The year is 2010. I had just turned 50 years old. Up until the banking meltdown of 2008, I had a solid career in the tv and movie business in Atlanta, including opening up my own shop, a post production house (a post house does editing, visual effects and animation for tv commercials, feature films, music videos and the like), in 2004.
To start my own post house, I found investors willing to put their hard earned money into my business. I also put all my own money into the business.
By 2010, it was all gone. I played a big hand, bet all my chips and got beat by the house.
Bless my bride’s soul, she is a teacher and working 60 hours a week, she kept the mortgage paid and the power on. But to say things were tight financially is an understatement. When I needed to buy gas, I paid in dimes.
Late one summer afternoon, the discussion came up about what to have for the night’s dinner. I looked in the pantry. We had cereal, rice and dried beans and I think we had pasta but no sauce.
It struck me then...we didn’t really have anything to eat. And we really didn’t have any money to go get anything. We didn’t have a chest freezer and we didn’t have a garden. I felt like a pioneer who was letting his family go hungry. It sucked.
Later that night, lying in bed, I thought to myself “we have a creek in the backyard...if we had a trout pond, we could eat trout”. But we don’t have a trout pond. But we do have deer back there. And I knew people eat deer. But I had never hunted, I didn’t really know anything about firearms and I had never tasted venison.
When I was a child, I had BB guns and I had fired a shotgun a couple of times with my dad. But I was the classic suburban kid raised in the 60’s. Hunting was not something that was a thing growing up...suburban kids played sports, rode bikes and were in bands and the food was always there in the fridge and pantry.
Until the day it wasn’t.
I was fortunate at that time that I had a burgeoning friendship with my pal Nick Ciarlante and he was very similar to me in that we both had never hunted...but he was always up for learning a new thing.
So we began to get versed in what it took to actually hunt something with a firearm. Between reading books and magazines and watching YouTube, there is a lot of guidance and wisdom that can be gleaned. But the difference between reading about doing something and actually doing it are light years apart.
In the end, I purchased a Henry lever-action rifle in 30-30. Being a lever action, it was familiar to me from cowboy movies and tv shows. The choice of 30-30 was a basic one as it is the caliber most used for deer hunting over the past 100 years.
From there, it became a deepening obsession of practice, reading, watching and learning. And in the first week of the first deer hunting season in which I was qualified and licensed, I harvested a 150 pound doe in our backyard.
Taking a deer is a profound and very moving experience. You can read another blog post of mine that describes that experience.
But what was almost immediately apparent was that after taking her life and working through the sadness, I was in for a lot of very hard work. Field dressing a deer, dragging it back to one’s vehicle, loading it up and driving it to the processor took me several hours, all of it hot and hard work.
A few days later, after picking up my now butchered and packaged meat from the processor, it was apparent that I had just provided my family with around 60 pounds of 100% organic, extremely lean, high quality protein that could be prepared hundreds of different ways.
60 pounds of venison will provide around two months worth of meals for my family. It was a revelation.
The journey from staring at an empty pantry to filling up a chest freezer had begun...and the journey from being a mostly clueless suburban kid to a much wiser hunter and provider had also begun.
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