Essentials

     My father taught me to hunt whitetail deer in northern Michigan, and we always camped in a canvas wall-tent heated by a wood-stove.  Tall pine trees stood above our camp, the under-story open and clear.  When it snowed, the boughs of the pines would sag with the burden.  In my youth, the place seemed separate from the passage of time, removed from the modern world, and I felt happy there.  Later I discovered that the pines were planted by the state to log for timber.  That knowledge damaged the place for me.  The trees were no longer nature, but rather man's garden which he could harvest at anytime.  I began to look beyond.
     Hunting holds my mind and senses in rapture.  It pulls me deeper and deeper.  The deeper I go, the fewer companions venture with me.  Many, most really, do not understand why I love the wild.  I will try to explain.
     My family and I were not very successful at killing deer, so we brought meat with us.  Cooking was, maybe, the focal point of the hunting adventures I shared with my father.  We brewed coffee in a peculator that my Uncle set on the flat surface of the wood-stove.  I would fry eggs in a cast-iron skillet heated by the same surface, and make toast directly on the stove-top.  Dinner was a camp fire affair.
     During one hunting trip it was just my father and I.  He had bought a package of New York Strips and a can of Bush's baked beans from the local grocery store.  We grilled the steaks, without seasoning, over the open flames and set the can of beans in the coals.  It was a peasant's meal.  But it remains the most powerful culinary experience of my life.  In the wild, with the fire as the only light, a meal that lacked ordinary convention tasted like freedom.  I was free to enjoy the simple and uncomplicated life of bare essentials.  I began to pursue the wilder, more primitive life, and in subtle ways, abandoned the artifices of modernity.  
     Hemingway, in Death in the Afternoon, wrote that "the essence, when it is the essence, can be in a plain glass bottle, and you need no fancy labels."  This, of course, sums up his artistic aesthetic,  but it also describes a beautiful way to live.  I choose that life.