So– we live in the northern Michigan woods. And beginning last Friday, we have been hearing shooting. Lots and lots of shooting. It’s deer season (firearms) up north.

Our little grocery store-cum-gas station has a deer pole, and offers butchery, so a drive into the P.O. involves passing a large pile of dead deer, awaiting their turn to be gutted and sliced. Not a pretty picture.

And yet. None of this bothers me.

I’m not a gun owner (or gun-owning defender). Deer browse my compost pile, and I try to remain quiet on the porch, so they can get a big mouthful of rotten pumpkins or potato peelings, while I watch. Venison? Meh, except in chili.

I’ve been run into by deer four times– most recently, an $8K hit on the truck–and I know that controlling the deer population is a benefit to us and to them. Balance of nature and all that.

Plus– the annual ritual of deer hunting just doesn’t faze me. The whole rigamarole of blaze orange and hanging out at pine-paneled bars and doe permits vs. how many points– it’s all OK by me. You (and a half-dozen of your unwashed, unshaven friends) do you.

Probably, this is because I grew up in Michigan. My dad was a hunter, going out with my uncles and great-uncles. Everybody I knew had a ramshackle place up north where the guys went to hunt, in November. Women stayed home, watched the kids, got together with the other “deer widows” to play poker.

The school district where I first taught took the first week of deer season off, mostly because it was too dangerous for kids to wait for the bus when the woods were full of hunters. The next place I taught only took Opening Day off, which I saw as a civilized upgrade.

I know there are people who feed their families with game, but that’s not the reason I’m down with hunting. I guess I see it as a throwback to earlier times, a connection to an era when people secured their own food in the wild. Men hanging with men, suffering from cold and tedium, relieved by gunshots and whiskey and flinging the carcass over the hood of the car and using the meat (instead driving past unused and grisly remains beside the road, a daily occurrence this time of year).

I was amused by Garrison Keillor’s description of deer hunting and fishing (we have ice fishing here, too, in northern MI):

“Men hunt for the same reason they fish, in order to escape the company of women. Minnesota is a state of thousands of lakes and each one gives men an opportunity for refuge, sitting in a rowboat or a fishing shack out on the ice where nobody will say, “When are you going to clean out the garage?” Or “You keep talking about going to teacher conferences at the kids’ school but when is this going to happen if ever?” or “Why do you insist on dribbling coffee down the front of the kitchen cabinet and not wiping it up?”

Not many women fish because they know they can buy excellent salmon, tuna, or halibut for a tiny fraction of the cost of a boat and motor and trailer and a pickup to tow it. Ever compare salmon and northern pike? God created pike for cat food.”

Just heard another shot. Boom. Deer season.