20-20 again

It takes a certain level of intelligence to stand in a goose pit when the windchill is 20 below and your toes are so stiff they feel like rolls of nickels.

So naturally there I was seven days ago in a hole in the middle of a cornfield overlooking the Missouri River north of Pierre fearing hypothermia and hoping for my kids' sake that stupidity isn't genetic.

I live in South Dakota for probably the reasons most of you do. It is home. It doesn't have swarms of people, and the people who are here are good. The air is clean. The water is, too. Children can still ride their bikes to the store.

I also live here because I like to hunt and fish. I didn't do either a year ago. That wasn't just stupid. It was lunacy.

One of my earliest memories is of a badger scowling into the headlights of our car as it bounced across a South Dakota pasture in the morning darkness. My dad started taking me duck hunting as soon as I could keep up. He and my two brothers would pack me like they did their hip waders and the steel boxes that held their shotgun shells.

Though our dog – a Dalmatian and Labrador cross whose legs were short and body round – hunted better than one might expect, the job of retrieving what was shot, if it wasn't in the water, often fell to me. I did it without complaint.

You might say hunting restores my vision. Most days I'm stuck inside from the moment I wake till the moment I go to sleep. Mine is a world of gray carpets and yellow fluorescent lights. It is like watching an old color television set all day.

In a cold goose pit on a Missouri River bluff, the world is high definition again. Cornfields glow like bars of gold. Blue bays resemble socks on a baby boy.

In a cold goose pit on a Missouri River bluff, one has the chance to look out – and to look in as well.

One consequence of a hectic life is that we seldom have time to reflect. Because we're always taking stock of someone else's situation – customers, kids, whomever – we never take stock of our own.

That can be a happy consequence. When we're forced to reflect, to flip the light around and shine it at ourselves, to sweep it across the cracks and into the corners of our own lives, what we see can be discouraging and sometimes painful. In a cold goose pit on a Missouri River bluff, there is opportunity to reflect. But it isn't solely pleasant considerations that occur. There is reckoning, too.

In his short novel "The Old Man and the Sea," great American writer and even greater American hunter Ernest Hemingway wrote: "The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea."

In a cold goose pit on a Missouri River bluff, ties that have come undone can be refastened; plots that have been dropped can be picked up again.

Though still good friends, time has widened the divide between my brothers and me. That, I suspect, is not unusual. The longer our individual histories become, the less they have in common. In a cold goose pit on a Missouri River bluff, our shared story continues, however, and in the process we close our gap.

When I was a reporter fresh out of college, I took a job at a small-town newspaper in Nebraska. There was a copy editor there who hunted. He must have been 25, 30 years older than me.

One fall Monday morning someone asked him what he did that weekend. He said he and his sons went pheasant hunting. Someone asked him if they bagged anything. He said his sons did, but he didn't. He had quit carrying a gun some years earlier, he said, preferring to just walk in the fields alongside his sons.

At the time what he said struck me as pure nonsense. Why would someone go hunting if they didn't actually hunt, I thought?

I see his point now.