When deer first began visiting my parents' home in the Oregon woods, my parents thought it was sweet. They would wake up to see the sleeping forms of does huddled close by their bedroom wall and feel that they were one with nature. They would chop wood or clear brush as deer grazed within sight, and feel that they were communing with the wilderness. They would catch a doe helping herself and her fawns to composted watermelon rinds and feel that they had introduced the animal world to the refined pleasures of dessert. My father still feels this way. He holds conversations with the deer when he is outside working, and likes to think that they respond to his neighborly chatter with meaningful looks in their large wet eyes. But my mother's susceptibility to the wonders of deer proximity hardened the moment she realized the deer's ostensible sociability was actually a thinly masked determination to consume her plants.

Deer will eat just about anything anything except rhododendrons. So rapacious are deer, so wide their culinary tastes, that few plants can survive their prolonged attention. My mother knew this when she started her garden, but she consulted with nurseries and experienced gardeners to choose plants that would not tempt the deer. She put in x and y and z, operating according to the lore that says deer do not like such salad. But the deer that were squatting on my parents' property had not consulted the same guidelines, and had no notion that they were feasting on repellant fare. They liked my mother's butterfly bushes just fine, and took her strawberries for a rare delicacy.

My father is not the type to begrudge a few leaves, or even a whole garden, to the force of nature that is a deer's appetite. He could sit in his chair on the porch, beer in hand, watching deer raze flowers, bushes, and baby trees without any real psychic disturbance. In a philosophical mood, he might reflect on the distortions produced by humans and wild animals living in too close proximity--the overpopulation and periodic mass starvation of otherwise self-regulating species, the troubling and potentially dangerous tameness of deer and bear. But he would never see the deer themselves as the problem, preferring to identify himself as the real invader. Left to his own devices, he would never think to impose himself on the vegetation natural to the neighborhood. It is not his style to be a grower; still less so to think of his homestead as his territory. He knows he lives on the deer's land, and simply feels happy to be there. My mother's position is more complex. Like my father, she appreciates the precarious balance of nature and culture that defines life in the wild. And like my father, she feels a deep obligation to the land and the life it supports; she knows it is for her to live unobtrusively on her mountain, to keep the air clean, the ground unspoiled, the ecosystem intact. Both of them slave to prevent erosion on their slope of property, and they work together daily to clear away the dead trees and brush that could make their little heaven into a fire hazard. They compost, grow organic vegetables in a small fenced enclosure, and burn dead wood with deliberate and tireless care. But their philosophies differ when it comes to deer.

Every day my mother does battle with deer. While my father grooves on peaceful coexistence, she strives to discourage, deter, waylay, terrify, disgust, outwit, and undermine the deer. Every day she sends me a report, listing her losses and detailing her most recent strategy of attack. She began by yelling at them, frightening them away with the sudden bark of her voice. The deer were unimpressed, and soon began ignoring what they clearly regarded as her empty threats. So she began chasing after them with a broom. She would charge at the guilty beasts with broom waving, cursing the while, like a disoriented witch who had forgotten how to fly. It all went down like a game of chicken, the deer contemplating my mother's attack with implacable calm, chewing along on a mouthful of foliage, and only moving beyond her reach at the last possible moment. Then there was the netting, great swathes of it draped over her treasured planting like so much vegetable wedding veil. These disappeared in the night, consumed by hungry does as appetizers to the leaves they covered. The thought of deer expiring painfully, their bowels blocked to bursting with yard after yard of sodden white mesh, upset my mother as only a former gastroenterologist could be upset. So she moved on to bone meal, a fertilizer infused with deer blood that was supposed to feed your plants while frightening deer away with the odor of their own death. Her Lecter-like deer had a taste for such gruesome garnish, however, and downed the greens that had been grown from collegial blood without hesitation. She also tried urine: coyote urine, first, placed strategically in slow-evaporating containers guaranteed to terrify even deer who are unimpressed by blood fertilizer; then human urine, said to possess similarly offputting properties. The coyote urine she bought on line; she declines to name the source of its human counterpart. Now beebees are the weapon of choice, loaded into a little rifle and aimed to bounce off their thick hides with memorable deterrent sting. She'll stop short of bullets or poison. But if she could rig up some wiring in her garden to shock the deer every time they tried to taste her carefully cultivated leaves, she would.

The irony of all this is that my father is the hunter, while my mother is the one who is loathe to contemplate killing game for sport. Every year when the season opens, my father kills a single buck. Early on a Saturday morning in late fall, when it is still dark and when everyone for miles is still fast asleep, he wakes, makes himself a thermos of coffee, pulls on layers of long underwear, thick socks, and camouflaged gear, drives out to the woods, and walks himself, his binoculars, his thermos and his rifle out to a deer stand he knows. He climbs up into the stand while the stars are still bright, readies his gear, and settles in to wait for dawn. He sits perfectly still, listening to his breathing, feeling his heart beat, giving his scent time to mix with the mingled smells of the woods, watching for first light. He witnesses the forest awakening and beginning to move, sees an owl in flight perhaps, or a mouse skittering through leaves, or even an owl diving for a mouse skittering through leaves. Still unto numbness he waits, hoping for deer. Some days there is nothing, but he doesn't count that as a loss. He has always said that the meaning of hunting lies in the meditation of it, the careful quiet mindfulness of the lonesome wait. Some days, though, a buck shows himself. Sometimes he comes within range, sometimes even seems to see my father, to look him in the eye. These bucks my father gets in his sights, aims at, and, gently squeezing the trigger, shoots as close to the heart as his aim will allow. The good kill, the quick and painless death, is part of the point of the hunt. The head of my father's first buck hangs on the living room wall. The freezer is filled each fall with enough venison to last all winter. The hunt, the kill, the head, the meat: all this is a show of respect for the buck. There is a great deal of honor involved, my father tells me; hunting is a form of reverence for the wild.

My mother has never shared my father's perspective on hunting. She has tolerated his love of the sport, and she has allowed the guns, the head, and the meat to enter the house. But she doesn't like the head, with its graceful rack, sorrowful eyes, and velvet nose, hanging above the big screen tv. She won't eat the sausage and steak gotten from my father's kills. And she doesn't hunt or even fish with him, as much as he wishes she would. For my father, hunting with mom would be the ultimate date with his best girl. For my mother, it would be a cold, stiff, possibly blood-flecked reminder that there are corners of this man she will never understand. My mother is no hunter. She is, rather, a cross between a ranger and a security guard. She will not kill, but she will not rest until she controls. She does not want to take a deer's life, but she does want to make it respect her rules. Herein lies the difference between them. When my father kills a deer, he is marking its absolute mystery. You might think hunting was about control, about staging man's power over nature, about using the cheap trick of the gun to approximate a petty dominance that fools no one but the hunter himself. Not at all. It's trying to keep a deer from eating your leaves that shows a need for control. To my father's mind, the kill commemorates the fact that the deer cannot be controlled; a bullet may penetrate its heart, but the deer will not itself ever be penetrated. Hunting is in this sense for him a metaphysics of the unknown. It is a ritual of acceptance, a way of acknowledging his smallness, of wondering at nature's largeness, and even of confronting his own inevitable death. When my mother chases a deer, or feeds it particles of its own clotted blood, or startles it with the sharp ammonia of its enemies, she looks to be as far from metaphysics as can be. In reality, though, she is marking the limits of my father's romanticism with a pragmatism as sharp as the sting of a well-aimed beebee on a deer's round little butt.

The chronic tension between my parents, this essential philosophical difference that at once divides and binds them (for dad's way can't exist without mom's to temper it, and mom's way comes into focus through dad's), this tension is their conjugal recreation of the great American metaphysic of nature, that conflicted romance of the land that sees it as both the source of transcendance and a force that must be contained, regulated, controlled. My father inhabits the happy side of this typically American irresolution. He melts into the oversoul at the drop of a hat. Like Whitman, he finds himself under his bootsoles, in the sandy loam of Oregon clay. He is a sort of balding domesticated Huck Finn, capable of floating forever on the clear promise of a great big sky, capable too of reconciling the precise joy of the hunt with a truly humble appreciation for the boundlessness of the universe. He is large, he contains multitudes. He regards the deer as a mysterious gift. My mother, by contrast, reveals the hidden tension at the heart of my father's romance. Where he sees the deer in all their natural majesty, she sees vermin who are out to eat her plants. Where he enjoys their close proximity because it makes him feel that he belongs to the landscape, she worries that they are becoming so tame that nothing--not even beebees--will drive them off. It works out: dad has the dreams, and mom finds the problems; dad holds fast to the dream while mom solves the problems. He makes sure the marriage has wishes, and she makes sure at least some of the wishes come true.

My mother's deeply American pragmatism forms the flip side of my father's equally American romanticism. Tempering his idealism with practicality, she harnesses it and puts it to work. Mom plays Henry Ford to dad's Huck Finn: she streamlines my dad's daydreams, makes his wishes efficient. It was his idea to build the house, but she designed it, oversaw it, even built parts of it herself. Dad's dreaminess and mom's practicality not only complement each other, they are versions of one another. Pragmatism, if you think about it, is simply applied dreaming. Based on the need to control outcomes, pragmatism ensures that the way of a thing is never just a means to an end. An absolute need for a certain end actually makes the means into a scene of endless possibility: the end doesn't justify the means so much as it justifies making the means into a form of creative expression. As my mother practices it, pragmatism is an art form. It involves flexibility, creativity, a willingess to experiment and invent. It is a controlling aesthetic, an aesthetic of control. And in this it is the perfect aesthetic for my paradoxical mother.

All of American history may be read as the result of this essential tension between doing and being, between getting things done and grooving on what is: when we are not worshipping the land, we are ruining it. We litter where we camp. We sit in gridlock, looking out at farmland. We turn forest into suburb, and then spend our weekends fawning over our small squares of lawn, growing chemically enhanced grass and flowers and trees in order to simulate the land we will kill to live on. The Puritans came here to build what they called "a city on a hill," an exemplary society raised up for all to see. Their aim was to prove their righteousness by surviving in the American wild--a wild whose unspoiled character both symbolized their own natural right and embodied the obstacle they had to conquer in order to demonstrate that God supported their mission. A city on a hill: the phrase captures the tension between civilization and natural formation that lies at the heart of Americanness, the sense that America is neither here nor there, not wholly in the city, not wholly in the hill, but wholly present only in the problem created by putting a city on a hill, in the tension between the land that is buried beneath the city it holds up, and the city that is glorified by its place on the land. Americans have lived out that tension ever since. The pioneers ran from it when there was a frontier (building more cities on more hills as they went). Now that we can no longer run from it, we run back toward it. We have the tallest buildings in the world and the biggest parks; we have mountains, deserts, prairies, New York, Hollywood, and Disney World. We are tourists of ourselves, eager to visit cities and hills alike. Our capital is a civic theme park. Our snow-capped mountains boast posh ski resorts.

Finding a way to live meaningfully in America gets tougher the more cities there are on hills. My parents chose to try it by building a home on a hill. Two years ago they suddenly decided to sell their house, quit their jobs, consolidate their assets, and head for the foothills in southern Oregon. They traded their quietly unexceptionable midwestern existence--spacious home (paid), two cars (paid), gorgeous lawn (sprayed), great jobs (401K'd)--for a wooded life in the West, giving up their considerable security for a chance at peace. They found a spot on a hilltop that let them see nothing but ridges and sky for miles on all sides, and they built. It was a brave and beautiful thing to do, an act of poetry committed by my practical professional parents that continues to surprise and inspire me to this day. My parents traded a good life for a shot at grace. I watched them go from my own city on a hill--the city that loves you back, the city of brotherly love, that paved malarial swamp that set itself up two hundred years ago as the rank emblem of liberty--and I thought to myself that what they did was a sort of prayer. It makes me mindful of all the other lived American prayers that preceded it--the prayers of pilgrims, philosophers, storytellers, poets, fortune-hunters, empire-builders, and adventurers who willed the vast unruly expanse of America to mean. They made mincemeat of their sacred nature, casting it as an entirely incoherent force, as potentially violent and ungiving as it was gloriously beautiful and inspiringly infinite. By the time my parents inherited the myth, passed down to them from Emerson and Thoreau and Hawthorne and Twain, through Jewett, Cather, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Pynchon and Proulx, transcendental hope was crushed--like Proulx's accordian--beyond repair. My parents live in an America that believes as deeply in the emptiness of the American romance as it does in the romance itself. As countless writers have made painfully clear, to see through the shallow myth of manifest destiny is finally for us to make the myth more manifestly our destiny than it ever was before. It's a problem for people who want to recover a sense of simplicity; more than anything, such people need to be able to shelve their cynicism; they need to be able to believe in belief.

My parents, as I said, began by building a home on a hill--not in order to raise themselves up to be seen, but rather that they might always be able to see. The most remarkable thing about their spot of earth is the perspective it offers. From every room in the house, you look outward at open endless space. You cannot feel enclosed in their house; entire walls are made of glass. You look out, and you lose your sense of safety. Your feet don't understand what your eyes are telling them about the bottomless space they see. You get a bit dizzy; you struggle for balance. You are not cocooned in their house; you cannot retreat to it as you would a cozy little sheltered nest. No, you are constantly looking outward, constantly aware of a world beyond you, constantly alive to more than yourself. You lose your sense of safety, but you gain possibility. You study the sky, see how its face changes during the course of the day, see the hawks glide for miles without flapping their wings, catch the mists moving among the purple ridges or spot the first low star, and you look at yourself differently in consequence. You know something new about who you are and about what matters. My father calls this seeing the view.

Copyright © 2001 Erin O'Connor