It's been a bit since the last blog post. The last several weeks have been busy with work requirements, family responsibilities and (of course) the opening of hunting season. In the last post we explored several reasons why I enjoy hunting - beyond the thrill of seeking game. Hunting provides an opportunity to step out of a busy, professional lifestyle and just slow down to appreciate the outdoors. But there is one main benefit that I left out from the last post.
Hunting is something that I wanted to do since I was a kid. I have a sketchbook filled with pictures of trees, mountains, farms, tractors, trucks, deer, geese and guns. I would spend hours laying on by bed pouring through Cabela's catalogues studying the different camo patterns and hunting equipment.
25 years later, as I climbed a tree stand for the first time, the culmination of a childhood full of dreaming was about to begin. It took me a couple seasons to actually harvest a deer. But when I did, WOW! And that rack is still mounted in my office.
I started hunting whitetail because that is what all my friends hunted and it was the easy, obvious game in my area. But I quickly realized that hunting whitetail is a rather solitary sport. As any deer hunter would attest, to be successful, you have to be really careful with scent control as well as be quiet and still. Too many times, I have been busted by a wary deer that sensed my presence in the woods. My enjoyment of being in the woods is always dampened by the realization that every hour I spend in the tree stand is an hour that I am not with my family and my wife is parenting alone.
Much of this problem has been driven by the age of my children. But now, as my kids are getting older, I have begun to incorporate them into my hunting and bring them with me. And I am working on expanding my hunting to waterfowl and upland game that would be more conducive to hunting with others.
This year, I brought 2 of my kids out with me on my hunting mornings. One of my boys is rather talkative. We had a great time in the blind chatting. He spent the morning asking me to tell him stories of my childhood and previous year's hunting experiences. At the end of a couple hours of sitting, we had spent some good time together building our relationship.
As I sit back and think through the "why" of what I do, I look at hunting as not just an opportunity to do something that I enjoy, but as an opportunity to purposefully build time with my kids. And more than just time, it is building a common, shared, repeatable experience.
I've been thinking about my relationship with my kids lately. Right now, they are young and they love to do anything that involves me. But as they get older, I know that there are going to be competing things or people. Not that this is bad or wrong, and not that I want to develop some pathologic attachment disorder. However, I want to maintain a good relationship with my kids when they transition to adulthood. I believe that a key to this is through building common, shared, repeatable experience that bring us together and keep us together down the road.
So, as it pertains to hunting, my goal is to use it as an activity that we can do together consistently even as life circumstances change around us. I look forward to the day when my adult children come home to visit and ask to go out hunting "like we did when we were kids."
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