My dad said when he retired from the military that he wanted to go hunting and fishing, so that’s what we did. I shot my first deer during shotgun season when I was fourteen. I had shot at one earlier during muzzleloader season and missed. We were in an open field, and I was too shaky to shoot straight, so my dad crouched down so I had something to rest my elbow on, but I still couldn’t calm down. I put my eye too close to the scope and gave myself a black eye with the recoil.
The one I shot only ever saw us because it was about to run into us. My dad stood up from behind the fallen tree where we were sitting, waved his arms around and yelled “HEY”, then it veered off and ran for another 20 yards before dropping. We gutted it, dragged it out, hung it up and skinned it. Then I told him I was done deer hunting. It was just too hard.
I’m glad I killed a deer. If people are going to eat meat, they should have to experience killing for it, because that’s what it is — and not just a turkey or fish, but a mammal. Killing a mammal is especially hard. City people are too disassociated from their burgers.
A couple of years ago I talked with the CEO of a Japanese company’s U.S. branch who said the biggest culture shock of going from Iowa to Tokyo isn’t the language; it’s the city. Urban life requires a different set of skills. The more of them I acquire and the more rural ones I lose, the more emasculated I feel.
Every month I drive three hours on rural highways to meet my business partner halfway in a town with less than 30,000 people. I drive past rural decay — dilapidated barns, rotten fenceposts, rusting sheet metal. The pictures you see online don’t show it, but it’s the same view from a non-bullet train in Japan. Some find it depressing, but I see beauty in it.
I don’t fit in in the country anymore, but I can’t fully assimilate to the city. It feels like cosplaying with men who are cosplaying the men I grew up around. Maybe I’ll make enough money someday to buy a home in both places.
That’s what we tell ourselves.