David Michael Miller
The thing about deer hunting is that there is a lot of nothing.
If you sit in your stand for 10 hours in the cold, as I sometimes do, the time during which you actually see deer can usually be counted in random seconds here and there totaling less than a minute or two.
And there are days, like this past weekend when I was in the woods bow hunting (the big gun deer season starts this Saturday), when I see no deer at all.
In my view, if you’re not prepared for a long day of solitude during deer season you’re not prepared to hunt deer. You can never be guaranteed to see, much less be able to dispatch, a 10-point buck, but you can be absolutely certain that there will be long hours of nothing much happening. If you just can’t stand to be in your own company for long stretches, then you should consider bowling or maybe golf.
What I was thinking about as I sat 14 feet or so in the air and watched as nothing much happened around me was that it was pleasant to be settled. I knew exactly where I would be and just what I would be doing for the next several hours. Good deer hunters learn how to sit in one place for long periods of time without stirring much.
Just sitting quietly is an art that is lost in modern society and not appreciated much when practiced. This is a world built for extroverts. Constant motion gets rewarded just for the sake of the motion. We have a president who criticized his opponents for being “low energy.” I think I can guess with some confidence that Donald Trump has spent no time at all in a deer stand.
I think it’s possible that at the core of all this upheaval in the world — Trump, Brexit, and what seems like the cracking up of the whole liberal democratic consensus of the last seven decades or so — is upheaval itself.
Mitt Romney called it “creative destruction,” but Silicon Valley billionaires like to give the same thing the more fashionable and politically palatable title, “disruption.” We seem split between an elite, mostly in big cities, that is comfortable with change, movement and diversity because they have the education and the resources to weather it or, more importantly, prosper in it and those, mostly outside of major metro areas, who feel left behind and unmoored in that world.
Rather than trying to match the coastal metro areas for an embrace of disruption, we might be better off in the Midwest doubling down on our natural advantage, which is blissful boredom. No earthquakes, no hurricanes, no raging wildfires. No mountains, but some nice rolling hills in the Driftless. No oceans, but some Great Lakes and tens of thousands of smaller ones. It’s a modest landscape breeding modest people and a temperate climate fostering temperance.
The Midwest is about being settled in a place, committing to it like a hunter commits to a deer stand. The sense of being unsure of your future, of where or how you’ll be, creates anxiety that makes people do desperate things like vote for an unqualified egomaniac. The irony is that the Midwest delivered the presidency just barely (by 77,000 votes total in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania) to just such a man. Maybe it was because Midwesterners value stability so much that they went out of their way to reject a candidate who surfed along with the changes and to embrace a candidate who promised to put the earth back under their feet.
I’m an urban liberal who voted for Hillary Clinton, but when I sit for hours in my deer stand I remind myself of the value of being settled and maybe I start to understand, just a little bit, what it means to feel unrooted in a world you don’t know.
This doesn’t make me want to change my political stripes, but it does argue for a change in attitude. Maybe those of us who are left of center should spend more time thinking about ways to make people’s lives more solid, stable and predictable. Maybe it’s boredom we should embrace.
