2022 Hog Hunt Day 4 - So It Goes

"Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes." - Kurt Vonnegut

I woke up and had no reason to dither.  I thought about taking a shower, but even that seemed like a waste of time.  I was on the road a few minutes after 3:00.  I made my way out on the dark roads.  I saw lots of deer, but they are mostly not too stupid this time of year so they stayed where they should be.  There was quite a bit of traffic for how early it was, but the morning was still quite nice.

I was listening to The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer.  Or at least I tried to listen to it.  It jumped around and I thought it was going to be about fighting/hiding from terrorist Islamic groups.  It started out as mostly history of writing in Africa.  The description of the physical books was fascinating, but I just could not get excited about the books.  Should they be preserved from a historic perspective?  Of course, but it seemed like forcing it to make it sound like these books were centuries ahead of anything.  It is sad how little the owners cared about the books - keeping them in goat skin bags to be ravaged by water or allowing them to be eaten by termites says something about the current culture.  Character development was somewhere between unsympathetic and non-existent.  It did sound like the book would have gotten better later, but rather than skip part of the book, I think I'm better off deleting it.

Thankfully I had tons of podcasts saved -mostly Hidden Brain - many of which were really good.

The evidence of the winter storm started a little over 100 miles from camp.  South Carolina High Country looked like it got hit hard as did Central Kentucky.  Oddly, the Appalachian area didn't look like it got near as much.  The snow did make the mountains very pretty though.

I continued driving and stopped to get gas at the same gas station I usually do right off I-81.  Why oh why do I buy pickled sausage?  I question my life choices sometimes.

I think I woke up SO and her sister when I got home.  I watched my sister-in-law help SO get moved into another room.  If SO doesn't have any mountain goat (she does not), I don't have the caring gene (I do not).  I'll have to develop this.

We talked for a bit about both the current situation and a few other things before Sis-in-Law had to leave.  I am incredibly grateful for what she did for us.

I'm disappointed that my hog hunt was cut short.  Sometimes life happens.  So it goes.  At this point, I can only hope that I am prepared for the next few weeks.  It will be stressful enough that I may need something like a hog hunt after it is all over.

2022 Hog Hunt Day 3 - Ended by Tonya Harding

I woke up and had one of those - where am I - moments in the bizarre space between asleep and awake.  I love that liminal place: fear, ambiguity, texture, enigma.  As the haze was lifting, I grabbed my phone to see what time it was.  There were a ton of messages from my home security system which wasn't too surprising since I went to bed early.  There was also a text from SO, "Give me a call when you can.  I'm OK."  When someone says this, it usually means they are not.

I called and SO said that she had fallen in the garage and was at the hospital.  She had broken her knee.  Her sister was on her way down.  "I'm assuming I need to come home?" 

"I don't know, let's talk about it later."

I tried to get back asleep, but it was near the time I usually get up anyway so I just flopped around for a bit before looking back at my phone.  In my mind, it seemed serious, but not serious-serious until I looked at some of the video from the home security cameras and saw ambulances, cops, squad...

I guess it did make me feel a little better to see one of the squad guys let the dogs in and the cop lock up everything before he left.

I texted her to see if she could talk again, but didn't get a response.  Either she was busy being hospitaled, she was asleep on some marvelous pain killer, or they put her down.  I got up and tried to busy myself until I could hear back from her.  I spent too much time rewatching the videos - why the eff didn't they shut the lights off before they left?  Why is that guy parked on my lawn?  These reactions were neither pertinent nor rational.

Sitting 700 miles away miles away is somewhat helpless.  I was struck by how technology has consistently made things both better and worse at the same time.  Last year I visited my dead relatives.  In subsequent reading of letters to/from them from their first years in the US, I read about their troubles - both big and small - that they went through.  But news travelled at the pace of of boats across the ocean.  No blow-by-blow partial information.  Now, in nearly real time I could watch SO get wheeled out of the house on a stretcher.  I could worry almost as it happened, even if I couldn't really do anything.  At some level, it isn't different:  go about life until...  That "until" has moved.  When things travelled slowly for my relatives, they didn't dash off a 2 sentence letter that a knee was broken without more of the chronology.  The narrative was able to find a resting place, even if that place wasn't a good one.  This is also a false comparison at some level since the idea of driving 700 miles to hunt pigs would have been quite preposterous 100 years ago.  Besides, they had pigs on their farm.

SO and I talked and decided I would head home.  For most of the rest of the day I felt like a tool for not going home right away.  The doctor said she would be off her feet for 4-8 weeks after surgery, so it clearly wasn't a minor surgery. 

But for better or worse, I had one more evening to hunt.  After getting my annual dose of fast food, we fed stands.  The stand I had been on the previous afternoon looked like a bomb had gone off with hog activity.

Back at the lodge I mostly sat around.  I thought about reading, but didn't have the concentration.  Early afternoon we headed out for hogs.  Temperatures were wonderful in the upper 40s, but the wind was brutal.  Not only does this make it feel much colder, but it also tends to make the animals hold tight.  I was sitting on the church stand, which I like.  It was moved back into a small field from where it had previously been closer to the road.  The tripod stand was really comfortable.  Predictably, not much was moving.  I was disappointed it was my last afternoon to hunt, while at the same time I felt like an ass for not already heading home - the worst of both worlds.

Right around sunset five does came out with a buck trailing them.  It spent a while rubbing its nose on trees before heading to the corn pile.  For the remainder of the shooting light, deer sauntered in and out to the point I lost count.  There was a lot of them.  At dark:30, I unloaded and walked back to the road.

Denis had been at Sandy Bottoms and hadn't seen anything.  Claude had shot at two, but only one was recovered.  And it was about the same size as a big squirrel.  It will still be good on the rotisserie.

Back at the lodge Denis and Claude generously shared their spaghetti with me.  I packed most of my stuff up for the drive home.

2022 Hog Hunt Day 2 - A Wet Start

The four Philadelphia guys left around 2:00.  They sort of woke me up, but I was only sort of sleeping anyways since it felt like every time I moved I was Godzilla shaking Tokyo.  Once they were out, I felt a little better, but still couldn't sleep.  I got up a little later to pounding wind and rain.  I could only hope this was going to be over before afternoon pig time.

Most of my stuff was still in my truck, so it was lodge coffee and a lone granola bar.  I poked around online and read for a while.  For unknown reasons, I was feeling very anxious.  I watched a few episodes of Seinfeld followed by some of The Office.  

At some point Lisa came to clean the lodge.  I had taken advantage of a very brief window with less rain to get my stuff out of the truck, so it was a bit in the way.  So was I.  She was very thorough with the Lysol to the point that I wasn't so fond of the smell.  These are indeed strange times.

Two O'clock rolled around and it was time to head out to hunt.  I asked Rick where I was going and he originally told me a tripod, but switched to a ground blind as the wind switched in a very short amount of time.  I had been cold most of the day so I wore tons of clothes - possibly too much.  I was in a stand I had never been in before (I don't remember the name).

As I was getting situated, I saw three deer on the corn pile.  They were acting very nervous and only stuck around for five of the first 15 minutes.  But the good thing was that the rain had stopped.  It was still very drippy, but the heavy rain would have made things worse.

I tried to get a quick picture of the deer and the camera on my phone decided to try to be an impressionist painter.  While it looks kind of neat, I hope it isn't a sign the camera is dying.

The afternoon passed quickly despite not very much in the way of animals.  There was some really noisy people a few hundred yards away, but it was only really annoying for a few minutes, as well as for a bit while I waited to get picked up.  Late afternoon in the blind was actually quick pleasant with just a hint of sun.  There was some wind, but deep in the trees it was minimal.

Darkness came and I slipped out as quietly as I could.  I had to walk down the road a bit to be picked up.  At one point a truck very similar to Rick's drove by and I almost walked out to it.  I'm glad I didn't - that could have been embarrassing.

Back in camp Denis and Claude were there.  We all ate dinner and talked as best we could in English (although I did my best to at least use a few words).  I went to bed hoping for a bit of much needed sleep.

2022 Hog Hunt Day 1 - Drive Day

The previous week was far too busy at work and filled with too much stress.  I was looking forward to a few days off and to hog hunting.  My last trip to Canada for bears wasn't that long ago, but mentally it seemed like it was.  The extra time off around Christmas seemed like I wasted a phenomenal amount of time; I watched a lot of TV.  But I was able to mostly use my vacation through both 2020/2021 which is a win.  I say mostly because there were a few days were I ended up logging on to work - too much...

After packing everything up Friday, I was up around my normal time for work.  After taking care of the dogs, it was a quick shower and I was out the door around 4:00.  The dogs just thought it was a normal day of work.

It felt good to be on the road.  Early traffic was predictably light, although there were many places through the day where it seemed like it was much busier than it should have been.  I listened to the book Sex on the Moon by Ben Mezrich.  It is a very well written book about a man (Thad Roberts) who throws away a promising career at NASA by stealing some moon rocks to sell.  As the book progressed, I kept thinking, "What a waste to throw away so much." but it doesn't sound like things in the end turned out too bad for him.  Whether he would admit it or not, his notoriety certainly launched his present life (how may other people who have been convicted and sentenced to nearly a decade in federal prison give TED talks?).  Little can be (easily) found about the wake of destruction in other people's lives.  Charisma and evil are not mutually exclusive.

The book made the drive go very quickly.  Sunday was expected to have a winter storm through the area I was driving, which was evident with the pretreatment of roads.  At least the storm wasn't pushing me out early as it seems to so often.  It was cloudy through the day, so no sunrise near Tennessee, but it was still pretty in the usual places.

I got to Rick's early afternoon.  The lodge looked like there was a full camp with crap everywhere.  I can't say this made me very excited.  Not that I always mind other people, but the lodge gets cramped quickly with so many people.  Not long after I got there, Rick texted that all 4 would be leaving early in the morning.  It got better when he said I would be hunting with Denis and Claude.

After dark the four hunters from Philadelphia came back with a smaller hog and a bobcat.  They were a good group of guys - father and three sons.  The lodge was a bit chaotic; I just sat back and stayed out of the way.  They were leaving really early, so thankfully it wasn't a late night.  Getting up into the top bunk, I told the guy below me that I wouldn't break through.