cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Holy crap, I pulled it off! Holy shit what a weekend. I can't believe I pulled that off. Wow. Seriously, wow. It went like this: I left work an hour early on Friday to try to get a deer. No luck, but when I came back inside I had a message from the Times reporter. I called him back, he had gotten into town and wanted to check in. We arranged to meet up in town. So I cleaned up and changed and drove into town and we met up for drinks and had dinner and talked about this and that. He and I are on the same page generally. Got home late and tired. Woke up just before dawn and was out there looking for a deer. Long story short, at about 6:50 am I managed to make what I do say was a stunning shot on a large doe. About 120 yards, standing up and off-hand. 'Off-hand' means that I had nothing to rest the rifle on. I had a set of shooting sticks with me but they were too short to shoot off of from a standing position, which was necessary to make this particular shot. This was easily the longest shot I have ever made while shooting off-hand. The deer ran about 15 yards before collapsing in the woods. I had blasted through the lungs and clipped the heart, so it only suffered for perhaps 20 seconds at most. However, as I walked back to the house to start calling everyone to come out for the field-dressing demonstration I realized what an ass I would look like in the NY Times if I told them it was a 120 yard off-hand shot. Any deer hunters reading the article would assume I was exaggerating or making it up completely. And I don't want to encourage my students or newbie hunters reading the article to attempt to make a 120 yard shot from a standing, off-hand position. Because it would be really easy to fuck up and have a wounded deer if one didn't do it just right. I have shot thousands and thousands of rounds from rifles in practice and have a pretty solid record of experience on actual deer as well, so I felt comfortable doing it. I decided to tell everyone that the deer had popped up out of nowhere at only 10 yards distance and was practically the simplest shot I'd ever had presented to me. Which was exactly what I ended up saying. About an hour later people started arriving. It was nice and cold and I was fortunate that there was little risk of the meat spoiling during the wait. The reporter arrived first. The field-dressing demo went really well. Nobody froze up or freaked out. These guys really did me proud. Bear in mind that only one of them who were there on Saturday had ever so much as fired a gun before this class. These guys are programmers and graphic designers. A few months ago they were horrified at the idea of doing something like this. But they all did great. They were able to identify many of the organs based on our anatomy class. Everyone took turns doing different tasks, removing organs, skinning, etc. We dissected the heart and the rumen and some other organs to learn more about how they worked. All of these guys are going to be able to field dress and quarter a deer on their own. The really great part about teaching them how to quarter in the field is that the ones without pickup trucks who live in apartments can still hunt. Even with a compact car, all they need to do is put a big cooler in the back seat when they go hunting. This way they don't need to bring the whole deer home. They can strip the whole carcass clean right there in the field and then the meat will all fit in the bottom drawers of a regular refrigerator. The cooler that we used has wheels, making it even more practical for this application. I am so psyched that I stumbled across this method because so much of what I'm trying to do is make deer hunting practical and accessible for people who live in urban places and don't have the space, freedom ( to hack apart a deer in the front yard) or vehicles that rural hunters typically have. I digress. Point, is that the field dressing went great and the reporter filmed the whole thing and did interviews with my students (which they aced). Just watching these guys standing around in the driveway and chatting afterwards made the whole thing worthwhile. This was literally a life-changing experience for them. They'd been sitting at desks for decades in some cases and suddenly they actually did something real and, pardon me, 'visceral.' They looked and felt totally alive. Like something dormant in them had woken up. All of them were smiling and beaming. It was amazing. The reporter left and then came back at 4:30 pm so that I could drive around with him to help him find live deer in fields to get video of. That took an hour or so. That night I was up until about 2 am having weird sex with Trish and then I had to get up by 9 am the next morning to start preparing for the reporter to come back out for the formal interview. Which I didn't get around to really starting for a while, on account of more weird sex right after waking up. Which it turned out that the bedroom door was open and I hadn't realized it, and we were kind of noisy and our house guests were walking back and forth through the hallway and probably saw all sorts of fascinating things. He showed up at around noon, we spent about 30 minutes figuring out where to set up the shot for the interview with good light, etc. Then the actual interview was around an hour. He wanted to get something going bang, so I did some shooting with my .30-'06 while he filmed it. Then we hung out for a while talking about beer, and then he packed up and left. I began madly preparing everything for the butchering class. Aside from the butchering, I had to cook dinner for a dozen people at the same fucking time. Went to the grocery store on the way to pick up some ingredients, found out that I am flat fucking broke again and had to use my company credit card to pay for $26 worth of groceries, which I will have to reimburse. The butchering class went great. The kitchen was a little cramped but it worked. Everyone came. There was another photographer there for the Times in addition to the reporter. All the students got to take turns trying things out. One guy brought both of his kids. It was a fun little party. Trying to cook dinner for 12 people in a strange kitchen while also butchering a deer into steaks, roasts and medallions, while explaining the methods to everyone in attendance and being interrupted to do mini interviews throughout the process while another photographer is also trying to get me to pose just so is a huge pain in the ass. I have no idea how I pulled it off, but somehow it worked. I was toasted and praised by all, which was nice. That whole thing wrapped up at around 9 pm, we packed up and then I took some of the students and the reporter over to a friend's homemade hard cider tasting. That was a nice big party packed with slow food people and locavore types, so the reporter had a ball doing interviews there. At around 11 pm I packed it in and left for home. So fucking exhausted. Also I cut my thumb pretty bad with a meat cleaver. And the tenonosis in my elbows is horrible today after all of that butchering. But the weekend was a HUGE success. One of the finest things I have ever pulled off. Oh, and I did all of this while Trish had 2 internet friends fly in for the weekend to stay with us. Wow. This article int he NY Times is going to be great. And publishers will swoon all over it and offer me lovely big book advances. Its going to be great. 3:44 p.m. - 2009-11-09 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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