THE GODS OF AUTUMN

Sometimes we are meant to wander alone.

Sometimes we are meant to wander alone without an audience if we ever hope to find what it is we seek in the wandering. And I suppose that is the point I was trying to make with the story excerpt below, which originally appeared (in a much longer and different version) in the bird-hunting anthology Mouthful of Feathers.

In a few days I will load up the dogs and make the first hunting trip of the season. No Instagram tailgate shots (I deleted my account), no reels from the field, no Facebook updates (I should delete my account), no digital documentation and real-time broadcasting to the world of every moment. Because when the (over)sharing of the activity becomes as integral to the experience as the experience itself, then you have lost the true meaning of the experience.

So try hunting alone this season, without an audience or followers. Hunt quietly, like you’re listening for a voice that can’t be heard above the howling din of our online lives. Hunt disconnected to what doesn’t matter in order to connect to what does. You might like it.

I camp in the same spot where I always used to. I am the only person here. It’s just the dogs and me and the wind and melancholy and that feeling of being so perfectly alone, like you’re the last person on earth and don’t really mind.

I unload the truck, set up the tent, feed the dogs, then make myself a gin & tonic and sit in a camp chair.

I listen to the rhythm of the wind and wonder at the passage of years. I think about regrets and joy and happiness. Sadness too; the kind of wistful sadness that causes you to dwell on things more than you should.

I almost didn’t come. Responsibilities always drag at desire, of course, but it was more than that. Some vague unsettling restlessness, the feeling of occupying that liminal space at the threshold of familiarity and whatever comes when familiarity ends. There’s a vibe I can’t shake that we exist somewhere between old assumptions and new assertions, and we are all waiting, with no small amount of trepidation, to see which of all those fiercely competing future realities will be the one we ultimately step into.

We all have those thresholds, of course, on every level from the global to the individual. I’ve crossed dozens of them, spent much time—and often too much time—in that unsettling liminal space between what was and what will be. But they certainly seem to be coming with more frequency, ferocity, and troubling questions than they used to.

And with those transitions; of age, occupation, place, self-identity, spirituality, has come the knowledge—bitterly gained—that I am utterly incapable of divining what or how the larger world is supposed to be, or where it and I and we are headed.

So all I can do is grasp at those tiny, scattered bits of the world around me that I am still able to understand, and hope that if only I can gather enough such fragments of the known, the familiar, and the trusted, I can then somehow arrange them into a rough understanding of the whole, or at least my place within it.

Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Lately, if I’m honest, it hasn’t. I feel—to us a classic Vonnegut line—trapped in the amber of the moment; the numbing exhaustion of not knowing exactly who I am, what I am, and what, if anything, the point of it all is.

But in the end I came anyway. Because that’s what September is for; birds and dogs and walking and pondering. September is wind and loneliness and waning sun and a long walk in a lonely place. It’s the first whisper of autumn in that dusky twilight between summer and fall, light and dark, heat and cold. September is essential to the soul.

After dinner, I put the dogs back in the box, grab a bottle, and take a walk into the darkness. It’s time to ring the seasonal New Year.

January 1st doesn’t mean a damn thing to me. Never did. Just another day where the cheap booze and cheaper nostalgia of the night before finally wears off and you realize through the fog of a hangover that not a goddamned thing has changed in your world or anyone else’s.

If you really want to hear the world creak and groan and slip from one epoch into the next, walk out into the prairie in early September. Find a hill to sit on, turn your face up to the sky, let that ancient celestial light strike your eyes, and listen to the ancient gods whispering in your soul’s ear; old thoughts, old yearnings, old fears, old hopes, all welling back up from within on the tendrils of that first softly keening fall breeze that marks the trembling of the seasons and the dimming of the summer light.

Those stirring gods will tell you that despite our skin and bones and blood and the wounds we inflict on each other and the land, we humans are ephemeral, temporary. And when we are gone and what we think so important, so pressing, so urgent and so righteous is gone as well, all of our furious certainty and rage will mean nothing, be nothing, so accept the beauty and rightness of the moment you are in. Because it will not last.

Sitting there in the elegiac twilight and the rustling wind of passage and change, I make my resolutions for the next seasonal year and my peace with the lessons I’ve learned over the one just past. Some of those lessons came dearly and wounded deeply, as a certain kind of learning and the clarity that pain provides always will. But it taught me, too, because darkness is as much a gift as light, if you just choose to learn from it.

Sometime long past midnight, the gods stop talking to me, so I stumble back to camp and fall into my sleeping bag, dreaming of sharptails and early fall thunderstorms lighting up the night sky.

The next morning I wake up, make coffee, and go hunting. I tromp the sandhills alone behind an old setter who knows the prairie grouse game well, and a young pointer who doesn’t.

I walk about a fair bit along routes I vaguely recognize from years past. Leo the old setter points a single prairie chicken, which I shoot, then Abbey busts a group of sharptails, which I shoot at but shouldn’t. She’ll learn, eventually. I’m not so sure about myself.

And that’s how it goes over the course of the morning. I meander, wool-gather, remember, and occasionally shoot a bird. I revisit some places I recognize, find some spots that still hold the after-image of moment and memory, and have conversations with some old, rapidly fading ghosts. Leo finds another chicken, because that’s what he does, and Abbey redeems herself on her first pointed sharptail.

It is a wordless, wonderful morning. I came here looking for a measure of solace. I found that and more. And that’s a damn good thing to finally realize about yourself when you’ve been swimming around in the crucible of doubt and anger just waiting to melt.

I found out, meandering out there in the grass, that I don’t melt so easily. And that if you walk far enough toward the event horizon that always hovers in front of you, what melts away is not you, but the weight of all those unresolved questions.

That night I celebrate, make a fire, cook a sharptail and split it with the dogs, and as the flames dance I ponderabsolution. Absolution from sins, flaws, guilt, anger, resentment, bitterness, pettiness; all the things that make us human right along with the good, all washed away in the moment.

That’s what a good long walk behind fast dogs will do for you. It’s temporary, of course. What we are always comes back to us.

But right now, I’ll take temporary and be damn happy to have it, here in the silence of a lonely camp and a waning moon.