00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s topic is the relentless march of time and what it means to us as deer hunters. Look, this is a topic that’s been on my mind for a while, and I’m guessing you’ll be able to relate to it. It seems like every year is marked by some kind of annual events and that for some reason, the hourglass is just draining faster than it used to. I don’t know, I don’t know how to describe it. I don’t know if we are all masked, disassociating or what, but time freaking flying by. This has implications for our lives as a whole, of course, but also for us as deerhounds, which is what I’m going to talk about right now. A couple of weeks ago, my daughters, my dad, my sister, and my niece walked along a road in Cocoa Beach, Florida, to get to a park on the Banana River, which is really just kind of a giant saltwater lagoon. Hundreds of other folks were already there by the time we showed up, and after checking out a manatee which was doing manatee stuff beneath a wooden walkway over the water, we pointed ourselves to the northeast and we waited at a distance that a fellow like me could run in maybe about forty five minutes. Sat out of sight four astronauts readying themselves for the Artemis two mission. They were set to go on a ten day journey that I’m sure you’ve heard about, where they were going to travel to the far side of the Moon in what is a multi phase mission to get humans not only to set foot on the Moon again, but to eventually establish a human presence on the Moon, much like we’ve done with the International Space Station. Now, when we think of a rocket going into space, we often think of the discontinued Space Shuttle program, and we really can’t conceptualize the size of the whole thing. This whole ship, rocket boosters, whole thing that was set to lift off on April one and did while we watched with actual, true patriotic pride in our hearts. Measured three hundred and thirty two feet tall and weighed in at launch. It get this five point seven six million pounds To escape Earth’s gravity well with what amounts to basically a thirty story building, they needed to burn twelve thousand pounds of rocket fuel every second. Think about that. Their total flight path took them over two hundred and fifty thousand miles from Earth and overall took them across six hundred and twenty thousand miles. They’ll see parts of the Moon that have never been seen by humans, and on their return they’ll reach twenty five thousand miles per hour while the outside of their shuttle heats up to five thousand degrees fahrenheit. The next time you think of someone being really badass, I want you to think about those astronauts and the risks they took, and the astronauts who will do even more in the near future to advance the Artemis program along. And I want you to think that while they were swinging around the Dark Side of the moon, hopefully listening to some pink Floyd, but probably not that time for them was moving at a different pace than it was for us here on Earth. It’s close enough to assume that they probably didn’t perceive time moving at a different speed, but atomic clocks prove that it does, just as Einstein predicted a long long time ago, before we proved that time was relative. This is one of those concepts I just can’t quite wrap my head around, and I hate it. I don’t like to be so handily reminded of the limitations of my own brain. But time is not absolute. It’s relative, and what that means is that time is a function of how fast you’re moving and how fast you’re accelerating. The faster you move, the slower time goes, which is why if you could travel the speed of light, which is the theoretical speed limit of the universe, time essentially stands still, but not to you, because everything around you is slowing down at the same speed, including your aging process. It matches the time you’re in No I know, I know there’s a lot more to it that gets really wonky, like the twin paradox, but I don’t know how to explain it better, because I don’t understand it very well at all. What I do know is that I keep talking to people, and I keep seeing Reddit threads and other mentions of the fact that it feels like time has started to move faster for a lot of us in the last six years. But it’s really our perception of time which I just read about, and the explanation was that, no surprise, our exposure to technology is the culprit. This may be a totally wrong read on it. I don’t know, but I think about how often I pick up my phone to look up something and I get totally distracted by Instagram or some other site, and pretty soon it’s half an hour later, and I’ve done nothing but melt my brain a little bit with NonStop stimulation. That means truly nothing to me or my experience as a human. I don’t know, but I know that life is flying by. I thought of that as we watched that rocket takeoff and punch a hole through the atmosphere to enter the vacuum of space, and the fact that not only were my daughters there to witness it, but my dad was too. He’s the guy who got me started in hunting. And fishing, and the seed he planted when I was a child has grown into something that has dominated my entire life. It has shaped the course of me as a human. He and I haven’t always seen eye to eye, and I’m ashamed to admit this now, but we didn’t speak for a decade over something that neither one of us really did, but both of us enabled, and the key player in that story has shed her mortal coil. I’ll write the whole thing into a book, but until then, I’ll speak as evasively as I can, because I don’t want to hurt anyone that way. My dad is seventy six now, and watching him catch his first freshwater fish ever with my daughters and talking to him about the deer we hunted and the turkeys we chased and the dogs we never owned, it kind of got to me. This was the first time we ever flew together on a plane, and it could be the last. I hope not, but I’m not going to count on it, because life is unpredictable and I can scarcely believe the journey I’ve been on anymore than I can comprehend the life of someone else and their day to day activities. Or their regrets or their dreams are really anything. We are all mysteries to one another in some ways, and maybe that’s just how it goes. I don’t know, but I know that I regret not hunting with him more than I have over the last fifteen or twenty years of our lives. He’s a crossbow hunter now, and he hates it because at heart he’s a vertical bowhunter, and sometimes he talks about going back to that, but he won’t. He doesn’t want a reminder that he can’t do that, and I think that’s what he’d get. I think he knows that. He talks about death a lot too, which is probably a function of believing you’re closer to it than you ever thought you’d get, which for someone who’s spent a year and a half in Vietnam and then nearly took himself right out of the game twice not long after they sent him home, I suspect he’s pretty happy to get the days he’s getting. I also suspect that catching fish with all his granddaughters, and watching humans do something good and powerful with their collective minds, and that explorer spirit that hums inside some folks to the point where they’ll agree to a six hundred and twenty thousand mile road trip and the name of getting us off this rock was something pretty special to him. I know it was to me A lot of times on this podcast, including the episode I dropped last week, I comment on the social aspect of hunting. You don’t have to listen to this show too often to know that I’m just not a big fan of social media. But I’m also just not interested in the social aspect of hunting too much.
00:07:58
Speaker 1: Now.
00:07:58
Speaker 2: I like it some, but after that Florida trip with my dad and my daughters and nearly my whole family, I’m starting to realize that I’m wrong about it. It’s cool to go kill a giant buck on public land and you know, engage in the whole solo pursuit with a defined end goal. But you can only hunt on your own so much before you either want someone to share in your experiences or you want to teach someone how to do what you love you want to pass it on, which is you know the stage I’m in right now, And in fact, I just set up a Turkey blind that I know will be a good spot to not only take my kids, but a couple other people this spring, and it’s highly likely we’ll all see some turkeys die, and if we don’t, we’ll certainly hear them talk. And we’ll see plenty of migrating songbirds, usually a coyote or two, and always some deer somewhere along the way. I’ll get out to try to arrow a bird of my own, and that’ll be great. Two. But when I look to the future of my life and I acknowledge that this whole thing seems to be set on one point five speed. Now, like what happens sometimes when you hit the wrong button while listening to a podcast and yours truly, or maybe Steve Vanella or Rogan and a guest suddenly go Alvin and Chipmunk with their voices. I’m thinking more about how to use my time Wisely. It’s a no brainer to take my daughters as much as possible. But that was going to happen regardless of how fast or slow the clock felt like it was ticking. I live in low grade fear that that whole thing will end at some point and they’ll let me know they don’t want to go, you know, sit in a turkey blind with me anymore. But so far, that hasn’t happened. Now. I did have one daughter get up to fish with me every day on her vacation and one who slept in, but that one spent more time netting crabs and fishing later in the day, so I let it slide. I don’t want to force her or anyone else to hang out with me, because I want the things I love to be the things that other people love and not just an obligation. Because if there’s a real shared interest, there’s a really good chance bond is just going to stay strong. We see that in the white tail world quite a bit. And I bet when you think of some of your favorite people in the whole world, that they all share a love of deer. But it’s not a love of deer really, it’s a love of what the deer represent to us, which is sort of a ticket to the places they live, and that gravity to be there is strong. Now, if that’s true for you, ask yourself what the next ten years hold for you and for them, you know, those people in your life. Is there a trip you could take, maybe start banking those Iowa points together, So over the next three to maybe seven or eight years, you can talk about it and plan it out and do some e scouting, and just always have the prospect of that dream rut hunt riding shotgun in your relationship until it’s time to pull the trigger and put the sticks to a tree. Maybe your dad, you know, who grew up rifle hunting in a place with very few deer and very few prospects of shooting a big one has watched his hunting party dwindle down nothing and is maybe thinking about selling the shack because no one used it anymore. Go hunt with him, even if you know that you won’t shoot anything. It’s not always about the best odds of killing the kind of dear we want, although that’s what this entire industry is predicated on, to the detriment of the whole thing, at least to some extent, maybe a large extent, depending on who you ask. Myself included there, As hypocritical as that makes me sound, it’s also about doing something with your time that matters if it’s all just speed running toward death. For us, what we do with the years we have is important. But even looking at it in terms of years is a mistake. It’s too hard to grasp a full year. Months might be too much, and certainly, looking at a hunting season as a whole season, it’s too hard to grasp. For example, here in Minnesota, we have six weeks to turkey on if we get an archery tag like I did. But that six weeks covers mid April to the end of May, which is a lot of time and a lot of different kinds of turkey hunting opportunities rolled into one season. There’s also a hell of a lot of good fishing to be had in that timeframe, and of course, depending on where you live out of state, birds to chase, maybe bears out West or up in Canada, maybe exotics down in Texas, who knows. Wherever you live, there’s probably some good opportunities to get outside, not just during turkey season four turkeys, but during spring for all kinds of things. And of course you can get a little white tail work done or a lot of it, and you can look at summer because it’s kind of the same way, just as you should look at this upcoming deer season is not just mostly two important weeks in November, but a whole several month opportunity to use your time wisely, even if that means hunting for a dough some morning in early October when you just know that the big bucks aren’t going to walk in. Better yet, hunt that dough with someone else, maybe someone you care about a whole lot, and suddenly the fact that you probably won’t kill a big buck won’t matter nearly as much because that’s not what it’s about. I know that’s almost sacrilegious to say, but I’m at the stage of my life where I’ve watched a hell of a lot of people get their hands on prime deer ground, and they can and do kill big deer nearly every year without very much effort. I see a lot of them seem to enter this weird phase where they can’t see past the big bucks, but they still want someone to come hunt with them. It’s a careful what you wish for situation. Honestly, some of them move past the big buck gatekeeping to recognize that they want more out of hunting, and that means more with other people. But some never do, you know, to each their own, you know, But I think it pays dividends to remind ourselves as often as we can that you can go to prom alone and have some fun. But it’s not the same thing as going with a date. If you get my drift. We need other people and we need shared experiences, and if the whole thing happens to be conducive to a summertime glassing session or a long weekend on the road to hunt out of a tent with a couple of buddies, regret it for a single second. Maybe that’s the last thing I want to say about this, because you can’t talk about the passage of time without acknowledging regret of time spent not doing what you wish you had. I regret not speaking to my dad for a decade in a way that brings me a lot of shame to say it out loud. But I can’t go back in time and change the events that conspire to create the whole mess we found ourselves in. I can look forward to this coming turkey season and bring my daughters down to hunt with him, because he’ll think it’s pretty amazing to watch them shoot a turkey. He’ll also think it’s pretty amazing just to sit in a blind with them, eating snacks and trying to call in a gobbler. That’ll be time spent wisely, I’m pretty sure, and I highly doubt I’ll regret bringing them down to his neck of the woods, even though I’ve had about enough of the driving game overall. Another thing that I’m going to do this year is I’m going to hang a couple ladder stands for him on a farm we’ve hunted since I was fourteen, you know, a piece of dirt. I got permission for us to hunt one once again a couple weeks ago from a phone call to a farmer who has beat cancer twice but is on a timeline that isn’t in his favor. My dad and I figured out how to hunt deer on that farm, and if you were to mine my memories for the best ones, a hell of a lot of them would involve he and I bow hunting deer out there when I was younger. Now he hates hunting out of ground blinds, and so I figure if I do the work with those ladder stands and put them in places that are not only pretty easy to get to but also should show him some deer, I’ll be pretty happy using my time for that. I’ll put up some cameras to keep his excitement up, and maybe I’ll get a double ladder stand for one of those spots so he can sit with one of the girls some night and teach her what he taught me when I was their age. I don’t know, but I know that I’d rather not have any more big regrets about how I use my time or my life, even though I know I will, because in some ways, just like a lot of us, I’m a mistake making machine. But I’m also just feeling that ever increasing acceleration of time as I watch my little girls grow up, and I watch my father slow down with each sporadic visit, and I hope, above most things, that I don’t forget this lesson that I’m trying to teach you all with this episode. I want you to remember it and if you need to remind me of it, if you feel I’m veering off course, I promise I’ll do the same for you from time to time before it’s too late for all of us. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening and for all of your support. If you are not subscribed to this podcast, please do that so my podcast editor will leave me alone. If you need more White Tail hunting content. Maybe you just need to see some fishing content. Maybe you need a new recipe for that gobbler you’re about to shoot. Whatever, go to the medeater dot com and check out all the stuff we dropped there. We literally put up new content every single day, film, podcast, articles, recipes, news pieces on the conservation world. It’s all there. Go check it out, and thank you once again for all your support.
Read the full article here