Hunting Trip

When my Dad hit me up about a hunting trip to Colorado and then offered to pay for it, I quickly accepted. This was all the better since I was not going to be able to make it back to Pennsylvania for buck season that year. As it was laid out, I would give my two week notice at work and one of those weeks would take me Colorado.

***

When the time came to leave, Leanna saw me off to the airport and soon enough I was in the air heading west. As usual whenever I flew, I managed to get one of the ill-fated wing seats - but managed to get one by a window and as I looked out over the wings as 737 inched off the ground those aluminum wings flapped and waved in the air like a struggling condor and I thought for sure that they might snap off any moment leaving the hot dog of a fuselage and me clutching my peanuts nose diving into eternity.

After brief layover in Chicago I arrived in Denver. Dad had already arrived at the location of the hunt along with my Mom. He had arranged for me to pick up a rental car somewhere near the airport so I hopped the shuttle and bobbed along in what seemed an endless circle until I finally arrived at the Alamo rental place. The 1991 Montero, hunter green, gleamed in the warm October sun before me. It seemed to me that this must of been the way some cowboy reacted when he saw his nice clean horse outside the Alamo place a hundred years earlier. I went inside with the rental guy and put the vehicle on my American Express (travel expenses to be reimbued by father) and he handed me the keys.

"Here you go. Enjoy... and good luck."

I wasn't sure what he was talking about until I remember I was here to hunt.

"Awh thanks. We'll see how it goes. Never hunted anywhere but Pennsylvania so..."

"Well, the truck should get you where you need to go. You're lucky you reserved that when you did. Alot of these guys are having to take sedans out into the moutains."

I looked around me and noticed the other guys (Colorado was literally being invaded but hunters by land and air) grimacing as they were handed the keys to a Caprice or Beretta. I thanked the guy, grabbed my keys, and jumped into the Montero.

***

I was indeed heading out West to hunt, but the truth was I was drifting, traveling and not caring one way or not whether I got an elk or mule deer. The plane out was packed full of enthusiatic hunters, but I looked like an imposter in their midst. I kept my attention split between Kerouac's Desolation Angels and a map of Colorado. Somehow though they were alive and vibrant; I was merely observing.

Even Denver seemed a bustling town of the old days with guys shouldering rifles and spinning tales and now that I was in a vehicle I quickly steered it out of town. I head spent much of the previous two years or so reading about the Beats and therefore headed to Boulder where I had heard there was a school of 'disembodied poets' or something set up with the help of Allen Ginsberg. In my mind it was a place to aim for, where I might somehow identify with the people there. I drove around the city streets and peeked from behind the steering wheel when I could - even got out and walked around for the 30 mintues allowed by the parking meter. For such a town associated in a way with the Beats, there wasn't a whole lot left. What I did find of them was commercialized and only the book peddlers were purveyors of their word. I picked up a flyer in one of the sotres of a poetry reading that was happening in the next week or so and there was Kerouac's picture in photocopy on pink paper. Words read "Hear [so and so] read Old Angel Midnight".... Yeah okay that sounded alright, but where was Kerouac? I quickly had enough and jumped into the Montero to head to the poets school. I was suprised when I found it so easily - set in among the lesser suburbs kind of out of the way but along an empty lot which reminded me of a field.

The place was an old barrack likely purchased and dropped off from some military surplus wholesaler. People were coming and going clutching notebook and pulling their hair out of ther faces. One guys nodded as I reached around him to grab the door. Once inside I saw several people in the gribs of conversation, the way some of the more earnest students will do outside of a just-cleared classroom. They didn't even see me walking around looking at the bulletin boards and picked up semester course catalogs. I didn't want to interupt any of the hallway exchanges, but it seemed a damn shame to drive all the way and just leave with a course catalog that I would probably whip in some trash can at some rest stop down the road.

I passed another door further down the hallway above was the painted word on wooden plaque 'Registrar.' A guy was seated in reclining office chair looking up at book clutching poet girl who stood leaning against his desk. It weas clear to me the fake poet registrar was trying to pick her up. Their comfort zone filled the room and they quickly noticed when I entered into it.

"Can I help you?" the guy said as they both looked at me.

I actually thought for a moment about what I was going to say, but didn't come up with much.

"What all courses do you offer here?" That was me, lamely.

The girl looked quickly at the guy, like wanting to seem him at his most challenged in his career.

He efficiently offered "Feel free to grab one of the catalogs stacked out in the hallway there." He pointed and at the same time noticed my hand wrapped around one of the catalogs already. "Oh, well, yeah.. check it out. There's some pretty good stuff in there." The girl shrigged slightly.

I made a mental note then and there to try as hard as I might that if I found myself in a particular place that I would have some idea of what the hell I was doing there.

"Right. I'll check it out" I said waving the catalog about and then "Thanks."

I quickly spun back out into the hall and strode for the door. I heard some sniggers coming from the Registrar's Office.

"What the fuck?" I said under my breath. Actually I meant "What the fuck am I doing?" I was skimming the surface of life trying to go to places that had some significance to other people or to dead people I had read about. "School of disembowed poets more like it" I thought and punched the Montero out of the parking lot spinning dry western dust into the air. Surely I looked like a freak to those poets, but it really seemed to me a dumb idea to actually sign up for classes to study poetry. Grab a book of poetry and read it... but most importantly, write your own.....

"What do they know?" I said to myself, thrusting a straw through the Coke I had purchased at a McDonald's somewhere outside of Boulder. I leaned up against the side of the Montero in the warm October Colorado sun washing two cheeseburgers down with the Coke. It was a little after noon and the thermometer was already near 80 degree. My trip to the poetry school yielded litte but a sense of disatisfaction. Truth was they didn't know me from any other hopefull loser that walked through their doors. I didn't know what I expected from people. Like was the whole school barrack supposed to welcome me with a big Hotel California "We've been expecting you?"

***

I made my way to the hunt by traveling north out of Boulder and winding through Rocky Mountain National Park. The park seemed almost deserted; not a sign of a hunter anywhere. All around me was wilderness, albeit a preserved one with a beautifullly maintained road running through it. Still, it helped me to distance myself from the District and the disappointment of Boulder. Such grandiose scenes such as slowly pushing my way through a herd of mountain sheep at the top of a pass and taking the winding road down into the greens and yellows of late season aspens quickly moved me into the present experience of being far way from the city and into the majestic expanse of the West.

At some point I left the park and the land went from mountains and forest to prairie. The road took me south through no sign of man; save for the determined movements of a freight train hugging the outline of the southern flow of the river below. The huge distant mesas further out to the west kept me craning my head to the right and back the road (usually just in time to keep at least two wheels on the road). The signs of development grew closer as I approached route 70 until the secondary road wound past a BFI landfill area and I hung a right onto the interstate and headed further west.

***

The first day of the hunt found me on a stump in darkness in air so cold and thin it seemed the oxygen had frozen out of it at some point and dropped to the ground. The cycle of the moon had taken it far away form where I was and only the faint pre-dawn glimmer of stars remained in the sky. If I looked hard enough off at the horizon I could just make out the faintest trace of daylight pink. Even with the coming light I could make out little more than dark conifer blobs against the frosted ground.

I knew from my short scouting trip after arriving the day before me that there wasn't much around me. Dad and I had creeped slowly up several thousand feet of one-way dirt road (with no guard rail) to reach the very top of the White Moutain National Forest all of ten thousand feet high. I was driving.

"Awh geez take it easy Conrad." Dad was squirming in his seat, barely able to look out the front window (or more amazingly drink his coffee). Another truck for whatever reason was heading down the road and I was over as far as I could go against the side of the mountain without trying some insane off-road manuevre.

"You're the one that better take it easy Dad. You're causing more harm than good. I mean you're making me all twitchy to the point where I just might twitch off the side of this mountain. Whoah!" I swiveled the wheel ever so slightly.

"Now come on!"

Though we were still on the mountain, I had pushed Dad over the edge.

My feet were quickly feeling the cold and again I found myself looking longingly towards the sun. There it was, a little more profound casting the crags of the mountains in a dark light. The shards of their peaks were all around the perimeter of the world I could see as though I was a small speck sitting looking out across the edges of a great cracked red clay jar. It was the sometimes crazy thoughts that popped into your head that drew me to the hunt as much as the idea of killing the animal. All the more for a guy who just really wanted to write more than anything. In fact the moment was so profound that I just had to pull my breast pocket notebook out from the downy-jacket within to make some notes of this glorious experience.

Still, as inspiring as all this was, I thought back to just a few hours ago when I was sure I was near gonna lose my Dad. We had each brought our own backpacking tent and the other guys had hauled in this big ass canvas thing which was seriously about 30' by 10' and actually had a little wood burning stove in it. Yeah they were really roughing the hunt. Meanwhile my Dad and I were shivering to death a stone's throw away in the next level spot in our unheated rip-stop nylon tents. Amazing that it was 74 degrees when we arrived, but by midnight it was 20 and falling. I fact it had gotten so bad that for survival I pulled all the shit out of my travel bags and piled all the clothing around me for insulation. The bags that Dad and I had were good to fifteen degrees. At some point in the middle of the night Dad dropped below that point.

"P-P-Peter" Dad chattered. I don't recall how many time he had to do so until he woke me up.

""What?" was all I could muster.

"I think I'm freezing to death," he said in a desperate, fog laden whisper. In the next tent the guys were peeling their sleeping bags away from their sweating bodies to get more comfortable.

I perked up a bit when I heard the shivering in his voice. I knew what the problem was. He deemed fit to bring a cot along on the hunting trip so he could be more comfortable sleeping, but it was killing him in the end.

"Dad, you gotta get up off of that cot. All that freezing air is circulating all around you. You have to get on the ground. Unpack your bags and put all your clothes around you. At least that way you have some insulation."

He chattered some kind of response like "I guess you're right," but I didn't wait around to see what happend. I mean shit, I was tired.

In the morning I was awakened by the sounds of my father's body doing its best to keep hypothermia at bay. It was all that kind of shallow irregular breathing coming out... not even chattering teeth anymore. Just involuntary muscle spasms. He was still on the cot.

"Are you insane Dad? I told you to get off of that thing. Geez." I threw on some boots and crawled out of the tent in my long underwear and helped my Dad into his boots and humbly into the canvas wood-heated tent of our hunting partners. We slapped ouur hands against the canvas and they let us in. Dad did all but jump on top of the wood burner which was nearly out, but was way warmer that the deep space cot which my Dad was on before. The other guys were awake and got some oat meal going. I felt better and knew that Dad was okay and left the tent to go get changed and head out to the first day of the hunt.

So there I was on the stump I had spotted the day before and o

Little old me sitting quietly captured and surrounded by the craggy bracken of this world.

***