Work Weekend at Deer Camp Inc.

Working my way up from the bottom is how I’ve stepped on board most adventure. Deck -handing on charter boats landed me buckets full of snapper and mahi baksheesh.  I’ve arced lightning across the tip of a screwdriver to an electric reel in a driving summer squall. Underwater hull patrol to untangle eighty-pound leader connected by drop weights and circle hooks put lead in my pencil. Sleeping on a rocking deck during overnight trips to the oil rigs once landed me in the drink. Free beer flowed like an offshore current. Joyfully, I butchered coolers of grouper and snapper on the ride to the hill. Green jeans was a mythical creature. I scoffed at the consequences consumed in a blaze of Glory. I was grateful. God shined on me.

Remorsefully, I was promoted from riding stern and cutting bait. Thankfully, I found new labor love in a place and its people. Her name is Crestola. She requires a lot of attention.

It is not by accident mossy-backed swamp donkeys sniff and lick the bottom rung of my ladder stand. To get them there, I started on the bottom rung of the duty ladder, as per the call of the wild requires.

During my audition decades ago, I near missed an eighteen-foot harrow tooth kissing the back tire of the John Deere I was driving – not operating. My labor hopes were shot out the back of a silage cutter like so much sunflower seed. To create some niche of value, I reimagined myself in the hierarchy of deer camp support. Now, I’m equal parts trail maintenance and nutritionist. Yep. I mop the floors, pole-saw the lanes and fill the feeders. Figure that math out.

Reluctantly, and only in moments of pitiful mercy, am I given mowing responsibility. And even then, strictly under the watchful eye of a circling vintage orange Chevy Luv.

The long hot days of menial, but divinely appointed tasks camouflage their own discoveries. Deer tracks, large and small, appear where there were none before. Fox squirrels pose in a forest lane; their white whiskers asking to be counted. Unbothered sounders of pigs roam around a feeder, blinded by the morning sun; bullet casings tumble from an ejector port.

Hornet and wasp nests swollen like cantaloupe tick-toe with flitty wing blades, then drip into the next world as foam washes over the colony. I’d grown smart to summer below the gnat line. Or so I thought.

This past weekend was one with nothing planned and a weather forecast hotter than two rats…Well, you get the picture. Perfect for a work-weekend at Deer Camp Inc.

Photo Credit: Jeff Peacher; 2019, Cottonmouth

Warned, I checked the Brickhouse carport for cottonmouths with a taste for chirping rain frogs. I placed watchful steps on the paths to feeders. Slithering chocolate-drop shapes and black diamond shadows once jarred my sensibilities.

On summer walkabouts these days, they simply confirm the rare air I breathe. Two days on the screaming end of a pole saw rendered me close but not finished. I peered through sweat-dripped readers and scanned the road edges for hovering stingers. But my time had run out.

I pushed my gloves through fresh cut limbs in a pile next to my truck door. When I felt the crawling sensation, I knocked my hat off. One of nature’s most lethal hypodermic needles slammed into the back of my neck. It left a bullseye radiating attack pheromones so hot, ten to fifteen more immediately painted duplicates on the blast radius. Raising to face my enemy allowed them access to my bare scalp. The ancient methodist marched and stung across a swath of bare acreage. My pelted bald head blistered like a day-old range target. The Muckalee swamp and sky cracked into a clockwork of floating glass chards.

I ran the required distance – ‘til you’re out of breath or need to hurl, both in this case – and waited. My blood curdled and my DNA unraveled as yellow jacket venom took root. Dizzy and blindsided, I wretched in horror. Five or six more planned their next move on my chest. Snatching my shirt off settled any differences among them, and they hammered me again. Expecting my life to flash before my eyes, I raced back to the Brickhouse for medical-, and sheepishly, moral-support.

I was met with faces shocked still into replicas of Edvard Munch’s, The Scream. Empty beer cans and peals of laughter weren’t entirely helpful, but at least I had an audience. Desperate, I asked my brothers in small arms the only thing I could, “Camb fumb wuh dribe me to da gaff fafion? I neeb ben-ba-drill.”

The warm, caring reply from my friends came back, “I can’t drive anyone anywhere, but I’ll ride with you.”

After a brief encounter with a rural convenience store owner who’d ‘never seen anything like it,’ I slept off the medicine and drove back home. In a moment of quiet narcissism, I stood in my dark garage tired, but proud of my service to my greater hunting group. Suddenly, a nudge of disbelief formed in my mind.

One of the little bastards had the perseverance to hitch a ride in my wheel-well for hours. He clung to life in a blistering wind. A rotating rubber wheel of death dared his weakness. On a crusade spanning this life and the next, he patiently waited to send one more message for his pals. The burn of a thousand candles seared into the middle of my back. My head thrown into last week and my belt buckle yanked into the next, I stretched my palm to where it would not go. All I could think of was DeNiro’s portrayed fury as the Cape Fear villain.

It’s just remarkable what you can discover on a work detail. I’ve more than I can say Grace over.