Some Experiences Are Better In Hind Sight

Some Experiences Are Better In Hind Sight

Once my husband and I married, I decided to join him on his annual hunting trip to Wisconsin. I piled the floorboard at my feet with my laptop and books and we made the thirteen-hour drive. As we drew closer to the dairy farm where Randy’s relatives lived, the marshy flatlands rose up to rolling fields crop-striped dull yellow and green. A majority of the farmhouses had coils of steel-gray smoke twisting from their chimneys, and the only color decorating that fall landscape came from the red barns, navy Harvester silos, and bright orange hunting gear the men (and women!) had snapped to the clothesline to disperse their own human scent.

The opening morning of buck season, my husband flipped on the lights while outside the sky was still dark and the Wisconsin wind howling and scrambled into his camo gear layered over with orange. Putting on enough clothing that I resembled the Abominable Snowman, I stumbled downstairs while dragging my blanket and pillow like a disgruntled child.

That first year I settled into a routine. I would sleep a few hours in the cold Jeep, then awaken and type until lunchtime when I ate a military MRE (meal, ready to eat) and walked the waterway to help drive out deer toward my husband. Afterward, I would return to the Jeep and resume typing until dark when Randy and I would go back to his relatives’ house, shower and change, then eat the meal his aunt had prepared that was worthy of Thanksgiving.

The second year did not go as effortlessly as the first. My husband parked our Jeep in an area populated by other hunters and Holstein cows. I did not know any of this was a problem until I was abruptly awakened to a sensation that I was being rocked in a cradle. But I wasn’t in a cradle; I was sleeping inside a Jeep.

Wiping the drool crusted across my face, I sat up and looked out the window to see another face staring back at me. A huge, black and white face with limpid brown eyes and a long pink tongue that licked the side mirror like a lollipop. But this wasn’t the only huge black and white face staring in at me. The entire vehicle was surrounded by cows. By so many cows I honestly feared I was going to be stampeded even while shielded inside the Jeep. Seeing this commotion from the woods, Randy’s uncle — garbed in an orange jacket, insulated boots, and with a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder — waved his arms and tried to shoo them away.

To this day, I believe my life is indebted to him.

Beside a tree, there were no plumbing facilities out in those woods and after all that juice without anything to soak it up, I realized I had to use the restroom and that I had no time to make the drive back to the house.

Randy’s grandfather, Elam, was shot through both calves when he sat in the hunting camp and changed his socks, the flash of white being mistaken by a passing hunter as the tail end of a deer. Recalling this accident, I knew I was faced with a quandary: When using the restroom did I continue to wear my bright orange vest and hat so that I wasn’t shot by a hunter, or did I take it off and risk getting shot when my white tail was mistaken for an altogether different kind of Whitetail?

In the end, I chose to protect my end and wore the orange hunting cap and vest. I did roll my hair up behind the cap and strut into the woods with my hands in my pockets like a boy, hoping that Randy’s relatives wouldn’t recognize me as his wife.

Saturday, which marked Randy’s sixteenth-annual hunting trip to Wisconsin, the opening day wasn’t too eventful until my husband climbed down from his twenty-foot tripod stand, returned to the Jeep and tried to crank the engine. For hours I had been editing on my laptop that I had plugged into the power adapter, but I had taken a break at lunch and traveled back to the house to fortify myself with chili, cornbread, and a thermos of hot chocolate.

Only four hours had passed since lunch, but the Jeep battery was dead.

My husband’s cell phone was also dead, and I didn’t have his cousin’s number. So we just sat there in our Jeep parked in the middle of a dark, soggy cornfield–listening to the cold rain plinking on the windows, trying to figure out what to do.

I used my cell phone to call my sister-in-law in Tennessee, and my sister-in-law scrawled through my mother-in-law’s phone until she found the number for Randy’s uncle. We called him and Randy’s cousin came, but Randy’s cousin didn’t have any jumper cables and neither did we. We rode out of the cornfield in the cousin’s car, fetched some jumper cables at the house, then Randy and I returned in his cousin’s car to our forlorn Jeep.

It didn’t take long to jump off our vehicle, and I climbed into it and tried to drive back up the slick hillside with my husband following behind in the car. Randy had warned me that he might get stuck and that I should wait to make sure he could get out.

But when I pulled over and watched the car lights in my rearview mirror — making sure he was indeed making it okay — then shifted into drive again, I realized that I was the one stuck.

The tires slung mud across the field without gaining any traction. Shifting into four-wheel drive, I tried again but went nowhere. Randy pulled up in the car and ran up in the rain. Opening my door, he reached over me to shift the Jeep into a different gear, but all we heard were grinding sounds.

“Did I kill it?” I asked.

Yet the next morning, when my husband flipped on the lights while outside the sky was still dark and the Wisconsin wind howling, I still put on enough clothes to resemble the Abominable Snowman and stumbled downstairs while dragging my blanket and pillow like a disgruntled child.

Some experiences just look better in hind sight.