When it comes, the Landscape listens —
Shadows — hold their breath —
–Emily Dickinson
Like Men and Women Shadows walk —
Upon the Hills Today —
–Emily Dickinson
Every picture has its shadows
And it has some source of light
Blindness, blindness and sight
–Joni Mitchell
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale,
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
–William Shakespeare’s Macbeth
Hunting chukar is a privilege, a hobby. Nobody hunts chukar because they must. If your life depended on it, even if you shot 100%, you’d die of malnutrition. Calorically, it’s way less than a zero sum game. On this 95th anniversary of Black Tuesday, that’s food for thought.
I started this blog about 15 years ago, after I’d lost my job and had more time on my hands. My first chukar hunt happened ten years earlier, in the fall of 2000, thanks to the generous father of a co-worker. He and his Lab had picked me up in the dark in his Bronco, never having met me or my puppy Glenna, and drove about an hour outside of Boise. He’d told me to bring waders. We linked arms, started across the swift river, hoped the dogs would figure it out, ditched the waders on the opposite bank, changed into our boots, and headed uphill. My youthful enthusiasm and Glenna’s natural ability impressed him, but we never went with Rich again. I’m not sure why. I think I got one bird that day. But, as I’ve written about before, Glenna — for whatever reason, probably my fault — began hunting too much for herself and diminished my desire to chase birds.
I started really becoming obsessed with this privilege when I moved to Cambridge in the summer of 2012. It served to stabilize me through the first several years of my new teaching career there, and soon became my favorite thing in the world. Even though my first glimpse of Cambridge was colored by the pawn shop’s astonishing storefront, lowlighting the deplorable ‘Murica mentality of its owner (who’d been the high school art teacher before the district cut the art classes because of Idaho’s deliberate underfunding of public education), being able to go hunting after school and on the long weekends (ours was a four-day school) really helped me to develop a stability and contentment there. And as teaching became easier and more fulfilling, so did chukar hunting. Funny how that works.
So my first four seasons there became more and more joyous. My youngest group of students had become seniors, and in the spring of 2016 they asked me to give the Commencement address, an honor which moved me tremendously. But in November 2016 the shadows started becoming more of a factor, darkening the landscape. It took awhile to notice. Incredulousness played a big part. Teaching critical thinking skills seemed increasingly important, but began taking a toll on my demeanor. When I refused to answer a question about the recent election, one of my best students said, “I’ve been waiting since kindergarten for a new president but I didn’t want this one!” Not by nature a tongue-holder, saying nothing about any of this at school took more out of me than I’ll ever know. By 2018 I realized I’d transitioned from a merely negative person to a constantly angry person. It’s been a while now. Nearly ten years of watching the normalization of hatred and division, the disrespect for the rule of law, and now the threat of a complete dismantling and destruction of this country’s admittedly flawed but hopeful foundation looms so large for me and tens of millions of others that every day every thing is laced or suffused with dread. Including this privilege of walking around public land (who knows how long that’ll last) searching for game birds with my dogs and wife.
So it would feel ignorantly irresponsible of me not to say that I’m voting for Kamala Harris and to encourage everyone I know to do the same. Actually, I voted early. It was easy for me. I know it’s not for many. As I’ve written here and elsewhere, strong women have been a formative part of my life from its beginning. This shouldn’t strike anyone as irrelevant to this blog: it’s been a satisfying impossibility for me to separate chukar hunting from everything else and vice versa. Worry, dread, shadows all play their part at some point in every outing; the ups and downs of any hunt reflect life in reassuring ways. But when those dark things spread so opaquely over everything they demand all of my attention, paralyzingly so. The thing that saved this country in the fallout from Black Tuesday, after so many people died and suffered needlessly for years because of the un-democratic power and greed of a few, was FDR’s New Deal, which is the model for what Biden’s done to rescue the economy from his predecessor’s grift and graft. Harris, obviously, will build on that success if she wins. But there’s more to this than just “the economy, stupid.” Obviously. There’s the abyss, which is always all shadow.
Stupidity is one thing. Ignorance is another, and it is truly deplorable. Our dogs and the birds we chase, god love them, are stupid, but their instincts — at least on this playing field — are smarter by far than ours. Their lacking of the anatomy that makes us intelligent is the basis for our love of them: dogs, for one, can only do what’s right and good. Ignorance, on the other hand, is having the ability to know the difference between right and wrong and choosing not to give a shit, choosing not to pay attention. There is only one right choice out of the two we have for who leads this country. The wrong choice is simply, obviously, wilfully ignorant. I know there are many who think, like Macbeth, that it doesn’t matter. Even a smarter writer like Emily Dickinson thought that
Diadems – drop –
And Doges surrender –
Soundless as Dots,
On a Disk of Snow
but I like to think she wasn’t as serious about that as she was about shadows holding their breath. I’m holding mine. Don’t be ignorant. Do the right thing.
