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Other Columns By Linda...
'Catwoman' De Je Vous or Out Of The
Closet?
This was the third such beastly boulder to have magically surfaced in the periphery of camp this year, and being of course perfectly suited for the fire ring, I simply had to fetch and use it. Crawling to my feet, I shook the dirt off myself. Once the rock was artistically placed, I resumed the excavation of the fire pit. My muscles were beginning to shake, so I stopped and leaned on my shovel for a moment while watching the crowns of the surrounding trees dance wildly in the wind. This was one of those days where Mother Nature had PMS and the whole woods seemed angry with erratic wind and intermittent rain. At 55 degrees however, it was a perfect day for grunt work, and I had definitely made a few primal grunt noises with the laborious task at hand. Suddenly I was struck with a sense of De Je Vous, that feeling you get when you realize something is strangely familiar or recurring in your life. Much to my chagrin, I get this feeling from rather mundane things instead of things like say, winning the lottery. The last time I had the De Je Vous feeling was the day my son gave me my hunting nickname, 'Catwoman'. I have promised previously that I would explain how I got that name and will do so by the end of this article. For the moment however, this year's De Je Vous was the stark realization that I like to dig. "Dig!", you say? "Dig", I say. Puzzled and curious, I shook my head back and forth, musing over this. Here I was, digging again. I seem to gravitate toward doing projects that require digging. Lots of digging. Wheelbarrow loads of digging. I could not think of any hidden meaning to this, and I was not aware of any professional Diggers in background. I know my family likes to do gardening and play in the dirt, and while that is a form of digging, my affliction seems to somewhat more compulsive and multilateral. Why do I like to dig and what does it mean?
Unfortunately, the treasures were the remnants of a discarded miniature golf course complete with fake grass and hole numbers, several thousand bricks, and a zillion rocks. I then dug a trench for a culvert so the road in to my shack would not get swamped when it rained. I dug the trench and placed the culvert not once, but three times since I did it wrong the first two times. Strangely, I had fun doing it. At home I dug out a ten by twenty foot area for my garden and dug out, hand graded and hand loaded several tons of rock down around the entire perimeter of our house. I have lost track of how many holes I have dug for planting trees and plants. Literally thousands over the years. I guess disking my food plots is a form of digging as well, although that is not the kind of De Je Vous to which I refer here. This particular penchant involves a shovel and my own muscle and sweat. Last year I had 5 tons of lime, 3 yards of road rock and 3 yards of Class 5 gravel dumped at camp. I hand dug and loaded the rock to groom my ATV trails and road, and dug around in the lime and Class 5 numerous times over the summer. What's left of the pile of Class 5 gravel still beckons for some good digging on the next dry day. After pondering this decided proclivity for excavation and the hoisting of earthen materials from hither to thither, it was clear I had an "issue" going on here. As I continued to dig and make a perfectly symmetrical bowl shape out of the fire pit, my mind continued exploring. Ever the self-analyzer, I had to ask myself, "Why Dig"? I thought of several legitimate reasons right off the bat. One, nearly every digging project has at its conclusion a finished product that a person can stand back and admire. There is a sense of completion at the end of a digging project. Second, digging is physical labor and a great workout and I like both. I have a strong back too, which helps. Third, I have this odd inherited connection with dirt (or rocks, or you name it). It runs in the family. My maternal grandfather was a farmer, and my mother is an addicted gardener, even now in her third floor suburban condo. My sister revels in gardening and getting filthy so much that she calls me up just to share it. I then contemplated the possibility that I should have been in some sort of manual labor for my occupation instead of being the bean counting accountant that I actually am. I quickly dismissed that notion. My son and I had hunted Tillie's Corner at the Mille Lacs Wildlife Management area for three years. Camp was a public parking area and of the 25 or so hunters, I was the only hunting female. Occasionally a spouse or significant other would visit, but the primitive nature of camp pretty much kept the women away. Except me. One of the more challenging aspects of being the only woman in an all male camp was the issue of toileting. God has blessed me with an enormous amount of self-control in this regard, but when nature calls, the men just turned their backs at the edge of camp and did their business in the snow. Me? I had to go about a hundred yards into the winter woods and freeze my biscuits off to accomplish the same task. On one of those dark night trips, I was struck with that De Je Vous feeling. I suddenly realized that for several years when I took my trips to the woods, I would dig a hole in the snow and leaves, take care of my business, then circle the project and bury it with leaves and dirt. I would even finish it off with snow to hide any evidence. As I walked back to camp, I was chuckling to myself. My then fourteen year old son approached and asked, "Hey Ma, what's so funny"? I explained to him about my digging, circling and burying routine and how I in fact had been doing it not only for our three years of deer hunting, but also for nearly my whole life when in the woods. His immediate response was, "Oh my gosh, you are acting just like a cat. You're a Catwoman".
It just occurred to me that the common note of digging is strangely present in each of these De Je Vous's. I think I will save the Freudian analysis of that connection for another day. Meanwhile, tomorrow is going to be a hot sunny day and my shovel beckons. * Copyright July 2004 by Linda K. Burch Linda K. Burch
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On
my hands and knees and with my last ounce of energy, I gave one final shove
on the at least seventy pound rock to get it to the edge of the fire pit.
I flopped flat on my stomach in the dirt as the rock took on a life of
its own and rolled a bit further than I had anticipated.
Shortly
after that, I dug my first bear bait pit smack in the middle of the thickest
woods on the property. I then dug and leveled the area around camp,
unearthing many a buried treasure.
Well,
you guessed it. 'Catwoman' stuck as my hunting moniker. Alas,
I am not Catwoman because of my cat-like stealth in the deer woods as a
hunting buddy of mine once surmised. It's just plain old scatological
humor. And try as I may to break my little habit, in the absence
of civilized accommodations; I remain compelled to eradicate any evidence
of my nature calls with my little cat routine.
