a black bear it’ll climb up the tree to get you, but if it just stands up and shakes the tree until you fall out, it’s a grizzly.”

According to Jon, there was a meme that the rangers kept posted in their office: Teddy Roosevelt walks through the woods and slaps signs upon them reading “Monument! Monument!” every time he sees a tree he likes.

as a great man once said, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.

OPPPTYB (Other People’s Poop Particles Touching Your Butt).

Jonas Salk: “Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.”

It is inherent in human nature to destroy, with ever-burgeoning ease, everything we touch.

As the King James Bible has it: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them, bitch.”

“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall, bitch.”

while our wealthiest playboys play rocket ship grab-ass giggle-tag.

Mother Nature is not an American, and she is not proud. She is all creation, so her vibe encompasses all experience, in every size, shape, and color, from the high to the low. Her economy and its successful evolution thrive on diversity, and her children never rest in their glorious participation, reproducing and adapting, so as to grow ever stronger.

It’s a daunting project, this remembrance, but since we continue to own a mirror in our household, try as I might to avoid it, I catch the occasional glimpse of myself and am reminded regularly that I’m a dipshit. You might think that I would not like to be reminded of this fact, but on the contrary, I am always grateful for the knowledge, because it is the starting point. When I recall my fallibility as a human, it comes as a relief to remember that I have still more work to do, and that the work will never cease until my hands give out.