LESSONS FROM WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY, HUNTING, AND RANDY

"We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity." – E.O. Wilson.

I was out drinking with my brother this Monday at the Lakewood Grill, chain-smoking and ordering new beers even before the last ones were entirely devoured. While this kind of activity was more regular for me five or six years back, this last Monday was a celebration of my finally graduating from MSU with a degree in philosophy. As we sat and jabber-jawed, a stranger named Randy came over and interjected himself into our conversation. He, like us, obviously had also spent the past hour working on getting thoroughly tuned up. On paper, he was the classic example of the type of person you try to avoid at a bar when you are not in the mood for an argument. An anti-vax, young-earth Biblical literalist who believes that Ron Wyat found the Ark of the Covenant somewhere on mount Arafat and has been suppressed ever since. However, Randy broke the mold by being totally uncaring about whether or not we believed him. He would say, "the earth is six thousand years old," to which my brother and I would cry, "Randy, no! That's such bullshit!" Every time he would just shrug and move on to more fertile conversational territory, and that was that. Soon he would be back on some other insane horse, like how mRNA vaccines change your DNA, but every time the idea lasted no longer than a couple of lively back-and-forths. Both sides would drop it without admitting defeat. Randy was anything but awful and proved that the best lessons are not ones learned in school. They can be found bursting out of every subject, from every angle we look at the world, from the bird park to the Lakewood Grill. Truth is not argued about. It is agreed upon.

Because I am interested in and take the life lessons of 60-year-old organisms seriously, I asked Randy what he has learned about life in all his years living it. His answer also happened to be the three most essential things outdoor hobbies have taught me. These are:

1. Be patient.

2. Don't get too excited.

3. Work is overrated.

My jaw dropped. What excellent advice, and how thoughtful to boil it down so perfectly to three separable subjects that make it easy for a philosophy guy like myself to write about it. Below you will find the best advice I have learned while birding and hunting. Whatever anyone else thinks, my boy Randy totally agrees with me, and that’s all I need.

1. BE PATIENT

Aristotle once said that patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet. In outdoor pursuits, this is an understatement on both sides. Waiting for your object can be total torture, but the joy felt when it works is pure ecstasy. 

Whether hunting, fishing, or taking pictures of birds, the idea that we should JUST SIT THERE UNTIL AN ANIMAL HAPPENS TO STUMBLE UPON US can be too big a pill to swallow. One glance at a map shows us how much there is to explore. After five minutes of waiting in a meadow, at the side of a creek, or at a blind on the lake, our brains start to kick us in the heart and beg for us to go explore more territory. Any justifications we make to ourselves to wait come off as lazy excuses to not climb the mountain or hike a few more miles off-trail. Nine times out of ten, it does not take long for me to abandon all the advice I have ever heard to the contrary and start hoofing it for greener pastures. Waiting can be just as painful as hiking, and the only pain reliever is covering more ground.

As we become more experienced, there is another medication one can self-administer when the bug to move starts to make our skin crawl with impatience: past successes gained through waiting. Once you have sat in the cold for a few hours, expecting to get skunked and go home empty-handed, only to experience precisely what you wanted to happen at last light, it becomes easier to convince yourself to do it again. In a sense, it hammers into us the truth that we are not in charge of these encounters, and we are just lucky to be around when they do. And it is far better when looking for animals to be a fly on the wall of the room they happen to walk into. No matter how quiet or stealthy we think we are while moving through the woods, most of us might as well be god-fucking-zilla as far wildlife are concerned. You stink, and you're loud, and yes, everyone knows you're there. You aren't fooling anyone.

Sitting still is a skill that needs to be practiced, and the rewards come later as we slowly collect new places to wait and watch. The rewards of having an animal unknowingly walk into your zone instead of the other way around are myriad. So, we should never forget Randy's number one life lesson, straight from his Camel cigarette smoking mouth: Be patient.

2. DON'T GET TOO EXCITED

Nothing can ruin the reward of patience more than blowing it when it happens because of nerves. The buzz we feel when our furry or feathered friends finally walk out into that clearing or fly out onto that perch is indescribable, but that has not stopped outdoors people from endlessly trying to describe it anyway. Whether we are taking pictures or hoping to fill a freezer, that internal earthquake can cause us to forget that there is still a goal to accomplish and very often can be the root of why we fail even when everything else happens perfectly. The deafening roar of my heartbeat can be disorienting, and my adrenaline-fueled movements become clunky and lose all their finesse. I would never say that getting excited in general is a bad idea; I am one of the most excitable dudes on the planet and love to daydream and regularly propose partnership on grand projects with people I barely know. But there is a point, when you are trying to accomplish a goal, that it is something we have to learn to manage so we can complete it and not hurt ourselves. Days when I should have had a perfect shot ended in disappointment when I found out I was not watching the in-camera light meter and overexposed or the death grip on my camera caused the shot to turn out blurry. I've never shot a deer because in the two times I had an opportunity, I became overcome with option paralysis, and they ended up walking away from me before I got the nerve to pull the trigger. Adrenaline and my inability to manage it was the cause of these particular failures, and this is the kind of excitement that we need to keep our eye on.

Early excitement can also cause us to hope too much for a particular ending to the story and makes us believe that if we get skunked while fishing or birding, the whole endeavor is a failure. We cannot control the feelings that bubble up, but we can control how we act somewhat when they happen. Every time we head out into the woods, there are any number of outcomes that could manifest, including but not limited to physical death or becoming permanently mangled by a cougar. Not taking an animal or a good photo home is far from the worst possible things that could happen. Getting excited too early often means that the outcome we prefer is the only one we can think about. We can have blinders to the dangers that could harm us, the auxiliary lessons we can learn, and the joys we can experience that have nothing to do with the primary objective. A closed-off favorite trail is an opportunity to take a new one. Some other asshole glassing from your knob just means you get to go find a better spot and stave off the boringness of glassing for a couple more hours. There's a lot more to being out in the woods besides what you went out there to do. We should always be looking for something new to learn from that great teacher named The Wild.

3. WORK IS OVERRATED

Goddamn straight, Randy. Next rounds on me for that one, bud. Work is the chain we willingly wear, hoping that the one who owns it is merciful and ethical enough to know that he is required to feed us and water us every day. Usually, our new masters are only interested in taking care of us from the reference point of the bare minimum of what is required by the state. The employed run calculus on how much freedom they are willing to sacrifice for stability, while the employer's mathematics are constantly trying to find ways to minimize the stability they are expected to offer per hour of work. It is a fundamentally one-sided system here in America, and the only referee involved has been entirely captured by people of a particular team. I'm sure anyone can guess which team that is.

Planning a hunting trip makes it depressingly obvious how fucked up our lives have become because of the work system here in the US. A two-week trip, the length of a proper elk hunting expedition, and is in most cases all anyone has time for throughout the year. Never mind the almost infinite amount of shit worth experiencing on planet Earth and the fact that we've only got one go-around to pack it in. Never mind the horrid worldviews that fester when people are not encouraged to travel outside their hometown and meet new people from different parts of the world. Our benevolent employers have graciously offered us 14 days off to do whatever we like as long as the other 350 are spent following their orders, and we are supposed to be grateful. 

The saddest thing about all of this is that anyone that reads this will know it's all bullshit. We all know it sucks, yet we perpetuate it every day. I wish we could develop a healthier relationship with our vocations and understand that we are not just the things that help us make money. It's nice that some of us have skills that are marketable (I sure wish I had one), but it is a mistake to identify ourselves with these things. Not that I believe there is someone underneath your physical self you need to uncover to "discover" who you are. No, that illusion is total horse shit, and if you believe that I suggest you give up that wild goose chase today while you still can. Change is what we should be looking for and exposing ourselves to new experiences morphs us into creatures we never thought possible. It is surprising how quickly we go from struggling to understand a new concept to being somewhat proficient in it if we do not give up. I wish more people had the time and ability to spend months out of the year just experiencing some new things, to have the chance to pick up some new toys and figure out how to use 'em. I know that's what Randy would want from us. Randy knows that you are not alone in hating your job and that you should not take it so seriously.

 

To conclude, let's just suffice to say that EO Wilson's quote at the top of this essay applies to us people as we look at animals and us people as we look at people. At first blush, I would not have guessed I would learn anything from Randy or that our particular conversation would be all that enjoyable. I'm sure Randy felt the same about my brother and me with our screaming and visible revulsion to many of his ideas. But we let the conversation go wherever it wanted, kept an open mind, tried to really embrace diversity in all forms, including those of the creationist anti-vaxxer or loud-mouth libtard. In other words: sit and wait, don't get too excited, and good things happen. 

Also, fuck work.